I would actually have serious respect for someone who is in such an intellectually impoverished environment that they think the world is flat, yet they have the

I would actually have serious respect for someone who is in such an intellectually impoverished environment that they think the world is flat, yet they have the intellectual humility to say they're not totally sure. The video doesn't actually say what Penn's objections to carbon credits are. Googling a bit, Wiki's episode summary for "Being Green" says: "Attacks the concept of carbon credits as a method of profiting off guilt, and compares them to indulgences"—well, is he wrong? I also see comments indicating that he says Al Gore buys carbon credits from a company he owns, which sounds at least like an "appearance of impropriety" which Gore maybe should have avoided. > Clearly principles get trumped by fossil fuel funding. Do you really think Penn got funding from fossil fuel companies and ... The steelman is that fossil fuel companies have paid unscrupulous individuals in think tanks that libertarians subscribe to, to write mendacious reports that libertarians believe. That's possible. I wonder if any other group has been fooled by mendacious reports. I wonder what the best strategy is for defeating mendacious reports in general. Perhaps encouraging everyone engaged in a scientific debate to be as scrupulously honest and precise as they can be—and to recognize dishonest tactics. A failure mode in that is seeing dishonest tactics where none exist, so perhaps one can (encourage everyone to) adopt practices that make it easier for everyone to tell the difference. Things like publishing all raw data, preregistering experiments, and offering rewards for neutral parties to reproduce an experiment, seem helpful.