Bjorn Lomborg, formerly a Greenpeace member, authored "The Skeptical Environmentalist" in 2001, citing 3,000 non-peer-reviewed sources to claim climate change is negligible. Despite debunking by experts like E.O. Wilson and the Danish Ministry of Science labeling his work dishonest, he pivoted to promoting geoengineering over emission cuts while receiving $4 million from the Randolph Foundation. His false calculations on electric cars were off by 2,100%, and his tactics fueled irrational hatred toward activists, ultimately revealing how misinformation parasitically consumes scientific discourse to serve partisan agendas. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Introducing Sophie's Shame00:02:59
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share stay with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Mode of my next guest.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's badly introducing my podcast?
Sophie's a shame to me.
I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards, the podcast where every week we talk about a different terrible person in exhaustive detail.
And I come up with an introduction that's either embarrassingly bad, entertainingly bad, or just plain lame.
And today it was the latter.
Sophie agrees with me.
My guest today, Eric Lampere.
Eric.
Hello, sir.
How are you doing today?
I'm doing really good.
Thank you.
I'm actually very excited about this because I don't often get thrown into a podcast without any prior knowledge of what's going to happen.
Well, that's the way we like to do it here.
Yeah, we like our guests or our subjects to be a mystery.
If the guests were a mystery, that would be very different podcast.
Robert Evans Meets Lumborg00:15:33
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That would be Robert Evans invites people in off the street.
I also like that you've got a machete on the table.
Just to let me know who is boss here.
Well, now, you know, this is a very democratic machete.
Anybody can use the machete for any purpose.
If you feel the need to hit something, I have it on good authority that all of the equipment in here can be hit with the machete.
Is that correct, Sophie?
We're allowed to damage all the equipment, all of the walls, the windows, the poison room.
Absolutely not.
Well, technically, it can get hit.
It can be.
It is possible.
I mean, theoretically, this is a big machete.
He's right.
Eric, you want to hit something?
It'd probably be thrown upon.
I'll tell you what, I don't want my fingerprints on there.
I don't know you well enough to know what you're going to do with that machete afterwards.
I had very different plans for a man, though.
I had very different plans for what to do with the machete before you said that.
Well, I don't know who to joke about murdering.
Damn, that would have been a great time to joke about them.
Yeah, good old-fashioned murder.
Speaking of good old-fashioned murder, today we're talking about newfangled kinds of murder.
The kind of murder where you just talk to people and write bad books and it leads to unspeakable human suffering and possibly millions of deaths.
Wow.
Isn't that a cool thing to talk about?
That's one hell of a murder.
Yeah, it is.
It is.
The guy that we're talking about today, the actual death toll from his work can't quite be quantified yet, but I think one of these days he'll be recognized as...
Real piece of shit.
I'm going to start with a little bit of a winding introduction, so I hope you'll forgive me for that, Eric.
When I was 16 years old, Michael Crichton released State of Fear, the second to last novel he would publish in his lifetime.
Now, I was a big fan of Crichton's work ever since stumbling across the lost world in second or third grade.
I dutifully devoured his canon.
State of Fear was decidedly different from his prior works, though.
The plot was that a group of radical environmentalists using experimental technology were attempting to create a series of natural disasters in order to convince the public of the dangers of global warming.
Because, of course, it wasn't real.
Now, the book was filled with graphs and charts and like quotes from actual scientific studies, which is not common for a sci-fi techno thriller.
It included a 30-page bibliography, all of which was angled at convincing the reader that global warming was not that big a deal, actually.
Right.
Cool book.
Yeah.
While a work of fiction, State of Fear also served as Crichton's manifesto against what he called the politico-legal media complex, which had politicized science and unjustly scared people about the dangers of climate change.
So it was a fun book to read at age 16.
Crichton's work was a massive success, as most of his books were, because the man did know how to write a crowd-pleasing thriller, even if it was a crazy piece of anti-climate change propaganda.
It received widespread praise from conservatives.
Senator Jim Imhoff declared it required reading for the Senate Committee on Environmental and Public Works.
He called on Crichton to testify before said committee in 2005.
Oh, shit.
Yeah.
If you want a real nutshell encapsulation of how fucked American politics has always been, the Senate called on a science fiction, the author of Jurassic Park to testify on climate change.
Trust the guy that blends frogs with dinosaur DNA.
Yeah.
Have they not seen Jurassic Park, Jurassic Park 2, 3, Jurassic World?
It's bound to lead to disaster.
Yeah, exactly.
How can they trust him?
How can they trust him?
It's like if you had, if there was like a clown-focused terrorist group and you called Stephen King to speak to like the Senate about terrorism and stuff because he wrote it.
But I guess King, though, it would be interesting to get into his mind.
I'd love to have him in sort of CIA or FBI table.
Yeah, I do feel like King would actually have some insight into the mind of a terrorist.
Yeah.
Isn't it Einstein that says, you know, the true sign of intelligence is not knowledge, but imagination.
And potentially, maybe that's why Crichton is trusted.
He was not a dumb man, although, like he had a very specific kind of intelligence.
So Michael Crichton, a lot of people don't know this, was a trained doctor.
I forget what he was.
Yeah, he worked on ER.
He created ER.
Oh, he created it.
Yeah, he's the creator of ER.
And he was a medical student.
He got his MD and then kind of pissed off the college he got his MD at because he then didn't work as a doctor and went on to become a science fiction author and like apparently just got the MD so that he could like write good science fiction about medical stuff like Terminal Strain or whatever the hell that book was.
But yeah, so he's not a dumb man, but he has, this is the kind of problem you like come up with a lot, especially in the global warming debate.
People who are not dumb, but have a very specific kind of education and intelligence and then assume that they understand climate science.
That's like, yeah, that's what this episode's really about.
Right.
So yeah, Crichton was called upon to testify before the Senate Committee on Environmental and Public Works in 2005.
In 2006, the AAPG awarded Michael its Journalism Award, which sounds impressive until you learn that the AAPG is the American Association of Petroleum Geologists.
Yeah.
Famed unbiased source on climate journalism.
Actual climate scientists, of course, did not like State of Fear.
Several of the people who authored studies that Crichton used to prove his points even spoke up to complain that he'd completely misinterpreted or outright misrepresented their research.
Peter Doran, author of a nature paper on cooling in the Antarctic, echoed the concerns of many when he complained, our results have been misused as evidence against global warming.
This is a famous study that's cited by anti-climate change people about how like, there's ice in, like one of the poles is increasing and they're like, look at, these ice sheets are actually getting bigger, so close.
And it's like well no, but the other one is getting smaller and the total amount of ice lost from the poles does not over.
Like doesn't, doesn't.
Like they don't balance, they don't balance out.
We're net down a shitload of ice.
Thank you, Sophie.
Sophie's correcting my mic placement because i'm here in the office this time.
She gets to micromanage me.
By the way, I love your tattoo.
Ouch, I was just saying I really like your tattoo.
Oh, thank you.
Is it a shattering Greek pillar?
That's a shattering fascism from?
Uh well, there's a.
It's from a couple of places.
The Roman Empire is where it, but they also there's.
There's big bronze ones up on Congress.
All right oh yeah, of course.
Yeah yeah, as the symbol.
Yeah sorry Sophie, I didn't mean that.
I'm just gonna go cry.
I've hurt Sophie's.
Do you want to hit something with the machete?
I wouldn't hand that to me right now.
Well, i'm just trying to make your podcast better.
Well Sophie, I want everyone to hear every single word that you say.
Rob, now you've shamed me and now I feel bad.
Great, continue your podcast.
I'm once again the bastard of my podcast.
Yep, which is.
It takes one to know one, though you have to dive into the character to truly understand the complexities of bastardry.
As Nietzsche said, if you stare into the abyss long enough, eventually you hurt your boss's feelings.
Nietzsche was a very poetic man.
Yeah, he was a great podcaster.
A little bit very Anti-semitic really yeah, but it was a different time.
Podcasting wasn't as evolved in art form, didn't even know how to record things.
Anyway, I should continue with the episode.
Uh, so Peter Duran, author of that Nature paper on cooling in the Arctic uh, complained that yeah, that Cricin had misinterpreted his results and misused them as evidence against global warming.
The American Geophysical Union, which includes more than 50 000 scientists, stated unequivocally that state of fear quote changed public perception of scientists, especially researchers, and global warming towards suspicion and hostility.
So this is a big book like number one on the charts.
For quite a while it was like a very popular release that had a real negative impact on global warming.
And this is the place where I admit shamefully, that young Republican, Robert Evans, found this book deeply compelling.
Of course, even then I was a bit too savvy to take the words of a science fiction author as the end of the argument, Argument against vast scientific consensus.
So I started going through the bibliography.
And while I was doing that, I came upon the one work that Michael seemed to hold in the highest regard.
A book called The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lumborg.
Have you ever heard of Bjorn motherfucking Lumborg?
No, but I'm guessing he's Scandinavian.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think Danish.
Yeah, so there's a couple of versions of the Bjorn Lumborg story that you'll hear.
I'm going to read one paragraph that's sort of like how he's generally introduced when you read a news article about this guy.
A former member of Greenpeace, a self-described leftist, a backpacking outdoorsman, and a vegetarian, Lumborg in 1997 was paging through a copy of Wired magazine in a bookstore in San Francisco.
He happened across an interview with Julian Simon, a University of Maryland economist known for his optimistic prediction that population growth was unlikely to exhaust the planet's resources.
Later that year, an intrigued Lumborg set about in Denmark with 10 of his brightest students to examine Simon's claims.
Expecting to prove Simon wrong, Lumborg and his students were surprised to find that many of the economists' predictions about the state of the environment were on the mark.
This discovery led Lumborg to pin a few op-eds for a center-left Danish newspaper, and eventually the publication in Denmark of the first edition of The Skeptical Environmentalist.
Now, the book was essentially a thoroughly argued case against the scientific consensus on global warming.
Lumborg pointed out what he called a number of inconsistencies that he claimed to have uncovered between the hard scientific data and the party line of climate scientists and environmental activists.
Lumborg would use what looked to my 16-year-old brain like compelling scientific data to argue his points.
Among other things, Lomborg argued.
Number one, species are not going extinct at a weirdly high rate.
Number two, the world is not losing ice, and thus the seas are in no real danger of rising.
Number three, global temperatures aren't increasing in any worrying way.
And number four, there's more trees than ever, so what are environmentalists worried about?
It sounds silly like talking about it now in 2019, but in 2001, it was a different media ecosystem.
Like the fact that the world was shitting its climactic pants was not quite as obvious to everybody.
But the whole climate change debate has been around for quite a long time, hasn't it?
The 80s?
At least the 80s.
Oh, yeah.
And really even before that, Murray Bookchin, who is a philosopher I'm a fan of, kind of an anarchist political thinker, in the 1960s, wrote a lengthy series of essays talking about how carbon emissions and fossil fuels were going to lead to like massive climate catastrophe unless we adopted like vastly radically different ways of living that were like not compatible with kind of the consumptive capitalist system that we existed in currently.
Like that's 1965, he's writing this stuff very clearly later.
So yeah, people knew about this for decades.
It's just that nobody took it seriously until we had what, three category five hurricanes hit the U.S.'s east coast in the course of like a year.
But even that doesn't seem to be enough evidence for people.
Well, I find fascinating.
And there's an element of me that sort of not sympathizes, but until you experience something, you can't actually know anything's real.
And so when people say, oh, you know, it's all melting the ice and the poles and stuff, until they actually visibly see it, they can't fully understand the complexities of it.
Yeah.
So it's that.
Christopher Nolan mentions it in Inception, you know, about how once a seed is planted in your head, it's very hard to sort of unroot.
Yeah.
And if you don't have trust in your government, then why would you trust that they say that the climate is being destroyed?
And I'm just talking here, like, because obviously the climate is changing drastically.
All you need to do is rub your hands together and you understand that friction causes heat.
And the more people there are on the planet, the more cars there are, the more food that needs to be grown, all of that.
It is logical.
But I am trying to understand why people don't believe.
You know, there's a lot of reasons.
I think a lot of it comes down to people like Lumborg because there's this kind of war that really started in the 90s, the late 90s, against scientific consensus.
Like there was a time when if scientists in like nature came out with a study saying like, we got a big fucking problem, the idea that you'd have a bunch of people just rejected out of hand because they believe there's a conspiracy by China to like convince people global warming is real.
Like that would that would sound absurd to people.
And now the president has essentially spread that same line.
Like it's this is a lot of this is like where we are right now is the culmination of a process that Lumborg was a major part in starting, this war against kind of a shared understanding of reality.
And part of the problem is that this issue was so politicized.
And it's like, I don't think Al Gore was wrong in making it like a key cornerstone of like his presidential campaign and just like his personal activism.
But the fact that Gore was associated with Clinton and that Republican, having grown up in a Republican home, I can tell you the kind of hatred of the Clintons that existed in the late 90s and in 2000 was beyond rational.
It was a kind of mania that overtook the conservative right and that is still very much present and prevalent.
And so because Al Gore, who was connected to the Clintons, was making this point, it had to be fake.
And so that was a big driver of all of this.
So there's a lot of this that's tied together.
It's the end of a process in which kind of at the apex point of the process, nobody believes anything.
There's no sort of authority beyond the one guy that you like if you're that sort of person or whatever pundits you trust.
And yeah, it's a real problem.
Yeah.
It's interesting.
I also wonder, though, if all the people that are pushing the climate change as a hoax thing generally are quite wealthy.
Well, and they won't be affected by it.
Ultimately, the world and humanity will survive, right?
Now, there may be millions, billions of deaths caused because of climate change, but ultimately humanity will survive.
And I think the very rich will always be good.
They can just move somewhere else.
Yeah, they'll move somewhere that's going to go from having brutal winters to being like a Los Angeles when Los Angeles burns down.
So ultimately, they don't give a shit.
Well, yeah, that's actually kind of where this is headed a little bit.
Right.
Yeah.
Apologies if I rumble.
No, no, no, no.
This is what the podcast is for.
So the unavoidable conclusion from reading Lumborg's book and taking it seriously was that everything was more or less hunky-dory with the climate.
Now, Bjorn did not deny that there were some environmental problems.
He didn't even come out and deny that human beings were changing the climate.
But his argument was that all of the issues we were having were things that could be solved by better conservation and modest infrastructure investments.
Nobody needed to say, stop driving cars or stop burning coal or stop fracking gas.
The people telling us to do all that were just fear mongers.
That's Bjorn Lumborg's line.
Now, 16-year-old Robert Evans took Lumborg's book apart and used many bits arguments for a series of debates in his speech and debate class.
And then he grew up and entered the real world and stopped being a young Republican.
Somewhere between reading the work of actual climate scientists, which Lumborg is not, and living through four of the hottest years on record, he came around on the whole climate change thing.
But I was not the only person fooled by Bjorn Lumborg.
The media narrative around him was just too good for bunches of overly incredulous journalists to not flock to him.
The Dehumanizing Cost of Capitalism00:04:00
One example of this was a 2001 New York Times profile released right before the publication of the English translation of The Skeptical Environmentalist.
The title, Scientist at Work, from an Unlikely Corner, Eco-Optimism.
That's nice, eco-optimism.
Quote, strange to say, the author of this happy thesis is not a steely-eyed economist at a conservative think tank, but a vegetarian, backpack-toeting academic who was a member of Greenpeace for four years.
He is Dr. Bjorn Lumborg, a 36-year-old political scientist and professor of statistics at the University of Aarhus in Denmark.
Now, the article went into loving detail about how Lumborg had been converted from environmental apocalypticism by reading the work of Dr. Julian Simon, who's that doctor we talked about a little earlier.
Now, Simon is famous for having some very public arguments with a guy named Dr. Paul Ehrlich over resource scarcity.
Ehrlich was like a doom, kind of a doomsayer.
He wrote like a book about how human population was going to reach an apocalyptic level and cause massive resource scarcity.
And his predictions turned out to be largely untrue.
And Simon actually made a bet with him about like, you know, they picked five resources and Ehrlich bet that they would all increase in cost over the next like couple of decades.
And Simon bet that they would decrease.
And Simon wound up being right.
Can I ask, do you think that people aren't necessarily worried about the whole climate change thing as a whole as an actual doomsday possibility because they've gone through so many doomsday possibilities?
So we've had the millennium bug.
You guys have had the nuclear threats from Russia.
We are constantly barraged by these end-of-the-world scenarios that never usually happen.
That when we are presented with one that's actually in front of us, happening live in front of our eyes, that most people can just brush it aside because they've experienced other doomsday scenarios that have actually just sort of gone by in the wind.
I absolutely think that kind of particularly some of the Hollywood, like the day after tomorrow shit, like that's that's actually really hurt the cause of getting people to take this seriously.
Right.
Because the problem is not that the world is going to end.
Human beings are very adaptable.
The majority of us will find a way to survive no matter what happens to the climate, like even if a fucking asteroid hits.
I have no doubt that a lot of people will figure out how to make that shit work because we're just cunning little bastards.
The problem is that like it's not an apocalypse thing.
It's like what do we want the world to be?
What do we want the world to be for our kids, for our grandkids?
Do we want it to be this sun-wracked nightmare hellscape where people knife fight to death over jugs of water?
A lot of people don't.
That's another scary thing.
I am hoarding water and knives, but that's very little to do with the podcasting machete.
No, it is weird how a lot of people hate being by themselves, which means that they always have bad voices in their heads.
And if they have bad voices in their heads, they don't really care about other people.
And so the idea of an apocalyptic scenario where their life gets twist turned upside down is actually welcoming because most people's lives are kind of difficult and challenging.
Well, if I can get into like my own fringe political beliefs on this, I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that there are some very dehumanizing aspects to the kind of capitalism that we enjoy in the United States.
And a lot of people's lives are incredibly difficult and there's very little hope that things will lighten up or that they'll be able to retire.
There's like no light at the end of the tunnel.
There's just a series of distractions.
And so the idea that it might all come tumbling down and you would get to be king of the wasteland and not have to clock in at work at Target the next morning.
Right, right.
That does, that is very attractive to a chunk of the population, especially the people who believe that they would thrive in that environment.
Yeah, that's an important key, I think, is that they would believe they would thrive when the reality is two days in the woods.
Now, Eric, speaking of the dehumanizing realities of modern American consumerist capitalism, it's time for an ad plug.
From Addiction to Acceleration00:04:06
Is this a good, this is a good one, Sophie?
Yeah, nailing it.
Products!
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
They said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Mode.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Steve Bannon and Species Extinction00:16:10
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
Boy, a lot happened in that break.
Number one, I grabbed my throwing bagels.
I don't know if you're aware of this, but I throw bagels on the show.
It's a much kinder substitute to a machete, I think.
Well, for your guests.
I actually plan to combine the two.
So here's what I'd like to do when we hit a point of maximum rage in this episode.
Or perhaps at the end of it.
I'm going to throw these bagels, and I want you to slice them out of the air like a modern samurai with the Sisters machete.
Hell yeah.
You want to do that?
All right.
Sophie says that it's approved by everyone at corporate, so we're good to go.
I also have to say, I just tried the Pear Editions sugar-free Red Bull.
I hate Red Bull as a general rule.
I hate the company, the ad campaign.
This is delightful.
The pear version is really tasty.
I hate that it's so good, but it's fantastic.
And I like that you gave it a little like.
You are a commercial now.
Thank you.
You've become America.
God damn it.
It happens every time I come back to Los Angeles.
When can I show him a photo of this fucker?
Yeah, show him young Bjorn Lumborg so you can see how this guy.
Okay, because I was going to say, Michael's all right.
Michael's an all right face.
No, no, he's fine.
So this is young Bjorn Lumborg.
So for anyone listening, he looks like Hitler's wet dream.
He kind of looks like what every Scandinavian.
Yeah, he looks like what Aaron Carter would look like if he didn't do drugs in like 20 years.
You know, the sort of blue eyes, blonde hair, and it works for him.
Yeah.
But how does he look now?
Well, we'll talk about that in a little bit.
I want to get to where this guy winds up as bad.
But not great.
Right.
Now, where the hell was he?
Is he a personification of what's going on inside his mind?
Yeah, kind of actually.
It's a personification of what's happened to his arguments over the years.
Which I think happens.
I mean, look at Steve Bannon.
If Steve, Stevie Banny, right, if he looks like Steve.
If Steve looks healthy, if he looked like Hercules and was like, just, you know, I hate these types of people.
Yeah.
I'd be like, I'm going to listen to that guy.
He's a beautiful man.
He must be healthy both physically and therefore mentally.
But Steve is full of like red alert type skin, you know, where like clearly skirmishes have happened on his face.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's a war between his acne and his cirrhosis.
And like, it's a vicious battle.
Oh, poor Steve.
No, don't fuck me for Steve Bannon.
You know what?
It doesn't get said enough.
Poor Steve.
Steve Bannon.
Stevie B.
So, yeah, Lumborg wanted.
We talked about Julian Simon, the guy who got into that argument with Paul Ehrlich.
And he's like a frequently quoted scientist by people who want to deny climate change because one of the things that they'll always argue is that, well, back in the 70s and 80s, everybody was told us there was going to be a population bomb and a population, a resource crisis, and that didn't happen.
So clearly, like, this is the same thing, and everybody's worried for nothing.
And Simon is one of the apostles of he was right about the population crisis.
And that is one of the things whenever we get into talks about climate change and people bring up population as a problem, that's 0% of the problem.
The overall human population is not an issue.
It's resource expenditure by people like us.
It's not like the issue is not that there's too many people being born in sub-Saharan Africa or in India or in China, it's a little bit, but a lot of that's because they're making stuff to be sold in the European Europe and the United States.
It's not a population issue.
It's the types of resources being consumed.
And also, like more than anything, related to, yeah, it's more an issue of billionaires and millionaires and upper middle class people in the kind of resources they spend, like celebrities flying their private jets from one airport in LA to the other to skip midtown traffic, which happens way more often than you would expect.
Oh, really?
you can track their planes.
Yeah.
It's more of that than it is like, oh, look at all these people.
And yeah, that's part of like what Steve Bannon actually, that's one of the racist arguments that he'll make about like, well, if you're really concerned, we should like be concerned about all these population problems going.
So it's like this weird thing on the right where they'll both point to Paul Ehrlich and his fears of a population bomb to be like, look, climate change isn't real because they were wrong about overpopulation.
And they'll also complain that like all these hordes of poor non-white people from like the global south are going to like are using up the world's resources when that's not at all the case.
Like it's this double-edged sword of racism and also not doing anything about the core problems of climate change.
It's very frustrating.
I do wonder with these scientists who say you know they're opposing climate change and stuff.
I do wonder sometimes if that's just good money.
It is with Lumborg.
I'm not going to say it.
Simon died, I think, before the debate really took off.
He was right about the population stuff.
So I don't want to lump him in with Lumborg.
But Lumborg sees himself as that kind of figure.
So Simon gains a lot of renown for being right about the fact that there was alarmism around the global population.
And Lumborg painted himself as that kind of guy.
And he would bring this story up specifically when he did news interviews so that people would, conservatives in particular, would see him as like, oh, this is the next iteration of that kind of scientist.
This is the clear-eyed Galileo-type contrarian scientist who sees the reality through the political bullshit of climate change and understands that it's not really a problem we can keep fracking.
Like that's how he's painting himself.
So it's important to understand that.
So one of the reasons that Lumborg was so convincing, particularly to journalists who, again, didn't know anything about science, like the guys at the New York Times who wrote this profile piece, is that his book had a shitload of citations in it.
In many of the articles about Lumborg in the early 2000s, you would read quotes like this one from the Times.
Dr. Lumborg has presented his findings in The Skeptical Environmentalist, a book to be published in September by Cambridge University Press.
The primary targets of the book, a substantial work of analysis with almost 3,000 footnotes, are statements made by environmental organizations like the World Watch Institute, the World Wildlife Fund, and Greenpeace.
Virtually every one of these pieces you would find includes references and often multiple references to the fact that Lumborg's book had like 3,000 footnotes.
So like that's part of the claim of like how like this is a really seriously researched scholarly.
Look at how many footnotes it has.
You can find like videos and stuff of people like opening the book and like pointing out how thick the section of footnotes is.
And like I did that when I was in school to point out like, look, this guy's really like, look at how many fucking, we're excited he has.
That means it's like a real solid work of science.
So you were once sort of on his site.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
I was raised very conservative, very Republican.
I thought that George W. Bush was the best president since Ronald Reagan, who was the best president.
And how long did it take you to sort of distance yourself from him?
I mean, as soon as I went to college and made friends who both were not white and also had not grown up middle class.
So bear in mind how challenging it had to take you to be from one place to another.
And you're clearly smart and you clearly have resources where you want to read and stuff.
Then we're asking the general populace to just switch off Netflix for an hour and maybe read an essay.
Yeah.
Like read an essay that's like dense and hard to understand.
And they might come across stuff like research on how one Arctic ice sheet is increasing in density.
And like you have to also ask them, no, no, don't stop just because you read one thing that doesn't seem like it actually takes understanding a lot of different things.
Like not just like what's happening with like ice sheets, but what's happening with like air currents and like weather patterns and species.
Well they have to understand chaos theory.
Yeah.
In its most complex form, which is...
And then you get to this situation where like you wind up telling people, just look, all the scientists agree about this, so just believe them.
But then there's...
So maybe if you need to know chaos theory, maybe we should talk to Michael Crichton about this.
It's frustrating he didn't get that.
Yeah.
In Crichton.
Lost World's still a fine book, but god damn it, dude.
So yeah, journalists who liked Lumborg would point out like all of those fucking footnotes.
Like that was one of the biggest arguments to like why the skeptical environmentalist was a credible book.
And most people who looked at all those footnotes assumed that his arguments were actually supported by the research included therein.
Spoilers, it was not.
As with Crichton, several of the scientists cited in Lumborg's book spoke out to warn that he had misinterpreted their work.
A bevy of experts took to the field to complain that the skeptical environmentalists was nothing but a pack of deadly lies.
For one example of how dumb this shit is, I'd like to quote an article written by Dr. E. O. Wilson, a Harvard professor, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and an actual biologist.
He's commenting on Lumborg's claims that fears of mass extinction brought on by climate change are bogus.
Using bad data and lies, Lumborg estimated a species loss worldwide of just 0.7% over the next 50 years.
0.014% per year.
Now, Dr. Wilson, who's an actual biologist, again, and not a fucking statistian and economist like Lumborg, wrote this.
Before humans existed, the species extinction rate was very roughly one species per million species per year, 0.0001%.
Estimates for current species extinction rates range from 100 to 10,000 times that, but mostly hover close to the 1,000 times pre-human levels, 0.1% per year, with the rate projected to rise and very likely sharply.
Wilson goes on to note, based on the work of Stuart Pym of Columbia University's Center for Environmental Research and Conservation, anywhere from one to several bird species go extinct annually out of 10,000 known species.
Hence say 0.01 to 0.03% of all living bird species are extinguished per year.
But birds are unusual in that threatened bird species receive an extraordinary amount of human intervention.
The real figure of observed extinctions would be much higher, very likely 10 per year, 0.1% or more, if it were not for their heroic efforts to save species on the brink of extinction.
Now that article and that quote from Dr. Wilson came from 2001.
But time has proved Dr. Wilson right and Dr. Lumborg wrong.
The Center for Biological Diversity notes, we're currently experiencing the worst spate of species die-off since the loss of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
Although extinction is a natural phenomenon, it occurs at a natural background rate of about one to five species per year.
Scientists estimate we are now losing species at up to a thousand times the background rate, with literally dozens going extinct every day.
It could be a scary future indeed, with as many as 30 to 50% of all species possibly heading towards extinction by mid-century.
Right.
So Lumborg says, yeah, 0.7% of all species by mid-century.
The reality is 30 to 50%.
But even that, the 30 to 40, I think most people don't care, right?
But what it seems like people don't understand is if you lose one animal, it snowballs and sort of triggers effect.
Like, you need to like, we need to win the heart of people in different ways.
I learned, so there's this woman called Dr. Erica McAllister.
She works at the Natural History Museum and she is a fly expert.
And I did an interview with her about flies.
And there is one fly that creates chocolate, pollinates chocolate.
And because of global warming, we're actually losing that fly, which means that potentially we could lose chocolate.
If you get to people in that way, I can see people protesting first.
Losing chocolate?
If you can convince them it's real.
Like, one of the problems is that, like, there's a lot of people who, when you tell them that we're losing species, will get angry and say, fuck all those species.
I want them dead.
I'm going to drive the biggest, I'm going to modify my car to release more pollution so that it'll kill them faster.
Because there's this big propaganda game that's been played in the U.S. to make it look like they'll point out a couple of specific cases where the Environmental Protection Act led to farmers losing access to pieces of their land to preserve like wetlands and keep a species of frog alive.
And it like led to people murdering some of those species, like as an act of protest against what they saw as government overreach.
Like it's this.
There's this hateful and utterly lunatic chunk of the right that has been trained to respond to any talk of global warming with just like violent rage, which is why you'll see people threatening to kill Greta Thunberg, the young environmental activist.
It's amazing to watch almost.
I mean, I'm obviously really sad for her and I almost kind of fear what could happen to her.
There's a piece of me that's like, as fucked up as it is, and I'm horribly sorry that she is going through this and very proud of her for being an activist.
It's good that it's been made this obvious that there's this young girl just saying, I want the world to be habitable by current, like when I'm an adult, I want to be able to like enjoy wetlands and like glaciers.
Like I want to be able to live in the kind of world that y'all grew up in.
And every like this chunk of the populace threatening to murder her.
And like that we see this kind of hate unleashed.
That like it really is that irrational.
It really has been irrational.
Hate and fear is irrational.
And Lumborg is ground zero for spinning that up.
Like he's a part of this convincing everybody.
Like that was the first stage, was convincing them there's this conspiracy.
And he didn't say it was a conspiracy.
He just said that like, look, there's this the reality.
If you look at the real data, it's actually not that bad.
And all these groups are just trying to scare you.
Like there's this conspiracy of fear.
And that's the whole idea behind Crichton's book is that there's a literal conspiracy to like make you believe this is happening when it's not.
And that's step one to getting and the end stage of this like long, and I don't even think it was really a plan, but the natural conclusion of the start of this where you just get everyone to distrust this information, believe they're being lied to, is when this young woman steps up, people are just like screaming spittle-flecked hatred at this girl for daring to be like, I'd like it if there were ice in the future.
Yeah.
It's pretty scary, the people that are out there.
Yeah.
And Lumborg is an important guy to understand to know how we got from like where we used to be as a species about like kind of basic scientific consensus and where we are right now, particularly in the United States.
Right.
But also, the thing is, I do try and understand people that don't understand.
Right.
And if most people, well, actually, all people can only experience life through their own eyes.
Right.
And if people are also not curious, because the majority of people are not curious, it's a shame.
Their curiosity is focused.
They're curious about whatever they're into.
They're not curious about that.
But even that, some people just aren't, right?
They just sort of float around, just sort of colliding into things and just life takes them in a different path and they almost have no control in where they're going.
And most people just haven't got that curiosity to read more than one clickbait article.
And so it's very, so, it's so easy to be brainwashed into thinking that, yeah, what if it is a conspiracy?
Because all the proof I have is it's getting hotter, but because the news tells me it's getting hotter, how do I know?
Look at this nicely dressed Danish man with beautiful blonde hair holding up a book with like 3,000 citations telling me not to worry.
All right.
Well, I'm going to go back to worrying about like, you know, the fact that my kid doesn't have healthcare or whatever.
Like I have other shit to deal with.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, yeah, It turns out that Lumborg, also speaking of that bibliography, puffed it up to a kind of ridiculous extent by including a lot of sources that were not rigorously researched scientific studies.
So like the way that it was framed is like, this is all the scientific citations.
It wasn't all scientific citations.
I'm going to read a quote from an article by Matt Nisbet, a professor of communication and a writer with the skeptical inquirer.
Flawed Economics and Biodiversity00:07:10
He uncritically and selectively cites literature, much of it non-peer-reviewed, and misinterprets or misunderstands the previously published scientific research.
Several scientists observed that most of Lumborg's 3,000 citations are to media articles and secondary sources.
Lumborg's research is conceptually flawed.
He ignores ecology and connections among environmental problems, taking instead a human-centered approach.
In several cases, he uses statistical measures that are not valid indicators of the problems he reports are improving.
On the topic of biodiversity, E.O. Wilson and a team of reviewers find that Lumborg's work is strikingly at odds with what every expert in the field has stated.
The review appearing in Nature goes broader and concludes that the skeptical environmentalist is a hastily prepared book on complex scientific issues which disagrees with broad scientific consensus, using arguments too often supported by news sources rather than by peer-reviewed publications.
So he picks news sources where people have misinterpreted scientific studies, then uses those arguments in his book, and then includes those citations to puff up his 3,000 citation counts that it seems like, because people think he's actually reading science and actually understands it.
But of course he can't.
Like one of the things you notice that's really frustrating that we're going to get to in a bit is how many different types of scientists it takes to debunk Lumborg's work, which points out that it's fundamentally absurd to assume that any statistician, any economist, period, anywhere in the world, could write a competent book on climate change.
It's not possible because it requires so much different expertise from so many different fields to actually have a hope of understanding the whole scope of the problem and analyzing all this correctly.
And Lumborg, that's not what he's good at.
I'm sure he's fine enough at fucking economics, but like, this is not economics.
Is there not artificial intelligent programs now to sort of create models of climate change and where it could possibly be going in the future?
Well, that's just the Chi Coms trying to trick us.
Right.
There is so much wrong with Bjorn Lumborg's book that I could literally write five or six episodes just going through everything that's been debunked in it and not finish getting through everything Lumborg got wrong.
And I'm not going to do that because we all have better shit to do.
And because a number of incredibly authoritative scientists have already gone through the trouble of doing line-by-line breakdowns of everything in the book.
Rather than just go over every single thing that Bjorn got wrong, I'm going to quote from the Union of Concerned Scientists.
They invited a group of the world's leading experts on water resources, biodiversity, and climate change to review the skeptical environmentalist.
Quote, reviewing Dr. Lumborg's claims are Dr. Peter Gleek, an internationally recognized expert on the state of freshwater resources.
Dr. Jerry Malman, one of the most highly regarded atmospheric scientists and climate modelers, and top biologists and biodiversity experts, Drs. Edward O. Wilson, Thomas Lovejoy, Norman Myers, Jeffrey Harvey, and Stuart Pym.
This is, again, that's, what are we at there?
Seven doctors, seven different experts at the top of their fields, all reviewing this book.
Liars.
Yeah, liars.
And of course, none of them are statisticians or economists.
Quote, these separately written expert reviews, they all had them write separate things so that they weren't influencing each other, unequivocally demonstrate that on closer inspection, Lumborg's book is seriously flawed and fails to meet basic standards of credible scientific analysis.
The authors note how Lumborg consistently misuses, misrepresents, or misinterprets data to greatly underestimate rates of species extinctions, ignore evidence that billions of people lack access to clean water and sanitation, and minimize the extent and impacts of global warming due to the burning of fossil fuels and other human-caused emissions of heat-trapping gases.
Time and time again, these experts find that Lumborg's assertions and analyses are marred by flawed logic, inappropriate use of statistics, and hidden value judgments.
He uncritically and selectively cites literature, often not peer-reviewed, that supports his assertions while ignoring or misinterpreting scientific evidence that does not.
His consistently flawed use of scientific data is, in Peter Gleek's words, unexpected and disturbing in a statistician.
All this makes me think, you know what, maybe free speech isn't the right path for humanity.
It's hard to read the story of Lumborg and not feel like we need to have a couple extra laws about when you...
I don't think it is that free speech is a problem.
I think it's that we too narrowly interpret the fire in a crowded theater rule.
Nobody disagrees that like, yeah, if somebody's shouting there's a fire and causes a stampede and someone dies.
Yeah, of course that person should be criminally liable.
What happens when a guy does this?
Why isn't he criminally liable for the impact?
He knows what he's doing.
Yeah, there should be more tests.
Like you shouldn't just be allowed to have a book, I think.
You know what I'm saying?
Speaking as a guy who's written a book, yeah, yes.
You shouldn't just be allowed.
You should have like some basic not much basic.
You should have some knowledge about what you're doing.
It's frustrating.
Like there should be.
One of the difficulties with this is like so many of these issues and the issues we have with like getting people on board with like a basic understanding of the consensus of climate change is that there's so many individual studies.
Like if you just read the summary of the study, you could argue like, oh, this proves that climate change isn't a problem.
And then if you actually go into what the scientists are saying, they're like, no, This may seem like it's not a problem, but it actually plays into this problem, this problem, this problem.
And it's a part of this chain of events that leads to this thing that's exactly what scientists have been telling everybody for years.
You're misinterpreting my research, but that doesn't matter because somebody just like waves, look, this study says it's not a problem on Fox News.
And then my parents are like, well, I guess we don't have to worry.
Right.
Yeah, it's frustrating.
You know what's not frustrating?
Ice cream.
Ice cream.
And the ads for this podcast might be ice cream.
Sophie, are we sponsored by ice cream?
God, I hope so.
Let's hope that it's ice cream sponsoring the show and not another Koch brothers ad.
It might be another Koch brothers ad.
That pops me out so much.
I hope it's a vaping ad and not a Koch brothers ad.
Same thing.
No, it's not.
Same thing.
I mean, technically, vaping could reduce overall climate emissions if it really is killing people.
So that's what I said on the Daily Zeitgeist a couple of days ago.
I said that I think that the NRA is actually the best thing America has currently in its fight against climate change.
You know, every death leads to a fewer carbon footprint.
I will say if we really want to get down that road, the greatest ally the world has in fighting climate change is the tobacco industry.
Oh, I'll put you in the best fight is climate change in itself.
It will kill a lot of people.
It doesn't kill that many people.
We've gotten too good at disaster recovery.
Right.
And this is how we get sponsors.
Yes.
Sponsors like Philip Morris Tobacco, solving climate change, one 45-year-old's lungs at a time.
Was that a good ad plug, Sophie?
Absolutely not.
Products!
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
Never Mess With a Country Girl00:03:15
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
They said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Sherry stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Moda.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Foreign Policy Decision Fatigue00:09:04
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
All right, we're back.
So all of these debunkings we've gone through were public information, basically as soon as Bjorn Lumborg's book was out and serious people had time to read it.
But none of the authoritative deconstructions of Lumborg's work seemed to matter.
He kept right on making bank as the prophet of everything's fine and capitalism will save us all from the climate catastrophe capitalism created.
His website, Bjorn Lumborg, get the facts straight, includes a short selection of the many awards he received.
One of the hundred top global thinkers, foreign policy, 2011.
Thought leader, Bloomberg Summit, 2011.
One of the hundred top global thinkers, foreign policy, 2010.
One of the world's 75 most influential people of the 21st century, Esquire, 2008.
One of the 50 people who could save the planet, UK Guardian, 2008.
One of the top 100 public intellectuals, Foreign Policy and Prospect Magazine, 2008.
One of the top 100 public intellectuals, Foreign Policy and Prospect Magazine, 2005.
One of the world's most hundred influential people.
Time Magazine, 2004.
Wow.
Wow, right?
Isn't that fucked up?
Well, it's fucked up.
It's also not surprising, though, because these people making those lists are probably interns.
Like, ultimately, the truth is that the people making lists aren't educated in that field.
It's a lot of, I think it's a mix of those and like editors who come from a wealthy background, because a lot of news editors do, and who have like friends in all these industries and stuff and are like, ah, this is the guy telling us it's fine.
Right.
Yeah.
I think that's a chunk of it, especially for like foreign policy and Esquire.
Now, you know, when you do your behind the bastard podcast, do you have a lot of anger just boiling through your veins?
Yeah, I go shooting about once a week.
I have a lot of different machetes that I hit stuff with.
I work out about 90 minutes a day.
Oh, very nice.
Yeah.
I wonder like how just hearing all of that out, how long you just stay Zen?
I do not stay Zen.
I do a lot of drugs.
It does help.
Yeah, to be honest, like speaking of the NRA, shooting is probably the best cathartic thing for dealing with that kind of rage.
I have to say, I'm very much sort of an anti-gun person, but at the same time, I don't want to judge people, especially once I've, until I've experienced it.
And I did get to a shooting range and it's fun.
Whether or not you think they should all be banned, it's objectively fun.
Oh, it's very fun.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That has nothing to do with what the laws should be.
Right.
Yeah.
Right, right.
Now, if you'd notice from all of those top thinker awards, they all came out at latest in 2011.
And a majority of them were from 2010 or earlier.
It's weird that Lumborg seems to be considered a top thinker much less often in these days of category five hurricanes and apocalyptic mudslides in the Midwest and the hottest years ever on record and California's largest wildfires.
Weird.
Yeah, because I guess what people's thought behind it is that things like that have always happened.
So I know that, for example, in the UK, during the Roman times, there were melons that you can grow melons.
And then in Charles Dickens' times, in one of his books, I think it was David Copperfield, the Thames was frozen over, which is the river that runs through London, which I've never seen it frozen.
It was so frozen, they could build bonfires on it.
So it's wild.
So I understand that climate does change all the time.
But I think people don't understand that it's sort of changing at a rate.
I think part of Lumborg's falling from grace is that people have started to like, like California's always had wildfires.
We've never had Malibu burned down.
Like, I think that was a wake-up call to a chunk of people.
I think that like, especially in like Florida and stuff, part of why it's gotten harder and why like a lot of people on the right no longer say climate change isn't happening.
They'll say that like either humans aren't behind it or that, you know, and we'll get to this.
The line Lumborg is pushing now.
It's like, oh, no, it's absolutely happening.
It's just what everyone says we should do, cut emissions and stuff.
That's wrong.
And there's other things that we should do.
But like you can't, even like a bunch of the arch conservatives living on the Florida coast, one of the most conservative, like you can't have those kind of hurricanes hit as regularly as they are and be like, nothing's changing.
At this point, it's like, oh, wow, we've had three once in a century storms in like a couple of years.
Like, maybe there's a problem.
Right, right.
So now the debate has changed.
Like, well, what do we do about the problem and stuff?
And Lumborg has tried to pivot on that.
He has been less successful, which again, we'll get to.
But, you know, it's in the first few years after the skeptical environmentalist was published by the Oxford University Press in 2001, which fucking Oxford University Press.
Lumborg was everywhere.
He was on 2020.
He was on Newsnight, 60 Minutes, The Late Show, Larry King, and he made regular appearances on CNN, MSNBC, and of course, Fox News.
All of these sources accepted Lumborg as an expert, while the real expert shouted desperately that he was as shit-filled as a poop factory.
Proud of that one, Sophie?
Thank you.
I think one hint as to why this happened is included inside that first fawning New York Times article from 2001.
Dr. Lumborg also chides, and this is him talking about what he calls the litany, which is the term he used for the doom and gloom stuff being said about climate change in the early 2000s.
Dr. Lumborg also chides journalists, saying they uncritically spread the litany, and he accuses the public of an unfounded readiness to believe the worst.
The litany has pervaded the debate so deeply and so long, Dr. Lumborg writes, that blatantly false claims can be made again and again without any references and yet still be believed.
This is the fault not of academic environmental research, which is balanced and competent, he says, but rather of the communication of environmental knowledge, which taps deeply into our doomsday beliefs.
And I think if you completely reverse everything that he just said, that is an accurate explanation for Lumborg's success.
The problem is not that journalists uncritically spread the gospel of climate change.
The problem is that journalists uncritically accept people claiming to be experts and will write glowing articles about them if they just have a 3,000 entry work cited page in their bibliographies.
People don't want to buy into doomsday beliefs, not really.
Most people want to believe that everything's going to be fine and they don't need to worry about a problem.
So we'll happily listen to a handsome European who misreads real studies to show us that everything is fine.
And I think Lumborg's ability to tap into all of these things is why he's been successful, or at least why he was.
Do you think that I like sort of asking you questions?
You're very smart and I want to see what comes out of your face.
Do you think that the world is sort of experiencing a mass bystander effect?
Yeah, always.
It's like.
Yeah, they are just constantly just going, oh, well, someone else will sort that out.
Yeah, I think we always are.
I think it's like a natural consequence of, I think, like one of the, I'm on record as saying like one of the worst things that ever happened is 24-hour television news.
It might be what destroys us as a species.
Like if there is a big apocalyptic nuclear war or something, I think the core of it will lie in the 24-hour news cycle one way or the other, because it's just this machine that exists to exhaust people's ability to give a fuck and to productively deal with problems.
And I think it's a big part of why you have this kind of decision fatigue and this assumption that somebody else will handle it, which is like what a lot of people on the right will point to now, that you can't completely deny climate change.
So they'll say, well, scientists are going to figure out a solution.
They'll figure out a way to fix the whole problem.
Which they will, yeah, as well.
Yeah, they sure will.
There won't be consequences.
Hey, as a French person, I really miss beheading people.
You know, honestly, I really think we should bring that back.
You know what I think the actual solution would be?
Like, the worst thing you could do to the people who are actually responsible for most of this is if you were to take away the oil and gas executives, the people at like, what's the company?
It starts with an E. Enron.
No, no, no.
Well, yeah, those guys too.
But like the people at like these oil and gas companies who like knew back in like at least the 70s and stuff that climate change was going to be a problem.
And like direct, like the cigarette companies covered up evidence that it was going to be an issue so they can maintain their profits.
I think you take all of those people's money.
Mitch McConnell at Applebee's00:02:55
I think you take all of their family money and you lock them and anyone who profited from the family business into making no more than the like median American salary and make them live in a normal apartment and make them just be a normal person.
And you have that enforced upon them so that they never will ever be able to get access to a yacht to do anything like that.
But on the way there, though, they have to do the Cersei Lannister style of walk and shave.
I'm okay with a little bit of a little bit with a bell and they have to walk around naked.
Mitch McConnell naked walking around streets of Washington, D.C. with his big frog face.
Yeah, but shame them.
Okay, hear me out on this.
That makes him into, that gives him the opportunity to behave as a victim.
If Mitch McConnell has to work seven shifts a week at the Applebee's to make rent on his one-bedroom apartment, and then he's got, like, number one, he's got to like depend on all these people, and they have to depend on, he has no privileged position, but also like all these people are like, hey, Mitch, it's 115 today.
Thanks, asshole.
Like, I do think that the worst thing you could do to a lot of these people.
I think there's folks like your Paul's Manafort out there who need to be locked up because they're just too dangerous.
But I think most of these people need to be locked away from the things that are most valuable to them, which is wealth and influence.
And I think that will hurt more than any guillotine ever could.
Although I get the impulse.
I don't know.
It's just a restaurant champ.
I don't like Applebee's.
I didn't say it's bad.
I don't want him.
No, I want him at a shitty restaurant.
Yeah, I don't want the people, I don't want the staff members of Applebee's to have to deal with Mitch McConnell.
I want to be able to go to an Applebee's and get problematically drunk off of their terrible cocktails and make Mitch McConnell serve me anything.
Why are you shitting on Applebee's?
Oh, you know what?
You know what?
We need to open a brand new Applebee's, right?
So that all the staff members are.
Mitch McApplebee's.
Mitch McConnell and Alex Jones.
They're all just running.
That would be a great segue.
Just an Applebee's staffed by the people who are largely behind our current era of post-truth nonsense.
That actually would be a great place to get.
I would never not be vomitingly drunk in that place.
I would be a problem to that.
That would be, oh, man, it would finally be like, I try to be on my good behavior when I get really drunk at like restaurants and stuff because I don't want to cause a problem for the wait staff or something because they're working people.
But if Mitch McConnell was serving my table, I would make it my business to puke on her.
Can I make a suggestion?
Yes.
So according to cheatsheet.com, the most hated restaurant and fast food chain in America is Red Robin.
And I think it's a great place for Mitch McConnell.
Oh, Mitch McConnell at a goddamn Red Robin or a Texas Roadhouse.
Hey, hey, hey, hey.
Okay.
I've not had the privilege yet of enjoying an Applebee's or a Red Robin.
Religious Comfort and Parasitic Scholars00:14:55
Oh, man.
Applebee's is great.
That's not about where all your people are.
Applebee's is.
Oh, what if he's at a waffle house?
Everybody's thrown up at a waffle house.
Yeah, but they don't serve liquor.
Like a waffle, I have been, actually, I've never been sober in a waffle house.
But I want to go to a place where I could get, I want Mitch McConnell to hand me like a gigantic margarita that's like a liter in length.
And I want to, as he's handing it to me, take a sip from it while it's still in his hands and then vomit directly onto him.
And make him bring me another.
But now you're victimizing him.
That's fine.
I would rather shame him in Washington, D.C. I'm throwing it out there.
What about a Dave and Buster's?
Because people also bring their screaming children over.
Oh, that would be Chuck E. Cheese.
Chuck E. Cheese.
I can't suggest Chuck E. Cheese as my friendship with Jamie Loftus is very important.
Honest people can debate over which specific type of shaming would be most effective.
Put him at a Red Robin.
All right, continue the conversation.
Maybe have him circulate, because it would be fun to have him clean up after me at a six flags, too, because I can fuck up a six flags.
Or like a Burger King.
I really love to hear him say, would you like fries with that?
These would all be very helpful.
If we could just establish basic income and health care and then make it so that our most unpleasant service jobs are all held by former Republican congresspeople managed by the former people who used to do their jobs.
Here's another question.
A lot of these people, are they religious?
In terms of a lot of the debate itself.
They're religious in quotes.
Yeah.
Right.
Because I do wonder like the real religious people, wouldn't they want to take care of their planet?
You know, I've never understood that.
Like the people that preach Decades' will and stuff, and then they're going, ah, it's God's will for me to be an asshole.
Then they're not taking care of the planet.
That gets into a really complicated subject of like theological debate because there's a sizable chunk of American Christians in particular.
It's not just the United States phenomenon, but it's big here, who believe that the apocalypse is preordained, essentially.
So this world, like, why would you take care of this world?
It's ending soon.
There's also a chunk of people who believe that God gave us dominion over this planet.
So we're supposed to use it and use it up and use all the resources.
And there's even people who will argue that God provides us with new resources when we use the old ones.
And that's why we've discovered all this gas under the earth to frack.
That was God being like, don't worry about those pesky Arabs holding all the oil.
Here, just suck it out of the earth.
And like, whatever problem.
Yeah, there's a bunch of different frustrating things.
And I think those people, once upon a time, you couldn't take them seriously, like in mainstream politics.
And what Lumborg provided was a chance for the more technocratic conservatives, like my parents, who were like religious, but not really religious.
They could look at this guy's arguments and be like, well, no, here's a smart, educated scientist with a doctor in his name.
And he's making, he's not saying like God's going to take care of it.
He's saying that like, you know, he's making what seem like very logical arguments for why this isn't a problem or why what problems exist will be solved very simply without us changing our lifestyle or dealing with the problems on like a fundamental level of our society and it's its consumption of resources.
So yeah, it's comfort that's killing humans, actually, isn't it?
Yeah, it always is.
Yeah, it's just comfort.
People are scared of change.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's always comfort that's killing humans.
From a literal point of view, in terms of just the fact that we're eating stuff that's clogging our arteries and giving us heart attacks at a younger age, up to like the fact that we'll ignore doom as it rules, like leers down on our heads because we want to go out to Applebee's and we don't want to worry about climate change.
I'm not saying Applebee's is bad.
Red Robin, yes.
You know what?
I'm going to go to an Applebee's after this.
Maybe not today, but maybe not today.
I know that when I drive past one, I might stop just to experience it.
You know, Applebee's is often a staple place for me to get wasted when I'm not at home and I'm at like a roadside motel because you'll often run into an Applebee's next to a roadside motel.
And I have gotten drunk in many an Applebee's.
And if Mitch McConnell were the one serving me, I would happily throw him into the pocket on his apron.
That would be great.
Especially if Paul Ryan came out with like the sawdust that you use to soak up the vomit.
And like, yeah, that would be really sweet.
Now, back to Bjorn Lumborg.
So another reason Lumborg was able to have such an outsized impact on the debate over climate change in the United States is the simple fact that misreading and misrepresenting a mix of actual scientific papers and news articles is a lot easier than conducting authoritative research.
The people who do conduct authoritative research are very busy.
And when a guy like Bjorn comes along and shotguns out a book full of nonsense, they have to spend valuable time slowly debunking all of the many, many things he got wrong.
I'm going to quote here from something Dr. E.O. Wilson wrote about the difficulty of combating this sort of misinformation.
My greatest regret about the Lumborg scam is the extraordinary amount of scientific talent that has to be expended to combat it in the media.
We will always have contrarians like Lumborg, whose sallies are characterized by willful ignorance, selective quotations, disregard for communication with genuine experts, and destructive campaigning to attract the attention of the media rather than scientists.
They are the parasitic load on scholars who earn success through the slow process of peer review and approval.
The question is, how much load should be tolerated before a response is necessary?
Lumborg is evidently over the threshold.
And this is kind of what we were talking about.
Like, what do you do about these people in a perfectly sane world?
Like, I think that someone like Lumborg would face criminal charges for his misrepresentation of scientific fact for the same reason that if you caught a diving instructor telling kids that the safest way to dive was headfirst into the shallow end of the pool, that guy would face charges, even though all he was doing was giving people information because you're clearly misleading people into a dangerous situation.
Parasitic scholars.
Yeah.
That's a great quote from that.
Yeah, parasitic scholars.
And that's another thing: you know, why do these people go into that field?
So do they go into the field because of the betterment of the world or the betterment of themselves?
And do they do the betterment of themselves because they love themselves or because they have a desperate need for affection?
And because like all those go to different paths.
Yeah, right.
And I think in Lumborg's case, it is that desperate need to be famous.
I think it's this sort of narcissism that like he couldn't accept.
He was a professor of like statistics and shit.
Like that's not the most exciting life in the world.
I'm sure it's very satisfying to the people who legitimately like it.
But I think Lumborg is the kind of guy that had a thirst to be famous and was like, well, this is the fucking easiest way to do that.
I mean, yeah.
Yeah.
Now, we've just talked about sort of how Dr. E. L. Wilson was like expressing his frustration that like a guy like Lumborg can just like shoot out a bunch of nonsense and then real scientists whose time is incredibly valuable and limited have to like spend hours debunking all of it.
And it's a very frustrating problem with our current system.
And that might make it seem like there were no penalties Bjorn faced for lying constantly.
There were a little bit of a penalty he faced.
Several official complaints were made to the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation.
They evaluated these complaints and found that the work that he had published was fundamentally dishonest.
But they found that they couldn't punish him because Lumborg wasn't an expert in any of the relevant fields and thus he couldn't be considered guilty of like fraud essentially.
Like because he was not really a climate scientist, they couldn't say that he was purposefully misrepresenting his case rather than just fucking up.
That's insane.
Yeah, isn't that crazy?
Oh, the world is so annoying sometimes.
Yeah.
I'm glad it's burning.
You know what?
I'm glad it's burning.
You've come around on climate change.
Fuck it.
Fuck all you people.
Yeah.
In 2007, Bjorn published a new book, Cool It, in which he explicitly accepted the reality of human-caused climate change.
This was seen by many as an abrupt reversal of his previous attitude.
Bjorn clarified in an interview with The Guardian, who declared him an influential thinker, that it was not, or I think they were one of the ones who said he was going to save the world.
Yeah.
Yeah, they voted him one of the 50 people who could save the planet.
So in an interview with them, and they were more critical of him in this article, Lumborg denies performing a U-turn.
He reiterates that he has never denied anthropogenic global warming and insists that he long ago accepted the cost of damage would be between 2% and 3% of world wealth by the end of this century.
This estimate is the same, he says, as that quoted by Lord Stern, whose report to the British government argued that the world should spend 1 to 2% of gross domestic product on tackling climate change to avoid future damage.
Incidentally, shit like this is why Rajenda Pachori, chairman of the UN Climate Change Panel, compared Bjorn Lumborg to Adolf Hitler.
Not because she thought he was a literal Nazi, but for the statistical crime of treating human beings like numbers.
And the odd thing is, Bjorn isn't even all that great at numbers.
The Stern report estimated it would take between 5 and 20% of global GDP to effectively fight climate change.
The Guardian pressed Lumborg on this.
Quote, not unexpectedly, however, the Stern report estimates that damage at 5 to 20% of GDP, however, not 2% to 3%.
The difference, according to Lumborg, is that the two use a different discount factor.
This is the method by which economists recalculate the value today of money spent or saved in the future, or to put it another way, the value today of this generation's grandchildren's lives.
So, sorry, I got it wrong.
The Stern report didn't say it would take 5 to 20% of GDP to fight climate change.
It said that the damage of climate change would be 5 to 20% of GDP if nothing was done to fight it.
Lumborg said that the damage would be 2% to 3%.
And then he claimed by sort of weasel math that the reason for the difference between the two numbers is the differing value that he and Lord Stern put on the lives of our grandchildren, basically.
Right, right.
So that's cool.
Well, I mean, I guess in a way there is a sad truth to that.
Sure.
Fuck.
I mean, I do hate kids, so I hate them.
Invaluable little fuckers.
Yeah.
But I don't like too much when people just go straight for the ad Hitlerum nauseaum or whatever that Latin phrase is, that whenever people just want to use an example, they'll go to Hitler.
Because there is a truth to people being numbers.
We're just algorithms walking around with little legs, just walking around, right?
That's what we are.
We're just numbers.
We're an algorithm.
I think in her case, she was making a really, she wasn't like, I think she was making actually a pretty salient point, which is that when you treat people like numbers in this way, you really are creating scientific crime.
You're devaluing their lives in the course of like making into an argument that shouldn't be an argument over the numbers purely, like devolving it into that.
But I guess, but yes, but the reality is that it is like that, right?
I mean, there's beautiful paintings of generals on sort of horseback, right?
And you'll see behind them thousands of soldiers just sort of marching towards the war that they want to fight.
But ultimately, the most important person is that person on horseback.
And everyone else is just sort of chess pieces at the back, right?
And we are using less and less humans to get the needs of humans.
So we don't need as many farmers.
We don't need as many soldiers because we've got drones and we'll have robots one day and stuff.
And I guess there is that sort of sad truth that we don't need that much manpower anymore to run society.
And so the people at the top, and I'm not saying I agree with this, but I'm just saying that the people at the top are going to go, look, we don't need as many people anymore.
Oh yeah, I think the people at the top think that way.
And I think what you're getting at is sort of a debate that historians have, like the great man theory versus like the trends and forces theory of history.
But I think one reason why the people at the top never stay that way all that long on like a generational basis, why things switch and turn and the nations in power change so much, is because they think that way.
They think that the most important guy is the guy marching, like sitting on the horse with that army of nameless people around him.
And then a poor Serbian peasant named Gavrilo Princep pulls out a gun and shoots the Archduke of Austria-Hungary.
Oh shit.
Empires fall.
The British Empire is no longer really a thing.
And like that, that I think is, and that's the kind of thing that people like Lumborg always miss when they treat people like numbers like that.
And it's the kind of thing, you know, on the other side of thing, it's the kind of thing that people like Hillary Clinton miss when they deride a bunch of people making memes on the internet as like unimportant to the overall thrust of the election.
And then it turns out that actually that may have made a real difference.
Oh, the deplorables.
Yeah, yeah.
I think that the people in power always disregard the potential impact of like one or a small group of just random people who have a thought in their head.
Agreed.
And like, I think that's, I think there's nothing that's more powerful than individual people's ability to fuck up the works.
And that can be good and that can be bad because it means that a little girl like Greta Thunberg can make an international impact on a problem just by being the face of it.
I think that is it the Dalai Lama?
I'm paraphrasing, but one of his quotes is, if you think that you're not important or if you think you're not big enough to make a change, try and sleep with a mosquito.
Yeah.
And I'm really paraphrasing it and butchering it.
There's the positive side of that, then there's the negative side, which is that a guy like Bjorn Lumborg can misread or directly misinterpret a bunch of scientific studies and lead to have a major impact on why we don't deal with a problem back when the problem's manageable and instead it becomes something that might consume huge chunks of the world and its population.
So I think in both ways, the little person is always more important than the big people want to give them credit for being.
It's just not entirely a good thing.
It's completely amoral factor in history, but it is, I think, a factor in history that the people at the top often misinterpret.
Now, the good news about all of this is that by 2007, people were starting to get wise to Bjorn's little schemes.
The Guardian noted in their write-up of his second book, some statements appear to contradict each other directly.
In the space of four pages of Coolidge, he writes that climate change will not cause massive disruptions or huge death tolls, that the general and long-term impact will be predominantly negative, and that it is obvious that there are many other and more pressing issues.
The point I've always been making, he explains now, is it's not the end of the world.
Reducing Emissions vs Climate Engineering00:12:25
That is why we should be measuring up to what everybody else says, which is we should also be spending our money well.
Speaking of spending money well, Bjorn has a bunch of suggestions for stuff that we should be investing in rather than reducing emissions to directly fight climate change.
He's a big advocate in improving nutrition in poor countries, improved access to contraception, more vaccinations, all of which are great things.
In 2002, Lumborg formed the Copenhagen Consensus Center, which he billed as a way to bring the world's top economists together to solve the planet's greatest problems.
Because, of course, economists are the best folks to solve our problems.
If I had to think of one group of professionals most famous for never being wrong, it would be economists or maybe weathermen.
In 2008, the Consensus Center ranked 30 priorities in order of what should be confronted first to deal with the greatest challenges of the world.
Mitigating global warming was ranked last, number 30.
Sixth was improving crop yields.
17th was green energy research.
And 12th, interestingly enough, was geoengineering.
And this gets us onto the subject of what precisely Lumborg thinks would be a better use of money than reducing emissions.
He's come around to the necessity of climate engineering because now, more than a decade after he started urging everyone not to worry about climate change, reducing emissions is too expensive and slow a way to reduce climate change for his tastes.
So that's nice.
So this is something Lumborg wrote in 2009.
There is a significant delay between carbon cuts and any temperature drop.
Even halving global emissions by mid-century would barely be measurable by the end of the century.
Making green energy cheap and prevalent will also take a long time.
Consider that electrification of the global economy is still incomplete after more than a century of effort.
Many methods of atmospheric engineering have been proposed.
Solar radiation management appears to be one of the most hopeful.
Atmospheric greenhouse gases allow sunlight to pass through but absorb heat and radiate some down to the Earth's surface.
All else being equal, higher concentrations will warm the planet.
Solar radiation management would bounce a little bit of sunlight back into space, reflecting just 1-2% of the total sunlight that strikes the Earth could offset as much warming as that caused by doubling the pre-industrial levels of greenhouse gases.
When Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991, about a million tons of sulfur dioxide was pumped into the stratosphere, reacting with water to form a hazy layer that spread around the globe, and by scattering and absorbing incoming sunlight, cooled the Earth's surface for almost two years.
We could mimic this effect through stratospheric aerosol insertion, essentially launching material like sulfur dioxide or soot into the stratosphere.
Another promising approach is marine cloud whitening, which sprays seawater droplets into marine clouds to make them reflect more sunlight.
This augments the natural process, where sea salt from the oceans provides water vapor with cloud condensation nuclei.
It is remarkable to consider that we could cancel out this century's global warming with 1,900 unmanned ships spraying seawater mist into the air to thicken clouds.
He sounds like he's learned his science from that Mr. Burns episode.
He wants to cover the sun.
He's just, we'll just shoot soot into the sky and build 2,000 boats to fire water up into the clouds.
That's way better than reducing emissions.
That sounds economically friendly.
It's just so fucking dumb.
Like out, it's just like, don't do it.
He tells everyone, don't do anything for more than a decade.
And then he's like, okay, we need to launch 2,000 giant boats to shoot seawater into the clouds.
And also, have we considered spreading sulfur over the stratosphere?
Yeah, so he's gone so far on the other side that he's lost it again.
Yeah, that's clearly more rational than cap and trade, stopping rainforest logging, you know, any of that stuff.
Like 1,900 unmanned boats and sulfur into the sky.
All perfect solutions with no conceivable downsides.
Yeah.
Bjorn's tactics have gotten no better in recent years.
No better than that is suggesting thousands of boats shooting water into the sky.
In 2014, John Stossel, writing for Real Clear Politics, asked Bjorn Lumborg how much President Obama's goal of getting 1 million electric cars on the road by 2015 would slow down warming.
Lumborg replied, one hour.
This is a symbolic act.
Once again, Lumborg was very wrong.
Greg Layden, a biological anthropologist writing for science blogs, actually spoke to an expert.
Quote, I asked atmospheric scientist and energy expert John Abraham about this, and here's what he said.
If you put 1 million clean cars on the road and have them last 15 years before removing them, and you take the typical admissions of a vehicle and you have saved over in the last 15 years, and there's a bunch of numbers.
Basically, he crunched the numbers on it and he came to the conclusion that over their lifetime, just 1 million cars, if you did not build any additional cars after that point, you just put 1 million on the road and kept them there for 15 years, you would have saved the total equivalent of 21 hours of emission for the entire planet.
Oh, wow.
Which is a significant amount.
And that's again just a million, not increasing it at all, not replacing them after they wear out in 15 years, which means Lumborg's calculations to John Stossel was off by 2,100%.
It does seem like a lot of scientists are going, Bjorn, shut up.
Yeah, constantly.
Shut up.
For more like 20 years now.
Yeah, they've been saying, shut the fuck up, dude.
You don't know what you're talking about.
But I think he knows what he's doing.
In 2016, Bjorn's Copenhagen Consensus Center was paid $640,000 by Australia's Education Department to help produce a report that, among other things, called limiting world temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius, a poor use of money, since it would yield less than $1 of social, economic, or environmental benefits for every dollar spent.
Meanwhile, reducing world trade restrictions through the Doha Trade Round would, Bjorn calculated, yield $2,011 of benefit for every dollar spent.
Universal contraception access would return $120 per dollar spent.
Now, reading stuff like that might make you question a couple of things.
Number one, how good is Bjorn's math?
Are there any factors that might influence his calculation and might have led him to calculate that reducing global temperature increases only yields a dollar of value for every dollar spent, while reducing trade restrictions leads to $2,000 of benefit?
Like, are there maybe any conflicting interests he has that might be influencing his math in some way?
Well, he thinks like an economist.
He does think like an economist.
He thinks like an economist who might be being paid by a specific group of people.
Well, yeah.
And I do sometimes, like some comedians, so a couple of comedians in the UK have gone sort of gone to the right.
Yes.
Politically speaking, when they weren't really like that when I sort of first met them.
And I was observing them from afar and sort of not admiring, but understanding that, oh yeah, there's more money.
Yeah.
If you're not getting that much work as a comedian that you are currently now and you understand that the right is rising, they went there and now they're going there and they are getting more work.
And it's interesting because I'm going, whoa, you've become something totally different because you have to survive.
Yeah.
And you've decided that it's worth it to take money from you can't, you know, you're not going to make that great a living as a statistician teaching at a college in Denmark.
You'll be comfortable, but you're not going to be rich doing that.
Whereas if you become Bjorn Lumborg and tell people that climate change isn't a big deal and open this consensus center that advises people that reducing trade restrictions is a better way to fight global warming than stopping global warming.
Well, that actually turns out to pay pretty well.
So I found a good breakdown of where Bjorn Lumborg's funding comes from, written by Graham Redfern of DSMog, a website focused on cutting through the PR spend around climate change issues.
Their research revealed that the Copenhagen Consensus Center, or CCC, registered as a nonprofit in the United States in 2008.
Since then, it has received more than $4 million in grants and donations.
Three quarters of that came in 2011 and 12.
Lumborg's salary for a single year was $775,000, representing nearly a quarter of what it had received by 2012.
He's basically an Instagram model that's pushing those drinks to lose weight.
That's exactly what he's doing, but instead telling everyone not to cut global emissions.
Now, back in 2006, when the CCC first started to look at gaining support for its efforts in the United States, they hired Washington lobbyist and PR veteran James Harf.
And so this is like a lobbying group for somebody.
And the lobbying group's primary goal has been to convince people that emissions should not be cut, that carbon should not be taxed, that fossil fuel use should not be reduced.
Now, again, this leads us to the question of like, who's actually giving these people that money?
And we don't know where all of it comes from.
We know that in its first year, the center received a $120,000 grant from the Randolph Foundation.
That foundation's money comes from the $1.2 billion the Randolph family made by selling the Vic Chemical Company to Procter ⁇ Gamble.
The trustee of the Randolph Foundation is Heather Higgins, the CEO of Independent Women's Voice and chairman of the Independent Women's Forum.
And that sounds good, right?
Independent Women's Voice.
That sounds like a woke progressive organization.
Yeah.
It's actually a hardcore right-wing lobbying group that accepts money from, among other people, Charles Koch.
I look forward to...
I look forward to when they start implementing like the transgenders against clouds.
Yeah.
And all of these different new groups coming along.
We'll get it really woke.
Yeah.
Bjorn wouldn't be the right spokesperson now.
You'd hire someone who is like very much like, I don't know, you'd hire someone like not Take all of that money.
Yes.
Like an eight-year-old.
Like an eight-year-old kid from Cameroon.
And you'd have him be like, I love fossil fuels.
That is where we're going next.
Yeah.
And then you'll call everyone racist who argues with them.
And while complaining that all the left does is call everybody racist who argues with them.
Like, it's beautiful.
I love the way the media works.
It's perfect.
There are no problems.
So, yeah, I'm going to read a quote from D-Smog about the Independent Women's DSmog blog.
So, yeah, they do a lot of really good analysis on the disinformation campaign thing.
The name of a company.
I thought it was the name of a person.
I was like, what a great name for someone that works in climate.
Graham Redfern, which is also a pretty good name for Sandy World.
Reed Fern, actually, but I think it's pronounced Red Fern.
It's fucking Australian.
I don't know.
Nothing makes sense over there.
Read Fern.
Yeah.
That's not an Australian accent, actually.
No, that's not.
I was like, more Scottish.
Yeah, well, Scots-Irish.
Quote, staff writers of both organizations regularly express skepticism about the science of human-caused climate change and cite Lomborg's views approvingly.
A recent article from the International Women's Forum senior fellow Vicki Alger claimed: a majority of scientists believe that global warming is largely nature-made, ignoring several studies that show the vast majority of research from scientists studying climate change believe exactly the opposite.
Now, funders of the IWF include, as I said, the Claude Lamb Foundation, which is controlled by Charles Koch, and the Donors Trust, a conservative political action fund that spent millions of dollars on climate change denial.
This means that Charles Koch indirectly has helped fund Bjorn Lumborg.
Now, Higgins continued to pump tens of thousands of dollars directly into Lumborg's center over subsequent years.
But in 2014, when that D-Smog article was written, the author was only able to track down where about $500,000 of the $4.3 million in funding it had received up to that point had come from.
However, in 2015, Reed Firm revealed that Paul Singer, a Republican billionaire venture capitalist, was one of the CCC's major backers.
He gave more than $200,000 to the group.
Mr. Singer also helps fund the Manhattan Institute, the think take behind the fallacious claim that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal would cost $100 trillion.
In recent years, Bjorn Lumborg seems to have dropped most of the pretense of being a leftist environmentalist.
He's appeared in five videos for Prager University with titles like, Is Climate Change Our Biggest Problem?
Are Electric Cars Really Green?
And the Paris Agreement Won't Change the Climate.
His grift seems to be less profitable these days than it was in the era before mega-hurricanes regularly battered our shores in record-setting summers and wildfire seasons were a matter of course.
But Lumborg still does a brisk business in media appearances.
As of the writing of this episode, his most recent appearance was in a Fox Business video with the title, Green Innovation Trumps Spending When Tackling Climate Change.
Bolt Cutters for the Alien00:09:10
Colon, Expert.
He was the expert.
Let's show him what he looks like.
Let's show him what he looks like now.
This is Bjorn Lumborg after 20 years of climate denial.
Does he look any doesn't look that bad?
You really oversold it.
I think I was expecting like a gruesome creature.
I think he's mick-jaggered at least 50% in the last 20 years.
And Nick Jagger hasn't mick-jaggered that much, but Sophie definitely has a very negative reaction to his waddle.
A waddle.
Waddle.
Watson shaming.
This is waddle shaming.
Yeah, she's holding her skin and making it sort of thicker.
Now, Eric, if I know my audience, and I don't, the one thing they love more than anything else is when we hit things.
So the one thing they love more than anything else is when we hit things.
So I'm going to give you the giant machete, and I'm going to throw it.
I'm going to throw it right past all of the recording equipment because that's a good idea.
Yeah, he's got money.
Are you holding the whole bag?
No, I'm going to throw the whole bag.
I always throw the whole bag.
It would be irresponsible to throw a single bagel.
All right.
So I'm going to throw them at Eric, who's wielding the machete as if it were a baseball bat, and he's going to try to hit him as hard as he can and really just swing it.
There's nothing you can hurt in this room full of delicate electronic equipment.
Nothing at all.
Audience, I have Anderson.
She is protected.
Anderson's fine.
All right.
I'm going to throw it.
Yeah.
Ah, all right.
Toss it back to me.
We got to get it.
We got to get him going across the room.
I'm terrified because I can hear my subconscious going, what if you drop it?
What if you throw it?
No one's ever been hurt by a two-foot machete.
All right, ready?
Never.
Not once in history.
Yeah, yes.
Nailed it.
I didn't make a very smooth samurai cut.
It's okay.
It takes practice to really be able to do damage with that thing.
But I definitely got a lot.
Everybody happy with how that went?
How did it feel?
I feel really manly.
I want to go to war now.
Yeah.
I see how easily I can be turned.
Everyone can.
And if people like Lumborg get their way, I will be buying a lot more machetes for a lot of people to try to get him to feel that way.
I see that there is a box of tissues on the table.
I'm now going to grab them and I will remove the prints from the actual machete.
Not a dumb man.
There we go.
I did grab the blade.
I was going to find Lumborg's Hollywood Hills home.
Wow, there we go.
Look at that.
I've seen enough CSI to know how to get rid of.
Yeah, I don't think he lives in the Hollywood Hills because it's one of the places that's going to face the consequences of climate change fastest.
Anderson is on the mic.
And you get on a me for pouring liquids on the microphones.
What's wrong with Anderson on the microphone?
Anderson slobbers.
No, she doesn't.
Sometimes.
He's a classy broad.
Classy broads can slobber.
You're a good dog.
She's a good dog.
Eric, you got any pluggables to plug now that we're at the end of our episode?
Yeah, I do have an album called Alien of Extraordinary Ability, which is the title that the American government gives you.
And I say you, you know, outsiders when they come in and apply for a visa.
That is a sweet title.
Like, our immigration system is fine.
That's a great title.
Alien of Extraordinary Ability.
So I like that.
So that's an album.
I've also got, you know, my show, if you're in Los Angeles, I've got a show called Born of Chaos, which is about the time I escaped a psychiatric hospital.
So, you know, I've got some things.
Just basically follow me on Instagram.
That title makes me want to marry a European, renounce my U.S. citizenship, become an EU citizen, go through that whole years-long process, and then move back to the United States and get a green card so that I can be declared an alien of an extraordinary ability.
Yeah, yeah, it's pretty cool.
Also, I'm no longer it because now I have a green card.
Oh, you use it when you get a green card.
Yeah, so now I'm a permanent resident.
Well, that's not as cool as being an alien with extraordinary abilities.
No, but I once was, and it felt good.
And I'm sure it did.
It felt right.
Well, audience, check out Alien of Extraordinary Ability.
I will say as well, I'm now leaving this podcast slightly angrier.
Yeah, you should.
Everyone should leave the podcast angrier.
I mean, I hope the catharsis of hitting the bagels with the machete.
You get some energy out for sure.
Yeah.
I see why people get their anger out of violence.
I am in no way training the audience for things to come by pushing machetes and bolt cutters on people and teaching them that these objects can help them deal with their anger if the bastards are in the title.
I do wonder what I'm doing at all.
I do wonder what your product placements are.
Machetes, come and buy them.
You know, any machete company that wants to sell branded behind the bastards machetes, I feel like we can make a lot of money with them.
Same thing with bolt cutters because we're big into the pushing bolt cutters.
And right now, I just have to suggest people get basically anything with the cheap Harper Freight ones because those won't cut through theoretically be's security gate.
You want some heavy-duty bolt cutters.
You want to be spending.
I'm sure it's available now.
You could, in fact, get the bolt cutters from it on that you used to break through his security.
Yeah, not that we encourage that behavior because we don't.
It does seem like that's where it's going to go.
Like in 20, 30 years' time, like, you know, it's going to be Hunger Games style.
You know, the masses versus Amazon.
You know, my hope is that we can avoid that by making some pretty sharp course corrections now.
But if we can't, Fisker's brand machetes resist rust very well.
So, you know, they'll chop bagels.
They'll chop through.
Please stop.
Okay, yeah, you're right, Sophie.
How do we lead this out without me suggesting more crimes?
A firm handshake.
Do you have anything you want to plug?
I already talked about bolt cutters.
No, I mean, like.
Hey, what about the environment, bro?
I just want to plug trees.
I do want to plug trees.
What about tree frogs?
Not mine.
Sophie's wearing a sweater.
It seems comfortable.
You're the most frustrating person.
We have shirts on tpublic.com, behind the bastards.
You can find the podcast on behindthebastards.com where the sources will be, although the coding of the site is sometimes broken, but you can generally figure out what the sources are.
And you can find us on Twitter and Instagram at BastardsPod.
You can find me on Twitter at iWriteOK.
And I have a new podcast with my friends Cody and Katie called Worst Year Ever about the 2020 election.
So we will definitely talk more about bolt cutters and machetes on that podcast.
So if that's something you're into, check it out.
Eric, thanks for being on the show.
Thanks for having me, man.
Until next week, hug a cat, buy some bolt cutters, consider investing in a machete or three.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world of AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Mode.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.