The Peter McCormack Show5 Des 2022

A Climate Change Debate with Nate Harmon and Steve Barbour - WBD589

Nate Harmon is CEO and cofounder of OceanBit; Steve Barbour is CEO and founder of Upstream Data; both are Bitcoiners. In this interview, we debate climate change: the reliability of climate models, climate change mitigation, adaptation and the forecast inequality of climate change impacts.

- - - -

What Bitcoin Did has discussed both sides of the climate change debate with a number of esteemed guests. The reasoning is two-fold: firstly, one of Bitcoin's major attack vectors is energy use and associated climate change impacts; secondly, it is one of the major issues of our time, arguably the most pressing issue. These shows have either expressed one side or another, until now.

Bitcoiners are a broad church. That is an inherent strength. But is also brings its own internal pressures. Whilst there is broad consensus on Bitcoin's mission, there are divergent opinions on a host of other issues that this new form of money affects. None more so than climate change. Many believe in the need for fossil fuels to enable humans to continue to flourish; others argue that we need to rapidly pivot from fossil fuel reliance if we're to avoid an existential crisis.

However, the debate is not open-ended. There is a strong argument that the framing of the current discussion falls within agreed boundaries. It doesn't feel contentious to state both sides of the debate within the Bitcoin community agree that abundant energy is needed and that the climate is warming. The disagreement is focused on the rate of climate change and the approach to mitigation.

Obviously, whilst there is agreement that narrows the parameters of any debate, the outstanding issues are complex, contentious and critical. The stakes on both sides are high; discussion and compromise are vital. Can we within the community find common ground? Is it possible to attenuate the growing animosity around this subject? Can Bitcoiners lead the way in being open-minded, receptive and malleable to different ideas? Let's start engaging and find out.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(1081)

#203 - Gregory Allen - Ex-DoD Official: "AI Is Now A Digital Nuclear Weapon"

Greg Allen has spent his career where AI meets national security. He wrote the landmark 2017 report on AI for the US intelligence community, served as Director of Strategy and Policy at the Pentagon's...

20 Aug 1h 34min

#202 - Barry S. Strauss - "We Are In The Final Stages Of Western Collapse"

Barry Strauss has spent four decades studying how empires rise and fall. A senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of Ten Caesars and Jews vs Rome, he argues the West is repeating a pat...

18 Aug 1h 15min

#201 - Connor Leahy - The AI That Escaped: Inside OpenAI's Rogue Agent Incident

Connor Leahy has spent his career at the frontier of AI, from reverse-engineering GPT-2 as a student and co-founding EleutherAI to building the AI safety company Conjecture. He now leads US policy wor...

14 Aug 1h 9min

#200 - Sebastian Thrun - The Singularity Is Here & We Are Completely Unprepared

Sebastian Thrun has spent his career working on technologies that once sounded like science fiction, from self-driving cars and flying vehicles to online education and artificial intelligence. He now ...

11 Aug 1h 34min

#199 - Aubrey de Grey - The Man Who Says Ageing Can Be Cured

Aubrey de Grey believes ageing is accumulated damage in a biological machine and argues that medicine may eventually become capable of repairing that damage faster than it appears. He gives humanity a...

6 Aug 1h 17min

#198 - Michael Shermer - Truth, Conspiracies & The Things We Can't Explain

Michael Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, host of The Michael Shermer Show and author of Truth and Conspiracy. He joins Peter to ask whether we are really living in a post-truth w...

4 Aug 1h 27min

#197 - Brian Keating - What Came Before the Big Bang & Does Time Exist?

Brian Keating joins me to explore one of the deepest unanswered questions in physics: what is time, and why does it only appear to move in one direction? Brian argues that time may not exist as a fund...

30 Jul 1h 39min

#196 - Sam Bowman - The U.K. Is Becoming a Poor Country

Sam Bowman joins me to discuss why Britain is approaching two lost decades of stagnant median wages and why the country is now far poorer than it should be. Sam argues that Britain does not lack talen...

28 Jul 2h 9min