The West won't worry about climate change until lots of white people die. In a white country. So if you have 50 million Texans die of climate disasters, then they'll take it seriously, but not until something like that happens. When it happens to brown people in the third world. They won't give a s#!% The influential contrarian economist, Steve Keen. Brilliant economist that criticizes much of modern economics. The research fellow at the Institute for Strategy, Resilience, and Security at University College in London. He is someone that each and every one of us has to listen to, whether we agree or disagree. You're Steve Keen. My name is Matthew Rose. I'm one of the editors of Brave New Europe. I don't know how one does an introduction for Steve Keen. He held a talk yesterday at the MMT Congress. I don't need to know where to begin with the accomplishments. He probably became best known after the great financial crisis of 2007, 2008, 2009, which he predicted, other people just said, there's something coming. But Steve said what's coming and why it was coming and it all proved to be very correct. Steve was one of the first, economists who brought economics and climate change together and, the connection between the two. When you look at the beginnings of the research on climate change, it's all about the carbon dioxide trapping heat, which for the experiments, I think it was, Artenius. I've forgotten the name of the female scientist who first discovered this back in the 1850s. But the fact that carbon dioxide traps heat, was known by experiments just by passing, I think, passing, irradiating a tube of, gas, of different gases and see whether the temperature rose or not. And of course, if a gas was transparent to infrared, Light, heat, then it would just pass through without heating it up. So oxygen on its own, no effect. Oxygen with carbon dioxide, the temperature rose. So we know that particular mechanical, semi mechanical role of carbon dioxide right from the 1850s. If you want to see where climate change work, in a sense, began in terms of looking at how it would impact human civilization, that was the Limits to Growth, written in 1972. And that book was the very first public exposition of a model in what's called system dynamics. So you, and you had a bunch of MIT engineers, so one of the greatest engineers of all time, Jay Forrester, designed the technology, which led to a model he wrote himself called World 2. And then he handed it over to his, students at that time in Dana Meadows. her husband whose name I've forgotten temporarily. And, Jürgen Randers is still alive and kicking. And they produced the Limits to Growth Report. And what that did was say, looking at five major systems in the economy. So population was one, food production another, industrial output, health, and pollution. Those are the five factors. And what they did with, a, they, work with a number of, quite a number of global experts on different, aspects of population experts, pollution experts, agricultural experts, and so on. And they then developed an index of data beginning in 1900. So they took, various data series on agriculture, pollution, industrial output, life expectancy, and so on, put them all together. And they then set up the model. So the model could roughly reproduce that index data from 1900 to 1970. And then they ran it forward from 1970 forward. And they deliberately, when they plotted what this model predicted, they deliberately began the x axis at 1900 and finished it at 2100 and had no dividing lines in the middle. And they explicitly wrote in the book itself that we are not making a prediction of the particular times for this to happen. The model's too general, too, simple to be able to do that properly. So we're just saying what the trends imply and what that trends imply and what they call business as usual. So you had how we were behaving as a civilization, population growth and industrial output and so on from 1900, continue forward to 1970 and just keep on going on that track. And what that predicted was roughly a population peak and collapse, an industrial output peak and collapse, a pollution peak and collapse sometime in the early 2100s, between 2100 and 2150, roughly speaking. So that was the beginning of climate change science in a sense, and that's when the economists got involved. That was William Nordhaus, and he dived in and rubbished the paper, rubbished the work of their limits to growth, in a paper that he called, measurement without data, and denigrated them and having no data whatsoever in their study. Probably without knowing that they had about a five or six hundred page book of all the work they'd done with scientists to set those indices up in the first place. Which they published after the popular book came out. So we go back, so economics was in there right at the beginning and the role of the economist, specifically William Nordhaus, was to say this is garbage, doesn't matter, there's no danger, capitalism can continue on indefinitely. Alright, but let's not do the one millionth podcast about, the data and, follow the science and everything will be fine. there's another problem. I think that I think it's become, I think a lot of us knew it was there or were very conscious that it was there. But I think one event has changed everything, although I don't think it's quite arrived yet in the consciousness of many people, which is the current genocide in Palestine. Because, we have the scientific side, the climate side, we have the economy, economics, which you've, one of the leaders in and still are. But we now have the third element, and that's the political, where I would say, if you're willing to accept, and this is what the West is very willing to accept, the death of 2 million, 3 million, 6 million people in Palestine, Then why would you care about the, what's going to happen, the consequences of climate change, especially as the first people are going to be hit by climate change, in the Pacific islands, and they all have dark skin in Africa. They all have dark skin. Why would the West, to put it in colloquial terms. Why, with the, the political class in the West, give a fuck about this climate change. I've said this quite a few times in public talks that I've given, the West won't worry about climate change until lots of white people die in a white country. So if you have 50 million Texans die of a combination of climate disasters, or there's a wipe out of food crops and Europeans, particularly English, starve. Then they'll take it seriously, but not until something like that happens when it happens to brown people in the third world They won't give a s sh but we're talking about probably We're talking about what the Americans would call white trash because you have people you know who have lots of money Yeah, you're the billionaires they're all buying estates on Hawaii and New Zealand and you know creating bunkers as we know with is occurring and just assuming, don't matter about all these other people. I will be all right. I don't know if they've really worked this through what, the consequence. It's like an atomic war. If you. If you survived in a, a bunker, you're sorry you haven't died. Yeah, exactly. but anyway, I don't think these people are intelligent enough to think this through. This is one of the, my favorite lines in the movie don't look up, which was Jennifer Lawrence is it when she's hanging out with those skateboard riders at one point and like people like typical conspiracy theorists types that you see on Twitter all the bloody time. And I've had a fight with one this morning. they're talking about how they can just being planned by the elite. And Jennifer says, guys, The truth is way more depressing. These people aren't smart enough to be as evil as you give them credit for. So I think we're just stumbling our way into the biggest crisis in the history of humanity. Alright, but this is, in my opinion, an element that we have to, bring in to the discussion, because it's not about, only about climate change, it's not only about capitalism, the people in degrowth have been Brilliant in this where they said, it's all about capitalism. As long as this cap capitalism is the cause, the root cause of, of, I, I pushed back climate change, I pushed back a bit on that a bit because of what the Soviet Union did when it was power that the Bay, Carl Lake and the, some of the disasters that were, done there. it's basically the real problem is, not so capitalism per se, but the belief we can continue having economic growth. on a finite planet. But isn't that what, the socialists were saying in, in Russia as well? They were doing the same thing. the classic, the people would, wouldn't remember Khrushchev the classic speech where he took off his shoe to bang it on the United Nations table and say, we will bury you. What he meant, we will bury you in consumer goods. We will produce more consumer output than you do. And we will have much wealthier, working class people than you have. And that's how we'll bury you by, growing faster than you can do. Now, of course, he was quite wrong about the actual dynamics of Soviet production at the time. And I've done work on that as well. but the, that was the basic orientation of both extremes was to continue growth and by growth to lift everybody up to a high enough standard of living of the people with the very bottom would still have a decent standard of living. But that implies you can continue. Extracting energy resources from the planet, fossil fuels, storing solar power in the form of fossil fuels and burning it indefinitely. And now we're seeing that simply isn't physically possible. So I think any human social system which is focused upon growth, rather than focused upon not letting the dominant predator on the planet wipe out the planet. That's the problem. Now I think we've gotten this far. At least, I think the progressive discussion, at least, has gotten this far as, saying, this whole beginning, listen to the science, that was, what all the climate people, that was their motto, where, I don't think politics gives a shit about the science. Although they don't have a clue, and this is one reason that I've, my work on climate change is, I only started doing it in 2017, I think, or maybe even in 2019. After I read, Richard Toll's paper called the Economics, Impacts of Climate Change. And I realized what absolute garbage they were pumping out. What total, absolute bullshit they were pumping out. And that was trivializing the dangers of climate change. So that's when I, got involved in that. And now I've lost my bloody train of thought on the previous comment. That's, that, it's, that's right. The, what I thought. Before I started looking at The Economist. And a lot of my progressive friends told me the same thing. They said, Steve, don't bother reading that neoclassical shit on climate change. All you'll find is they've taken what the scientists have said about the impacts of climate change, and they've applied a high discount rate to it. And I remember writing, I've forgotten, but at least two people wrote to me, good friends. It may have been like, Louis Philippe or someone. Hi, Louis. but what I doubted, it was probably somebody else and a, woman in Germany as well, both wrote the same thing. And I said, look, okay, you might be right, might just be a high discount rate, but at least I need to read it to find out. So then I started reading this paper, the economic impacts of climate change by Richard Toll. And I thought it's far worse. It's far more stupid than that. They've actually made up their own numbers about climate change based on the belief that you can predict the future impact of climate change by looking at the relationship between temperature and. GDP today on this planet. Now, not through time, but that's where the dangers came from. Getting back to the poli, the politicians who make the decision indirectly make the decisions and they're being dictated to, but what? What I think they're doing, this is why I'm pushing the point. I think what they did is exactly the same beliefs that my progressive friends had and that I had that economists have taken. The research scientists applied a high discount rate and trivialize the dangers that way. That'd be good. That'd be really good, when instead they've made up their own stupid numbers, completely ignoring the scientists. And because the politicians also think, like my friends did, that, there's go scientists, economists, telling the politicians what to do with too high a discount rate, so we just need to discuss a higher discount rate. In fact, the economists make up complete bullshit about climate change. The sort of stuff a climate denier would publish, and in fact they get republished by Leon Lomborg all the time. So the politicians probably, I'm trying to work out how stupid people think here. They probably think, scientists have done this work, economists assessed it, it's trivial stuff that's going to hit in a hundred years time, somebody else's problem. I've got to go in front of the cameras and pretend I care about it, make some nice statements, then walk away and continue licensing new oil and gas and coal mines and stuff like that. And get, we end up being hired by the, by the coal lobby when I retire from politics. Which is exactly what's happening. Yeah. Yeah. It's, and the interesting thing is we're seeing a parallel process right now in the West, which is a criminalization of, people who oppose the genocide in Gaza, but we're also seeing a massive criminalization of people who are actually actively opposing. Climate change, Roger Hallam and the other five being in jail, put a sent to jail for being attending a zoom meeting where he wasn't even part of the community, the group organizing the idea of blocking a motorway. And he gets five years in jail. Amazing. And you're getting, the same sort of sentences or similar sentences for people who oppose what's happening in Palestine, you can say, follow the science. You can also say, follow the truth, follow justice. Yeah. And the repression by the political class in the West is massive. And in the, state and mainstream, corporate media, exactly the same thing. You have simply, with the always, denigrating. fake news, everything's fake news. That's all they're producing right now is fake news. And anything that contradicts it is we're seeing it now is being criminalized. They're going right into the area of media as well. Yeah. And arresting people, sending people to jail. So we're now in, I think a state of All three elements are coming together, radicalizing, going back to economics just for a moment, please, Steve. it's not only climate change, any sort of, let's say, not neoclassical economists. They've been sidelined. They've been pushed out of universities, pushed out of, publishing, whatever. And it's. Created, a monopoly of the discourse. By the mainstream. By the mainstream. So it's happening everywhere in our society. And I think we're just not that aware of it. And, it's even gotten to the point where if you make a comment, a even a like on Twitter, you can lose your job, you can lose your existence. I've forgotten who it was in Australia, a woman, you I can't think of her name, unfortunately. I'm not in Australia anymore. But she liked to tweet, I think, by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or some group like that, and for her trouble for liking a tweet. She was sacked by the ABC. Now she's now fighting back, and it looks like she'll be either successfully reinstated or she'll be paid compensation. But she literally just liked to tweet by another group, which was an official group. Might not UNHCR, but it was a group of that nature. Saying, liking what they're saying about the, what is effectively a genocide being committed in Palestine by Israel. And, and Bankshee loses her job. And that's mild compared to what some people have had happen to them in Europe. Yes, but, let's be honest. As an economist, if you didn't write, what the mainstream expected, that was more or less fine. the end of your career or you'd end up in a fourth rate university. Which is what happened to me, yeah, yeah, but I, there are only a handful of non orthodox economists like me who have managed to get some sort of presence despite that history. But like I began at, when I did my undergrad, it was the University of Sydney, which would have been a sort of globally a top, certainly top 25 uni. I then went to the University of New South Wales, which would have been a top 50. Worked most of my life in the University of Western Sydney, which had a great economics department, that was, as a university, ranked in the top two or three hundred, and I finished my career at Kingston, which again, I managed to hire some great staff for, but again, non, non mainstream, and that's down a bit, that, that's getting close to the thousandth on the planet. the more non orthodox you are and the more prominent you get, the lower the quality of university you end up teaching in. And therefore the mainstream gets reinforced at the Cambridge and the Oxfords and Harvards and so on. And the same bullshit that we know is bullshit that you can pull apart using the research of mainstream economists. That's what's been promulgated as economic analysis around the planet. Yes. But this is something that's permeating the whole of Western society. Yeah. I think one of the best examples with regard to Ukraine, the war in Ukraine and Palestine Okay. are John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs. Absolute, the problems and the primary, academics in their field, they don't get onto mainstream media anymore. They all, or they both have to work in alternative media. And these are really leading thinkers. Highly, respe anyone you speak to, highly respected. But, of course, You don't want to, be in contact with these people, they, no one, here, at least the political class does not want them on the media, in mainstream media, whatever. So that we literally bound just like the economists and it's not only there, I, we've had this with, in Germany, for example, I can remember the people who are in a genetic manipulation of food, they were all. They just couldn't get any jobs anymore, had to leave the country, find a job somewhere else. and this is not only going on in academia, it's in the whole, I think this is something Noam Chomsky, did very well, which is simply explaining you aren't getting anywhere in the media, the mainstream media, if you think differently, yeah, you gotta, you, you don't get, you don't get to be sitting in that chair if you don't espouse views that are acceptable to the mainstream, to the power powers that they, and you get a filtering effect coming out of that, that, amplifies when you, what you know, when you look at it is disgustingly stupid research that justifies the current power structure but doesn't. Have anything to do with how the power structure actually works Which is why the climate movement has to stop with this follow the science because it's I know I think they're you listen to the bloody side because they at least know what the hell they're talking about This is what I find so frustrating which one reason I'm trying to get Scientists to realize that it's the economists who shut them out of the dialogue Because what scientists have been doing, they've been doing what scientists do. You, you, find a research topic that interests you. You, work, you look at the previous history of the research. You see where you can contribute something new. You write your paper. It's published in a referee journal and you think that's it. And then you keep on doing it and you find absolutely nothing is happening in policy. You're thinking, but I've written all these research papers and there's this huge history of data that shows you what's going to happen. If you continue doing, why are you still going down this trend? the answer is partly the power structure effects you're talking about, but certainly the contribution of economists to that. Because if we had decent economists, people actually understand capitalism and understand that you can't have, conventional economic theory teaches students you can have output by combining labor and capital in a factory. And I've, one of the line that got me into saying I can actually make a contribution here was one that occurred to me in another friend's place, Bob Ayers. And Bob Ayers has been a physicist who got involved in economics and was trying to bring energy, the role of energy into production in economic models. he said, you cannot have a model of production which doesn't include energy. And that was, Bob's work was the beginning, with a guy called Kummel. I've never actually met Kummel, but he was a German researcher, a mathematician. Bob worked with to build alternative models that included a role for energy. And though I respected the work and I liked it, and I actually wrote at one stage that I'm going to base my work on what Bob has done, I still didn't like what they had done practically because they still at one point in their model, the mathematical model of the years, which is called Line X, linear exponential I think it stands for, they, they had, An index number for an output, which was a product of labour times capital times energy. And that's the way the mainstream, whenever they think about energy, they think, you've got labor and you've got capital, and if we have to include energy, then we just tack it on as a third factor of production. And the equation we use as output is a multiplicative result of multiplying technology by labor, by capital, by energy, in such a way that if you double labor and capital and energy, you double output. That's the technical way they do it. And I didn't like that because I thought, look, that implies you can hit a factory with a lightning bolt and goods will come out the other side. Or you can throw an atom bomb into a factory and it'll produce goods. Energy is not independent of labour and capital. There's something wrong with it. So I was actually in Bob's house. It's similar to you and me. So I was staying overnight while I'm travelling. And I was working with Bob on this whole idea. So I was staying at the house for about a week or so. And his house is full of statues. And Absolutely packed with them. And, and I was walking, went to the bathroom, the old man's house, or going to the toilet late at night, and walking back, and I just glanced at all these statues, and this little thought popped into my head, and it was labor without energy is a corpse. Capital without energy is a sculpture. Exactly. And I rushed into my room, and I sat down, and ten minutes later, I'd worked out what that mathematics, The concept does to the mathematics of production theory by neoclassicals was ridiculous how easy it was. So that's, where it, brought in the role of energy there. And that, what that means is what economists have done is fool themselves one and a half centuries that you can produce output without inputs from the natural world. I know we're going off on a tangent right now, but I think it's an important question. yeah. Beyond economics, which is, it that these people don't understand it? Or is it, they don't want to understand it, because we were speaking a moment ago about your career depends on Yeah, it's, a weird mixture, because, my analogy would be, imagine that I found the body of Jesus Christ, I'm an archaeologist over in Palestine, and I managed to find a grave and I prove that this is actually J. C. and mum and dad aren't too far away. And I go to the Vatican, and often they'll say, I found the body of Jesus Christ, would you like to have a look? Fuck off. they'd have the Vatican guards coming and spearing me to get rid of me. They don't want to know in that sense. But they also believe. There's a combination of the two. So economists, the thing which is seductive about economics, and I know this from when I was a young student, I fell for the whole line as well, hook, line, and sinker. And what it implies is you have a perfect, effectively anarchist society. Capitalism, from the mainstream way of thinking, is an anarchy. Because anarchy means no government. So here you have a system with no government. You have consumers on one side, producers on the other. Some people doing work, others being capitalists and so on. Consumers get, have their set of tastes. and those tastes determine what is produced in the factories. Labor and capital have to come together to produce the output and they get paid. They're marginal product, which says basically workers get their contribution to production and capitalists get paid their contribution to production. There's no power. There's no coercion. They're perfect. Their preferred model is what they call perfect competition, and that is so many producers producing every commodity that the producers can't coordinate, and so many workers competing with each other for the wage that they can't coordinate. So there's no power. Now that is an incredibly seductive vision of an anarchist society. That's what they think capitalism is. What it could be, if only they could reform away and get rid of the trade unions, minimize the government as much as possible. Maybe one of these days abolish monopoly. That's not quite so important, But that's what they do. That's the way they think. This is why it's so seductive to them. And when you get sucked in by it, it is a compelling vision of a perfect society. So when you go and do an economics degree, you don't become like a scientist who's trained to understand quantum mechanics or astrophysics or, Einstein's equations or, chemical bonds or, all that sort of stuff. You get trained to believe that you can create a perfect society if only other people that get out of your way and let you do it. So it's also, the difference between economics and then political economics, because as a political economist, 2000 years, it's not too tough, but as long as capitalism has existed, 300 years, let it be, The system is not anarchic. It's manipulated. even trying Even the anarchy itself is false. this is what I've really been doing, is showing the anarchy, the idea that this is how the system works. Even if you could make that system work, it would not work like the textbooks say it to. That was the major hole. That's why I dived into the whole area and became a critic, starting when I was 18 years old. Frank Stilwell never understands why it was so important to me, but one lecture by Frank Stilwell was the foundation professor of political economy at Sydney Uni. in a department, which I helped bring about by the strikes, which we read to the students back in 1973. One lecture by Frank drove a freight train right through that anarchist vision that I was totally accepting of at the time. And that was what's called the theory of the second best. And this is published, this is, it was Kelvin Lancaster, and I've forgotten the other author, published an article called the general theory of the second best. And what that said was, imagine you're two steps from this economic nirvana, okay? So the nirvana has, atomistic firms, who therefore don't even know the other firms exist, let alone collaborate or collude with them. Workers who aren't organized into trade unions, okay? So in that situation, you'll get the perfect outcome. Capitalists get the marginal product of capital. Workers get the marginal product of labor. No coercion, that's perfect, that's perfection. That's what you're aiming for. But the theory of the second best said, what if you're two steps away from that nirvana? So there are employer associations and there are trade unions. What's the situation that applies then? And you can do a mathematical model of that. So what they work with, when they, when economists learn the basic of this, two, two intersecting supply and demand curves, when you include collusion by employers and collusion by. Workers, you get another two curves. The marginal social product curves, I think they're called, and what Frank showed is if you do that, you then find there's an indeterminate range where the wage can be above or below the marginal product, but there's a defined range for the two. Okay? If you abolish, that's the obvious one is choose abolishing the trade union. But that's what's been done in the last four or five decades if you abolish the trade union. Using completely mainstream theory, you provably show that you've reduced social welfare by getting rid of one, but not both, what they call imperfections in one go. that meant that, I wrote a school, I wrote an essay, one of my first essays at university, arguing in favour of abolishing trade unions and monopolies. Thank God it's been lost. I don't need to be, dragged. Luke Coon, you wrote this, I thought he'd 50 something years ago. So I swallowed the whole thing. And then Frank does this proof and shows that according to the theory of the second best, if you have both trade unions and monopolies, abolishing one or the other will make the social outcome worse. So the only way to do it is to abolish everything simultaneously. And I thought, that's bullshit. You can't do that. So this, what I thought was a perfect argument for a, what is effectively an anarchist society, is capitalism. Was flawed. And I thought, this is ridiculous. All you've got to do is bring in a bit of realism to say, there are trade unions and they're also employer associations. And then you say, you abolish one of the, you make it worse. This has got to be a shitty theory. There's something wrong here. So I looked at my textbook, no mention of the theory of the second best. And I left that lecture and went downstairs and the Merriweather building at Sydney university made a big line for the economics library. And I said, I can't trust the textbooks. There's nothing about this. Maybe the journals have got it. So I grabbed a copy of, the latest copy that was bound at that stage was the 1966, I think it was, edition of the, Journal of, the Economic Society. The, I don't know what they call it, I think the main, the, Economics, I think it's called the Journal of Economics, coming out of, Cambridge University. And there was a set of papers by a Marxist. I And I thought, what's a Marxist doing, publishing and it was Badouri and some top class Marxist, economists critiquing neoclassical economics. I said, hang on a sec, I've never heard that Marxists were actually economists, I thought they were rebels, And and then I got a later edition, and there's an article by Paul Samuelson, that's a name I recognize obviously, and the title of the article was, A Summing Up. what's he summing up? So I open up the article and I found he's summing up a discussion, a debate between academics economists at Cambridge University in UK and academics at the M-I-T-M-I-T in Cambridge America. So it's called the Cambridge Controversies. He was summing it up and conceding defeat. Okay. The final paragraph of that paper says, if all this makes you nostalgic for the old time parables of neoclassical thought. We must appraise ourselves as scholars are not born to live an easy existence. We must accept and confront the facts of life. And I thought, wow. He's admitting he lost. What does he say in his textbook? Which was a 1971 textbook. I had a copy of it. 70, 71 textbook. No mention. Okay. And I thought, this is mendacious. I'm being lied to by the textbook writer. He's conceded defeat here in the journals. He's continuing to push the same shit, which I now realize was shit. So that was the beginning of it. So we've gone a long way from where your original question was. no. Because what you're saying is They do believe it. It's a passionate belief in an ideal society. Yes, but it's the fear of the loss of a perfect world, which is what they've created. Yeah. It's a perfect world and suddenly you think it's not perfect, and what do you do? Do you admit the problem, or do you retreat back into believing perfection? And just if I went to the Vatican and showed them the body of Jesus Christ, they'd be, they'd spear me, they'd find some way to denigrate me, throw me out at the top of the Tiber River, and then they'd go back to believing the same old, and they'd be teaching it, and say, I hope nobody goes and finds that body again. that's what they'd be doing. So that's the basic nature of it. you have to not forget that, for a human being, it's, going back to religion, it's, the microphone. We're not used to the technology here, so apologies for occasional Yeah, being 60 years old and then, yeah, being a priest and then suddenly discovering Yeah, I don't believe in God. Yeah. Yeah, and it's just it would be the same thing. I think yeah, it's a terrible crisis plus Good, you're almost at your pension at 60 But yeah, I'm going for five more years And then you can go and have all those massages. You've been denying yourself and or it might be not, but yeah, it's it's a combination of belief. is it, that's why people believe in God. it's, this wonderful, all you've got to do is what God tells you and you'll go to heaven and live in perfection. This is heaven on earth. In fact, there's a particular neoclassical twit who I've long ago blocked on Twitter. He was just a pain in the ass, but his blog about economics is called Utopia. You're standing in it. They actually believe that capitalism is a utopia. And if only we can just reform it. So it looks like a textbook. We'll be living in utopia. Now what I've done instead is go back and read this literature and find, in fact, all the ideas about convergence to equilibrium and absence of cycles and impossibility of breakdown and things working better without a government are all mathematically invalid. So what you then get is this thing you're talking about with the priest who goes through the whole, believes the whole thing. Some of them never want to look at those books, so they don't even read the articles. Others read them and think, oh, shit. Do I actually acknowledge that or do I continue living with this beautiful vision and get to my retirement age? And most of them do that, right? Which brings us back to the topic we began with, which is this belief that you can reform a society which is, has one goal, which is growth and redistribution of income from the bottom to the top. And why should they reform it? Why would the ruling class want to reform this? Even if it's not perfect, as the textbooks say, it's pretty damn good for them. Like the funny thing is most economists work as bureaucrats in government departments, or as academics in universities, which have been privatised by their own ideas and have stuffed up their own lifestyles. They're not particularly wealthy. They're not making a fortune out of this stuff. So it's not that they've been saying what they're paid to say, it's They're being paid to say what they believe in because it's consistent with the interests of the ruling class in that sense. But they're not particularly benefiting from it. So the danger, and this is why I regard economists as being extremely dangerous, the most dangerous person isn't somebody who's saying what they're saying because they're paid to say it. The most dangerous person is somebody who believes what they're saying, okay? Because the one who's being paid, and I use this as an unusual example to use, but the You can't pay somebody enough to fly a plane into the World Trade Center, somebody who believes will fly that plane into the World Trade Center. So we've got economists from the latter category and they believe they're doing good and they're setting us up for catastrophe. Which is again, the same. You can say the same for the political class and they're all setting us up for catastrophe. I think You know, you have your fanatics, the climate deniers and whatever But you don't have you have to be pretty blind not to see Climate change already happening. I was sitting here in the midst of another drought in Berlin with temperatures that are Very high. This is not normal. There's about 27 degrees outside. Wasn't it yesterday? I think that was a cool day Wow, most of the time we've been over 30. Late August. Yeah. Beginning of September. When's the formal start of autumn? It's Oh, it's in September sometime. Sometime 22nd, in the final throes of summer anyway. Normally you're down to what, about 15 degrees, 20 degrees, that sort of range. In the evenings it cools off. But anyway, the more frightening thing is the lack of rain. Okay. It's just, there's a rain and this is every summer now you have one month of no rain at least once. Yeah. Quite often twice. Yeah. some, we had, March, we had no rain, which is very unusual for what we're talking about, Central Europe, Northern, Central, Northern Europe. Yeah. and it's the same thing and this is, what someone keeps saying, with regard to Gaza was, Seeing genocide in real time, that used to not be possible. It went through the filter of mainstream. You can see it in real time. Mainstream media. Yeah. So people can see it. And of course you're going to have people who are going to deny it and see you. These all, these films on fake and the manufactured and whatever. But this is the point that I think men, and you're going to notice this, where many people can see reality on the one side. Yeah. And the reality they're supposed to accept. on the other side and realizing they're getting further and further apart. Yeah, the, this is becoming more obvious. But the, I've read an enormous number of climate science papers, certainly more than 500. and so I've picked up, I don't, I'm not a scientist. So I've got to rely upon the research. And I know the people who, some of the people who do this work and I trust them. They're genuine. Scientists, in the full sense of the word, their models are fairly accurate, okay, and what their predictions have been that effectively the Sahel region, the climate that exists in the Sahara Desert now is moving, with climate change, is moving north and will occupy most of southern Europe and a fair bit of northern Europe. So what that implies is an area that people, you know, how many people, perhaps 650 million, a billion wealthy white people live in, is going to become uninhabitable. and it's a dual thing, it's partially there's going to be more, the drought region that is this, above the Sahara is going to move north, but there'll be more rainfall at the same time because every one degree increase in temperature increases the moisture carrying capacity of the atmosphere by seven percent. So we're already about 10 percent more moisture in the atmosphere than there was before climate change began about 1750. so that implies when swamps hit, they're going to be catastrophic. It won't be the gentle rainfall that's enabled England and most of Europe to have broad acre aquaculture and you don't need to worry about irrigation because it falls out of the sky fairly reliably. Those days are over. First of all, most of the time it's going to be drought. But secondly, when it does rain, you don't want to be there. You're going to get washed away. Exactly. But we see these floods constantly. And again, it's all it's a natural phenomenon. It's not natural anymore. No, it's unnatural. And again, that's what deniers would be country people. And they, they think that a bunch of lefty greenies in the city were coming out with this garbage and the climate's always changed. That sort of nonsense falls in with them. But they're the ones we're going to see, sometimes they have a year where there's rainfall's normal and they do pretty well. Other times it's actually an improvement. There's something catastrophic either the drought comes along and their crop gets wiped out or they have hailstones that destroy everything in a day and overnight. Or they have such high temperatures that the crop gets cooked on the vine and you have nothing to sell. So I think that what we're going to see is that the centres that are the major locations of denier sympathies right now, which are largely rural, they're possibly the ones that are going to say, Holy shit, this stuff is serious. Why are you fuckers in the city not doing anything about it? And the real fun would be if the rural people decide, we've got enough for ourselves. this is already happening, Steve, and look at the prices of, of certain goods that are, which were once, yeah, olive oil, I think in the U. S., orange juice. These were things that were once luxuries, but then became cheap goods, right? And now it's going back to being luxuries. Yeah. and you can see, It's normal that you have bad harvests and good harvests, whatever, but in the meantime, it's, all looking like poor harvests, not only one year, but two years of, and then you might have a good one in between, but then it gets worse in the next round of poor harvests, and you'll see this in the price of, Products, vegetables, fruit, bread, what, everything, the staples. And this is actually one of the scientists that I work with, Tim Garrett, who's one of the world's leading experts. You're going to love this. He's the expert on snowflakes. Tim's We're happy to catch up with him again in December. I'm working with a mathematician, Mattias Griselli, and we're trying to bring out realistic, founded, absolutely foundation models of economics, which rely upon Inputs from the natural environment to produce anything. That's, the great fabulous. That's why economists haven't seen this coming. They've mentally conditioned themselves to models in which you can produce output with labor and capital. They don't even think about inputs from the natural environment anymore. That's why they've been so blind. So we're trying to do the foundation work to say, what models do you need to have? So you actually physically acknowledge that without energy, you produce nothing. And without material to convert, to transform into other forms for consumption in black. Count humans, you don't have commodities either, so you've gotta have that natural foundation. So we're working together on that. But it's him, I forget, I've lost my train of thought to some extent. It was about the snowflake. Sorry. You are snowflakes. Snowflakes. yeah. he, is, the, work that they do is so detailed, the, experimental. instruments they design so that they can actually measure this stuff. It makes what economists do look like, worse than child's play. Because Tim had to invent a machine which could photograph, swallowing snowflakes at such a high speed. Resolution and they're falling out at night half the time at such resolution that he could determine the shapes of the snowflakes And they get the mathematics of the shapes of snowflakes. So when people like Richard Werner, for example, hello Richard Denigrate what scientists are doing. They have no idea how dedicated these people are to understanding that specific deep topic They've taken so one of my great regrets is that what we're doing what we're letting happen by the collapse of civilization, which I think is almost inevitable, given the lack of action so far, is that the knowledge the science community has accumulated in the last quarter millennium, ever since Galileo, so it goes back further, but certainly under the industrial revolution, a huge part of what we've learnt has come out of the fact we've exploited fossil fuels. Without all the fossil fuels, the knowledge we've got would never have been accumulated. We're likely to lose it all. the thing, I once told wrote, I don't know if it, and I think I didn't mean it seriously, where I said, just like we have political economists, we also need political climate scientists. That's true. And this is what's missing, or it's starting, it's getting, there are some really good climate Peter Kalmas, for example, Peter's been extremely active, tied, literally locking himself to the door of a shell company, that sort of thing. Jim Hanson, Jim was one of the first to raise the alarm. Jim actually spoke. to Congress back in the 60s, I might have been in the 60s or 70s, warning what's about what's coming. And this is why I find the movie Don't Look Up such a brilliant, parody of what we're going through with climate change. Because, when, Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCapriccio playing the roles of the scientists who discovered the meteor and the scientists who predicted its path and shorts on a collision course, they get into, Talk to the president, and they say it's 99. 7 percent likely they'll hit the earth. Oh, so there's a chance it won't. They go, what? And then they get kicked out of the room and try to go on media, and rather than being taken seriously, the journalist is playing with Leonardo's leg, and kicking them out. There's an extent to which our political class trivializes all the actual system they're supposed to be running, because they're having a good time out of it. They're doing pretty damn well. There's a superficiality to their thinking. And the people who rise to the top are not the creme de la creme. No. To the contrary. That's why they get to the scum. But interesting point is, what's changed. How old is the film now? It must be, how old is the film? About five years ago? No, not that old. about three, two or three years. Nowadays, I don't think the climate scientists would even make it onto the news. in fact, I'm actually involved in some, attempts to get this issue back into the, Media. And I've been told by journalists that when they talk about climate change, they say, Oh, not that topic again. Exactly. Can we do something else? so we've got to find an angle that will mean this topic will get onto the media. And what it means is, it's almost and again, I make analogies to World War II all the time, because that's the last time we mobilized human resources on a grand scale to fight what was agreed to be an evil by virtually everybody. and, it, we didn't do it until you had a quarter of a million British troops on the, shores of Dunkirk about to be slaughtered after Poland had fallen, after France had fallen, and then finally Churchill, who's been anti Hitler for, not decades, but quite a while, gets the chance to take over and say it's going to be blood, sweat, and tears to be able to survive. that's, the change in sentiment you need. But people, we had Chamberlain going off to shake his hand. I've seen arguments that Chamberlain was actually doing that to enable British industry to have time to gear up. That's a very generous interpretation. I know. I've seen, but I've seen that's one of the extremes I've seen. But otherwise it was, peace in our time. And then you forget about it, it's not important. Holy shit, we're about to lose a quarter of a million troops. Okay, so the extent to which the dominant elements in our society trivialize anything which is going to change the trajectory our society is on. That's what's biting us right now. And, we're even seeing, there is a change. Let's be quite honest. I think this whole authoritarian liberal, Liberalism is crumbling and you can see, the panic, look at, I think one of the best examples is what Macron is doing in France right now, where you have a mandate for one party and he said, we aren't even, the left, we aren't even considering letting them, form a government. We Melenchon, isn't it? Huh? Melenchon? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And, and we're going to see more and more of this as this. I did some number crunching after the EU election and discovered that, in Germany, in the EU parliamentary elections, the legacy parties, if you take the share of the vote and you take the number of people who voted. You only have a third of the population who support them. We saw the same thing in France, and then we saw the same thing in Britain. Although you had, the usual Labor, Tory parties, but the number of people who are voting for them. It's trivial. And Australia is the same thing. Same sort of trend. The share of the major parties has been heading down for the last 50 years, and now it's getting to the point where minority parties actually have a chance of winning. first of all pushing whichever party wins into a minority position and then secondly at some point maybe getting more votes and Actually being able to form a you know a governing party of independence So there is a generalized sense of disillusion in the political classes of the West and there's a reality that's coming home to the West which is The u. s. Got rid of the rule of law introduced a rule of rule based order. And most people didn't quite realize, the sleight of hand that was, of course we're seeing it in, in Ukraine. We're seeing it in, in Gaza, but it's also happening here. And I think an important, no, I won't go down this road. we'll get lost, but, it's coming home. And people are starting to realize, wait a moment, this is not the law, this is, someone's interpreting it to their own advantage. Yeah, exactly. And that's Doris Johnson and twerps like that getting to be leaders of, major societies like Britain. And they're in it for the parties. they're not all that trivial, but the extent to which you've got, your basic attitude is the role of the ruling class is to rule, but this, the role of the ruling class is to live on the fat of the land and have a great time and then retire and write your memoirs. And so that trivial level of leader is taking over now. So you look at, again, I'm not praising Churchill, but you look at a Churchillian type personality and the extent to which he stuck his neck out and put his Not his, quite his life on the line, but his future reputation on the line. Versus bloody Boris Johnson, who thinks he's the reincarnation of Churchill. That twits, Buddy Donald Trump and the idiots and like even completely senile and still being president. Macron's not senile, but like his, what do you call it? I'm talking about Biden. Huh? About Biden, who is president. And we all, people knew for two years he's senile. Yeah. Until it finally came out in that debate. Yeah, but in that sense, Macron is slightly different. He's obviously much younger. But he was on Marsh, was his party's name, wasn't it? And managed to sweep aside the previous bullet, and now he's pushing, again, he's pushing an economic style agenda. And then he believed that it'd work, and I remember talking with Yanis Varoufakis, and Yanis actually had a lot of time for Macron, because he said Macron is the only politician he dealt with who said, I'll do X to support you. And when it came to crunch, he did X to support Yanis. So Yanis has respect for the personal integrity of Macron. But he says at the same time, he's deluded. He's followed the same neo liberal, neo classical economic founded vision of how the world operates. It doesn't operate that way. It's going to blow up in his face. And that's what's happening now. But I think it was Jeffrey Sachs, who in an interview said he's never, he's been around, He's an economist, but he's also just been around everywhere in Europe, Western Europe, and Europe, even Eastern Europe. He knows, the ropes pretty well. And he recently said he's never seen such a low quality of political leadership. That's why he has no hope because these people are not capable of solving the problem. as much as you might attack Richard Nixon, for example, Nixon, he's and Kissinger, they were the ones who opened up relationships with China. they ended the, it was the mild Cold War with China, it was ended by Nixon agreeing to send Kissinger to go and negotiate with, it was, I'm getting my personalities mixed up, I'm thinking Chiu and Lai, but that's Vietnam. But there was some, now Kissinger went to, on a secret mission to China before the end of the Vietnam War at Nixon's behest. And that's a level of cleverness and capacity for intrigue and stepping outside the boundaries of your own political ideology that I would never expect Boris Johnson to be able to do. That is too damn stupid. So yeah, there's an incredibly low caliber of, of political leaders these days.