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Sept. 9, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:19:12
Bjorn Lomborg
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Welcome to the Deling Pod with me, James Delingpoll.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but wait till you hear I've got this week.
It's none other than Bjorn Lomborg.
Bjorn, lovely to have you on the show.
Can I just ask you first of all, what is the actual correct pronunciation of your surname?
Because it's got one of those complicated O's in it, hasn't it?
No, that's my first name, yeah.
But honestly, I've just a long time ago accepted that there's a lot of pronunciations and the English one is Bjorn Lomborg, but the Danish one is Bjorn Lomborg.
Yeah, don't try.
It's just one of those things.
You don't pronounce the G at the end.
Yeah, it's interesting.
Danish is sort of famous for pronouncing the first few letters and then just sort of muddling through the rest.
So we're like a language where you almost can't hear what we're saying eventually.
The Norwegians had a...
Funny skit about that.
They sort of envisioned what would Denmark look like in 50 years when we were all sort of and nobody had any idea what anyone else was saying and nobody could remember how to pronounce anything.
That's us.
Yeah, I can see that would have been a very funny bit of Scandinavian humour.
And also, the whole world mispronounces, doesn't it, Greta Thunberg.
It's pronounced something like Greta Thunberg or something.
Yeah, yeah, that's probably true.
I mean, we pronounce a lot of things, right?
So, hey.
Anyway, I just wanted to say thank you, Bjorn, for an enormous favour you did to me many years ago, because you were the guy who turned me on to climate scepticism.
I mean, it was your book, The Skeptical Environmentalist.
When did it come out?
That was 19 years ago.
19 years.
And people can't remember now because, you know, there's been lots of books since by people like Christopher Booker, people like me even, Pat Michaels and stuff.
But you really were an outlier, weren't you, at the time?
There were not many people actually spelling out that there was a case against this kind of environmentalism gone mad.
Yeah, that's probably true.
I think if you look back, there's been a lot of these conversations for a very long time.
But I think what I tried to do was to set the whole conversation in perspective.
So I think I occupy somewhat of a middle ground in this conversation saying, look, there is global warming.
It is a problem.
But let's just get a sense of proportion and make sure that the policies that we make are proportionate to the troubles that we're trying to actually alleviate.
Sure.
Whereas there seems to often be a tendency to either say, oh no, it's not happening at all, or it's the end of the world, let's throw everything in the kitchen sink at it.
Both approaches are probably wrong.
Right.
I like that probably because I'm obviously in the, yeah, it's nothing to worry about and we're making a lot of fuss about nothing camp and I wouldn't want you to dismiss me out of hand.
By the way, I am going to talk about your Excellent, excellent book.
Don't worry.
We'll work our way onto that.
But I was wondering actually what you said just then.
I mean, are you still a man of the left?
Would you consider yourself a lefty?
Yeah, yeah.
And even in Danish terms, right?
So I've never voted for the right of Denmark.
I believe that it's important to recognize that there are Disadvantaged people and the policy situation should try to correct that.
But I also think we need to remember our policies need to be effective.
That used to be a very, very strong left wing point.
And I think increasingly it has become less so.
Unfortunately, I think that's probably also true that it's become less so and the right wing as well.
We've become more and more sort of a civilization of virtue signals in all kinds of different ways, rather than a civilization focused on saying, look, we have an immense power through the government to set policy and actually change the way the world works.
Let's make sure we do that well so that we spend little resources on having great outcomes.
I think everyone ought to agree on those terms, but unfortunately, a lot of this is instead about saying, oh, I'm against straws or I'm against masks and all these kinds of things that are much more sort of displays, I think, rather than actual conversations about what works as a policy.
Yes, it's interesting you mentioned that.
As a brief digression, you're talking about straws and single-use plastics.
Remember, that was the buzz phrase of about 6-12 months ago.
We were all obsessing with the greatest threat to the world, which was apparently single-use plastic.
And now that's gone completely out of the window because suddenly we discover that single-use plastic has been our saviour in this alleged COVID crisis.
And of course, on a much larger scale, we seem to have no sense of what is it that's really threatening and what is a big problem for the world and what is not.
Again, if you look at the amount of plastic debris in the ocean, about 60% comes from fishery equipment.
Maybe that should be our main focus if we actually care about it.
And remember, plastic bags and all other things, plastic from consumers is perhaps 1%.
But more importantly, of course, we live in a world where still millions of people die from easily curable infectious diseases like tuberculosis, malaria.
We have lots of people who are still starving and don't get a good education.
All these other things.
And maybe, you know, on the big scale of things, those should be our first priorities before we worry about plastic stores in the ocean.
Again, it's not to say this is not also a conversation.
And we are rich enough to care about more things.
And we're, you know, advanced civilization.
We can walk and chew gum at the same time.
But unfortunately, we very often end up mostly focusing on these small things where we end up doing a little good, often at very high cost, rather than actually focusing on the things that would really make a difference.
Yes.
Even though you and I disagree on some things, and we'll come to our disagreements in a moment, but I think that they're less important than where we agree.
I mean, I really do.
I consider you one of the great allies in the fight against environmental lunacy.
And I think it's good that you're on the left for reasons that you hinted at earlier.
It's your brand enables you to reach people that a right wing tinfoil hat loon like myself could never possibly reach.
Well, certainly.
I mean, and in some ways, I always thought that when you try to argue for data, it really shouldn't matter where you're from, whether you're a left wing or a right wing or any other kind of wing.
The main point is simply that you're making the arguments of what are the costs and benefits.
But look, we're a deeply sort of tribal And we tend to look out for, do I agree with that guy or do I agree with some people who he associates with?
And that makes evolutionary sense.
But certainly we also need to sort of decouple ourselves, start listening to what are the actual arguments and say, does this actually make sense?
We can probably be invigorated with good ideas from around the political spectrum.
Yes, just go back to your journey towards scepticism.
You were a Greenpeace-supporting professor of statistics, was it?
Yeah, political science in Aarhus.
So you liked crunching data?
I was like your standard sort of left-wing kind of guy.
For a long time member of Greenpeace, I didn't stop because I disagree with them.
I stopped because I ran out of money as a student.
So I had the poster on my wall, and I didn't go out and rub a boat, but the poster where it says, once they've caught the last fish and felled the last tree, they'll realize they can't eat gold, which was presumably a quote from a famous Indian chief.
Turns out later that was fake, actually.
And, you know, I had the sticker in my backpack and all that stuff.
So I didn't consider myself, you know, sort of radical in any way.
I was just, you know, sort of a member of this mainstream thinking, I think, in the university and certainly in the group of people I associated with.
But I read this one interview with an American economist called Julian Simon, who said, look, you think everything with the environment is getting worse.
And you're mostly wrong.
It's actually mostly getting better.
And I just thought, oh, right-wing American propaganda.
I didn't think any more of it until I read he said exactly what I teach my students every year.
Go check the data.
Because we have all these ideas about what the world looks like, but often they're based on very poor information.
Typically, they'll be based on basically what makes for a fun story or an interesting story in a newspaper.
And that's probably not the way to inform our decisions.
And so I thought, okay, if he's actually making that challenge, Maybe we should go check him out.
Maybe we should show him wrong and learn a lot in the process.
We're totally convinced that we're going to show him wrong, but it'd be fun.
We'd learn a lot of stuff.
And as we went along, sure, he was right when some of the things he said was wrong, but a lot of what he said was right.
And that's, of course, how I ended up writing The Skeptical Environmentalist and basically taking a very sharp turn in my career away from what I thought I was going to be doing, which was computer-simulated game theory, which, you know, like a hundred people would have enjoyed in the world.
Yes.
And you've suffered personally for this.
I mean, you've been vilified.
You've had that fake committee.
What was the Danish Academy?
Committee for Scientific Dishonesty, yeah.
Yeah.
So, well, look, I've heard a lot of people say that I've been, you know, crucified in so many ways.
And you're absolutely right.
This committee actually decided to say...
That I was being dishonest, but because they couldn't tell whether I was being an idiot, they couldn't tell whether I did it on purpose.
Which was, I think, designed to be as rude as it could possibly be.
And it was done on the basis of 22 loosely written pages.
Which basically just said, there's some people out there who criticize Bjorn, so clearly he shouldn't be allowed to say this.
It was very much sort of, you know, right-thinking people saying, oh, we can't have that, and, you know, rebuking me.
There's a real risk I would lose my job.
The ministry, whom they were sorted under, rejected it for a lot of reasons.
They did a lot of mistakes, but one of them was that you have to actually have a good argument.
For making a decision in Danish government, which is probably a pretty good setup.
And they said there was absolutely no argument for why I was being wrong.
So they basically just felt like, oh, you're wrong.
Look, that's happened a lot of times.
I have always sort of personally figured that, look, I'm not interested in your feelings about me.
I'm interested in what facts do you bring to the table?
So there's this famous saying in Harvard, if you have a great case, Harvard Law School, if you have a great case, pound the case.
If you have a bad case, pound the table.
And I've always figured that most of my critics actually pound the table a lot.
And to me, that doesn't sound like a criticism of me.
It actually sounds like a vindication when you run out of good arguments.
So, yes, a lot of people have disagreed and a lot of people have said nasty things about me and thrown cakes in my face and stuff like that.
But honestly, I think it's a much, much more important conversation about how do we spend trillions of dollars to do the most good for the world.
And if that pisses off a few people, well, so be it.
I'm really trying, to the best of my abilities, to make an argument that will help mankind do better.
This is the area where you and I totally agree on the concept of cost-benefit analysis, which is so very much missing from most environmental policy, isn't it?
It's missing from environmental policy, but it's missing from most policies, honestly.
So for instance, in road safety, there's a lot of cost-benefit analysis.
So most road offices around the world realize, look, we don't have infinite resources.
So where should we make extra care of the design of the road so that fewer people will be killed?
Should we have dividers down the line?
What kind of dividers?
Should we have better signage?
All these kinds of things.
Should we have a roundabout?
Making a roundabout costs money.
It also costs time because it takes more time to go through it.
It reduces number of death.
So if there's a lot of death, you put in a roundabout.
If there's not so many deaths, you don't.
These are very, very simple things.
And people know this, and to most people, it makes a lot of sense.
We can't build everything to 100% safety, so we build it smartly with the available resources.
There's also some bits of this in the healthcare sector.
Very clearly, we can't afford to save every life everywhere all the time.
There's some Diseases are just too expensive.
There are some medications that are too expensive.
And so we make collective decisions on saying, look, given that we can only spend about 8-10% of our GDP, unless you're US, on healthcare, how much healthcare can we get?
And we try to get the most healthcare we can for those 8-10%.
To me, that makes perfect sense.
We save more people rather than fewer people.
We do more good rather than less good.
We should have that same conversation in every other sphere of life.
And one of the places, as you point out, it misses is an environmental conversation where we very often focus on ineffective policies rather than effective policies.
Perhaps the most sort of egregious one that has been quite apparent in Europe for at least a couple of decades is if you look at what the EU has focused on most of its environmental policy, it has been on water quality.
So, in water quality, we actually have a decree that says we should have water quality around Europe that is as if no living people actually lived here.
Like, you know, it was in pre-human beings' time.
Now, that's a very, very beautiful thought, of course, and it's wonderful for the lobsters who will live better lives, but it always strikes me as odd that we would focus on water first.
When so few people live in water, whereas, of course, most of our kids live exposed to deadly air pollution in inner cities.
Those are the places where people really do die and where a much greater amount of focus on air quality would have been much, much greater.
Now, the EU has focused on both things, but we have much less rapid environmental restrictions on air pollution than we have on water pollution.
One of the reasons is That water pollution reasonably can be said to be the fault of other people.
It's mostly farmers.
In rich countries, most of us are not farmers.
So it's easy to point at those farmers and say, you've got to do better.
Stop polluting the waterways.
Stop polluting our coastal areas.
Make the water clean.
Whereas air pollution, of course, It's all of our fault.
It's all of our cars.
It's the fact that we have all these factories, all this other stuff.
So it's much harder to regulate.
Now, I get that politically, but at the end of the day, don't we want to realize when we can't do everything, should we be focusing on water or air first?
There is a very, very ample argument that we should be focusing on air because that kills literally hundreds of thousands of people in the European Union every year, whereas water probably kills very close to zero.
It's not the same thing as saying we don't want also to have clean water, but if you have to choose, and we do because we don't have enough resources, where should you focus first?
Air pollution.
We haven't done that, and that's the conversation I think we need to have also for climate.
Yes, it's interesting, isn't it, that given that the environmental movement is so obsessed with the concept of scarce resources, they haven't yet twigged that Governments also have scarce resources, that they have a limited pot of money to spend on these wonderful projects which everyone on the left is behind.
And I was thinking, even more than water quality and air quality in Europe, There are people in the world who are, you've made this point very well, who are not getting access to clean drinking water.
There are many more useful ways of spending our money, getting more bangs for our buck in improving people's lot generally around the world.
Give me a few examples of that.
Yes.
So it's important to say when you worry about air and water quality, that's you and my environment.
Most people don't actually care all that much about the world's poor and the global south.
Because if we did, we wouldn't be building hospitals here.
We'd be building all the hospitals in the third world.
So in that sense, most of our money gets spent on us.
That's not necessarily wrong.
We've always done that.
I think there's good moral reasons for why you worry mostly about yourself and your Your family, your extended family, your nation, but not about the whole world.
So it's fair enough when you talk about water and air.
But when you talk about global warming, and that's where it becomes relevant, Global warming is mostly about everyone else.
So, you know, if you cut a ton of CO2 in the UK, it will have a minimal impact on the UK, but it will have an impact around the world.
Most of the impact, probably 99%, will happen in other countries.
And most of the impact will actually be in the Global South.
So when you're talking about climate policies, It is very much a question of saying, I want to help mostly other people far away, both in terms of distance, mostly in the Global South, also typically in time, you know, so I want to help people 100 years from now rather than right now.
And that's where there is a real conversation to be had, because if you really want to help poor people, if you want to help the world's most vulnerable, I'm always very struck by the fact that you want to help people a tiny bit 100 years from now when they will be much richer, rather than helping them now when they're vulnerable and when you can help them a lot more effectively.
And as you mentioned, there's a couple billion people who don't have good access to water and sanitation, kills lots of people.
There's an enormous amount of indoor air pollution, so basically people cooking with Dirty fuels like cardboard and dung and wood inside their homes, making their homes on average, so about for 2 billion people, the average air quality inside their huts is about 10 times as bad as outdoor air pollution in Beijing when it's worst.
Those are the kinds of things where we could have an immense impact.
And of course, there are lots of infectious diseases that we easily could cure from malaria, tuberculosis, many other diseases.
And of course, there are many other things like almost a billion people who still don't have enough food.
To sustain themselves.
The fact that most of the world has really crappy education and we could do so much about that.
All these other things.
So again, I don't need to make the whole list, but it's simply a question of saying if you want to help the world, surely we should have a conversation about how do you help the world in the most effective way.
And it turns out that is rarely in climate.
I think the last time you and I met was in Paris, wasn't it?
At the Paris Climate Conference and you did one of the best pieces of research from that era, which was that you went through the INDCs, is that right?
What does it stand for?
International?
No, the Intended National INDC? I can't remember anymore.
I've said it too many times.
No, exactly.
But we know what they are anyway.
They are the promised contribution of each nation state to the promised carbon dioxide reductions that they were going to commit to, wasn't it?
And what you did was you, at the end of the Paris You added up all the promises that made and you pointed out that even if they kept to their promises, which none of these countries are going to, even if they kept to them and reduced their carbon dioxide by the agree amount, The effect on global warming by the end of the century would be, can you remember the figures exactly?
It's very tiny.
I actually, I published a period article on this as well.
And basically, if you just look at the contributions that you have promised till 2030, the impact will be trivial.
It will be 0.029 degrees centigrade reduction by the end of the century.
We will not be able to measure that.
If all the countries, not only Do what they promised until 2030, but stick to those promises for the rest of the century.
It will still just reduce temperatures by about 0.17 degrees.
So again, almost not measurable in 100 years.
So instead of 4.1 degree by the end of the century, we'll see about 3.9 degrees.
So very tiny difference.
Entirely trivial, but almost trivial.
And remember, the cost of that is going to be somewhere between $1 and $2 trillion a year for the rest of the century.
So that's a lot of money to achieve almost no good.
So I've just come out with a new period article that indicates what is actually the cost-benefit analysis of this.
And I haven't seen any other cost-benefit analyses of the Paris Agreement.
But what this shows is that for every dollar spent, You will avoid about 11 cents of climate damage.
Which is obviously a very bad deal, partly because you could have given away the money and achieve 10 times more, at least give away a dollar and people would be a dollar happy.
But there's also many other ways, as we talked about, if you, for instance, spend it on combating tuberculosis, every dollar can easily do $50 or $100 worth of good because you have so many knock-on effects from people who don't get sick later on.
So fundamentally, it's an incredible waste of resources when we spend it so poorly.
This, again, does not mean that climate is not a problem.
It doesn't mean there are not smart solutions, only that the Paris Agreement is a very poor way of spending resources.
Yes, yes.
That figure of $1.52 trillion, obviously it's impossible to calculate exactly.
But am I right in thinking that if we just Put that money aside.
Forget about global warming.
We could do all the things we just mentioned, like we could give clean water to everyone in the world.
We could cure tuberculosis.
We could give people, another one was sort of micronutrients or something.
Micronutrients, yes.
We can do all these wonderful things.
I'm sounding like a lefty now.
I'm sounding like one of you bleeding hearts, aren't I? But even as a right-wing person, that would seem to me a great thing.
We can do all this stuff, forget about global warming, but it's not going to happen.
And you, the first part of your book, you give some examples of, I mean, actually reading it, even I was quite shocked because I was thinking, You were getting into the mind of the typical person in the street and the rubbish that they're fed about, the hysteria that they're fed non-stop by the media.
And you gave a few good examples.
You focus the blame on the newspapers, don't you?
On the irresponsible reporting.
Just give me a few examples of that.
So one of the things that we constantly hear is, If you have a research paper that shows you a wide range of different outcomes, you will obviously choose the worst one because it's just the most fun to publicize.
So last year, and this comes every couple of years, last year a paper was telling us that if we don't do anything about global warming, Sea levels will rise, which is absolutely true.
And this sea level rise will flood so many places that 187 million people will have to move by the end of the century.
And of course, some other papers went a little further and said, so the 187 million people will actually drown.
I understand.
It's a clickbait.
But of course, what that actually assumes is that over the next 80 years, Nobody who's in these zones will do anything.
So they'll just sit there, watch the waves lap up over their knees and then hips and eventually their chest and then they'll drown.
No, that's not how the world works.
We will actually and very, very cheaply take action.
So this very paper that said you will see 187 million people have to be relocated if we do nothing also said this is not realistic, but with any realistic adaptation you will not see 187 million people having to move by the end of the century.
But 305,000 people.
So 600 times less.
Remember, 305,000 people having to move is half the number of people that move out of California every year.
I think we globally can handle 305,000 people moving over the next 80 years.
This is not a problem to an enormous problem.
And of course, when you only hear the enormous problem, then clearly you are scared and meant to believe that this is the end of the world.
We've got to do something.
But the reality is, it is a problem and a rather manageable problem.
I don't know if you saw just three weeks ago, and obviously I didn't have that in the book because my book came out a month ago in the US, but there was a new study out.
That showed how many people would get flooded and how much damage the world would do if we not only didn't make more dikes, but if we ripped out all current dikes in the world.
Just let that sink in.
So if we assume that there's no protection anywhere in the world, obviously Holland, gone.
And many, many other places, London would probably also be gone.
But what they're doing, and I understand it from a scientific point of view, it's much, much easier to look at just simply what are the heights around the world, and then look at what they call a bathtub model, just fill it up with water and see what goes.
But, of course, it's absolutely unrealistic and useless for anyone.
You know, what's the mayor of London gonna use a study for that assumes we're gonna tear out the barriers of the Thames and everything else and see what happens by 2100?
That's not useful for anyone.
It is very, very good for scaring the pants off of people.
And so the reality here is to realize many of the studies that you hear about have some truth, and they're scientifically valid.
I mean, if this was a conversation between different people who were doing these models by themselves and looking at what do my estimates make, that's fine to leave out all adaptation and leave out all dykes, but it's not okay if you try to actually inform policy based on these things.
And we see this over and again.
Yes, I think you're still a bit too kind about scientists.
I think you take them too much in good faith.
I mean, I totally agree with you that the mainstream media is hysterical, always looking to jump on any scare story, and that's what they do.
We accept that.
But there were too many cases.
That example you gave of a paper, why would you even write a paper where the baseline assumption was that people were going to rip out all the dikes and the walls?
No one's ever going to do this.
I mean, if I wrote a paper on why we should all chop our feet off so that we can get the experience of...
And how hard it would be to walk.
Yes.
Yeah.
I mean, what would be the point of that?
I think there's a couple of things that makes this less problematic because what they're basically trying to do is to improve their models of how much will this change the seaside given that there's different, for instance, accretion rates Those kinds of things.
I think it makes sense within that local community when you do that.
It's the problem that this gets out.
And I would argue two things.
Partly, you can see this from all the press releases that get sent out from these universities.
These researchers undoubtedly sit down with their press people and they say, ooh, big number, we can sell this and it'll make our university look good.
And the second thing is, of course, when you make this study, you get a lot more money because people are, oh, you're the guy who showed we're all going to die.
Yeah, here's more money.
We don't want that, do we?
So I think without having to assume that the researchers are bad people, I think there's a lot of mechanisms that end up making a lot of people around them behave that way.
Look, I'm in no doubt that there are some bad people out there, just like there are bad people in almost all organizations, but my experience when I interact with a lot of these researchers is that they're generally just interested in some things that are often very, very marginal, and had they been doing this in Ubuntu countries in the 1600s or You know, a French philosophy from the 1700s or something.
We would just never have heard of it.
They would still be making silly assumptions, but we wouldn't have heard of it.
But in climate change, we end up hearing a lot about it.
Yes, I think there has been a corrupting effect of the kind of, what you call it, big green, I suppose.
The hysteria that's generated reinforces this political climate whereby governments pour money into environmental research.
Some of it, quite a lot of it, I think, junk.
I mean, did you read the case about the, there was a story in the papers that It was widely reported in the UK and probably around the world, whereby a study showed that baby fish were now preferring to eat plastic microbeads to actual food.
I remember I saw that.
It turned out to be completely untrue.
It was made up.
I think the researcher went on to do something about lionfish, I think, and she was using the same lionfish over and over again, pretending they were different lionfish.
As I recall, this is actually fake studies.
And look, there's always going to be those kinds of instances.
I think two things.
Partly, I think most people are not actually fake and most people are not just trying to cheat on the exam, if you will.
But I also think, and this goes back to our conversation earlier, if you want to get people to sort of embrace smarter policies, I think we should always start out with saying, look, you're a good guy.
I'm a good guy.
We're all good guys.
We want to try to help the world.
Let's have a good conversation.
I find a lot of, you know, Twitter is a great example of everyone assuming that everybody else is horrible people.
And, you know, just sort of kicking off on that note, which of course leads to very, very little understanding between the different factions.
I've always assumed that the best approach is simply to say, I believe that most people, you know, so many of the people I disagree with, so Al Gore and Michael Mann and many others, are fundamentally nice people who want to do good.
But yes, I disagree with them on these points, and I think here's why.
I think that's a much more sound conversation that we end up having Instead of, you know, sort of immediately assuming that they're just trying to be nasty and misleading.
No, that's my job.
I think...
One of the questions one always ought to ask oneself, and I never do, of course, because I'm just in it for the lols and the fight, but one really should think, what am I trying to achieve?
What is the best?
I mean, if I were mature, when I grow up, that's how I'm going to start thinking.
I'm going to be more like you, Bjorn.
I'm going to start thinking.
Well, you know, how do I get my message out to all that?
So I think tactically and strategically what you're doing is very astute.
And I'm not, by the way, accusing you of any form of cynicism.
But you are never going to persuade me, I'm afraid, that carbon dioxide, man-made carbon dioxide, is a serious problem.
I accept that it may have an influence on global temperatures, but I think there are balancing mechanisms.
And I'm slightly surprised, given that you are very much a metrics man and a stats man, That you don't look at the increasingly big gulf between what the computer models tell us and what global temperatures have actually done, why you don't look at that divergence and think, well hang on a second, the models are basically bollocks, we shouldn't buy into this.
So tell me.
So again, my contribution to the conversation is I'm a social science guy.
I think the vast amount of what I can contribute here is on the social science side.
Say, look, the UN Climate Panel was set up to try and figure all of this out.
They come out with all the natural science.
Here's what the social science, or especially the economics, tell us about what would be smart models.
With that said, of course, it's not like I haven't looked at some of these things.
I think we used to see, so we had this pause in the temperature rise From about 2000 to about, you know, 2015, that made the models look a lot more silly.
And I think it was right to ask back then, look, isn't there something dramatically wrong with the models?
And a lot of people, also very, you know, sort of very committed climate scientists in the climate community and also in the UN climate panel report that came out in 2013-14, were asking these questions, perhaps not as hard as you would want and possibly not as hard as one should have asked.
But with the dramatic increase in temperature that we've seen since then, the difference is much less or possibly zero.
So I think, again, it's one of those things where I think we're much better off, and certainly from my point of view, much better off simply saying, look, a lot of scientists have looked at this.
I think mostly they're getting it reasonably right.
I think there's some things that you can still criticize and not be happy, you know, if we took another hour.
But I think this is small potatoes compared to the big thing that we get wrong, which is that we listen to a lot of the climate science, but we forget to listen to the economic science, which also tells us very important issues that we totally, totally miss.
And then we end up, you know, so just to foreshadow that conversation a little bit, I follow very much the only climate economists who've ever gotten the Nobel Prize in economics.
William Nordhaus.
And so you end up in a situation where people say, you should follow the climate science.
But then when I say, and you should follow the Nobel laureate in climate economics, who also got the foremost accolade in the economic science, people say, no, I'm going to watch a video on YouTube and say, see, that's wrong.
So I think there's a much better argument in the economic part of this discussion of saying, we're not listening to the economic science As we are listening to the climate science.
Yes.
That was a really good answer, Buren, and I'm not going to pursue this one, because I think that the details about things like climate sensitivity, forcing feedbacks, and so on, are such a kind of, A, they're very niche, and B, they're a kind of elephant trap, which is designed to end the debate.
We are scientists, this is our field, we know what's going on and you mere mortals don't understand, therefore you're not qualified to judge.
So I think even though I disagree with you mildly, I think it makes absolute sense that you take this position because then you can...
Do you break bread actually with these people?
Do you find that they give you the cold shoulder or do you generally get a sort of reasonable reception when you You go among the climate science establishment.
Well, no, I think there's a lot of them who have decided.
So one of the reasons why I wrote this book was really that, and you know this, over the last couple of years, we've seen a dramatic increase in the sort of virulence of how we are describing climate change, perhaps most markedly.
A document by The Guardian who decided to no longer call it climate change because that sounds way too mild.
So they call it the climate crisis, the global heating.
They're very explicit.
They want something that sounds dangerous.
And a lot of people have followed along on that.
And my experience when I talk to some of these people, for instance, Gavin Smith, who followed in the path of Jim Hansen, who was the original guy who Who put climate change on the world map in 1988 when he testified for Al Gore's committee.
I think, in many ways, he is a good exponent of this.
He used to think that, you know, it was an interesting sort of conversation and addition.
He didn't, you know, buy into what I was saying, but, you know, it was a reasonable conversation.
And now he just finds that I'm totally, totally outside of what's reasonable to discuss.
Obviously, I think he's wrong, and I think he's wrong in areas where it's not his expertise.
But I think what has happened is that we've gone to a state where you've seen an almost separation between people saying, this is the end of the world.
And a lot of people who say, well, I couldn't really be bothered, possibly a little bit like you say, or just, you know, not happening at all or something.
And I am in that slightly unenviable position where I'm saying, well, let's try to find the middle in a conversation that almost doesn't have a middle anymore.
But it's still incredibly important because we are slated to spend, we talked about the Paris Agreement, trillions of dollars.
We're slated to spend trillions, hundreds of trillions of dollars on this, and we're very likely to get it wrong.
That means that we're essentially leaving the world less well off than it otherwise could have been.
And the victims of this are mostly going to be the world's poorest people.
So while a lot of people will tell you we should do something about global warming for the world's poor, the honest answer is very often we end up doing a lot of climate stuff and actually harming the poor in the process.
Not because this is badly intended people, but simply because they haven't thought through The process of what their policies will actually do.
Yes.
Now, do you not think slightly that we've both been overtaken by events?
I mean, the thing that you and I have been, has become our shtick for as long as I can remember, that we've suddenly got this crazy thing going on in the world where it's like weaponized climate change.
Now, before we go on to discuss that, tell me where you are right now.
So I'm in southern Sweden.
I live in Prague.
My boyfriend lives in southern Sweden.
And when the COVID started, we flew back from the US and we basically had to decide where we're going to stay.
And we decided on Sweden for a number of reasons, but also because it was a nicer place if you're not in a risk group, certainly, to live out because it's been a lot less restrictive here.
Yeah.
What's the relationship between the Danes and the Swedes?
Do they love one another, or is there a hatred thing going on?
No, no.
I mean, they love to hate each other, but it's sort of for fun.
But obviously, in the COVID conversation, there's been a very, very strong sense of a strong difference.
The very strong sense of we're going to shut down everything and we're basically going to shut down the economy until we have pretty much zero.
Now, remember, and Sweden can't do that because of their constitutional setup.
So they're actually run, when there is a health crisis, they're run by the health authorities, not by the government.
So in some sense, you could say Sweden is...
Run by the people in charge who are health professionals.
And they've done what everyone, if you remember back to the start of the COVID crisis, everyone told us, you need to flatten the curve.
And the simple argument is, if you flatten the curve, you flatten it below the capacity of the healthcare system so that people don't die because they can't get access.
But the point is, you don't flatten it to zero.
Because if you flatten it to zero, basically you're just postponing the time when you'll have to get all the deaths.
That has been the standard thinking in most of the epidemiological community, and that's indeed what they've done here in Sweden.
They've limited below the threshold of the healthcare system, but not to zero.
But when a lot of politicians realize, ooh, we can go to zero.
A lot of them actually said, let's do that.
And clearly, they have become very successful in doing so.
A lot of people have said, it's amazing that you've seen almost no deaths.
And we all admire Jacinda Ardern the most.
Obviously, she has a big benefit in being four hours in flight away from anywhere.
But in New Zealand, for having almost no dead.
But the reality, of course, is that it seems unlikely that we will be able to continue that in sort of favorite parlance.
It's probably going to be unsustainable to keep shutting down economies until you have a cure or a vaccine.
I believe that there's a lot of arguments and we could also have those for why Sweden may actually be doing the right thing, but we'll still have to wait and see because clearly there's been lots of deaths in Sweden right now.
But I think the crucial bit, and that I think is what we should probably take into our conversation now, is just like in climate change, in COVID you need to have a conversation that actually says, look, there's a real problem.
Doing nothing is going to leave you very, very badly off.
But doing everything that is shutting down the economy forever until we get a vaccine is also unsustainable.
It will have a huge cost in proportion to the amount of people you save.
So what you need to do is to find some middle ground.
In my book, I make a different metaphor, but I think perhaps one that's more sort of easily understandable.
In the U.S. every year, about 40,000 people die in traffic deaths.
A lot of politicians will sort of grandstand and say that number ought to be zero.
Well, there's a very simple way to get traffic that's to zero.
It's to set the speed limit at five kilometers an hour.
The reason why we don't do that is because it would also, you know, basically prohibit everything else we like about a continentally integrated economy and the ability to go and visit your friends or your family and your loved ones.
So we actually have a discussion in European societies, should the speed limit be 90 or 130 kilometers an hour?
Most people, except Germans on a few autobands, don't say just go whatever speed you want.
But the idea here is you don't say just go 300 kilometers, you don't say just go 5 kilometers, you have a sensible middle.
And I think that's the conversation that we're lacking both in the COVID conversation and that's a whole other ball of beans, if that's not the right expression, but you know what I mean.
Yeah.
Yes.
A kettle of fish, right?
A kettle of fish, yeah.
But in climate, we really need that conversation to recognize that doing nothing is a bad idea.
Doing everything actually is also a bad idea.
We need to find somewhere in between where the cost of the problem that you're trying to solve is diminished for real, but where the cost of the policy to achieve that is not spinning out of control.
Yes.
I wonder whether the last 20 or 30 years of hysteria about the imminent climate change catastrophe, I wonder whether there hasn't been a sort of dry run for what we're experiencing now.
That people have been primed to live in a state of fear and to be programmed to think that the government must take drastic action to remedy this existential crisis.
And they never quite managed to persuade enough people that climate change is worth destroying the global economy for.
You know, they sort of got halfway.
But now, all their dreams, the same people, I think, behind the climate, all the same kind of people behind the climate scare, are now really promoting this Covid overreaction.
I mean, I think you agree with me, don't you, that it has been a terrible overreaction.
So I would probably be a little more reticent and careful here.
Well, it's hard to know.
Who actually did the right thing?
I think the models tell us that Sweden will do the right thing, but I also think that if we actually manage to get a vaccine working in a couple months, it may very well be that Denmark and New Zealand and others have, possibly for the wrong reasons, ended up actually doing better.
So I think we need to see that and let that play out.
But I think the point here is to recognize That you should not just assume that policymakers will be able to solve every problem for you without also looking at what's the cost.
And I think we have sort of let our policymakers get away with setting very, very strict regulations and to a very large extent because the feeling was this is a huge crisis and we need to do something.
And that was absolutely true.
We needed to do something.
We probably shouldn't have done as much as what we did.
But the real challenge comes afterwards once we realize, you know, as the economists like to call us the 90% economy, that we have lost a lot of the things that actually make our societies work and be wonderful places.
And we will start asking, did we do the right policies?
And I think that's a great opportunity for us to also start asking those questions about climate policy and about many, many other policy areas.
Are we doing the right thing?
Because the cost of two strong policies are really serious.
We're back to our favorite topic, cost-benefit analysis.
But you're going to be on your own, Bjorn, because I don't see many, particularly not lefty, statisticians To statisticians around the world doing what you're doing.
You know, I mean, that scenario you described at the beginning of our conversation where you're sitting in your university in, how do I pronounce it?
Aarhus.
Yes.
And the fact that you and your students were prepared to engage with a kind of the Doom Slayer, a right-wing Environmental economist, I suppose.
The fact that you did that is in itself very anomalous.
I mean, I don't think there are many, many lefty professors teaching their students that kind of thing.
Definitely not now, probably not even then.
Is that not true?
Possibly true.
I think one of the things I tried to do at the university was simply try to make it more interesting.
I think the damnedest thing about university is that it's just incredibly boring for most people most of the time.
So I would like to believe that I just simply helped make it a little more interesting.
And this was one of the many attempts that I tried.
It just happened to affect me as well a lot.
But I had lots of other books that we read and And study groups and stuff.
So this is just one of many.
I think a lot of professors try to make their students more interested, engaged and stuff.
I'm not going to pretend that I know very well what they do now.
But I think we need that sort of conversation much more.
Just to answer what I think is actually your implicit question, which was your point of saying, look, nobody's going to listen to this.
Who cares to say all these things?
So I run an organization called the Copenhagen Consensus where we bring together lots of the world's top economists.
We work with seven Nobel laureates, one of the three of the world's top economists across a wide range of areas and basically look at where can you spend a dollar or a pound or a euro or a rupee and do the most good.
And I think what we try to do, so we just finished this in Ghana, so we're working with the government of Ghana, the National Development Planning Commission and many others to look at where can you spend extra resources and fix more of your problems rather than fewer of your problems.
And what you get every time when you do this in countries, we've done it with the UN, we've certainly done it for the world, you always end up antagonizing a lot of people because not everything is the greatest, right?
A lot of things are actually pedestrian and some of them are actually really bad ideas.
You always end up pitting off those people and the proponents for those arguments.
Of course, likewise, you end up saying, these are some of the really, really great ideas.
Let's do more of that.
So I think what you realize is you make countries and governments Do a little better.
But if it could help Joe Biden, he's just promised to spend $2 trillion in climate, right?
And most of it is going to be spent on things that have actually fairly little to do with climate.
And quite an amount of the money is going to be spent badly.
Some of them are actually going to be spent pretty well.
I mean, we don't know, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, about $400 billion he's going to spend on research and development into green energy, which is exactly what I say will be the best climate solution.
So, you know, that could be really good.
If I could get Joe Biden, sorry, I shouldn't say Joe because I don't know him, Joe Biden to spend, say, $50 billion more on the smart stuff and $50 billion less on the stupid stuff, I'd consider that a great victory.
So, you know, this is about...
We're nudging the conversation towards a slightly smarter state.
That's what we do in Ghana.
That's what we did in India and Bangladesh and Haiti and many other places.
And that's what I'm trying to do in the climate conversation.
I totally hope you're wrong about Biden's electoral prospects because I fear that, I mean, he's warming over the Green New Deal, isn't he, basically?
And it seems to me that his energy model is the Californian economy, which is about as wrong as you can get.
I mean, I think you and I agree on this one, don't we?
You hate bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes as much as I do.
Are you a Wind Farm fan?
So I'm assuming you mean wind turbines.
So look, my point again is to say, if you're going to fix climate change, you need to switch the world away from emitting lots of CO2 to emitting almost no CO2. There's also some other greenhouse gases, but it's mostly about CO2. And one of the ways to do that is to switch dramatically to solar and wind.
This is what most people have in their minds.
But the problem is that that's fairly unlikely to work out unless you have enormous amount of backup power, which at least right now is going to be exceedingly costly.
Most people will sort of, you know, blindly say, oh, we just need a lot of batteries.
I think most people don't have any sense of how little batteries we have and how much batteries you'd need.
Just to give you a sense of proportion, I read that in the book as well, the US right now has batteries to last for 14 seconds of US average electricity consumption.
So, you know, we're just not anywhere close to the scale that you would need to do this.
Now, the real solution It's going to be some sort of combination of some of the solar and wind, which when you build it together with other energy forms can actually be part of a cheapest solution.
But right now it can't take over most simply because what are you going to do when the wind is not blowing or the sun is not shining?
You need some backup power.
The baseload power that we get from biofuels, which the UK does a lot and Drax and others, is probably fantastically unsustainable because basically we're importing woods from the US and we're burning them.
It emits more CO2. But then we're hoping that somehow you'll regrow all those forests, which is already a dodgy assumption.
We're doing lots of other pretty poor investments.
But, and this is where my point is, if you look across all these areas, the real solution is not going to be, you know, convince poor countries to put up lots of solar panels and wind turbines.
For some places, in some situations, it'll actually be a good idea.
Some places in India, because they're There's an enormous amount of solar influx, and they have a willingness to say, hey, maybe we don't have power some days.
That's fine.
If you can get it really cheap, it's a great solution for them.
Mostly, it's not the thing that'll actually drive most of their development, but what they need is to get cheaper green energy.
And that's where I'm saying, all right, when you look across all the different things you can do, if you spend it on the Paris Agreement, every dollar you spend will do about 11 cents of good.
If you spend it on innovation, that can have a dramatically higher payback, simply because this is about making sure that future people, both in rich countries like the UK, but especially in poor countries like Africa and Asia, will pick low or serocarbon technologies, not because they're green, but because they're cheaper.
And so, you know, just to give you an example, Los Angeles back in the 1950s, terribly polluted place, mostly from cars.
If you sort of follow the standard textbook argument from Greens, you would say, I'm sorry, could you drive your car a little less or possibly even could you stop driving your car?
Of course, that would never actually work.
What did work was somebody invented the catalytic converter.
You put this thing on in 1974, you put it on cars and basically you can drive along and almost not pollute.
Pollute a lot less.
Which is why Los Angeles and most other cities are much, much cleaner today.
Technological solution can actually afford us to both do all the stuff we want and do it much greener.
Whereas telling people do with less will never really work.
That's why we find that for every dollar spent on innovation, you will probably do $11 worth of good.
Not as good as some of the best things you can do in the world, as I talked about with tuberculosis, but certainly good enough that that's where our money should go.
So if Biden spends $400 billion on that, he's actually doing good.
Well, there's some phasing in problems and can you actually, you know, is there capacity for 100 billion a year and stuff like that?
You can have some reservations about that.
And also, are they going to be spent well?
Are they going to be spent on pet projects and all that?
But, you know, fundamentally, there's some real good to be done here.
There's also a lot of bad policies.
Let's, you know, focus more on the good ones, slightly less on the bad ones.
Yeah, I'm so there with you for maybe 75% of the way.
But the problem is, and I'm not saying that this is something you've chosen to do cynically, I think you do believe it, or rather you think it's above your pay grade to discuss this issue, but I think by conceding the territory on CO2 to the establishment, what you're doing is Giving them the justification they need for what I think are inexcusable.
I mean, I think wind turbines, wind farms, Offshore and onshore are blight on the landscape.
They cause tremendous damage to birds and bats.
They cause visual blight, sound, low frequency noise.
They are inefficient.
They probably don't do anything to make a difference to climate change anyway because of the base load power you need produced by fossil fuels and power stations on spinning reserve.
All the reasons that we know.
And my second, sorry, Jack is having a go at you now, because I know that there's going to be some of my right-wing people are going to be saying, you didn't ask them about this, you didn't ask them about that.
My other issue with what you say, again, I'm 75% of the way with you, is pouring taxpayers' money into experimental tech ventures.
I think this is what the private sector should be doing.
I don't think government cannot pick winners.
It just, you end up with waste.
I mean, look at the money that Obama poured into Solyndra, half a billion dollars into a complete boondoggle.
Government does not spend money well, particularly on environmental issues.
Yeah, so look, those are two great points.
So let me start with the last one.
So you clearly have a situation where, and this is sort of standard in almost all economics, that there is a severe underinvestment in all kinds of research, and for a very simple reason.
Most of the basic research that you, for instance, want to have in medical areas is stuff that Pfizer or some other drug company can't use.
Because if you get a great insight, 40 years later, you get a great pill.
But of course, by then, the patent has run out.
So the real issue is here, this is why we spent a lot of money on public health research, because it actually makes sense to make all that basic research that will enable Pfizer and others eventually to make the pill that will make you and me live longer.
So there's a real argument for saying there's an underinvestment simply because it's hard to capture all of the benefits from your breakthrough.
And this is true in almost all areas simply because there's a public benefit in scientific breakthroughs.
That would also be the case in energy.
So there's a public argument for spending more money on energy.
We spend almost nothing on energy research compared to, for instance, medical research, which has gone up dramatically from public money.
So you're absolutely right.
We should also have private investment in energy, but we have very little public investment.
And there's a good argument for saying you should have more.
What Obama did with Cylinder was exactly not research and development.
That was spending money on saying, let's take a product, which is probably not going to work, and spend half a billion dollars on actually producing it.
That's what you shouldn't be doing.
And yes, governments are doing that a lot.
We're setting lots of solar panels and wind turbines, especially solar panels, and In high-latitude countries where we know they're not going to be cost-effective, you shouldn't be doing that, but you should be investing in getting better solar panels because that is going to help everyone become richer in the long run at very low cost.
That's why we find that there's a benefit-cost ratio of $11 back on the dollar.
The other question of saying, am I conceding the point?
Look, as you rightly point out, I happen to believe that when really serious people have looked at what is the cost of global warming, they tell us that by the end of the century, if we do nothing, the cost is 3.6%.
This is Nordhaus' number.
And of course, there's no way we know that to the second digit.
It's sort of 3% to 4%, and it's probably even more roughly than that.
But in that sense, Ballpark area.
What that means is if you can spend, say, half or 1% of GDP to avoid most of the 3% to 4%, you can actually make humanity better off.
We should try to do that.
What we should also do is tell people if you're trying to spend, say, 15% to 30% of GDP to avoid a 3% to 4% problem or only parts of that, You're wasting a lot of resources.
And unfortunately, that's what we're doing today.
I think that's a much, much more important conversation and also the right place.
So I think global warming is a problem.
In the big scheme of things, it is by no means the biggest problem in the world.
It is one of many problems that we should fix in humanity.
And we simply need to make sure that people recognize if you have a three to four percent problem, Don't fix it with 30% cost, but do fix it with 1 or 2% cost.
And that's what I'm trying to do, and I think innovation actually turns out to be one of the best ways to achieve that.
I still think, Jon, that If you spent a weekend at Dellingpole boot camp, I think I could very easily make you right-wing.
I think actually, deep down, you're one of us.
I've been trying to convince you for many years, so I think deep down you want to be convinced.
Well, I do think actually...
I get the vibe that I'm slightly more eco and lefty than you are on the subject of animals.
I reckon that I care more about the bats and birds killed by the wind turbines than you do.
I'm just putting it out there.
Look, I think it's a real concern.
I think that's also why you would want most wind turbines, for many other reasons, to be offshore in the long run, simply because that's where you'll have much less death, but you'll also have much less human suffering, both the blight, which I think people just simply disagree violently about.
I think they look ugly, but I recognize that a lot of people think they actually look beautiful.
But very clearly, most people don't want to live close to them.
And I think that's a very good indicator of saying they have real local impact as well, negative impact.
And we should take that into account.
Actually, I just wanted to ask you.
Carry on, sorry.
All right.
So I think most of these things, just like with any other issue, is something that you can reasonably manage if you do this well.
So obviously in the long run, we should be focusing on offshore wind turbines.
We should be focusing on solar panels that don't look ugly, but actually fit in.
You know, I've always thought we should come out with, and I love the fact that Elon Musk came out with, you know, You know, roof tiles that look like roof tiles, but also supply you with energy.
Now, again, they're not cost effective now.
And so we shouldn't rush out and say, yay, and buy all of them.
But what we should say is that's the right approach.
You know, find things that will actually be beneficial and cheap.
Those are the ways that you solve problems in the world.
And so I just tend to be a lot more sort of, look, it's very, very hard to predict what the future is going to look like, but let's make sure that we invest in the knowledge that will make it much more likely to be a good future.
One of the things, I also mention that in the book, Oh, what's his name?
Craig Venter, the guy who cracked the human genome back in 2000.
He has this crazy idea, or wild idea, of taking algae and growing them out on the ocean surface.
And basically, they'll soak up sunlight and CO2 and produce oil.
And then we just harvest all the oil, burn it in our fossil fuel economy, and it'll be CO2 neutral because they just sucked up the CO2 out in the ocean.
I mean, It doesn't work right now, but imagine if you could make it work.
I mean, it works in theory, but it's not anywhere at scale and at cost.
But the point is, there are thousands of those kinds of slightly crazy ideas, and we don't need all of them to work.
We just need one of them to work.
And that's what I mean by saying if you invest in the innovation, not do the Obama-Cylinder thing where you spend half a billion on one idea that was probably bad from the start, But spend, you know, a million dollars on these really smart people to make better knowledge and find out, does this actually work?
Is this something that you could imagine eventually getting to a point where somebody's going to be incredibly rich from doing this and making the whole world have plentiful energy at much lower cost than what we currently do from fossil fuels?
That'd be amazing!
There's bound to be future problems with all of these solutions as well.
But the idea, you know, we've never done a situation where we just develop and, oh, magically there are no more problems.
But we have reduced the amount of problems by making things cheaper, more effective, and better for most people.
And that's what we should be doing.
If we can solve global warming and actually get cheaper energy at the same time, that'd be fantastic.
Maybe we can't do that.
But I think there's a very good argument for saying, let's invest in research and development, which will both make us better off simply because we'll be likely to have better energy sources.
We'll probably also be able to fix climate change.
And oh, by the way, it'll probably also throw up a battery that'll make your cell phone much better.
Just like they argue for the Apollo program, you'll get lots of spin-off things.
Not that that was the main part, but it'll also be part of the benefits.
Yes.
That question I was going to ask you was actually quite boring.
It was only about whether they're coming from Denmark that you'd noticed there'd been a kind of backlash.
Because, I mean, I imagine there were so many bloody winter burns in Denmark now that people must be sick of the noise and the blight.
My sense is that most people are very proud of it.
If you look back in the 19, 1910s, 20s, when you saw pictures of cities that were really successful, they had lots of smokestacks.
That was sort of the mental picture of what success looks like.
And today, if you look at most cities who want to sort of brand themselves as we're really successful, they have lots of these wind turbines in the horizon.
So I think, you know, sure, I still think when you're close to them, most people hate them.
But when they're a little bit away, I've got to realize a lot of people like them.
I think eventually we'll get to the point where we don't like them, but we're not there yet.
What has happened to your people, Bjorn?
I think I almost respected you more when you came and raped and pillaged and burned down our monasteries and stole away all our gold.
I mean, at least you had a spirit then.
I mean, now!
Look at you!
Just Gaia-worshipping wimps!
Yes, yes, yes.
I'm sure the monasteries feel different.
Yeah, yeah, right.
Yeah, well, we got rid of you in the end, I think, didn't we?
Oh, no!
Basically, you sort of narrowed into it.
Yeah, exactly.
We're all the same.
We're all the same.
I think Harold Godwinson, of course he was a Viking of some kind, wasn't he?
You obviously seem very buoyant and cheerful and I think it's probably because of where you are right now.
You're in the one country in the world that hasn't completely screwed up on this thing.
And I love your optimism and I like a lot of your vision, particularly when it comes to sort of combating hysteria and the cost benefit analysis.
Looking around you, looking at the world we inhabit, I mean, looking across the water from Sweden and elsewhere, do you not think that the world is...
Well, that we're in that kind of state of civilizational decline where there's really not much hope.
I mean, the groupthink that has seemed to beset the world at the moment, what I call COVID bedwetting, the people...
Terrified of something that is actually killing no more people than a bad year of seasonal flu, if that, and yet we've never closed down economies before then.
Do you not fear that a kind of a mass irrationality, well, the madness of crowds, mass irrationality has taken over the world and that logic like yours is not going to find a place?
So I think we have a missing understanding of how incredibly unrational the world used to be.
So in some sense, we have this idea that, you know...
The Americans believe that Lincoln was just good and rational and there was nothing bad about it.
It was pretty terrible times if we actually look at the way people lied and cheated and did all kinds of other things.
And Lincoln had his fair share of that.
And that's true pretty much everywhere in all kinds of ways.
So yes, I do despair in the sense that we're so smart, we're so educated, we have so much information and yet we get so many things wrong.
But at the same time, if you look at the accumulation of getting a lot of things wrong in 2020 and in 2019 and all the way back to 1900, We've done pretty damn well.
So I think there's a risk that you look at the world and think, oh my God, why can't we do it better?
And yes, it would be wonderful if the world was somehow hyper-rational and, well, actually, I'm not sure if that would be true, but that's a conversation for a different day.
But it'd be wonderful if we were smarter.
But actually, we are pretty smart.
And when you look at the UN climate panel scenarios, and I also emphasize those in the book, so the UN, in order to be able to quantify what's going to happen in the rest of the 21st century, they actually have to make assumptions about what will the world look like for the rest of the century.
And of course, we don't know, because it's not happened yet.
But this is five scenarios of what the world will probably look like by some of the smartest people in the world.
And one thing stands out.
In all of these scenarios, we'll be much richer.
And the most likely scenarios will be phenomenally much richer.
We will live longer.
We will be better educated.
We will have pretty much on all accounts and we'll have less inequality, which matters a lot to a lot of people.
I don't think most people grasp how much better it is likely to be in 2100.
So, yes, there will be problems, and global warming will undoubtedly be one of them.
But compared to the problems that we have right now, we're still, you know, 15%, 10, 15% of people are illiterate, that about a billion people are still starving, about 10% are still poor.
Remember, in 200 years ago, 95% of all people were extremely poor.
Today, it's only 10%.
But, you know, by mid-century, that number will probably be very close to zero if we just play our cards reasonably right.
So I think we're also, you know, faced with a sort of myopia where we look at a world and say, oh, come on, guys, do better.
But the reality is we are doing better.
My goal is to make sure we do a little better better rather than a little worse better.
But it will be a much better world in 2050, and it'll certainly be a much, much better world in 2100 in ways we can't imagine.
And a little bit like people in 1920 thought about 2020.
Oh, how are they possibly going to manage with the Habsburgs and all this?
No, that would have been...
But with worrying about things that ended up just not being the main issue, I'm always a really smart professor at Rockefeller University, He loves to point out, you know, when you look out ahead, you often get it fundamentally wrong.
You know, so if you think back in, you know, early 1900, if you were going to look at transatlantic travel, you would think the main challenge would be to find ways to avoid a Titanic disaster, right?
So you try to build up, you know, much better iceberg surveillance and stuff.
And you'd entirely miss the fact that we'd be flying over the Atlantic 50 years later.
And I think that sort of tells you the basic story of how we often get it wrong by saying, oh, with all those ships, how are we going to avoid all those icebergs?
It turned out that technology made that question almost irrelevant.
And of course, today, we have a world that dies much, much less in all kinds of ways.
So let me just leave you with one final statistic that I also show in the book.
If you look at the number of people that died from climate-related disasters, On average, this is a wildly fluctuating number, so I averaged it over decades.
On average, in the 1920s, about half a million people died every year from climate-related disasters of floods, droughts, storms, temperatures.
Today, most people would imagine with all the media conversation around climate change that this was a much higher number.
No, it's not.
It has dropped 95% to about 20,000 people a year.
We are much, much safer.
And of course, at the same time, we've quadrupled global population.
So actually, the individual risk of dying from climate-related disasters has reduced 99%.
This is a fantastic world, and it's very likely that that will continue because prosperity outcompetes global warming.
This does not mean that global warming is not a problem.
If there was no global warming, we would decline our risks even faster.
But it's a much, much different world to say, look, things are not going to go quite as fast towards better because of global warming, rather than, as the stereotypical argument is, we're all going to die from global warming.
And that, I think, is the main message that we need to get at.
Global warming is a real problem.
Not the end of the world.
Let's be smart about it, but let's not waste trillions and hundreds of trillions of dollars on things that will do almost no good.
Thank you, Bjorn, for infecting me with your dangerous optimism, which I think is going to last with me for at least the next 10 minutes before I sink back into my depths of despair.
I would love to hope that I'm not infecting you with optimism, but with rationality.
Because this is really not...
Optimistic doesn't really play.
I mean, it's not about saying, oh, cross our fingers and hope for the best.
It is about realizing that the trends that go towards better are much more pervasive than the trends that go towards worse.
Overall, there are going to be problems, but it's very, very likely that we'll be better off in 2050 and 2100 for a number of very, very basic points that we've seen play out over the last couple hundred years, namely that our inventive and adaptive capabilities make us much, much better off.
Great, thanks.
Thank you very much, Bjorn Lomborg.
And if you've enjoyed this show, please don't forget to support me on Patreon or Subscribestar and you'll get lots of wonderful interviews like this.
Probably not quite as good as it.
This is the best, isn't it, Bjorn?
But yeah, almost in this league.
Anyway, go and enjoy your southern Swedish...
Is it sunny there at the moment?
Yeah, it's rainy.
Oh, is it not?
We needed that.
Yes, we need it.
Oh, it's sunny here.
Suddenly I'm not envious anymore.
Thanks for rubbing that in.
Good.
Thanks a lot.
It was great talking to you.
Bye-bye.
Thank you.
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