Joe Rogan - Environmentalism is Treated Like a Religion

Fuel for life. For example, we humans right now. We're under the influence of another end of the world religion. Looking toward a different kind of paradise. It's called environmentalism. And it says that we humans are causing climate change. Now that's, this is a little silly. We humans may be contributing to climate change. But climate change has been the norm on this planet for 4.5 billion years. This is one of those sacred science subjects that's almost like a scientific Jesus. You cannot question the ancient scrolls. And it's an end times belief system. Because it says the world is about to end because of things we've done, because we've sinned. And if we simply sacrifice to the goddess of nature, to Gaia, the universe will go back to being a stable, a climatically stable Garden of Eden. Well, I got news for you. This planet has never been climatically stable. In the very beginning, it wheeled around its axis once every six hours. That means if you pick any point on the surface, it was in this poisonous stuff called radiation for three hours. Then it was yanked into darkness, which is equally destructive. And the temperature would go up a minimum of 86 degrees every, whoops, up and down, 86 degrees every three hours. That's climate change. Plus, it was on a tilt and it was rotating around the sun. And as it rotated, the climate went through hideous changes. But this is all way in the past. And what people are concerned with, what our role and what impact human race has had. Doesn't matter. What we need to be after is climate state. If we really want the climate to be the way it was in 1650, before the Industrial Revolution, that's a human choice. That's biogenic in origin. And we need to acknowledge that that's what we have decided. And now we're going to develop climate stabilization technologies. My question for you, though, is why is it such a sacred subject? What you've just said, even just questioning for a moment and saying that environmentalism is a type of religion, climate denialist. You could be labeled with that. And people would love to break it down in a very simple one sentence statement and call you a climate denialist. Climate change denialist. That's son of a bitch. And the next thing you know, people will repeat that. It doesn't have to have any basis in fact. And nobody will want to sign you anymore for a book contract or anything. Right. Any complexity or context in what you're trying to say. They don't want the subtle nuance of what you're trying to express. Well, there's a blunt nuance. We have to develop climate stabilization technologies. If taking carbon out of the atmosphere is a carbon stabilization technology, then so be it. But we have to develop others because this globe goes through ice ages and global warmings. So you think the answer is in technology? Yes. That's what the answer has always been for humans. I mean, why were we born? Look, we have this chemical in our gut, cholocystokinin. And it only goes off when we eat meat. So we're built to eat meat. And it's a bonding hormone like oxytocin. It brings people together. So if you're having a good meat meal with a bunch of people, this is a chemical in your ruts that says these are good people, stick with them. Don't tell the vegans this. Yeah. Well, so why, if we were born to eat meat, don't we have claws? Why don't we have ripping fangs? Why don't we have fur? Because we figured out a way to cook it. Because we figured out a way to make clothes. We figured out a way to use skins. We figured out a way to isolate ourselves from the environment in terms of housing and control of fire. You got it. And that means that we were born naked. We were naked apes for a reason because we are homo-tulicus, whatever that word would be. We are the people of tools. And we developed the first stone tool to the best of our knowledge, approximately 3.1 to 3.4 million years ago, long before we became modern humans. So we were born in this peculiar way that is naked and without claws and without ripping fangs. After we developed the tools it took, like fire and cooking, which you just cited, to allow us to have artificial claws, artificial ripping fangs, to cook our meals. The big conclusion of a book that I've just read on what makes us different from a neuroscientist, she's the neuroscientist who corrected the standard figure for the number of neurons in the brain from 100 billion to 86 billion by actually counting them. She says what made us human was cooking, just what you said. Because when you cook you liberate a whole mess of calories and nutritive sources that are not available to a gorilla that's eating leaves. And how do we know that? Because the gorilla is born with a pot belly the size of a Franklin stove because it needs this huge digestive apparatus in order to handle those leaves, to break them down into food. Well when you cook you don't need that huge gut. Now the bacteria, or the ape is not able to go very far, the gorilla. He certainly can't migrate once. You know you see Jane Goodall and she is pleading for us to save the habitat of the chimpanzees. Have you ever seen Jane Goodall pleading for us to save the habitat of baboons? Never. The baboons are the rats of Africa. Baboons are extraordinarily adaptive. They're extraordinarily curious. They're always finding new environments and figuring out ways to turn them into food. Chimpanzees don't have that quality. The reason we need to save their environment is because they're so dumb as a group. Because the collective intelligence of a group of chimpanzees is so low that now that they're adapted to one environment that's the only environment they can adapt to. Whereas baboons who have smaller individual brains have greater collective smarts. Do you see how baboons have domesticated dogs? No. Yeah. They domesticated house dogs. They figured out a way to keep the dogs near them so they could be alerted when some intruders are in camp. That's amazing. They can kidnap these dogs and hold them hostage and feed them. And the dogs just kind of learn to hang around them. Well, they're ideal hunting companions. It's very bizarre. Yeah. It's what we did once upon a time. And you could say very easily it wasn't us who tamed dogs. It was dogs who tamed us. Look how well we treat them. Here it is right here. See, they hold on to these dogs. The dogs try to get away. Oh, is that a puppy in its shoulder? It's a puppy on the ground. Oh, I see. And they eventually stay with them in these camps, but they hold them hostage. Look. Amazing. He's dragging this dog right. He's not killing it, not eating it. But they have somehow or another figured out that if they keep these dogs around long enough, the dogs will bark when intruders and predators are near them. Amazing. It's crazy. Absolutely amazing. Really crazy stuff. But remember, we were just looking at baboons. And baboons have a brain smaller than the brain of a chimpanzee. Have you ever seen a chimpanzee do that? No. No. Chimpanzees are not highly adaptive. What's the measure of intelligence? Ability to adapt. Okay. So let's see how we measure the intelligence of bacteria, knowing that bacteria work in a group of 7 trillion and have a collective intelligence within that group. And they have a collective multi-colony intelligence because once they develop certain genetic tricks, they pass the tricks around in little tiny envelopes for practical purposes. So they're constantly sharing new bacterial tricks. So we are told by the environmentalists, the New End Times movement, that we have used up all the resources on this planet. We have vastly overburdened this planet. We are eking it out of existence. But bacteria are 12 miles beneath our feet right now, and they are turning raw rock granite. Now if the task of life is to kidnap, seduce, and recruit as many dead atoms as possible into the grand project of life, who's doing the best job right now? Who recognizes that for every ounce of living stuff on the planet, there are 100 million ounces of dead stuff waiting to be kidnapped and seduced and recruited into the grand project of life? Bacteria get it. Our bacteria nature? You bet your ass. So what is nature telling us through these bacteria? You have 100 trillion more ounces of dead stuff for every living ounce you've got. And your obligation on behalf of life is to do what the bacteria are doing, kidnap, seduce, and recruit as many dead atoms as possible and bring them into the project of life. Use technology to stabilize the environment. If that's what we choose, yes. And that is what we've chosen. But people are not regarding it as a choice. They're regarding it as something imposed on them by a higher force. Right. No, I'm sorry. Gaia, Mother Nature, is not a higher force. Mother Nature is a bitch. Mother Nature throws every conceivable obstacle on her path, and she can't help it. Why? Because our planet, in addition to the fact that we are on a tilted axis, so we go through a climate change called summer, fall, winter, and spring every single year, and it's a pretty violent climate change. And we have a planet that's been ice ball earth, snow ball earth, twice in its history. The fact is, the planet is on a trajectory, on a path, on a voyage, on a mission that is scarier than the mission of Frodo the Hobbit. It is circling the core of the galaxy approximately every 235 million years. And as it goes through that long voyage around the center of the galaxy, it goes through spiral arms of galaxies that change our climate dramatically. It gathers something like 100 trillion tons of cosmic dust per year, and at certain points, it goes through clouds of cosmic fluff that triple the amount of that dust that we gather, which changes the climate considerably. And we go through a Milankovitch cycle that changes the climate every 22,000, 40,000, and 110,000 years. Not precisely, but in that range. So, yes, if we want to stabilize the climate, take responsibility for your decision already. Admit that this is a biogenic decision. And then go after climate stabilization technologies. Yes, try removing carbon from the atmosphere. See if it works. But in the long haul, we are on a 12,000 year passage in which climate has been relatively stable. That's not normal. The norm is rapid climate change much more rapidly than we've seen, and ice ages. And they alter. So we better damn well learn these things. Now, when I was in Japan a few years ago, in a conference about harvesting solar power in space and transmitting it down to Earth, which is carbon neutral and a source of such tremendous amounts of power that it defies description, there was a woman from the European Space Agency, and she said, well, if you guys are going to build these giant solar harvesting farms, these five mile by five mile arrays of photovoltaic panels, when you see a hurricane heading for Jamaica, send down a laser beam, lays the outer edges of the hurricane so that you change the heat at a certain point on that hurricane and redirect it so it doesn't hit Jamaica. So it goes harmlessly out to sea. Well, that's the beginning of harnessing these things, harnessing disasters as energy opportunities. Now, have we ever done that? Well, what about fire? If you'd been the first one to start playing with fire, your mama would have told you, look, you see all those dead animals in there that have been roasted and barbecued by this forest fire? You want to become one of them? Put that back where it belongs. And fire saved us. At the heart of a jet, at the heart of a piston and the piston of a car, what do we have? Explosions. Explosions? That's one of the most devastating catastrophes we can imagine, an explosion. What causes this very rigid, I don't want to say scientific dogma, but dogma in terms of the way you're allowed to talk about climate change? Well, there are certain aspects of science that are religion because we science people are built with the same supernormal responses in us that the flying saucer people have in them and that the Christians who still believe in the coming of the kingdom of God. You can't debate this. This is not something like even what you've said so far is outside of... Absolutely heresy. Well, one person did. There was an astronomer who had gone up to Canada for God knows what reason. He wrote a book on the evolution of the cosmos. I thought it was brilliant. My friend, Eshalbyn Jacob, my colleague who was the head of the physics department at the University of Tel Aviv and the head of the physical association, you know, the association of all physicists in Israel where they have some pretty good physicists, said, oh, Lee will talk to you. He's a very open guy. And when I got hold of Lee, I forget his last name, but you would recognize it. Lee sent me a note saying, well, it's a pleasure to meet you, but that article that you wrote in the Wall Street Journal about climate was unfortunate. It was something a little harsher than that, meaning you have sinned. And I watched this movement develop from the beginning and it developed by using conformity enforcers. Well, that Al Gore movie tipped it over the top. It helped. A lot of things helped. And the unfortunate truth that just people had, they realized they had, I mean, if you want a virtue signal, you got to get on board. Well, what really put the environmental movement on the map was Earth Day. And the guy who pulled that off really pulled off an amazing PR stone. That was just an astonishing PR stone. So that's what started it off, you think? Yes. Yes. Because in the 1950s, when I was the head of the program, Kiminy, at my high school, I programmed in a guy who talked to us about what was being done to Wales. And the pictures were horrifying. This guy was a giant. He was about six foot two. And in those days, that was really, really tall. And he was the most severe person I'd ever met. He walked in without acknowledging me. I had booked him at all. He had a frown on his face that was unbelievable. He walked out with that same serious frown, uncompromising, without saying goodbye, without saying thank you, without any of the normal social graces. And he didn't have a name for what he was doing. Conservation was the name of what he was doing back then. And it was Earth Day that put another word on the map, environmentalism. And that got environmentalism into first grades and second grades and fourth grades when kids are at an imprinting age, when their brains are literally being fashioned around some of the key things that they absorb at that age. When we talk about impressionable, we're talking about a certain element of the morphology of the brain that wraps itself around certain things and then never lets them go. And environmentalism was built to get into the brains of young people and never leave. And eventually, environmentalism developed its own end of the Earth scenario. It tried to develop one in 1968 when Paul Ehrlich, who was a butterfly specialist, said that by 1980, which remember, 1968 was 12 years away. So that's like my talking about something that will happen in 2030. It seemed a long ways away. And he said by 1980, we would get to the point where there are so many people on the planet that we'd have to stand on each other's shoulders. There would be no room for us. We would vastly outstrip the carrying capacity of the environment, meaning the food supply would run out. It would not be able to keep up with our population growth. And as a consequence, in the early 1980s, people would die by the hundreds of millions in India and China and even the United States. Now, remember back to those days, Joe, I don't know if you know the history of it. You were probably born after it. But did remember all the hundreds of millions of people dying in India and China and the United States? Remember how your parents had to stand on each other's shoulders in order to find room to live? No, I don't recall that. You don't? I just, what's wrong with you? I don't understand. So much like the apocalyptic cults, they move the goalposts. Yeah, exactly. And so now it's climate change. And originally it was global warming. And then they smartened up to the fact that they better cover their ass just in case we had an ice age instead of warming. And glass, what is the planet of global warming and climate change? This one? Yeah, big time. So they are right. And they are wrong. We need to do these climate stabilization technologies. We must. I mean, we've been doing them, you said it best. We've been doing them ever since we invented the fur coat, which allowed us to get out of Africa and go to the forest ends of Asia when we were still far from being humans, modern humans, that the technology of the cave and beyond that, the technology of the hut, all these are climate stabilization technologies on a small scale. We need to do climate stabilization technology on a big soul scale. No, that does not mean that we have to put sulfur droplets into the atmosphere to keep the sun from warming the surface of the earth. That would be so stupid. It's ridiculous. It's not a reversible move. But if you have a laser from harnessing space solar power and you use it to redirect hurricanes, you can see what worked the first time and try something different the second time and the third time until you perfect it. You can't do that with sulfur docks and droplets in the atmosphere. It's one of the stupidest things I've ever heard in my life. But that's the first solution, technological solution, to come out of all of the climate people's mouths. But we need to do what they're talking about. We just have to take ownership of it.