HS 102 – Ideology vs Reality of Environmentalism with Devin Foley

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My pleasure to welcome Devin Foley to the show. He's been a frequent guest on a few of my different shows and today we'd like to talk about environmental economics, green issues, thinking behind the environmental movement, climate, natural resources and environment versus ecology and the ideology of that versus the reality of it. And of course, Devin is the co founder and president of intellectual takeout. Great website. Devin, welcome. How are you?

I am well. Thanks for having me on again, Jason.

My pleasure. So, first of all, you know, maybe, Devin, let's start with, you know, everybody, I think, knows what environmentalism is. However, what is the difference between environmentalism and ecology or environment and ecology?

Good question, Jason. I think, you know, broadly used, we hear the term environmentalism, or we need to take care of the environment, things of this nature bandied around quite a bit. But if you actually get into environmentalism, it has a lot of different components. You could say there's conservation would be a component of environmentalism, ecology would be another, where you're studying the impact of different components of nature impacting with the other. So you could study how does man and, you know, man building factory impact a local stream or something like that. You could also look at how do. How does an invasive species interact with the other fish, if it happens to be one of those, or something along those lines. But there's another component to environmentalism that I think is largely being unspoken these days, which is more of a sort of philosophical, spiritual look at the world that sees things as very much interconnected, a very sort of Gaia centric look at it. You can see a lot of that coming out of the thinking and philosophy of deep ecology, our nest even going back to Spinoza in the 17th century. So, I mean, it has deep roots. It's a very interconnectedness that we are all sort of one energy, if you will, and we're all connected by that. And individual people are just sort of a higher consciousness of this sort of Gaia spirit that would be going through everything.

Devin, there's this issue of commonality and common ownership of things. And I remember your ago reading an article and looking at some amazing photographs in the Greenpeace magazine. And it was a story about the environmental destruction that they had discovered once the Soviet Union fell apart. And they did this amazing story, a bunch of incredible photos that were really shocking. A place that was always hiding its failings for so many years. And, you know, I remember hearing stories of friends when I was a kid to Russia, how they weren't allowed to take a picture of a trash can and things like this. And everything was very controlled under the old Soviet Union. And the point of it was, which was maybe a little bit surprising for Greenpeace to be exposing of all things given, given that organization's leanings, is that you have this issue of when, when it's everybody's land, it's nobody's land. And. And maybe the best way to get people to respect the environment is to have them privately own the environment. Right?

That's a wonderful point, Jason. You know, you've got two sort of threads in there. You hear a lot of the, you know, the environmentalists who would call themselves environmentalists now say the Earth is One, we all are part of the earth. We're all one with the earth. We need to pass it on and this sort of communal sense of nature and life and all of that. But as you pointed out, the reality is, and this is nothing new, but that which is owned sort of quote in common is usually the most abused property out there, whether. And that goes back to a term from Aristotle that is the tragedy of the commons. And again, it's just this tragedy that the land that is not owned by anyone, but as you say, is owned by everyone is the most abused land. It has no real defender out there. And you know, when you look, nobody wants to see air pollution or dirty water or things like that, but it's look at those things. Water most often as well as particularly the air is common to us all. It's not really owned by anyone. And you can bet, you know, and you can bet any factory or things like that. Is the equipment in the factory taken really? Are they taking good care of it? Are they doing this or that? Sure, it's like a property owner, I mean, not every property owner out there takes the best care of stuff, but overwhelmingly, you know, people take really good care of it. You're not going to abuse your car like you will abuse the rental car. Does that make sense as far as.

Yeah, it does philosophically. But here's the problem. When you get into the world of big business and these mega corporations we have nowadays, and I don't support the corporatocracy, as much of a capitalist and free market guy as I am, I don't think the big corporations and big businesses are really in the free market. I think they have a sort of a rigged game and through their lobbyists get in bed with government and use that to increase regulation, as odd as that may sound, and reduce new entrants, the regulations are a big barrier to new entrants that might be their competitors. So big business to me isn't free market really at all. I don't think it's a little freer than government, sure. But I think small business operates in a free market. But the problem is when you get into the scale of big mega corporations, you know, they can just do that. Good. Ben Franklin write the line down the middle of the paper cost benefit analysis and say, hey, we'll buy all this land over here that's nowhere near where any of them live and we'll just destroy it and just rape and pillage the environment because we can make profits from it. So yes, philosophically, I most definitely Agree with you, but I don't know if it totally holds up in practice, especially in the world of big business. A small farmer or a small business person, sure, they're probably going to take care of the land because they, they can't do that. They don't have the kind of scale where you can do that sort of cost benefit, disposable land type analysis.

You actually raise really good points. Your point about big business often working hand in hand with big government is very true. You know, if you look at what kicked off the Clean Water act was the Cuyahoga river fire. So, you know, here's a river in Ohio catches on fire and America is just, whoa, this is incredible what just happened. We clearly have dirty water. What's forgotten is that river caught on fire, I believe nine or 10, maybe even more times, going all the way back into the 1800s because factories and these bigger businesses were polluting into it. The thing is, though, is what's also forgotten is the Clean Water act wasn't the first law on the books that was saying, no, you can't pollute into the water. There were both state and local laws as well as even federal laws on the books going back into the 1800s that said, no, you can't dump this into the water because it's again, tragedy of the commons. You're actually polluting and you're doing damage to the people that are downstream things along those lines. The problem was government didn't actually enforce those laws. It turned a blind eye to it because it was in favor of the bigger businesses. And you could argue, and I think a lot of people have, that it was in bed with them. Same thing you can look at for Chicago. You see a lot of that with the Chicago river, where you hear stories during the last century where you've got different manufacturing or actually beef pork processing and different processing plants. They were just dumping just disgusting amounts of lard and things like that into the river to the point that it was always a common joke and things to laugh at, that tourists actually didn't realize it was a river. And you'd occasionally see one trying to walk across what was actually a river, but covered in lard and hardened factory waste and things like that.

That is beyond disgusting.

Oh, totally. But they would fall through eventually, almost like thin ice. Eventually, you know, they get far enough out and it was too thin, they'd fall through. And this was, you know, humorous. What was funny is some entrepreneurial small business guy decided, wait a minute, they're pumping all this lard in there, I'm going to go start collecting it. Set aside any of the people that had sued and been ignored for violations of their property downstream from all this. But so you get this little entrepreneur going out there, starts picking all this lard up because you can make soap and you can do other things with all this waste product. It was at the moment that the factory realized that this little guy was making a profit off of their waste, that all of a sudden they cared about what was in the water and said, no, no, no, no, you can't do that. That's ours.

Interesting, interesting story.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, go figure. So, you know, to the point, I think it's important this gets really to a fundamental issue of the common law and the rule of law.

What's the difference there? What do you mean when you say that?

Well, the common law would just be more of the tradition of law that goes back through Western civilization. So this is, I mean the common law is very much based out of the English system of law, of property rights, of protection that would be provided by government through the courts. That there's sort of a fairness and there are certain rules to how everything works. And that would be very much, America is founded on that. Canada, Australia, a lot of the Anglo world. And so at any rate then you get the common law. But then the rule of law, the rule of law would actually be that things are enforced evenly and across the board. So that you, whether you're an individual property owner, let's say you just have some, your house is on the river downstream, or maybe you're a small business owner who's on the river downstream, or you're another really big business downstream. No matter how big or small you are and impacted by something taking place upstream and this staying within the sort of water pollution example, that you would have equal access to the law and that the law through government would treat you the same way. Unfortunately, that just wasn't the case and.

And it's still not the case.

Yeah, it's not the case. But unfortunately, had we actually enacted that, you might see a very different structure of environmental prot here in the US Rather than the very heavy handed top down approach that we have from the EPA today, it was because government didn't do its job, that we now have a very, very different sort of law and that the EPA does not represent the common law tradition. It's much more of a top down bureaucratic system.

Well, the scary thing about government and all of its overabundance of laws is that they basically have made almost everything illegal in some way. And you know, we all walk around throughout our lives and especially if we own business, breaking more laws than we probably can imagine, you know, unintentionally. And, and the scary thing about that, the really scary thing is that it allows the government to do something that is very wrong, unethical and unconstitutional. And that is the game of selective enforcement. Because it, like you said in that example, it turns a blind eye when it gets some benefit. You know, the government again starts to think like any other self interested business, which you know, is fine for businesses and people in a marketplace to think out of self interest, but it's not okay for the government to do that because the government has to be the arbiter of fairness. Right? And that's frankly what we're paying the government to do is to enforce laws. And so when they turn a blind eye to something, but they pick out the one person or the one business that maybe they don't like or has a contrary political position. Think Gibson Guitars a couple of years ago with the Obama administration and the hardwoods and that kind of fiasco. And think during the time of the too big to fail Hank Paulson, you know, in the beginning of the Obama administration bailouts, you know, how they didn't save Lehman Brothers but they saved the others. That wasn't a legal issue really, but it was still an issue of, I think selective benefit being doled out. And that's the scary part about it. And this may be a little bit tangential to the issue, but I think it's worth mentioning actually, I think it's.

Dead on with the issue. I mean, to go back to the idea of common law, a lot of it hinges on property rights. And so if your property is violated by somebody else, so let's say somebody's polluting the water, it gets in the groundwater, it does this or that, you can sue and say, you know, this is wrong, what you're doing has to stop and you need to pay restitution or do whatever needs to be done to repair the damage that you've done to me. And again, you take that sort of common law tradition with the rule of law that me as a tiny little individual would have the access to the courts and to justice and the expectation that the law would be netted out equally so that I can expect fairness and justice within the system. That's a very big check actually on big businesses as well as, and it eliminates a lot of this need for big government. And to your point, when you Take it into a very bureaucratic system, very top down management, where, you know, you have any number of examples within the EPA and how it operates, whether it's saying, you know, it's treating certain coal burning plants the same way despite the fact that their coal might have a different composition and might actually release different pollutants. So you deal with it differently. It's across the board, very much this top down and at times very selective enforcement. And unfortunately what that really the disturbing part is that opens us up to very much what can be considered corruption in some sense, where it is the politically connected that are the best able to navigate the new sort of bureaucratic regime and laws. So that again, this favors big business because who has what little business, has enough lawyers, has enough resources, has the, you know, lobbyists and politically connected friends to be able to navigate the various, you know, red tape challenges provided by the EPA or some other. And you know, this applies to the FDA and to others. And again, you'll hear plenty of stories of how people are meeting with success while they're lobbying. They're working within politics. And that really shouldn't be what it's about. It should be, you want to be able to defend property rights, and defending property rights is going to be one of the best ways to defend the environment. And you do will need to have some rules and regulations to deal with things like air pollution and water, especially since they do cross over state lines, they cross over international lines, they do all kinds of stuff. But nonetheless, it's a very different perspective. And I think the larger that you get the federal, the more involved you get the federal government, the bigger it becomes and the more there's danger of this sort of political cronyism and corruption that can take place as well as of course, heavy handedness.

Couldn't agree more, couldn't agree more. It's amazing, Devin, that everybody pretty much will agree with the following no matter what their political beliefs, that government is inefficient, it's corrupt, and the private sector can pretty much always do things more efficiently and more cost effectively. And I say that no matter what, in any human organization, organization, you're going to have people trying to get a larger slice of the pie and use the system and use the laws to do that. So the only real cure to my thinking is, you know, we need government, we have to have it, but just keep it as small as possible because then you keep the corruption and the inefficiency and the bureaucracy to a minimum. You've got to have it. It needs to be there, because anarchy is no fun either. But the more of it you have, the worse those problems become. And we see this all around us. You look at the kind of fraud that goes on within the environmental movement and how people initiate ridiculous regulations and frivolous lawsuits over it. And, you know, the ada, the Americans with Disabilities act, has become just a money train for lawyers with just frivolous, ridiculous litigation that they're bringing based on these. These laws. So one side of the argument says, well, the government's not big enough to go out and enforce all the laws. Well, then maybe the first problem is there's too many darn laws, okay? But, you know, maybe the government doesn't have enough inspectors, enough police, enough enforcers, enough ATF agents, enough border patrol, whatever, to enforce all the laws. So in a way, then, the private sector does it, and they do it through lawyers, and they do it through bringing litigation and, you know, clogging up the court system. So the government has to enforce the laws another way. But the problem with that way is it brings payola to, you know, certain groups of people. So it just seems it's all an issue of size, of it being too large. What are your thoughts?

Yeah, I think there is. There are issues of size and then also orientation and sort of the goal, if government is, you know, as our country was founded, is sort of to have rule of law, to have equality under the law, these sorts of things. It's very different and grounded in sort of that common law tradition that I brought up. It's a very different goal and perspective and duty of government than it would be to go out and fix all of the problems of the world. Or at least America, though, seems intent on all of the problems of the world these days. And I mean, if that's your orientation of government is to fix everything, what isn't there to fix? And then the things that you fix might cause other problems, so then you get to fix those, too. And so you're describing a system of basically, do you have a limited government or an unlimited government? And now, you know, again with the environmental stuff. A lot of people argue, well, clearly the unlimited or the limited government failed us because look at all the damage to the environment. Except, again, the government didn't actually enforce the laws and it didn't uphold the common law traditions and, you know, the rule of law. So did government fail us? Yes, but it failed us by not doing what it actually was initially instituted to do. And then you can look at it today, too, where it's the Mentality, even of the bureaucracy. Let us say Founders didn't foresee the need for an Environmental Protection Agency, but you can make some arguments that yeah, you can, you know, it's reasonable to have some sort of federal laws. I'm not going to say necessarily EPA or something like that, but you can say that there's federal laws and perhaps federal agency that needs to be there to defend the environment now, you know, in this loose context as we know it, but more so, you know, prevent pollution, things like that. Well, how should it run? Should it make rules for every process along the line or should it simply come in and say, you know what? You can't. We know that there are certain levels of pollution that are naturally going to happen that, you know, you can't have a zero say, you can't have a zero emission policy, but we're willing to tolerate, you know, so many particles in the air for per cubic feet or things along those lines. And so, and come down and say you can only pollute x amount. Figure out how to do it any way you want to do it. But this is the cap. And that's a very different game too, and a different mentality of actually trying to manage every step versus just saying, look, here's the rule, you can't do this or you can only do it X this amount. Figure out how to do it. And I ask you and listeners here too, which do you think is going to be more efficient, more cost effective? If you put the goal as that for a business, they're going to be able to figure out how to meet that goal with the least amount of expenditures and you could see some improvements. Perhaps we stop exporting a lot of our businesses and manufacturing to overseas where they don't have the environmental rules and it's not so expensive for them to be able to meet these challenges. I don't know, it's just a different way of looking at things, right?

It's like this law of unintended consequences. The environmental movement gains a lot of power in the US and all that happens is the dirtier businesses, the dirtier manufacturing businesses just go offshore and pollute over there. And I remind everybody it was John F. Kennedy that said we all breathe the same air. And he's right. I mean, you don't think that at some point what goes on in China affects what happens over in America in terms of the environment? I mean, the same air is floating around the whole earth. It's ultimately it's, it's just very hypocritical. It's really the NIMBY syndrome is what it is. It's the not in my backyard syndrome. And we want all the products, we want all the goodies, but, you know, we don't want to have the damage over here. So we say, well, let's drill for oil off the coast of Brazil, but not off the coast of the U.S. you know, California has got to be pristine, because God forbid we might have an oil well in front of Barbra Streisand's house. You like my snarkiness?

Yeah, it's pretty funny.

But I think we should put the first one there when we get into enough pressure. Again, where we have to drill again off the California coast, there's a moratorium on it. I mean, they do have oil platforms there, but no new ones, at least. Right, right, right.

And I think, actually, yeah, the point you're raising is a good one. I mean, if you look at satellite imagery, you can see plumes of smoke, pollution coming off of China. If you go even FARTHER Back to JFK's point, you know, they've done ice core samples out of Greenland that show lead deposits. And, you know, carbon dating shows that these deposits were around from when the Romans were doing all of their lead smelting, you know, and pushing that out into the air. So it is true that this stuff all carries around. And so. So it's pretty reasonable. The flip side, too, is we can't forget how much technology has changed things. You know, if you. You poll a lot of people today, they'll say, oh, our air is so dirty here in America.

Oh, it's much cleaner than it was before.

Exactly. It's like, what are you talking about? Granted, in the 1960s, and even back then it was pretty dirty. But let's really go with the 1800s. Just imagine that all of your heating and all. All of your cooking is being done. Actually, you go before the 1800s, you know, your heating and your cooking are all being done almost all the time by burning wood. And every house in your neighborhood is burning wood almost all the time. And then it turns into coal. Imagine how dirty that would be. I mean, this gets even into the natural gas fracking arguments, things like that. I mean, technology has changed, and it's made our world a whole lot better. And it has improved it in some ways more measurably than a lot of the EPA rules and things like that. It's just been a change as far as what we're doing and how we're doing it. So I think there's Something to be said for that.

Let me take a brief pause. We'll be back in just a minute.

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Go back to what you were saying at the beginning of our talk today about how we might have a very different environmental structure. And I think you meant a regulatory structure, whereas now we have this sort of top down EPA type of structure. What might we have had instead if the government had enforced the laws that it turned a blind eye to in the past that caused so much pollution?

Right, right. Well, you would have had, I mean, it's not to say that you still wouldn't have different government entities at the local level and perhaps even at the national. Actually at the national level or federal level, setting some rules out there, these things are going to take place. But you're primarily looking at much more of a common law system which is saying, no, no, you can't do this because what you're doing is actually violating my property. And if you actually Go back in American history, actually, Benjamin Franklin, interestingly enough, there were a lot of issues, these issues of pollution, particularly of water and even of air. These aren't new issues at all. Water pollution has been something that's been a problem, as you know, throughout time. And as soon as men or man is grouped together in cities and become more dense in the population, simply because we have waste sewage issues. And you saw that in the colonial area where Benjamin Franklin did work actually with local government to figure out how do we manage the water pollution that we have now, because we have diseases like cholera and typhus and other stuff, because all of the sewage is being dumped into the water. Interestingly enough, if you look at even earlier than, or actually after that period, but early in the 1800s, you actually saw Supreme Court issues and other court challenges coming up from cities like St. Louis suing cities upstream because all of a sudden their water was becoming dirty. And they saw a rise in diseases like cholera or typhus and things like that. And so they would put, they would sue and say, look, you can't do this. You have to deal with your waste problem because you were causing us problems down here. You were doing harm because you're violating the commons. Again, this is tragedy of the commons. But unfortunately, sometimes when somebody you know violates the commons or pollutes, impacts negatively others, and so then you have a system of law, common law, to say, no, you can't do that and you actually have to shut it down, which in some ways is actually a more severe way of doing things. I mean, imagine if you had to completely shut down your pollution, whereas today, I mean, you know, your allowed to scale it or do different things, or government says, well, we can't turn it all away, so you can pollute a little, but you know, just do it this way. Whereas actually in some ways the common law tradition can be much more harsh as far as dealing with pollution.

What do you think of the whole system? Which on the surface of it it sounds capitalistic and it actually sounds kind of rational and good, but I know it's been, it's turned into a big, another, a big new crime syndicate basically. And that is, you know, and I'll, I'll say his name but Al Gore's carbon credits concept, that's a way for people to offset pollution here and there and kind of move it around and it philosophically, it's kind of interesting to me, but you know, I know there have been a million scandals inside of it.

Yeah, there, well, you know, you're touching into an area that now is very politically charged because the cap and trade is primarily looking at. And so the big question is, is carbon a pollutant? Now, the Supreme Court ruled in, I think it was 2006, Massachusetts versus EPA, I think it was, that carbon is a pollution. And so because of the impact of this, you know, because while everyone's pumping out carbon or CO2, that this would be a pollutant because it can do damage to, you know, wildlife up in the Arctic or things along those lines. Big question is. So, of course, logically that brings you to a conclusion of, you know, when I exhale, I'm polluting. So, I don't know, you know, you kind of. Okay, how does this all going to work?

Well, the ultimate goal of the environmental movement has to be to have genocide because people are the problem. I mean, that's just logical.

Well, that actually, I mean, you know, it sounds shocking to say that. It sounds very crazy.

That's why I'm saying, because it's shocking.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it sounds shocking. But again, that goes back very early on in our conversation to the deep ecology. If you actually get into deep ecology and some of these more philosophical, religious or spiritual roots of a lot of the modern environmentalism, that is actually sadly, kind of one of the positions that they take. And you'll see that throughout a lot of the writing of some of the environmentalists that are out there.

Well, they're the Malthusian prominent people.

Yeah. And more aggressive. I mean, they see man as.

I interviewed one on my show.

Oh, did you? Okay.

He was a professor from Berkeley, and forgive me, I can't remember his name, but it's a prior episode, and I think I had the most balanced environmental conversation, you know, I've ever heard with him is because, you know, he just kept saying, well, there's too many people. There's too much pollution. And I just asked him the simple question. I said, how do you know what the number is? Is it 7 billion people? Is it. I mean, people were saying this when we had 3 billion people, that it was too many. And now we're at 7 billion. I mean, is the number 3 billion, 7 billion, 1 billion, or, you know, 35 billion on the planet? You don't know what the planet can sustain. Nobody knows that. It's. It's just. It's an unknown. The ultimate thing has to be as heinous as the this sounds. And it does sound heinous, what I'm about to say, but is that every genocidal maniac do we have to revere them as some kind of environmental hero? Do we have to revere someone who, you know, when we hear one of these disgusting stories on the, on the 11 o' clock news about, you know, some guy who murdered himself and his whole family, you know, in some murder suicide thing, is this someone that really helped the environment? I mean rationally speaking, the answer would have to BS because the extreme environmental movement thinks people are the problem and people have to go.

Right? I mean it again, it does, it sounds crazy, but when you actually do read through the primary documents associated with deep ecology and other more, you know, philosophical side of environmentalism, that actually is a position that in some ways they take. It's very much their ideal. They see again because of this, the spiritual idea that we are all connected and we are all one. It is seen sort of as that man is, you know, individual people are kind of higher consciousness of Gaia and in that frame of mind that you only want a few people around and we're sort of the, you know, the tenders of the garden that we make sure everything's okay, but we don't leave, you know, we try not to leave any imprint or impact on the earth. And to best do that there are some within the environmental movement and deep ecology that would argue that you want to just have small towns that are basically isolated from all other towns and can communicate back and forth and do limited amount of trading, but it's very limited so as to not have a big impact. And that that would basically be for some of these folks, I'm not saying everyone, but for some it would be the sort of ideal world would be to have these small isolated communities that barely interact with each other and have very little impact and are very much sort of this myth of the noble savage that we all sort of go back.

I am all for the idea of eating locally grown produce and certainly the corporatocracy doesn't like the. This Obama's head of agriculture, the Monsanto, former Monsanto CEO isn't for this idea. The corporatized farming that we have isn't for this idea. But you know, I'm for it. I think, you know, that's generally a good idea. The scary part though of the, of the environmental movement is is this question. You know, if we have too many people, then the question I asked the other gentleman I interviewed on my show, I said, said, well, who gets to decide who goes and who stays? Right? You know, you, I mean, it's just, it begs the question, who gets to make this decision. Is it a decision where, like in the past, that we decide who's worthy to live? You know, do we decide based on physical ability, looks, age, handicap? I mean, that is one scary, scary road to travel.

It is, but it's not that uncommon, you know, even outside of the environmental movement. If you want to have read an enjoyable document, not really enjoyable, it's kind of sarcastic. But if you want to read an interesting document, read the end of Laissez Faire, which was written by John Maynard Keynes in 1926. And the important part is 1926. And in that document he actually says that there will come a time, you know, if you're going to manage and plan an economy, that there will come a time when you actually will need to manage both the size of the population as well as the inherent nature of the people in it. And so you're going to actually have to manage population, but then also manage the types of people that are in the economy if you're going to be able to fully manage the economy. Now, of course, after the Holocaust, all of those sorts of ideas, and those were popular ideas, not just with Keynes, but with a lot of other intellectuals, you know, during the early 20th century, of course, Holocaust comes in and the Germans actually, you know, take that idea to its logical conclusion and to horrific results and just pure sheer evil on earth and. But those ideas, you know, are now, it's pooh, poohed a little bit, but you still see that even in the environmental movement, as you say. And again, it sounds crazy, but there are a lot of documents out there, primary documents by big name intellectuals as well as others that do go down that road. It's a scary thing to push back, you know, we have to push back against the, you know, when it comes to individual freedom, natural rights, things like that. And that's the side that, you know, you're pushing back against these people who want to manage society or think they know what's best for, you know, whether it be the environment or society or whatever.

So that's a very scary, very elitist mentality that they have that they know best. As soon as you get on that path, you've got all sorts of trouble. History's replete with very, very ugly examples of that type of thinking. Let's wrap up, Devin, with, you know, what are some proposed solutions as to how things should work and could work better?

Yeah, I think one of the first things to do would be to sort of change the conversation that we're having right now, you know, a Lot of things are said, well, we need to do this for the environment. Okay, what is the environment? I mean, what are we even talking about, about when you say that? I mean, so let's change that. Let's start talking about, you know, maybe perhaps consider cleaving environmentalism from ecology and taking much more of a pragmatic look at things and saying, okay, here's the actual impact of this or that and getting into, you know, being honest about what is the air quality like now, how are things working? What is the history of pollution, things along those lines, what's the history of the laws on pollution? Is it the island? Is it really the narrative that's being told now? Or were things actually really different? And I think that's what you have to do initially as far as changing the way the public perceives the issue. Nobody wants dirty air and dirty water. It's just more of changing the narrative. And then number two would be, of course, in a pragmatic sense, it's just reevaluating how the EPA goes about its business. Are there ways epa, rather than taking this very heavy handed, top down approach and micromanaging how these pollution issues will be tackled, but maybe perhaps stepping back and saying we're not going to tolerate this level of pollution into the air, anything above it, but you have the freedom as a business to be able to figure out how you're going to meet the goal that is set. And I think that that is a pretty reasonable compromise, something that we shouldn't be, you know, scared of. It's to say that, okay, there is something, some entity out there, quote, protecting the environment, you know, in the air, fighting pollution, all these things that I think Americans do want. But at the same time I think that we can all understand that, okay, having a goal and having to meet that goal or a limit and being free to hit it any way you want is very different from being micromanaged. And one can be far more cost effective and perhaps bring some of our companies either back or keep them here in the US and not see this sort of exportation of pollution that's taking place and sort of the deception that somehow everything is clean and great now, when in reality it's the Chinese and you know, Vietnamese and other places around the world that are being polluted by, you know, to be able to supply Americans with cheap products and often plastic products and everything else. So I think that that's just an awareness that needs to take place. And then finally, of course would be part of that conversation is just digging back into these ideas of common law, of property rights and the interplay with the rule of law and the environment and how that actually would work. And looking at tragedy of commons and these ideas, I mean, this is not a new debate. This sort of debate has been going on for well over 2,000 years, 3,000 years. I mean, again, these things are not new. It's just how do we deal with them in the way that's best.

Devin Foley Give out your website.

It is intellectualtakeout.org and you can also find us on Facebook. Just search for Intellectual Takeout and you should be able to pull us up.

Thanks for joining us today.

Hey, not a problem. Thanks for having me. Jason.

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