Juno News - January 23, 2023


Niall Ferguson pushes back against Davos green agenda


Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

156.94366

Word count

469

Sentence count

24

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I sit down with climate economist Dr. James Ferguson to talk about his views on global warming and climate change. Dr. Ferguson is a professor of economics at the University of Toronto and a regular contributor to the New York Times and the Financial Times.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 So, Dr. Ferguson, why is it you think a lot of the green energy proposals we've seen so far have not really been all that effective?
00:00:06.720 Well, it's a little bit like economic planning through the ages.
00:00:10.260 If the U.S. government, or for that matter, the European Union, mandates a transition to so-called renewables
00:00:18.100 without thinking through the unintended consequences of that kind of central planning,
00:00:23.040 you get what we've seen in the last two years.
00:00:25.300 You could call it greenflation, where prices have soared.
00:00:28.740 In practice, putting a price on carbon is not something that consumers were ready for.
00:00:33.500 So, even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, you could see some of the problems playing out.
00:00:39.160 It's very hard to get to so-called net zero.
00:00:42.040 Truth, the world continues to need hydrocarbons, and cutting down the supply of hydrocarbons is just a recipe for higher energy prices.
00:00:51.100 That's not politically sustainable in democracies.
00:00:53.680 So, you can see why this enterprise has run into trouble, and I think that was predictable.
00:00:59.560 Do you think that the problem is the specific goal, or is it that idea, as Hayek wrote about,
00:01:03.900 that you just can't centrally plan something like that as government?
00:01:08.140 Well, I think the solutions to the problem of climate change or global warming, which I certainly don't deny,
00:01:14.340 will come from technological innovation.
00:01:16.180 It's technological innovation that's made solar so much more efficient in the last decade or so.
00:01:21.640 The idea that central governments, or for that matter a world government of the sort that some people at Davos dream of,
00:01:28.060 could somehow bring that about, I think is at odds with historical experience.
00:01:33.680 So, my sense is that the fears of a climate catastrophe today are a little bit like fears of a population catastrophe back in the 1970s.
00:01:42.120 They're the kind of nightmares of the end of the world that technocrats, educated elites, are often drawn towards.
00:01:49.380 My sense is that we will, in fact, gradually transition to more efficient energy.
00:01:54.320 We've been doing that, in any case, for decades.
00:01:57.720 I mean, if one simply looks at the reductions that have already happened in emissions in Europe and North America,
00:02:02.800 that wasn't because of government mandates.
00:02:04.680 The big problem is still China. 0.98
00:02:06.800 If you look at all the increase in carbon dioxide emissions since Greta Thunberg was born,
00:02:13.220 about two-thirds is China and about 85% of the increase in coal consumption.
00:02:18.320 And nobody here ever has an answer to the question, how do you constrain China?
00:02:22.040 How do you make China honor its pledges?
00:02:23.880 Until there's a good answer to that question, there's clearly not going to be a reduction in global warming.
00:02:29.320 There's a good answer to that question, there's a good answer to that question, there's a good answer to that question.