Big fan of both Penn and Teller but libertarian bullshit is still bullshit and they proved that even smart people fall for it if they hang in the wrong circles too much.
"Every tingly spidey sense, every sniff, every whiff, smells like global warming—which they now call climate change, in case they want to go the other way and say it's colder—but it just reeks of fuckin' bullshit to me. And yet, in good conscience, we can't really come out and say it's bullshit, because there isn't enough information to really refute it completely. And there is some information that it might be real.
So—the high-dea is not to go with your gut, the idea is to go with your head, and our heads can't say that global warming is complete and utter bullshit. So we're doing—again, this is like our third show that's kind of sort of on global warming—we're kind of picking out one area that we're sure is bullshit, and that is the carbon credits, the spending money so that your guilt goes away. Buying a forgiveness."
I see proper intellectual restraint about the science, and criticism of one particular policy proposal.
Just replace climate change with another established scientific fact that you actually agree with, like the earth being a globe perhaps, and you'll see what you sound like to people outside your bubble.
> "Every tingly spidey sense, every sniff, every whiff, smells like global earth—which they now call non-flat earth, in case they want to go the other way and say it's a pyramid or banana-shape—but it just reeks of fuckin' bullshit to me.
> And yet, in good conscience, we can't really come out and say it's bullshit, because there isn't enough information to really refute it completely. And there is some information that it might be real.
> So—the high-dea is not to go with your gut, the idea is to go with your head, and our heads can't say that the spherical earth is complete and utter bullshit. So we're doing—again, this is like our third show that's kind of sort of on global shape—we're kind of picking out one area that we're sure is bullshit, and that is the funding for satellites, which would only make sense if the earth was a globe. What a waste of money. Millions down the drain!
Says a lot about Libertarian ideas that the one thing they attack is using market mechanisms to address the problem. Clearly principles get trumped by fossil fuel funding.
I would actually have serious respect for someone who is in such an intellectually impoverished environment that they think the world is flat, yet they have the intellectual humility to say they're not totally sure.
The video doesn't actually say what Penn's objections to carbon credits are. Googling a bit, Wiki's episode summary for "Being Green" says: "Attacks the concept of carbon credits as a method of profiting off guilt, and compares them to indulgences"—well, is he wrong? I also see comments indicating that he says Al Gore buys carbon credits from a company he owns, which sounds at least like an "appearance of impropriety" which Gore maybe should have avoided.
> Clearly principles get trumped by fossil fuel funding.
Do you really think Penn got funding from fossil fuel companies and ... The steelman is that fossil fuel companies have paid unscrupulous individuals in think tanks that libertarians subscribe to, to write mendacious reports that libertarians believe. That's possible. I wonder if any other group has been fooled by mendacious reports.
I wonder what the best strategy is for defeating mendacious reports in general. Perhaps encouraging everyone engaged in a scientific debate to be as scrupulously honest and precise as they can be—and to recognize dishonest tactics. A failure mode in that is seeing dishonest tactics where none exist, so perhaps one can (encourage everyone to) adopt practices that make it easier for everyone to tell the difference. Things like publishing all raw data, preregistering experiments, and offering rewards for neutral parties to reproduce an experiment, seem helpful.
Admitting that they where wrong on some parts isn't exactly bad. Also doesn't affect the countless other topics they covered from which almost all are still BS today. Could they have been wrong on recycling? Yes, they could but there is no evidence that they where wrong.
