Fox News host David Webb accused American liberals of “turning climate change into their religion” last week.
An interesting thought.
Pascal’s Wager came to mind while Ashby and I were exploring it on the podcast. It’s a 17th century philosophical argument about the existence of god advanced by the French polymath Blaise Pascal. The gist: humans bet with their lives that god either does or does not exist.
He argued that a rational person should live as though god exists. If they’re wrong, they avoided sin for no reason. But if they’re right, the potential gain (an eternity in heaven) is infinite.
I think this logic holds for climate change. If we’re wrong and the planet isn’t dying, we’ll have cleaned it up for no reason. A specific loss. But if we’re right, the potential gain is infinite.
To me, it’s an easy choice.
Check out the podcast to hear us talk through the logic in more detail. As always, we answered questions from listeners. Write with a question and we’ll answer it in the next episode!
- HBO’s show succession features a plot line where investors from a Canadian pension fund issued the most creative and aggressive swear words in the entire series. Is this realistic? I thought Canadians were nice.
- I saw that someone tweeted candid, negative comments about a startup and caught a lot of flak. Why is outward positivism such an entrenched norm in Silicon Valley?
- Why do we keep calling it a risk free rate when there is no risk free rate?