 Okay, why don't we go ahead and start, get started here? I know some people are still trickling them, that's fine. So first, let me just mention, this is the first time I've spoken to you guys at this conference, so let me just mention it because I've had some people asking about it. The, so as many of you probably know on the Contra cruise, which was last week, I debated Tom Woods and we had this sort of side agreement that the loser of that debate would shave his beard. Now, I did something with sort of a logic puzzle here, because I shaved, does that mean I lost the debate? Not necessarily. Okay, now, what you also would need to really cement it was to see Tom's face and so I'll just leave that open to your imagination. So for this talk today, let me mention that on the plane back from Seattle, there was this guy sitting next to me and I was working on this presentation and so then, and I could, it was a six hour flight, and I could tell it's something, you know, he was like working up the courage to ask me and finally he said, yeah, this presentation you're doing the economics of the Green New Deal. If you want to like try it out on somebody, would you do it on me? And so I said no. This is like, I feel to see how that benefits me, but I did tell him I was going to email him afterwards. So if at times it seems like I'm being very clear and not making inside jokes, that's why some of you may say that was the clearest presentation Murphy's ever given and that's probably why it's going to be that way. The other thing though, he said that was intriguing is at the end, he said something like, a lot of us agree with you. And I think, so I don't know, I mean, because I don't know how much he was seeing or whatever, but I think what he was saying is, yeah, we realize, because obviously as you can guess, probably I'm not going to be on board with this. It's not that AOC and I are joined at the hip on this. And so I guess he was trying to let me know that, oh yes, in liberal Seattle, a lot of people talk like this, but you know, secretly a lot of people agree with you. So, viva la resistance, my brother. And I hope you're not watching this at work. If you are, just blame it on me and say I misunderstood. Okay, so the other sort of caveat I'll give here with this one is, I mean, it's appropriate this is topical and certainly I think most Austrian economists would be fine with the stuff I'm going to say here, but as you'll see as I go through this, I'm not going to make like methodological critiques or something and say, oh yes, they have their utility functions and their models, everything makes sense and we should have a green new deal, but we Austrians know that value is subjective. That's not what I'm going to be doing. So that stuff's all true, of course, but I think that concedes too much to the advocates of aggressive government intervention in the name of fighting climate change. So I am an economist at what's called the Institute for Energy Research and that's where a lot of my work that you're going to see here, that's where I do it and I'm just summarizing some of the key takeaway points. But in that capacity, I went into it thinking like, oh gee, we've been lectured to for years about how the consensus is out there and the science is settled and the only people who could possibly doubt the need for aggressive government intervention are people who don't understand science or hacks who are in the pay of big oil and really that's not true. So as you'll see as I go through this, all you have to do is read the reports put out by the UN or the Obama administration and you'll see that the consensus science does not at all support the aggressive policy measures. So don't misunderstand me. I'm not up here saying, oh, I don't believe in climate change. That's sort of a bait and switch in and of itself. They lead you to believe that you have to deny basic chemistry or physics in order to not have the conclusion pop out that the government needs to slap on a big carbon tax or people need to stop eating so much meat or people need to stop having so many kids or else we're all dead. That is just not at all supported again by the very documents that are being held up as the consensus science. So if you want to see more on that general theme, a talk I gave at previous MisesU's, what's the plural of MisesU? Is it MisesU's? That sounds kind of funny, but in any event, the previous episodes of MisesU talks I gave there about the Paris Climate Agreement. So you'll see more. If you want to see more about in terms of just the two-degree Celsius target, is that really supported by the literature? And it turns out, no, it actually isn't. And yet that's just an article of faith. In fact, now the UN is telling people governments how to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. So that's the spirit in which I'm going to go through this is just to show you that this is, it's amazing to me. Like when you just delve into it a little bit, you don't have to be a trained economist to read it. All you have to do is have the attention span to get past the summary for policymakers and get into the nuts and bolts of this stuff and understand the jargon. You can see it does not at all support what the media headlines are telling you. And I'm saying that, and it's not so much that I'm blaming the media because I can kind of see any individual sort of evolving in this milieu of the information. They would just naturally take it in stride. So it's, I don't know who's to blame for it, but the point is there is this chasm between what the science actually says. If you include with that the, you know, like analysis of government policies, like how should people respond to this given these facts or, you know, these tendencies concerning natural science relationships. Okay, so just for those who don't know the elements of the Green New Deal, which is the focus of today's talk. So Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is a rising figure in U.S. politics for those who are from other countries. I'm not sure how big a deal she has had on your news cycle. But here, so she was newly elected in the previous midterm elections and is just having a lot of impact on the political discussion far out of proportion to what you would have normally thought. And one of her signature issues is the so-called Green New Deal. So she didn't invent that phrase. I looked at it before the talk here. I think Thomas Friedman used it as early as 2007 or 2008. I'm not sure if he coined it, but so this idea has been going around. So obviously what it's alluding to is the New Deal of the United States in the 1930s. So the Franklin Roosevelt's administrations, they were implementing what they called the New Deal. And that was a whole series of interventions, regulations in the market, but also involved a lot of big spending programs. And so in standard U.S. history that you would learn in grade school, especially if you went to a government school, it would be you'd learn, oh, yes, the U.S. tried laissez-faire. There was the stock market crash in 29. Herbert Hoover was this ideological do-nothing laissez-faire president. Didn't do anything. We had the worst economy in U.S. history. Then thank goodness the American people came to their senses, elected FDR. He implemented the New Deal and that got us out of the Depression. So that's stuff you would learn in a standard setting, which of course others and I at Mises U have shown that that history is wrong, both in terms of just the theory and the standard historical figures. But that's the context for which AOC, so AOC stands for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is trying to link this new aggressive program to something that a lot of American progressives would have thought, oh, yes, that was back when we solved a problem back then that was huge. We now face a similar problem, the climate crisis, and they're trying to link those two together. Okay, so just to give you an idea of the language involved here. So as we go through the talk, I'll give you more specifics about the things they want to do because I'll show you like the cost estimates. So rather than me spend too much time here summarizing it, I'll just give you a spirit of the flavor. So this is from the draft legislation that they released in December of 2018, and it was saying that they want to have this committee to establish a Green New Deal that would have authority to develop a detailed National Industrial Economic Mobilization Plan. Okay, so you can see that part of what they're doing is they're saying, we can't think small, we have to be big and bold. That's successful politically, like they're saying, hey, back during the New Deal, FDR didn't shy away from doing something radical, even though people said he was a socialist, he went ahead and did what was necessary. And they're saying, in our time now, the climate crisis is serious. This is kind of like how Cortez sort of pushes against some of the older people in the Democratic Party, including Nancy Pelosi. She's saying that we've tried their compromise approach, their play nice politics, they want to do a little carbon tech. And the time for that is beyond us that we have, and she actually says, I'm not putting words in her mouth, she has said we have 12 years to act, and that's what the U.N. is talking about, we have 12 years to turn this around or it's over, we miss the window. And so we have to do big, bold programs. And on top of all that, they say this will address all these other social and economic problems with the United States. So they have all sorts of stuff in this document involving gender imbalance and stuff like that. So you can see where they're coming from. They're saying we have this big, bold plan, and they're saying not only do we need this in terms of the science, but it will sell politically. People get excited about some big, bold program, like a Green New Deal, where it's something like, oh, let's have a carbon tax set to the social cost of carbon to deal with a negative externality. That puts people to sleep, they don't want that. And another thing too that they say, and she's probably right politically, is let's stress, instead of having the broccoli and the vegetables, why don't we give them the good stuff, that people like spending programs. They don't want to hear that you're putting in a tax that will make gasoline more expensive, and that's what a carbon tax does. So they don't really focus in the Green New Deal on that stuff. They sort of mention as an aside, oh, yeah, sure, we'll tax stuff, don't worry. And I don't think there was any doubt of that. But their point is no, what we're focusing on is spending a trillion dollars plus on new infrastructure to refit buildings in the United States with better insulation, that kind of stuff. So that's where they're coming from. So they call us for spending at least a trillion dollars over 10 years. And they have different language, but the idea is they want to get the U.S. down to net zero emissions. So that phrase net zero means there's still going to be things that emit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the U.S. 10 years from now or 12 years from now, but they're going to take other measures and compensate for that, like planting trees or doing other things that suck carbon dioxide. They're saying on net. And this is where just as an aside, if you've heard somebody on one of the FAQs that was up originally, so the frequently asked questions, one of the ones that they had the hypothetical questioner who's reading their version of the draft language for a hypothetical Green New Deal, they have people say, why are you going for net zero emissions as opposed to just zero emissions period? And that's where they said the infamous thing of, I'm paraphrasing here, but this language was in there saying something like, well, because we realize in a decade that's not enough time to completely get rid of airplanes and farting cows. And so that's why a bunch of Republicans then and people like Rush Limbaugh were going around saying AOC wants to ban hamburgers. And then of course people like Paul Krumers said, oh, that's a dirty rotten lie. To prove it was a lie, they're saying that was put up or that wasn't intended for public consumption. The public wasn't supposed to see that and they took it right down once people started flipping out, which you can imagine in other contexts like if some Republicans had put up something saying we're trying to, well, we can't get rid of all abortions in 10 years, so that's what, I don't think Planned Parenthood would say, well, they took it down. They probably don't really have anything. Okay, so again, that stuff was not a straw man that was in the FAQ that somebody on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's staff, they posted publicly and then when people started flipping out that's when they took it off, right? And there was other things too that I won't dwell on. In the original version they put up about like people, there was a line in there about how they're going to have a job guarantee for those unable or unwilling to work. And so some people were a bit concerned, what do you mean unwilling to work? And so they took that down and they go, oh, that's a dirty Republican lie just because we put something up there you're quoting us, come on, come down to quoting. All right. Okay, so here's some problems with the Green New Deal. Obviously we could dwell on any one of these, but just to go through it quickly. So one thing, and again, and this just shows you how, I don't know, like to use the language that the left off used to, how in bad faith these arguments are where you don't take them seriously. The word nuclear did not appear in the original draft legislation. And then later, because people were asking about it, they clarified and said, yes, we will not expand nuclear power at all in this. All right. So again, if you really thought that, you know, our grandchildren's fate depended on us drastically reducing carbon dioxide emissions within the next 10 to 15 years, then the only hope you would have of doing that would be to drastically expand electricity production from nuclear, right, because that's zero emission. And yet they don't want to do that. And for obvious reasons, because nuclear power for a long time has been a boogeyman to people on the left. And so, you know, why would they expand it? What they want are so-called renewables, wind and solar, are there other babies, okay? And in some settings they also support hydro. And by the way, that's another example of this just to show you why, you know, I don't believe the surface rhetoric that for, there's things, these things called renewable portfolio standards for U.S. states where they're going to generate a certain percentage of their electricity from so-called renewable sources. And in those states where hydro, you know, electricity coming from water power actually makes economic sense, then hydro does not count towards fulfilling those requirements, right? No, it's got to be wind or solar. And so it's, you know, really it comes down to it's not so much that they want the utilities to demonstrate to them, no, we're generating stuff from renewable power just like you want, because, you know, hydro is renewable. It's that they have to do something that's uneconomic, right? To show that they're engaging in sacrifice. If it made economic sense for a particular region to have a lot of power from hydro, they don't get patted on the head, okay, you're part of the solution, that just doesn't count, because oh, well, you're just doing that because it's the profit motive. So again, it's showing that this stuff is rolled up into the broader, let's call it agenda or vision of a good society of a typical progressive leftist who's hostile towards capitalism and you see that just shining through with all this stuff. Okay, another problem with this, again, even if you were a Keynesian like Paul Krugman, we don't need a new deal right now, okay? So even if you thought the original new deal did solve the problem of the Great Depression and got rid of double-digit unemployment and so on, and the infrastructure was a great way to create jobs, boost aggregate demand, even if you bought all of that hook, line, and sinker, it still would not follow that right now we need a green new deal, right, because according to any conventional measure, the labor market is certainly not in need of a massive fiscal stimulus right now, and the Fed has been tightening, so the very least you'd say first the Fed should cut interest rates back down to zero and only then would you consider, so my point being this doesn't even make sense even if you were a standard Keynesian, let alone if you're an Austrian. Okay, another problem with this stuff, again, just taking it prima facie and the case value here, even on its own terms, it has a laundry list of various goals and programs of things they want to achieve with this green new deal and they're internally inconsistent, and so one, just one example of what I mean here is that part of what they want to do is retrofit every building in the United States to make it more energy efficient and so on, and then when I say every building I'm not exaggerating, they really have language in there to suggest they mean every building needs to be considered for this and upgraded if necessary. At the other hand, another of their goals is to rapidly move toward, again, net zero emissions at least from the electricity sector. If you think about it though, those two goals don't make sense. If you achieved the latter goal, if you got it so that the electricity used in the United States was derived from sources that didn't emit greenhouse gases to produce that electricity, then it doesn't matter whether your buildings are energy efficient or not. The reason you want to have energy efficient buildings in this context is because then you don't need to use as much electricity for your heating or your air conditioning depending on what season it is and so then you don't need the coal fire or the natural gas fire power plant to produce as much electricity. So you see the problem there that if they actually did achieve the one goal then the other one is unnecessary but just to even think like that is so alien to the... To think like that makes it sound like they actually have some specific thing they want to do and they're trying to use the best least cost means to achieve that and that's not really what's going on here. I think that the list itself of things is its own goal and that's why it's actually kind of naive and silly missing the point to ask, wait a minute will these things achieve this alleged climate goal that's not really the issue? And this is just another example of that. So as I've been alluding to here obviously when you read the whole list of things they want to do here this climate crisis is just a pretext for all sorts of things that people on the progressive left who are typically hostile towards capitalism have been clamoring for decades. It's again they want things like the Green New Deal among other things that it's going to achieve that they talk about explicitly in the draft legislation and in the FAQs discussion it's not just about oh we're going to solve the climate crisis and make sure that we restrict atmospheric levels of CO2 to such and such targets it's much more than that. It's things like restoring gender parity in labor markets and making sure that we don't discriminate against indigenous peoples and things like that. So it's all sorts of interesting language in there that again sounds odd for a document that's talking about the alleged particular natural science crisis that we have to do some quick technological fix for. To give an example of what I mean so in this list of attributes describing what they're going to do in the Green New Deal they have this one clause in there saying for anything they're going to propose they're going to obtain the free prior and informed consent from indigenous peoples. So that sounds great but again what it is they're saying humanity is on the verge of an existential threat and so my point was why are we going to let indigenous peoples ruin the planet? Right? I mean that's what it comes down to. They're going to let indigenous people hold the rest of humanity hostage. Or to flip it the other way they certainly did not get the free prior and informed consent from shareholders of coal-fired power plants before ruining their way of life. Right? And it's not even just a cutesy thing about well okay native peoples versus a big business even when it comes to other people living around the world part of what they're doing to the extent they're going to have a carbon tax is they would have what's called border adjustments. And so the idea is if the US taxes items here based on their carbon content well then there's a concern that if China doesn't follow suit and they're not taxing their stuff well then people could export stuff from China into the US more cheaply because they're not getting dinged with a carbon tax and so then at the border we would compensate, right? So anything coming into the US from a country that doesn't have a carbon tax or doesn't have high enough of a carbon tax the US would put in a quasi-tariff to account for that. So again it's think that through so they're going to use coercion to influence what other people do in terms of their government policies because obviously the whole point of that is to encourage other governments to likewise levy a carbon tax in their own jurisdictions and not think that they're going to be able to get an export advantage to the US or Europe or whatever because they're not taxing carbon and doing the responsible thing. So again using our political system to lean on other peoples to get them to do what they want. So in other contexts to interfere with other people's elections is a no-no but it's okay if the US government influences other peoples government policies because it's in the name of fighting climate change. So again this stuff about obtaining free prior to informed consent obviously the real thing there is typically someone on a progressive left is very concerned about indigenous peoples whereas they don't care about big business or they don't necessarily care about the people in China and what their government might be doing. Okay so let me give you a cost estimate of some components of the Green New Deal so this comes from the American Action Forum and there's some huge numbers here admittedly so the bottom line here is a 10 year total cost of $93 trillion and let me concede to you when I first saw that and this thing was making the rounds so like right leaning think tanks and media organizations that were that typically are against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez obviously they pounced on this distributing it and it was making the rounds and when I first saw it I thought okay I bet you they're stretching it points to come up with such a big number because how could it be and no they're not. I went through the thing again I was skeptical at first and I went through it and they explained how they came up with these calculations and it is very conservative and I'll give an example when I hit one of them as to some of the assumptions they made that would underplay what it is so don't misunderstand me I'm not saying if some version of the Green New Deal passed would actually mean in fact there'd be a 10 year cost of $93 trillion because that's crazy they wouldn't do something so ludicrously expensive what it means is the actual language so far of the Green New Deal is just crazy I mean they might as well just say we're going to give everyone a unicorn right and then some you know some horse society would equestrian society would come along and come with an estimate of infinity and we'd say okay that's not that it's really going to be infinitely costly is that they're not going to give everybody a unicorn that's what's going to happen in practice okay so likewise with this stuff the U.S. is not going to go to net zero emissions in 10 years that's just not going to happen no matter what anybody does okay and so it's things like that so the what I'm just kind of showing you here I'm not predicting this is how much it will cost if some version passes I'm just saying if you actually took them seriously and went through and started quantifying what some of this would mean in practice the numbers just blow up really fast so again underline how how crazy and pie in the sky this stuff is okay so one thing is a low-carbon electricity grid 5.4 trillion great net zero emissions against this stuff it's not worth getting into the mechanics here in this talk you can you know go google that American action forums estimate you want to see how they came up with it but let me draw your attention to you see where some of these big numbers come from is like the job guarantee so that's the third one down this one right here so that's kind of a wide margin isn't it 6.8 trillion to 44.6 trillion so the reason it's such a wide range there for the cost estimate is because they're they're just showing under different assumptions as to what exactly are we going to do here when you say a job guarantee because part of the issue is Alexander Ocasio-Cortez and other proponents of the Green New Deal were rather vague about the specifics and so to come up with some of these numbers they were the authors of this cost estimate kind of just had to say well maybe they mean this in which case that's the way it went and again they were not reaching and putting words in their mouth they were just taking the plain language and then trying to show and practice what would this mean so for this job guarantee where they came up with it as they said alright I think it was something like six six hundred dollars a week something like that so it was a reasonable figure to show you know what it means so they were going to other proponents of a job guarantee to come up with some of these numbers and then they were saying okay if we look at like right now at the unemployment rate for people who are under employed for economic reasons alright so not necessarily someone who's literally unemployed but someone who's not working a full time job because of economic reasons so that's a specific classification and they said all those people would want to take the government guarantee job which pays more you know in terms of how much you get from a 40 hour work week and so that they multiply those numbers there so they figure out how many people in America right now would clearly prefer to get the job guarantee versus what they're doing right now and they came up with that and that's on the lower end but then they started saying okay well also what if there's people who are working full time but they're in a job that pays less than you know what the federal job guarantee would be presumably they would all switch over right so that's how they got the number bigger and then they went even further and said okay what if there's people who are working you know at a miserable job for 40 hours a week and technically they're making a little bit more in take home pay than they would get from the job guarantee but the thing with the job guarantee is you don't have to work and so presumably a lot of people even who right now are making a little bit more would rather get the job guarantee and not work at all rather than you know having this thing right so they started just going through and running the numbers to try to see how much this job guarantee would cost and that's what gave you the wide spectrum there and and I think so they just they weren't making any assumptions beyond that right so otherwise it was just simple arithmetic and the reason it blows up so fast is just because well the job guarantee is a big number in order for it to truly be able to replace a job it's got to be a decent number and then times however many million people you know you have doing it over the course of ten years that's where they come up with these numbers beyond that though it's also I think they're understating it because they weren't doing a feedback effect right they weren't saying as we expanded more and more of the population just stops working and now gets this job guarantee and so now they effectively had the purchasing powers if they have a full-time job well clearly over time something has to give right so if you all of a sudden say 20 million people right now aren't working or working very little are going to now have the income equivalent as if they have a full-time good-paying job and they start going and buying stuff with it okay so unless you're a Keynesian who thinks that we had you know artificially high unemployment but for anyone else whether you're a classical economist or an Austrian obviously if a huge portion of the population now is consuming that wasn't before and you haven't made society more productive just by giving these people purchasing power that means the amount available for everybody else has to go down right just in terms of simple arithmetic so if you think it through no matter how they finance it whether they run the printing press or borrow money or tax clearly per capita you know your real after-tax plus taking into account inflation wage rate has to go down if you're one of the shrinking number of people who are still working in conventional jobs after they put this into effect and so if the government is giving this guarantee for anybody whether you work or not and now the amount you get all things considered from your regular job keeps getting worse even more people are going to switch over and so that's something that they didn't model that in here they were assuming that everybody else's job would stay the same universal health care 36 trillion that's not an unreasonable estimate even proponents of universal health care come up with numbers like that and the questions and they talk about different things so again these numbers are not pie in the sky whatsoever they walk through and show you how they came up with it and this is just a few of the things that are in the Green New Deal okay so what about this issue of do we really have 12 years to solve climate change and I should say Ocasio-Cortez herself kind of admitted that she was just bluffing on that okay I don't have the tweet I didn't have it in here but later she said something along the lines of people who take the rhetoric about 12 years left literally at face value that they really they need a lobotomy she said something like that she said some put down it might not have been that exact one rolling her eyes on these GOP people when I said we had 12 years left to act and that's what the UN told us they actually thought I meant that literally go figure that's the way she played it when people were going to the UN documents no actually it doesn't say that and then she was acting like oh come on you thought I was serious and again you can go see her she's talking with sincerity and earnestness in front of this live audience where she originally said this thing about 12 years left but for those who just want to see it definitively let me show you again this isn't even close so this is coming from the UN's own documents so it takes a while to learn how to read this stuff but once you do it's pretty straightforward and so where I got this from it's called the AR5 that's the most recent of these periodic updates that the UN publishes summarizing the state of both the natural science but also things talking about what they call mitigation factors so different policies the government could do to help mitigate the impact of climate change and other conditions relative to what otherwise would happen and so that slows harmful climate change and that's the idea so this is from their own document let me just there's a lot going on here what it's talking about, what is this it's the increase in the mid and long term mitigation cost due to delayed additional mitigation up to 2030 so what this chart is showing you is to say what if governments around the world did nothing until the year 2030 and then they began aggressively putting in place measures to try to hit various types of climate change targets okay so that's what this is talking about and what I just want to show you is the biggest number in the whole chart, the whole table is this 44% and that's showing between the years 2030 to 2050 if governments around the world did nothing until 2030 and only then began aggressive measures the cost of achieving and these are the targets over here so the particulars don't matter so much I just want to show you the big picture they're saying oh it would be 44% more expensive to achieve those various climate change goals if we procrastinate if we don't do anything until 2030 and then in the long run from 2050 to 2100 that worst case number drops to 37% because these ones the top row those are more aggressive climate change measures the bottom row it's less aggressive so the more stringent the climate target that we want to have like how much warming or how much atmospheric concentration of CO2 by the year 2100 is the goal the costlier it is if we twiddle our thumbs until the year 2030 that's what they're trying to present here but notice there's not infinity signs or there's not an asterisk that you go read and says we're all dead so it doesn't matter so the rhetorical point of this table these people they're for carbon tax they're for these so-called mitigation measures they are trying to use this to show the reader let's not listen to those counseling delay those saying let's wait for more data to come in because we have uncertainty they're saying we need to act now because look at if we don't act for example if we wait until 2030 it's going to cost 44% more but you see the problem rhetorically because they've got other people saying if we don't act so notice 2018 to 2030 is 12 years the way that works out you've got other people like Ocasio-Cortez saying oh the UN is telling us we're all dead or our grandchildren are doomed if we don't act if we don't solve this problem by 2030 here they're just showing you if we did nothing and just got started on solving it in the year 2030 oh it would cost 44% more and you might say okay but you know is the original baseline costs some huge thing and then well again the proponents of this pain themselves into a corner that Paul Krugman for example has said repeatedly in his columns that the cost of achieving all of these renewable goals and so forth is relatively low because hey wind and solar they just keep getting more and more efficient all the time pretty soon that you know even without government measures they're going to break even with conventional technologies and so it's going to be in some of his columns he goes so far as to say the cost might be negative by which he's saying it actually would benefit us from doing it and that sort of makes you wonder well then why does the government need to force it but again that's his own terminology so it's the cost if we act now of dealing with hitting all these things and saving the planet is close to zero or possibly negative and if we wait until 2030 oh it's going to be 44% more so I don't know what 44% more of basically nothing is but it's not we're all dead okay so again you see what I'm saying that the rhetoric here is completely out of bounds and you see how they've painted themselves into a corner where on the one hand they want to scare everyone and say we need to act and take all these aggressive measures right away or our grandchildren are doomed and then some people say okay but you're talking about revamping society that sounds like it's going to be expensive they say no no don't worry it won't be okay and so it's kind of hard to have it both ways if it's going to be relatively painless because wind and solar are going to be so efficient just around the corner that it's you know not going to be that hard to switch over well then the market would switch over anyway right historically people switched away from you know horse and buggy to the automobile and it wasn't because there was a manure tax right people just naturally switched over so if it is the case that it makes sense to people to drive electric cars they'll do that automatically right you don't need the government to have a huge carbon tax to force people to do it unless it really doesn't make economic sense okay in which ways it will be painful to switch over so again they're trying to have it both ways or at least a lot of them in this debate are doing that okay uh there's a few other fun things here so how do progressives claim that a green new deal will make us happier so I like this because occasionally you know the the mask slips or some of them don't realize what arguments other people on their side of the debate are making to the public because what so I like this one this article in the intercept it says the one I highlighted here it says Fremstone Paul find that people who work less also emit less carbon dioxide and and the punchline here is a novel this economist so and so drawing connection between work hours and climate change for well over a decade how Americans have come to work more and what effect it has and how people spend their dwindling leisure time okay so in case you don't get it the big picture here is the way the green new deal will make us happier is because it's going to reduce economic growth people aren't going to work as much in the new equilibrium once all these you know policies are in place people are going to go to work less they're going to refrain from working so much businesses won't produce as much stuff real GDP will be lower than it otherwise would have been and will be happier because we'll have less consumerism okay and so I that may you know you can you can make that argument but I do appreciate the honesty of it right so it's kind of like if for those familiar with it originally the socialist said oh let's have socialism will produce more for the masses than capitalism will and then people saw what a disaster socialist countries were and how people were starving and then the claim was let's adopt socialism because we won't have crass consumerism the way those capitalists do right and so that's what they're doing here that they're sort of admitting okay yes output will be lower conventionally measured but will be happier incidentally I'm fine with that like if somebody wants to say you know what us culture stresses consumerism too much and if everybody worked 10% less and you know and it didn't buy so much stuff and had smaller houses they'd be happier I'm certainly open to that argument and that's fine but you don't achieve that by forcing it on them right what you would do is you would voluntarily persuade them don't work as much okay you wouldn't make them better off it's like if you took away all the forklifts you know that that would reduce output but that wouldn't therefore make us happier right even if it were true that we're working too much right now and all things considered in a paternalistic sense okay what is the best evidence I can give you so again what I'm sitting here telling you is it's not merely the Austrians and other radical free market economists who know that the claims made in support of the Green New Deal can't be right it's conventional economics that's saying this the best example I have of this by the way let me say this before I forget is William Nordhaus back in the fall won the Nobel Prize he was a co-winner of the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on the economics of climate change the same weekend that that announcement came out the UN issued a special report advising governments on how to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius some newspaper stories like in the New York Times talked about both things in the same article saying ah William Nordhaus wins the you know his work for his work on climate change raising awareness da da da the time the UN you know showing the urgency of the situation you would have no idea that William Nordhaus' work shows that trying to achieve a 1.5C target would be disastrous it would be worse than doing nothing okay and yet that's the situation the guy who wins the Nobel Prize for his work on climate change his own work shows the UN targets crazy is nuts and it would be better just to have unrestricted climate change than to do that such a crazy target and yet it's the same time that his work his Nobel Prize gets covered in the same story and nobody in the media even knows to ask that so again I'm not mad at them I don't think it's a conspiracy I think they just don't know and the one and the one time where he did have a chance to clarify and I really think less of him because of this because up to that point I just thought okay well you know he doesn't want to rock the boat or something but technically he's not saying anything wrong he could say hey my work speaks for itself but somebody for the New York Times I think it was Coral Davenport when she was interviewing him the week after he won and talking about and one of the questions near the end of the interview was do we still have time to hit the 1.5 C target and Nordhaus just said no I don't think we have time left to do that I think that's unrealistic we're gonna hit that and that's how he stopped he didn't say and thank God right so he didn't let anybody know that that would be a terrible target or that is a terrible target we shouldn't be trying to hit it so I'm just again showing you the dichotomy of this so here in case you're skeptical and think come on Bob how can you be saying this that we know mainstream economics surely you're supporting this stuff this is the best evidence I've come up with thus far to show you that no standard economic theory whether it's mainstream economics that you know Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus would endorse or even Paul Krugman in terms of the standard models that he would believe in stuff the Obama administration puts out does not support the Green New Deal I don't know if you can read that in the back but this is an editorial from the Guardian and it says the Guardian view on a Green New Deal we need it now and the subtitle was policymakers ought not wait for economic theory to catch up with the environmental crisis alright and so this when I saw this I wrote an article saying economists need to stop being useful idiots for the green socialists okay and so there I was alluding to there's this and there's controversy over whether this was actually a thing but in US right-wing circles for a while you know back in the 50s and 60s that a useful idiot was somebody that was helping the Soviet Union achieve their agenda unwittingly right like they didn't realize they were being used by the Soviet so the idea was that the Soviets you know the commies refer to these people as useful idiots in the West okay and so I'm saying here economists who are publishing their papers on carbon tax and oh if we use the revenue to do such and such and reduce corporate income tax we could get a win-win that they're being used by radical environmentalists they don't care about what their economic theory says right so if they say oh yes there's a mild market failure and we should have a modest carbon tech it's not that the green socialists are gonna say oh wait a minute carbon tax is $30 a ton and that's it because we wouldn't want to you know move away from the Pareto optimum that's not what they're talking about you know if they think capitalism is evil for you know hurting oppressing women and indigenous people they're not looking at you know what Pagu said about fixing a market failure all right and so that this is what I'm trying to show and again so that the people who know who are more sophisticated they can't stand the work of William Nordhaus because they recognize correctly that using regular economic theory even with all the market failure stuff and saying oh yes people who drive don't take into account carbon dioxide emissions and how they're imposing you can't get the radical prescription an agenda of what the Green New Deal is calling for it doesn't make sense even on its own terms and that's what you know this this article is confirming okay so let me now I just got a minute and a half here left let me just show you some of the ways that things are getting better and even the UN's own documents show it all right so this is something coming from again the latest report from the UN on climate change issues I know it's gonna be hard for you to see in the back here what this is talking about is the number of undernourished children below age five in both two thousand and twenty fifty okay so the two thousands are real figure the twenty fifty figure is obviously an estimate and so you can see they estimated that in the year two thousand there were about a hundred and forty eight million undernourished children age five were younger in the year twenty fifty what if there's no climate change that number's gonna drop to a hundred and thirteen million right so a big reduction but now what does the UN say in the year twenty fifty if there is climate change a hundred and thirty eight point five million okay so yes it's higher than the counterfactual there's no climate change so there's a sense in which climate change might cause there to be twenty million more undernourished children and that's a bad thing other things equal obviously you don't want that but it's still better than what it was in the year two thousand and this is you can do this with just about every figure you know in this debate that what they're ultimately talking about they're doing things like saying oh in the year twenty one hundred under pretty pessimistic scenarios meaning where humanity releases a lot of carbon dioxide or the greenhouse gases and the Earth's climate system is particularly sensitive to those emissions in terms of how much warming that they will yield and you get pessimistic on the damage estimates from well that much extra warming how much damage will it cause humanity even so it's like a real bad scenario oh maybe GDP in the year twenty ten sorry twenty one hundred is nine percent lower than it otherwise would be so yeah prima facie a nine percent hits a global GDP that's humongous but when you couch it in terms of what's going to be in the year twenty one hundred what that really means is all the standard of living that humanity would have achieved in the year twenty one hundred which they're going to be and so instead of being like four times richer than we are they'll only be three point eight times richer right or I've seen other people do the calculations where without climate change if they just weren't a thing if the laws of physics were different or whatever then the standard of living humanity would have in the year twenty one hundred now because of climate change shoot they got to wait to the year twenty one or two in order to get that level of per capita standard of living you see what I'm saying so this is again these are the conventional figures this is this is stipulating for the sake of argument all the standard relationships that are published in the UN documents so I'm not up here denying climate change I am denying the interpretation that's being given to the UN's own documents okay let me just show you one last one here so again this is based on standard data this is age standardized death rate by cause and you can see it starts in nineteen ninety right so I'm not like showing since the time of Charles Dickens I'm showing from nineteen ninety look at how drastically death rates around the world including from communicable diseases have come down this is when we've allegedly been hit with the ravages of climate change such that only you know people in the pay of big oil could possibly deny and you can see these improvements okay so again this this is kind of the standard response I would give to the extent that this is true and that there are going to be you know certain problems arising from it maybe there will be and that's an empirical question the way to deal with it is by having relatively unfettered capitalism people create wealth and they deal with problems and that's the way you would respond to this stuff okay that's my time thanks everybody