Professor Jordan Peterson on climate change and climate policy at the Cambridge Union

drought flooding and ocean acidification unanticipated for 65 million years all result from climate change according to over 700 of your fellow scientists so I was wondering whether you thought climate change could be an issue that could unite us all or left and right moving us beyond debates about c16 to discussions at the UN Katowice next month where perhaps humanity might finally discover its global map of meaning No I mean those there's a couple of reasons I mean the first reason is is that I spent a lot of time reading I worked for UN Committee for two years on sustainable economic and ecological development and read a very large amount during that period of time and learned a lot much of which made me much more optimistic than I have been before I read the relevant literature which was a real shock to me but the climate change issue is an absolutely catastrophic nightmarish mess and the idea that that will unite us is that's that's that's not going to unite us I mean first of all it's very difficult to separate the science from the politics and second even if the claims the more radical claims are true we have no idea what to do about it and so no and besides it's even worse than that here's though here's one of the worst things about the whole masses so as you project outwards with regards to your climate change projections which are quite unreliable to begin with and the unreliability of the measurement magnifies as you move forward in time obviously because the errors accumulate and so if you go out 50 years the error bars around the projections are already so so wide that we won't be able to measure the positive or negative effects of anything we do right now so how in the world are you going to solve a problem when you can't even measure the consequence of your actions like how is that even possible and and besides that well what's the solution what are we gonna do switch to wind and solar well good luck with that just try it and see what happens we can't store the power Germany tried it they produce more carbon dioxide than they did when they started because they had to turn on their coal-fired plants again that wasn't a very good plan well we don't want nuclear it's like okay what happens at night huh the Sun Goes Down well isn't that something we shouldn't have taken it that we should have taken into account are we gonna flip on the coal-fired plants well so it was a complete catastrophe and all that happened was the price of electricity shot up there's like zero utility that's that's not a solution so what are we gonna do about it well we should cut back we can't consume as much as we should as we as we are all consuming it's like well maybe except the data that I've read indicate that if you can get the GDP of people up to about five thousand dollars a year then they start caring about the and the environment cleans up so you could make a perfectly strong case I think and a reasonable one perhaps even a humane one that the actual idea would be to get everybody in the world who's poor desperately so out of poverty as fast as possible which would increase consumption in the short term because then they'd start to care about the environment and things would clean up it's like okay well what are we gonna do about global warming well good luck figuring that out I don't see a solution on the horizon I look at Bjorn long Berg's work I really like Bjorn long Berg I think he's a real genius you can look them up if you want he took the UN millennial goals there's 200 of them that's way too many goals if you're serious about goals by the way because 200 goals isn't a plan it's a wish list you have to prioritize I'm serious you have to prioritize but they won't prioritize because each of the goals has its constituents and if you prioritize then you irritate the constituents and but if you don't prioritize then you can't implement the plan so what Lumbergh did was gather a team of teams of economists multiple teams some of whom were Nobel prize-winning economists he had them assemble teams he had them rank order development goals in terms of the return on investment all of the teams then he averaged across the teams and came up with a final list and an addressing global warming wasn't even on the list the most fundamental he wrote a book called how to spend seventy five billion dollars to make the world a better place and that's not very much money on a global scale almost everything that he recommended had to do with increased child nutrition in developing in developing countries it's like these things are complicated man these are complicated it's like well let's fix global warming it's like okay well good luck with that first of all how are you going to do that and to think that will unite us but certainly not uniting us so far so no and it's just it's just it's the kind of low resolution thinking that just gets us absolutely nowhere I like what Lumbergh did way better I think it's way more intelligent so you know maybe if you if you increase child nutrition enough and you produce another I don't know 10 million geniuses as a consequence of that and maybe one mo figure out what to do about global warming well I'm serious about that you know it's not a bad thing to increase the total some of human brain power you know and so we pretreat these things so lightly well let's fix the planet well we're going to concentrate on global warming well why global warming well cuz everyone thinks that's the biggest catastrophe well maybe it is but if you don't have a solution well then what about all those other problems what are you gonna do about them well we'll ignore them because we can feel good about you know being concerned about global warming it's like I don't I don't you know one of the reasons there's more trees in the northern hemisphere than there were a hundred years ago no one knows that but it's true and by a substantial margin you know why in part because people burned coal instead of wood it's like everyone says well we shouldn't burn coal it's like ok fair enough what do you want to do burn trees instead because that's what poor people would have done it's like coal isn't good well it's better than burning wood so these things are complicated so they're unbelievably complicated and so no it's not going to unite us and we're not gonna do a damn thing about it either so it doesn't really matter so well what are we gonna do you're gonna stop like having heat you gonna stop having electricity you're gonna stop driving your cars you're gonna stop taking trains it's like you're not gonna stop using your iPhones you're not going to do any of that and no wonder so so no thank you for thank you for that

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Length: 6min 30sec (390 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 08 2018