Ed Barnhart: belief

Transcript context

…From that perspective, absolutely. But I also have a faith in human ingenuity that we humans like to create a really difficult situation and then come up with ways to get out of that difficult situation. And in so doing innovate and create a lot of awesome stuff and sometimes cause a lot of suffering. But on the whole, on average, make a better world. But with nuclear weapons, the bad stuff might actually lead to the death of everybody. I guess there’s always that chance, but I am an optimist. I think you’re an optimist too. I think exactly as you just said. I think that the greatest capacity of humans is our ability to innovate. And we are never more innovative than when we’re under distress. I think that a lot of the developments of humans over the last thousands of years have been about we didn’t change the world when we were comfortable. It was when we were in crisis. Necessity is the mother of invention. But I think we’ll be all right. I think that this impending climate crisis is real and happening. I actually personally think that I’m going to answer a question that you didn’t even ask me. I think we’re wasting our time thinking that we can reverse this. We’re delusional. I’m all for electric cars and being good stewards of the environment, but we are wasting our time not technologically adapting to what’s about to happen. We’re spending too much time pretending, the average American thinks if we all just drive electric cars, we’ll be okay. That’s bullshit. That’s not going to happen. We need to start making technologies that desalinize water, a host of things that we need to use our technological capacity to accept it and adapt, instead of Pollyanna thinking we can make it go away. Yeah, kind of accept that the world will change and a lot of big problems will arise and just develop technology that addresses them.…

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