Dwarkesh Patel: uncertainty

Transcript context

…and whether anybody is going to sort of litigate your decision. This is the other sort of big part of NEPA–– people are basically able to sue people for not completing the analysis thoroughly enough. They can't permanently stop the project because all you need to do is basically show that you've documented your things thoroughly enough. So once you have documented it thoroughly enough, they don't have grounds for stopping it anymore, but they can't slow it down. If they slow it down enough, sometimes the project becomes unattractive and it gets canceled. That's kind of what a lot of these groups hope for and so basically instead of great uncertainty and solid coordination problems, it creates all this new uncertainty where people will like very deliberately try to avoid the NEPA process because they do not know how long it will take and how much it will cost to get their project approved and in some cases going through the process will take a very very very very long time. So making a business decision as to whether to do a new offshore wind development or develop a new forest resource or something like that is very hard to do. You don't know when your project is going to start because you don’t know how long the process will take. Yeah, that's so fascinating. All right, so I've got a lot more questions about this because your breakdown was really interesting. I don't know if you're familiar with the longtermist movement, maybe you’ve come across this before, but one thing they've proposed is not like a doctrine or anything, but on the periphery, some idea I saw was that just as we have environmental review we should have a posterity review so that you're analyzing the impacts of your actions on generations way down the line. What are the future impacts of actions just as we analyze what the environmental impacts reactions? What do you think of an idea like that given the various dysfunctions of the environmental review process? Yeah, a couple thoughts. One is just my gut response is that any additional review is just gonna add additional time and complexity to your process. It's a process that takes some amount of time and has some particular chance of success, right? So adding basically another filter to this process means that it's only going to make the process slower and less likely to succeed rather than more. The other thing is how accurately are you gonna be able to predict what your long-term impacts are/ it's not obvious to me that anybody making predictions over the past 20 years would have been able to do so with any degree of precision. It's not obvious that we would even be able to get like the sign right. Whether it would be net positive or net negative, that's off the top of my head, I could definitely be persuaded otherwise by somebody who is who has thought a lot more about it. So that is not a strongly held opinion, but that's fine.…

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