Joe Rogan - How Accurate Was An Inconvenient Truth?

The Al Gore film is something that scared a lot of people, but was also very widely dismissed by a lot of other people as well. How accurate was that movie? I think it proved to be too sanguine. It didn't deal with a lot of extreme weather. I thought that stuff was far away. And I think this is one of the big shortcomings of most writing about climate, most kind of communication about climate for 25 years, is that we were told it was slow. We were told it was going to be coming maybe at the scale of centuries, something we'd have to worry about for our grandchildren. But when you realize that half of all the damage we've done has been done in the last 30 years, and you see already the extreme weather, we had a global heat wave last summer, totally unprecedented. A lot of people died in Canada, they died in Russia, they died in the Middle East. The same season, 3 million people were evacuated in China from a typhoon, unprecedented rains in Japan. We had multiple hurricanes in the Caribbean all at once. There was an island in Hawaii, East Island, a small island, not one that most people have gone to, but got literally wiped off the map by a hurricane. They were thinking about inventing a new category of hurricane, category six. All of these impacts are coming much faster than scientists predicted even a decade or two ago. And so I think the first inconvenient truth is a little too complacent. But Al Gore is also, I know him a little bit, I've talked to him a few times. He's temperamentally, he's a technocrat, he's an optimist, he thinks market forces can solve all this stuff. And I don't even totally disagree with him. I think that market forces are really powerful. We've had a huge green energy revolution in the US that's, you know, and had spillover effects elsewhere in the world. So solar power is now cheaper than anybody expected it would be decade or two ago. Although it's also the case that we haven't replaced any of our dirty energy with it, we've just added to our capacity. So the ratio of renewable energy to dirty energy is now the same as it was 40 years ago. We made no progress. Why is that? Because we just, if we're like, rather than saying, oh, let's retire this coal plant and replace it with a, you know, a wind farm, we think, oh, we'll have the coal plant and the wind farm, we'll have more energy. You know, we just grow the pie of energy.