Jordan Peterson Tells Joe Rogan Poor People 'Not Resource Efficient'

Jordan Peterson has suggested the fastest way to have a sustainable world is to make "poor people as rich as possible," saying they are not "resource efficient" because their main priority is feeding their families.

During a four-hour interview on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Peterson said efforts to ensure the planet remains habitable must start from the bottom up, including changing how people from lower-income backgrounds source food and other essentials.

Peterson told Rogan that when people are worried about "where your next meal is coming from" they are not as focused on whether their food is environmentally friendly or sourced ethically.

The clinical psychologist cited slash-and-burn agriculture—a farming method where vegetation in a plot of land is cut down and burned in order to produce more fertile soil—as an example of an unsustainable practice.

"The fastest way to make the planet sustainably green and ecologically viable is to make poor people as rich as possible as fast as we possibly can," Peterson said.

"The thing about poor people is that they're not resource efficient. They use a lot of resources to produce very little outcome, so that's a problem.

"But even more importantly, when you're insecure on a day-to-day basis, you don't know where your next meal is coming from, you're not paying attention to the broader environment around you," he added.

"You can't even really worry about your children's future in some real sense because 'No, no, you don't understand. Lunch is the future. We don't have lunch, we're hungry and that goes on for like a month we're dead.' That's the future."

Peterson—who has defended Rogan amid criticisms of the podcaster's comments on COVID vaccines—suggested that once poorer populations had "some hope of a genuine future" then they would "immediately become concerned" about environmental issues.

"The attempt to make the environment habitable and sustainable—that comes up of its own accord at a grassroots level and spreads everywhere."

Elsewhere during the interview with Rogan, Peterson criticized "left-wing types" who he said seemed "willing to sacrifice the poor to their Utopian [visions]" by pushing green energy resources as a way to make the world more sustainable.

"Let's say you increase the cost of energy, that's the price you pay to move forward to a hypothetically green economy," Peterson said.

"What happens is that in any system that's hierarchical—and left wingers know this because it drives their whole philosophy—when you stress the system, the disproportionate amount of that stress falls on the people who are in the lower rungs because they're barely hanging on anyways.

"There is the old saying, 'When the aristocracy gets a cold, the working class dies of pneumonia.' So fine, increase energy costs. Well, what happens? A bunch of poor people fall off the map and the more you increase the energy cost, the more that happens."

At the start of the lengthy interview, Peterson also suggested that there is "no such thing as climate" because right now "climate and everything are the same word."

When asked by Rogan to clarify his comment, Peterson said: "That's what people who talk about the climate apocalypse claim in some sense. We have to change everything... The same with the word environment. That word means so much that it actually doesn't mean anything.

"When you say everything, like, in a sense that's meaningless. What's the difference between the environment and everything? There's no difference. What's the difference between climate and everything? Well, there's no difference."