Patrick Moore on How “Green” Forest Mismanagement Caused the California Wildfire Disaster

because what you don't know about energy can kill you here's alex epstein welcome to power hour i'm alex epstein wildfires are once again in the news and i'm excited to have one of my favorite guests of all time on to talk about it it's patrick moore the co-founder of greenpeace and a very wise ecologist who also i believe happens to have a background in forestry so without further ado patrick welcome back to power hour it's great to be with you again alex and such a good subject yeah and i know last time you were on you said you would come back on any time and true to your word you immediately agreed to come on so i'm very excited to have you so let's start off uh big picture what do you think are the top policy changes necessary to prevent dangerous out-of-control wildfires and i want to emphasize dangerous out-of-control wildfires which is not the same as preventing all fires that's right and it really depends what kind of forest you're in the tropics are completely different from the boreal forest is completely different from the dry forests of the u.s southwest so it's very much a regional issue the situation in california and oregon is very parallel with the situation that occurred in australia during their hot season this last year so the most important thing is fuel load dead wood on the ground and dead wood standing up and what we call ladder fuels which allow a fire that starts on the forest floor to get up into the crown of the trees the next thing is thinning not having the trees so closely spaced together so that they automatically catch each other on fire when the fire goes up into them another key factor is species and particularly never see this mentioned conifers versus broadleaf trees as they're normally called it's angiosperms versus gymnosperms gymnosperms are the needle trees angiosperms are the flowering trees like maples and the coniferous trees are full of pitch anybody who's come close to many trees knows that that pines and spruce trees and and uh troopers they what they call balsam uh are full of pitch and so they burn so much hotter and so much easier like for example the the paradise fire uh that burned so many houses down and killed people uh that was basically putting a suburb into a mature coniferous forest with four with big strips of forest between each row row of houses kind of and that's just asking for trouble the first thing that should be done there if you want to keep some coniferous trees is to take the bigger ones out and thin it and that then that wood can be used it adds value to the project and you don't have so many trees and they're not so big most of the coniferous trees are simply too big for residential setting they should be in forests not in residential areas and then plant broadleaf trees in in amongst what you've left of the conifers so that they get enough light because most broadleaf trees are shade intolerant and they won't grow under a canopy of covering them up from sunlight so all of these factors come into play but the problem in these forests is they are suppressing fire they're trying to stop fire from happening now that is the last thing you want to do in a dry coniferous forest you need to have regular controlled burns or thinning you can do it with a chainsaw and you can do it with fire there's a lot less risk of the fire getting away if you do it with a chainsaw but for some reason people think they're evil or something they don't like people cutting trees with chainsaws it's a you know i said what do you want us to use a swiss army knife you know i mean if you're going to cut a tree down you need a chainsaw and it's good to cut trees down because they have wood in them which is very useful and it's also good to grow new trees now i see people are starting to use the word deforestation when what they really mean is forestry if you plant new trees back and look after them that is not reforestation which is the opposite of deforestation so so many many of the concepts about forestry have been twisted in ways that really are a problem and that the fact of the matter is most of these big forests are starting on public lands and the west has almost in the vast majority of the public lands in the united states because most of people lived in the east so they could do whatever they wanted with the west in the early days so they turned a lot of it into into public land national forests national parks etc it's great to have those things but the problem with the public force is they're being managed by an urban green public instead of by professional foresters who have infiltrated the forest service whereas the private forest lands which are being not they don't the people who own those do not want them to burn because they're very valuable because that's how they make their living so the professional foresters that are running those forests are doing what they can to make sure these catastrophic fires don't start on privacy forest lands and that's that's about the size of it i i really think the lesson is being is coming to the surface on this because i see california has joined with the federal forest service in a program over the next 25 years to to thin and reduce the fuel load uh on a million acres of land a year and also uh i think it's coming out in the news more now that the problem is too much fuel not the climate climate does the climate doesn't start fires lightning starts fires and people start fires and if you allow conditions to exist where any flame that is put into it will turn into a conflagration then you're not managing your force properly because you can manage them in such a way that a fire is very unlikely and if you look at the native americans who had like 10 to 15 000 years to figure this out uh they used fire when it was moister and colder that's the trick to controlled burning it is a tricky thing because if you're a forester and you start a controlled burn and it burns down a neighborhood you don't get very popular with the people and it's it there's always that risk you know the risk of the wind just suddenly coming up when it wasn't forecast for example so you should you should do controlled earnings when there's no big wind going to come when it's moister than it is when these fires are starting now in the late summer so you do it in the spring or you do it in the early fall and you also uh make sure that it's not as hot like hot winds and dry grass and you know in california actually the majority of these forests have been in mostly grass places not so much in forests in oregon there's more of them in the in the forest this year but jim steele is one of the members of our co2 coalition uh in washington he's a californian and has been a naturalist all his life and he's written a couple of really good papers on how the the annual grasses have been taken over by perennial grasses in california in many places or maybe sorry i might i might have that backwards but anyways one has taken over from the other and the one that's taken over is much more susceptible to these wildfires so there's also some land management projects that can be done to change the nature of the forest floor back to one that is more resilient to fire uh you know i worked with you know you mentioned my background in forestry my family's been in forestry in canada on the west coast here uh of vancouver island for over a hundred years my grandfather came out here at the turn of the last century uh and was already a forester logger when he came here and he started a logging company in the early 1900s which we've actually just sold but because the family didn't have anybody that wanted to run it anymore but it we've been in it for a long time and the head of my phd thesis committee was a yale graduate phd forester you call forest ecologist and uh and i did a phd in ecology very much involved in in forestry so i i've learned quite a bit along the way and i've probably spoken to every forestry association in the united states at one time or another not as so much recently but back when the forest issue was the real hot issue around the spotted owl and all that so enough about me um what's your next question so yeah we got that is a great um overview so let me ask with the government so you mentioned kind of in almost in passing that the you know there's government-managed lands i mean my view on this and i posted it on twitter yesterday is the the government managed california forest is the biggest environmental hazard in the united states like if there was any private entity that was run this way in terms of if you look at the pollution the danger there's nothing comparable i mean this is there's no set of coal plants that can come close to what the government managed forests are doing in terms of threatening neighbors with air pollution and danger so my default is why doesn't most of this land get sold to private people who are responsible for it what do you think of that well the the problem is it's it is public land and it's in national forests national parks and that sort of state parks uh the the proper way to deal with this canada's lucky in that it doesn't have many federal lands uh almost all of our our public lands are provincially owned so we have the management much closer to the situation you're trying to run these forests from washington you know that the western forest from washington is not a good idea and at the same time uh that these these bureaucracies have been taken over by people with a green orientation as they like to call it but it doesn't end up being very green when the whole thing burns up and we've got to get more professionalism uh in the forest service and in the park service uh and there's there's been good signs coming along at various times that it was going to change but it hasn't uh it seems that the uh more extreme uh environmental groups have had held held sway here in terms of a hands-off approach that's what it basically is it the problem with much of the environmental movement is that they really do believe that everything humans do is bad like humans are the enemies of the planet right and all interventions are the destruction of nature and there's nothing could be uh further from the truth and as i said the native americans they knew how to manage the land so that it didn't like they they're living in little villages they do not want a fire sweeping through their little village so and they also opened up the forest in order that there was more browse for wildlife and that gave them a larger amount of food uh and more berries grow in the open sun than do under the deep shade of a coniferous or even broadly forest so there's nothing wrong with opening up the forest so that sunlight can hit the ground and and make things grow there but you have to be careful to clear it every once in a while and that's what the control burn is about in australia the aboriginal people there called it the fire stick uh procedure where they actually took a stick that was on fire and went and lit the grass on fire and let it burn under the eucalyptus trees without getting up into the crowns because it was cooler and moister when they did it they knew exactly what they were doing and they did it for 10 000 years you know australia actually they did it for 50 000 years because they or more because they arrived there about 660 000 years ago and and as i say that's a very analogous situation in in australia and and we also have this firebug problem now though where people are actually lighting fires on purpose i don't know to bring attention to themselves or why what what do they what purpose do they think that serves are they trying to harm people and kill all the wildlife uh you know when a hot wildfire goes up a mountainside it does a lot more damage than logging does because it burns the soil off the rocks and that sets it back about two or three hundred years whereas loggers don't rip the soil off the rocks they leave the roots in the stumps there and gradually a new forest will grow back by itself or usually these days especially in private forest lands they're always planted with the species that they want to be there for the next harvest so it there's a lot of common sense in it but it seems to have been lost yeah and just on the i mean on the government front part of it is you've got a monopoly and so if they happen to be taken over by an irrational ideology they're not held to the same laws that a private owner would be in terms of there's who there's nobody who gets punished really if federal lands go out of control and wreck everyone else but i'm wondering if it is controlled by government are there models of government owned forests uh that are comparable to california in terms of the po you know the climate uh and the being prone to lighting on fire that are well managed around the world so there any models that we can follow on private forest lands yes in europe in particular now in europe the population is so concentrated that you really can't allow a situation to occur where you're going to have the kind of conflagrations they have in the western states so they they they have very strict forest management there they come over and look at our mess why don't you clean this place up because they they like a little bit more neat and tidy looking for us where people over here would say no we have to keep that there because it's the fertilizer for the next trees see people have this idea a lot of people have this idea that the trees are are using the soil as their primary nutrient but this is not true they're using the air and water as their primary nutrients wood is 50 carbon all came from the air from carbon dioxide and the hydrogen and oxygen came from water so a tree is made up 99 of water and air a few minerals from the rocks that form the subsoil are what they need for nutrients calcium and phosphorus and that sort of thing but it's that they think the tree is using the soil up when in fact the tree is what makes the soil if there weren't any trees there there wouldn't be any soil there and if there weren't any plants there is the general plants make the soil but in forests trees are the primary producers of soil because their needles fall off and their dead limbs fall off and then even when they die the whole tree falls over and makes dirt so it it it's people need to understand a bit better about these basic factors which is why these fires are burning is because people don't understand them anymore what one thing that has been suggested like you may have know known they've suggested that the environmental protection agency be more devolved down to the state level because every state has an environmental protection agency so what is the need for a massive federal bureaucracy in this area and that would be a good idea to devolve it down maybe have some federal guidelines for minimum standards etc but the same thing could happen with the federal lands in the west like washington controls 70 percent of idaho now idaho doesn't control that land washington does and the problem is there are more politicians in the east than there are in the west so eastern politicians can make rules about western lands which don't have any repercussions on their own voters on their own base and that's that's a really big problem in the united states which very few americans understand and if the management of the western federal lands was devolved down the day-to-day management with standards was evolved down to the state level or a few states together where it made sense that three or four states would work together because the region was a you know a geographical region an ecological region that sort of model would be very useful at getting more local involvement in how forests are managed at the state level most state forests are much better managed because they actually make money from them state forests are not you're not banned from logging in state forests like you more or less are now in national forests the national forests were never meant to be parks they were meant to be multiple use areas where you could do forestry and mining and recreation and maintain the landscape in a semi-wild condition but at the same time being able to use it for resources like oil and gas and minerals and trees and during the clinton era and the spotted owl fiasco which was a totally fake uh situation that spotted owl was never endangered by forestry uh you know they only need one old tree per owl to nest in and even then they'll nest in a not so old tree if that's all there is but it's a good idea to leave him a couple trees here and there i'm not i'm just joking i believe in saving lots of old growth forest but not the way it's gone it's been a hundred percent and that that has killed the forest industry in the u.s west uh where some of the finest treason would grow in the world and there's been no need for that from any kind of ecological perspective or environmental perspective no need whatsoever and now these fires are being blamed on the fossil fuel companies you know as if they're pouring gasoline on them and lighting them on fire or something they are not and the the fact is if you look at the records of the high summer temperatures going back to 1900 the 1930s were much hotter than it is now much meaning relatively much hotter it wasn't like on on fire it was just hotter in the 1930s and fires were less frequent then if you look at the 120-year history of fires from 1900 for the first two or three decades of the last century there were a huge number millions of acres more land than they are today that was largely because this was like 120 140 years after the government got control of the land and stopped uh managing it properly like the native persons had been and so the fire raged and there was a big meeting uh in the western states i think it was in the 20s or early 30s that cat that started to say we got to come to terms with this situation and that's when the professional foresters came in and you saw the rate of fire just plummet and it's only been in the last three decades that it's gone back up again nowhere near to what it was at the turn of the last century but it's because the control of management over public lands has gone to urban green ecology you know ecology type people who think that that hands-off is the best method of managing forests and it simply is not especially if you're going to live in them if you're going to live in the forest you have to manage it because you just don't don't want what's been happening for the last number of years we don't want that to happen anymore i'm on vancouver island and we can't see across the bay because of the smoke coming from washington oregon and california all the way up the west coast of british columbia it's probably in alaska too for all i know but we've had this for about a week now and you know it's it's fairly thin but you can't see that far you can you can't see i can look out here i can see maybe half a kilometer and uh because of the smoke coming up from your fires so when the when this better forest management occurred how much of that was logging and could you elaborate a little bit on how logging is crucial to avoiding fires avoiding dangerous well i i i wouldn't say logging is crucial to avoiding fires in a point-blank way like that uh you know we had a situation here in british columbia where on the west coast where it's a rain forest and virtually never burns because it's so wet but when you've when you log it it dries out in the summer because the trees aren't protecting the soil from the sun and they had a policy of what they called slash burning because the the west coast rainforest is so thick with limbs and wood and dead wood and i mean you can't even get a place to plant a tree in it after you log it so what they their theory was let's just burn all that stuff off well in a couple of years we killed more live forest with runaway slash burning then we had logged that year and people kind of noticed that you know hey we're burning more force down with these things and then came vladimir crying forest ecologist from czechoslovakia who joined the faculty forestry at ubc which i i did my undergraduate at combined honors in forest biology and and life science in the science department so combined between forestry and science and uh he came out here and joined the faculty of forestry and started preaching against these slash fires and they kicked him out and he went to the science faculty now this was the this is the man who i learned most of my ecology from and he had been the deputy minister of force in czech slovakia and had to flee because he was in the anti-communist underground after the war and so he came here and he taught us a lot he created the whole ecological reserve system in british columbia and he ended he eventually won the argument to end the widespread use of slash burning on our forests because it wasn't good for them so fire isn't always good and but also too many trees and too much fuel load isn't good either and so the the the way i outlined it in the beginning if you say if you're going to build a suburb with a with a coniferous forest beside decided first thin it by cutting the larger trees or a mixture but you don't really want six foot diameter pine trees in a residential area because they're 150 feet or more tall and it's not good if they fall in your house in a windstorm so why would you want that there you want a nice oak tree or uh you know birch tree or some other kind of broadleaf tree to to start replacing the conifers in residential areas because they just don't grow as tall one fact about forestry that's really interesting about trees is you know how conifers grow straight up and broadleaf trees are sort of rounded that's because conifers are negatively geotropic in other words they can sense gravity and grow exactly in the opposite direction so negatively genotropic whereas broadleaf trees are positively phototropic they just go for lighting wow which is why they grow in such a different form than conifers not many people know that yeah i definitely uh did not know that so i want to talk a little bit more about the the green hands-off approach what do you think are the most destructive things that they've done in terms of forest management well they have basically an anti-forestry attitude they don't believe that we should be managing the forests they believe that the forest can manage themselves perfectly well and that would be true if we weren't here i mean they would just do whatever they wanted right they'd burn when they burnt when the lightning came it would burn them but very often uh in some parts like in california there's lightning frequently enough to be basically a substitute for controlled burning and sometimes lightning will come early in the season when the trees aren't susceptible to catastrophic fire and that will keep the forest floor clean but it wouldn't be everywhere i mean nature is pretty uh chaotic and unpredictable so what what we're talking about here more is that people are living around and in and by these forests they have to be managed to protect the people i mean we could just evacuate california and i don't know where they'd go but who would want them so you're talking about how they're against man i mean they're against managing forests in general but like what are the particular policies that they've put over that have been bad well if you take their uh influence in the national forest it's basically been to end forestry so there's no income like one way to get the income for managing the forests is to cut some wood now and again and sell it to a sawmill that that was the way we used to do things but no longer most the sawmills in the west have shut down because there's no wood for them because no one's got enough trees down so there are private forest lands of course where that are still operating sawmills and pulp and paper mills not much of that in the west though uh you know the u.s south produces by far the most timber now of anywhere in the country because they haven't they don't have anywhere near as much public land and the trees grow faster there they're very desirable species the southern pines basically uh three different species and they're they're excellent construction wood the united states also still imports about a third of its construction lumber from canada because we have the second largest forestry uh industry in the world after the united states which is number one and uh we only have one tenth the number of people so we don't need that much wood and can therefore cut a surplus of it and still have a completely sustainable uh forestry operation but we don't have the place where we have the most catastrophic wildfires is in the boreal forest which is completely unmanaged but it's all coniferous and it's often very dry and there's a lot of lightning and there's nobody there to put it out so those those fires are just left to burn mainly except we did have this fire at fort mcmurray where the oil sands are which is at the southern part of the boreal forest which was extremely damaging to the to the town like a lot of houses were lost there and of course the government blames it on climate change instead of recognizing that if there's a big town in the middle of a boreal forest you should probably manage the forest around it so that the fire stops before it gets to the houses and you can think of this in terms of of a buffer zone the whole forest doesn't necessarily have to be managed this way uh if you if you manage a a five-mile buffer zone around a community you can make it so the fire will stop before it gets to the community and again thinning and changing species is a good idea because there's a lot there's lots of broadleaf trees that will grow in the same areas where the pines are growing and in in europe for example i mean they really focus on broadleaf trees especially white oak which is the most valuable wood grown in europe and and then also um forgetting its name now but it's another nice tree they grow a lot of different species of trees and forests in europe they grow a lot of spruce too uh and and you know it's interesting northern europe only has two coniferous species of the trees and west coast of north america has about 35 i think and what's the reason for that it's really interesting in europe when the glaciers come and go and there's been 40 advances and 40 retreats in the last two and a half million years the trees have to with when they're coming back from northern africa which is when the whole of europe is glaciated the trees have had to migrate down into africa northern africa first they have to cross the mediterranean then they have to cross the alps and then they have to cross the baltic if they're going to get to scandinavia which is where there are only two coniferous trees but in north america the rockies and the other coastal ranges run north south so when the trees come down the valleys ahead of the glaciers they just go back up the valleys they don't have to clamber over whole seas and mountain ranges to move north and south that's that's wild let me ask with these forests in particular in california how long have they existed in close to their present form because i think most people have the idea oh these have just been these forests have looked like this for millions of years no uh they haven't looked like that for millions of years every one of these hundred thousand year period glaciations has changed the whole ecology uh in the in the northern part of of uh the northern hemisphere so california would be included in that the species mix in california would have been more like it is in british columbia during the last glaciation and and the others too so trees do move when they have a hundred thousand years they don't have any trouble moving i mean the wind blows their seeds the birds carry their seeds so the range of of each species of tree is dependent on the climate in that region and climates change especially when you have the big glacial uh epics that come in the last million years they've been every 100 000 years in sync with the milankovitch cycle that has to do with the change in the earth's orbit shape and before that for a million and a half years before that uh the pleistocene is said to have started 2.6 million years ago for the first 1.6 million years the glaciations were following a 42 000 year cycle which is the cycle of the change in the tilt of the earth's axis called obliquity and these cycles there's a third cycle which is the wobble of the tilt they are caused by the gravity of saturn and jupiter mainly by jupiter so that there's hundred thousand year cycles as to which where the planets are in relation to each other that cause these changes to occur in the earth's large scale changes in the earth's climate from an ice age to an interglacial period like we're in now but most people don't realize that even in this interglacial period we are in a colder period of the earth's climate than it has been in through almost its entire history this is the first ice age in 250 million years from 250 million years ago to about 5 million years ago the earth was always warmer than it is now today even people are saying it's too hot you know and their people are saying there's not enough co2 when it went down to its lowest level in the history of the earth 20 000 years ago at the peak of the last glaciation because when the oceans cool they suck co2 out of the atmosphere when they warm like they have done since it came back up a little higher again but still starvation levels for plants and even today the level of co2 in the global atmosphere is only about one-quarter to one-third or so of what the plants would really like to have what they evolved to live in up to you know 800 parts which is twice today's level up to 2 000 parts which is five times today's level that's where plants are happiest yeah well this this raises a final question i wanted to talk about because it's i think one thing i like about when you give this historical like really historical geological context is we get rid of the idea that the circumstances we inherited are somehow perfect from the perspective of all species and you're mentioning well plants would have preferred it if they were in an era with a lot more co2 and i think with forests people have the idea that oh 50 years ago 100 years ago before we emitted all this evil co2 in the atmosphere the forest never caught fire and now because it's gotten one degree warmer it's super dry and it's just inevitably gonna go up in flames and even even with the people who are starting to acknowledge forest management uh is an issue they'll often say like this yale guy was commenting on my uh on my post about this i'll say yeah forest management is important but clearly changes in climate are the root cause of this how do you respond to that in california in particular ah that's it's so ridiculous for a a yale forestry guy saying that they don't know if it's a foreign 360 people yeah they've gone so soft in the yale school of forestry it's just ridiculous they're basically against logging and they're a school of forestry forestry is about wood like it's not just about trees it's also about wood and getting the wood out of the forest and you know you can't call it forestry if it doesn't include forestry but they are now defining forestry as this sort of hands-off let's just study it approach and that isn't good enough if you've got people living in the landscape and where else are we going to live besides in the landscape that that's people don't understand that really you know living in british columbia everybody understands that there's forest everywhere all around us and it is reasonably well managed we still have forest fires especially when big lightning storms come through there's not much you can do about the fire starting but we're very well equipped to put them out try to get them under control we've sent a whole bunch of firefighters from canada down to the western states just the other day to help with that problem and and we're good at it because we do it a lot because we get fires here but we're pretty good at making sure they don't burn down villages and we just had another fire a fire this summer at penticton which is in the dry interior part sort of like being in the central valley in california uh and uh they they did not lose us a person there even and they got it out they were still putting it out the other day but it's just spots now but we get we get big fires here too i mean you're never going to end forest fires and you're never going to end the fact that they will cause damage but you can radically reduce it by managing them properly that's that that's the deal and that's why i say i i'm quite optimistic that california has gone into partnership with the federal government although i'm afraid the federal forest service also is locked into this hands-off policy but that's not how they're talking so if they say they're going to thin a million acres a year that if if they they know how to do that they just people didn't want that to be done now maybe people after seeing this uh hopefully it will just be a fringe that still thinks that this is caused by climate change and it gets a lot of news i know but it isn't being caused by climate change in any way shape or form fire forest fires have been with us ever since there were forests and there are ways to manage forests to radically reduce the chance of killing people and burning up their villages and houses let's say it was four degrees celsius warmer on average would we still be able to manage forest fires well it's four degrees warmer on average in mexico somewhere you know yeah this this whole thing about two degrees is so nutty so nutty where are you now i'm in laguna beach california yeah well you're at a place that is probably four degrees warmer than where i am right now today it's 18 degrees here which is uh in the 60s yes it's probably 80 here 75 80. yeah my god how can you live there it's so much and it should be on fire yeah it should be no this this thing about two degrees is one of the stupidest things that's ever been invented it does not cause the earth to to blow up when you go up two degrees in temperature the earth the temperature was so much higher than it is now just 30 million years ago right and then they say well yeah but we weren't here then our ancestors were people don't realize that that every single living species on the earth today its ancestors lived through the entire past from the beginning of life right otherwise if there'd been a break they wouldn't be here you wouldn't be here if there'd been a single break in other words every living thing on this planet represents an unbroken successful reproduction from the beginning of life now that's a nice thought that's awesome it's true you can see that it is if it if if if your parents didn't have you that would break that line right or definitely or at least if they didn't have any children it would break that whole line right and so that's been happening well the the evolution is like a bush nature is constantly pruning but it's constantly getting more branches because it's constantly growing out so even though it's being pruned by natural selection and evolution it is still getting more complicated and the truth is biodiversity is higher in this era than it has been in the history of life there's there's a wonderful illustration in the national geographic february of 99 where they show the number of taxonomic families of life from when the cambrian explosion and multicellular life began 545 50 million years ago and since then the number of families it goes family genus species so the rose family the bear family the eight family of which we are proud members uh these families are there's in most families have hundreds of species in them and the number of families has gone up and then an extinction event gone up higher another extinction event gone up the permian extinction wiped out fifty percent of all families taxonomically it went right back up to even higher than it was before and then the dinosaur extinction occurred there's been five of these since the cambrian explosion of life and then now it's higher than it has been in the history of life and everybody's saying half the species are going to go extinct because of climate change if it goes up another half a degree or something yeah it's literally half a degree nonsense it's complete and utter nonsense or malarkey as biden likes to call it yeah i was just seeing i i know you've had a lot of run-ins with facebook my girlfriend was just showing me yesterday on her facebook it came up and it said something like climate change information center and it said if if we hit 1.5 degrees then droughts and floods and storms are all gonna get worse and that's but 1.5 degrees is 0.5 degrees warmer than it is today because we've already gone the one it's really like it's it's really a religion there's no there's no rational view that half a degree is going to make it unlivable for the most adaptable species in history and also it's a religion that a change that we make must be all bad like if it gets warmer is it really not going to get wetter or they're not they're going to be no benefits to be it being warmer it's really remarkable how they assume that it's all bad and it's catastrophic there's one benefit and that is for every degree celsius warming agriculture can go 200 kilometers further north all across canada and russia that's a big piece of land so with regard to feeding ourselves for example that would be very beneficial uh most people don't realize that when the earth warms and cools it does so more at the poles than it does at the equator as a matter of fact the equator stays pretty much the same through all of these glaciation cycles it doesn't get colder or hotter when the poles get colder and hotter in it cools and warms inordinately towards the poles from the equator so we can expect if the poles warm up by four degrees the equator won't even budge but as you move from the equator towards the poles the warming goes up and up and up till it's the highest at the poles the amount of warming so we don't have to worry about the the tropical areas getting hotter if the earth warms all that will happen is the cold areas will get warmer and they talk about billions of climate refugees coming in the future as if they're going to flock from mexico to the arctic no people the true climate refugees are the millions of people can afford to get in a plane and go south in the winter from canada and europe and russia those are the climate refugees because we are a tropical species we are not an arctic species or a temperate species or even a subtropical species we are a tropical species we evolved in the deep tropics at the equator a human being could not live outside the deep tropics without clothing fire and shelter it's the only reason we can all live where we do but before that all he needed was one animal skin for the cool of the night and a human would be fine in the tropics but it even you see during the last major glaciation which was only 20 000 years ago when it peaked the people in the tropics weren't cold it was the people in the north who had to flee from the glaciers they were the ones who were cold and during the warm periods of the earth's climate which are known as the hot house ages as opposed to this age that we are in now that's the other thing people don't realize we are still in the places in ice age but the politicians in the international global governance movement decided that the commission on stratigraphy which is the commission that names the ages the cambrian age the carboniferous age those things and there's four different categories of ages there's long ones and shorter ones within them and they've decided that the pleistocene is over and they've called the interglacial period that we're in now the holocene a new epic and the pleistocene is an epic so if you if you name a new epic that means the other one is finished so they're actually saying the ice age has ended and they have absolutely no justification for doing that there is no evidence whatsoever that this place has seen ice age has ended they are basing that whole thing on the hypothesis that higher co2 is going to send the earth into some new hot house age they're writing about it all the time how it's going to happen it hasn't happened and it's very unlikely that it will happen there's no evidence that it's going to happen so we are still in the place to see an ice age and some people are even calling for the holocene to be declared ended and call it the anthropocene now right human influence on the climate and no it's that's total politics and has nothing to do with science but that's the trouble is that you know i've had a debate on twitter lately about being called a climate denier right and i'm and and the nassau guy um gavin schmidt gavin schmidt yeah he said there's no there's there's simply no doubt that all climate deniers are sociopaths that was just straight out like that he said it and i can't i forgot i never bothered with the word sociopath i just said anybody who's calls someone else a climate denier but i said the term climate denier is stupid and anybody who uses it is stupid too because what does it mean that you're denying the climate it's it's so and they they know it's code for what we believe you're denying what we believe right climate catastrophe questioner yeah the catastrophe it's i'm i'm skeptical of the climate catastrophe caused by humans i don't believe in it and then they say well you you what do you mean believe what about having knowledge like they make a difference between know and believe so i you know mark twain said it very cogently he said it's not what you know that's gonna hurt you it's what you think you know that just ain't so and that is a very wise saying because all these people think they know something which isn't true and that they think they know that there's a climate catastrophe or that it's inevitable i mean obviously it hasn't happened yet although the wildfires are being used to say this is the kind of catastrophe that will happen because of the climate when it has nothing to do with the climate the climate doesn't start fires lightning starts fires and people start fires that's the only main two ways they happen yeah one thing i've been saying lately is i think it's just really important that people associate the california blackouts with green energy and the california wildfires with green forestry like those are and i think there's an opportunity right now because you as you pointed out people are more seeing the light on fires you're seeing a bunch of good articles come out they're getting publicity i think the president has some awareness of it he's made this point uh as well and i think if we can if we can succeed with this issue then people can start to see wow it's really it's like fossil fuel i mean there's a broader issue but like fossil fuels are making the world a way better place and there's a whole group of people who want to deny us the benefits of them and then just make up these catastrophic side effects that are really about totally different things such as bad forest management yeah i've just about finished my next book which is titled fake invisible catastrophes and threats of doom and it's based on what i believe is a true fact and that is nearly all the scare stories today are based on things that are either invisible like co2 radiation and whatever bad thing is supposed to be in gmos they've never actually shown us what that is or put a chemical formula to it or anything or so remote that nobody can go and check it out for themselves like polar bears how many people can go to the arctic and count how many polar bears there are so and coral reefs are both they're both polar bears and coral reefs they're so is due to climate change which is due to co2 which is invisible but they are also invisible to almost everybody so this means that you can make up any story about them and the first principle of science is denied to almost every individual which is observation for themselves seeing is believing and seeing the same thing happen again and again and again under the same circumstances is getting towards thinking there might be a cause-effect relationship here and then you have experimentation and then you have replication by other people you say to the to the world look what i i think i found something here this is what i did and this is what happened and you and you so you tell them what your methodology was and methodology is usually about trying to eliminate other variables from interfering with the things you're working with to try to figure out what causes what and you know like they always say that co2 causes temperature well in fact during the glacial cycles it's temperature that's causing the co2 to go up and down because the oceans warm and give off co2 and the oceans cool and take down co2 that's that's why the co2 is changing because the temperature is changing and that's actually the only really solid known relationship we have between co2 and temperature is that the temperature is causing the co2 to go up and down so people in the green movement the media the left politicians mainly the scientists who are getting serial annual grants for doing these things studying these things and uh what's the other one oh yeah green business yeah they are all with a strong financial and or political interest in these scare stories right the greens to raise money the media to get advertising revenue and sensationalize everything the leftist politicians to tell voters they can save their grandchildren's lives for them if if they've stopped co2 emissions etc uh the the scientists because they're getting their grant money from this uh and the green business because they get their uh government handouts for doing something like wind and solar which is ridiculous uh so they're they're all in in cahoots and no hardly anybody can truth the situation because you can't see it you can't say look what that co2 is doing over there you can't say look at this awful thing in this gm plant in in the case of gm there actually isn't anything there co2 is there and radiation is there but it's invisible and so when fukushima happened not one person died from fukushima although they did blame a leukemia that happened 10 years later in someone that was there on fukushima okay one person died because of radiation from fukushima in fact over 2 000 people died because of the evacuation they moved an intensive care ward into a gymnasium somewhere else and a lot of people died as a result of that so there were more people died in fukushima from really an unnecessary evacuation the evacuation was more necessary even there 340 000 people were taken from their homes in the country mostly or in small towns and cities into huge tenement blocks around kiev where the social breakdown suicide crime and murder and marriage breakdown and mental illness and all that was so much worse than anything that ever could have happened to them from the actually fairly low radiation levels that were there and and they they've made the standards for radiation so strict that's what makes it much more expensive to build nuclear plants and china russia and japan have all rejected those standards because they know they're not realistic the the fact is radiation is actually good for you sometimes like take the sun for example most people don't think of the sun as being radiation it is especially it's got uv so people do know about that that ultraviolet in the sun can give you cancer but solar energy also makes you make vitamin d and makes you absorb phosphorus and calcium better so so radiation from the sun has a benefit as well as a negative and we have to think about that about radiation in general and and and they're making it seem as though radiation is just this horrible bad boogie man that's going to kill everybody that gets near it when in fact we're all exposed to radiation every day from bananas for for one thing have phosphorus 40-something in them so it's it's really about and that's why i'm writing this book these and threats of doom catastrophes i i i categorize as things that people say are already happening like the climate catastrophe and threats of doom are things like half the species are going to go extinct if the temperature goes up by one more degree which is totally fake so they're mostly fake uh you know there's one there's one that goes africa's oldest baobob trees are dying at an unprecedented rate and climate change may be to blame that's a new york times headline and subject right they don't actually know how many baobab trees there are to start with so how do they know that they're dying at an unprecedented rate and all of this and and climate change may be to blame whenever you see the word may in a headline or in a first sentence you should always say may or may not to yourself climate change may or may not be divine because it's conjecture it is not a statement of fact and could and would are in the same category no sorry could end may might and could those are the three it should be could or could not might or might not and uh may or may not in every case you should always have that or not in it and and so the the bay above trees are dying at an unprecedented rate the only data presented in a story that went worldwide even a fox affiliate picked it up worldwide story was a romanian chemist apparently the expert on dead baobab trees which have a range about the size of north america or i mean the continental united states in africa it's a huge range the whole of southern africa has baobab trees in it and he said that eight of the thirteen oldest baobab trees had died in the last decade so like that's less than one per year right and this is an unprecedented rate of them they are the oldest ones the oldest ones imagine if you had a headline saying the oldest chinese are dying at an unprecedented rate well it's probably true because their population has been growing so there's probably been never been this many dead old chinese per year since history began so it it it's amazing how made up so much of this stuff is and now they're making up this idea that finland sweden nor norway and estonia have increased their rates of deforestation by 49 they got a real number for it uh for wood chips for biomass energy plants this is the wind and solar energy coming in industry coming out against wood being used to make electricity because at least wood is continuous they're not they're not intermittent like wind and solar so wood-fired electricity plant can make electricity 24-7 and you don't think they would make chips out of trees that could be made into good lumber do you no because the lumber is worth more so what they're using is the waste wood from forestry and it's not deforestation they're reforesting those areas and if you go on google earth pro and zero in on those countries there is nothing but green there is light green for agriculture and dark green for forests and you can't see a cleared place in any of those countries because they reforest right away after they cut their trees down and so you might see you know and they cut them in they cut very small patches in those countries like in in north america we make larger clearings because the forests are 10 times larger than what they've got in europe but because they've got a lot of agriculture in the landscape too more like the midwest or even like appalachia where there's lots of farming in the valleys and lots of forests on the hills uh but they are not deforesting their land to make wood chips or pellets it's just not happening and there's an island in the south pacific named henderson island it's near pitcairn about a hundred and some miles from pitcairn where where the mutiny on the bounty people went and uh they still their descendants still live there pitcairn has no airport and it is the most remote island in the world and henderson is even more removed so a few years ago there was a big story showing a beach just completely littered in plastic trash claiming it was henderson island and that henderson island was in fact the most polluted island in the world with plastic trash go on google earth and you can go around the whole perimeter of henderson island and see where the sandy beaches are you can't see one piece of plastic and you can zoom in on it close enough that if it was totally littered in plastic you'd be able to see it so it's a fake picture and a fake story and the only way to get there is to fly to tahiti and then take another plane to magda something island furthers [Music] which takes quite a few days and then you have to take them you have to get someone will take you in a boat to henderson island where there is no dock and it's uninhabited right so that's what i've got to do if i want to you know uplink photographs of what it really looks like on henderson island but i think i'll just use the google earth images yeah i'm glad you're tackling that topic when is that book coming out hopefully by december 1st oh i'll tell you another good one while i'm on the subject of plastic the great pacific garbage patch twice the size of texas or three times the size of france i believe that's how the new york times described it not that long ago it does not exist alex it is a fiction there is no great pacific garbage patch when you challenge them on it the first thing they say well it's just under the water like as if every piece of plastic has a buoyancy compensation device on it right just under the water one guy actually told me it was only the clear plastic that's why you can't see it from a satellite or a plane right but then it comes down to the truth it's microplastic in other words it's invisible right as a matter of fact a scientist from department of fisheries and oceans here in canada went into the gulf of alaska to collect the microplastic from the water column because it's apparently ubiquitous in the earth's seas he came back embarrassed that he must have done something wrong because there wasn't any he's afraid to tell people that there's no microplastic in the water column of the of the gulf of alaska these all these garbage patch things are complete bs and then of course you've got sir david attenborough greenpeace the bbc the smithsonian and the natural history museum of the united states all with big web pieces on how adult albatrosses are feeding plastic to their chicks because they're mistaking it for food okay they're feeding it to chicks because birds have gizzards you'd think david attenborough who wrote the life of birds might know that that birds have gizzards that's a muscular stomach where they on the land they use pebbles mother birds feed their young birds pebbles and then when a bird learns to fly it can get its own pebbles and their gizzards have pebbles in them to help grind their food just like in a mill in a mine where they put big steel balls in there to grind the ore as the mill turns around same idea and they're saying that the parents are and then they have these pictures that they put on the internet go on and look at plastic in albatross stomachs they take a dead chick cut it and stuff it full of plastic things they're staged pictures it's just too obvious to anybody who would think about it for 10 seconds there can't be that much plastic inside a bird right but the the reason that they use plastic is because sometimes there's not enough pumice or bits of hard wood or nuts floating in the sea there's no pebbles on these rocky islands that they live on and breed on and most the time they're actually at sea when they're when they're flying when the chicks are fledged everybody goes out to sea and stays there for weeks on end so they can't collect pebbles and so the bits of plastic are ones that the parents choose that are the right size and they wear out eventually all the but pumice it's interesting there's undersea volcanoes that give out pumice and it floats so the bird will find a marble-sized piece of pumice that's their favorite thing because it's a rock basically but it it's light and so they they give the chick a rock and when the chicks are young they don't have to fly so they really fill their gizzards up with lots of this stuff because the faster they grow the sooner the parents won't have to feed them anymore so they want them to grow fast so they feed them a lot and they give them enough grinding material before the birds fledge they have to cough up it's called a bolus this wad of stuff they keep some of it but they cough up most of it and then they can fly because they're not too heavy so that's the real story but sir david attenborough is telling us the same thing and he shows a plastic bag albatross do not feed plastic bags to their chicks they feed them hard bits of plastic that have broken off and in you know in the waves or whatever crashing on the shores so uh that's a true story and this is the lies they're telling everybody in the public and how many people can go to midway island and see what's going on with the albatross there not only that the albatross population is growing enormously in population because in the early 1900s there was what you called a which meant going bash a whole bunch of albatrosses over they had to take their feathers and so they did that a lot and now it's illegal so we are making some progress here but in the lion's department we're not making much progress in the fake news department that's for sure yeah i'm very excited i really like your talk on the invisible catastrophe so i'm really looking forward to um seeing the book okay we need to wrap up but just any any final thoughts and and also just make sure to share where people can learn more about your work they can learn more about my work on my twitter account which is at ecosense now ecosense as insensible uh i have a website ecosense.org or is it oh it's ecosense.me i think that's right it's ecosense.me uh i'm all over youtube uh i have five five minute videos on prageru which are pretty concise to the point and short enough that people won't mind watching them i'm not very good myself with the half hour one hour videos but five minute one is good um you can buy my book on amazon which is called confessions of a greenpeace dropout the making of a sensible environmentalist and just patrick moore will find you either an e-book or print book on amazon this book will be available on amazon and as an e-book and as an apple book because apple allows color i'm putting a lot of color plates in here which won't look too good on what's that thing called that amazon has a kindle kindle yeah probably i don't think they do color yet and it would be good if they did uh but the book will be color uh and it will have a cover which has a an illustration of the four horsemen of the apocalypse uh with a sign sort of like the one hermann holds in uh what's the name of that cartoon uh anyways the one where they're always making fun of the nuclear industry and the green slime oh the simpsons simpsons yeah homer yeah not herman homer homer has there's a cartoon of homer holding a sign saying the end is near oh right right and and that's sort of the tone of this book is mocking the end is near uh because the end is obviously not near and so many people are saying it is because of whatever um terrific all right well we'll definitely try to get you on uh when that comes out and i just want to say thanks for all of your work and educating us about the truth about how the earth works and it's great to talk to you again nice to talk to you too alex i hope could be with you again someday sounds good thanks again to patrick moore for being on the show there's one point he made that i wanted to comment on but he um he jumped into another important point after he made it so i didn't have it i have time to comment at the time which is he was talking about these different forces that are combining together to lead to a huge distortion of the way the world works and in particular these invisible remote catastrophes and predictions of doom that are almost entirely without foundation or in many cases entirely without foundation and he mentioned i don't know if i'll remember all four but there's the media and there's green industry and then there are academics who are financed and maybe it was the environmental organizations as well who are financed i forget exactly what the four were but a point i want to make about this is that i think all of those motives are real but underlying that is something that he mentioned earlier which is the idea that everything humans do is bad and i call this the anti-human impact framework or the anti-impact framework for short and this is basically the idea that our starting point is that we think that human impact on the rest of nature is a immoral and b inevitably self-destructive and part of the reason we think that is because we have this idea that nature is a delicate nurturer i sometimes call this the delicate nurturer premise or the perfect planet premise and this is the idea that nature gives us a planet that is sufficient safe and stable but that any significant human impact is going to disrupt that because it exists in a delicate balance and as soon as we disrupt the delicate balance then it's going to become it's going to become deficient and dangerous and just completely destabilized and in reality the truth is nature is from a human perspective wild potential so it's got these amazing building blocks of life there are amazingly beautiful parts of it there's potential but that potential has to be actualized by a massive intelligent human impact and one thing i really value about patrick moore that i probably always say is that he doesn't have this bias against human impact so he's able to objectively look at different kinds of human impacts and say hey some of these are intelligent and some of these aren't versus saying no all of our impact is bad and it must be bad and so of course all these things are true and even if they're not true they're basically true they're fundamentally true they're on the right track so we don't have to correct ourselves and anytime you have this bias against human impact you're just going to see that the whole world and the way it works is distorted because overall we have a world that in large part thanks to fossil-fueled machines is getting better and better and better because with those machines we can produce a huge amount of value that we could never produce with manual labor and part of that value is we're able to uh make our environment way cleaner and safer than it would naturally be but because we because all of that is impact we think oh that must be bad and so we can't even see it we can't even see how amazing the world is and then of course when anything goes wrong we assume oh it's because we it's because we disrupted the delicate balance it's of course it's because of our impact it's not actually as as patrick moore points out in many ways because we failed to impact nature intelligently in terms of actual forestry including where it makes sense uh logging and brush clearing and controlled burns so i just wanna i i tend to see these things fundamentally as about the philosophy or the framework and i think the more the anti-human impact framework is spread the more then there are financial incentives uh around that because people believe it's morally the right thing for us to be reducing our impact in this general way and so then they'll they'll uh there are all sorts of different ways of cashing in on that from having a supposedly low impact form of energy namely solar wind energy or having an organization that's designed to minimize human impact like the sierra club or having scientists who are studying the evil of human impact like all of these things are based on this framework or philosophy or ultimately really religion that says that human impact is bad and so we need to correct the errors error of our ways so that we do the right thing we bring nature more to a natural less humanized state and we avert the alleged disasters that are inevitably going to result from all of our impact even though in reality life keeps getting better and better so the alternative is the human flourishing framework recognize that our goal is not an unimpacted planet our goal is human flourishing and that means we need to dramatically and intelligently impact the planet to make it a much much better place for human beings to live and as i mentioned one huge way of doing that is to use a lot of machine power to make us way more productive and we want the lowest cost most versatile form of energy and for most cases that is fossil fuels all right i hope that's clarifying uh some a quick update energytalkingpoints.com has a new website i just put up the entry on wildfires and i'm hoping by the time you see this that the the uh entry on it was california wildfires the entry on california blackouts is up i've been sharing it a lot lately please share it now it's a way better site thanks i mentioned him in the last episode which is going to release this same week thanks to sasha klein who volunteered to help create this website which i think is a massive massive improvement so there's uh there's that i am getting more and more interest in these more people using them more people reaching out to me sometimes behind the scenes at quite high levels to ask for input on things so any of you who are sharing energytalkingpoints.com it is time well spent also if you like energypoints.com and you want to help accelerate its spread consider becoming a center for industrial progress accelerator as i talk about all the you can go to industrialprogress.com accelerate all accelerator contributions go toward either research and development on projects like this or promotion on projects like this none of it is overhead none of it is going to me so you can be sure that any dollar you give to this is going to be used in a very high leverage way to make something new happen that wouldn't otherwise happen all right couple more notes as always if you have any questions comments love mail or hate mail email me at alex alex epstein dot com i should mention i never mentioned this but i'm on linkedin and i'm very what you might call promiscuous in terms of accepting people adding me to their network because i find that it's it's been a really cool network just to post things to i've been posting there more lately so if you want to add me to linkedin i'll be happy to accept it unless you send me something really generic that unless you send me some message that makes it clear that you have no idea what i do but that you want some business from me that those are the only ones i reject because then i figure they're just going to send me another email and then i'm going to have to deal with that and that email will have no purpose so a little bit of a tangent on uh linkedin sign up for the newsletter maybe the most important thing industrial progress.com just enter in your email address i mentioned already energytalkingpoints.com please go there and share that and also if you are interested in a speech including a virtual speak go to industrialprogress.com speaking or just email me again my address is alex alexepstein.com all right that is it for this week hope you enjoyed this episode uh make sure you also check out the other wildfire episode i did this week uh with chuck devore of the texas public policy foundation i think combined there's a ton of wisdom in these episodes so listen to them learn from them spread the word all right that's it for this week i'll be back next week until then i'm alex epstein this has been power hour power hour life liberty and the pursuit of energy power hour the antidote to shallow thinking about energy issues

Channel: ImproveThePlanet

Views: 9,717

Keywords:

Id: oiwfR2cqVh0

Length: 76min 41sec (4601 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 16 2020