 a lot. You've got this feature on Twitter that I really like, which is what is it? Catastrophizing? Yeah, catastrophizing. Yeah. And that's actually a central word in fossil future. It's a term that's used in psychology, but it's not sufficiently used in, I'm using it somewhat of, I mean, my understanding there, I'm not an expert in that obviously, but it's just that it means taking something that's maybe problematic, maybe not, and just making it into a catastrophe. And so what catastrophizing the feature is, is it's showing what I would call our designated experts. So people that are leading institutions are telling us, these are the experts you should listen to, particularly about our environment. And then they're making some prediction that seemed compelling at the time, but we now know has been totally disproven. So I think it gives the purpose of it, people don't get it actually, it's because the criticism I get of it is, oh, you're just, you're just challenging climate science by, you know, your cherry picking old headlines. But what it's, what it's doing, and I talk about this a lot in fossil future, is it's, it's exposing that what I call our knowledge system is very problematic. So the system of institutions and people that we rely on for expert knowledge and guidance, and that there's something very wrong that they keep confidently giving these predictions that turn out to be 180 degrees wrong. They keep saying the world is going to get much worse for human beings, and then it gets much better. So it's a call into question the system and how it distorts science, not to say that science is wrong. Yeah, I mean, I've often used the analogy to finance, right. So if somebody comes to me with a, with a investment idea, you know, one of the first thing you do is you test it on the past. And how good have you been at making these predictions about stock prices or making these predictions about markets in the past. And the more wrong you've been in the past, the less likely it is for me to give you money to invest. And, and I think it's the same, the more wrong you are about anything in the past, the less likely I am to believe you about anything you say about in the future. But it seems like the knowledge system is broken when it comes to issues around, around climate science, because it seems like the more wrong they are in the past, the more credibility somehow they're gaining about their predictions about the future. Yeah. And what's interesting is both, you know, what I call the designated experts. So these are the, the spokespeople for the whole system. Like these are the people who are supposed to be emblematic of what the best expert opinion is. Both they don't lose credibility, but also the system itself doesn't question its own credibility. So you take the New York Times, which in fossil future have many, many examples of it just being totally wrong and catastrophizing. But if you look at what they talk about in terms of their track record on say climate, what they say is we've been heroes. We've been on top of this. And in fact, what they'll often say is it's worse than we thought. Like we sounded the alarm, but it turns out to be worse than we thought. And what you see is they're predicting, you know, mass, death, destruction, different kinds of devastation, and empirically in terms of how you look at death is the easiest one from climate related disasters. Those are down 98% over the last 100 years. So it's the opposite of what, if they had predicted, for example, if they had predicted, yes, we're going to have a drastic decline in climate related deaths through the early 2020s. And then it's going to reverse and get much worse. That would be interesting. But you have say John Holdren, President Obama's leading science advisor who predicted up to a billion climate related deaths by 2020 due to famine. And we had, you know, record harvests, record feeding people, record low climate related disasters. So there's a big problem with the system. And so in chapters one and two of the book, I document kind of two features that I think are provable of our knowledge system. And I'll talk more about what that is in a second, but just you can think of it as the leading institutions that we rely on. One is that they systemically ignore the benefits of fossil fuels. And I'm sure we'll get into that. But the other one we're talking about now is that they have a track record of catastrophizing the negative side effects. So taking something that's either not a problem or a challenge and making it into a catastrophe. And then it actually gets better. And then the kind of the question is how is this possible, including why don't they correct themselves? And part of it is they have the, they have this assumption I call the delicate nurture assumption, which is that nature exists in this delicate nurturing balance and our impact destroys it. So they expect nature to respond like a vengeful God. If we impact it and we violate thou shalt not impact nature. And that relates to the second point, which is the moral point, which is they actually think that climate is already a catastrophe, not because it's a catastrophe for humans, but because we've had significant impact. And that points to their ultimate goal and standard is eliminating our impact on nature, not advancing human flourishing in nature and on earth. Cause if it was, then you would say climate is amazing today. That would be your evaluation. But if your standard is eliminating impact, then climate is terrible. So that's, that's my explanation for it. So what do they say when, when you give them a list of, of the catastrophe, of all the misses, do they have a list of, of all the things they got right? Or do they just hand wave, you know, as you said, we've got it right all the time. But I mean, but here are the facts, you've got it wrong. What would it say? Well, so the, with a lot of the things we're going to talk about, the number one response has been non-engagement with these views. So if you talk about, what do they say about declining climate related disaster deaths, non-engagement. What, if you point out, they ignore the benefits of the fossil fuels, mostly non-engagement. There's an exception there because they'll say, oh no, I have a study that proves that we can rapidly replace fossil fuels by 2050. So we could talk about that. That thing, but it's mostly, so this is, this is, you can think of this, the climate catastrophe, fossil fuel elimination movement as like the ultimate spoiled child that has not had to deal with challenges. I would say that the one thing that I do get, I have a kind of reliable, small army of trolls that I, I hope grows into a much larger one just because that will be an indication. I hope they get smarter because my current army is really unimpressive. I have to say, but one of their standard responses is they'll say like, oh, you're quote mining. You know, you just looked through all the newspapers, but these are leading institutions and prominent people making these predictions that they have not themselves corrected or apologized for. And we know many of these predictions were very, very prominent. Obviously global warming, also global cooling, as I talk about, was quite prominent. Resource depletion was incredibly prominent, like mass death from pollution, from out of control pollution. Overpopulation. Yeah, yeah. You know, you can think of that in general or as an aspect of the resource issue. So it's, they'll just call it quote mining, but they don't even, what does that even mean? The idea is that, is it true that our knowledge system was, did our knowledge, does anyone believe any of, I don't engage with the trolls directly, but do any of you believe that in the 70s, human beings were telling us that the leaders were telling us, hey, the world is going to become so much better for human beings by the year 2020. It's going to be amazing. And it's thanks to industry in general and fossil fuels in particular in capitalism. That was not, none of these environmental, particularly environmental experts were saying anything resembling this. So quote mining is just a word that is evading the issue. So say a little bit about this idea of a knowledge system, what it entails, kind of the hierarchy of it, how it works and why it's so central. Not just to pass our future, but really to all the problems we have in the world today. Yeah, this is one of the things definitely that I figured out that was almost totally new. And like this and many other things, I'll credit Ankar Ghatte for helping me think through this, not to attribute any of my errors to him obviously, but he helped me think through this issue a lot. So I think that there's this basic need in human life for expert knowledge and guidance. Like we're making decisions about energy and climate. There's no getting around. You need to know a lot of specific things about energy and climate. You can't assume like, oh, I know fossil fuels will be uniquely cost effective or I know that they won't. You can't assume that CO2 is going to impact climate this way. That way you actually need to study the issue and you need, in particular, researchers. So the core of expertise is research, like in-depth study of the thing. So we need that. But at the same time, we know that often in history what we're told the expert say is wrong. And I want to emphasize what we're told the expert say is wrong. And so there's this question of how do you deal with that? How do you gain from expert knowledge without just being a victim of these authoritarian claims? I've thought about this a lot. Like I don't want to be the person who would have voted for the Nazis in a plurality in Germany. I don't want to be the person who just stood idly by while slavery was going on because many experts, including scientists, said, yeah, this is good. This is true. This is what we know about biology. This is justified. And now we think rightly that it's totally wrong. So I think the thing that's helpful is to recognize that expert knowledge and guidance are they're the product of a system. And that system can go right or it can go wrong. So the four stages are there's research. So I've mentioned that those are the people, the specialists who are doing research on detailed issues, and they can go wrong too. But what I'm focused on in the book is primarily not them going wrong, but how their research is then how that leads to our view of what expert knowledge and guidance are. So then the next thing is synthesis. So there's so much research in the world, you need to synthesize it to be useful. Even within climate science, no one person knows everything even remotely. Many people are super are very specialized and don't know much about the rest of the field in many ways. So you need synthesis. And this is where there's a huge potential for error, because who gets to do the synthesis, who gets to decide what's essential. And when they're competing views, what's true. And so in the realm of climate and energy, we have the UN government intergovernmental panel on climate change IPCC. And one thing that I point out in chapter one is they are provably a terrible synthesizing organization because they omit this issue of declining climate related disaster deaths. This is a climate research body. And in their thousands of pages of reports, they don't mention radical declines in climate related disaster deaths. Like if you're talking about polio, and you didn't talk about declines in polio deaths, and you didn't mention a polio vaccine, that would be insane. Even if you drew on good research, the fact that you dropped that essential context would be really bad. And so and then the next stage. So but let's say synthesis goes right. There's still the issue of how do you disseminate it to the public? Because you have these very complex syntheses by people in the field. But what do we learn about that from the general public? There's a process of essentialization and dissemination. And that's what we rely on the New York Times and the Washington Post. And it's pretty well known that those can be way, way wrong. If you're in a field at all, you know anything about a field, you usually find that what the newspaper says is insane compared to what actually happened. But you think, oh, all the other fields are fine, but my field, they're bad. But so we know dissemination can go wrong. And then the final thing that I think is the least understood part of the system is how does the disseminated expert knowledge translate into policy? How do we evaluate how to act and what to do? And I call this the phase evaluation. So let's say we know, for example, that rising CO2 levels are going to make drought 20% worse, which I don't think is true. But if that were true, there's this question of how do you evaluate that, including how do you evaluate what action to take in light of that information? And this stage is not just a matter of knowing what experts say, it's a matter of integrating what different experts say. And here the big point I make, the big point I make at least initially in chapter one, is that the huge thing that is being ignored in the evaluation is the huge benefit of fossil fuels. And my favorite example of this, because I think it proves my point beyond a reasonable doubt, is one of the number one designated experts on climate today, Michael Mann. He's a climate scientist and activist. He has a whole book about climate and energy. It's called The Madhouse Effect. And I invite you to look through it. And he talks about agriculture, but he only talks about the negatives of rising CO2 levels on agriculture. He doesn't talk about the benefits of fossil fuels, even though fossil fuels power all the machines that make modern agriculture possible, and they provide the fertilizer without which billions of people would arguably star very, very quickly. So how can you talk about fossil fuels without talking about these unique benefits of them? It's totally irresponsible, yet he doesn't mention them once. And my argument is, if you do this, you have to make terrible decisions. It's exactly like you're choosing a prescription drug, but you only look at side effects and you don't look at benefits. And in his case, we're experiencing this right now, because we're having food shortages, talk of starvation, fertilizer prices going through the roof, fuel prices increasing. And it's because of people like Michael Mann. Because they told us fossil fuels have no benefits, all we need to be concerned about is eliminating their climate impacts. So before we keep going, remind everybody, the best way I think to support Alex's work and to support, and one of the best ways to support human life on earth right now is to go buy the book. Go buy fossil fuels. You can do it on Amazon. Fossil future. Fossil future. You'll buy fossil fuels no matter what. Yes. Fossil future, why global human flourishing requires more oil, more coal and more natural gas, not less. You can get an audiobook, you can get on Kindle, you can get it on hardback. You'll be able to get all of them when like in Tuesday. Tuesday. Tuesday and the other thing is, if you go to the website fossilfuture.com, like many people I offer pre-order resources, but I think these are particularly extravagant. So we have a conversation with me and Peter Thiel, like this 90 minute conversation, conversation with me and Palmer Lucky, free subscription six months to my premium sub-stack, which is a $50 value, the Alex notes of the book. So that's like the Cliff's notes, but by me. And then there's going to be a live event, how to talk to anyone about climate change. So we're trying to just, if you, and I'm going to extend it because I've been bad about promoting it, but basically by next Saturday, so Saturday the 28th, if you do that, all you have to do is go to that website, email fossilfuture.com, email your receipt, and then you'll get all of those bonuses when they're available. Thank you for listening or watching The Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening, you get value from watching, show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbookshow.com slash support, I'll go to Patreon, subscribe star locals, and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those, any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see The Iran Book Show grow, please consider sharing our content. 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