 Welcome to another episode of your own debates, Europe. When you hear about environmentalism, you probably think about people who are anti-capitalist, people who are on the left, and people who are against the idea of market or even the idea sometimes of an industrial civilization. But today, we're gonna have a different experience. Today, we have with us, Connor Tomlinson. Connor is the policy director of the British Conservation Alliance, and it's a group that describes itself as pro-planet, but also pro-market. So it's gonna be an interesting discussion to see if there can be a bridging of the protection of the environment or of the ideology of environmentalism and of a pro-human, pro-market approach. And on the other side, of course, there is Yaron Brooke, the director, sorry, the chairman of the board of the Andron Institute, and also he is the producer and not the producer. What's wrong? Host, host. The host of the Yaron Brooke. So you already know the format, 10 minutes, we start with our guest, 10 minutes with Connor, then Yaron replies, then there's gonna be some inter-panel discussion, and then we're gonna go to your question. So make sure you send your super chat questions for either Connor or for Yaron or something that you found interesting in the debate, and we're gonna get to them. Before we start, a big thank you to the Andron Institute for supporting and sponsoring these discussions. Make sure you follow the Andron Center UK and ARI Global on Social Media for short subtitle clips with highlights. And most of all, thank you very much for joining us for one more week. Without further delay, Connor, the floor is yours. Fantastic, Nicos. Thank you for making the minor errors of introducing Yaron because now any cock-up I make in my introductory remarks will look perfectly human by comparison. Those hoping for a more contentious debate this evening, Yaron and I go at each other's throats, may be surprised because I'm probably the closest to an ejectivist that the British Conservation Alliance has on staff, years of reading Ditko's question and watchmen have pushed me just slightly to the right of Rorschach. So I think there's gonna be a bit of concordance between Yaron and I in worldview in terms of ethics and market ethos. The thing I expect a little bit divergence, however, based on Yaron's past appearances and his debate with Darren Grimes was also very enlightening on this topic, is how viable the melding of market principles and the goals of environmentalism nowadays, particularly 2050 targets, actually are. The primary issue with things like net zero commitments are the monopolistic partnership between the states and the energy corporations for decorates have made it so that people don't believe that the market can solve these issues. Also the targets being a cap on the market and essentially how would I describe it? An artificial deadline that doesn't quite fit with the natural rate of innovation or doesn't take into consideration resource limitations, et cetera, that's a massive problem. But a lot of the narrative has shifted away from what individuals and innovators can do and more towards the state must be responsible for everything. The Nebida society causes pollution and this society is on the hook for fixing it. A lot of people don't realize that that society means people that make the edicts and that dip their fingers into your pocketbook to pay for these things. And often they're not on the hook for all of the disastrous implications that their totalizing policies have. It's normally the people forced to pay for them that have all the issues lumped on their shoulders. It's also the height of human hubris, I think, to, as the modern environmentalist narrative that isn't the market environmentalist narrative do, say that humans are the cause of some sort of apocalyptic, pending climate crisis. Climate crisis is a very loaded term. It essentially conjures up the ideas of the sort of 2012 movie tidal waves crashing through New York and whatever. I don't think we're gonna be in a day-to-earth still scenario and unlike what AOC frequently says, neither does the IPCC reports. It does project at worst case scenario, something that Michael Schellenberg has written about quite cogently. A loss of life due to natural disasters in undeveloped areas and some property damage in built-up areas. And even though a lot of the global industrial elites decide to say, oh, there is a climate crisis facing us all, we're gonna have billions die, then buying beachfront property in Martha's Vineyard and consistently flying around the world on private jets doesn't exactly give away that they buy into the spiel that they're selling. Instead, however, it is very much in our self-interest in the third world to conserve the lives of their populace. And also in the first world, if we're going to have property damage, it's very much in the interest of the businesses and individuals to mitigate that, to take steps, which make for a cleaner environment to curb any potential impacts of climate change. But also it's in the self-interest to a lot of things like pollution and whatnot, because that's going to have indirect health impacts and also a sustainable environment does make a sustainable market. The worst thing you can do to your own customer base is poison them with that, et cetera. You're not going to get a lot of people on your side if you're slowly degrading the planet for your products. Just gonna find where I am, there we go. Ah, yes. Essentially, you can have at the ethos of preserving the planet prolongs your profits along into the future. Now, having a system like that, which rewards competition, which rewards innovation in the environmental sector, means you have to devolve a lot of the powers of subsidies and also a lot of the monopolistic partnerships from the state. And only then, when repealing things also in the legal system, I know international trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership that really gets my goat, the ISDS provisions that are gonna obligate us buying oil along into the future, for example, those are going to screw over a lot of the company, the transition to renewable energies, but also those sort of things in the other sectors, screw over a lot of up-and-coming companies that might make more sustainable business decisions compared to those that benefit some state subsidies. So reverting the legal system to a common law universality away from this sort of utilitarian, utopianist policy-making strategy would be a great step, not only for environmentalism, but once those are proven as working models for implementing new technologies and recovering from the dreadful effects of lockdowns and all the inflation is gonna come from that, that can be used as a rolling model for other sectors. I know Yaren was very happy when Darren said, in his prior debate, that the Tories had essentially consolidated all the various benefit systems on the universal credit, not because the welfare state is a good thing, we're very much in agreement on that, but that because it's an incremental step to dismantling it wholesale. Essentially, you can take these mocking from environmentalist ideas and rather than do direct subsidies, do indirect subsidies, air quotes, by doing tax incentives for sustainable infrastructure ventures, and that becomes a slow rolling method to reducing taxes wholesale because it proves this works in the market sector for environmentalism, so it will carry over to other sectors. It also is going to require, and I understand a little bit of pessimism on this, and actually this is one of the main things I think that the present objectivist movement, especially the libertarian side of the aisle that we work with sometimes, for do I drop the ball on? They can't make the moral and cultural case for environmentalism or markets by them. And as much as the, there's the old adage of, if you don't care about the culture, the culture still cares about you. And as much as Yaren, for example, may agree with a lot of the sort of intuitive climates denialists, which are completely mislabeled by the way, it's a very snooty up through and backside label of the I'm not bothered about the sun, monster coming to eat me, I'd rather talk about the on the ground reality of economic growth and how the decommissioning fossil fuels will affect people's lives and livelihoods. The overall narrative will see some hearts and minds and it will also see the hearts and minds of those in the halls of power. And if you don't have a compelling counter narrative to go at it, and instead you're just talking about even the Cousins curve is a great indicator of how economic prosperity aligns very well with environmental awareness. If you're just talking about how numbers go up on the spreadsheet, people don't care. So the case needs to be made essentially rather than the Marxist, revolutionary rhetoric or the stock kind of slogans that come out of Davos for the bill, better stuff that nobody likes. God forbid the Cousins keep using that. There's got to be an investment narrative to tell people why they should be interested in making individual market environmental solutions. It starts with the government devolving power to make those solutions possible to innovators and industries. But it also means that the case should be made for individual people wanting to adopt these market environmentalist measures because it means more job security, in principle it's more personal and indirect measures of improvements to health and also a reconnectivity to the spiritual and possibly transcendent based on your religious inclinations, relationship with the natural world and sort of Waldo illness type thing. And those are very compelling arguments for why market environmentalist principles should work and they're not necessarily tied to state activity which I think Yaron will be rejoicing to hear that I would be banging that particular drawing in this debate. Thank you very much, Gondar. Yaron. Cool, thanks, Kana. And as Kana mentioned before we went live, Kana helped organize a debate I did years ago at Kent University, which was I think a very successful event and a lot of fun. So when it comes to the market aspects of market environmentalism, and if what we're talking about is true market mechanisms, then Kana and I will not disagree on much. My concern is more with the environmentalism side of market environmentalism and with my skepticism with regard to whether these market mechanisms, a true market mechanisms are just a more subtle way in which government coercion is applied to the marketplace and they don't actually prove that markets work. They actually prove that nudging and government intervention is something that is workable. I think it's important to define what we're talking about and environmentalism is a loaded concept. Environmentalism is whether Kana likes it or not defined in the culture by our worst enemies and not by Kana. I wish it was by Kana. But what does environmentalism mean in its common usage? I wish it meant clean air and clean water and just a better life and the ability to walk in the forest once in a while and schmooze with animals or whatever you do when you walk in the forest. I haven't done it in a long time, obviously, so I don't know. But it means a lot more than that. The terminology of environmentalism is the placement in the environment. And here environment means something very specific. It means nature above and beyond any benefit human beings the right from it. That is, it means the intrinsic value of nature that nature has a value independent of human beings. And I reject that idea. Objectivism rejects that idea. There is no such thing as a value independent of human beings. For every value, I must ask for whom and for what? There has to be a value or. And the value of what we have are human beings. So nature, if it's a value, it has to be a value to humans for a particular purpose. Nature is not valuable in and of itself. The planet is not. I'm not pro-planet or anti-planet. I'm pro-human. And as a consequence of being pro-human, I want a planet because this is where we live and we need it to anchor us. So I don't want it drifting away or I don't want it destroyed. But it's in the context of human existence that concern about certain aspect about nature arises. And by using the term environmentalism, one buys into the notion of the intrinsic value of nature. And I think that is very dangerous. They used to call themselves ecologists. Now they call themselves environmentalists. And it's their term. They invented it. They came up with it. They've defined it. And our attempts to kind of change it a little bit, I think it's futile and I'd rather see us come up with something, some different view. I think we buy the whole idea of free market environmentalism by too much into the idea of environmentalism, gives them too much credit, gives them a moral sanction, elevates them to a status which they don't deserve because most of them, not the common person who is an advocate of environmentalism, but the intellectual environmentalists, primarily man-hating. They primarily hate the human race. And they want to see human beings destroyed. They don't view human beings as part of nature. And they certainly don't take the perspective of nature is there to serve us, to serve our values, to serve our lives, which I think is why nature is there. Not why nature is there in terms of why somebody put it there. It just exists there. But in terms of the human perspective on it, the planet is there to serve human needs. We mine it. We exploit it. The whole way in which human beings survive. The whole way in which human beings thrive is by changing nature to fit our needs. We chop down trees to build homes. We knock down mountains to build highways or to build skyscrapers. We mine for steel or for gold or for whatever it is we need in order to make our lives better. We use sand to create silicon. Everything we do requires altering nature. We are the only species out there of all the species that doesn't adapt to nature, but adapts nature to our needs. Now saying all that, I grant the fact that there are certain issues regarding how we do that that might in the long term affect us badly. Pollution is obvious. A clean water, clean air kind of issues. I would argue that the answer to most of these issues, almost all of them, is not some free market environmentalism, the answer to most of these issues is property rights. If we adopt a consistent uncompromising position on property rights, then most issues of pollution go away. You we know from common law, 1,000 years old, you can't take your garbage and dump it in my backyard. If the rivers and lakes and oceanfront and pretty much the fisheries or the fish out there and the air I breathe to some extent are mine if I have a property right over them and I don't argue that I have it all worked out on how you do that, but that's where I like to see the energy placed on how do we do that? How do we create property rights out of all these things? Then it's easy. You can't destroy what is mine. You can destroy my property right. If I can prove that what you are doing is creating harm to me, we have civil courts that for a long time have protected me from the harm that you were doing. Of course, nothing wrong with legislating that. Once we know objectively that what you're polluting is actually a threat to me, that is part of the role of government in protecting individual rights. So most of my view is that mostly free market environmentalism to the extent that it is legitimate idea is about property rights. It's about defining property rights and expanding property rights. A good example of that is in Africa, the expansion of property rights over elephants. If I own elephants, then they don't go extinct because I have a strong interest and economic interest in keeping them around. I think there are very few true legitimate issues that cannot be solved by just being consistent and applying consistently the issue of property rights. The whole issue of global warming, of course, creates a real challenge because global warming, if it is a problem and if it is a problem of the scale that some people claim it is, it is a phenomena of all of our activities. Every time you breathe, you breathe out CO2. Every economic activity you engage in is really an economic activity that generates some type of greenhouse gas. And then the challenges are, how does the market adapt to these? And I think the market either adapts or it doesn't. That is, I don't know in every circumstance as how the market would adapt. We don't have markets. We have a lot of government intervention. But to the extent that there are solutions out there and to the extent that the real problems, markets are wonderful things to solve those problems in ways that we often cannot imagine. Freedom is something that produces results again we cannot imagine. But it's quite likely that there will be property damage. People will have to move. It might be the case that some areas flood and people won't be able to live in there. You can imagine insurance companies already raising prices in a free market. All of this would be dealt with. The real challenge we have is not, how does the free market deal with these things? The real challenge we have is that we don't have a free market. And therefore we can't let the free market deal with these things. So for example, the problem of coastal flooding would be solved if we actually let insurance companies dictate prices for property that was insured on the coast. We know they're not allowed to do that. We know for example, the United States insurance for coastal property is subsidized. It is often granted by the states and therefore people encouraged to build on the coast in spite of the fact that it's not economic in a free market. So the problems we have I think are primarily problems that are created by the fact that we're not free. And what we again should be advocating for is property rights and more freedom rather than advocating for more attempts to manipulate government so that they can manipulate us to do what we believe as good central planners would be a good outcome ultimately. What we really should be advocating for is getting rid of government programs. But let me end on an important point to conimate. And that is that people are not inspired by spreadsheets. They're not inspired by numbers. They're inspired by a vision. They're inspired by, unfortunately, they're often inspired by fear. Now I can't help with fear because not my strong suit. I don't engage much in fear. But I think we can inspire people without fear and I think we can inspire people without admitting that the problems of the magnitude that those who would like us to fear believe they are. I think the inspiration around freedom is the same as the inspiration around this free market environmentalism. And that is the inspiration for a better life. We should inspire people around their ability to be successful at living in the future. That freedom is good for them. That constraints are not. That their ability to thrive is gonna be constrained. And this is particularly true of poor people. I think rich people can survive even if we place all kinds of restrictions. But poor people cannot. Certainly people in Africa cannot survive dropping fossil fuels and adopting solar and windmills. They would drastically be hood by that. What we need to inspire people around is how much better life could be on this planet if we just got rid of all the restrictions and all the restraints and all the limitations that government places on us. And if we just applied ourselves to making the world a better place for each one of us using the win-win mechanism of markets and of trade. So I think we can inspire around capitalism. We haven't, you know, I've tried and I don't know if I've been successful but certainly not a lot of us have been successful. Capitalism has a very bad name. Free markets have a very bad name out there. But I don't think the issue of nature and environment is any different than any other issue when it comes to advocacy for free markets. We have to have a positive vision of a future that includes human publishing. And if you want to stall in the woods, if the woods were private, they'd be better taken care of, they'd burn down less frequently and you would have an opportunity to enjoy them even more than you do today. Thanks guys. Thank you, Yaron. So Conor, pick whatever you found more interesting, more controversial, and you have three, four minutes for let's say a reply time. That's fine, yeah, I'll run through a few of those because broadly speaking again, sorry to disappoint everyone who was hoping we were going to punch up, I do agree, particularly with the property rights being, well, I'm going to say property rights are the mechanism. I would say environmentalism is the ethos and I think it might be a definitional issue here as to why Yaron is very adverse to co-opting the term environmentalism. And I also don't think we should seed that sort of term to the left, particularly when you've had quite a few philosophical environmentalists like Ralph Wood, remember some Burke was very much one of those throughout history and people throw on board, scrutiny, et cetera. But property rights being the mechanism through redress environmental issues is pretty apparent, especially when you look at the case studies, I know I've done a bit of this with hopefully an upcoming paper with the Adam Smith Institute when it gets released. If you look at the hellfire pit that the USSR created by just burning all the oil or them being responsible for all the whaling deaths even after the UN put the Greenpeace legislation which did literally nothing. Or you look at the petro-statism of Venezuela for example, the socialism that's proposed time and time again has been completely pointless. It's only in battling the tragedy of the commons approach and allowing and empowering private property owners to make the best and sustainable use of their property. That's the way out of this. The thing is the environmentalist views are not incommensurate with the trajectory of human self-interest and property rights. And I'd actually say that you're missing a trick if you don't believe they are, because as Jaron said, I know Jaron believes that there is no innate value to the environment. The reason that there has been a view developed of there being an innate value to the environment is the same reason, for example, that the two biblical stories of creation have got dominion and then stewardship. It's because at the start, the nature is regarded as wilderness where a lot of predators might have been growing in the underbrush. So he had to burn it with fire and blade and settle it. As we reached the industrial revolution, we realized via the contrast that our technology created between highly populated industrialized polluted environments and nature, that we realized we had more of a benefit from stewarding it and not exploiting it as much. It transitioned from wilderness to nature. So that idea is not incommensurate with self-interest because it melds to our intuitive sense of duty as individual persons. And it also melds with the business practice of wanting a sustainable market long into the future to prolong your profit incentives. It's like the, and devolving it from the state as well. It's like the Piaget Equilibrium States idea where essentially you remove the enforcement cost of any state mandated program, devolve it to those with the lots profit incentive and the voluntary cooperative action taken to preserve something and sustain a behavior is actually going to win out over time because you haven't got to put things into force. The only things I think I've picked up on particularly with Yaron, I would be a bit more of us too, is Yaron, you sounded quite blasé about the just move idea, especially with the insurance and whatnot. It's fantastic news that, for example, the natural disaster deaths have massively plummeted in the last century, especially when we've imported, I believe the Netherlands specifically has imported a lot of anti-flooding technologies to Bangladesh and they've solved that problem. The issue is when that's, in the cases that that would become unavoidable, centralizing more occupations in the sort of judge-dread style high rises in cities because coastal areas may become uninhabitable, it's going to be pretty undesirable. I understand that is not a market issue that's a purely sentimental issue, but I'd like less, you know, high rise concrete prefabs in, and also on the fossil fuel point in Africa. Yes, you're completely correct. The issue is less so with them being inviolable for adopting renewables now because renewables are rubbish. That's an issue of the subsidies holding up the fact that innovation is possible. The issue is actually the leapfrogging, again, Schellerberg has written about this pretty well. Essentially, you can't go from having massive amounts of fossil fuel burning and then straight onto renewables without a sustainable behavioral pattern developing over time because you're just going to overuse them and then you're going to get brownouts if you're in Germany just for completely different reasons. Instead, we can do things, not the market environmental solution. Under the Kling Capsules Coalition and I wrote a paper on this just before Christmas, was the tax reciprocal, order reciprocal, clean asset bonds and loans for sustainable infrastructure products that incentivizes investment and goes around all the government corruption and we're not looking to build up the infrastructure in those countries. So I know that was quite a lot and quite a lot, very different points, but Yaren raised a lot of great stuff and I wanted to address everything, so thanks. Thank you, Konrad. I mean, I think a big disagreement here at the end of the day is going to be environmentalism as an ethos. I don't see the justification for that. Human life is the ethos. Human prosperity is the ethos. Human thriving and flourishing is the ethos. And clearly property rights precede environmentalism. Property rights are much more fundamental concept and a requirement of human survival. Having a clean environment is nice, but we can survive in the cave, which is a pretty dirty environment. We can survive in 19th century London, which is pretty polluted place and we can actually thrive in those places. So environmentalism, a clean environment is a luxury of well off capitalist countries. One of my problems is that we try to impose it on poor countries and keep them poor that way. So environmentalism is not an ethos. It's part of what as a rich, relatively rich culture, we want clean and clean water to make our lives marginally better. But the standard, the standard must always be individual flourishing, individual life. And to the extent that individual flourishing contradicts with so-called clean environment, then to hell with the clean environment. And you can see that for example, in China, right? So China went through this phase of being unbelievably poor to now having a middle-class population. Going from unbelievably poor to middle-class would require polluting a lot. It's just a requirement. You can't do it otherwise. You can't do it in a cost-effective way. So the Chinese basically made the decision and I think the Chinese people agreed with this decision. We're gonna just pollute for 40 years so that we can get rich. And then when we get rich, at that point, having clean and clean water becomes a higher value than not being poor and we'll clean it all up afterwards. But the standard, and I think they're right in that, the standard is human life. The standard is human flourishing, not... And this is my problem is when you buy into the ethos and environmentalism, you're placing the environment somehow outside of human life or as a higher value, people talk about a value, something above and beyond yourself. Well, there is nothing beyond yourself or at least there is nothing beyond human beings. So I worry about placing the environment and in that category as ethos and again buying therefore into the playbook of the left. I'm not a big fan of Emerson. Emerson is a pure subjectivist. It's all about emotion. The reason has very little place in Emerson's world. He's very poetic and obviously, the poetry often is very striking and very powerful, but as a philosopher or as an interpreter. Yes, he places a lot of this emotional emphasis on nature and he forgets that sometimes you have to destroy nature in order to create for human beings, in order to create wealth. Sometimes nature has to be destroyed and has been, right? Now, it turns out again, when we're rich, we start planting forests again, right? Because we value strolls in the forest, but poor people don't value strolls in the forest. They much prefer chopping down the forest to build stuff so that they can get rich enough so they can value strolls in the forest, right? And this is the problem I see with Africa. The solution for Africa is to burn as much of our fuel as possible. And if we can make nuclear cheap, then yeah, they should go for nuclear and that would be great. And of course, one of the things that I think reveals the environmentalist movement as being anti-progress and anti-human being is the rejection of nuclear, which is the obvious solution if you care about climate change. It would be a massive shift to nuclear allowing markets to experiment and let's get massive competition and massive experimentation and let's find a cheap way of producing nuclear power that's effective. And I think there probably are ready technologies that make it possible. It's just a matter of allowing the market to adopt them. So I'm, and then of course I'm always gonna be against any kind of tax subsidy, tax credits, tax this. I mean, the only way it's semi-legitimate for government to tax is to tax everything the same. The government should have no say in what technologies are better than others, what human behavior is appropriate and what is not. You know, what marriage is okay and what marriage is not. You know, one of the subtle ways in which they do that is what they tax them, what they don't taxes, what kind of behavior we should engage in. Should we drink or shouldn't we drink based on how much, you know, alcohol tax there is or tobacco tax or marijuana tax or whatever. I would like to see the government get out of manipulating our behavior, including when it comes to these environmental issues and let people make choices for themselves. And you know, then you make it individual responsibility. You know, if people really worry about climate change, then they can buy their electricity from the manufacturers who manufacture it at zero carbon and avoid manufacturers who manufacture electricity from. I mean, if you had open competition, if you privatize utilities, if you privatize the energy market, you as a consumer would be able to make those choices and let the market dictate it. But what I don't want and what I worry that free market environmentalism does is it gives central planners a role in identifying environmental goals and then manipulating using quote, free market techniques, manipulating behavior in order to get to the goals of central planner set. No, let people set the goals. Let insurance companies set the goals by increasing insurance on flood areas. And yes, I know I'm blasey about moving, but yeah, I'm blasey about moving because I think about the United States of America and how people moved here in the 19th century to escape not flooding, but to escape tyranny or to escape pogroms or to escape poverty or to escape forced poverty like in Ireland. And yeah, they got up and they got on ships that took weeks to get to a place they'd never seen. They didn't really know anything about moving today is so much easier. It's so not a big deal in the big picture things. And America is so big that we wouldn't have to have concrete jungles. There's plenty of land all over this country that nobody's inhabited yet. And I always like to say if global warming actually happens, Canada and Scotland for the first time will become habitable. And people can move into places that right now are under sheets of ice. So I'm just not convinced about the panic about flooding and so on. I understand if you own a home on the coast, but then maybe you should consider selling it before. The flooding happens and moving inland a little bit. Nature is gonna do its thing. We can build dikes, we can build protection, but we're not gonna build it everywhere. And where we can't, some people have to move. Okay, so let's go to some questions. People can send their super chats. And so you mentioned, Connor, you mentioned the issue of the whales and the Greenpeace campaign on the whales in the 80s. My opinion is the most successful, perhaps, campaign in the history of social movement. So it portrayed Greenpeace as this heroic thing, the whales as weak, which was a reversal of the image we always had about the whales. But so you don't mention the protection of elephants and the idea would be privatize the land so you make sure that you protect the endangered species. How would this look like though in the... No, no, no, no, you got it upside down. I don't advocate for privatizing land because I care about, I mean, if you privatize the land, it turns out that the byproduct of that is that you protect in some endangered species, not all of them, the ones that have human value. For example, I always say, if you like spotted owls, buy some and create a forest and put them, but if they fly into my land, I'm gonna shoot them because I don't value spotted owls. And the reason I don't value spotted owls is that it turns out they don't taste good. You know, birds that taste good, there are plenty of those. It's the birds that don't taste good that are problems. So it's, I don't wanna reverse the causality. The primary value here is property rights. And then it turns out that for some species, not all, some species property rights protect, some they won't. Okay, so question to corner. So would you be in favor of privatizing, for example, parts of the Amazon or even parts of the ocean for that part, if it's feasible to protect endangered species? And question to Yaron, would you expand the idea of property rights to things like rivers or the oceans? Connor? Yeah, Yaron's question is actually also very interesting because I'll piggyback slightly off that because I spoke to Francesca of safety oceans, I believe this is the NGO. BCA's podcast network is a good one. And she spoke specifically about the issues the UN are trying to do an endeavor where they take certain amounts of the ocean and create protected zones. But the problem is you can't place it because they're miles away from anywhere else. So a privatization scheme could be an interesting little hand grenade thrown in there to see if that can ameliorate the issue. As for the privatization of certain areas of land where species could be conserved as a byproduct, I know one of the more, I'm going to say uncomfortable because as soon as Yaron said he'd shoot the bird that flies over his property, my gut instinct was, well, that would be a needless end of life. But there you go, I'm more of the, okay, I'm going to kill an animal if you need to eat your type. But if one of the more strange things is that the, what's the, the wildlife poaching trade essentially that's regulated for recreational use in certain regions of Africa is one of the main contributors to the conservation efforts out there. So there is a role very much in the privatization of the animals and the land and even recreational hunting, which I personally don't endorse or would go on. But that, that is a, it leads to the conservation of those species. So yes, it can very much be a solution to conservation. The impetus for me would, would be to endorse it would probably be, yes, property rights would be the mechanism. The environmentalism there would be the more, moral force behind it, if that makes sense. So I don't want to come across as somebody who shoots birds because I don't, and I don't do recreational hunting and I don't understand recreational hunting and I see no reason to kill a living being unless not just food, but unless they're destructive, for example, to my fields that are destructive to my home or they happen to be a rat or a cockroach and then I'm fine with killing as many as possible. But it's the issue of rights. I have a right to shoot that bird. That is, and that is a different issue than whether I think I should or whether I think it's okay to do so. You know, what would I do with oceans? I think that was your question, Nicos. I don't know. I mean, I don't have a simple answer to this. I think real thinking has to go into how do we privatize oceans? What would be the incentive structure around people owning pieces of the ocean? What would it look like for them to exploit those pieces of the ocean? You know, maybe build floating cities or maybe there's some minerals in the ocean bed. Maybe they'll just buy it because they want to conserve it, right? There's a big environmentalist group in the US that just goes and buys up forest land. Not to do anything with it, but just so it stays virgin forest. And that's fine. That's within the context of property rights. Good for them. I mean, it's not something that is in my high and my priority list in terms of saving humanity, but so be it. I think a big problem in the Amazon is the lack of property rights. That one of the reasons a lot of the forest is being burnt is because it's not owned by anybody. If it was owned, people would think about what they wanted to do with that land and there are all kinds of outcomes there. Foresting companies, companies that use the wood in forests actually have a strong incentive to replant. So you get a lot. Now you lose the so-called virgin forest, but it's not clear to me that virgin is better than non-virgin and so on. But see, I don't believe in environmentalism. This is where we disagree, I think more fundamentally. Environmentalism can be an ethos because ethos starts with human beings. Again, it might be your ethos in terms of what is valuable to you, but imposing that on other people or assuming that it's an objective that every human being should follow, I think is where we would diverge. And I'm fine with people having, placing nature very high on the hierarchy of values and therefore devoting a lot of resources to it, spending a lot of time there, maybe buying virgin forest and keeping it, all of that. But don't impose it on other people. Don't tell me that that has to be my priority because it's not personally. And I don't think it would be for everybody. So it's certainly a value within a hierarchy of value where it, and we have to be careful not to place it too high because as it goes up in the value, human progress tends to goes down in value. So if there is some, let's say disagreement here on the issue of values, there is agreement though that human beings have rights and quite often environmental degradation could influence these rights, whether it's property rights and it's mostly property rights. What about though the idea of sustainable development which has been one of the most powerful ideas of the environmental movement? And in simple terms, it says that development today has to be, it has to be made sure that does not hamper the development of that the environment basically is gonna be there. The resources are gonna be there. The quality of the environment is gonna be there also for future generations. So they say, look, this has nothing to do with animal rights or the pristine environment. It has to do with the rights of the people of the future generations. So do you recognize such a concept as rights of the people who are not yet born of the future generations? So Connor and then Yaron. Yeah, this is very much the idea of, was it great men, plant trees which they would never sit in the shade of? That's the sort of ethos there. I think you don't even need to market it necessarily as your obligation to future generations even though I think you very much have that and especially if you wanna market it so much down to your own self-interest as obligation to your direct descendants, then that's the better way to go about it. I think relationships provide a lot more meaning than some sort of abstract wedding to humanity is a greater thing. But it's also, you can market it essentially in a business practice sense where you can say this is of your direct interest to not deplete it for the inheritance of your company and also the future employees that you're going to have so you can stretch out your profit incentives along into the future. If you deplete all the resources you get a Lorax scenario where as Yaron said the forestry companies have an intrigue in planting the next crop essentially and they keep that rotating. Now, as much as Yaron said, I don't know if virgin forests are any better than sort of artificially built stuff. There's quite a lot on the rewilding stuff. I did a paper on that of why that may be beneficial. So that may be something they want to incorporate into that but it's not that the environment is there for the sake of it being a higher ideal above humanity. It's that our usage of it should be responsible so that it exists in dynamic equilibrium with human flourishment. And it's also the sort of bedrock that human flourishment rests on because Yaron said, oh, human beings can survive in a cave. Human beings can survive in the 19th century where it's heavily polluted. Yes, not for very long because the infant mortality was substantially higher and pollution and whatnot is very much tied to that. So building that sustainable bedrock via practice of sustainable development is tied very closely and correlates positively with human flourishment. And that's why you see environmental concerns go up with a gross natural profit going up with the Kuznetz curve trend. So those two are very tied. Do you want to tell for the people who are not familiar with what the Kuznetz, is it the idea that the richer you become, the cleaner the environment is? Yes, essentially. And it's also the idea that the environmental conservation attitudes correlate quite closely with the riches of the country. So as Yaron said, environmentalism can be a very first world concern. However, the goal of market environmentalism is to make it so that the first world develops these technologies so sufficiently so that it's not just a first world concern. So these can be imported to developing nations and incorporated far easier. So you'll skip that whole, we need to build, we need to burn a load of fossil fuels just to advance period. Yaron, sustainable development and do we have obligation to the future generations? Yeah, I mean, future generations don't have rights. That's a perversion of the concept of rights. They can't have rights to anything. They're not born, they're not existence, they're not entities. Only entities can have rights. It's one of my arguments about abortion, but to raise another controversial issue. But it's, so it's not an issue of rights. And I think how much we should be concerned about future generations, very little. And primarily because they're gonna be richer than us. They're gonna be more successful than us if we can preserve freedom. And there are some come to solutions that we can't even imagine. Imagine if in the mid 19th century, we see all the coal burning in London and all the pollution and all the horrors of disease that this is causing. And it really did cause, you know, black lungs and all this stuff. And we said, you know what? In the name of future generations, we're gonna just stop using coal. We're gonna stop it. We're gonna stop the industrial revolution right now because we're worried about future generations. Would future generations have thanked you or not? They would have cursed the day you were born, right? So no, you don't, you know, when this kind of, when progress is happening, when we're moving forward and progress relies in this case on some pollution, then you just gotta allow it to play out and future generations will deal with it. How did future generations deal with it in the case of coal? They cleaned it up. They found technology that was super cheap to relatively cheap to clean up the coal. And then they figured out how to use other forms of energy in order to clean it up even further. So to project what future generations care about, what they will care about, what their technological capabilities will be, what the kind of wealth they have is, is part of the problem that these, that I think environmentalists, central planners engage in. So for example, take climate change. I saw an economist did this great study on climate change and he said, okay, let's take the worst predictions of what the world looks like a hundred years from now, assuming climate change happens. But let's also assume we invest nothing today and we allow economic growth. And let's assume we invest a lot and economic growth is mitigated, is much lower. Which is the better outcome? Well, by far the best outcome is to not do anything and allow economic growth to advance. And yes, people a hundred years from now will have more costs associated with mitigating the effects of warmth. But there'll be so much risk that those costs will be meaningless because of the exponential effect of economic growth. So my view is, yeah, I mean, you care about your kids and you care about your grandkids and you wanna think a little bit about the future. Don't think too much about very distant future because you don't know what's gonna happen in the distant future. You can't predict that. And the best thing, and this is the key, the most sustainable thing in the world, the thing will result we know in the best possible outcomes for humanity is freedom. It's capitalism. It's the profit motive. It's businesses making money. That's incredibly sustainable. And yes, businesses making money think long-term. I don't know of any entity, political or otherwise in the world today, that thinks more long-term rationally than a business does and invest long-terms and things long-term. So I rely on the profit motive. I'm not worried about the distant future. The only thing that worries me about the future is government. It's people who wanna restrict growth. It's people who wanna restrict our freedom. But if we leave freedom to our kids, I will die happy. I mean, there's gonna be no issues about future generations because freedom is the remedy for all these problems. Good. So we have 10 minutes and three super chat. So first super chat, Phil. Can someone tell us if CO2 is essential to plant and therefore animal life or what would happen if there wasn't any? So I think this relates to the idea that CO2 is only bad for the environment. But I'm not sure that anyone in the panel would question this but let's hear Connor. Well, there is a little bit on this. So one of the main fields of research that people have been saying about CO2 emissions is that an increase in CO2 emissions will actually be really beneficial for crop yields, for example, or increase in forestry. Yes, the problem is if you look at, there was a great bit of research done by someone who was doing a mathematics PhD at the University of Arizona. I forget the extra name of the study, but it's in an academic I've worked with Professor Valkyrie and Reed, his book, Primate Change, looks at some of these sorts of stuff. And in the study, essentially there is a lowered mineral count over time with the rate of CO2 atmospherically that then converts into crop yields. So it was something like a loaf of bread in the 17th century has far more nutritional value than any of the grains we're producing now. And that's directly because of the amount of carbon that was in the Industrial Revolution and produced a lot more plant growth. So yes, it's of course vital to the ecosystem life cycle. The issue you have is you're devaluing the nutrient content of the soil and the amount of nutrients that you're going to get per crop yield that we're gonna have. GMO crops may solve some of this issue, but we currently don't have great vertical farming technology and whatnot. So one of our safest bets is to in order to improve the crop yields and take direct action on getting the effect of CO2 on agriculture. Okay, next question by Phil, this was asked early. So I think it was answered, but what economic system would best protect the environment for our benefit? So I assume Conor's answer would be capitalist, but I'm curious, Yaron, would you say that capitalism is the best system to protect the environment or capitalism is the system that protects our rights? Therefore everything else is kind of derivative from there. Well, the way I look at the environment, right? So environment to me is not a thing. I ask who's environmental? And if the question is what is the best system to protect the human environment, the environment for human beings and for human flourishing? Yeah, of course it's capitalism, but that doesn't mean X number of forests, X number of species. I don't know what the X number of forests or what number of species are good for human flourishing. That I leave to the market to determine not like anything else, not to some central planet to figure out. All right, thank you very much Boris and thank you, Enric for the super chat and the kind words. So question by Thessie, do you guys see a difference between animal rights and environment quotes rights? Sounds like you see nature all as one thing. Personally, I don't. So here we have the issue of animal rights raised. So what's your take Connor and then Yaron? I don't, I'm gonna upset some people on my side of the aisle definitely as well because it's gonna be a very much more sentimental thing. I think animal and rights together might be a misnomer. I did write a piece talking about the, it was titled animal rights abuses that are going on in China particularly with the Eulink dog festival. I think it's less so a concept of rights because rights are contingent on sentience and also potential slash lost sentience. So rights are inherent to humans only, the category of human. However, we do have a, as an individual sentimental value we have an obligation to reduce cruelty as much as possible. And that's why I think Yaron and I agreed for example on not needlessly shooting animals or when you're not going to use them for food or for and I think to say that the animal rights issue is bound up in the environmental issue. Yes, because I don't think you can deviate it based on a category, you can't categorize animals as sentient as humans. Therefore you can address the environment in the totality and because they exist in an ecosystem unlike humans who can essentially move themselves outside the ecosystem and sustain in self-created ecosystems. So only conceptual beings can have rights. Rights are a form of protecting ability to reason and ability to make choices based on our reason. Beings that do not owe things, that do not have free will and do not have a conceptual ability are not therefore covered under rights. The issue of animal cruelty is an issue of morality. It's not an issue of politics. And I think that lots of categories under which it's okay to kill animals and I don't deny that for some people, hunting is a legitimate way of, is legitimate even if they don't end up eating the animal. I wouldn't, that's a choice I would make. But again, to the extent that animals are destructive to my property or destructive to any part of my life I would distance them from me and in some cases destroy them if they were real pests. But environment can have rights. Nothing that's not human has rights. Now it could be that we discover an alien species that has cognition and therefore they would have rights or if robots ever become sentient they would have rights if that's possible but you have to have free will. You have to have the conceptual faculty in order to require rights as part of who you are as part of your nature. Thank you. So question by Boris. What, thank you for your question Boris. What happens to nomadic animals? They need multiple spots of property spread across the globe to survive. So Connor, how would you deal with that? It wouldn't be enough to privatize one part of the area because that animal could move to another area and then it could be killed or mistreated there. I know this was actually one of the issues I can't remember the NGO's name but when I was doing research on the environmental impacts of American policies between Trump, Biden, the head of the elections, one of the NGOs was talking about how the border wall had unexpectedly obstructed migration patterns for big cats of all things. It's quite a niche one but an interesting study. So one of the things I suppose you could do is that would be very, again, in a property rights framework that would be very reliant on the moral sentiment regarded towards animals and their worth. One of the things I would encourage is of course the cultural enforcement of environmental values. You wouldn't want any ethics applied by the gun barrel of the state but you would have to then have some form of agreement between the landowners with neighboring land to permit, to create provisions so that those animals migration patterns who are nomadic wouldn't be impeded. And I think you can solve that for a self-associative framework. I mean, I agree with that or not. And some, I don't think the standard has to be no species ever goes extinct. I mean, that's not the standard in nature and that can be the standard in a free society. You know, yeah, there were gonna be solutions so a lot of these issues and they're not gonna be some solutions and some species will go extinct. Okay, so we're out of time. Thank you very much to our super tatters. We had good questions today. So, Connor, tell us where we can find you. So you said, we discussed before the episode that you are doing also appearances in talk radio. Do you want to tell us a bit about this and where people can find you? Yes, sure, no worries. So I am the policy director for the British Conservation Alliance. As has been said before, you can check us out bca.eco, I believe that all of our Twitter handles and whatnot are there. We also have an independent blog called The Peak where I publish a fair amount of content. I'm also an associate contributor to Young Voices UK and I appear pretty frequently on talk radio through the media circuits around. I'm there nine o'clock tonight discussing essentially critical race theory and the statute toppling the barcode with some hot takes on that. And I usually repost those clips and articles over on Twitter. If anyone's dumb enough to follow me. Good. We you've been tagged in the tweets of Iron Center UK and of AI global, although AI global has had the wrong time, but we forgot that. So thanks. That was a good discussion. And if people found this a bit too peaceful next week, we're make sure that this is not the case because we're going to have someone who is going to discuss the Middle East and Afghanistan with Yaron and whether it is the West fall. So thank you very much. Many thanks to the Andrews Institute for supporting this series. Thanks to Yaron. Thanks to Connor. See you all next week. Bye bye. Thank you very much everybody. Bye.