The Tragedy of Jake Meador - Good Faith Climate Change (part 4)

All right, all right, let's get started. What I've decided to do is I'm gonna go right back to the good faith debate to continue.

You know, yesterday I let Jake Meador have it a little bit, just about his whole presentation style, his whole, you know, anti -masculine appearance, you know, voice, everything.

And so, you know, and I think that's important. I'm not sorry for it. I would do it again,

I'll tell you that right now. I would definitely do it again. But I think that needs to be talked about because that's something that will never be talked about in a good faith debate, absolutely never.

This is not how a Christian man ought to present himself. It's just as simple as that.

But what I wanted to do is I wanted to get right back into it just so you could see how a winsome guy who, you know, if you're going by his opening statement, he's winsome, but he's not a pushover.

So I'm very grateful for that. I've heard a few things about Mattson at this point that, you know, make me wonder if, you know, how this cross -examination is gonna go.

I haven't seen it yet, so we'll see. But, you know, again, I'm gonna give credit where credit is due.

He did a great job in his opening statement. So we're gonna go right back into it just so you have an example of, hopefully,

I mean, we'll see, hopefully a winsome example of how to refute Jake Meador's presentation.

By the way, so many people in the comments, you know, privately as well, you know, they're noticing so many errors, so many mistakes, so many assumptions, so much awfulness of Jake Meador's opening statement.

And there's so much. It's just, again, there's so many ways to attack this.

You know, I gotta let some of it go. Otherwise, you know, this video will be, you know, 20 parts instead of 10.

But you're right, everyone who's making these comments about his presentation, there's just so much here that's unchristian.

It's unbelievable. In any case, let's continue. Thank you,

I appreciate it, both of you. I'll start with you, Brian. One of the main areas of disagreement here seems to be the degree to which we proactively address this problem and the role of the free market and the government in that process.

So I come from the state of Florida. And when my grandparents moved there in the 30s, which means we were in Orlando before, there was a good reason to be in Orlando.

And back then, the lakes were crystal clear. You could eat the fish in them. The fishing all around the state was amazing.

Now, nobody would eat a bass out of a lake in Central Florida. The estuaries around Canaveral no longer have the vegetation they used to.

You wouldn't eat the fish there. Even the keys, I can remember growing up as a kid and my dad would take me offshore and we'd finish fishing some days when we filled up the boat.

Now you go all day hoping for one or two medium -sized fish because of the impact of commercial fishing in there.

So, and then you add the sugar canes and sugar cane fields that block the water from the

Everglades, the natural filtering process, all that to say. I hear what you're saying.

For me, those issues feel like the free market's not helping. So how can you, and I don't expect you to be an expert particularly on the waterways of Florida.

Florida habitat. But there are places where it feels like the free market is doing the opposite.

What do you say to that? Well, I think that I'm not here to deny the need for environmental regulation.

In fact, I'm happy to defend the status quo of environmental regulation.

I think that Jake is saying more needs to be done. You know, the Environmental Protection Agency's share of the federal register this year is 30 ,246 pages.

Yes, I took the opportunity to count. Spread over 30. So you can't say nothing's being done.

Spread over 37 bound volumes. That's not low regulation, unfettered, lousy, fair free market capitalism.

I'm not at all against. I mean, I'm from Montana and we have a long history of industrial interests extracting our natural resources.

We're called the treasure state for a reason. People extract those treasures, right? And we have one of the largest

Superfund sites in the country in Butte, Montana. I'm not against stopping the tragedy of Butte, Montana and the

Berkeley Pit there at all. So I'm not against regulation. The proactive part,

I think, is key to your question. And that is, who has that insight?

That forward -looking insight to say, if we just craft these laws and these rules and then the market will sort of inhabit the natural legal paths that we have prefabricated,

I'm wondering who's wise enough to do that. Because that kind of central planning has all kinds of problems with it, the knowledge problem.

How can one person or one committee or one group of experts possibly know all of the factors that are going into things?

And so you have a knowledge problem there and I'm concerned about central planning. I'm concerned about a state that has no restraints on it.

Jake talked about conviviality and how the state and culture and economics and politics ought to all be friends.

What he's leaving out is that only one of those groups has a monopoly on coercion and violence.

So that's a concern of mine, that a state says to one industry that's disfavored, we're going to penalize you and reward our friends over here because we approve of what they're doing.

The state has the power to do that. And so, no, I'm not a laissez -faire, don't know environmental regulations.

I am concerned about how those policies get crafted. Is it a cult of the expert who's just going to tell everybody how this is gonna go?

That hasn't worked well in the past. Or are there alternatives to that? And I think that markets are far more nimble than many give them credit for.

Wow. You know, a lot of you people have been with me for a long time.

I always get comments from people about how long they've been watching the channel.

And it always just gives me a nice warm feeling. It's really cool to know that some of you,

I mean, not all of you, but some of you have been watching the channel probably, I don't know, at this point, five years, more,

I don't know. And those of you who do know me know that I interrupt the video a lot.

You know, I'll interrupt to interject my two cents. I'll even have some people that'll complain in the comment section, you know, regularly, you interrupt them too much, you know?

And it's like, well, you know, you could just watch the video, their video, you know what I mean? You can find this video, it's on Gospel Coalition, if you wanted to watch it.

People watch this channel because they want to hear my opinions, my interruptions, my interjections. But I do think

I might interrupt too much. I mean, you know, I think that there's some truth to that, and I always work on it. But you know, at the end of the day, it's just, it's hard because of the kind of content that I watch.

It's just like, you guys notice this, there's always like, when a guy like Jake Meador, you know, gets to the mic, there's always like 10 things a second that you could respond to.

And so, you know, it's just very difficult. Brian Mattson has accomplished something that very few people have ever accomplished on this channel.

And he had, I kept my mouth shut for like four minutes straight.

I mean, I didn't time it, but I didn't say a single word for like four minutes. I mean, let me just, out of respect, hats off to you.

I mean, that was impressive. And what's interesting is

I'm not sure I necessarily agreed with everything he said there, but it was pretty good.

And it's interesting. I mean, it was interesting enough for me to keep my mouth shut. I mean,

I don't know, I guess this is just how the channel is now.

No, but he's right though. I mean, you know, being pro -free market solutions doesn't mean that there's no regulations.

Of course there are regulations. I wouldn't necessarily want to agree with him, you know, as far as defending the status quo.

I think of course there's some deregulation that needs to be done, number one. But also,

I mean, we could certainly talk about, you know, smart regulations and adding smart things as opposed to the stupid things that we do.

So I don't necessarily agree with that. But obviously I'll have to think through that. He didn't really give you any specific examples.

He's just talking generally. So, you know, it's hard to really truly disagree with him there. But there's probably some nuance.

He's even got me using words like nuance. I mean, Madsen, Madsen. Seriously, if anyone knows him, man, give him a pat on the back for this one.

Anyway, but yeah, I mean, of course, there should be regulations and there should be certain types of regulations.

You know, like if Acme Corporation pours poison into the water supply and people die or have medical issues and things like that, there should be a very kind of a, not draconian, but a very serious restitution that needs to be paid, something that would be meaningful to Acme Corporation, but also would make restitution for the people that they hurt.

And the thing is, like, if you do that enough, the cost of doing bad things would be way too high for Acme Corporation and they wouldn't do it anymore.

They'd find another way to get rid of their industrial materials and things like that. And that's just,

I mean, a smart business. I mean, if Acme wants to stay in business, they wouldn't hurt people because the cost of hurting those people would be too high.

You know, if it's found that your chemicals have killed somebody, okay, well, there's a certain penalty.

You didn't know your chemicals were gonna kill somebody. But then if you don't change your recipe and you continue to use those chemicals and it kills somebody else, well, now we're talking about murder.

Now we're talking about, you know, something with malice aforethought and God's law has much harsher penalties for that.

So the CEO of Acme Corporation knowingly putting a harmful chemical that killed somebody into his thing, you know, he'd be paying the ultimate price for something like that.

I mean, there's all kinds of ways we can use God's wisdom and God's law to regulate to these kinds of issues, you know, these kinds of things.

So yeah, there was a lot of good there. I mean, that's a common trope, you know, that free market people don't believe in any regulations.

And it's like, it's so insane. It's as if we have no regulations right now. No, we have a lot of regulations right now.

A lot of them are stupid, but some of them are smart and some of them are good.

And it's just a very interesting thing. And yeah, that whole thing of how like, oh, the culture and the law should work together.

I mean, well, yeah, that'd be nice. But at the end of the day though, whether or not the culture wants to have illegal abortions, it should still be outlawed.

It should still be outlawed because it's murder. And that's what God says. And the civil governing authority is a servant of God.

That's what the Bible says anyway. It's a servant of God. And it should be executing justice on the evildoer.

You know, Jake Meador here is saying, well, there's maybe other justifiable purposes for government, you know, and discipline and helping you love mother nature.

And it's like, well, that's not what the Bible says. The Bible says that the civil governing authority is a revenger of God, a deacon of God.

And it's there to execute vengeance, the vengeance of God upon the evildoer.

That's what the Bible says. You know, I know Jake has other ideas, but the Bible says that that's what it's there for.

So anyway, let's hear Jake's response. By the way, he went right at Jake.

He went right at him. And I gotta be honest, again, that's a rarity in these good faith debates.

I'm very impressed. I wanna get Jake's response to that, but I wanna add a second part to the question because you made a compelling case,

Brian, about China. And, you know, we can do all the good in the world here, but, you know, looking at the other side of the world, it's not changing anything.

And in fact, in many ways, it's getting worse. So how would you respond to what he said and add the element that even if we do, is it -

Yeah, I don't really see the need to add that element because I know what he's gonna say. Let's let him respond.

Perfect, when on the other side of the world, it's not going very well. Yeah, so one of the big questions concerns incentives.

And so one danger certainly is that how do you create incentives that will keep the state from abusing its power?

Because the state does have a unique capacity. There are plenty of ways for markets to be coercive as well in soft ways.

So we've understood the greenhouse effect since the 19th century. And the greenhouse effect is not a complicated kind of egghead science idea that only three people on the planet understand.

CO2 traps heat. As we pump more CO2 into the atmosphere, more heat is trapped, causing temperatures to rise.

And if you look back, a lot of the fears that were being discussed in the 60s and 70s, we are now starting to see in the form of more wildfires, more, not necessarily more hurricanes, but more intense hurricanes.

Just think back, I think it was five years ago, we had Harvey Irma Maria hit boom, boom, boom.

And if we wanna talk about dangers and damages to developing world of Middle East, South Asia, those are the places that are gonna get hammered by this in a way that like in Nebraska, Nebraska might be a little bit more like Oklahoma or Texas in 40 to 50 years, which isn't great, but it's not a desert, which is what parts of the

Middle East and Sub -Saharan Africa are looking at. And so what concerns me with leaving these things to commercial entities is that commercial entities are going to behave in ways that are incentivized to help them now.

They're not necessarily going to be thinking about 30, 40 years down the road. And so I think what government can do is it can create a quote unquote artificial environment that tries to incentivize commercial entities to think about those things.

In the same way that my wife and I do this at home with our kids, we create a kind of artificial consequence when they do something wrong, because what we're seeing now is in 20 years, if it's not addressed, problems develop over time.

And I worry that the commercial incentives that most firms are given don't equip them to think long -term in the way that a lot of these problems necessitate.

Is there some variance in computer models? Sure. Can we predict everything with perfect accuracy?

No, but I think the basics here are not that hard and they don't require a

PhD or a complex computer to understand. It's basic greenhouse effect dynamics and the rising temperature.

This guy is a true cultist. I mean, at the end of the day, like this guy is, you know, Mattson says, yeah,

I worry about the cult of the expert, right? And what Mattson is saying is that this idea that we've got this cabal of experts, you know, and these are like the equivalent of the priests of a pagan religion.

You know, they're going to look into the future. They've got their crystal ball and they've got their crystal ball in the form of a computer model and they get together and they ask the gods and they say, what's going to happen?

What's going to happen in 20 years, in 10 years? They ask the gods and they type it in and they spit out these predictions, these prophecies of what's going to happen.

And it's a very scary, it's a very scary prediction. And so, and then what they do is they say, okay, we've spoken to the gods, we've addressed the oracle and the oracle says, this is the future, but, but, and there's always a way for redemption, of course, but if you will do these kinds of sacrifices, if you will make these kinds of, if you'll do this kind of penance, if you'll do this, then perhaps the gods will be appeased and we'll be okay.

And it's coming in 10 years, yay, whoa, whoa, 10 years, the sidewalks will be melting.

And of course, Los Angeles will fall into the water and the polar ice caps will melt.

And, you know, the whole story, you've heard this before. And Jake here, just, he believes that, he believes in that kind of a

Pentecost. And so, you know, and it's really not that hard.

Like, it's, you know,

Jake has, Jake has almost silenced me in the opposite way.

Like, it's just like, it's like the scattergun approach, but it's like intensified by the fact that he presents himself like a transsexual.

Like that's, it's hard to respond in a serious way to someone who's so unserious.

And you even wonder if it's even right to even respond. Basically what he said was, it's like, it's like, so, so, you know, yeah,

I don't know. I mean, I mean, there are no breaks on this, on this cult of the experts, there are none.

He's given himself to them. And so they say that the greenhouse effect is going to kill us all in 10 years, and he believes it.

He totally believes it. It's truly, it's a sad, this is a, this is a, this is a man who's owned, and he's owned by, by, by, by tricksters, you know, by, by wizards.

I mean, these, these climate scientists, they operate like the Wizard of Oz.

It's like, as long as you don't look under the hood, everything looks impressive and scary and things like that.

But the minute you challenge even one of these premises, I mean, go, go to the, go to the comment section of,

I don't know, it was the second video in this series, I believe, and people just have walls of links of scientists and people that are not in the cult.

And they say, yeah, you know, there's something going on with the climate, but this whole idea of the greenhouse gases and human activity doing this, that's not, that's not it.

That there's, there's really, there's really not the open and shut, we all under, even children understand.

This is a matter of faith to him. This is a matter of dogma to him. You know, this is, this is, this is what this is about for him, you know?

And, and essentially he's, he's telling you, trust the experts.

They've spoken to, to the gods. They've spoken to the Oracle. And this is what they've told us.

This is not a, this is a matter of faith for, for, for Jake Meador. It's so, it's sad.

It's sad to watch a man just so beaten. You know what I mean? Like you've ever, you ever watched, you ever watched like those videos with, with the people that, that catch would -be child predators?

Like they pose as, as children online and they set up the meeting, you know? Chris Hansen used to do it, but a lot of guys are doing it on YouTube now.

And, and, you know, it's, it's, it's, these people are disgusting.

There's just no question about it. And so like, on the one hand, you're happy that they're getting their comeuppance.

They're being exposed. You know, they were about to abuse a child and they get, they deserve everything they get.

You get that. But I don't know if you've ever watched this and felt this way, but I've always felt a certain sadness as well to watch the guy who's just, who's been exposed.

And, and, you know, he's telling you his whole life story. You know, he was abused as a kid and he's given you all, and, and, and it's amazing.

Like they'll just, they have no authority. They're not police officers, but they'll ask questions. And, and these people often will just expose their whole lives to these people.

And, and the reason they do that, partially there's probably some self -preservation there. Like they think if they be, if they're honest, they'll be more lenient.

But I think part of it is that they're just completely beaten in that moment. They're completely beaten.

There's no, like there's nowhere for them to go. And that, there's a sadness there to watch a man that's just so owned.

You know what I mean? It's, it's sad. It's a very sad thing. And Jake Meador is so owned that as much as I'm angry at, at, at, at what he's done to the church in, in, with his little influences, it's, it's infuriating and he deserves everything he gets, you know, based on that alone.

There's a sadness here. This man is owned. He's owned. And the

Wizard of Oz has him dazzled. And he's just trusting the wizards. And he, and it's not like in, in the last video, you know, if you didn't watch it to the end, one of the points that, that, that was made was like, look, if the climate was truly changing, if, if, if Montana was becoming a desert or whatever it is he just said there, if that was real, that would be from the

Lord. And we, we don't have to guess why he's doing it because in the Bible, it was covenant curses include some of this climate type stuff.

You know, you'll become a desolation. Your crops will fail, things like that. And it's because of blood guiltiness.

It's because of, of immorality in your land and all of that kind of stuff. And it's, and Jake is not saying, look, we need to repent where we're sinning because of this and that, the abortion, you know, the transsexual stuff.

He's not saying that. He's saying, look, look, no need to repent. We, we just must have the carbon credits.

And, and all of that, like, it's just, it's just unbelievable. Anyway, this video is, you know, let's let him finish and then we'll be done.

What's the result from that and the consequences of rising temperatures? It's a tragic, he's a tragic, my point is when you see

Jake, you know, this is a, you know, it'll make you mad. You know, you'll, you'll want to refute him. I get that.

It's this, it's a, he's a tragic figure. He, he's, he's a, it's a tragedy.

He's probably, we're probably similar age, him and him and I. And I, I, I, I remember as a child,

I remember as a child the kinds of propaganda that I, that I was given.

You know, you remember Captain Planet, of course. That's silly stuff, but, but, but, but during that time, you know,

I remember hearing about the whales and how the whales were going to be gone in 20 years or whatever it was.

I remember hearing about the big, the hole in the ozone layer. And I remember the fear that I was,

I was, I was taught about the ozone layer. You know, that, that the ozone layer had a hole.

They've detected it. They predicted this for a long time and it had a hole and it was going to expand.

And essentially, you know, all of our protection from the ozone layer was going to go away. And, and, and I remember hearing about that.

And I, I, I do remember being afraid. I remember that. Do you remember that? Do you remember being afraid of the ozone layer as a kid?

Cause I do. And then as I grew up, you know, my, my father did a great job, you know, you know, training us and teaching us and preparing us for, for, you know, keeping our wits about us.

You know what I mean? My father's a nuclear engineer. I don't know if you guys knew that. He's a nuclear engineer, double master's degree, almost has his

PhD. My, my, my father's an intel, is extremely intelligent person. And he knew what was coming.

He knew, and he prepared us for it. So I don't remember why I stopped being afraid of the ozone layer, but the thing is

Jake never stopped. Jake never stopped. And he just gorges on every lie the wizards want to tell him.

Any lie, whether it's about COVID, you know, Jake was probably very scared about COVID. I don't know that for a fact, but I would assume he was probably very worried about COVID.

He was probably watching the computer models and like that kind of stuff. He probably masked his children.

Oh, he must, he had to mask you. You feel bad. I gotta feel bad for those kids. You know, he watched

Captain Planet and he really took it to heart. I saw a comment in the section, in the comment section about that. It's true.

He did. This is a man who, who never grew up out of these lies.

These, and it's, and this is, they're ex, these wizards are experts at lying to you.

They're really good at it. Some of us escape the lies. Some of us don't. Jake never did.

He just kept believing. He kept being scared of the ozone layer.

And now his patron saints are people like Greta Thunberg. And it's, it's a real sad, it's, it's a tragedy.

I'm not even joking. I feel sad. Drier vegetation, which leads to more wildfires. There's actually concern now on the

East Coast about more wildfires, where their wildfire season, which traditionally has just been April, is now stretching out into June.

So the East won't get hit as hard as the West, just different landscapes, different climate.

But people are worried about wildfires on the East Coast now, which was not something we were worried about.

So I would say that the move here is to try and create laws that help firms have incentives to think long -term.

So as this all relates to China, China is a time bomb for several reasons.

They have a demographic crisis that is worse than just about anywhere else in the world because of that one child policy.

So they're going to have major questions to deal with there. And as far as cities vulnerable to sea level rise,

China is way worse off than we are. I, as I was prepping for this,

I pulled up a map that just showed major global cities that are especially at risk due to rising sea levels.

And it's basically - And when I watched the map, I quivered in fear because of our future. You can see this guy is addicted to fear porn and probably other types of porn as well, but definitely fear porn.

And I'm not talking about actual porn. I have no idea if he's addicted to actual porn. But he loves his fear porn, that's for sure.

I remember they tried to get me addicted to fear porn when I was a kid. I'll never forget how scared

I was of the ozone layer for no reason. I had no idea, you know what

I mean? But I was told to be afraid of it. And a lot of you people in this audience, because similar ages in this audience for sure, a lot of people, you probably remember this.

Or maybe, and if you didn't, and if you were afraid of the ozone layer, maybe you were in a different generation, what was the eco -terrorism that they, eco -fear that they tried to push on you?

I'd be interested to hear. What do you remember from when you were a kid? What cataclysm did they say was going to happen unless you went along with their socialist policies?

Coast of China. Every decade has one. I don't think the fact that other parties are not doing something necessary exonerates us from the need to do it.

Yeah, that's an easy, that was a weird point. Of course, it's very easy to refute that.

Just because they're not doing the right thing doesn't mean we don't have to do the right thing. It has to do with stigma. This is where, I'd actually, we should talk more.

Roger Scruton, an English conservative, has written extensively about environmental issues. And Scruton will make arguments about how environmental protection is about protecting social ecology.

And so I think if we're approaching climate change right, we are restoring a lot of things that have been lost that are part of human existence, that are part of the good life, being able to enjoy healthy landscapes, as you were describing in Florida.

So I think a lot of this work can just be delightful if it is designed properly, not in just a mandated, top -down, regulatory way, but in a convivial way that is trying to recognize the roles that all these different social bodies that make up a polity can play.

All right, so we're done with that. Yeah, there he goes. He's gonna push his little hair back, you know, like a...

Yeah, Jake Meador, in my opinion, is a tragic figure. He's a tragic figure.

You know, men in this audience, you know, like, this is what you want your sons to not grow up into.

Someone who never gets control of that fear of the boogeyman in the closet.

You know what I mean? Every kid has a fear like that. Every kid has a fear of something that they were told to fear, but they were misled.

You know, it was a story. It was a wizard spell, something like that. And yeah, it's sad.