Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, saying three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Hey guys, check it out, I got Bob Murphy on the line.
He's a senior fellow at Mises.
That's the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Mises.org.
They do the Austrian school extremely, all the way, free market economics, you might say.
And he wrote The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism, and The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal.
Oh boy, I love those books so much, they're good.
And he also wrote a ton of other things, and he has a show.
He has two shows.
He has a show with Tom Woods called Contra Krugman, and he has a show that's called The Bob Murphy Show, which you can find at, I don't know the URL, but all of them are also at Mises.org.
And yeah, welcome back to the show.
How you doing, man?
Thanks for having me, Scott.
Always a pleasure to do it.
Yeah, man, happy to have you here.
And I'm sorry, tell me the website right for where people can find The Bob Murphy Show?
It's BobMurphyShow.com.
That's pretty hard to remember.
Say it one more time.
It's BobMurphyShow.com.
All right, cool.
Hey, I'm happy to have you on today, because I'm just tired of talking about Gaza and everything.
I'm going to take a break for a minute and talk about this global warming stuff.
So you have this interesting thing here.
I like the take, because what you're doing here is you're saying that, you know, never mind your opinion or this or that thing, but take for granted the narrative of the most qualified of the climate change people.
This is what shall be done in order to save us.
And that by their own standards, the things that they want to do will not work.
And, well, this and that and the other things.
So I just thought it was interesting to talk about.
I actually don't know much about the so-called or the actual science behind this at all.
And I do know that essentially, with very few exceptions, all ideological capitalists and conservatives don't believe in it.
And everyone to the left of them does.
And that's essentially the division.
So hopefully us libertarians try to be a little bit more objective and less partisan.
But I want to know what all you have to say about, well, explain this piece.
What universities won't teach college students about the economics of climate change.
OK, sure.
So, yeah, I'll just say something.
You just guide me through the conversation, Scott, because obviously, you know, this is something I could talk a lot about.
So primarily in my capacity, I'm the senior economist with the Institute for Energy Research or IER.
That's a think tank, the free market energy think tank.
The beat they've had me on more than a decade now, I think, is the economics of climate change.
And so, you know, I really have gone into this area.
And so I want to stipulate up front, just for your listeners who might be on their guard, absolutely nothing that I'm going to say in this has anything to do with challenging what the so-called consensus is in terms of what climate scientists say.
So I'm not challenging, you know, the physics or the chemistry behind this stuff.
And in fact, a lot of the statistics or facts that I'll give you here, Scott, they're not coming from the Heritage Foundation or from some maverick scientist, you know, at a second tier institution who's got his own theory about cloud formation.
This is all stuff from either the UN directly or the climate models from William Nordhaus, who just won the Nobel Prize.
And by the way, Nordhaus' model was one of the three that the Obama administration selected when they were coming up with what's called the social cost of carbon.
So what I'm doing here, and this is the talk I gave to these college kids, is I'm just showing if you actually go in and read these reports, what they say do not at all justify the political goals that are being trotted out as, you know, oh, this is what we need to do now.
Okay, so that's really my main message from this particular talk that I gave you referencing.
It was at Connecticut College, and I gave a presentation.
And there I wasn't, you know, as you know, Scott, you know, I'm philosophically opposed to the federal government, and I have views on that stuff, but this has nothing to do with that stuff.
This is just saying if you go and dive into this research and this literature, you'll see that what people are, you know, bandying about like, you know, oh, we got to at least have a two degree Celsius limit on warming, and ideally we'd like to keep it closer to 1.5 C.
Just to give you an example of what I mean, the standard results in the literature on this, again, from the guy who just won the Nobel Prize, is that doing that, if we could somehow pursue that goal, that would cause humanity far more damage economically than doing, quote, nothing about climate change whatsoever.
And it's not even close.
Like, they're not even in the same ballpark as to how drastic that would be.
So that's just one example of what I mean here, where the published literature on this stuff does not at all support what everyone is treating as, oh, this is the settled science, and if you doubt this, you must be in the pay of big oil or something.
Yeah.
Well, in fact, so that was my thing.
I want to deconstruct you one more second here before I let you go on that, which is you said, of course, ideologically, I'm extremely libertarian, this kind of thing.
But what people also might be suspicious of is that this Institute for Energy Research is just a front for coke oil.
Is that right?
Or anybody else?
Texco or Exxon?
So they, again, I'm not on the fundraising side.
Big, quote, big oil does not, to my knowledge, support this stuff, partly for PR reasons, but also like Exxon, for example, I think a while ago, they decided, oh, carbon tax is coming, and so they got into like natural gas.
Exxon now funds, you know, middle of the road things that support, quote, a price on carbon.
And it's funny, the tables flip.
So now people who are pro-intervention will say, even Exxon recognizes now, you know what I mean?
So it's like if they support them, then it just shows how obvious it is.
And if they're against them, it just shows because they're corrupt.
And look, it doesn't follow that if you have a job, then that means that you're just, you know, a billboard saying what you're being paid to say.
I know you, and I like you, and I trust your motives.
But people have the right, and in fact, the duty to be very skeptical of things that you say, especially controversial ones.
So I just want to, you know, bring that up.
And again, that's why I'm saying, so like, yeah, if I were saying, oh, I did my own model here, or some, you know, some computer study that was published and funded by, you know, Peabody Coal, yeah, that would, you might say, I don't want to trust that stuff.
But here, again, I mean, you know, we have links and I have screenshots.
This is all, again, this is not coming from me.
This is, and it's not like my esoteric interpretation.
When you look at these charts and things that people click through to the article, you can see this is quite clearly what Nordhaus' model says.
You know, I'm quoting from the Obama administration's results.
So again, this, it's, you'd have to know where to go find it.
That's the thing is it gets buried in, you know.
And again, the main point here is the incongruity between what the climate scientists say is the problem and what must be done and the proposals of what must be done.
But it sounds like just from the beginning there, before you've had a chance to state your case, that maybe they should do even more.
But you're saying what?
No.
Oh, because of the cost.
Yeah.
So specifically, I mean, so we probably should just deal with this head on.
There are plenty of people, you know, in the natural sciences who like study whatever, coral reefs or something, you know, like, oh, the ecological diversity in the oceans.
And they would be very concerned about climate change and warn all these things are going to happen.
And that's why, you know, we need to drastically slow down emissions and that sort of thing.
And if we don't really go to net zero emissions by this particular date, bad things will happen.
And so that's all fine.
But, again, you need to have some basis to say, well, what are the drawbacks?
What are the costs of your recommendations?
And so that's unavoidably an economics question.
So it doesn't mean the economists who publish in this are gods or, you know, infallible.
But my point is you can't just look at people saying, oh, it would really be much better if we slowed the rate of emissions without saying, well, what are the downsides of that?
And so that's the thing where, you know, the standard economic studies in this area show that, yes, the standard economist who publishes this says unchecked climate change will be bad.
And they recommend a modest carbon tax, for example, is the best way for governments to deal with it.
But my point is their recommendations would still allow something like 3.5 degrees Celsius of warming.
And for people, I mean, I know to look at the average outsider who's not familiar with this debate, that's meaningless.
But that is way beyond what the standard activist who's, you know, clamoring for we need to do something quickly here, or our grandkids are all dead.
That's way beyond the limit.
They think 2C is the absolute most we should allow.
And that, you know, if you said what about 3.5C, they'd say that's crazy.
You know, Earth would be uninhabitable, or, you know, that's the kind of language they would use.
And I'm saying that's unsupported.
That apocalyptic rhetoric is just not in the standard literature here.
And so it's my, I guess partly the irony, Scott, is for a while, as I'm sure you knew, anybody who challenged the standard, you know, view as to the political intervention, the necessity of this, was just beat, you know, browbeat and said, oh, you got to look at the consensus, you're a denier.
And so I'm saying it's weird here where when I go and I quote from the UN's own documents about the expected costs of climate change and the expected benefits of dealing with it and show, you know, it's kind of a wash here in terms of, again, quoting from the UN's own reports to say, like, a particular climate goal will spare humanity this much in damage from climate change, but it will cause this much in slower economic growth.
And using their own numbers, it's about a wash, at least under the middle of the road projections.
And the pushback will be, well, yeah, but those models leave a lot of stuff out.
And I'm sure they do.
I mean, you know, computers simulating the economy and the climate for the next 300 years, of course it leaves stuff out.
But my point is, all of a sudden, the rhetoric flipped from you need to go look at the published literature, you deniers, to, well, the published literature leaves a lot of stuff out.
So that's what I'm saying is, like, the goalposts keep shifting.
And these aggressive goals, it's not merely that it's hard to support them, that the standard results in the literature would say, for example, the UN's goal they announced last fall of 1.5 C Celsius of warming, and that's the target we should shoot for.
Let's see if we can contain warming to that level.
The guy who won the Nobel Prize the same week that UN report came out, his own work shows that would be catastrophically damaging to humanity's welfare.
That would be far worse than doing nothing.
So, you know, you could quibble with it, but it's just weird that, like, the same New York Times article that reported William Nordhaus winning the Nobel Prize for his work on the economics of climate change, and also mentioning the UN's special report on how governments can try to limit warming to 1.5 C, you'd think there'd be at least one sentence in there saying, oh, by the way, the guy who just won the Nobel Prize, his model shows the UN's target would be catastrophically bad.
But nothing like that.
They act like they support each other.
Like, this just shows the growing recognition of how serious this issue is.
Sorry, hang on just one second for me.
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Okay, but so now some things aren't really calculated in prices exactly.
Like, for example, the future of coral reefs and ecosystems and the food chain on the planet that sustains us all.
And so maybe we all do have to tighten our belts a little bit in order to, you know, in other words, if the costs are a little bit higher for driving or preventing the temperature from going even as high as 1.5 degrees or whatever it is, maybe whatever the cost would be worth it for the long term.
Or not whatever, but maybe a much higher cost than just what it would cost people in monetary productivity, you know, as measured by GDP or what have you going forward in the same time period.
Right.
And I totally get that.
And certainly, you know, I mean, and this is, as you know, Scott, like an Austrian economist.
Is that making me a one-world communist?
Well, it raises questions.
Privatize the oceans immediately.
That's the only option.
Go ahead.
I mean, if you want to get into that later, yeah, I mean, I think that is ultimately the way to deal with this stuff.
But it's, so yes, again, I'm in an awkward position here where I've written, you know, journaled critiques or critique.
Well, no, two of them at least.
Critiques of the kind of model that William Nordhaus does.
Because Nordhaus, to be clear, I don't want to mislead or, you know, have your listeners take away the wrong thing.
Guys like William Nordhaus are for a carbon tax.
The average economist, if you just grabbed him and asked him, what do we do about climate change?
Would say, oh, yeah, there's a negative externality.
People are emitting, you know, CO2 and other greenhouse gases, and they're not taking that into account.
And so the government should levy a tax on that to bring private, you know, behavior into conformity with, you know, what promotes the social good.
My point is just the magnitude of it.
It's like leaning against the wind is what the economics, you know, result would pop out and say.
And so I am against that because of, you know, public choice reasons and philosophical ones.
I don't trust the government to do what the guys in the white lab coats recommend.
I think you give the government a new tax, they're going to go to town with it.
And they don't really, you know, I don't trust the guys running governments around the world to be sitting up at night worried about climate change.
So but those are separate things.
So here I'm not saying that, yes, because William Nordhaus' model says something, that's gospel.
But it's more, it's way more nuanced than I think the average person thinks when they hear about, oh, cost benefit in terms of dollars.
It's not saying, oh, sure, you know, we're going to lose coral reefs and 16 percent of the Bangladesh population is going to die early because of, you know, heat stroke and whatever, or sea level rise.
And we're going to displace millions of people and agriculture is going to be changed.
But, you know, measured GDP is going to go down only by such and such percentage.
That's not what they're saying when they quantify the, quote, costs of climate change damage.
They're putting in a lot of those non-market things and they're coming up with estimates.
And so certainly somebody can look at what they did and challenge it and say, no, I think you guys are downplaying this issue or whatever.
But it's much more, it includes a lot more than I think the average critic would believe.
It's not merely looking at like official GDP growth.
It's throwing in a lot of non-market stuff with proxies, like, well, how do you quantify or value those sorts of things?
So it is.
And again, but the point is they went when Nordhaus tries to pull those, he went to the literature and looked at that stuff.
So it's sort of it's again, it's this irony where the original claim was you science deniers need to go look at the peer reviewed literature and stop just making up stuff.
So I am going to the peer review.
I'm taking the best estimates.
Again, the one that's in the UN's own documents as to here are the best estimates of the cost of climate change damage.
The very ones they, the UN cited in the what's called the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
If you go and look at the chapter under the, you know, the estimated damages, that's where I'm quoting from.
I'm not going to the Heritage Foundation.
And then when those numbers aren't catastrophic, then the critics will just come back and say, oh, yeah, well, they leave out a lot of stuff.
So that's fine.
But now they're the ones who are ignoring what the peer reviewed literature says.
And they're just saying stuff that, you know, isn't so.
And also, too, let me just say this.
Obviously, I can't prove, Scott, that it's not going to be a disaster by 2080.
But by the same token, an asteroid could hit Earth.
And so I could say we need to have 20 percent of all governments around the world devoting their military budget, 20 percent of it to building space-based lasers to knock out incoming asteroids.
And you can't prove I'm wrong.
You can't assure me that there's not going to be a killer asteroid coming along, that we need to have that level of funding.
But you can see the danger there and how that's kind of non-falsifiable.
So it's a similar thing here where this is justifying, you know, just trillions of dollars of expenditures and huge new tax revenue sources in the name of something that, yeah, I can't prove that these worst case scenarios won't happen.
All I can say, though, is the U.N.'s own published assessment of the literature is saying probably this isn't going to be that big of a deal.
It'll be manageable, even under fairly pessimistic assumptions.
And then when you contrast it with, OK, to deal with it, what's the economic fallout?
It's in the same ballpark.
That's the irony here, that it's really so.
Well, and taxation, too, is a matter of freedom.
So it's not just the cost financially, but it's a matter of the cost from real people that changes their lives for the lack of having that money in big ways.
You know, they talk about, oh, and of course that's all they can think of to do is put a new tax on for regular people.
When, you know, as long as they're printing money, they could just subsidize nuclear without adding new taxes on to coal or oil or whatever it is.
They could subsidize geothermal or whatever garbage.
I don't know.
Can I say something to just spark something with nuclear?
That's another thing, too, here.
Again, and I know some of your listeners will be, oh, come on, this is crazy.
And this guy Murphy's talking about being counter stuff.
Again, just this is why I don't believe the rhetoric of some of the leaders in these movements or the public representatives, the face of green activism.
So I'm not challenging the motives or impugning the motivations of the average person who's really concerned about this stuff.
But I'm saying, like, for example, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the so-called Green New Deal.
Within there, they explicitly say they do not support expanding nuclear power.
So if you really thought that we had 12 years to change, you know, fundamentally the energy and transportation system of humanity or else it was going to spell disaster for our great grandchildren.
If you really thought that, wouldn't you be willing to expand nuclear, at least in the short term?
Because nuclear, of course, is emission free and it's fairly effective and it's dispatchable.
You know, France uses it.
It's not like it's some unproven technology.
And yet they don't.
And so it makes me think I don't really believe that they believe their rhetoric, because if they did, they wouldn't be.
It'd be like if you really did think, you know, an asteroid were coming and it was going to destroy the Earth and we needed to knock it down with a laser.
And people said, OK, we need huge funding now for lasers and activists.
And no, we oppose that because that interferes with our message on gun control.
See, the problem here is all of these things are different questions, right?
Of the degree to which climate change is a real thing.
The degree to which liberals and leftists have any idea what they're talking about.
The degree to which the Nobel Prize winners computer model is actually a meaningful thing.
And the question of whether government should do anything about this one way or the other or anything.
These are all separate things.
So I'm the kind of guy I'm like you.
I'm just anti-government first, whatever it is they want to do about anything.
I'm against it.
I don't care what it is.
So that's my bias as hell.
And I admit that, but that doesn't really have anything to do with whether there's a problem or not.
And just because I don't want to hear it doesn't mean that I shouldn't take the time to hear it.
But so I wonder then for as much work as you've put into this, are we talking about just for argument's sake and taking all of that?
I mean when you look at these computer models and you look at all of the peer-reviewed this and that.
I mean essentially for a guy like me who's just way out here in the public opinion on the receiving end of all of this stuff.
Essentially I'm asked to believe in it.
And I'm told that if I don't believe in it then I'm a real dummy for not believing in it.
But it's science.
I shouldn't have to believe in it.
It should be demonstrated to me somehow.
And I understand that computer models, they could show meaningful things like how an H-bomb detonates.
I can't discount that.
But I don't know about it.
So what do you really think about it?
Okay, great.
So let me just first elaborate on your first main point there and then I'll try to answer your question.
So right, on my own I was going to do this analogy and you kind of just set me up perfectly for it.
For me, my view on this stuff is kind of analogous to my view on drug addiction.
And so obviously as a libertarian philosophically I'm against the U.S. government locking people up for what I view as consensual activities.
And I also, so I'm for legalizing, even if that meant that there'd be people falling over in the streets from massive heroin overdoses all next Thursday and half the population is like that.
I would still bite the bullet and say no, but I believe in freedom and who am I to justify putting people in cages for activities that are consensual.
But I don't happen to believe that also.
I think that that's just a pretext that funds a prison industrial complex and gives them the pretext to monitor financial transactions because, oh, we've got to watch out for funneling money to cartels.
And it's a great, convenient way for the government to expand its power and invade civil liberties.
And I don't think the other thing, but of course that doesn't mean I'm saying there's no such thing as drug addiction or there's no such thing as families that are ruined by drug abuse.
Obviously that's not what I'm saying.
Or like the war on terror, similar thing.
I'm not saying terrorism doesn't exist.
I'm just saying I don't trust the authorities when they use those things as a pretext to expand their power and they largely cause the problem.
So similarly here, it's true.
I don't think that climate change, human-caused climate change is this existential threat to humanity and they need to really drastically cut emissions in the next 20 years or else that means it's hopeless and people in 2100 are going to be doomed.
I don't think that.
We can talk in a minute about why.
But my point is even if you did believe that, having the government try to solve it is going to just make things worse.
One quick example, this Paris Agreement, the stuff that Trump announced two years ago he was going to pull out of, people were freaking out saying, oh, humanity's now in trouble.
To this day, even if you include the US's commitment, they're nowhere close to limiting warming to two degrees Celsius.
In other words, you go around and calculate all of the pledges that the countries who have signed into this Paris Agreement have made as to what they're going to do and you say, okay, let's assume they all lived up to their pledges.
Which they're not on track of doing, but just assume they did.
Warming still is over three degrees Celsius in terms of just looking at what they're promising to do.
So by the activist's own logic and rhetoric, this Paris Agreement is still bringing us, is on course for utter disaster.
And so again, it's like saying even if you really did think heroin abuse was this huge problem, saying so that's why I'm going to have Rudy Giuliani in there to really fix it, that would be a non-starter.
You'd be distracting yourself.
They're not going to solve the problem using guns and cages.
And likewise here, a political solution's not going to work even if the problem were as bad as they're saying it is.
In fact, that would be distracting everybody.
Clearly these political solutions are not on track to solving the problem if it's as bad as they say.
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All right, so then go back then to the why not though.
You still don't buy it either way.
Sure.
So again, so here, the basic situation is the so-called greenhouse effect.
That's standard physics and chemistry.
It's certainly other things equal.
The higher the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, it lets in sunlight and it retains the heat that bounces up.
So that's standard, just like an actual greenhouse works.
But that by itself is not what's driving the catastrophic projections.
And so standard climate scientists, they all agree on that.
Where the disagreement is in the so-called feedback effects.
And so the idea is as the planet gets warmer, does it do things that induce further warming, like melting the permafrost?
So there's all kinds of things that could happen that would then enhance the warming.
So that's what they're arguing about.
They're not arguing over just the basic physics.
And that's why, Scott, by the way, it's very disingenuous sometimes, especially like in Internet arguments, when people will say something like the basic science of climate change was established by this guy back in 1890, when he climbed a mountain and discovered.
That's not what any normal person.
I mean, when Trump says it's all a hoax or something, yeah, maybe he doesn't know the basic chemistry and physics.
But guys like at the Cato Institute who are professional climate scientists, who are skeptical of these political solutions, they're certainly aware of that.
That's not what the argument's over.
It's over things like, well, as more moisture is released, does that cause more cloud formation, which would reflect more sunlight?
That's the kind of stuff.
Because the climate system obviously is extremely complex.
And there's all kinds of feedbacks.
And some amplify and some dampen the original warming.
And that's what they're arguing about.
And that's really where the crux of the debate is, that if there's a runaway positive feedback effect, then it is true that, oh, gee, if we allowed a little bit more warming, then it's going to kind of hit a tipping point and get away from us, and we're not going to be able to stop it.
Whereas if there's negative feedback effects, then it's the other way around.
Or other people are arguing, maybe there's factors that if it weren't for more CO2, Earth would go back into a little ice age kind of thing.
And so those are the kinds of things where they're arguing about, to see there's a million different factors.
It's kind of like economists arguing over the Obama stimulus package.
You might think, well, can't they just look at the numbers?
And no, I mean, economy is so complicated, they can all come up with their different theories and fit the data into their own frameworks.
And it's a similar thing here, where, yeah, they all have different views.
The historical observations are all consistent with their models, because there's so many moving parts and dials you can tweak.
But their projections are wildly different.
Right.
And by the way, we started out this interview with, are you corrupt working for some oil company, saying the things that you say are this kind of thing?
It's fair to bring up the economic incentives.
You mentioned already Exxon's incentive for supporting this narrative now.
But there's a lot of rent seekers in a lot of universities and a lot of God knows what institutions and government offices who are dependent upon this narrative now.
And that doesn't, again, it's a separate question from whether they're right or wrong, but it sure means that they don't want to hear from your point of view, either.
Yeah.
And let me also just follow up on that.
So, yeah, I mean, there's the straightforward thing of, well, gee, if the fact that an energy company might subsidize some think tank to then put out a study and everyone understands the sense in which they're not going to look with skepticism.
By the same token, somebody who's getting funded by the government, who comes out and advocates expanding the government's power, for some reason that's just viewed as legitimate science.
You know, that's not, well, wait a minute, it's the same thing.
That's democracy, man.
Why do you hate freedom so much?
But I do want to clarify.
So what I'm, I'm not saying that I think the average rank and file, you know, researcher is publishing stuff that he or she knows is false because I'm getting a paycheck or I'm going to get that grant.
But I think it's more that somebody who, you know, they publish their literature, but they pull their punches.
And certainly when they're being interviewed, the way they express their results is very guarded.
So let me give you a great example of this.
Because they know what the conventional narrative is, and maybe they don't want to give ammunition to quote the other side.
So, for example, William Nordhaus, who, again, it was beautiful, the timing.
It was last fall, you know, fall of 2018, when it was, it was the same weekend, actually, the news broke that he had won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his pioneering work on climate change.
And the UN comes out with this document about, here are steps that governments around the world could take to try to contain warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
And I, like I said, his own work showed that would be a ludicrously bad thing to try to get at.
So someone from the New York Times was interviewing him about all this stuff.
And, you know, I was talking about his work and, you know, in the 70s, and what do you think about public awareness and blah, blah, blah.
And then near the end of the interview, she asks him, so what do you think?
Are we going to be able to hit the 1.5 degrees Celsius target?
Or is it too late?
And he said, well, paraphrasing, but he said something like, yeah, at this point, I think that's unrealistic, that we're not going to be able to hit that target.
And he didn't then follow up with, and thank God.
You know what I mean?
What he said was a true statement, and it was consistent with his work.
But he did, he refrained from volunteering.
By the way, my own work shows that target.
It would be insane to try to achieve, and I'm glad we're not going to hit it.
He just, and of course, I know why he did that, because he's getting the Nobel Prize.
He's getting, you know, if he stuck his neck out and challenged that narrative, then he would have a million people at, you know, Huffington Post and whatever, Daily Kos and all these other places, Vox, ripping his head off and going and saying how his model leaves out all these things and his damage function's wrong.
So why would he, you know, he doesn't want to deal with that.
And also, since he's for a carbon tax, and he knows the political resistance to it, I think the way he justified it is saying, yeah, I'll let these activists shoot for the moon, because in practice, what will probably pop out of the system is something closer to what I think is correct.
And so he keeps his mouth shut, even though these activists are justifying these measures with absurd projections and rhetoric and scaring the public with stuff that's not remotely accurate.
You should interview this guy on your show.
I should.
I'll ask him.
There was a point when he was answering my email, because I was going through his model and noticing little slight mistakes and things.
Nothing that changed the, you know, but like it as a professional courtesy.
I was like, hey, you might want to check table six here of your results.
He was like, oh, thanks, yeah, I will.
But even here, I mean, that's the thing, too, is I've noticed certain people, like there's another, I won't say his name, because I don't want, you know, I can't prove this, but there's another big researcher in this area who is more middle of the road.
And I used to cite his work, you know, to show, hey, in this guy's results, look at this.
But I think, you know, he's still for some political measures.
He's not a total, you know, laissez-faire guy.
And so I think it sort of embarrasses him or puts him in an awkward position when I quote his stuff.
So, you know, again, I can't prove this stuff, but I think, you know, there are these different coalitions kind of like, you know, oh, I'm not one of those nutjob people who doesn't want the government to do anything.
So it's tricky.
And it's, and again, I understand the, you know, in other words, no scientist wants Rush Limbaugh to be quoting from your working paper on his show, because that's embarrassing.
It looks like you're, you know, fueling the enemy.
Yeah.
All right.
I'm sorry.
I got to go.
Ron Paul's next, and I'm late.
Oh, well, there you go.
I'm a good warm up to Ron Paul.
Yes.
Very good.
Listen, man, thank you so much for coming on the show.
It's great to talk to you again, Bob.
This is Robert P. Murphy.
He's at Mises.org and at the Bob Murphy show, not the Bob Murphy show dot com.
Oh, and check him out on Contra Krogerman with Tom Woods as well, of course.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at Libertarian Institute dot org at Scott Horton dot org, antiwar dot com, and Reddit dot com slash Scott Horton show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, more in Afghanistan at Fool's Errand dot U.S.
