 You know, so I've got a perfect example of this. So we're gonna take a little detour now, and we're gonna talk about this one example of a project that's supposed to help reduce carbon emissions, right? And reduce our dependence on those evil fossil fuels. And let's see how people deal with this, right? And you can see that nobody wants solutions. Nobody wants solutions. What they want is for you to be afraid. What they want is for you to feel guilty. What they want is for you to be vulnerable. All right, so this is a project in New York State that has the potential to provide 20% of New York City's electricity. That's a lot of electricity, 20%. And a 20% of New York electricity would come from existing dams in Quebec, Canada. So it turns out that Canada produces a huge amount of hydroelectric electricity, more than they can consume. And the Canadians, because they're really nice people, well, not so nice images right now coming on television from Ottawa, but you know, they're supposed to be nice people are willing to share or sell that electricity to New York City. And of course, because the dam is already built and because it just uses water, it's already, it's green. It's considered green. It's not Niagara Falls, it's in Quebec. It's already existing dam. They're not building any new dams. God forbid we actually built something and changed nation. So the dam exists. We wanna get that electricity from Quebec to New York City. And this would, I don't know how expensive it would be there, it doesn't matter because our goal here, remember our goal is to reduce carbon emissions. So we want, we wanna stop using fossil fuels to produce electricity. So here's the perfect alternative, perfect alternative. So okay, so how difficult could this be, right? Quebec to New York City is not that far, not that far. It's 339 miles. I'm not even sure if this is the direct route or not the direct route, 339 miles from Quebec's remote forests to New York City, right? And we could provide 20% of electricity for New York. It would diversify, you would have fewer power outages and of course you would reduce the dependence on carbon fuels. Now this project was first proposed 17 years ago, 17 years ago. It is funded by Blackstone, a private equity group, private money. You know, it's a Chaplain Hudson Power Express. Putting four and a half billion dollars into doing this. And you would think that this is, yeah, this is pretty straightforward, right? You power transmission in Quebec, you put up lines, you pull the lines down to New York City and you're done, right? Not that hard. Most of the way between Quebec and New York City as forests, nobody lives there, nobody's there. So you put the power lines in and, you know, not that expensive and it's pretty cool. Oh no, no, no, wait a second. You can't put power lines up. Although power lines are like ugly. I'm not gonna have, you know, we've got pristine nature here. You can't build towers and put up power lines in pristine nature. That is unacceptable. There are a million not in my backyard groups along the way that oppose this. There's massive environmental challenges. I'm sure there's some bears who live there, as Jennifer says, that wouldn't like it. I mean, it would spoil their view. Vacationers who hike might happen across a power line and that's not acceptable. You can't do that. So here we are with an effort to get quote, clean power to New York City. So it would fund a significant part, 20% of all New York City's electricity, that's a lot. Can't do it, power lines, can't do it because not in my backyard and all the rest of it, right? All right, so let's put it under the ground. Well, you're not gonna put it under the ground. I mean, this is 300 or something miles of woods, mountains. You'd create massive environmental damage if you did this. You'd have to knock down trees. You'd have construction equipment. You'd dig in the ground. Who knows what kind of worms and animals live down there under the ground? It would take years. It just think of the cost. The cost would be astronomical. It would make it completely invisible. Four and a half billion dollars would not be enough to do it. So it's just no way, no way. It would take forever and it's just not doable. You cannot, you cannot. It would be too expensive, too expensive. All right, so we can't do it overhead. You can't do it under the ground. So what do you do? Now here is where you can see private enterprise. You can see private entrepreneurs, private equity actually coming out with a brilliant idea. I mean, this is really cool. What did they decide to do? They decided to run the cables under the water so they can go in in the lakes of Connecticut, get to the Hudson River and go along the Hudson River all the way to New York City. Bam, there's the power. No, not in my backyard because there's no, you can't see the cable. It's under the water. There's absolutely, I mean, this is brilliant of putting it under the water. I mean, who would have thought of that? I wouldn't have. She can't go in uninhabited forest. She can't bury the lines because it's too expensive. Since then, you put it under the water. Now, this is not a solution for other potential power lines. It's not a solution everywhere. They're gonna have to find their own imaginative ways. Maybe they can beam the electricity space and beam it back down. I don't know. Elon Musk will probably figure something out. But instead, they're gonna go in the water, in the river. All right? Well, that's great. So here they are ready to lay the line in the Hudson River. And then they discover the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, a section off a portion of the Hudson where sediment was contained by polyqualinated biphenyl PCBs that were dumped decades ago in the river by General Electric. And if you trench the river to put the cable in, you're an orthotoxins. And that's gonna create, obviously, environmental disaster. Things people, you know, fish will die. People who knows what will happen. All right. So Blackstone said, okay, get it. We don't wanna do that. We, you know, God, we'll go around. So there's, I guess, a way to go around the sections. They go around, it's 118 mile detour, all right? So it'll still take another three years, but we'll go around, expense it. But we'll do it, all right? Fine. Now, in addition, in order to do all this, right, there was complaints about what's this gonna do. The fish. So Blackstone had a higher environmental consultants who spent the summer of 2010, this is 12 years ago already, watching patches of blue lupin for endangered corner blue butterflies and fostered elfens, a threatened species. I don't know what any of that means, but you get the drift of that, right? They spurted two corners and wrote a plan for avoiding damage to wildflowers upon which the butterflies rely. Arrangements also made to protect bold eagle nests that might be present during construction. Not in the long run, because the cable's gonna be in the water, but during construction. And identify shag-bark hickories. Anybody know what a shag-bark hickory is? Big enough for the endangered Indiana bat to roost. There's an Indiana bat that's endangered that roosts in New York. I mean, who knew that there was an Indiana bat in New York? Then, of course, they found out that they couldn't dig beneath Habastor Bay, I don't know where that is, but somewhere in the Hudson, because there's an endangered Atlantic Sturgeon lives in Habastor Bay. So they had to redraw the route again to go around Habastor Bay. Now, all of this, all of this, in spite of all of this, in spite of them going around and doing the environmental inspections and the environmental, this and environmental, that and trying to appease this group and trying to appease that group and trying to appease everybody, in spite of all of it. This project is opposed by the Sierra Club, local New York-based energy companies, a bipartisan group, Republicans and Democrats. Republicans, well, I should say Democrats and Republicans of lawmakers and the labor union oppose this. The Sierra Club argues, listen to this one, that importing power, importing power from Canada does two bad things for the environment. One, it threatens the development of in-state renewable energy projects. So if you import energy from Canada, you won't build solar panels in New York, solar farms and windmills in New York, but wait a minute, why do you care where the energy comes from? Isn't what's matter that it has a low carbon footprint supposedly? Why do you want windmills in New York? You can get the energy from Canada, let them do it. So no, we're against import, we're against trade. God forbid energy comes from a different state. Man, this could all cause environmental damage in Canada, maybe, maybe, maybe. If this plan works, Canada will build more hydroelectric dams and export more energy to the United States. Hydroelectric dams are really evil according to the Sierra Club and we don't want to give them an incentive to build more so we want the project to fail. Even though Hydro-Quebec, which is providing the electricity for this, sworn on their god, mothers, whatever, that they have no plans for new hydroelectric facilities. By the way, all of this, I am cribbing off of the grumpy economist. This is only John Cochran's latest piece. You know, I love John Cochran's blog, blog, he's brilliant, he's excellent. This stuff is great. So I'm basically stealing this from John Cochran as I encourage you to go to John Cochran. But that's not just the Sierra Club, right? So there's a operator of the soon-to-be-closed nuclear power plant called Indiana Points. They're against it because they want to be able to charge high electricity prices in the state of New York. So the power companies in New York, upstate New York, want to be the ones selling New York City electricity and they want to be able to charge high prices because they don't want competition and the Canadians are coming in. Evil Canadians again, ruining everything. And they're providing clean energy, lower prices, that's not good. So you've got the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local 97 is arguing that it threatens upstate renewable projects and would eliminate the need for additional gas-fired plants to be deleterious to New York state energy jobs. So they're worried about jobs. God only just goes on and on and on and on. And think about this. I mean, this is the best line in the article and it's great to see John Falkin saying this and I wish more people got this, but he says more generally this whole story is a reminder why a legal system of property rights rather than political permission is the only way to run a successful economy. In other words, this is inevitable. If you give pressure groups, economic power, this is inevitable. If you give politicians, economic power. The beauty of a system of property rights is you own the river, you get a say in what I do in your river. You don't own the river, none of your business stay out of it. You own the land, I can put my stuff on your land if we come to an agreement. If you don't, I can't. I mean, the developers of this project have pledged millions of dollars to train New Yorkers for green energy jobs. They've funded an environmental trust with $117 million. Talk about gangster bribery, extortion, not bribery. This is Don Corleone type way of doing business, right? Where the environmentalists demand to be paid, otherwise they'll stop your project. Of course, the supply project, they haven't got a contract yet with the city of New York for the electricity and city of New York right now needs to get permission from the New York Public Services Commission. And the New York Public Services Committee has one group that keeps, it's a non-profit called River Keeper that is dedicated to protecting the Hudson. And they don't like the project because they're saying that the transmission line could lead to additional dams in Quebec that would possibly expose indigenous people to methyl mercury, a neotoxin created by microbes and freshly fluttered soils that can pass up the food chain to people who live off the land. Now, it happens that there is actually exactly zero evidence that methyl mercury is a threat from any of the dams in Canada. So you see, they come up with excuses. They just make them up out of thin air. Hypothetically, dams can cause this extraction of mercury that can then poison everybody. It never happens, but it could, ever, never ending. List of reasons why not to act and never ending list of reasons why not to solve the problem. It's much better to be afraid. It's much better to feel guilty. It's much better to do what you're told and to stay quiet. Best Fed Hank says, Iran keeps swearing today. Where's my swear poop? I thought dollars were associated with me swearing. What's happened, Best Fed Hank? It's damn, yeah, no, it's damn. It's damn, damn, damn. This is the key line in Cochrane's article. I mean, the one was the positive. Property rights solve all these problems. The second one is the key line in terms of the incentive, motivation. Obviously, the answer here is simple. Don't build anything. Freeze in the dark or more likely, how about a hundred million grand for us too? The whole environmental movement is not about solving problems. It's not about finding solutions. It's about stopping. It's about regression. It's about stagnation and it's about extortion and it's about eliciting fear because people who are fearful can be manipulated. People who are fearful can be controlled. People who feel guilty can be told that it's okay to freeze, that it's okay to stop, that it's okay that they hard-earned money is going to groups they've never heard of protecting stuff they don't care about because it's all for some common good. It's all for something that's supposed to alleviate their fears but actually doesn't and makes them all worse. All geared ultimately, you know, towards the destruction of capitalism but more broadly, it's geared towards the destruction of freedom, of any kind of freedom that we are. Be afraid to produce, to build, to act. Now, that is one project. That is one project that is well-funded with people figuring out as they go along and figuring out solutions, it's going to take 20 plus years and they're probably going to get it done in spite of all the obstacles and they're going to pay people $100 here, $100 million here, $100 million then and they're just going to pay it all out and they're going to get it done. Blackstone will get it done. But think about how many projects. How many projects that would improve our world, that would make our life better, that would make things cheaper and in the case of green energy or whatever you want to call it, make us less dependent on any one source of energy for electricity. How many projects never take off or never started? Somebody has an idea and then he goes, God, the regulators would never allow that. Scrap that, God, that would cost me a lot of money to bribe all the environmental groups. Scrap that, God, there's no way they'll let me do that. Scrap that, how many? How much richer, how much wealthier could we be today if we built, built just straight concrete, construction stuff? This is the world of atoms, not the world of electrons. In the physical world, if we just built stuff, the way we did in the 19th century, the way we did in the early 20th century, how much richer, how much more efficient, how much more productive would we be? I mean, California has a drought, let's build desalination plans. They have a drought? Well, it rains a lot somewhere else. Let's build a canal. We have traffic jams. Let's tattle under them. Let's build more roads. Oh, there's not enough housing. Let's build lots of skyscrapers. If you can fit seven and a half million people into Hong Kong Island and adjoining areas, you can filter a lot of people into the Bay Area, a lot, imagine. I'm a civil engineer in a previous life, I am. Imagine if civil engineering came back, if we could actually do something. If civil engineers were actually allowed to do civil engineering projects, build highways and tunnels and dams, skyscrapers and water projects. And imagine if all of that happened in a world of private property, how cheap that would be, how efficient that would be, how effective that would be, how rich we would be. I mean, and if there was, let's say, a climate crisis, imagine if we deployed all of our private resources because private people care about, I don't know, let's say there was a crisis, about not dying, deploy those resources, deploy that energy, deploy those smarts, deploy that capital, deploy that ingenuity to solve the problem. It would be like that, it would be a problem. We'd solve it like that. I mean, I was just reading an article about a company that Bill Gates has funded. Don't hold it against them. A company that Bill Gates has founded. It's not, maybe it's not a company, it's a research project out of MIT. I think it's MIT. About putting this material up in the atmosphere that would cool the planet. So if it's warming, if it were true, if it really is catastrophic, we could put up a chemical out in atmosphere, and we could test it, we could try it out, we could do all kinds of things, and it would bounce the sun rays back to the sun, it would cool the planet, and we could do a little bit to start off with and see what the effect was and play around with it and figure it out. But that's again a project that would never be approved. That's again a project that people are so afraid of. God, that's human beings playing God. You can't do that. What if it goes wrong? Then we fix it. And the fundamental here is the fundamental cause of this fear is not climate change. For all I know climate change could be real. The fundamental fear is not this idea that the sea levels will rise, maybe they will. Best friend Hank, thank you for the support, I appreciate it. I don't know. Let's assume they will. The fundamental cause of this is not, I don't know, more hurricanes or more droughts or whatever. The fundamental cause of the fear. Again, as Alex Epstein has shown many, many times, as others have shown, but Alex in particular, almost nobody, very few people die today of climate related problems. So even if they're accelerating, if they're growing, that risk to our actual lives on a day to day basis is very small. Now you might say, oh, in the future, maybe to get worse, maybe, maybe. But why, even if all of that were true, why would I not be afraid? Because I know every one of those problems is solvable. Because I know every one of those problems, every one of those problems has a technological solution. And I have a profound belief in the ability of human beings to solve these kind of problems. I always say, they build dikes to protect Amsterdam hundreds of years ago from flooding. You think we can protect Florida today if we had to? Of course we could. We build houses today. They don't blow away when a hurricane hits. We can have, Israel today provides, I think, all of its water from desalination plants. And yeah, that requires a lot of energy, right? Nuclear fusion, thermal from Quebec. It's a little far from California. But California could build nuclear power plants. Have a little mini nuclear power plants at every desalination plant. Or natural gas. Why am I supposed to keep Amsterdam out of this? Amsterdam's a great example. I love Amsterdam. So the real source of the fear. The real source of the fear is a lack of trust and belief in human reason. A lack of belief in human beings' ability to solve problems. A skepticism about reason and science and engineering. A skepticism that is fed by our elites and by the people in power who constantly convince people that technology cannot solve problems. That technology is the problem. Big tech, evil big tech. The real source of this is the fact that we elevate emotions over reason. We've abandoned this positive idea that we had in the 19th century. And again, I think in the early and mid 20th century, that we can solve anything. That there's no challenge that nature throws us at that we can't solve. And also, and here I'm inspired by David Deutsche's book. But it's something I've argued many times and many others have argued many times. Oh, thank you, Trika. Wow. Really appreciate that. 99, 99, 99. Trika says that the app won't let him round it off to 100. 99, 99 is great. This idea that human beings were born into as a species. We were born into this perfect environment. We were born into this planet that's gonna protect us and shield us. Everything's just there. It's a garden of Eden. This goes back to the garden of Eden myth which I talk about periodically. Action Jackson, if you're listening to this, you need to make a series of short videos of me talking about the garden of Eden myth because I think it's important and I think it's powerful. And I think people might actually watch it. Anyway, maybe I should do a series of lectures on Biblical stories. Somebody's done that already. Oh, yeah, that's right. Jordan Peters. Anyway, I could do one. So the idea is, what do they call it? Spaceship Earth. This is what I'm taking for David Deutsch. Spaceship Earth. We have Earth. It's this spaceship built for human beings and if we don't screw it up, if we don't screw it up, we can survive here forever. Spaceship Earth is amazing. But that's just not true. The Earth is unbelievably inhospitable to human life. It would be very difficult for human beings to survive on this planet without us changing it. The only reason we can sustain 8 billion people on planet Earth today or a million people on planet Earth, the only reason we can sustain a million people on planet Earth or even 500,000 people on planet Earth is by using our reason to change the world to fit our needs. If it floods, we build dykes, we build dams. If they're droughts, we figure out how to channel water from the lake to do our agriculture. If we need a hunt, we develop tools and weapons and strategies to get the animals. Nature doesn't like us. We're not a species that has evolved to survive with the way the world is. We're a species that evolved to change nature so that we could survive, to change the world to make it ours. Wes, thank you for the support, really appreciate it. $50 worth of chugging along here, guys. What makes human beings human beings is the fact that we must, as a requirement for our survival and requirement for our thriving, change the world to fit our needs. We must change our environment. We must exploit nature, otherwise we die. So if you really wanna be afraid, then be afraid of the shutting down of technology. Be afraid of not allowing us to build power plants and power lines and big canals and desalination plants and all the things and electricity for air conditioning and all the things that allow us to live in Las Vegas in the summer and in Alaska in the winter. Because we couldn't without heating and without air conditioning, without electricity, without transportation. I need the thing to require the human mind. And this is again, this is the Garden of Eden story. The fall as described in the Garden of Eden, in Genesis, the fall of man, which is getting kicked out of the Garden of Eden, is the beginning of being human. The fall represents our need to work, to change the environment, to fit our needs. The fall represents reason and free will. Before that, we were animals. Animals don't have reason, don't have free will. They just accept the environment the way it is. They succeed or they die based on the seasons, based on the environment. Human beings don't. Human beings change, adapt. We don't, somebody reminds you of a Leonard Peacock talk called The Evil of Respecting Nature. Yeah, our job is in respect nature. Our job is to change, manipulate, exploit, there's a word for you, exploit nature. For what? For our own well-being, for our own survival. So it's not planet-ship Earth. No, we as human beings are in a hostile environment. And a place not built for us. It's built for the chimpanzees and the microbes and the snails and the owls and it's built for them. But even there, if it changes a little bit, some of them will die out. Not built for human beings. For human beings to thrive in this environment, we must change it. We must adapt it to our needs. So the fear that's being elicited here is a fear of human, is a fear that is, it's source is our belief that we cannot, that we will fail to change environment to feed our needs. It's a fear that's focused on a lack of belief in reason, a lack of acceptance of reason and it's ability to be successful, it's ability to change the world. No, it's hostile. It's hostile and not in a sense of intention. It's hostile in a sense that you just go naked into nature. Everything around you, and if you cut off reason, everything about you is going to kill you. You are not going to survive. Reason allows us to pacify nature. Hostile not in intention, but hostile in action. And the first human communities couldn't grow very much because the environment in which they lived was too hostile for human formishing. They had to figure out solutions. They took them tens of thousands of years to figure out those solutions so they could grow and expand and go into other areas and change their environment so that they could live and they could grow. But it's, you know, again, not intentionally hostile but existentially hostile. Absolutely. Having animals running around all around you, cheetahs, lions, I don't know. That's hostile. Having snakes, that's hostile. Again, snakes are not there to, their purpose in life is not to get you, but they will get you if you don't do something about it. And of course, weather. Human beings are not good in cold and extreme heat. They need water, droughts. That's nature being hostile. Again, not intentionally, of course. Well, Frank says mosquitoes, God, I hate mosquitoes. Yeah, I have no idea why we don't wipe out mosquitoes. All right, so the real challenge and the real way to overcome the fear is not to start knocking them down. Oh, it's not, the earth isn't warming and this fact is wrong and the hockey stick is wrong and this is wrong and that is wrong and all these things are wrong. The ultimate solution because, and by the way, this is the same thing with COVID, same thing with COVID. Oh my God, this virus is gonna kill us all. Virus has always been around. We have a capacity to think, figure it out, solve problems. Give us the facts, let us decide how to live, how to behave, what to do. Should we remask, should we remask? What kind of medicines work, what don't work? What vaccines work, what don't work? We'll figure it out, we'll solve the problem. What's there to be afraid of? Well, you have to be afraid because if you're not afraid, how are we gonna lock you up? How are we gonna control you? How are we gonna make you dependent on government? And of course, it's not even, and here's the, here's an important point, it's not even the politicians and the people at the top are scheming evil conspiratorial rulers of the world. No, for the most part, they're afraid, they're petrified. They have no clue what's going on and they're scared and the way in which they respond to fear is by inflicting stuff on you. If I'm scared, I'm gonna make you scared too. And I'm gonna make you do what I tell you and that's gonna help shield me. I'm more and more and more less likely to believe in the evil genius madman in the background scheming to take control over the world. I've never met anybody competent enough to do that. It was bad. Bad people are just not competent and they tend to be super emotional, super fearful. But if you look at all these issues, all these issues, the solution to any real issue, any real problem is reason, is to think more. If we undermine reason, all we're left with is emotion, all we're left with is fear, all we're left with is responses to fear, all we're left with is control. So if we're gonna fight climate change and COVID authoritarianism and the left and the right and stupid politicians rushing us to war and fear of trade and even fear of China, what we need to elevate? We, it's gonna be impossible to knock them down, knock each one of them down, not each one of them out, prove that each one of them is wrong, don't think of this, don't think of that. What we need to do is elevate the methodology. What methodology? The methodology of reason, the methodology of science, the methodology of the way human beings make the world their own. All of these problems are solvable. All of these problems require thinking, require freedom and they're solvable. But that's not the environment we live in. I mean, just look at what's going on in every issue from COVID to climate to, I don't know, the war with Ukraine and Russia, fear mongering, hysteria, panic, reason, thinking, facts, evidence, thoughtful analysis, nobody cares about that, nobody wants it because for years and years and years, for decades now, we've been taught that reason is not efficacious, reason won't solve the problems, thinking is not the solution. And we've just been taught to accept the fear. That's what these psychologists are telling this woman, to accept it, world is going to hell, just have to accept it. You have to learn to live with the fear, you have to learn to manage the fear. Don't look at the source, don't look at actual solutions, that would be relying too heavily on flawed human beings and flawed reason and flawed ability. No evidence, zero zilch. So much of this world can be explained through kind of just looking at it from the perspective of people are just guided by emotion and a dominant emotions by a lot of these things, of fear and guilt. 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, by going to Patreon, subscribe star locals and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see the Iran book show grow, please consider sharing our content and of course, subscribe, press that little bell button right down there on YouTube so that you get an announcement when we go live and for those of you who are already subscribers and those of you who are already supporters of the show, thank you. I very much appreciate it.