Climate Change is the new human sacrifice

[00:00:00.990] Today we're going to go back in time to March 20, 858 BC, to the Roman province of Galia Sicilipina, which is basically modern day Switzerland. Now on that day, there is a large group of people, a Celtic tribe known as the Helveteans. They've been living in the area, but for the last three years they've been planning a migration south into Roman territory. It's not really entirely clear why. There were a lot of speculations about this. [00:00:28.930] They may have lost some territory to some other Celtic tribes that have been pushing them further and further south. There was one story that came more than a century later from a Roman author named Plenty the Elder. He wrote that there was a Helvetean man named Helico. And this guy, helico went down to Rome and he came back with this vast treasure trove, riches and oils and spices and foods and things that were enough to really excite all the rest of the health veggies and said, oh my God, we got to go to Rome. That place looks amazing. [00:00:56.590] And so for the last several years, they've been planning this move. They were going to go south. And when they committed, they really committed, they said, we're going south and we're going to literally burn all of our villages here in this province, galileo Sicilipina, we're going to burn all of our villages to make sure we are not turning back. We are not coming back here. We are going south. [00:01:15.420] It's Rome or bust. So this was a pretty big deal. And the governor of the province, the Roman governor of Galileo Szel. Pina, he knew he needed to spring into action. He knew that he needed to secure the border. [00:01:30.010] But more than that, he knew, the governor knew that this would be a pretty incredible opportunity for him to raise his political standing in Rome. And the reason for that is that Rome had for a long time felt a threat from the north, from these northern tribes, these barbarians that were located in the region that they called Gaul. Now Gaul is sort of basically modern day France and Switzerland and parts of Germany. And there had been a conflict with these various Gallic tribes going back at least a century, including military conflict. There have been very one in 107 BC. [00:02:02.680] There have been one very humiliating Roman defeat. It was shocking. People couldn't believe it. There was a Roman defeat by a Gallic tribe in 107 BC. And that really stuck with the Romans. [00:02:14.530] This is now decades and decades later, but they still remember that defeat. They read about it in their history books. Their parents and grandparents told them about it. And so people really fretted about their border security from north. They were concerned about these people coming in and that's why they actually had people at the border. [00:02:31.510] They didn't just say, we've been to the border. They actually put a lot of resources into it and that's why they had a provincial governor there and so forth, and the provincial governor there in this province, he knew it. He knew that Romans were going to be terrified, these barbarians crossing into their territory. And he knew that he could harness that fear to justify a military campaign. Rome was a place of laws. [00:02:54.040] You couldn't just go and gather up a bunch of troops and go and wage war and have a military campaign against whoever you wanted, whenever you wanted. You couldn't just do that. You had to have a reason, you had to have a just cause in order to do that. But he knew that this fear would be enough to justify essentially waging war, and not only on the Helvetians, the Helveti tribe, but really on all of Gaul altogether. And that this war of going and conquering and subjugating Gaul, this vast territory, he knew that would really cement his standing among the Roman elite. [00:03:25.480] And that's what the governor decided to do. His name, of course, was Julius Caesar. At the time, Caesar was essentially the governor of this province. And so when the Helveti attempted their mass migration south in late March and early April, caesar decided, I got to stop this. And so he pulled together in 58 BC, a few legions and basically engaged the Helvetia as they were coming down into Italy. [00:03:51.580] He engaged them, he defeated them. A lot of the survivors were taken as slaves. Others were sent back to their home territory, this place that they had just burned their villages and said, there's no way we're coming back here. Well, Caesar sent them back and he even gave them supplies, a little bit of money to rebuild all their burnt villages. He says, you guys aren't coming into Italy, you staying right here, but here's a little bit of money for your troubles and go and rebuild. [00:04:11.760] And God's beat. But he didn't stop there. He didn't stop there. Caesar continued to basically campaign to take over all of Gaul and subjugate the entire all these various Celtic tribes as far away as Britannia. Modern day Britain and the UK sailed across the British Isles to a certain point across the English Channel and tried to subjugate Britain, all of Gaul, and pulled us all basically into Roman territory, at least Rome's sphere of influence. [00:04:36.870] And he knew that what he was doing would be supported because, again, people were afraid. They never forgot the lessons from that defeat in 107 BC. And they were terrified of these people that were going to come into their territory. So he knew what he was doing would be supported by the people. And he also knew that what he was doing was historic. [00:04:53.080] It hadn't really been done before. And Caesar being Caesar, he actually wrote a book as he was doing it, chronicling, basically his military campaign. And this is a very famous book still exists today. It's called commentaries of the Gallic War. You can download it for free all over the internet. [00:05:09.010] There's no copyright on it. Obviously. It's a book that's over 2000 years old. And Julius Caesar wrote a book. And you can read Julius Caesar's book. [00:05:16.780] Commentaries on the Gallic war. Now, if you've ever read memoirs, anybody's memoirs, especially political memoirs, they're so obviously onesided, this takes that to a whole new level. Caesar's account of his own actions in the Gallic War are so ridiculously one sided. He has this massive ego that would make Napoleon blush. It would make Napoleon look like the Dalai Lama by comparison. [00:05:42.640] And to make matters even worse, to make it even more pretentious, caesar, throughout his own book, wrote about himself. He referred to himself in the third person caesar did this, Caesar did that. It's completely ridiculous. And of course, he makes himself out to be Superman. He's so smart and he's so handsome and he's so daring and he's so bold. [00:06:02.320] And of course, in the third person, Caesar was so courageous and Caesar brilliantly did this. And so it's really ridiculous. And historians have kind of discounted most of us, and so there's very little value here, but there is some marginal historic value to the text. And some of that is from Caesar's firsthand experiences. Firsthand information, sometimes secondhand information about the various Celtic tribes that they came across. [00:06:25.920] And remember, the Celts were sort of almost like an ethnicity of all these people in this diaspora all across Gaul and modern day Switzerland and into modern day UK and Britannia, all these various different tribes. And there were some commonalities, some cultural commonality. And Caesar wrote rather extensively about Celtic tribes and Celtic culture and their various cultural practices. And among them, among the more curious ones, at least to the Romans, was the Celtic practice of human sacrifice. So you probably heard of a group of people called the Druids. [00:07:02.340] The Druids were sort of the religious leaders, the high priests in Celtic culture. And human sacrifice was a normal thing for them. It was completely normal. One of the ways, for example, the Druids were charged with trying to foretell the future. And one of the ways they would do that is they would sacrifice people. [00:07:19.020] And as they would sacrifice people, they would watch the sacrificed humans sort of final death throws as they're twitching and twerking their way into death. And based on the person's gyrations, the Druid would then try and foretell the future based on the way a dying person would be gyrating in pain. Obviously, we sort of look at and say that's kind of ridiculous. But those were their beliefs. Caesar thought it was ridiculous as well, and he makes them out to be. [00:07:49.610] I mean, obviously most of the book is ridiculous. Referring to himself in the third person about how brilliant and handsome and courageous he is and all this, but he does make the drugs out to be in the Celt out to be quite an uncivilized group, the Druids and the Celts. Also, they would take criminals and they would enclose and they would construct like, a giant statue made of wicker and reed. This is kind of known as the Wicker Man, a big statue. And they would stop a very, very large statue, and they would stuff people inside of this enclosed in, like, a wicker cage that's made out to look like a giant human being, and then they would set the whole thing on fire. [00:08:25.140] And of course, they were being sacrificed to their gods and so forth. It's not just Caesar. These sorts of stories and cultural practices were corroborated by a lot of other ancient historians. Plutarch actually wrote quite a bit about this, and we heard about this sort of over and over again. But again, this isn't really unusual. [00:08:46.830] In history, we see concepts of human sacrifice even in plenty of religious texts. Frankly, there's a story of Abraham being ordered to sacrifice one of his own sons. This is a well told story in Christian judaic and Islamic texts. So this sort of thing has existed for a very, very long time. It's very common, especially in the ancient world, on the opposite side of the world, in the Americas, in precolumbian America, the Mayan culture, and later the Aztecs frequently performed ritualistic sacrifice. [00:09:19.140] They viewed human blood as almost a delicate sin for their gods. And if they wanted to please their gods, then blood offerings needed to be made. In Tenochtitlan, which is basically the Aztec capital, where today Mexico City is the main Aztec temple there. Archaeologists archaeologists have found 600, more than 600 skulls in that temple there. And the Conquistador, Hernan Cortez wrote extensively about this quite harshly, just like Caesar, about, look at these uncivilized people and their human sacrifice. [00:09:50.500] This is so disgusting to me. And, of course, that was commonplace. Invaders usually took a dim view of the natives that were there. Caesar was very harsh about the Celts. And Hernandez Cortez was disgusted by human sacrifices in Mexico among the Aztecs. [00:10:05.760] But of course, the Spanish burned thousands of people, the stake during the Inquisition. And the Romans, they vanquished native tribes across Latin America, all over Latin America, all the way down to the tip of Chile and Argentina. And the Romans, of course, used to murder people in the Coliseum simply for the amusement of their peasants, the class known as the Plebeians. So this is kind of a little bit of a cultural elitist, believing that their respect for human life is somehow better than everybody else, but it's really not. In fact, you could probably make an argument that the Spanish in particular murdered a whole lot more people than the Aztecs and the Mayans. [00:10:41.380] But in general, this theme of human sacrifice and killing people for whatever reason, this has been a very common theme throughout history. And it usually comes down to one guy, an emperor or some kind of leader or a high priest who makes a decision about what the gods require, that there's some sort of greater good. And we need to appease the gods. We need to placate somebody somewhere. And in order to do that, we need to sacrifice a large number of people for the greater good. [00:11:10.390] Sometimes that greater good is actually not even a greater good. Sometimes it's a very narrow good. In fact, Swedish mythology has a story of a king who had ten sons and shortest story as he ended up sacrificing nine of his sons because he was told that if he sacrificed his sons that he would have a longer life. And eventually people sort of convinced me that, wait a minute, if you sacrifice all of your sons, then the line ends and there's no more king and we're going to descend into chaos and anarchy and all these things. And so they finally convince them, don't sacrifice your 10th son. [00:11:41.110] But again, this is a story, this is a concept that is very, very old, as old as human civilization, where there's usually, again, very seldom do you find a whole lot of people getting together and say, hey, let's just pick each other and, you know, kill some of our own. That's not really as common. What is a lot more common is usually some kind of high priest that asserts a certain amount of authority onto themselves saying, well, I know more than everybody else. I'm the expert. And as the expert, I'm going to make a decision in my sole discretion about what the greater good is. [00:12:13.990] And some of you people are just going to have to die. And people go, OK, that's fine. That's what we're going to do. And sometimes, again, that was a very narrowly defined good. In the case of this mythological Swedish king, sometimes the greater good might even have been a civilization ending existential threat. [00:12:30.790] And there are many instances of this throughout history. There were times where maybe a volcano erupted and it led to a really bad harvest. And again, people looked at back then, they look at things like a volcano erupting and they go, the gods are angry with us. And so the local high priest says that, well, we've got to appease the angry god and so somebody's got to die. And there are many historical instances of this, really of climate disasters, including even periods of climate change throughout history. [00:12:59.400] Thousands of years ago during the Bronze Age in the Minoan civilization, which is really kind of ancient Greece before the classical age, what we think of as ancient Greece I mean, this was more than a thousand years before that, the minimum civilization where during this time in the Bronze Age, many parts of Europe really became actually significantly warmer. And this undoubtedly led to many tribes desperately attempting to placate their gods and say, we've got to do something about this. Sacrifices must be made. And that led to some people dying. If we're really honest, if we're intellectually honest, I think you could make an argument that we just have a more refined version of this today. [00:13:41.370] At its core, there's still some kind of ruling class. Back then, it was an emperor or high priest or something like that, but we still have a ruling class today that's not some kind of conspiracy theory. I don't necessarily think that there's mustache twirling supervillain sitting in the cigar filled room or anything like that, but there are people that sort of think that it's their lot in life to tell everybody else what to do. Many of those people are unelected. Many of those people you know, you've got some of these organizations like the World Economic Forum and so forth that just crank out white papers demanding that they should be able to tell everybody what to do and how to live their lives and so forth. [00:14:19.410] So there are people you know, let's call them global policymakers or the policymaking elite. It's not a conspiratorial statement. It's just there are people that are in a position to have enormous amount of influence in setting these policies. That includes even in the media, that includes in certain businesses, even in the financial sector we've talked about this a lot with companies like BlackRock that have basically weaponized $10 trillion of other people's money in order to put forward an agenda, including, frankly, including a climate change agenda. And there are people that make certain decisions about policy, and those decisions often involve everybody else sacrificing. [00:15:02.950] Now, we're not necessarily talking about let's go on an altar and plunge a dagger into somebody's heart to make a blood offering to our gods. That's not really what we're talking about. But as an example, we saw this extensively during COVID And in respect we still do in places like China, where the leaders, the ruling class make decisions to sacrifice the needs and in some cases, yes, the lives of certain people for what they deem in their sole discretion to be the greater good. And this has happened. And this did happen. [00:15:35.280] Even in some of the most I'm doing error quotes most advanced democracies in the world. We have supposedly a representative democracy, a republic in the United States and in many other countries as well in Western Europe, where there was never any debate about the merits of this strategy. There's never any debate or discussion about defining the greater good. What does this mean? What are the priorities here? [00:15:55.720] Do we actually want to do this? There was no vote. There was only dictatorship. There was propaganda, and there was intellectual suppression, and they simply decided that if you died for other reasons, if somebody died during the pandemic, during the Lockdown era, because they didn't get you know, they didn't have the opportunity. To get a cancer screen because everything was closed or they died because of drug abuse or suicide or any number of reasons. [00:16:21.090] That was OK as long as you didn't die. Of COVID if your children lost years on their social and educational development, if your business closed, if your entire life was turned upside down, that was fine with them, right? You were just simply expected to sacrifice for what they deemed to be the greater good. Now, everyone, of course, didn't sacrifice. The politicians didn't sacrifice. [00:16:43.620] The ruling class themselves. They didn't sacrifice. There are many famous instances of this, and not just politicians, to be fair, there were instances a member in the UK, one of the first guys who wrote he was an academic, and one of the guys who wrote was the key author in this study saying everybody needs to be locked down or everybody's going to die. We got to do this right now. Sound the alarm bells. [00:17:05.380] You know, this is a guy that was going out and sleeping with his mistress when everybody else is supposed to be locked down. And of course, some of the other examples were just hilarious. You had Nancy Pelosi caught on video going to her hairdresser during the lockdown, and then she blamed the hairdresser not to be outdone. Then Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot was also caught going to the hairdresser after locking down people of Chicago. And then when she was caught, she justified it. [00:17:28.500] She stared cold into the cameras and said that she takes her personal hygiene very seriously. Not making this up, this is almost verbatim, direct quote, that she takes her personal hygiene very seriously. Therefore it was okay for her to violate her own lockdown rules because she takes her personal hygiene very seriously. Then you had Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, who was caught gladhanding slapping everybody on the back at a fancy restaurant with rich political donors after locking down his state. And the list goes on and on and on and on and on. [00:17:57.970] Completely and totally ridiculous. Because of course, the sacrifices never come from the high priest. Rarely at all. In human history, when we have cultures that engage and practice ritualistic human sacrifice, does the high priest step up and say, let my blood be the first to spill? It just doesn't happen, right? [00:18:15.550] The king, the emperor, or whatever. It's always somebody in the lower classes who gets tossed into the Wicker Man. It's never the high priest, it's never the druid. And we can see this again with the trends that are taking place. I already referred to it with climate change and the recent this top 27 climate change summit. [00:18:37.030] I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago that was taking place in Egypt. Frankly, it was another hilarious example. We've got dozens of world leaders, corporate CEOs, NGO presidents, guys like Klaus Schwab who run the World Economic Forum. Everybody flies in on their private jets to wag their finger at all the little people in the world to tell everybody else what we can and cannot do what we should and should not be able to do. And they do it all in a host country. [00:19:02.680] Egypt, which has a pitiful, absolutely pitiful track record on human rights, has been sanctioned by the United Nations. And all these guys show up and they go shaking hands and slapping each other on the back and basically just to come up with ideas about how the peasants should all sacrifice for the greater good. They're not going to sacrifice for the greater good. They fly in and out on their private jets and their security, and they tell us we shouldn't eat meat, and then they've got filet mignon on the menu. Again, it's hilariously. [00:19:31.570] Bad tone deaf policymaking at its worst. But this is the way it always is to them. Everything that everybody else does is bad. Meat is bad. Travel is bad. [00:19:42.280] Any economic activity is bad. God forbid somebody has a factory and produces something. Any of these things, it's all bad, bad, bad. Basically, these guys want us to simply consume less and go back to being neanderthals where we're just eating weeds and bugs and we never travel far from home. That's to them, kind of the goal of what everybody wants is just a way of consuming less. [00:20:03.510] They want to have a pastoral lifestyle. And again, I'm not making this up. [00:20:09.860] You go to the World Economic Forum and you can read the white papers where they put out things like, we need to eat. We need to start eating weeds. Human beings can be conditioned to eat and to like weeds, to eat and to like eating bugs. We can be absolutely conditioned to do so. They want to train us to eat weeds and bugs while they fly in and out of their summits on their private jets and have fancy steak and all these things. [00:20:35.510] Honestly, it would be hilarious. If it's not so disgusting. I kind of have a glasses half full approach to life, so I do find it hilarious also because there are ways around this, and that's really kind of what I want to talk about. Before that, anytime there's any discussion about climate change, I'm not making any statement on climate change. In fact, I will be even more direct and say, just in case anybody's wondering, yeah, of course the climate is changing. [00:21:03.180] I don't think that's a controversial statement to say, yes, the climate is changing. For me, I have a background, a lot of different businesses. I started an agriculture business some time ago, and I focused a lot on agriculture. And so from an agricultural perspective, you can grow corn in North Dakota now, and you used to not be able to do that, but now you can, and you can. You can grow corn in North Dakota because the climate has changed sufficiently to make that possible. [00:21:29.290] And so to me, it's not really a question of whether or not the climate change of course the climate is changing and the climate frankly, has changed so many times throughout human history because the climate constantly changes, just like the universe constantly changes. And I don't know, when did anybody promise any of us that from the day that we're born, nothing at all in our lives is going to stay the same forever? I don't know. Anybody that came out of the womb and got a contract that said nothing in the universe will change. Everything will stay exactly as it is right now today. [00:22:03.910] Like, of course, not everything changes. And when things change, there are advantages and disadvantages. There are costs and benefits and sometimes crises and sometimes incredible opportunities and problems that just need to be solved. And there's, of course, a certain amount of really over the top alarmist fanaticism. Again, I'm not suggesting that the climate's not changing or anything said I like clean air. [00:22:29.470] I like clean water. I like clean soil. I think it makes I like organic food. I think it makes sense to consume resources efficiently. I think it makes sense, especially considering that fossil fuels are finite and once we run out, we run out. [00:22:40.870] So of course it makes sense to consume things efficiently and look at better technologies and so forth. But it's difficult to take these people seriously when they're constantly screaming. They have this ultra alarmist, endoftheworld is nigh scenario and yet A, they refuse to lead by example. You know, again, they fly in on their private jets. They can talk about how everybody else should not be doing any of this sort of stuff and we should all be vegans, eating bugs and weeds and so forth. [00:23:08.890] And then they go and have a fancy steak on their menu, and B, they refuse to engage the most obvious solutions that exist that are already on the table. If they were actually serious, for example, about reducing CO2 emissions and slashing fossil fuel consumption and so forth, then they would be all in, all in on nuclear power. Nuclear power exists. It's a technology that has existed for decades. And if the world actually went nuclear, then CO2 emissions would fall by at least half. [00:23:35.290] They would easily surpass their carbon neutrality goals and all these things. But instead they get together at Cop 27 in Egypt and they dedicate an entire day to solving climate change through gender identity. And if you think I'm making that up, I encourage you to go to the top 27 website and you can see the agenda and you'll see there is literally an entire day devoted to gender identity. Somebody could possibly explain to me, what does gender identity have to do with climate change? And yet these people screaming, the end of the world, the end of the world. [00:24:06.190] And it's just really hard to take these people seriously. Of course it makes sense to who wouldn't want to have nobody's just say, I like dirty air and I don't want to drink clean water. It's ridiculous. Of course these sorts of things make sense, but they're ultra alarmist, end of the world's nigh, complete lack of leadership, going and putting resources and manpower and research and everything into terrible, terrible ideas is just completely and totally ludicrous. But that's the standard. [00:24:37.540] The thing that's obvious out of all this is that the momentum is not slowing down. They're down this war path and they're just going to continue and continue, continue. The momentum is not slowing down. It's building. It's growing. [00:24:49.830] And it's going to continue to do so and most likely become a much more dominant part of our lives. The rules and the regulations and the taxes and the fees and the scowling and the finger wagging and all these things is only going to increase. And we can see a lot of examples of this. In the United States, for example, there's a big push from government regulators. And so for companies to have to put their climate liabilities, their CO2 emissions on their corporate balance sheets. [00:25:15.250] And if that weren't I'll just be polite and say difficult enough, the rules that have been proposed are completely absurd where they are essentially impossible to deal with. Where a company is supposed to put on its balance sheet essentially what the potential climate impact would be to what the climate impact would be as a result of its customers and contractors, potentially employees and suppliers and so forth. It's not even sort of what one company does and say, okay, well, we have a factory and here's what we think we might be. You know, our greenhouse gas emissions, what they might be. It's like, well, somebody's buying our products, so now we have to know what their greenhouse gas emissions are going to be. [00:25:57.960] How would anybody even know that? And you end up basically double, triple, quadruple, counting every single thing. It's so completely ridiculous. They take something and they make such an absurdity out of it. Again, it's very, very difficult to take these people seriously because you just look at this and go, really? [00:26:13.020] That's your solution? It's so completely ludicrous. But it's a trend that's not slowing down. And we see these pushes. We see activist investors, the tiny little hedge fund that puts a couple million dollars into ExxonMobil and ends up taking over, basically taking over the board of directors and forcing huge oil companies to invest, to divest some of their fossil fuel assets, divest their refining assets, and invest in hugely inefficient wasteful projects. [00:26:42.570] Say, oh, let's get into Coronethanol, because every single study about corn ethanol shows that it has negative energy return on energy invest. It's one of the worst things you could possibly do. But you know, it ticks certain boxes in their, you know, their little green circles that they really like these sorts of things. Even though it makes absolutely no economic sense, it makes no environmental sense. It's actually a terrible idea. [00:27:05.140] For the environment, but they do it anyways because it's not oil and that's all that matters. So this is a trend that is not going away, and it's not going away. It's getting bigger and bigger. It's already so big and it's just getting bigger. And because of that, it's really important to understand. [00:27:19.930] And I want to walk through one aspect of it today because again, change is constant. The universe itself is constantly changing. The universe is not stationary. The universe is expanding. We have expanding galaxies, we have contracting galaxies, we have solar systems. [00:27:34.740] Everything is just constantly changing and including human beings, we're constantly changing. Our relationships are constantly changing, our businesses are changing, our children are changing. Everything is constantly changing and change. Economies change and political trends change. All these things change. [00:27:50.370] And whenever we have change, there are sometimes crises and sometimes opportunities. There's costs and benefits, advantages and disadvantages, risks and rewards. And it's important to understand those. And one of the things that I want to talk about today, one trend in particular, all this really big trend of climate change and really not just climate change so much as people's reaction to climate change policymaker's reaction to climate change, this human sacrifice element of it. One trend that's really growing, one sub trend is carbon credits. [00:28:20.440] Now, carbon credits, you most likely have absolutely heard of carbon credits. Most people have because they've been around for a while, but they kind of back in the algorith days when he was going around giving his climate change presentation, people started talking about carbon credits and then it sort of died for a while. It got really quiet and there are a lot of reasons for that, but they're starting to really make a big comeback, especially among global policymakers. Global policymakers are really starting to get behind carbon credits. And if you think about carbon credits, the basic idea boils down to carbon neutrality, to treat the environment as a zero sum game, an asset that needs to be maintained. [00:28:58.380] So polluting it as a negative, emitting CO2 or some kind of greenhouse gas is a negative. So if you're emitting some kind of greenhouse gas, then the first step is to reduce that negative as much as possible. And the next step is whatever negative you have remaining is to offset that remaining balance in some way so that it balances out. That offset basically means buying carbon credits. So one carbon credit generally represents one metric ton of CO2 or what time would you say, a CO2 equivalent that has been captured or sequestered, etc. [00:29:33.810] So, for example, if you have a company, you have a factory, and your total gross carbon emission is whatever, one metric ton, then you buy one carbon credit to offset that so that you become carbon neutral. So you have minus one from your emissions, plus one from your carbon credit to offset that. So minus one and plus one offset. So you are now zero. You are carbon neutral. [00:29:54.330] And you've got all these companies that are already pledged to be carbon neutral. And I'll get to that in a minute. But the way this sort of market works is you have on one hand, you've got companies, factories and big Fortune 500 companies, and everybody saying we need to reduce our carbon emissions and we need to become net zero, we need to become carbon neutral. And so they're buyers of carbon credits. On the other hand, you've got people that are suppliers of carbon credits. [00:30:20.070] These are people that plant trees and conserve trees and so forth. Because of that, they have there's some math behind this that shows, okay, depending on this species of peak or pine trees or whatever, this many trees on this many acres will sequester x number of tons of carbon. So basically they say, okay, we'll give you x number of carbon credits per acre of this kind of species of tree you have. And so you have people that are going to plant those trees or conserve those trees that already exist, then they get a certain number of carbon credits. So you have the producers of the trees, basically people that are managing the trees and the forestry projects that are supplying carbon credits, and they're selling them to the companies need to buy the carbon credits to offset their CO2 emissions. [00:31:07.630] And so because of this, there's this creates a marketplace where you've got the suppliers of carbon credits and the buyers of carbon credits. And so the price of carbon credits goes up and down based on that supply and demand. There's more suppliers, there's more demand, et cetera. So that price goes up and down. And then, of course, there's interest. [00:31:23.340] What really drives a lot of the price of carbon credits is interest from speculators. So you have speculators that come in, and they think the price of carbon credits going to go up, and so they buy a bunch of carbon credits, or they think the price of carbon credits might go down, and so they start selling carbon credits. But ultimately, in the long run, it comes down to speculators get into everything. They get into stocks and get into forex, and they get into options. They get into every gold and commodities, everything for which you can speculate, real estate, etc, etc. [00:31:50.160] But at the end of the day, longer term market prices are determined by supply and demand. There's either there's more demand for carbon credits or there's less demand for carbon credits. That's what ultimately drives supply and demand of just about everything in the long term, supply and demand. [00:32:07.540] The other thing I think to understand about this, and I want to talk about supply and demand of carbon credits, is that it's not enough. The marketplace is really quite broken. There's no marketplace. There's a lot of different individual marketplaces. I won't say it's decentralized, it's just really fractured. [00:32:24.900] It's very disparate. A farmer doesn't really sit with a factory owner in exchange credit. It's not like a guy who runs a forestry project shows up to the local factory and says, hey, I got 1000 acres of peak here and so it's this many tons of CO2 and you're admitting this many tons, so let's do a deal and you're going to pay me for this. That's not really how it works. How it works is there's some bureaucratic organization that stands in the middle of that. [00:32:47.700] And they go with their clipboards and their studies and their surveys and they go to a farm or forestry project and they say, OK. Well, you've got this many acres and this many or hectares in the metric system and this type of tree and blah, blah blah, carry the one, etc. And so we're going to award you this many credits. But it's kind of you lick your finger and stick it up in the air and figure out which way the wind is blowing. It's really not an exact science. [00:33:13.110] As much as these guys love to brag and praise about their science and science people and following the science, whatever, it's actually not really a terribly precise or scientific process. It's also incredibly bureaucratic. Sometimes these projects, in order to be certified by one of these kind of bureaucracies, these nongovernmental organizations that stand in the middle there, it could take a really long time, sometimes even a couple of years. And so then you've got the exchanges themselves where people go onto an exchange to try and buy and sell carbon credits. There's no global market for carbon credits, no standardized contract like there is for something like gold or oil or coffee or Apple stock or whatever. [00:33:53.800] I mean, you can sell Apple stock in exchanges all over stock exchanges all over the world. And a share of Apple is a share of Apple. But with carbon credits, every place is different. But more importantly, the rules and the regulations are different everywhere. So it creates a really confusing and highly bureaucratic process. [00:34:10.090] That's kind of one of the reasons why it sort of got quiet for many, many years and people didn't really hear very much about carbon credits because it became a little bit too difficult for it to take off. Now again, if these policymakers were actually serious, then they would come up with a simplified standardized process for carbon credits at this. But of course, they're not interested in real solutions. They're interested in the appearance, the optics. They're interested in giving the appearance that they care about the climate as opposed to actually doing something and coming up with real solutions. [00:34:38.820] Now my view is that there are challenges in, in this, this fractured and disparate marketplace. But long term, and again, long term is really the long term. Supply and demand is what sets prices and really drives prices. And I believe wholeheartedly that demand for carbon credits will soar based on the trend that we see right now, there's almost an unstoppable momentum in this sort of climate fanaticism from policymakers, where it's every month, every year, it's more and more and more. It's more regulations. [00:35:11.350] In New Zealand now they want to tax Cal Farts and all these things no joke. These are real policy ideas and solutions that people are coming up with. Again, it's ludicrous. It's hilarious to see some of the stuff that they come up with. And so every day it's just more and more and more. [00:35:29.010] And I think that that drives long term demand for carbon credits. We already see this right now that a bunch of companies, for example, if you look in the United States and the SP 500, whole lot of companies have made some sort of climate pledge. But honestly, right now it's a relatively small number, which is well under half of the SP 500 companies. And way below that, if you look at a broader index like the Russell 2000, it's just a fraction of what it's going to be in the future because I think probably within a decade. Again, I could be wrong on the timing, but we're going to get to a point, I believe, where pretty much, I mean, not only every company in the SP 500, but probably nearly every medium to large sized business. [00:36:12.180] At least in the developed world, will have to be moving not only towards some kind of pledge, but hardcore carbon neutrality, whether they like it or not. They'll either have to do it because they're being forced to by the government, or they're going to have to do it because their consumers aren't going to forgive them otherwise. And again, it's all about the optics. We don't really care. We just have to look like we care. [00:36:31.260] And so we're going to come up with this pledge, but it's got to be a big pledge like carbon neutrality. And carbon neutrality again, means A, I got to cut my carbon emissions as much as possible and B, I have to offset whatever negative emissions remain with some kind of positive offset. That means carbon credit. So the demand you can sort of see already that if you're looking at the longer term trend here, demand is absolutely going to soar. And on top of this, that's just corporations, right? [00:36:59.310] On top of that, you've got pretty much nearly every country in the world has pledged carbon neutrality by different timelines. 20, 30, 20, 40, 20, 50. China says 2060. Who knows if they'll actually get there? And again, this is very long term, but there's a whole lot of this even by 2030. [00:37:15.540] And by 2030 we're going to have this much of our carbon emissions last, or this percentage that's carbon neutral. And for governments that are signing up for this stuff, this means they have to do it that's state, provincial, local, federal, national governments, schools, hospitals, port facilities, etc. Are all these different entities, governmental, governmental related, that are having to purchase carbon credits to offset their carbon emissions. So that's a really big increase in demand for carbon credits. At the same time, the ramp up period, if you think about supply, has significant lag. [00:37:50.350] It takes years and years for trees to grow to the point that you can actually say they're really sequestering or capturing a lot of carbon. Years, not to mention the bureaucratic process to approve those credits can also take years. But that aside, if you just think about nature itself, it takes a long time for trees to grow. So if all of a sudden there's this really big increase of all these countries that want to go, and corporations and all these different facilities and institutions that are trying to reduce their carbon footprint and go to carbon neutrality, et cetera, and you have this really long lag period because it takes such a long time for trees to grow. There's a massive gulf between the demand for carbon credits, which could go to the moon, and supply, which will certainly increase, but will do so at a much slower pace. [00:38:36.930] And so that gulf of the difference between demand and supply, I think you can make a case, as a case to be made, that the price of carbon credits could really take off. I would say. Speaking of taking off, actually, we could also see incredible man from consumers as well. Take off, I say a little bit tongue in cheek, but if you've ever bought an airline ticket from some airlines I know British Airways does this, for example. It always gives you the option to there's an option right now where they offer you carbon offsets when you purchase your airline tickets. [00:39:06.640] So you get to the end, you go to your shopping cart, and of course, they always offer you that travel insurance, which is a total scam, and everybody knows that they offer you travel insurance. By the way, if you're traveling and you're thinking, geez, I need travel insurance, never buy it directly from the airline. That's crazy. If you want travel insurance, just go and search for specifically travel insurance and you'll get a much, much better deal. Travel insurance in and of itself is not a terrible idea because if you get sick and you have to go to the hospital or something like that, it's not a bad idea to have some insurance. [00:39:34.210] Just don't buy it from the airline because you'll pay three, four, five times the price easily. But in that sort of shopping cart part in the end, and you say, okay, would you like to buy a carbon offset? This could easily become mandatory, right, so you won't see it in the price. There'll be some law passed or they say every airline has got to charge carbon offsets. And when they do that, you're not going to see it. [00:39:54.150] It's going to be invisible, but your fare is going to go up to include the cost of the carbon offset, or they might add it to the fare. So they'll do like with rental cars, when you reserve a rental car and they say, oh, it's $75 a day, and then by the time they add all the taxes and fees, it's like $180 a day, you go, whoa, what happened to $75 a day? It will be the same thing where they go, okay, your fare is $249. And they go, oh, there's this fee, this fee, this fee, this fee, this fee, the 911 security fee, blah, blah, blah. And then, oh, there's a carbon offset fee. [00:40:23.290] So instead of $249, you're actually paying $486 or whatever. So it'll be something like that. And that is really inflationary. And I think we could easily see the same thing for gasoline and electricity and all sorts of things. I mean, ad valorem taxes, carbon taxes on automobiles in general. [00:40:43.080] If you have an automobile, they don't like that, so they create certain disincentives and taxes, and there's a carbon tax on vehicles, all sorts of things that we could see, all in an effort to offset individual CO2 emissions. This could be one of the most inflationary events of our lives if we all start having to offset individual carbon emissions on all these things travel and transportation, energy consumption, etc. And that could be an incredibly inflationary event. But again, these are people who are all about human sacrifice for the greater good. They've unilaterally decided in their sole discretion what the greater good is. [00:41:22.380] There's been no discussion about it. There's been no national debate. If you have a different opinion, they shut you down. They say you're a conspiracy theorist and you're anti science and all those things, and then they'll just force you to sacrifice whether you're willing to or not. Again, they want everybody to go back to this almost neanderthal pastoral lifestyle, eating bugs and weeds. [00:41:42.340] And that, to them is this ideal situation. And I say a little bit tongue in cheek, and I don't know really how serious they are about that. But again, you look at this cop, 27. You go, really? You devoted an entire day to gender identity, but there was no discussion of nuclear. [00:41:58.920] Zero discussion of nuclear. And you just how do these people expect anyone to take them seriously? That's why you can hear me almost laughing as I talk about this, because it's comical. Their incompetence is just so comical. It's hilarious. [00:42:15.860] And it would be I think there's probably a reason to be afraid if you don't have a plan B, if you're not thinking about this stuff. Big picture. And I think that's the important thing is to think about this really, really big picture, look at the trends, step back and take a much larger view of some of these trends. And you'll see here, sure, there's risk and there's also opportunity. So part of the risk needs to be mitigated is them trying to force feed things, no pun intended, really jam things down, whether it's carbon offsets or taxes or just different rules and regulations and things like that. [00:42:53.190] Because again, they've decided what's the greater good and they want you to sacrifice. And there is a lot of precedent for this. If we look at COVID, et cetera, lots and lots of precedent for them just forcing everybody to sacrifice, whether it makes sense or not, where it's economically rational, where it's environmentally rational or not, they don't really care. It's all about the optics. But there will always be countries that don't participate. [00:43:14.430] And COVID, again, was another great example of that. Whereas most of the world certainly was hardcore, hardcore locked down and keeping people in their homes, like where Felons locked up in a maximum security penitentiary. There were countries that didn't participate. There were places even within countries that didn't participate. And I've told this story a lot, but it's why I ended up my wife and I ended up in Cancun, Mexico, to have our first child last year. [00:43:40.120] It's because we wanted to be in a place where COVID didn't matter. And the Riviera Maya region, coastal Mexico, near Cancun, this was a great place to be. And I remember the first time I walked into the gym in Cancun and nobody was wearing a mask. And this was like peak insanity during COVID nobody wore masks, nobody cared. Because there are always going to be places that buck the trend. [00:44:03.700] Everybody else might be going along with it, but there will never be 100% compliance. Even with something as crazy as COVID, there was not 100% universal compliance across the world. And it would be the same with this. There will be people to go, no, we're not going along with this nonsense. We're not going along with this gender identity solutions to solving climate change. [00:44:22.170] We're not going to play by those rules. That's silly. And those countries will make themselves known. And this is why we talk about things like residencies and passports and so forth, because you will have options. And when you have options, when you exercise those options, more options means more freedom. [00:44:38.220] And this is why it's something that we can look at it and see all this sort of insanity. We can see the wokeness and the incompetence and all these things that we can be afraid of it, or we can say, you know what, I'm just going to make sure that I have some options. And if you have options, you're going to be okay. You're going to be okay. And this is a really big risk mitigating factor. [00:44:58.840] Again, with change, there's risk and there's reward. There's consequences, an opportunity, and it makes a lot of sense. The whole concept behind having a plan B is making sure that you're in a position of strength regardless of what happens or doesn't happen next. And so some country, a whole bunch of countries go down a very destructive road and say, we're going to regulate this. We're going to make this happen, we're going to increase this tax, and so forth. [00:45:21.220] If you have some other options, you're going to be okay. And if that stuff doesn't happen and things turn out to be just fine and the risk never materializes, then big deal. You're not going to be worse off because you have a second passport that still allows you more freedom and rights to live in other places and you can pass that down to your children and your grandchildren and so forth, that you have the ability to go and live in a nice place. At least go on vacation on the beach somewhere or whatever. There's no downside to that, right? [00:45:51.580] There's no downside whatsoever. But if the worst does happen or even anywhere near that adverse scenario takes place, then you have options. And those options mean that you're going to be okay. That's the whole point of the Plan B. It's not to go and spend crazy amounts of time and money and energy and stress on things that don't make sense or they only make sense in some cataclysmic scenario. [00:46:13.930] That's not really, in my view, a sensible approach or a sensible plan B. If your Plan B only makes sense if the world comes to an end, then it doesn't work, right? Because there's going to be 99.9% that like this one specific scenario that you're planning on doesn't come to pass, it's going to be something else, right? And so the idea is to do things that are sensible no matter what happens. If everything turns out to be fine and the unicorns and the rainbows and the buttercups and everything's great, then your Plan B should make sense in that scenario as well. [00:46:46.260] And that's why I said having a residency or a couple of residencies and other places that you actually like to go and visit that might even end up later on down the road after a few years awarding you a passport that your children also end up getting and their children can end up getting. And great. There's no downside there. There's no downside. Oh, well, I take a vacation every couple of years and I go to some nice place on the beach that I enjoy. [00:47:10.710] There's no real downside there. And that's the way to think about it. And again, in a scenario like this where they get really draconian on climate regulations and so forth, it does make sense to have some other options. We can talk about some of that other time. We talk about that sort of thing a lot. [00:47:26.850] I don't want to get too deep into that today. But the flip side of that is once you've mitigated the risk, again, these changes and trends and so forth, they come with risk. They come with rewards that come with consequences, that come with crises. Sometimes they come with opportunity and the opportunity here is these guys are creating a massive industry, really, really massive industry, and there's going to be a lot of money to be made. [00:47:50.590] It's undeniable because they are putting so much money behind it. They're putting just hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars. I mean, you see these estimates about stopping climate change. You know, it's going to cost hundreds of trillions of dollars. Oh, my god. [00:48:04.080] I mean, if they even put if they even put 1% of that money towards this, I mean, it's trillions of dollars. So there's a lot of money to be made in that trillions of dollars. And it's important, I think, to look at all this with a very long term view. I have to say here as well. Like, this is not me giving anybody any investment advice. [00:48:27.930] This is a guy I'm recording this on December 2, 2022, a time when the first amendment in the United states still exists. So this is a guy who's just exercising his first amendment right to have an opinion. But in my opinion, one, again, hedging your sovereign. Risk, as we talked about before, does lead to more freedom. Having a plan b makes a lot of sense. [00:48:46.720] And number two, you can make money from this insanity. And one of the ways to do that is through carbon credits. I think it's definitely sensible to look at if you have a long term view. There is potential, as we talked about, for the price of carbon credits to grow substantially simply because there's a mismatch between demand and supply. You got all these companies, all these governments, potentially individuals and so forth, that are going to demand more and more and more. [00:49:12.670] We can see easily an exponential increase in demand for carbon credits for supply. There's not a whole lot in the marketplace. And the growth process, just the cycle of nature, takes years. The approval process for that bureaucratic issuance of carbon credits, that takes a long time. So there's a lot of constraint on supply, but a lot of momentum for demand. [00:49:36.270] And so you look at something like that and go, well, geez, that makes a lot of sense. And in a way, in a weird way, it's actually a little bit like bitcoin. If you think about bitcoin, ten years ago, there was very little penetration. Most people never heard of bitcoin. There were people that knew about bitcoin. [00:49:51.730] They were studying it. They were looking at it, and they were buying it, and they said, okay, there's going to be a time where demand is going to increase a whole lot for bitcoin. So I'm going to buy right now. Supply of bitcoin, as we know, is fixed. So there's clearly constraints on supply and probably going to be a lot more demand. [00:50:05.760] I mean, we were writing about it long, long time ago and thinking like, yeah, demand is probably going to increase. And so in many respects, carbon credits are a bit like that, where it's like bitcoin in 20 13, 20 14, where there's very little penetration, really disjointed, disparate fragmented markets. There's not a whole lot of standardization in the marketplace. And so, yeah, at some point, just as we saw the price of bitcoin suddenly spike, we could see the price of carbon spike. And because it becomes the thing that everybody wants to invest in here, one of these days in the future, people sitting around the Thanksgiving table talking about investing in carbon credits, it becomes a hot trend. [00:50:46.180] The chart, the price chart for carbon credits goes parabolic all of a sudden, and I think that's a possibility. Again, there are no guarantees about financial outcomes. There are very few guarantees in life at all. But I think this view is on fairly solid ground, just given the supply and demand fundamentals and where this momentum is going. There are other ways to do that, though. [00:51:11.620] There are other ways to invest. And personally, I'm not much of a speculator. I'm more of a business guy. I view businesses as real assets. I think it's businesses a great business is the realness of real assets. [00:51:24.430] And I've talked about this before. I think that real assets in general, real assets always make sense. They especially make sense in an environment where governments and central banks have proven their incompetence. They're rapidly losing the confidence of the world. And in a very inflationary environment, stagflationary environment, real assets tend to make a lot of sense. [00:51:44.170] If you think back to the 1970s, real assets did very well. Gold did incredibly well. Agriculture did incredibly well. Farmland specifically did very well. Energy did very well. [00:51:55.690] The stock market, on the other hand, was pretty dismal. The stock market was not a good place to be in the 1970s. And so in an environment like this I've said this before, I think real assets do make a lot of sense. And I view businesses as a fantastic real asset, a productive business that's managed by talented people of integrity, that produce a valuable product or service that's in demand. This is a great real asset. [00:52:23.520] And I'm a business guide. I think about business. Businesses, unlike other asset classes, like real estate, for example, real estate generally has a fairly fixed upside. If you buy a single family home or an apartment complex or something like that, you can only do so much to raise the rents right. You can fix up the kitchen and spruce up the bathrooms and these sorts of things. [00:52:45.580] But you can't take a place, can't take a house that's running for $2,000 a month and all of a sudden charge $20,000 a month. But at business, revenues can grow really limitless boundless. It's really a function of, as opposed to market constraints. It's a function of human ingenuity, creativity, talent. And that's one of the reasons why I like business so much, is because the potential is literally unlimited. [00:53:09.270] And there. Are already and will continue to be businesses that look at this trend, look at this momentum, and capitalize on some of those opportunities. And so businesses that are really related to whether it's carbon credits or different technology, whatever. I'll give you a few examples. I mean, I help manage personally an investment fund that has invested pretty heavily in some of this. [00:53:31.270] And one of the things that the fund got into was a forestry provider. Often it's in Africa where land is literally dirt cheap. And the fund came in and bought thousands and thousands and thousands of acres to produce carbon credits. And there are going to be a lot of businesses that focus on this. And I look at something like this and go, okay, if I think that demand is going to soar in the future, I want to be a supplier of that. [00:53:55.240] I want to be a supplier of that thing, and I want to get in early so that as demand really starts to skyrocket, now, suddenly my trees are coming online, my permits are coming online, my credit is coming online, and we can start selling those things and make a lot of money. And there's going to be funds, there's going to be businesses and so forth that do that. Technology is always in. These sorts of things can be a really great idea. We invested as well alongside with many of our Total Access members in our group here, in a company that has developed just, again, another example here, really incredible satellite AI technology. [00:54:28.860] So this is so that companies can determine exactly how much CO2 is being sequestered. So this way they really streamline and even bypass that insane NGO bureaucracy. So if you've got a big company that says, you know what, I don't even care. We're not going to buy carbon credits. We're just going to go and get our own land and offset stuff ourselves. [00:54:48.630] We're going to go get our own teak plantations. We're going to outsource and contract with some teak providers. But I want to know exactly how much CO2 is being captured here so we can look at our balance sheet and get some really precise determinations. Well, these guys have created technology to be able to do that. And I think that's going to be really, really valuable technology, looking at the trends and the momentums and so forth. [00:55:08.380] Again, nothing is risk free, nothing is 100% certain, but it's just an idea of a couple of ideas of ways to sort of get into this. It's directly into carbon credits and some businesses that have exposure to that and businesses that are basically tackling some of the problems and the challenges in the marketplace. But ultimately, again, it just to me seems that there are a whole lot of opportunities here based on this big trend. These bureaucrats, these policymakers, the high priests are demanding their human sacrifices. They're creating a gigantic industry. [00:55:39.490] And we do hear about it a lot right now, but if you think we hear about it a lot now, you ain't seen nothing yet. This is still fairly nascent. If you compare what's happening right now in the climate market and the carbon credit market, etc. But if you compare this today to the ambitious climate and carbon goals that they've set for 20, 30, 20, 40, 20 50 and so forth, again, so I said you've got to have a longer term view. This isn't some overnight thing where you can just go, oh, I'm going to buy something and I expect it to go up 40% tomorrow. [00:56:09.400] That's not really what we're talking about here. This is something with a very long term view. It's not anything that somebody says, oh, I got to get in right now, or anything. We spend a lot of time studying this, trying to figure out the best ways in the best approaches, the right people to work with, etc. Or spent really a lot of time studying this. [00:56:27.820] And it's something that, again, you should never invest in anything that you don't understand. You should really, really do a lot more research and understand everything about the market and what you personally think are the risks and the opportunities. But there is literally so much money being put into this and a lot of it is completely silly, nonsensical. Some of these are just terrible ideas. But the momentum is what it is and it doesn't seem to show any sign of slowing down, let alone stopping. [00:56:53.650] And because of that, they are creating really a mountain of opportunity here for people that can see this and understand where these trends go. They are like the high priests of the Mayan civilization or the Celtic druids, or even the Roman elite who put their thumbs up and down or really sideways for the whether or not people live and die in the Colosseum, they're more than happy to watch people suffer. Or at least they're turned a blind eye to the suffering that they create, to the sacrifices that they demand for their sole definition of the greater good. Again, you don't have to accept that. You don't have to be the sacrifice. [00:57:27.390] And that's why we have a plan B. That's why we create options for ourselves. And there will always be options because like I said, there's never universal acceptance for these things. Even with COVID there were options. There were places to go where you could still have a sane and normal life. [00:57:43.470] And it'll be the same with just about everything. You rarely have universal blind acceptance to a single rule around the world, and COVID taught us that. But at the same time, we shouldn't ignore the obvious momentum of this trend because there will be a whole lot of opportunities that come along with it. Thanks very much for listening and we'll talk to you next week. Close Podcast Transcription