Empires rise and fall. And while we understand these cycles conceptually, there’s a bizarre notion that we are somehow immune. That we can continue to evolve toward greater ease and material abundance generation after generation. That our potential for growth is somehow unlimited. But natural resources are finite. So, what happens when we run out?
Dr. Jason Bradford is the Cofounder of Farmland LP and Cohost of Crazy Town, a podcast produced by the Post Carbon Institute that explores “climate change, overshoot, and runaway capitalism”. He is also the author of The Future Is Rural: Food System Adaptations to the Great Simplification. On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Dr. Bradford joins Ross to explain what differentiates ecological economics from other schools of thought and why some resources are simply too valuable to price.
Dr. Bradford shares his prediction regarding a great simplification of civilization, describing his vision of a future where we might still enjoy modern conveniences but at a very different scale. Listen in to understand why we he thinks we can’t ‘artificial ecosystem’ our way on to other planets, why industrial carbon capture is a bad idea, and how we might build a lower-complexity society that is sustainable for the long term.
Connect with Ross
Subscribe to the show on Substack @ rosskenyon.com/subscribe.
I also write Carbon Removal Memes and curate Climate Workers Anonymous.
Resources
The Future Is Rural: Food System Adaptations to the Great Simplification by Jason Bradford
Tom Murphy’s Do the Math Blog on Economic Growth
Enough Is Enough: Building a Sustainable Economy in a World of Finite Resources by Rob Dietz and Dan O’Neill
Paul Kingsnorth on Reversing Climate Change S2EP53
Ted Nordhaus on Reversing Climate Change EP100
Kim Stanley Robinson on Reversing Climate Change S2EP51
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m the creative editor at Nori’s Carbon Removal Marketplace. Today I have with me Dr. Jason Bradford, farmer, co-founder of Farmland LP. You’ve had so much involvement with the Post Carbon Institute over the years, and you are the author of the report, The Future is Rural, Food System Adaptations to the Great Simplification. Thanks for being here, Jason. Thanks for asking me to come on the show and spend some time with you. My pleasure.
I’ve known about you for a very long time and listened to the show on occasion because a colleague who’s also a podcast alumnus, Ryan Anderson, turned me on to what y’all are doing down in Corvallis. And yeah, I should say also that you are here to talk about the new season of the podcast that you co-host called Crazy Town, which I think is the goofiest show about the apocalypse I’ve heard. Maybe you don’t see it that way. Do you? It almost doesn’t seem like an apocalypse because you sort of, maybe there’s a sense that you look forward to it and think we might actually live better lives.
So maybe that’s even the wrong framing, but let that stand. It certainly is a goofy show. Yeah.
Dr. Jason Bradford: Yeah, yeah. No, we try to have fun with really kind of difficult topics. And I guess we’re trying to get people out of this sort of notion that the future of high-tech modern society is inevitable or even desirable. You know, there’s a lot of downsides to the complex civilization we have and all the consumption and waste and destruction of biodiversity, blah, blah. But, you know, we think that we’re going to colonize other planets and mine asteroids and get our way out of it like that. And so we try to break down that myth, but it’s also not like a Mad Max necessarily, right?
Or we’re trying to also say we have some agency in the future that is somewhere in between the apocalypse and space colonization. So...
Ross Kenyon: Hmm. God, we’ve veered so far into grim shows lately. Like one of the most recent ones we did was with Paul Kingsnorth. Do you ever read him? Oh gosh. Yeah. Great episode. You know, one of my personal favorites. Am I allowed to say that on the air? But also that’s been a running theme too. I need to have someone on who wants to talk about building a transplanetary civilization just so we can balance it out. I can’t just give all the future to you, Jason.
Yeah.
Dr. Jason Bradford: Yeah. Well, Kings North is pretty amazing. Really interesting. So great thinker.
Ross Kenyon: Fair enough. Yeah. Well, where to even begin? This report has been a useful applied lesson in what is often called degrowth economics. And I learned a lot reading it. I mean, would you describe it as a fair exemplar or an applied way into this way of thinking?
Dr. Jason Bradford: Yeah, I think so. You know, I’m pretty familiar with ecological economics with your friend Ryan Anderson, who you mentioned earlier, really knows quite a bit about. So I’m a student of that, which is really an important kind of distinction between mainstream There are mainstream economics nowadays, which would be called neoclassical economics, and even what you might call environmental economics, which is sort of a form of neoclassical economics, which tries to account for environmental externalities. Ecological economics, I think, goes well beyond that. And also, a lot of people that are into the degrowth literature, I think, will be aligned with more ecological economics.
It’s really figuring out a way to have the human endeavor be at appropriate scale for a finite planet with a certain amount of solar income and a certain amount of fresh water and biodiversity and all the ecosystem processes that Keep our planet like stable, relatively speaking, and cycle nutrients and clean up waste. So getting a handle on that and basing kind of economic theory on really the fact that we are just one species out of millions inhabiting a planet circling a star, you know. So that’s sort of where it came from is that understanding.
And I said, well, how does that apply to the food system and agriculture going forward? Hmm.
Ross Kenyon: And my understanding too, is that these two schools of economics are actively hostile to some degree. I think if you called an economist an environmental one, something’s about to go down. Is that your understanding too? Or vice versa?
Dr. Jason Bradford: Yeah. Yeah. No, I think so. I think a lay person would not think, oh, environmental economists, ecological economists, they might be the same. It’s like, no, very different kind of worldviews actually. So like William Nordhaus is an environmental economist and sort of believes that he’s trying to figure out how to price carbon correctly so that we mitigate climate change. Whereas most ecological economists would think that his work is pretty bunk and foolish.
Ross Kenyon: I mean, he won a Nobel though for it. Who are you, Jason? Did you win a Nobel Prize?
Dr. Jason Bradford: No. I know. How could I critique the Yale professor? Sorry. Sorry. I had to put you in your place a little bit. No, there’s just certain things that you can’t price, that the market is just limited in what it’s able to do. And there are certain things that maybe should be off limits for the price mechanism, that they’re just too valuable to leave to the vagaries of markets.
Ross Kenyon: Is your understanding of neoclassical economics and environmental economics as a branch of economics underneath the neoclassical umbrella? That’s something that is concerned with price theory about almost like a microeconomic lens of how prices might operate in distributing creation of goods, stuff like that. Is that a correct understanding?
Dr. Jason Bradford: Yeah. And it’s evolved to this bizarre notion where, and this has to do a lot with the history of the 20th century and the amount of growth we’ve had. And how do you explain that growth? And that growth seems to be explainable in terms of what you would call capital and labor. And there doesn’t seem to be a contributing factor anymore to resources or what historically would be called land. And so they’ve misconstrued then the situation to explain the growth of the last 100 years.
And so, The idea being that these things like the oxygen, the food are actually so fundamental that we take them for granted, almost like a fish doesn’t understand that it’s in water. And so that’s how completely warped the worldview of sort of neoclassical economics has become. And if you go back far enough, you know, the original economic theory, it was very much tied to land as the ultimate resource, right? Saying that, of course, we’re an agrarian society, we harvest food, and all wealth can be derived from understanding there’s sufficiency and maybe even surplus of food.
And if you don’t have that, everything else in your society is kind of going to collapse, right? You’re going to have chaos if people are hungry and starving and political disruption occurs. And it doesn’t matter what pyramids you’ve built or how well educated you are if you can’t eat. So the neoclassical economists kind of forgot about that because their theories really were derived in the 20th century during this amazing period of economic growth that was fueled by essentially exploiting oil and coal and natural gas.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. If you go back and read someone like David Ricardo, you’re like, God, dude, enough about land. I get it. Rent, land, over and over. Is this the only input of production that you care about? Answer, probably. But you almost sound more like a physiocrat to me, like this obsession with land and tangible, I don’t know. Yeah. Immovable property, nature. Do you see yourself as part of the physiocratic tradition? What even is that?
Dr. Jason Bradford: I don’t know enough about that in particular, but I do believe that we do have to retether ourselves to real goods and services and not sort of the virtual, the virtualness of even like art nowadays, right? It’s like a JPEG just sold for tens of millions of dollars, these crypto art. Yeah, so worth more than the greatest paintings in history, I guess. And it’s a JPEG. So, I think we’ve become so abstracted from reality and we’re able to only because we have this incredible industrial civilization that underpinning our sort of ability to put on virtual reality goggles and spend time on Oculus is really coal being burned and oil for transportation and rare earth minerals being mined.
But that’s all happening for most people so far away from where they live. And they’re living this high energy modernity and they don’t understand the physical nature of it. That’s what’s so bizarre to watch and to see how disconnected people are.
Ross Kenyon: That’s true. Man, you make me want to stick up for the division of labor though. And I’m like, some of these things are amazing advances. Would we be able to have... Things like vaccines, would we be able to have... There’s so many good things about the development that we’ve had too. Granted, it’s really easy to see all the downsides. If we weren’t living in close proximity, maybe we wouldn’t have as many communicable diseases that would outbreak in this way either. Maybe we’d be a little bit safer from that.
Dr. Jason Bradford: Yeah. No, I totally get this. And so, yeah, you can hear someone like me and think, oh, you know, this guy wants to live on some mountain in Idaho. And... And no, I mean, but there’s this in the Crazy Town season three that, you know, we sort of mentioned earlier, we do an episode on kind of the complexity of our world. And one of the examples we use to drive this home is there was this guy in the UK who tried to make a toaster from scratch.
Ross Kenyon: I love stuff like this. So good. Tell us about it. Yeah. You remember that? I don’t know this one in particular, but I saw one guy trying to make his own sandwich from scratch. Whenever there’s a story like this, I always read it, but I haven’t seen this one.
Dr. Jason Bradford: Right. So, no, you’re right. The division of labor is a pretty nice thing. And to be able to trade across vast distances is a really nice thing. And our openness to other cultures and other ideas that has developed through the Enlightenment era, it’s a really nice thing. I just think that do we have to do it while essentially driving life into dust? And we’re all wondering now how many more harvests we’re going to have on the agricultural soils, and we don’t seem to be doing a whole lot about it.
I know Nori is working on stuff and ideas related to that. Good, but come on. Why do we have to be so idiotic at the same time that we’re supposedly brilliant?
Ross Kenyon: It has to balance. The universe must be in balance, Jason. You have to have the idiocy and the brilliance together.
Dr. Jason Bradford: Right. Okay. Okay.
Ross Kenyon: No, I don’t know that’s too persuasive for me either. Okay, so what exactly, how should we be thinking about this? Reframe this for us and give us a new way of understanding how we can trade, how we can have some of the benefits of the division of labor without not taking into account all of the bad things and just ignoring them. I like the image of your show, by the way, has made me laugh for years every time I’ve come across it of the house that is just like half destroyed.
It’s like, I don’t know, something just seems a little off about this.
Dr. Jason Bradford: Yeah. And we’ve got a new one actually, which is the planet. Season three has a new logo or whatever. It’s a picture. It’s like the planet Earth has got a face on it. And it’s kind of like this weird kind of expression, like, I don’t know what’s going on here. Jeez. And it’s got a burning mohawk over the top of it. Oh, that’s fun. Okay. That’s kind of our new one, Crazy Town logo. But yeah, something is off, right?
So I think there’s a lot of anxiety in this world and a lot of confusion because it has gotten so complex that no one really knows what’s going on or how it all pieces together. There’s no one driving the bus. It’s like this hungry super orgasm that can never be satiated and it’s just churning up the planet. So I don’t know if we’re going to turn it around, honestly, through governance and treaties. I don’t know. I feel like we’re at the edge of a breakdown of some kind where the complexity will start to fade away and then regions will be forced to kind of make do With their own resources more and more.
And I’m not saying it’s overnight. I’m just saying like, more and more, they’ll be like, it’d be harder to get stuff from the other side of the planet. And we’ll have to start looking back at our own land, our own water, our own forests, our own food systems. And replacing those imports and having trouble exporting our specialized goods to other parts of the world because they’re having their own issues. And so I don’t know how fast this happens. I don’t know how far down it goes, but that’s what we sort of refer to in the report as the great simplification.
We’ve got this world that’s incredibly complex, the most complex civilization ever formed in the history of the world, the first global civilization of all time. And, you know, really because we have cheap transportation fuels, oil, that we can do this. But that, I think, is running its course. And at some point, we start having to fall back on the biocapacity of the regions we live in more and more.
Ross Kenyon: One feature of your book that stood out to me was that you don’t think we’ll be able to easily switch to renewable energy, which you might even not like that term very much. That might be something more like natural resources to you. So I’m prepared for a counter-attack. Yeah, that’s a great point. Yeah, please tell us why.
Dr. Jason Bradford: Well, I think of renewable energy really more as sort of, it’s really rebuildables. In other words, there are early versions of wind turbines and solar panels that are now waste products. Like they got to figure out how to put them in landfills. And that’s 25 years old. And so these are plastics and epoxies and these are complex pieces of equipment. You ever see a wind turbine? It’s gigantic and it’s manufactured with incredible specs and all these laminates, sheets. And if you were to dissect it, you would say, oh, wow, look at that specialized material here and this specialized material there.
We don’t know how to recycle this. So they end up being landfilled. Same with solar panels, you know? So when you say, okay, renewable energy, what you’re talking about is very, right now, okay, it doesn’t have to be, but right now, it’s very complex, globalized manufacturing processes to incredible specifications, producing things that end up degrading and becoming waste in like 25 years. And we’re supposed to produce so many of these that they compensate for all of our oil and natural gas and coal use, which is an extraordinary feat of materials, like the amount we have to mine and refine and ship to manufacturing centers and then ship back out and deploy.
The energy to do that and the material requirement. And then they have to be replaced because we’re not building them to be easily retrofitted and recycled. And they all degrade. Everything degrades. Everything breaks. If you work on a farm, you realize, oh my gosh, today this broke. And then next week, what’s going to break? Everything that gets used degrades, fricking entropy. And that includes the rebuildables that we use to capture flows from the environment. So I’m not against that per se, I’m just against the idea that we think that can scale to replace fossil fuels, or that it comes without risk and additional cost and complexity, or that we’re even thinking about it properly.
If we were thinking about it properly, we would be thinking foremost about reducing our energy use as fast and as much as possible, and then building these renewable energy systems or rebuildable energy systems In ways where it was pretty obvious how you retrofitted, repaired them and not landfill them.
Ross Kenyon: There are arguments in the book that I see along those same lines too, concerns about intermittency of these rebuildables as you call them. And you are thinking that with this great simplification, civilization is too specialized, too complex. It’s not actually resilient. It’s actually very fragile as we’ve seen with the pandemic or other things. A lot can go wrong and people are not prepared for it. So you are predicting at some point in the future, we will have a great simplification by which we will return to simpler ways of living.
Is that an accurate summing up?
Dr. Jason Bradford: Yeah, and I hope it’s a stepwise progression that you can adapt to reasonably, right? I’m not either predicting or wishing that this wasn’t something that we could adjust over time to, but yes. And so intermittency is a big deal. So right now, we always expect at any time that we can flip on a light switch or go to a gas station and get whatever energy services we need anytime we want them. And our society has really now become dependent upon that. And so the idea that energy systems can wobble and not always work for us is a big deal.
We saw like in Texas recently with the freeze, right? As soon as that happened, suddenly, oh, I don’t have a water system. I can’t cook. And without that, then with the freeze, the heating starts busting all my pipes in my house. Now I’ve got floods. So there’s all these knock-on effects. I think we’re going to suffer from intermittency and have to sort of shift more to the idea of making hay when the sun shines. We’ve now got surplus energy that we can capture and use.
Let’s do a lot of work now. And then Let’s be resilient for times when we don’t have a huge amount of surplus energy, but we can still get, you know, access to the things we need. And designing our entire civilization around that would be a really wise, you know, use of resources, probably better than like rebuilding the cruise industry, you know, as COVID winds down.
Ross Kenyon: Listeners may know this. I think it’s come up on the show more than once, but there’s an inbuilt assumption within modernity that’s often called the Whig or Whiggish view of history, that there’s just a constant evolution towards greater and greater ease. You’re Life will guarantee be better than your parents. And this will always happen. And it sort of compounds like the ease of life, the material abundance. This is relatively new. We take it for granted. We swim in it. So we don’t really notice it.
But previous civilizations used to see cycles, right? Like there’d be rises and falls of empires. Right. Yeah. Take us back there. Are you advocating a return to the cycle rather than the exponential or even logarithmic curve?
Dr. Jason Bradford: Well, I don’t know if I’m an advocate so much as I’m just pointing out the reality of it. There’s a concept in ecology called the adaptive cycle, and it’s been applied in social spheres as well. So to say that societies go through adaptive cycles And this has happened to all civilizations, like you’re saying. And it’s really just the bizarre notion that we’re immune to that. But I think it’s just because we got so high on the excess energy of fossil fuels, we thought we could solve every problem.
And you’re right. The mindset of that is a unique thing. It’s tied up in the progress myth. And I think that right now we’re in this sort of inflection point where if you ask people about their view of the future and what their anxieties are, you’re probably going to get a lot of cognitive dissonance. People are going to be both worried that it’s all going to fall apart at the same time they’re saving for retirement and really giddy about the latest gadget Or the newest idea on how we’re going to colonize space.
I think people live in these different world views and juggle between them sometimes. And so it’s confusing. There’s not a resolution because you’re getting one set of messages That everything’s going to be okay and technology will save us and we’re always going to live longer. And then you’re getting other messages like, oh God, you know, the grid is unstable and climate change is going to lead to major refugee crises and we only have so many harvests left before the soil washes away and fish stocks are depleting and all the old growth forests are kind of going and the coral reefs are dying.
So how do you resolve both of those? That’s what’s crazy, right? That’s crazy town. That’s what our podcast is about. It’s like, it is irreconcilable, honestly. And we need to have a unified vision of reality, or at least, you know, scientifically speaking, you can never say you’re going to know everything perfectly, right? But at least be a little bit better off. The Venn diagram between the thoughts in our head and the reality on ground in the universe That Venn diagram better have a big overlap or we’re screwed, right?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, fair enough. I want to talk more about this macro history kind of zooming out. I’ve heard a lot of explanations for this. I’m wondering if you can give me a canonical, quasi canonical, your unjustified opinion, some combination of all three. We’ll talk about the hockey stick Thank you so much. I can think of people maybe more like Andreas Malm representing sort of like the Marxian approach. I think of Deidre McCloskey talking about how cultural changes about how We went from vilifying merchants and usury into saying this is actually something that’s productive and worth celebrating.
That changed things. That created sort of modernity in that way. I’ve seen Paul Romer talk about the importance of ideas and how important that is. Then you have people like Neil Ferguson, I’ve seen talk about, he actually has like the killer apps of Western civilization, like private property, rule of law, which is sort of like the Washington consensus, like World Bank. Yeah. Do you think it actually is just the quick and easy energy? Is that the explanation that you think is most explanatory?
Dr. Jason Bradford: I think that’s at the root of it, but I wouldn’t say that these other factors aren’t important. And another one that you haven’t mentioned was sort of the financialization of the world. And that’s a really key one too, right? It’s the ability to then create financial instruments that allow individuals, corporations, governments at various scales to make claims on the real world. And so you have this thing, this abstraction of finance that has become socially so acceptable that you can trade it for real things. And that’s super important, of course.
But if you were to say like, why is Western civilization become dominant? I don’t know how much of it has to do with like, oh, our wonderful philosophies is it has to do with, we basically kicked ass with finance. We got We set up a banking system and trade relationships and sort of global governance that allowed us to essentially extract from the rest of the world and just pull resources in simply because we created reserve currencies and powerful central banks. And we did tend to have more or less stable governments that people then trusted we weren’t going to inflate away the value of our currency.
And so whenever there was any kind of crisis somewhere, the wealthy would just funnel money back into our markets. So I think that’s a huge part of it too. And then if you look at where Where the oil age began, it was in the US. So you had this country that did have a democracy, did develop huge gold reserves, because it was helping send food over to Europe while they were having all kinds of wars, like Napoleonic Wars. And then we got Louisiana Purchase, it was really cheap, and suddenly we had this vast territory.
And so we find oil. And then after World War II, we’re the big dog. So we get to set up the international finance system. Woohoo! That’s only 60 years ago. And so now these historians think that we’ve got some special sauce, you know, in our minds. And it’s like, fucking A. You know, if you’re an historian, look at, tie it all together. I don’t think we have, I’ve traveled all over the world and I talk to people from, you know, poor countries.
I look at them and I go, they’re not stupider than me or less, you know, creative or less caring or they just happen to be born in a place that, You know, is a colony. Sorry.
Ross Kenyon: I mean, that’s another explanation too, or certainly another factor. Think of world systems theory, Emmanuel Wallerstein of the center and the periphery. Yeah, if you’re born in the periphery, it’s not good.
Dr. Jason Bradford: Most of the world’s a periphery. If you live in the center, you think you’re God. You don’t realize you just, you know, you set it up that way to make you feel that way.
Ross Kenyon: Man, that’s such a brutal lesson, too, to be able to look at people like that and be like, wow, the chance involved in all of this is so cruel. I’m not smarter than any of this. And even when we’re born, you know, the era we’re born in, too, for gosh sakes. Yeah, I’m not more deserving or either in time or space than basically anyone else. Yeah.
Dr. Jason Bradford: I got, I’ve been lucky my whole life, you know, and sure, I haven’t made a bunch of stupid decisions, but most of what I have is because I happen to be born in a certain place and with certain parents and that were decent to me and good education. And I married a nice woman who makes money and there we go. And now you live on an organic farm and you get to shake your finger at all of us sinners. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Good life you’ve set up here, Jason. Okay, so great simplification. You think it seems likely to you that there will be less access to energy that is cheap and available. And so we are going to revert to a lower complexity civilization. That’s sort of where you’re pointing.
Dr. Jason Bradford: Yeah. Yeah. Lower complexity. So that’s an important, like, what does that mean exactly? That means that there’s fewer people working sort of in the managerial class, let’s say, the administrative class, which is a lot of work. I mean, it takes a lot to, like, govern and trade at the scale we do globally. Yeah. And to become specialists in, like you’re saying, making vaccines, you know, biotech or high energy physics or whatever, that requires an incredible amount of effort. People spending thousands and thousands of hours developing those specializations.
So I think we’ll just have less opportunity for that. It doesn’t necessarily go away and then we’re not necessarily like lose at all, but we have to really prioritize. You know, there are societies that Still have good healthcare and still have some modern conveniences and manufacturing capabilities, but it’s just at a different, it’s a vastly different scale. So looking at, I think it’d be really pay us to look at countries that use a tenth the energy we do Right now in places like the US, say how they organize, how they structured, what do they have, right?
What kind of conveniences? And is there a way that we can sort of shrink our ecological footprint and our consumption levels, but not, yeah, lose some of the great advances we had? Like, I like getting vaccinated and things like this. I like having, you know, I like having a surgery and not being awake, so.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we certainly take that one for granted. Well, paint us a vision of this future. You have a lot in here. I know you’re sort of set up now, almost in anticipation. You probably would do this either way, though. It seems dispositionally suitable for you. Living on a farm in Oregon, you get to live that lifestyle. How should the rest of us be thinking about it? I’m an urban dweller. I have dreams of being maybe a human. Could I be a human in the future?
It’s a very Larry David way of asking it. But like... Point me in the direction that we should be going, should be thinking about this.
Dr. Jason Bradford: Yeah, this is so hard because in the US, 80% of the population lives in cities or suburbs right now. 20% lives in what are called rural areas. But most of that 20% aren’t farming. There’s a lot of rural residential. There’s a lot of people who just have their nice place in the country and can walk their dog and get really nice views and not hear city traffic. But they’re tied to urban jobs. Maybe they commute in or They’re lucky enough to telecommute now, figure that out.
So they’re not necessarily making, you know, they’re living off of the land that they’re on, right? And I think that’s what I see long term is more and more people actually have livelihoods connected to being in a place and harvesting some of the surplus from that local ecosystem. How we get from here to there in a place like the US is kind of mind boggling. And so there are, you know, plenty of stuff I talk about, about, okay, we could have land trusts that buy land and make it available to farmers who are interested in learning how to skill up and serve local economies again, etc.
Woodlots and these sort of things can be important. It’s very hard to know how any of that pays for the modern lifestyle though. So people have to sort of either have a spouse that makes more money than they could ever imagine doing that kind of work and they’re supported or that society has to sort of subsidize that. If we had a society that guaranteed some basic income and had guaranteed good healthcare and relatively free education, a lot of people can make choices to live pretty poorly materially, like monetarily, but then have the latitude, like the security to develop those skills.
And I think of myself like parts of Eastern Europe, these villages, I could probably go into some village in Romania and they would stand me up against the wall and say, okay, who’s the best farmer here? Let me organize you by quality of skills. I’d be down by the bottom. I’ve been trying this for 15 years and gosh, my knowledge is vast compared to most people around me. I feel like a stud. Any rural peasant would just kick my ass, right? And so there’s a huge amount of time we need for a population like the US where very few people actually know how to do any land-based skills anymore, especially without heavy equipment, to learn that again.
I think that would be a wise investment to make and to do it before we actually have to do it. Think of it as a type of resilience. And people want to do this kind of thing. And many young people do actually. It’s hard for their parents to understand, but I meet them.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’ve told this story before, but I knew people who became first-generation farmers. I should say the first-generation farmers that I’ve met in my life. I was like, really? You’re not just born into this? This isn’t a caste thing? You can choose to be a farmer? I stayed on their farm for like a month back when I was more than a decade ago. Nice. Yeah, you learn a lot pretty quickly doing that. Yeah, you certainly do. One question I have for you is I’ve seen the claim that the most, I don’t know if it’s the most, but it’s certainly up there, the most ecologically beneficial way of agglomerating is something like Manhattan.
Like their carbon footprints are low. They don’t have personal cars for the most part. They walk, they take public transit. That’s supposed to be super low carbon. And then also the more people that live in cities, the more nature can rewild. In fact, having farms, if they’re the wrong types of farms, are not really natural, right? They’re like monocultures. They’re not really good for biodiversity or actually like how plants and animals would live in the absence of humans. What might you say in response to something like that?
Oh, this is one of my pet peeves. Oh, did I breach it? Did I do something wrong? Are you going to spank him real bad?
Dr. Jason Bradford: No, I’m just so happy I went right, cut right to the chase. Because yeah, there are books written about this. And I guess, you know, here’s like a thought experiment. Remember the Truman Show and they had like a bubble over this place? Sure. Okay, put a bubble over any city and see how long it lasts. Not long. That’s true. Not long. They’d be eating their own limbs after a while and wallowing in their waste. It’s horrible. So every city requires vast energy to move goods in and waste out, right?
And if you measure like at the final delivery, if you do the statistics where you say, right, the final delivery of It’s not that bad in the city. It’s really efficient. I can walk downstairs, go down the block, I’ve got a grocery store. Great. And nowadays in countries like the U.S., if you live out in the country, you’ve got to drive 40 miles to find a Walmart sometimes if you’re living in that country. So is that the fault of the country or is that the fault of a society structured the way it is?
Because I can tell you, I’ve traveled around the world and I’ve gone to plenty of peasant little villages where it’s like in a city. I’m in a little village and I walk to the town square in a block and all the goods and services I could need are right there. Just like I’m in Manhattan. But unlike Manhattan, I can also walk out to a field a quarter mile away and that’s where the food’s grown. So there’s a false comparison being made between high energy modernity in cities and in civilizations that support cities and what the rural hinterlands are now like where you can’t even find a freaking post office and the schools are all closed.
So you hate these LCA games then? A lot of the LCA is just to have poor boundaries of analysis. Yeah, fair enough. Well, I’m going to ask the Breakthrough Institute to come back on, trash what you just said. Oh!
Ross Kenyon: Cool. You guys should have like a battle show. I want to see you go through this breakthrough.
Dr. Jason Bradford: Yeah. On Twitch or something. I guess that’s the app where people do that or whatever.
Ross Kenyon: Oh man, you’re so far behind. It’s Clubhouse now. Come on, Jason.
Dr. Jason Bradford: Is it Clubhouse? I am far behind. I’m 51 years old. I’m ancient. Yeah. Well, also it’s only for iPhone, so you can’t come anyways. Oh, darn it.
Ross Kenyon: Fair enough. I think those are all really important, good questions to be asking. I never know. Some of these details, once you get into them, I feel like I don’t have the quantification necessary in my brain, the skills that are necessary to parse all this. Those seem like valid counter-arguments. Now I’m trying to think, though, what they would say in response to you. Put yourself in their shoes, Jason. Argue for them against yourself. Can you do that?
Dr. Jason Bradford: Well, basically they take a lot of trends that are real, okay, and they extrapolate them. And a lot of times they just don’t understand the energy basis for that trend and assume that we’re going to solve all our energy problems because things like renewables are getting cheaper and So there’s a misconstruction of like, it’s sort of like in economic theory right now, there’s this sort of idea that you can substitute one form of capital for another. So that productivity is a function of the multiplication of factors of production, labor and capital.
And if one form of labor or capital gets too expensive or gets rare, then another one will step in. It doesn’t matter. We can just substitute. And so a lot of what fallacies you see for organizations like that, that believe that we can substitute all these different forms of capital. And so it doesn’t matter that oil is running out. We’ve got other forms of energy to substitute. Or it doesn’t matter that topsoil is running out. We’ve got vertical farms we can do or whatever in cities.
And I think the problem is that you don’t really understand that these are non-substitutable things. The famous analogy I like is the guy, Frederick Soddy, who was a biophysical economist, who had this little quip. He said, no phosphorus, no thought. So there are certain atoms that without them, the human body just dies if we don’t have enough of them. And you’re not going to like say, you know, if the price of phosphorus is high, we’re going to substitute something else. I’m sorry it doesn’t work that way.
And the same thing is true for a lot of aspects of our civilization. We are depleting things that there are no substitutes for. I would argue there is no substitute for concentrated stores of phosphorus. There is no substitute for deep voluminous conventional oil wells in the long term. There is no substitute for the environmental sinks that things like the ocean provides or large tracts of forest provide. There’s no substitute. We aren’t going to substitute technology like building machines that will suck carbon out of the air at any kind of significant scale.
It’s just not going to happen. But they believe it will. They believe there are substitutes. When I think of myself, no, there’s not. You just don’t understand the physics, the biology, the chemistry enough. And you believe in the economic fallacy that you can substitute one form of capital for another.
Ross Kenyon: Some things probably are substitutable though, right? If a given commodity becomes expensive enough, the race is on to find something that will substitute. But are you saying for something like an element can’t be substituted for nearly as easily because it’s an element and it’s literally itself and only that. But does that logic not apply other places? Because it feels like it does to me.
Dr. Jason Bradford: I mean, think about like, sure, the price of wheat goes up. So the market decides it’s going to shift and buy more rice, like a country that eats wheat and eats rice. Okay, fine. I’m going to find a substitute. But at some point, what I’m saying is there are things like That assumes you’ve got a surplus of rice somewhere else, you know, that you can acquire. But for certain things, we are literally running low on them. Like we are running low on the world’s topsoil.
Now, some say, okay, we can step in technologically and make fake topsoil or whatever, you know, or do everything hydroponically. But you start doing math on these kind of supposedly solutions, and none of it scales very well, like the cost to do it. So a lot of these substitutes end up coming with very high cost, and they can’t deploy very fast, and they usually end up taking more energy and materials to do. Nature is there. It’s evolved and developed over thousands and millions of years. We are depleting that capital.
We call it natural capital. I hate that term.
Ross Kenyon: I knew that you would. Obviously you would. Yeah.
Dr. Jason Bradford: I’m using the terminology of the environmental economist. And we think we can come up with some technological built capital that will substitute for that. And I think for much of that, we can’t. We just don’t know how. And I don’t think we ever will be able to. So there are simple things, yes, we can substitute for, right? The rice versus wheat or whatever. But for a lot of the stuff that’s really fundamental, that at the scale of our civilization, no.
Ross Kenyon: I have a feeling that even if technologically, economically, some of those foundational things could be substituted, even if they could be, you might oppose them because the relationship seems inappropriate. Like if you could strip away the topsoil and have 50 years of amazingly productive agriculture, but then we had to make the rest of it in a lab, you’d be like, that is not the correct way to think of our relationship to land. Is that correct?
Dr. Jason Bradford: Oh yeah. Okay. So there could be a predisposition for me. I also think it has to do with like, I think that humans think too highly of themselves and their cleverness in general. And If I can get, you know, forests and soil organisms, fungi to do basic things like capture sunlight and that it just automatically happens, right? Like the production of biomass, the cleaning of pollutants, it just happens because the ecosystem is there and it’s functioning. I find that to be a much more elegant, adaptable, resilient system than to say, we’re going to wipe all that out, and then we’re going to develop some set of machines to replace those processes.
Now, we might be able to get away with that. Up in a spaceship, they figure out how to take carbon dioxide and turn it back into oxygen that people can not suffocate on a spaceship. But boy, there’s a lot There’s a lot that can go wrong with that mechanized equipment, and those scrubbers, and those filters, and they’re constantly needing replacement, and things break, and these astronauts are probably running around all the time, checking levels, and you know, I mean, if my car breaks down on the side of the road, that’s one thing, but I don’t want to be in outer space when shit happens like that.
We just, you know, because we’re so disconnected from reality and we’re so specialized, we don’t see how complex these systems are and how vulnerable they are. And meanwhile, we’re destroying the ecosystems of the planet that just took care of that for us without us having to sweat it too much. So it’s kind of stupid.
Ross Kenyon: I’m gonna tell a little anecdote here. I’m sure you know this already, Jason, but for listeners who don’t know, there’s a very famous story some decades ago of Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon making a bet on the price of commodities and whether they would be cheaper or more expensive. And Paul Ehrlich was famous for thinking that we’re gonna have intense population growth, everything was gonna get more expensive. And Julian Simon was famous for taking the contrary position, that things were gonna get cheaper, markets would develop, division of labor would expand.
Is there some sort of parallel bet you’d be willing to make with Ted Nordhaus and that we could track somehow to see which one of you is full of it?
Dr. Jason Bradford: Yeah, that’s a good question. I don’t really like saying when stuff is going to happen because, you know, it’s so easy to be just wrong. Like with Ehrlich, you know, what was it? North Sea oil was discovered and Alaska was developed. Pretty much explains what happened to his bet. We bought ourselves some time. I thought we might have gone tits up in 2008 or 2009. But guess what? We created an amazing amount of money and suddenly the fracking industry took off. That bought us another 10 to 20 years.
So there’s all kinds of hat tricks we’re going to try. More and more extreme shit. We went offshore. We went up into the Arctic. Now we’re going to the source rock. We’re going to try so much to keep the game going. I don’t know exactly when we’re going to start failing. I think maybe we’re seeing signs of failure, but it’s hard to say when it actually puts serious pressure on us, at least in this part of the world. I’m sure there’s people in other parts of the world who are like, oh God, it’s horrible already, right?
I’ve had a complete societal breakdown. I’m starving. The government has failed. The climate has shifted so much. I’m now a refugee. Hey, there’s plenty of examples of that, actually.
Ross Kenyon: Spoken like a guy about to lose a bet. Well, dang, I want to see something like that. Obviously, making bets like that is tricky, but I can imagine I’m going to put myself in Ted’s shoes here for a second. Ted, I hope you don’t mind putting words in your mouth. But these accidental discoveries happen over and over and over again. It isn’t only the financialization of everything and money creation. It’s just humans responding to price signals, making stuff happen, finding substitutes. We just do that over and over.
There is no stopping point. You reject this logic, though, fundamentally, I think.
Dr. Jason Bradford: Yeah, no, I reject that. Yeah. No, I mean, you can do... There’s this guy, Tom Murphy, who’s pretty interesting. He’s a physicist, physics professor in San Diego. And he had this blog called Do the Math that I really love because he said, Okay, let’s just keep doubling the amount of energy we use as a human civilization, you know, and let’s even get more efficient to a certain point. But there’s physical limits to how efficient you can get that are pretty well understood in terms of the car dot cycle and, you know, heat engines and these sort of things.
And there’s even using electricity, there’s a waste heat product. So when you convert, you know, to electric motor, the motor still gets warm. Anyone who’s run an electric motor knows it gets warm. So, the Carnot cycle, which is what internal combustion engines use, have a waste heat. Electric motors have waste heat. So he said, let’s make them as perfect efficiency as we can, and let’s just keep growing the economy and the size of the human enterprise and the population and see what happens. And it’s like, you know, he has these great, like, well, by this year, the temperature on Earth will boil water everywhere.
By this year... It’s remarkable how few generations it takes if you just keep doubling the growth of things, where just the waste heat becomes the point where we make an unlivable planet. So yes, there’s always going to be a limit somewhere. I think it’s going to happen far sooner than that. But no, you can’t just keep growing and imagining you’re going to have a bigger population and more consumption per capita forever.
Ross Kenyon: This seems like a good place to ask this. Is that a good summation of what degrowth economics entails? Is that a canonical view, you might say?
Dr. Jason Bradford: Yeah. And also though that, so first of all, it’s impossible to grow forever. And then also to throw yourself into this idea that you can means that you’re completely wasting what resources you have because you could be purposing for things that will actually persist and have a likelihood of persisting. So imagine if we said, Hey, we need to create a manufacturing base, an agricultural system that we know can persist for a thousand years, where we’ve done the math and say, hey, we’re always fighting entropy. There’s always breakdown.
So we need to tightly recycle all these things. We need to stop investing and trying to grow, but starting to make things that really, really last. Homes are not going to be these cheap tract houses that end up being wasted after 50 years, but we have to have homes that will last for hundreds of years and can be maintained with the kind of technology that anyone in that area can understand and repair. And you can go around the world and you can see places like this, right, where people still live.
In the same place they lived for several hundred years. So it’s not like it’s not doable. It’s just that because we have this other idea stuck in our head, we’ve been poisoned, brainwashed, we’re actually not taking all the human ingenuity. I think people are incredibly clever and can solve problems, but we’re not solving many problems that are actually worthwhile anymore as a problem. We now seem to be worried about human extinction and existential risks. The big universities in the world have these departments on existential risks.
And you look at what the risks are, it’s like, oh, it’s like cybersecurity. It’s like EMP. It’s like nanotechnology run amok or AI. I’m going like, well, that’s all because for some reason, we seem to think those are smart things to be doing to the world. What if we had all the brilliant minds actually saying, hey, I want a civilization that I can pretty reliably know will persist for a thousand years and not destroy the planet? Take your ingenuity and put it towards that, folks.
Ross Kenyon: I imagine people listening are pretty sympathetic to that. But I imagine a fair number of them also live in cities. Is it possible to enjoy degrowth economics and also be an urbanite? Or does degrowth naturally lend itself to a rural perspective?
Dr. Jason Bradford: I think it’s a balance. So like right now where I say, okay, 80% of people are in urban areas and 20% are in rural. I think over time that probably has to flip. But, you know, I’m not talking about, I think a lot of the model may be more, you know, small towns and villages. So you have conviviality or whatever, or conviviality. How would you say that? Something like that, you can still get, right? You know, you can still go down to the local pub.
There’s live music. There’s maybe theater. You know, there’s tennis courts, I hope. It doesn’t mean that everybody lives in some, like, isolated, you know, hut. But it should be where you can readily access the ecosystems in your area that supply you with much of what you need and your family needs and that your livelihood entails actually interacting with those ecosystems in productive ways, ways that aren’t long-term harmful to them, ways that allow future generations to also use those ecosystems. So that’s kind of the long-term idea I have.
I don’t think big cities, the way they are now, the huge urban agglomerations, can survive without the high energy systems we’ve got. And nobody in those cities can actually do that kind of livelihood I just talked about. Yeah, you can do some rooftop gardening there, et cetera, et cetera. And there’s some lots here and there, empty lots you can garden in. It doesn’t really scale and provide people with a significant amount of their actual material needs.
Ross Kenyon: A vision of your future might be something like the Shire. Is that fair to say? I like that vision. That’s cool with me. I’m fine living in the Tolkien world.
Dr. Jason Bradford: It’s beautiful, isn’t it? The Shire. Yes. They got good beer, you know?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. But you like that sort of village life, the country pub, something like that. That’s the vision.
Dr. Jason Bradford: That might be the scale that actually has a chance to persist. Yes. Yeah. And I mean, it’s not that there isn’t any large cities around, but probably a lot of people are living in shire-like conditions. Yes. What do we do about the carbon already up in the atmosphere? How should we be thinking about that? Massive reforestation, soil practices on productive farmland that store carbon, all that’s really critical. I think, I mean, not only to drop down carbon, but productive ag land that has high carbon stores also tends to have a good amount of nitrogen stores, tends to have a lot of viable soil food web networks that can then transfer nutrients to plants.
So they really go together. If we’re going to wean ourselves off of things like synthetic fertilizers, then we also need to have organic matter enriched soils. Not a fan of direct air capture, industrial carbon capture, not for you. No, it doesn’t work. It works in the sense like, yes, you can run an experiment, you can do a pilot plant, and you can actually capture carbon out of the air and turn it into rock. Fine. What do you do with the rock? And then let’s do the math on what was the energy used to do that.
And I tell you, the math is pretty awful. I had some colleagues do some work where there’s always a release. There’s some press release from some university partnered maybe with some private industry group. That says, this process we’ve discovered and here’s what we know about it. And then you just look at like, well, it requires fans to move CO2 rapidly over this substrate. And let’s do the math on how much work those fans have to do. And it’s like, you might as well just, you burn more carbon where our current electric grid by far, the energy required to actually just Move air rapidly and then sequester this stuff, let alone like you made a bunch of rock, you got to get it somewhere, you got to move it out somewhere.
And of course, you need to also mine some substrate that you’re going to use to capture the CO2 to make fake rock. And so no one does the math at scale. It’s just absurd. Like I did some math on one technology And there’s this big dam in the Pacific Northwest. It was like the largest dam in the world prior to the Three Gorges Dam. And it was built- Grand Coulee Dam? That one? Is that the one in Washington? It was on the Colville Reservation, I think.
I don’t even remember. It’s one of those, Coulee. I think it might be the Coulee. It’s gigantic. I’ve been there. It’s impressive. I wish I remembered the name. But if you look at how much concrete is in that dam and you look at, you know, What it would take to pull out all the carbon dioxide we currently use each year out of the air. It was, you’d have to move about 6,000 times the materials that were used to build that dam every year.
And so what’s the energy of that? There may be some stuff like replacing sand, you know, maybe that’s a good product. There’s some technologies that replace sand. That’s useful. But for the most part, no. Those will be very minor, minor things. And biological processes are going to be about the only thing we’ve got going.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. I got to stop the pitchforks coming after me now. I swear, listener, I’m going to have the most pro-growth, pro-innovation person on that you’ve ever heard. I’m going to try to figure out who this person is. After Kings North, after Jason, I got to get... We had Charles Mann on and we did the Wizards and Prophets. The show has veered so far towards the profits lately. I got to get a good wizard on. Who do you think is the best critic or the...
Who do you think is the best external critic of degrowth? Do you have someone in mind where you’re like, I hate this guy, but that’s a really good point. I can’t think of any good points they make, honestly. Really, man? Any position I hold, I could probably be like,
Dr. Jason Bradford: I got that. I could see that. Nothing? Well, because all of them are straw men. It’s like, you don’t believe in innovation. Like, screw you. Look at the trends of the last 50 years. Aren’t they impressive? Yeah, because you’ve been just sucking the world dry. So I can’t find any of these folks that I go, oh, I need to modify how I’m thinking. It’s very frustrating, honestly, because it’s like I’m paying this some wacko for questioning growth and human ingenuity and progress.
When I see a lot of it, I understand a lot of the benefits, but I’m not blind to the downsides and the risks is the problem and just want to go all in on that and double down. Because doing the math sucks.
Ross Kenyon: Well, crap. You’re just going to abandon me like that? You’re going to give me nothing?
Dr. Jason Bradford: Sorry. I mean, you’ve texted the Breakthrough Institute, guys. You know the whole shtick. Eco-modernists and Schellenberg and all that crap. I know. I know. I read their stuff.
Ross Kenyon: All right. Well, I don’t know what to do then. I’ll try to think of something interesting. Sorry. I don’t know. I think Ramez Nam stuff is like a nice, like thoughtful, still pro. You should send me
Dr. Jason Bradford: some stuff. Help me out. Thank you. Give me some names.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I’ll think some more about it. And then I’ll listen into your show and you’d be like, oh God, Ross from Nori. He sent me this thing. I’m going to demolish him and the piece on air right now.
Dr. Jason Bradford: Well, I find it fascinating that you’re willing to talk to this huge diversity, this huge range. That is good. I have a hard time tolerating it, honestly. It’s hard for me to listen to this stuff.
Ross Kenyon: Well, I used to have all the answers, and then I realized how dumb I am, and then I just talked to everyone. It keeps things interesting, at least. I learned something from everybody.
Dr. Jason Bradford: Why not? Yeah. I do think we have to have a lot of humility. That’s why I’m not willing to go for any bets because it is such a fricking hyper complex world and there’s so much we don’t understand. There’s blind spots everywhere. I’m totally open about that. I’m one guy trying to piece this all together and it doesn’t matter how much time you spend doing it or how smart you think you are. It’s tough. So I’m grounded, I think in ecological theory and Sort of take that to heart.
And as soon as you have ecological understanding of the world, a lot of stuff just looks like complete bullshit to you. And so that’s where I am. That’s why I’m trapped with that point of view, looking at this world that essentially has dismissed that as a viable worldview. But I do think that’s sort of That’s not true for everybody. And people live in this weird position where they both watch a David Attenborough show and cry over the last elephants and are worried about the Amazon rainforest dying and all the coral reefs while they’re excited that Elon Musk is figuring out how to get us all to Mars.
And living in those two worlds is really hard for most people, including me.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it’s a hard thing to live with. I know people, like I saw Greta Thunberg and others be like, why are we trying to leave? Spend that energy fixing the planet? Stop doing this? I sort of get the, what if an asteroid hits Earth though? I want to have a backup plan, but also the idea that we just escape Earth. No, I don’t know that’s the right way to think of it either.
Dr. Jason Bradford: Yeah. No, no, I think that’s, that’s right. I mean, it’d be nice to have a backup plan, but I think there’s a lot cheaper, easier ways to have backup plans that are more likely to have some modicum of success. So I, yeah, I think most of that stuff is a complete waste of time and that’s hard, hard to watch.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. This has come up on a couple of shows too, and they’re both from science fiction, video games, these examples, but The Flood and Halo, I don’t know if you ever played that. Or the Terrans in Starcraft. They’re just humans basically that hollow out, like other planets. Once they got space travel, they just hollow out and then they keep going and going and going. I think there’s an active, like that’s a sort of extreme version of I think what concerns someone like Greta, that we’re just going to not deal with any of the root problems of what is causing chaos on Earth.
And then we just transplant that around the galaxy. That’s not really, it buys us time, but is that really the universe we want to live in?
Dr. Jason Bradford: Yeah, and we’re not going to be able to do it. I mean, I’ve read some cool stuff by Kim Stanley Robinson where, yeah, there’s like these worlds inside asteroids that have artificial, they spin them and they have gravity and they’ve created all these ecosystems. I’m sorry, but we don’t even know how to do Biosphere 2. Remember those experiments in Arizona? We do not know how to do any of that at scale, any of this stuff. Where we re-artificial ecosystem our way onto some, you know, asteroid or some other planet.
There’s no like Khan or whatever, that Star Trek figure where they like toss some little thing out and it just sort of like creates a lush rainforest in some sort of giant chamber. I mean, that’s all bullshit. That’s just less fantasizing. That’s what I’m saying. Remember I said the Venn diagram between the shit in our head and the reality of the world needs to intersect really tightly? We’re not doing that. We’re fantasizing. We’re clueless fantasists. That pisses me off. No, we are not going to create faux ecosystems using life on Earth in asteroids or other planets.
No. We don’t know how to even do that on Antarctica. We couldn’t even set up an Arctic station and make that work. Do you fail, let alone Mars? Where does the energy come from? You try to grow an ecosystem on Mars. You know how much further away it is and how cold it is? Do you know in Mars it snows carbon dioxide every winter? No, I didn’t know that. That’s wild. It’s so freaking cold. Carbon dioxide just snows out of the air.
God. Getting real worked up. Yeah, you got me worked up. I’m sorry. I think Greta’s right that it’s a waste of time. She’s wrong to think we’re going to export it anywhere because we’re not going to go far.
Ross Kenyon: Fair enough. Although I hate to tell you, Jason, Stan’s been on the show too, and he’s coming for you now. You’re just picking fights with all my former guests, all my alumni.
Dr. Jason Bradford: I like Stan. I like Stan. I don’t think he necessarily believes that’s going to happen. I think he uses science fiction to make really interesting commentary about here and now. I really loved Ursula Le Guin. Oh my gosh. Does she really think there’s going to be faster than light speed travel? Probably not. Or she’s dead now. But did she really believe that? No, I don’t think so. But it’s a useful device to talk about really interesting questions and issues.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, yeah. Sci-fi, speculative fiction, cli-fi, any of those genres that are set up. Basically, elaborate thought experiments are super useful, I think.
Dr. Jason Bradford: Yeah, I totally agree. I really like, yeah, I read Ministry of the Future. I really enjoyed that. Parts of that, a lot of that stuff could work. I really do think so. So it’d be cool. If someone liked this conversation, would they also like Crazy Town? I don’t know if they’d like it as much because you’re such a good interviewer, but yes.
Ross Kenyon: You flatter me, but you guys know each other so well. I feel like all the hosts have known each other for decades. There’s a real camaraderie there.
Dr. Jason Bradford: Yeah, I’d say 10 years or more. Yeah. Not decades, too bad, but they’re my good friends. Totally, yeah. So it’s helpful. What are y’all exploring this season and how long will it be? What are you covering? Thank you so much. Okay. So on Crazy Town, season three, we are exploring the hidden drivers that have led us into Crazy Town. So these are the kind of things where we don’t often think about it, but... You know, there’s the way that our world has worked or human nature that have created this conundrum we have where the world is crazy and it’s making us crazy, right?
And so what are the things that we don’t really know about ourselves or society that have kind of led us to this point? I think we have 15 episodes lined up and we’ve recorded about 10 of them maybe now. So it’s fun. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: I listened to the first one of the new season this morning and it is about cognitive biases slash biases, which y’all never figured out which one it is. So, okay. Open question. How pretentious are you feeling when you’re saying this sentence is really the question. But yeah, so you went through sort of how our brains mess with us and distort information and do so in self-serving ways. Is that an accurate impression?
Dr. Jason Bradford: Yeah, totally. These are evolved actually to be functional in many regards, but the problem is that we have this modern world that’s so complex that our brains really haven’t evolved the capacity to handle it very well. And I think that’s part of the stress of being a human nowadays. We bring up the term hyperobjects, which is a bizarre term about things that are so large that we can’t comprehend them. And the human brain can’t really figure out what to do with hyperobjects. And that’s a lot of our problems in the world.
Ross Kenyon: There’s also ones like, maybe this qualifies or maybe it doesn’t, but okay, the big relief bill that just passed, 1.9 trillion. That’s so much money. I don’t even know how to... Is that a lot of money? I can’t even tell. What would be an appropriate amount of money? I have no idea. It’s outside of any experience I could ever have.
Dr. Jason Bradford: And the fact is nobody knows. Nobody knows. It’s true. But they have to pretend they know and they have to give it a shot. And so, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. What are some of the episodes that you’ve recorded or what are some future ones going to be about?
Dr. Jason Bradford: Oh gosh. Well, there’s a lot. Oh man. We’re working on one right now on money. Money is interesting because it makes claims on real things in the world, even though it’s a made up kind of social construct. So the show’s about how What we’ve constantly been doing is evolving money to lower barriers to exchange, to make it easier and easier for us to consume. And it’s become so abstract now. And it’s both a medium exchange and a store of value. And it’s become so abstract.
And it’s even turned to this thing where it’s not governed anymore by governments, the cryptocurrencies and stuff. But cryptocurrencies have a huge environmental footprint. Even though modern currencies are not as heavy footprint-wise as cryptocurrencies, by injecting things like $1.9 trillion into the economy, what we do is we give people purchasing power. And you could say, oh, that’s great. People now have money to go spend. But of course, every time we spend money, there’s carbon emissions. There’s a good chance there’s a mine being depleted somewhere.
There’s soil loss somewhere. There’s a fishery that’s just gotten knocked down a little bit. There’s a forest gotten cut down. So just about every good and service that we purchase in the economy comes with an environmental toll. And so is that a good thing that we just created a bunch of money out of nothing and then make claims on the real world? Did you ever read Bernard Lietier? Did you ever read him? No. Oh. I love the name though.
Ross Kenyon: I know it’s a beautiful, nice, too many vowels, French name that you omit many letters when you say it. Incroyable. Incroyable. Verily, it is so. Yeah, he died recently, unfortunately, but big thinker on money and how to create sort of pro-social monetary systems. Yeah. So ones that are not... When money is created as the US dollar, some people call it the petrodollar. So it interacts with oil and gas in really interesting slash not so great ways. It is also a debt-backed currency rather than something else.
And how could you create something that was more encouraging of the things that we want to see more of? We’re really interested in that with Nori too. We interact with those blockchain and cryptocurrency worlds too and are looking forward to more and more proof of stake, low energy usage kind of... But yeah, money is so interesting. And because we accept it as a neutral, almost invisible phenomenon in our world, that when you actually dig into it, you realize how weird it is and what it supports and how it’s not neutral.
You’re like, how much could we change? That’s what the Ministry for the Future too, right? Carbon coin...
Dr. Jason Bradford: Yeah, no, I think that’s fascinating. I think a lot of that could potentially work. It’s just very hard to know how to do it. I like how that book really wasn’t sure. There was a lot of uncertainty, like, is this going to work or not? Because I think he’s right in writing this. A lot of these big policies, they don’t really know how they’re going to go. So I think accepting of the fact that we’re kind of on this wild ride and we’re not sure how it’s going to go, But I would like a lot more people to be ecologically literate, you know, helping to try to steer things a bit and adapt in a way that is grounded in the real world and on this beautiful earth we have.
It’s a nice sentiment. Would you say that people should, well, Crazy Town’s a nice way into these topics. Your report that I was referring to, The Future is
Ross Kenyon: Rural, also a great place to start. Your colleague Rob Dietz, Enough is Enough, is I think the first book I read on the topic. Where might you steer someone to get a better sense of ecological economics, degrowth economics, that whole scene?
Dr. Jason Bradford: Yeah, God, there’s so much out now. I think, yeah, Rob’s book, Enough is a very kind of easy readable version. You know, the classics by Herman Daly still are really amazing. Herman Daly has such a way, kind of considered the father of ecological economics. You can buy a book from his in 1992 or whatever. You think, oh, this is an old book, but you can get it for probably four bucks. And I’ll tell you, it’s incredible. His turn of phrase, the simplicity of the arguments, it’s one of those where you go, well, of course, no duh.
Even just turning into those classics would be great.
Ross Kenyon: If you’ve listened to the show and you’ve liked the episodes with my colleague, Alden Donnelly, who’s an economist, her main guy is Herman Daly. So if you like Alden’s episodes, you’ll probably like Herman Daly too. Oh, good. Yeah. Yeah. Anything that you’ll feel bad for not saying as we wrap up? Are you supposed to plug anything?
Dr. Jason Bradford: I probably scared your audience enough. Hey, enjoy the day. Get outside. Eat well. Try to surround yourself with good friends. Have good, solid relationships in your life. Enjoy plants and animals and the sunshine. Get a good night’s sleep. That’s my advice. It’s a nice place to leave it given how you ruined this show. No, I still have a lot of fun and I’m glad we’re all here.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, thanks for being here. Links to all those things are in the show notes. Thanks so much for listening. And as Jason said, hope you have an excellent day. Get some sunlight, see some good people. And so far, such a thing is safe for you. And thanks for listening. Well, thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it in Apple Podcasts and or Stitcher. It really helps us a lot to get this content to a wider audience.
If you think what we’re doing is useful, interesting, fun, hopefully all three, we’d certainly appreciate your rating and review. You can keep up We are also now on Patreon at patreon.com slash noripodcasts if you’d like more content, engagement, and community. And thank you so much for your support.
