Bjorn Lomborg challenges extreme climate narratives, arguing that burning plastics with scrubbers and fracking’s $180B net economic benefit outweigh its $25B annual environmental costs while cutting U.S. emissions faster than renewables. He dismisses hurricanes as a major threat—flood deaths could drop to near zero by 2100 with adaptation—and insists poverty, not climate change, drives global suffering, citing tuberculosis (1.5M deaths/year) and malnutrition. Lomborg’s data shows net-zero policies would cost $6T annually, delaying progress on education, contraception access, and green energy R&D (~$100B needed), while wealthier nations like Europe still rely on fossil fuels, leaving poorer regions unfairly restricted. His books False Alarm and Prioritizing Development propose pragmatic, cost-effective solutions over fear-driven policies. [Automatically generated summary]
You have some emissions from the burning of the plastics, but you're getting rid of the plastics, which is a real—is it a net gain for the environment?
Because the plastics are a real problem, particularly in the ocean and in landfills.
But he figured out how to extract some of it, and then they took that plastic and then converted it into things you could buy, like sunglasses and things along those lines.
So, again, most things in the real world are both a problem and a benefit, and we need to find out how do we make it more of a benefit and less of a problem, but we need to stop having this conversation, oh, you can't have anything of this bad thing.
That's not how we organize our societies.
That's not how we think, and that's certainly not how we make good choices.
That makes sense, but if we know that there are alternatives to plastic, And we know that there's so many different problems with plastic, it being non-biodegradable.
Isn't there some plastic that they can make with plant fiber that's biodegradable?
Then there's the phthalate thing.
I'm sure you're probably aware of this, Dr. Shanna Swan.
Do you know this whole thing about what's happening to when women are pregnant and their bodies have levels of phthalates above a certain level, it has an effect on the reproductive cycle of the child.
And they can do studies in mammals and they show that when the female is pregnant and she encounters these chemicals from plastics It fucks with the gender of the child, like where their taints shrink, which is weird, but in mammals, apparently that's a representation of whether or not it's a male or a female.
It's one of the best ways of distinguishing, whether it's a male or a female.
It's the size of the taint when it's a baby, because the male taint is 50 to 100% larger than the female taint.
She's hilarious.
She's got a really funny thing on her Instagram because it also causes a decline in sperm production.
And so her way of approaching it that's funny is she has the jizz quiz and she does this thing.
She's like this adorable petite lady who is a brilliant doctor.
But she's kind of being funny and at the same time sounding the warning shot.
Like, hey, this is fucking with human beings' reproductive cycles.
And since the invention of petrochemical plastics that we use in basically everything, from that point to today, there's a very clear drop in fertility rates, a very clear drop in male sperm count, a very clear drop in penis and testicle size, and with females, there's higher rates of miscarriages.
And she believes through her research that this is connected and that these chemicals that we're getting from these plastics are literally affecting the development cycle of human babies.
The point is not that we shouldn't be concerned about issues and that we should be investigating things, but you also got to remember Our civilization is actually really, really good at making sure that we are concerned about all the different things.
And how do we know?
Because we live much longer.
This is one of the things I think almost everyone forgets.
In 1900, the average life expectancy on planet Earth was 32 years.
And the point is, there are these terrible stories and there are sign markers to tell us we should be careful.
But again, I also just want to come back to realizing that when you look at the whole picture, we're actually doing amazingly much better.
Remember, at the same time, while we lost these five IQ points, what we see now in IQ development is that kids are getting smarter and smarter, probably because you get better food, you get better childhood, you get better education, you get more stimulated.
There are all these kinds of things.
So we've actually gone up, what, 30 IQ points or something over the last 100 years?
So at the same time, it's a little controversial because you try to standardize it at 100. But fundamentally, what you've seen is a dramatic increase in IQ. And yes, lead was a stupid idea.
So I guess the point that I try to make, and I'm sure we'll get to that when we start talking about global warming and all the other problems, is that we need to recognize that we have real problems in this world.
But it's not that the world is sort of, you know, the wheels are coming off, which is very often the conversation that I think a lot of people feel like they're in.
When you ask, you know, kids and young people, for instance, on climate change, they're terrified.
You know, I had on Randall Carlson and Graham Hancock yesterday, and the podcast will be released on Thursday.
And it's this amazing podcast talking about moments in the Earth's history where the Earth experienced asteroid impacts, comet impacts.
And that there's a period around 12,000 something years ago where we for sure got hit by these big impacts of either exploding in the sky above Earth or hitting the ground.
And there's plenty of physical evidence of this, and it's called the Younger Dryas Impact Theory.
But they were talking about the rapid change in the climate.
How the sea levels rose, the ice caps melted, all because we got pummeled by asteroids.
This shit has gone on forever.
That's just natural stuff from getting hit by space.
If you look at, like, the cycles of, like, if you go back a million years in Earth and look at all the highs and lows, you're like, oh, this thing's never been stable without us even existing.
It's never been stable.
So I guess the question is, how much of an effect are we having on these wild cycles?
What can you really blame it on?
And what can we do, if anything, to turn it around?
Before you go to that, how do we know how much of an impact our society is having on the overall effect?
Like if there is a warming of the globe, how do we know?
How much of an impact?
Is there a real science that points out the amount of carbon and the emissions that we release has X amount of effect, which will equal this amount of temperature rise?
So, I basically just read all the- Oh, you're one of those guys.
I'm one of those guys, yes.
Sorry.
Should I leave now?
So I basically just take for granted what the UN Climate Panel guys are telling us.
I think they have – I've spoken to a lot of them.
I've read a lot of their work.
I think they're really trying hard to show that what they typically say is between half and all of the change that we've seen over the last hundred years is because of us.
And they've sort of trended towards all because of us.
It feels like that's possibly a little bit too much.
So really, the point here is this is a problem, but it's not the end of the world.
And I think that's really where we need to get back to in realizing this is not what is going to change our entire future.
It's going to have a negative impact.
But remember also, at the same time, fossil fuels have basically made it possible for us to have the Industrial Revolution and become incredibly safe in so many different ways.
And so that's where we need to find a way to slowly and eventually find ways to produce all of that stuff you just talked about without the negative impacts of fossil fuels.
And that's going to be hard, and that's not an easy trip.
And we're going to have a lot more of that in Europe this winter because of the whole Russian issue.
But what people don't get is most of the world's poor.
So about 3 billion people on this planet, they cook and keep warm with really dirty fuels like dung, cardboard, wood, whatever they can get their hands on.
And that means the average indoor air pollution in these homes is higher and worse than it is in outdoor Beijing.
Wow.
The World Health Organization estimated it's equivalent for each person to smoke two packs of cigarettes every day.
They had a life of eight hours of lit when they were normal, but then when they turned the air conditioning on, the air was blowing down on the candles, so they were burning through this.
Are you conspiratorial about this push towards a climate change crisis mentality where there was a famous Project Veritas video with a guy who worked for CNN and they caught him on undercover camera and they were talking about using climate change to get people excited.
I assumed he was talking about four ratings.
Which makes sense.
If you're a producer and you work in Hollywood, if the Kardashians are fighting with their boyfriend, get in there!
Let's go!
That's money, right?
That's what you do.
And if that's happening, oh my god, the climate.
Everyone freaks out.
The climate.
They're glowing their hands to Picasso's.
Oh Jesus, the climate.
If that's going to get you ratings, your job is to get ratings.
Your job is not to educate the American people.
You can barely figure out life yourself.
Right?
You're 34 years old.
You got a half a million dollars in student loans.
Can't believe you work for CNN. What are you supposed to do?
You're supposed to fucking put the climate change in everybody's face.
So, climate has that wonderful opportunity that it can actually Fundamentally get us to talk about every time something out there happens, it can be news and it can be somebody's fault.
Right.
Every time there's a flood, every time there's a storm, every time there's anything.
You also have more people dying if they're not taking care of their body, and no one talks about that.
Climate change causes heart attacks.
A second look at the data.
Hmm.
How good is the evidence implicating climate change as a cause of heart attacks?
Not very.
Let's take a critical look at some of this research.
So a slew of recent studies suggested that climate change increasing the number of heart attacks worldwide.
The hypothesis suffers from many critical deficiencies, the most important being that rates of heart disease and thus heart attacks in the industrialized world have plummeted as our ability to prevent and treat coronary artery disease has improved.
Studies that have reported a slowdown in this trend have also detected rises in the prevalence of obesity, metabolic syndrome, and type 2 diabetes.
What we were just saying.
All well-known risk factors for heart disease.
It's not that climate change is causing heart disease.
It's that people are doing things that they shouldn't be doing with their body in terms of letting their body get obese or not taking action and going to the gym and altering their diet.
They need encouragement.
If you really wanted to lower costs for healthcare worldwide, especially nationwide, A national program encouraging people.
Instead of just putting like a black square on your Instagram on Tuesday, how about encouraging people through one entire month to do 100 sit-ups and 100 push-ups and go up, you know, walk 10,000 steps every day.
Just encouraging people and everybody have to fucking be accountable online.
If everybody did that, people would just shed weight.
They would shed weight.
All sorts of medical problems would go away, if they're capable of doing this, of course.
If they're not, if they already have a health problem, it's obviously not their fault.
There's so many people that can improve their life and there's no encouragement to do it.
All they talk about is like the fear of what happens if this comes for you.
The fear.
The climate is going to make you have a stroke.
The climate is going to make you stay indoors.
The oceans are going to boil.
It's like, Jesus Christ, tell me what I can do to make life better right now.
Because every winter, you actually have to keep your home heated well for six months.
Especially up in the north, right?
In order to not have, you know, arteries clog, you have heart attacks, that kind of thing, what happens when it gets colder and you get cold, the body restricts its blood flow out to the surface and you get higher blood pressure and that's a very well-known risk factor for getting heart attacks.
So you actually have a lot of people that die because they don't get enough heat, especially older people.
Right, but how are they attributing those deaths directly to cold?
What is the statistic that you looked up and what's the source of that?
So key points.
So this is from, what is this from?
The EPA. Government.climate.
So this is the EPA. Between 79 and 2016, the death rate as a direct result of exposure to cold underlying cause of death.
So that's freezing to death.
That's not like strokes and heart attacks.
Right, okay.
Generally range from 1 to 2.5 deaths per million people.
With year-to-year fluctuations, overall a total of more than 19,000 Americans have died from cold-related causes since 1979, according to death certificates.
So what are they putting on the death certificate of these people that are dying that you're counting with the 166,000?
Sorry, the 170 for the US? Yeah, whatever the Lancet study said, 166. Sorry, the Lancet study is a global study, and that was an increase in the number of people.
So, for instance, curiously, everybody that dies from heat die after one or two days.
So that's why it's such good news, you know.
Sorry, sorry.
Such good newscasting, right?
When it happens, you can show the bodies right there.
When you have cold deaths, it typically happens after 15 to 30 days.
So you need to have cold for a long time because then you're starting to work that up and your body restricts your temperature.
That's what causes it.
So you really need to lag these.
A lot of times you don't do that analysis and so you only find the heat deaths but not the cold deaths.
So there's a wonderful study that actually showed back in the late 2000s when fracking came on board.
They found that gas prices went down, so about half of all Americans heat their homes with gas.
And so what happened was you actually could show that because people could now afford to heat their homes better, especially if they were poor, That actually every year saves about 11,000 people from dying from cold deaths.
So these cold deaths, we're talking about people who, because of being in freezing cold temperatures, they have a variety of different detrimental health problems, like...
And the reason why it kills people is because this is a lot of millions of people, and each one of them are put into this little risk factor.
And the overall point that I tried to make with that graph and with the Lancet study was just that, you know, you hear all this thing about more heat deaths, and that's absolutely true because of global warming.
But you never hear the fact that as temperatures rise, you're, of course, also going to see fewer cold deaths.
And actually, right now, it turns out that we're seeing many fewer cold deaths than we're seeing increasing heat deaths.
So when people talk about our impact on the world with oil and how we're ruining the future of our planet and so the hysteria of these young people, what do you think is the thing to tell them to try to give them a more balanced perspective of what's actually happening?
Like, if you think it's a problem, you think what people are doing is a problem, but it's not as big of a problem, that's what kind of has to be balanced out.
Because it's either everything or it's nothing.
That's the narrative that we hear today.
Either global warming is not an issue at all.
Oh, you silly goose, why are you worried about that?
And I want to get people to understand that global warming is a problem, But it's actually mostly a problem in the sense that the world is getting better and better, but because of global warming, it gets slightly slower, much better.
Obviously, that was one of the big things that people had a problem with with COVID deaths.
There's people that were already terminally ill and got COVID and they attributed it to COVID. But, you know, your body is like an ecosystem.
And if you have like a major insult coming into your body, like being obese or a disease, or if you live in one of these horrible places that has massive amounts of pollution, that's something that must affect...
There was huge floods in China and India in the 1920s, 1930s.
Huge famines.
Things that we just never heard of.
Well, we heard a little bit about it back then.
But then we've forgotten it.
And then when we hear about these things that will cause a thousand deaths.
Remember, let me take an example I know a lot more about.
The world's biggest hurricane death It was in Bangladesh in 1970. It was a big hurricane that came in, killed somewhere between 300 and 500,000 people in Bangladesh.
This was mostly because, you know, they were totally unprepared.
There was very bad communication.
It was also East Pakistan back then.
That was one of the reasons why they broke loose, because they felt they weren't really being taken care of.
Today, and this in many ways defined Bangladesh, and so they have taken great care in getting much better prevention.
They have information.
They have these centers where you can assemble up on high areas where you can actually keep everyone safe and stuff.
So now the same kind of hurricanes come in, and they kill sort of tens or hundreds of people instead.
Did you see that community they established in Florida?
That survived this last hurricane with, like, flying colors.
Is that a word?
You know that expression.
If you go to, what was the hurricane called?
The last one, the big one that just hit Florida?
Ian?
If you go to Hurricane Ian, Solar Community, Florida, I believe it's 2,000 homes.
They're completely off-grid in the sense that they have a solar field, and it powers these homes, and they built homes to withstand hurricanes.
And so this is a bad hurricane.
So it was a really good test for them.
And it nailed them.
And everything was fine.
They kept their internet.
They kept their electricity.
So look at that.
Isn't that wild?
Look how they did that.
They have this massive, massive field of solar panels.
So it's called Babcock Ranch.
And this community was established just to give people a safe place from a natural disaster.
Because a lot of the houses they built before, the engineering, when they were building these houses in the 1950s, did they really know how to survive a fucking hurricane?
They just built a good house.
They tried their best, but see if you can get some photos of what the houses look like.
They look like normal houses, but they built these houses with very strong tolerances, and they can take incredible winds And they look like a regular fucking house.
It's not like they're space houses, like they're built like a fucking, like a wind turbine or something like that.
No, they're normal houses, but they're just really robust.
And these people all made it through, which is pretty wild.
And if you just disregard the solar part, which of course kept them powered, but there's many other ways you could have done that with batteries as well.
The main point is you should have better regulation for houses if you want most houses to survive.
This is very, very cheap.
There's a good study for Hurricane Sandy and also for Hurricane Andrew back in 1992. Had there been better regulation, so you just had clamps, for instance, on roofs?
And so, again, because we're so worried about one thing, namely climate change, and saying, oh, my God, we've got to, you know, go to electric cars and stop using fossil fuels and all this other stuff.
No, actually, you need to have clamps.
Right.
And this is the kind of conversation that we have a very hard time getting around to, that just like we started off talking about with plastics, They're not nearly as comforting, but they're just much simpler, much cheaper, much more effective.
So what you see here is that you will actually, with climate, you will actually have slightly higher levels of malaria deaths than if there was no climate change.
So if you actually care about malaria, your right answer is not to say, we've got to change the entire growth engine of the world and stop using fossil fuels.
No, the right answer is to make sure that people get malaria medication, that they get bed nets.
There's a lot of these simple things.
Remember, this does not mean That we shouldn't also try to fix global warming.
We're a smart species.
We can walk and chew gum at the same time.
But we seem to almost entirely just go to the straight answer.
Whatever the problem is, the answer is to cut carbon emissions.
And that's often not the best or the most effective way to help people first.
Yeah, I mean, they should all be able to safely shut down, but clearly, Fukushima was not well enough to sign because they basically put them in a place where the backup generators could be hit by...
So, you know, some of the new ones that are being done in France and Finland and the UK have ended up being, you know, two to four times more expensive than they were planned.
And so they're easily, you know, sort of two, three times more expensive.
So they should realize this is not the end of the world.
And I think that would take away a lot of this, oh my god, we've got to do something right now.
And then we can start talking about, okay, how do you fix things smartly?
Well, you don't fix getting rid of fossil fuels by telling everyone, I'm sorry, would you mind being a little poor and a little colder and not being able to drive?
Would that be okay with you?
You don't win elections that way.
You don't actually get things done.
The way you fix problems is through innovation.
So if you think back to Los Angeles in the 1950s, it was a terribly polluted place, mostly because of cars.
There's special sort of geography that makes it very possible for all the pollution just to get stuck in that dome in Los Angeles.
And it's cars.
And so the current way we think about environment is basically, all right, the solutions back then would have been to tell everyone in Los Angeles, I'm sorry, could you walk instead?
And no, that wouldn't have worked.
What did work was the innovation of the catalytic converter.
So in 1974, this guy comes up with this little thing you put on.
It cost a couple hundred dollars, and basically it takes away all the pollution from the car.
In polluted cities, some cars, like particularly Jeremy Clarkson was talking about this on Top Gear, some cars like a Porsche Turbo, which is a very efficient car and has incredible air filters.
The air coming out of the exhaust is actually cleaner than the air going in.
No, not a Porsche, but a car that's sucking in carbon.
Everyone should, before they die, own one of those, though.
But if you could get a car that is somehow or another utilizing that fuel that's in the air that's problematic, and if there's some sort of a way to extract that and convert it, maybe through some unforeseen technology, convert that into energy.
Well, all combustion engines require oxygen, right?
Would it be possible for a combustion engine at least to somehow work carbon neutral by pulling enough carbon out of the atmosphere that whatever comes out the back is actually not good?
So, fundamentally, you can do a lot of stuff, and you could also do this, but it would just be incredibly expensive, meaning you wouldn't have the resources to do all the other stuff you also want to do.
In terms of what we can do now to slow the stem, like that's one of the fear-mongering things that you hear.
I don't know if it's accurate, but they're always saying if we don't do this now, with every day that passes by, if we don't enact legislation, the future is doomed.
And so the UN said, if you want to do this almost impossible, you have to do everything before 2030, which was then 12 years away.
That's where the 12-year time limit come from.
It's basically saying if you want to do something incredibly stupid and incredibly expensive, you only have 12 years left.
But that's not what the UN is telling us.
We should switch and we should cut carbon emissions.
But there are much, much smarter ways to do this.
So perhaps the most obvious one is what the US did back from late 2000s, which was fracking.
Yeah.
This is basically something that was done by investment research and development from George W. Bush in the early 2000s, where they spent about $10 billion working with frackers to find out how do you frack gas and then later on oil.
And what that meant was you ended up—this was not at all meant as a climate policy.
It was meant as a way to get more energy.
But what it meant was you ended up getting much, much cheaper gas.
And because you had much cheaper gas, you switched out coal for gas.
This matters because gas is about twice as efficient.
It emits half as much CO2 per unit of energy.
So you basically have this situation where you made a somewhat cleaner source of energy much cheaper.
And so the U.S. actually cut its emissions more over the last decade than any other country has ever done.
So this is local air pollution, and this is mostly from the increased amount of emissions, especially of methane, but also just because you have lots of construction going on where you do the fracking.
And because fracking is a very rapid turnover, you need a lot of wells.
So there's a total cost, environmental cost, of about $25 billion.
That's not nothing, absolutely, per year.
But the benefit of fracking to the U.S. is estimated by one of the Federal Reserve estimates.
Remember, air pollution, certainly in the U.S., has come down about 90% over the last 30 years.
So because of the Clean Air Act and many others, we've actually dramatically reduced air pollution.
And we know how to do that.
You can absolutely regulate fracking better, and you can decide that you want to have less air pollution.
But it is a trade-off in the sense of saying, how much more opportunity will you have?
And then you also actually cut carbon emissions, which is what the U.S. has done more than any other country, versus how much do you want, for instance, less air pollution?
Although a lot of these guys – this is one of the reasons why fracking is taken off in the U.S. and not anywhere else because in the U.S. you own your own mineral rights, right?
So the guys who own the land are the ones who typically get most of the – or not most of the benefit but a substantial benefit of the fracking – That's not true in Europe, which is why everybody then gets annoyed about the air pollution.
But if you get air pollution, but you also get like $200,000, many people will say, hmm, I like that.
Now, they probably like to have less air pollution.
RuPaul was just on NPR Fresh Air and shared that he and his partner own 60,000 acres in Wyoming and they lease mineral rights and sell water to oil companies.
Okay.
Terry Gross did not follow up with one question about the fact that RuPaul is fracking.
Oh, so it is fracking.
We found that RuPaul...
Is that true?
Ru's partner...
It is true?
Australian rancher George Labar owns seven parcels of land in Wyoming, totaling some 66,000 acres, Labar's company.
Labar Ranch leases that land to at least three oil companies, Anadarko, EP Onshore, Chesapeake Operating, and Ann Schultz Oil Company.
Using Frack Tracker, we looked at just 10,000 of those acres and found more than 35 active oil and gas wells.
All oil and gas drilling is bad, but these three companies are no mom and pop shops.
Chesapeake Energy was a pioneer of the drilling method early in the nation's fracking boom.
It was the second most active drilling company in the nation, closely followed by Anadarko.
An Anschultz owner, Philippe Frederick Anschultz, made billions from fossil fuel extraction that earned him the 41st spot on the Forbes 400. Wow, interesting.
Well, RuPaul is fabulous.
Go get it.
Get that money.
So if it's your land, do you have the right to pollute the rivers and streams?
That's the question because these all have trickle-down effects.
That's not how you show yourself to the world and say, Is that a political posturing thing where they put policies in place because those policies are what the people have been sort of at least programmed by fear-mongering to expect and want from their politicians?
I mean, obviously it's good politics because a lot of people get re-elected saying, I'm going to save your world and elect me and then I'm going to put up some more solar panels.
But the problem is it's an incredibly expensive way of achieving almost nothing.
And that's why, you know, if you look at what fracking has done, Fracking is sort of a dirty word.
But I simply point out that fracking, more than anything else, has cut carbon emissions dramatically because you've given an alternative to coal, which not only emits a lot of CO2, but also kills a lot of people through air pollution, and you can now do a lot less.
Imagine if we could make China frack, India frack, Europe would be good to track as well, because we could actually get all of these countries to switch away from coal towards gas.
Now, this is not the whole solution, but it has the beauty of being cheaper so that you don't actually have to go to all these summits where everybody promises stuff and then don't do it, but you would actually have people do what's in their own private interest.
But that's an uncomfortable trade-off to me, this idea of exploiting the environment that way.
Because that's what it is.
It's like if you're gonna agree to pollute a certain amount of the water, a certain amount of the land, is there any solution to extract that pollution and is that even feasible or possible?
It's localized, and it's mostly the people who are also getting the benefits.
That's why many people would accept this sort of tradeoff.
Absolutely, we should not have...
You know, you're sort of switching over to this other place where we say, but what if it, you know, dramatically damaged rivers downstream and, you know, a cultural place and all that stuff?
That's much more regulatable.
That's the kind of thing where you just simply say you can't do this.
We had a lot of this impact in the early part of fracking where just everybody did it.
It was sort of, you know, Wild West for everything.
But you can regulate a lot of this, and that's why I think it's a fairly small part of it.
Would you have to – So the way you regulated it was to get rid of the most dangerous parts of those chemicals.
As I understand it, there's very little dangerous now, the chemicals that you put in, and then also have the overflow so you actually get the wastewater out and that you keep that or you treat that before you release it back.
The pollution, that's also why it gets back into the environment.
The pollution typically came in the water pollution that you're thinking of, I think.
Surface.
Yes, from people taking this wastewater when it comes back up again and then just letting it seep in, putting it in places where if it rained a lot, it would just overflow or that kind of thing.
And this is something that we know very well how to do if you have...
Yes, there are always people who will cheat and stuff.
That's why you need some sort of follow-up as well.
And you probably also want to have bigger companies doing this because they follow standard procedure.
But this is fairly simple to manage, if you will.
That's what the EPA does in a lot of different senses.
There was one river that I think that they were talking about in that documentary that got polluted directly because of fracking and the chemicals released from fracking, and that it was really damaging.
That scares the shit out of people when they start talking about extracting oil near where salmon spawn and stuff like that.
We've got to be really careful about doing stuff like that just to boost the economy.
That seems like a short-sighted thing that's going to cost us more money in the long run if ultimately it does lead to be not just more money but these unfixable areas of pollution.
So can I just say, and you get this a lot, I don't know this particular thing, but what we know is that all pollution levels have been going down in the U.S. So it could actually both be true, that everything is getting cleaner, but Delaware's rivers are getting less...
Comparison with all the other very, very clean rivers.
And again, this is not untrue.
And certainly we want our environment to be cleaner rather than dirtier.
There's no doubt about that.
But it's just that we can't have this idea of saying we won't accept any damage anywhere.
Because then we end up—and this, of course, is what happens in many areas—we end up sending all our pollution to China and India and elsewhere and feel all virtuous about it.
So we actually can feel very virtuous about ourselves and make everything cleaner, but then just have the air pollution and all the other pollution impacts somewhere else.
People will tell you that, you know, going vegetarian is a great thing for the planet.
But actually, it's a fairly small impact overall.
So, you know, they'll tell you that it'll reduce your carbon footprint by 50%.
What they don't tell you, it's your food impact, your food footprint, which is a very small part of your total impact.
So we're talking about 4% or thereabouts.
And then remember also being vegetarian is cheaper.
So that actually means you have more money and you're going to spend that on a trip to Mexico or something.
So it actually turns out that when you take into account that people are going to spend the rest of their money on something else, it probably reduces your emissions by 2%.
When people talk about emissions and vegetarianism, do they take into account the difference in monocrop agriculture versus regenerative agriculture?
You can buy food.
We had Will Harris from White Oak Pastures, who has this very sophisticated regenerative farm that he converted his family's industrialized farm over a period of 20 years.
Amazing story.
Really interesting guy.
But doing so has basically...
They take out more carbon than they put out into the environment.
Everything is natural.
They don't use any pesticides or herbicides.
Everything is done the way nature intended.
Essentially, Recreated nature in a controlled environment in terms of like utilizing the manure and the chicken shit and the chickens roam around and the pigs root around and all these animals live as if they're supposed to live like like in normally in the wild and Because of that his water that runs off into the river is so noticeably different than the water of his next-door neighbor It's stunning His next door neighbor runs a traditional industrialized farm and when you see their property line,
when the water runs off, his is clear and then it hits where the neighbor's property is and it turns brown, like instantly.
There's a literal divide line in the river.
It's crazy to see.
So that's something you have to take into account when you think about vegetarianism.
How are you getting your vegetables?
Are you getting it from a place like White Oaks Pastures that raises everything in a regenerative way?
So it's natural, there's no pesticides or herbicides, no poison at all is getting leaked into the water supply.
Or are you buying your vegetables at, you know, regular supermarket, and they're, you know, oh, it's corn, great, corn's good for you.
But meanwhile, you're contributing to this fucking crazy eco-devastation on this river, and you don't even think you are.
So a lot of farms that say, you know, for instance, they're organic and they don't use pesticides and they don't use artificial fertilizer and all that stuff.
They basically get a lot of their fertilizer from other farms that are not because otherwise you can't make it run around.
A curious thing that I think most people don't recognize.
There's just not enough nitrogen in the world to make it run around.
That's why you have to have the other 4 billion people or half of every person fed with fertilizer that basically comes from natural gas.
And so when people say, oh, I have this very, very nice environmental farm, it often means that they're actually importing basically feces from other farms that have been grown with artificial fertilizer.
Look, I don't know this particular— But it's not that big of a farm in terms of like the amount of humans— Do you remember what he said, like the amount of humans he could feed with his farm?
And the point is we just can't make this happen for everyone, which is one of the things— When people go buy organic and all that stuff, it's great because it makes people feel really virtuous.
But the point is, we just couldn't do it all of us.
I think the way he was describing it, he was very proud of the fact that it's essentially below carbon neutral, that it's actually taking out carbon from the way they grow their food to the way they utilize the manure and the way they feed the animals.
And again, I don't know how you do that because you can certainly set some land aside and make sure you generate more and more carbon in that storage area for a while, but you can't keep doing that.
White Oak Pastures sequestered 919 tons of CO2 in the soil with the help of plants and compost.
That's like switching 31,679 incandescent light bulbs to LED. And so it shows white oak pastures versus other proteins, like how they're grown in other places.
So you see conventional beef, which is like a huge amount of carbon, plus 33. White oak pastures, it gets to them, their beef is negative 3.5.
I'm talking about how regular organic farms work, and there's been lots of studies done on that.
And the thing I'm a little worried about here is that it doesn't seem reasonable to me that you can actually keep this up.
You can certainly do it for a few short years where you build up your carbon storage in your land, but eventually you have to either use it productively or keep it fenced off.
So the main point comes back to saying, we can't do this for everyone.
And that was the main point I was trying to make, that we have this idea of saying we can all go organic.
No, a few people can go organic and feel very comfortable about it, but there's just not enough nitrogen for everyone to do this.
And so that was the answer that I wanted to say.
Don't think that these sort of cheap, simple things where you vert your signal is how you're really going to switch.
The way you're going to switch, the way we're actually going to fix climate change, Is by focusing on technology.
So you mentioned one of them, nuclear.
If we could imagine that we could actually get fourth generation nuclear in some way to be incredibly cheap and safe.
That could solve a very large part of it.
Imagine if you come up with a technology that's cheaper than coal and gas and all that.
Everyone is going to switch, not just because they're rich, well-meaning Americans, but also the Chinese, the Indians, the Africans, everybody else.
So that will basically generate a lot of cheap energy that's both good for economic growth and will cut carbon emissions dramatically.
Now, remember, this is not the only thing you need because you can't just run—well, you possibly— Possibly can run most of the world on electricity, but we don't right now.
Right now, only about 20% is electricity.
The rest of energy is industrial processes, heating, transport, all these other things that are much, much harder to switch out.
So obviously, also steel and cement and so on.
So there's a lot of issues that still remain, but the technology point still remains.
If we can come up with this technology that's cheaper than fossil fuels and does not emit CO2, we're done.
Now, if we don't do this and if we give in to climate fear, which is what a lot of people are using, it seems, if you want to be cynical, it seems like a political ploy.
Why would they want to do that?
What do you think the motivation is of not having a balanced, nuanced perspective and expressing a balanced, nuanced perspective to people where you could explain things the way you're explaining them?
There's an economic impact to this.
There's a trade-off to that.
Here's why it's actually better for the atmosphere overall if we do it this way.
And the solution seems to be in technology, and it's not into halting all use of fossil fuels immediately, which would be devastating to the economy.
And ultimately, when the economy goes, it's devastating to almost all aspects of our civilization.
That's the very unfortunate reality of life, right?
So have you ever had a debate with someone about this?
So my sense is that these guys are really well-intentioned.
So they really want to do good.
It's not sort of an evil ploy or anything, but...
They seem to believe that, you know, just by wishing we can somehow make it come true.
And I think a lot of the conversation that, you know, so when you're starting to see what is it going to cost to go net zero, for instance, a lot of people are talking about we should go net zero.
You know, Biden, President Biden is talking about that.
This will be fantastically costly, and that's what all these studies show.
So McKinsey shows it's going to cost nearly $6 trillion every year for the world.
That's two-thirds of the total global tax intake.
So basically imagine that two-thirds of everything the U.S. government spends Now would have to go to net zero.
Well, I think you said something that's very important, too.
You said the world.
And I think it's very unreasonable to assume that the rest of the world would take on this economic burden the way we're willing to take it on for the environment.
And that, in fact, there are countries that are not interested at all in releasing less carbon.
They're interested in economically becoming more and more powerful and spreading their wings.
I mean, they might assume that the government could foot the bill for this.
If they can come up with so much money to send arms to Ukraine and to invade other countries and do a lot of shady shit that we don't appreciate them doing, we would think that they could fork out 11,000 per person and- Per year.
Per year.
And crank that up.
What is that?
What is that all told with 300 and- How many do we have now?
That's why we need to get realistic and say, we're not going to do this by telling everyone you have to pay up right now.
What we can do is to do this innovation.
We should be spending lots, lots more into innovation because innovation is incredibly cheap.
So Craig Venter, do you remember him?
He was the guy who cracked the human genome back in 2000. He's sort of a crazy smart guy.
And he has this idea that he wants to grow algae, specific, special algae on the ocean surface that basically soak up sunlight and CO2 and produce oil.
Imagine that.
We could grow our own Saudi Arabias out on the ocean surface, and then we'd just simply harvest those.
We'd process them, make oil.
We could keep our entire fossil fuel economy going right now, but it would be CO2 neutral because they just soaked out the CO2 out in the ocean surface.
And even before then, we worried a lot about Africa, especially India and Southeast Asia, not being able to feed their own populations.
And sort of the standard way that we think about global warming now is to tell everyone, you know, could you not eat so much and then we'll send it down to, you know, the poor Indians and the poor Africans?
And of course that didn't work.
What did work was the Green Revolution.
We basically evolved these, we innovated these new seeds that produce two or three times as much per acre.
And that's what basically grew the world's food production dramatically.
India is now one of the world's – it is actually the world's leading rice exporter.
It's gone from a basket case to being able to feed its own population.
But aren't there a lot of problems with that too where the Indian farmers are getting fucked over and they get connected to these – There's seeds that they don't own and they can't reuse, and they owe a giant amount of money to the companies that provide them with the seeds, and they're going bankrupt, and there's a ton of suicides from these Indian farmers.
So there's IFPRI, who's one of these institutions that look into farmers and farming policy.
They did an estimate and found that there are fewer people die from suicides.
But because there's a lot of farmers in India, there's a lot of farmer suicides.
But yes, there are absolutely problems in India as well.
But, you know, fundamentally...
Being in enthrall to big acro business because you have to buy more of the seeds or you have to pay more is probably a lot better than dying from not having enough food.
Isn't there a solution where they have a more equitable sort of relationship with the people that provide them seeds and that they can both benefit from it?
So, again, my understanding of this is that you can, if you want to, you can buy the public seeds.
And so India and many other countries provide public seeds that don't have any copyright and that you can grow.
Or you can buy the private property seeds that grow more per acre.
And so it's basically a trade-off just like when you go to a store and decide between a slightly less good product, which is cheaper, or a more expensive product that's better.
If the stuff that doesn't work as well is the stuff that you could get from the state and people are economically poor and disenfranchised and You know, they have to take on loans to get the other seeds, and they get indebted.
So the problem is I think we're seeing the outcome here from the people who basically said, all right, I'm going to get a loan, possibly from a loan shark, and then invest this in order to get a higher payoff.
If it works out, if it's beautiful, if it was great weather, it works out really well.
If it didn't, I'm screwed and then I commit suicide.
I'm making a story here, right?
But the idea here is still that, you know, it's possibly not the right way to think about this if we're just concerned about, well, you know, the people who took chances shouldn't have been so exposed if they made the wrong choices.
Well, I think what we're really concerned with is predatory relationships between very poor farmers and giant multinational corporations that don't give a fuck about those people.
That's what scares us is that there's a dehumanizing aspect to this sort of method of producing agriculture.
So the real issue here is though that most of the big agricultural producers basically produce for rich countries because those are the ones who can pay.
So what we're stuck with and very often don't have very good is that we need much more research into getting yield enhancement in the things that you grow in many of the poor countries in the world that are also better suited for their agriculture.
This is a lot of what, for instance, research goes into and where we should be spending a lot more money.
So I totally agree that we can do it even better, but I just think we need to step back and also realize we have managed to make the world and India and Africa a lot better off, which is why a lot fewer people are starving.
And that's a weird conversation to have with people because all people want to think about generally is the negative aspects of any story.
They always want to do that.
And this is a big story that affects the whole world.
I was going to ask you in the middle of all that, I didn't want to forget, what percentage of the CO2 emission, the greenhouse gases, does the United States produce in relationship to the rest of the world?
Just to give you a sense of proportion, if you actually take out the U.S. emissions from the U.N. climate model, it turns out that by the end of the century, you'll have 0.3 degree Fahrenheit lower temperatures.
So you'll have this temperature increase instead of this temperature increase.
So we started out talking a little bit about what do they think.
And again, my understanding is that they're saying it's a very large part, it's a predominant part that's caused by global warming.
But it's also obvious that we have less good understanding of these long-term cycles.
Fundamentally, I think you can sort of step back and say, global warming is real.
It is made by man.
It is a problem that we're making.
It's not the end of the world.
And we need to deal with it, but deal with it smartly, right?
So instead of us, you know, gluing ourselves to pictures and saying, we got to stop everything right now, we got to look at how do we get innovation going so that we get, you know, better, for instance, nuclear, or better of this Craig Venter guy ideas, or these many, many other ideas that are out there.
We should be funding all of those.
So I helped assemble together with, I believe it was 49 of the world's top climate economists.
And three Nobel laureates to look at how do you best and smartest invest in green energy?
So better deal with climate change.
And what they found was the long-term best strategy was invest in green energy research and development.
I mean, and the simple reason is because we know around the world that when sea levels rise, it is very cheap and simple to avoid most of those problems.
And Holland, obviously, is the great example, right?
Holland has, while sea levels have been rising, they've actually gotten much larger because they know how to do this and they're very, very safe.
Remember, 40% of the country is underwater.
If you go to Schiphol, which is the 14th largest airport in the world, Amsterdam Airport, They proudly say on their website that we're the only major airport in the world that was previously a site of a major naval battle.
Because again, what you were saying, I had heard, was that the problem is the ground is porous.
And that whenever there's any sort of a water event in Miami, the streets are flooded.
And that they're worried that as the ocean level rises, this would be insurmountable.
Like, I don't know if that's as simple a problem as what they're dealing with in Holland or in a lot of other places where they make dams and seawalls and what they do with New Orleans.
So there are good global models that look at this.
If I can actually show you a graph of a global model on...
So it's number 23 on the A file.
So this is a model for the world that looks at how many people are getting flooded.
And what it shows you is that in 2000, about 3 million people got flooded every year.
And so you can see over there in 2000, 3 million people get flooded and it has a cost of 0.05% of GDP. Now, if you assume that there's going to be no adaptation, this is pretty much where all the catastrophic stories come from.
You end up in this situation where, you know, 187 million people will be flooded.
This number has been both on the cover of Washington Post and the New York Times, and there's a New York Times-Obed, lots and lots of- This is at 2100, year 2100. 2100. If, you know, sea levels rise, we do nothing about it.
Then, obviously, this is going to be terrible.
So it's going to cost 5% of global GDP. But this is not the world we live in.
We'll actually adapt.
So that's why I said in this general thing, it's not going to happen for Miami, but I don't know whether the model has actually modeled, particularly Miami.
You will put up high sea dikes, and much of this is not going to be these amazingly big structures that are going to feel overwhelming.
It's just simply water management.
And so the realistic outcome is that by the end of the century, about 15,000 people will be flooded, and the cost Of GDP will be, both for protection and from flood costs, will be almost 10 times lower in percent of GDP. So this adaptation that you show on this chart, where's this chart from?
So this is from one of the most quoted stories.
This is one of the few articles that actually both look at both adaptation and no adaptation.
So it's from Hinkle 2014. I think it's...
I don't have internet, so I can't actually show you right now.
What that tells you is that this is an issue that we fix.
We know how to fix.
And Holland is a great example of that.
If you're rich, you fix it.
If you're poor, you have a real problem.
This, of course, is why so many people died in China and India when there were floods back in the 1920s, as we were talking about before.
When you're poor, life sucks in so many different ways.
It also sucks from climate.
And that's, of course, one of the reasons why I think when people say, and they're right to say that, climate is going to harm the world's poor the most.
And they sort of jump to this unwarranted conclusion, so we need to do something about climate.
No, it's because it sucks to be poor.
We should do something about not being poor.
You know, there's a big hurricane that hit Tacloban in 2013, a Filipino city.
And it happened right when there was a global warming meeting, one of the big COP meetings.
And everybody outpoured and said, oh, this is because of global warming.
Of course, there was actually a pandemic.
Exactly similar hurricane 100 years before, 19-0 something, that followed the exact same path and killed half the city's population back then.
It was much, much worse.
This time, it only killed about 2% of the city's population.
But the people who got killed and the people who got harmed were still, you know, essentially living under corrugated roofs.
Our job is to make sure that they don't live under corrugated roofs, that they actually live in good buildings, that they have those clamps that we talked about, that they have all these other opportunities so that they can live well.
Of course, we should also in the long run find a way to actually make sure we fix climate change.
But it's wrong to say Because these poor people are going to be focused with more climate change.
We should do something about climate change.
No, these poor people are going to be focused with all kinds of bad things from malnutrition and bad education and from diseases because they're poor.
If we want to help them, we should lift them out of poverty.
And the amazing thing is, of course, this is what made our lives great.
Of course, most of the rest of the world want the exact same thing.
And we should let them have it.
So the real challenge here is, how do we find a way that means the vast amount, so the 6.5 billion people who are not rich can actually get a great living by the end of the century?
And we can also fix climate change.
And that's only going to happen if we find the technological breakthroughs, not by telling everyone, I'm sorry, could you do with less?
Not only is that not going to win any elections in the long run, but it's also just not going to be possible to convince China, India, Africa to do that.
Now, what about the impact on climate change and natural storms, hurricanes and the like?
How much are they increasing?
How much is the severity of them increasing?
Because that's a big point of confusion for people.
I've heard multiple people say that those storms are worse than ever and more frequent And then I've heard people say, no, they're actually less frequent than ever, but stronger.
I've even heard people say, no, no, no, they're more frequent and less strong.
So, the biggest point on this, I think, is they're certainly much stronger on TV. I mean, you hear much, much more about them because they're such great stories.
Yeah, absolutely, they sell.
But if you actually look at the data...
We cannot tell right now.
So that's the conclusion from the government agencies of the U.S. as well.
We can't still tell that there's a fingerprint from climate change on hurricanes.
Well, so in the 1960s, sorry, in the 1970s and 80s, there was a lull in hurricanes that hit the U.S. That was also when satellite coverage started.
So much of what you see now is if you start from the 1970s or 1980s, there is an increase for the U.S. But that's probably spurious because if you go back in the 1950s and 1960s, there was actually just as many hurricanes.
So what you do, and this is by far the best estimate, so I actually have that.
I brought that with me.
If you take a look at slide four in the A file.
There we see, if you look at the number of hurricanes that have hit the US, because remember, we don't know about the hurricanes that we couldn't see back when we didn't have satellites.
Now we see them because we have satellites, but that's obviously the wrong way to count.
So if you just look at the hurricanes that landfall on the US, you get this graph.
So this is from 1900 to 2022. Yeah, so 2022 is obviously not done, but it's probably done.
And that's why, you know, when you do these numbers, it's very easy to get this result if you start in 1980 when they were much lower.
If I can just show you the other graph again, because I showed you for all of the hurricanes, but we also have, if you take the next slide, that's just the strong hurricanes, so that's exactly the same as what you just showed, category 3 and higher.
And what you see here again is that there are fewer hurricanes, not more hurricanes, hitting the U.S. today than there used to be back in the early part of 1990. Is this saying there's only one per year?
But a lot of it is from 2006. And a lot of it is because you just, you know, go from a period when there was a relative low to a period when it's back up.
So the reason why I'm looking at landfall is because in the early part of last century, it's very likely that someone would have noticed a landfalling hurricane anywhere in the U.S. But if it's out in the middle of nowhere, there's a very good chance nobody would have noticed.
Actually, you can see in the data that when the Panama Canal opened, Suddenly, ships started going a different route.
So there was a big part of the Atlantic that they no longer traversed.
And so the number of hurricanes dropped in those areas.
Because you needed to have sort of a ship to be out there and noticing.
That's why it's a very, very bad way to look at this if you just look at how many hurricanes do we know about.
Well, actually, so the best evidence seems to indicate, that was one of the points that you said, that there will probably be fewer hurricanes, but they will be stronger.
And overall, stronger is worse than fewer is better.
Which means that overall, there'll be slightly more damage.
That's, you know, one of the many things that, you know, will actually be worse with global warming.
But it's not terribly bad.
It's somewhat worse.
And of course, at the same time, we're getting much better at dealing with this impact.
What you're actually seeing, if you look at the total cost, for instance, on hurricane impacts and all kinds of climate impacts, It's actually going down, not up in percent of GDP. Why?
Because we now know we have much better prediction.
We know how to deal with these things.
For instance, get a lot of stuff that can be moved, we get it out of harm's way.
So every time there's a hurricane, all trucks will go to other states, that kind of thing.
So there's a lot of things that don't get damaged.
We can also build better, as you talked about, with houses and so on.
So we have a lot of ways to reduce this, but what is happening is it'll reduce slightly less fast because of global warming.
This just says 4 hurricanes hit US and 4. And then when I Google it, it says there's at least 6, if not 11. Yeah, that's, I mean, this is period literature.
So this is basically, this is what my day job really is, because as you also know, and as we talked a little bit about, so look, there is a lot of problems in the world, and for most people, so rich people Who are well ensconced in their lives and they don't have to worry about their kids dying from infectious diseases or not having enough food, all that kind of stuff.
They clearly can worry about what the temperature is going to be in 100 years.
But for most of the planet's population, so the 6.5 billion people here, they actually worry about their kids might die tonight.
And again, sorry, if I could just show you the one on malnutrition, the slide from the B stack, number 6. Sorry, so what I just want to show you was that malnutrition has come down dramatically.
And again, what you see here, so this is the number of deaths from kids that are less than five years old.
And again, this is very similar to the other chart, but a little bit of a difference, the difference between with climate change and without climate change.
Without climate change is only slightly lower, but the overall trend is much, much, much lower than it was in 1990. And this is because we're getting better at making agriculture.
We're moving towards a world that's going to be much better.
So these guys that are protesting think it's the end of the world.
No, it's not.
It's a world that's going to be much better.
But they're right in saying that climate is one problem.
And we should definitely think about how we fix that.
But we should also remember a large part of this is how do we fix all the other problems?
There are still people, you know, there's one of the things that just blow my mind.
We all worried about COVID. But remember, the world's biggest infectious disease killer over the last 200 years has been tuberculosis.
It probably killed about a billion people in total.
It still kills one and a half million people every year.
And we know how to fix it.
We figured that out 100 years ago.
That's why no one in the rich world died from this.
But apart from COVID, it's the world's leading infectious disease killer.
And we do nothing against it.
We could, at very low cost, fix most of this problem.
And so one of the things I try to push is to say, look, for very little money, we could actually, so we're talking about $3 billion a year or thereabouts, we could actually save almost everyone from tuberculosis.
Why don't we make that one of the things we want to do?
So what you're trying to promote is a balanced message, and you're trying to counter the climate change fear-mongering by saying it is one of our issues, but it is surmountable, at least in some aspects of it.
So what do you think, if you contemplated the motivations for this fear-mongering and this distorted perception of this one very particular issue, you know, when you look at all the issues that we face that you've outlined, Why that one?
For a very long time, this was the gift that kept on giving for politicians because they basically got to say – The world is ending, but I can save you.
I can't do that voice, but you know what I wanted to do.
So fundamentally, imagine being able to say, I can save you, and we'll promise to do some stuff that will only happen long into the future, long after I've stopped being president or whatever it is.
Now, of course, this is catching up with us, because now we actually have to start paying for all of this.
And this is where, you know, the wheels come off because most people are just not willing.
Most people are willing to pay something to do good for the environment.
They're certainly not willing to pay, you know, $5,000 per person per year.
But, you know, the point is, these billionaires, sure, you know, I'm all for that they should do more, and I think some of them are doing excellent work, and some of them are probably not.
But this is not how you solve this problem.
This is about making sure that you actually responsibly can do it with the budgets that you have or with realistic tax increases.
And, you know, increasing your tax 5% or 10% of GDP is just not...
Do you have a fear that the fear-mongering and the way it's portrayed in the media is going to cause people to vote for things and to vote for people that are going to implement things that will ultimately be more destructive than they are beneficial?
I mean, partly, if we're suggesting we should do policies, because we're worried that this is the end of the world coming up, that are enormously ineffective, which is what most of the world has done, then we're going to waste a lot of money.
But likewise, on the other side, so you could say this is sort of Democrats here in the US, right?
But likewise, there's a lot of Republicans that are just, oh, no problem whatsoever.
You know, just keep fracking, do whatever.
And, you know, because you get sick and tired of having to pay those extra taxes from the Democrats, you might very well end up electing Republicans as well.
They'll just not do anything to solve the problem.
And so I really think this polarization, this it's the end of the world, it's not happening at all, is very unhelpful, both in the terms that scares people witless, but it also makes it very hard to make these sensible, middle of the road kind of arguments, which is we're not going to solve this by huge taxation.
We're not going to solve this by making lots of people pay for ineffective policies.
What we are going to solve this with is innovation.
So we should be spending a lot more on innovation.
But the beauty of it is right now, globally, the world spends about just under $20 billion per year on innovation into green energy.
That's in percentage much less than we've done over the last 30 years.
Because politicians want to go out and open new solar panel parks or wind turbine parks, because that looks like something not, you know, fun eggheads.
And one of the really depressing things that we're seeing now, if you've noticed, you know, growth rates are coming down.
The U.S. used to grow, what, per capita, 3% per year.
Your kids would be much richer than you.
But in many countries, both in the U.S. and Europe, we're seeing much, much slower growth.
One of the reasons, this is by no means the only reason, but one of the reasons is that we have somehow realized, oh, we should be sorry for all the things we're doing.
We should be doing more to counter global warming.
And one of the ways you can do that is by having little or no growth.
But the problem with that, of course, is that also impacts everything else.
It makes it much more of a distributional issue.
If the cake is no longer growing, everybody starts bickering about who gets what slice of the cake.
And it makes everything harder to deal with.
And of course, at the same time, we have the entire developing world that still just wants to get out of poverty.
And we're not really giving them a chance either.
We're, for instance, pretty much limiting them.
We've been telling Africa, for instance, for the longest time, sorry, you can't have gas.
You can't have coal.
You should just go straight to solar and wind, which, of course, can't really power an economy, or at least not right now.
And this while Europe is then, you know, starting to grind up more coal because we're cold and because of the war in Ukraine.
So, say you have all these 12-year-olds in the same grade, especially in the developing country, but even here.
They have very varying levels.
Some of them are just hanging on and don't quite know what's going on.
Some of them are far ahead of what the teacher is teaching, right?
So the problem is when you're in that kind of grade where we put all the 12 year olds in one grade, you're actually having a very hard time teaching all of these kids effectively.
What we've shown with, and this is not me, lots of really smart people have shown this, is in experiments, if you instead make sure that each of these kids are taught at their right level, at the level that they are, they can learn a lot more.
Now, you could do that in one or two ways.
You could actually shuffle these guys around.
So, you know, some 11-year-olds are going to be together with some 13-year-olds and maybe one 9-year-old and one 15-year-old and so on.
So they all have the same level.
That has some social problems, but they're doing it, for instance, in India.
You could also do it by every one hour every day.
You sit them down with a tablet.
And this tablet then finds out what is your level.
So it's teaching it in either your language or your mathematics, for instance.
And it very quickly adapts and find out what is your level and then teach you exactly at your level.
The beauty is you can actually teach these kids three years of schooling in one real year.
At very low extra cost.
We're talking about $20 per student per year.
So if you do this with a tablet, you can basically have a situation where you can educate these kids much better and teach them much more.
It's partly because so other students can also use the tablet so it becomes cheaper.
It's also partly because we don't want to upset the teachers because if the teachers don't like this idea, if they are worried that computers are going to take over their jobs, they don't want to play along.
And it's also because they would eventually get bored.
But no, if you sit in a classroom where you're 40, 50, 60 kids, the teacher is teaching you something that you don't quite understand or you're way ahead of this, that's incredibly boring.
This tablet is actually challenging right on the level.
And the beauty of this is that this is research that has actually been done in randomized controlled trial studies, right?
So you've done with some kids, you gave them the tablets, some kids you didn't give them tablets, and you see how much they differ.
And this matters because they not only learn more, but then they'll go out when they become adults and become much more productive in their societies.
So again, one of the things that we try to do, so in that big book I showed you there.
We did that with 50 teams of economists and several Nobel laureates and trying to find out, of all the different things in the world, what could we do?
But that's a very long book.
You can't get most politicians to read it.
So we actually did also a one-pager.
So I brought that one.
I'm hoping we can put that up.
So this basically is the whole...
This is the whole outline of all the stuff that we did.
So basically what it shows is all the different things you can do for the world, and then the length of the line shows how much bang for your buck you get.
So basically, if you spend money and basically in order to get free trade, you need to pay off the world's rich farmers, but you will get an enormous amount of growth in the economy.
If you get more contraception, it means two things.
It partly means that women give fewer birth and that means they die less.
It also means that each kid that then gets born will get more attention from their parents because there will be slightly fewer kids and they will have more capital available to them.
That means they become more productive and that means the economy will grow more.
And climate is one of them, but it's just one of them, right?
And if you think this is the end of the world, you think that's the only thing we should be discussing.
I mean, I've heard some people say, you know, if we only have till 2030...
We've got to do everything for climate.
And then, you know, there'll still be poor people in 2030 we can help.
And I just think it's so, you know, patronizing, right?
Because clearly we both want to fix climate change and fix all these other problems in the world.
And we can do that, but only if we spend money smartly.
So let's spend money smartly on climate and research and development.
But let's also spend money on, you know, getting tablets into the educational system.
Making sure we deal with tuberculosis, malaria, malnutrition, there's lots of other things where we for very little money can make an enormous amount of benefit.
So we can actually both liberate ourselves and realize, yeah, problem, not the end of the world.
And then also start talking about all these other issues and make sure that we actually leave this planet not just a little bit better, but a lot better.
This is all the other things you were concentrating on of all the different ways that we can prioritize spending that will benefit the whole world, and that's prioritizing development, a cost-benefit analysis of the United States sustainable...