Good Faith Debate - Brian Mattson Completely Crushes - Part 2

All right, we are back. Back covering the good faith debate about climate change.

I took a lot of your advice. You can't say I don't take your advice. I do these videos for you guys. A lot of people were saying they were sick of the good faith debate, so I waited an entire week before I got back to it.

So I hope you enjoyed that. I don't remember where I was at because I took so long in between.

So if I'm not mistaken, we're not quite done with Brian Mattson's presentation, which I was saying at the end of the last video,

I'm very impressed with it. And I personally, I would like nothing more than to have a good faith debate where I, with the right position,

I agree with almost 100%. So, so far, so good with Brian Mattson here. So we'll continue his presentation in a moment.

But yeah, let's, well, actually, you know what? Let's just continue it now. Here we go. Abstractness of that harm, the tenuous causality of that harm, as well as the temporal distance of that purported harm.

Without these kinds of elements or considerations, that is some requirement of actual harm or causality or proximity, what is the limiting principle for what a government may morally do?

Oh yeah, that's right. So we just finished, he was slandering Acme Chemicals, or not chemicals, just the

Acme company in general. And he made the example of, you know, Acme's poisoning the water supply with a certain carcinogen or something, or a poison, and people die, and you can hold them accountable for that.

And he was saying that's totally different than saying, you know, in 100 years in the future, maybe you're gonna cause a global temperature increase of a degree, so we're gonna punish you for that.

And he's right, it's totally different. It's absolutely different. And in the Bible, there's different case laws for different kinds of killings, illegal killings, murder, manslaughter, things like that.

And so this kind of like projecting into the future, future crime kind of thing, where, you know, you're using a computer model to allege that someone's gonna do something because of their industrial, you know, emissions or something like that.

That's insane, that's just completely insane. There would be no biblical case law you could point to like that, that you could draw from in all of that.

So yeah, I remember where he was, so we're back. Are there any impediments or breaks on that at all?

Second, it seems to me that many in these kinds of debates don't want to acknowledge trade -offs.

Sanctions, the kinds of sanctions I just mentioned, put downward pressure on economic productivity and growth.

It's not cost -free. It hurts consumers, employment opportunity, increase of wages, investments, retirement accounts, as well as economic prospects for future generations.

How much reduction in gross domestic product are we willing to take for every degree

Celsius we wish to slow 50 years from now? Okay, so Matt's making a good point here as well.

Now, I haven't heard the rest of this, so maybe he's not making a strategic error, but I think he might be making a strategic error because it's very easy for a schlub like the guy he's debating to say, are we going to mortgage our future as a society, as Mother Earth society, just for a few extra percentage points in our 401ks?

And all of the idiots in the crowd are like, yeah, that's right, what are you, a greedy? And here's the thing, here's the thing, because I remember

Russell Moore made a similar comment about your 401k being more important than the lives of people that are going to die from COVID if you don't lock down the society right now.

Like, you know, he's an idiot. Because here's the thing though, because your 401k is not just money that you have, right?

It's money that you've invested. And those investments, those capital investments are meaningful for production of goods and services, things that people need and use to survive.

And so if there wasn't a lot of capital investment, if there was a lot less capital investment, let's just say, than there is right now, we'd be producing less, we'd be producing less goods and services.

And when we produce less goods and services, the price of those goods and services goes up because there's supply and demand, everybody gets that.

And when the price of those things go up, rich people can still afford those goods and services because they have a lot of money, right?

But you know who can't afford those goods and services? Poor people, poor people.

And so if you start saying, well, your investments actually don't matter, your capital investments don't matter, and all of this kind of thing, that's nice to say rhetorically, but people that can think more than one or two steps ahead are gonna realize who's gonna suffer in the end if people aren't investing in companies that are producing goods and services that people need, it's the poor people, because they're the ones that aren't gonna be able to afford it when the prices rise.

Rich people, they'll have a little less, but they'll still be able to afford it. And I was saying this during COVID too, if the price of beans triples,

I'll still be able to buy beans. I mean, I'm not gonna like it because I'm spending more money on beans, but I'll still be able to buy beans.

Who won't? Poor people. They won't be able to afford beans anymore. And then you can go down the list of, poorer countries are gonna be hurt more than richer countries and things like that.

And so he's right, he's right. If you start reducing economic productivity, sure, it hurts your 401k.

I mean, that's true. I mean, that's not a good thing, but more than anything, it hurts poor people the most.

When there's less stuff to go around, it's the poor people that can't get the stuff. And that's how it works.

And so all of this climate change insanity, of course, will hurt poor people the most.

It's a designer belief. If you can think more than a couple steps ahead, you'll see how damaging it'll be for poor people.

Now, that's a question I think must be answered and a rationale has to be articulated and defended, but I have yet to hear it.

Now, I realize that framing the ethical concern this way, talking about GDP and stock prices are easy to write off as a self -interested capitalist greed, which it isn't, but the ethical concern goes far beyond that.

We are bound to ask what the trade -offs and harms are to our neighbors. That's what

I'm talking about. And here I have in mind economically marginalized peoples. Matson, Matson!

I'm just so, I could not be happier. I am so pleased. He didn't make the mistake.

He didn't. I said I didn't know if he would because I hadn't listened to this yet, and he didn't. You're not gonna be able to wipe this smile off my face today, that's for sure.

If we globally abandon and or ban by fiat energy production from fossil fuels, then it seems to me that we are in effect placing the burden of our sins, as some imagine them to be, on the weak and helpless, making scapegoats.

This guy is so brutal. Man, Matson, I'm gonna reach out to him. I'm just gonna thank him for this presentation, at least this intro.

He's brutal because he's not letting anything slide. He's like, we're putting the burden of our sins as some imagine them to be.

He's not even giving you that. He's like, we're putting the burden of our sins on poor people, but he won't even give you that they're actual sins.

This is a good faith way of saying your psychotic ideas of sins, your fake sins, your phony fugazi sins, you're putting them on poor people.

That's brutal, man, Matson's brutal. Vulnerable. So here's how it can sound. Africa, for the good of the planet, you must continue cooking your meals over dung fires.

We'll allow you to have a dorm room refrigerator and we'll give you a solar panel to power it, but you do not get steel mills.

You do not get textile mills. You don't get railroads. You don't get natural gas.

You don't get manufacturing. We are sorry, but we've enjoyed all of these things and we've gotten fabulously wealthy and healthy, but now the punishment for our sins must fall upon you.

I believe that to be immoral. Yeah, it is immoral. One might even call that the apotheosis of paternalistic colonialism.

My first criticism, my first criticism, I don't know what that word means, so therefore

I'm gonna take it as disrespect. Apotheosis, man,

I don't know what that word means and therefore I will take it as disrespect. My first criticism of Matson.

All right, yeah, it's actually even funny. He's 100 % right, I'm so impressed.

I honestly am very impressed with Matson. He's 100 % right. It's actually even worse than that because China, of course, will say, oh, yeah, yeah, you're poisoning the environment.

Oh, totally, you're poisoning the environment. You guys are just evil. They're promoting this kind of stuff within our borders and they love it because they love us crippling ourselves through trying to promote these green energy projects and getting rid of fossil fuels, all while they're gonna continue doing whatever they wanna do.

Strategically, it is a disaster as well, but hey, that's okay. That's okay, what do

I know? But the ethical problem is even worse than that, it seems to me, and here I think there's an analogy from Christian just war tradition.

One of the principles of a just war is the necessity of a reasonable chance of success.

The idea is that it's immoral to initiate a conflict where you cannot reasonably achieve the outcome.

To invite all of the damage of a war for a cause lost before it even begins is unethical, according to Christian just war tradition.

Likewise, I think it is unethical to wreak economic havoc here at home and to banish developing nations to darkness and poverty in a quest to reduce global carbon emissions when on the other side of the world, the

People's Republic of China is proposing to do and building unhindered, as we speak, additional coal -powered infrastructure.

They're doing that, but at the same time, they're loving and spreading the global climate change propaganda in the

United States. This is something that they love. They do this kind of stuff, man.

It's amazing. Five times more than the rest of the world is building combined.

Unless there is some magic solution to that problem, no amount of regulatory or economic intervention stands any chance of success.

Not to mention the fact that we don't cause climate change. It's completely absurd, the idea that coal emissions cause climate change.

At least the kind of catastrophic, cataclysmic, you know, world -ending climate change that schlubs like this like to talk about.

That's absurd. It's absurd. So all of this is nice, but it's all absurd anyway.

Madison's getting, Madison's got it going on, man. It's all for naught before it really even begins.

That doesn't mean that we are helpless. We have the greatest engine for human innovation and adaptation the world has ever known.

Free markets and all that they entail, private property and enterprise, risk and incentives.

These are the engine of human innovation that has not only brought about human prosperity and flourishing on a scale unprecedented in history, but also brings more creation care, not less.

And I can elaborate more on that in our time together today. I believe the way forward in the face of our environmental challenges is forward, not backward.

Free markets, even the high regulation one that we are living in right now, are not the enemy of environmental protection and creation care.

They are its best friend. Thank you. Thank you, Brian. I gotta say, I've got very little to complain about with Madison.

In fact, I can't really think of anything worthwhile mentioning. There's a few things that I heard that I wouldn't agree with necessarily, but not worth even mentioning.

You know what I mean? Not worth even mentioning. It's, I'm honestly, we're 10 minutes into this debate.

Brian Madsen's presentation was almost flawless. And I just can't even believe it.

I can't even believe they allowed this on their

YouTube channel. Now, you know, a lot of times, the opening statements are pretty good.

They're okay. And it's usually in the cross talk that there's a lot of ground given and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I've got a lot of faith in Madison though, because he wasn't letting anything slide.

He really wasn't. And I gotta be honest, I am very impressed. If anyone knows Madsen, which is a very good chance in this audience, somebody knows

Madsen, hats off to this guy, man. I am a very tough critic when it comes to Gospel Coalition content.

I don't wanna give Gospel Coalition any undue credit. But this time

I have to take my hats off to Madsen. Hats off to Madsen. There's just no other way about it.

All right. So now we're gonna get the pro -climate change alarmism, scare tactics, and all this kind of thing.

And as I've said, the idea that we're going to die in a five degree temperature increase globally, which is gonna cause flooding, catastrophic flooding, because the polar ice caps are gonna melt and all the poor polar bears and all this kind of stuff.

This kind of stuff is insane on the face of it, number one. But also if you read the

Bible, I mean, you know that God's not gonna destroy the earth in a flood. And that's the end of it.

That's the beginning, that's the end. So, you know, we're gonna hear this guy.

Yeah, I don't even really know what to say about this guy, but you see him on the screen. I mean, you can't always judge a book by its cover.

That's a good proverb, but often you can. Often you can. In fact, that's why the cover's there, so that you can know kind of a little bit about what the book's about.

So, you know, you can't judge a book by its cover. Yeah, sometimes that's true, but most of the time it is not true.

You see the cover here and you pretty much know what you're gonna get. So let's, I'm gonna try to not interrupt him too much to let his whole thing just kind of stand for you.

But we'll see, because I do like to interrupt. I appreciate that. Jake, tell us your perspective.

Yeah, thank you for having me and thank you for your comments, Brian. I actually agreed with much of the worldview section in particular.

So as I begin,

I think something that can happen when we talk about something like climate change or global warming, these terms can kind of sound very technical and remote and far off.

They have a way of insulating us from the reality of what's being described. And so I wanna start off just by talking about some of the risks we're facing that are, some of them we're living with right now.

Some are likely to come in the coming decades, not century. It's always just a few decades off.

It's a few decades off and he's been believing that for the last 30 years. In the last 30 years.

Thankfully has slowed down in the last 10 years, but between 1990 and about 2010, we chopped down tons of old growth forests.

And that's especially dangerous because those have unique ecosystems that have developed over centuries. We don't just plant more trees and recover that.

We're talking about a catastrophic number of species, maybe as many as 40 % of all species on earth being driven into extinction or toward critically endangered status by 2050.

We're talking about the probable disappearance or significant reduction of most global coral reefs by 2050 as water temperatures rise.

We're talking about shrinking ice caps, which we can see happening now as glaciers break away in the

Arctic and Antarctic. And as sea levels rise, there are cities that will be put at risk by this.

In the US, that would be Miami, New Orleans, and New York in particular. Get rid of them. A number of other cities globally.

That's what I like to call the judgment of the Lord. So just get rid of them. New York, New Orleans. Yeah, I like New York, but it's had its run.

Miami, you know, I could throw a few other cities in there. Just, that's okay. You know, that's fine.

We're talking about the desertification of the American West. As they get less rain, wildfire risks rise.

Farming will have to change because they will not have the same water resources to draw upon. We're talking about dangers to human life, animal life, and air quality that are created by those more intense and frequent wildfires.

We're talking about economic and communal challenges that are created by more regular high -intensity hurricanes.

Warmer water, warmer air can mean that hurricanes intensify faster. And create more damage because they're a category four or five hitting instead of a category two or three.

And finally, we're talking about some actually enormous financial costs that come with this. As we've seen recently with the hurricanes that have hit in Puerto Rico and Florida.

And with wildfires. And as we all know that there were no catastrophic hurricanes before global man -made global warming.

So there's historical financial costs. Oh, the dangers we're talking about, some are coming, some are things we're dealing with right now.

There is a second question to consider as well. This guy probably believed the old

Barack Obama line. Do you remember when, during the financial crisis, he would claim that his administration had created or saved a certain amount of jobs?

And like that, when you say created or saved, that's a complete bamboozle. Because no matter how many jobs you lose, you can say, well, we saved this many.

Like, no matter what, how horrible you had done, you could say, well, if I didn't do anything, it would have been worse.

It would have been way worse. It's like, you can't falsify it. This guy fell for that kind of stuff.

He's a created or saved kind of guy. Which is how we're going to respond to these problems.

Someone should have created or saved as many as you can. And there's a lot of ways that we can. A social problem does not necessitate a government response.

We can deal with social problems through cultural means sometimes. A cultural norm develops and it gets reinforced softly through society such that you aren't going to say or do a certain thing in a public place because a cultural norm has developed there.

We can also accomplish a lot of things through commercial means as we put the power of markets to work to accomplish some desired good.

And then of course, there are also political means where we use public policy and law to try and accomplish some desirable good.

So the obvious question to start with to begin is are cultural and commercial means enough?

And I don't think they are. And this is why. First thing to consider is it's important to understand that there are reasons we got here.

There are enormous market forces that have propelled many of these negative changes.

We didn't deplete oceans because we were just doing it for fun. There were market incentives to overfish certain bodies of water.

We didn't chop down old growth forests for fun. We did it because there were market incentives to do so.

We have failed to act at many points because of market incentives to keep going as we're going rather than change course.

There was a moment in the late 70s and early 1980s where there was a very strong push to try and adopt some more aggressive measures to slow climate change, and those did not happen.

And you can even see this now. I wonder if that was the, we're all gonna die in an ice age climate change or if that was the global warming climate change or was it the previous global warming climate change or the previous we're all gonna die in an ice age climate change.

I don't know. I wonder which one it was because it changes every single few decades.

Yeah, so there you go. There you go. I don't know how much more of this I can take. I really can't,

I can't, I can't. I'll keep going. Now, I looked up, according to Open Secrets, just the oil companies spent $176 million on lobbying in 2009 alone, and they've spent around $120 million every year from 2010 to 2021 on lobbying in Washington.

So I think to turn toward climate or to turn toward commerce alone to solve these problems is naive. The incentives of right now that a company has are not necessarily the incentives that we need to be thinking about because we might be dealing with a problem 20, 30, 40 years down the road.

Right, because this is the, this is where you see him expose his hand, right?

This is where you see a socialist, useful idiot, propagandist, where he exposes his hand.

Because to someone like this, the corporations, they're the only ones that have questionable morality.

They're the only ones that have a sort of immediate concern, and they're not really that concerned with the future.

They're not concerned with 40 years from now. They're only concerned with next quarter's numbers, right? And there's some truth there.

You know, there's some truth there. I think that a lot of corporations, of course, they're going to be only concerned with certain things, whatever.

That's fine, and that's as they should be. They should be concerned with their bottom line. I think it's obviously false that corporations don't think about the future, but let's just set that aside for a minute, okay?

Let's just set that aside. He presents that as if that we don't have that problem when it comes to governments, right?

When it comes to governments, see, they're somehow able to avoid thinking about now at the expense of the future.

Somehow, he thinks that that's the case, and I gotta be honest with you.

Not only is that not the case, every politician's just simply thinking about the next election, but a lot of these corpos own these politicians, so even if it were true that the corpos were evil and stuff, they own the politicians already.

But even if that all were true, you still have to demonstrate that these schemes, these kinds of schemes that the politicians come up with would even be effective, and there's really no reason to think that they would be.

And so it's like, you could see him tip his head. It's like politicians good, corpos bad.

Even though the corpos own the politicians, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. Politicians good, corpos bad.

Government good, private sector bad. That's how it works in a mind like this.

There is no reason to think that that's actually how it works. None at all. None at all.

In any case, let's let him continue. These might be helpful in this sense.

The incentives I give my child to not do something right now might not be about what's gonna happen to them today if they do it.

It's what will happen to them 15 years from now if they keep doing it. The thing we need to understand is that markets don't appear from nothing.

They don't descend from some kind of skyhook in some pure, sullied, untouched state.

They're made, and they're made through many factors. They are made through the laws of nations, customs of cultures, the realities of geography and climate.

This is why we have the joke about someone who could sell ice to an Eskimo, because they have no need for ice.

Markets evolve over time. Until quite recently, there was not much of a market for air conditioning in Northern Europe.

But after this last summer, where they had temperatures over 100 degrees in England, there is now more of a market for air conditioning.

So what sound climate policy can do is it can help create new contexts and environments in which new behaviors are incentivized and rewarded by new markets.

Right, and because we know that if there's anything we know, we know that when governments try to engineer markets, governments always know what's best.

They know what's best for people, and they work much better than the markets, because price discovery and incentivizing things based on prices and availability and demand, we all know that that's caveman stuff, but what we know is that governments know how much of everything to make.

The government can figure out how much beans we need to make.

They know that, because there are betters. They know how much milk to produce in any given season and how much the demand's gonna be, and they know exactly what the price should be, too.

This is just insane. You gotta get used to this kind of guy where he's like, I believe in markets, too, but then everything he says, he doesn't believe in markets, because that's not how a market works.

Like, when the government manipulates markets, they always cause problems in those markets.

They create black markets. They create shortages. They create runs. They create, like, this is how governments, because they don't know.

Nobody knows. That's the point. There's nobody smart enough to tell you how many eggs you need to produce this year.

There's no one smart enough that can tell you what the price of eggs should be. You need the aggregate to tell you.

You need the market to tell you. Of course, the market is not pristine and neat and clean all the time, but that's the best method we have, because there's nobody smart enough to tell me what the price of eggs should be, how much

I should produce, how much. Only the market can tell you that. Supply and demand. You can know how much eggs that you need to produce based on how much people want eggs, and if people really want eggs and the price of eggs shoots up, that price rise is an indicator to someone who's an enterprising individual to say, man, look at that.

I can get $8 for that many eggs. I'm gonna start making eggs, and so guess what happens?

So when the price goes up and someone goes, man, I gotta get in on that, totally self -interested, right?

He wants to improve his business, so he's gotta get in on the egg production. He starts producing eggs.

Guess what happens to the eggs? They still get bought, and the price starts going down because there's more eggs.

See, that price movement there, that's an important indicator for someone that's a business person, that wants to make a living, that likes to eat, that likes to provide for his family.

That's an indicator, right? And so there's no person or group of people in the government that can say, all right, the perfect price of eggs is $8.

Nobody knows that. He's a socialist, is what he is.

He's a central planner, and the thing is, central planners always look like this. They can't even manage themselves, and they think that they're good enough to manage everybody else.

This is why George Orwell said what he said about them looking like beetles. These people can't even manage their own freaking lives, and they think that they can manage everybody.

They can manage the price of air conditioners just perfectly to incentivize the right climate change policy.

These people are out of their ever -loving minds. They're out of your ever -loving minds.

When you think, oh, you know, maybe socialism isn't so bad. Maybe price controls aren't so bad. I want you to think about this face that you see in front of you today, this guy.

This guy can't even dress properly, but he knows what the climate is gonna be if we don't act right now in 100 years.

He knows. In any case, I'm gonna go because I just can't take it anymore.

I picked a heck of a day to stop sniffing baits, if you know what I mean. Hope you found this video helpful.