The Problem With the Modern Environmental Movement

Yeah, peace. To me, peace is happiness at rest, and happiness is kind of peace and motion. You can convert peace to happiness anytime you want, but peace is what you want most of the time. That's interesting. You can convert peace to happiness anytime you want. Yeah, if you're a peaceful person, anything you do will be a happy activity. And by the way, being on social media and engaging in politics will not bring you peace. There's nothing less peaceful. In today's day and age? The way we think you get peace is by resolving all your external problems, but there's unlimited external problems. So the only way to actually get peace is on the inside by giving up this idea of problems. Who thinks you can get peace by resolving external problems other than politicians? Everybody. That's what everybody's struggling to do, right? Why are you trying to make money to solve all your money problems? Why are you trying to win at politics? Cause then you'll be at peace because your people will have won. Whew. It's a daunting task to get your shit together. It's easier to change yourself than to change the world. That's true. And the best way to change the world is to change yourself. Exactly. It's all, yeah, it's all these people who are shouting on social media. The best way is just to actually live the life that you want other people to live. Like I went out in New Zealand and there's this guy that I met with and, you know, everyone's on social media shouting about environmentalism and conservative and sustained. And I go to this guy's house and he was doing a very quietly, very gently. He was doing a two week long zero waste experiment where he was throwing out nothing. So every package that he opened he would keep and he would like clean it up. So he would keep his Amazon boxes. He would keep the little containers, even a teabag. If he opened a teabag, he has to figure out how to compost the tea inside, how to make the tea itself useful, how to make the teabag like a little storage item. So there was no trash. He was literally living with zero trash waste and he was doing it and it was really inspirational. Meeting people like him made me far more environmentally conscious than, you know, any amount of people yelling at me on social media ever will. How long did he do that for? I think it was two weeks. It was hard. What the fuck are you going to do with tea bags? He had quite the collection. The teabag. He was filling them with little things. He sounds like a crazy hoarder, like a hoarder person with stacks of teabags in his house. Very impressive guy. Yeah, that's a strange way to go about things. I appreciate it. I mean, look, it is entirely possible to somehow or another engineer all of our cups and all of our things and all of our, to be biodegradable. You know, the struggle with the modern environmental movement is that they identify the correct problem, which is finite earth, spaceship earth, this is all we got, don't ruin it, but they don't have the solution. So what they say is no growth, no growth, no growth. No, the problem is you got 3 billion Indian and Chinese who aren't going to stay in poverty. They're going to grow whether you like it or not. So you can yell at them. You can scream at them. You can yell at us and scream at us, but that's not going to happen. So the only way out, unfortunately, is again, through technology, which is you have to build green technology. And I give Musk a lot of credit, you know, for being one of the few people who's out there trying to do that. So you build things that are biodegradable and good for you and healthier. And everybody wants to be healthier. Chinese want to be healthier. Indians want to be healthier. They want to be cleaner. If you say, I can clean up your rivers, I can clean up your forests. I can have your children not get sick with cholera and diphtheria and typhoid. I can cure your diseases. I can help make your immune system stronger. I can give you clean drinking water. Like that is what causes people to become environmentalists, not shouting and screaming at them that they shouldn't grow and they should stop pumping things into the sky. And you know, they have no concept of that. They're just trying to get out of poverty. So I think the modern environmental movement identifies the correct problem, but then doesn't come up with the right set of solutions that are appealing to people. People are not going to give up economic growth. They're going to have to get rich first. Hmm. That's yeah, that's a very good point. But how do you do, how do, how do you do both? You lower the price of clean, clean technologies massively. So you basically make clean technologies cost competitive through subsidies. Through subsidies. Innovation, ideally you can subsidize in the short to medium term until the innovation curve is crossed. I mean, like Tesla doesn't have any patents, right? Right. Or they, they freely give away their patents. That's an example of how you can do it. So, you know, someone, if you want to get rid of plastic straws, yeah, you can do it here and there, you can get San Francisco to ban plastic straws, but China's not going to ban plastic straws. Not until you build a paper straw that is, you know, same cost, good durability, and then you, and then you educate the Chinese like, hey, this is petroleum, you know, this plastic that you're doing is petroleum, this is bad for you. Here's the chemical composition. Here's the things that are going in your blood stream and they want healthy, happy kids also. So they're going to have their kids use paper straws. Maybe straws aren't the best example, but you can, you know, this is true with fossil fuels, for example, that's, that's probably the best one or replacing a lot of plastics with glass and paper and so on. Yeah. There's a new technology that was just Ron De Patrick, headed on our Twitter today about they're, they're able to convert plastic waste into fuel and that there's companies that are actively trying to do that now. So then in that way, plastic waste will become valuable and it'll become a commodity and it'll become something that people resource. Now there's certain problems this doesn't solve. This doesn't solve carbon. This doesn't solve deforestation. Uh, you know, so there you kind of have to step in with other means. So for example, you'll get the Amazon, right? Everyone's complaining about the Amazon being deforested. Well, you're not the poor Brazilian farmer, right? So you're, you're, you're sitting here in your comfortable chair, like social media hammering away at, you know, the evil Brazilians for deforesting the Amazon, but the Amazon has incredible resources. If we really care about it, we should turn it into an incredible tourist park and put your money where your mouth is, start doing ecotourism in the Amazon, start paying for it, and then maybe take the future rights for all the pharmaceuticals that are going to come out of all the incredible plants there and start selling those off so that people, so that maybe give the pharmaceutical companies an incentive to preserve the biodiversity of the Amazon. Say, Hey, if you buy this patch of the Amazon, you conservative and you conservative, whatever plant medicines that come out of there that you can then license, you get the patent for 20 years or 30 years or whatever. So I think there are solutions where we as the first worlders who have money can put our money where our, where our mouth is and go and rescue these kinds of properties. That's a very interesting solution, but I could see immediate pushback from people that don't think the pharmaceutical companies should have the rights to this natural plant. Or the, or the government does it and then the government gets the patents and the government will auction off the patents later or they'll worse or they'll license them or whatever it is. Right. Well, that's often like just this, the often, the problem is there is no really good solution. There's a bunch of solutions that also have drawbacks. That's life. Yeah. Right. That's the trade off. So as being a human. Yeah. Very messy. Yeah. It's a constrained environment. Obviously I skew more towards a private property capitalist type solutions because even though they're not perfect, they have been proven to actually work, right? Once something is your property, you take care of it. Yeah. You're not going to, you're not going to crap all over your own house. Um, but it should probably be temporary property, not permanent property. You see a lot of countries around the world now doing this no foreign ownership of land thing, for example, or Mexico has no private ownership of beaches, right? So you can draw the line at certain points. Mm hmm. Yeah.