Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and Hoover Institution visiting fellow, argues that politicians prioritize virtue-signaling over cost-effective climate solutions, with $2T spent globally in 2023 on EVs, solar, and wind—yielding minimal gains. Studies like Nordhaus and Tol estimate net costs at 2-3% of GDP under 3°C warming, while UN projections show wealth rising 450% by 2100, cut slightly to 435% with climate policies. Net-zero pledges could cost $27T annually for benefits worth just $4.5T, diverting funds from urgent issues like tuberculosis (1.25M deaths yearly) and malaria, where vaccines—saving 3.5M children annually at $1.7B—offer far greater returns. His pragmatic approach, often amplified by conservative media despite aligning with poverty alleviation, reveals how political bias distorts priorities, leaving graft-prone climate spending as a less efficient tool for addressing real global crises. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey, everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Bjorn Lumborg.
I met Bjorn, he probably doesn't remember this, but I met him many, many years ago at Andrew Breitbart's house.
Andrew brought Bjorn over to talk in LA, and I listened to him talking about all the simple and inexpensive things that could be done to make actual change and do actual good in terms of climate change, which I think at that point was still global warming.
And I actually asked him the question, you know, we had a small audience and I asked the question, well, if these are such smart, cheap ideas, why don't politicians do them?
And Bjorn said, well, because that wouldn't give them the chance to display their virtue.
And I thought, here's a man who not only knows about science, but actually knows about human nature.
And I've been following him ever since.
He is president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, a visiting fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, an author of False Alarm and Best Things First, the best writer, I think, on climate issues and other issues.
Bjorn, it's good to see you.
Andrew, it's great to be here.
And I do remember that event, although I remember it for seeing the guy who played on Airplane at that.
Sorry, so I remember that because it's still one of my favorite movies.
It's one of the greatest movies ever made, I think.
It was gone really weird in that.
It's very, very funny.
Yeah.
But in a totally different direction.
So I was watching with great approval Donald Trump's appearance at the United Nations.
I guess it would be when we were playing this last week.
And he had this, I'm just going to read just a little bit of the speech he says.
He talked about, he said, in the 1920s and the 1930s, they said global cooling will kill the world.
We have to do something.
Then they said global warming will kill the world, but then it started getting cooler.
So now they could just call it climate change because that way they can't miss.
If it goes higher or lower, whatever the hell happens, it's climate change.
It's the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion.
Do you agree with that?
So I get where he's coming from, and I think there's some truth to this.
I mean, Donald Trump always speaks in, what is it, larger than real life words.
Yes.
So it's not a con job.
There is a problem.
And actually, in some sense, bizarrely as it may sound, the world is built, all of our infrastructure is built to live at the temperature that we've had for the last 100 or 200 years.
That's true in Los Angeles.
That's true in Boston.
It's true everywhere in the world.
And so if it gets colder or if it gets warmer, that will be a problem.
So there is an issue here, but obviously it's vastly exaggerated when people then talk about the end of the world.
You may remember that this was one of the favorite terms of Biden, but not just Biden, but pretty much everyone for the last four years and certainly more as well, that this is an existential crisis.
There was a recent survey by the OECD, so in all rich countries in the world, where they found that 60% of all people believe that unmitigated climate change, so climate change we don't fix, will likely or very likely lead to the end of mankind.
And that, of course, is a very different statement.
There is a problem.
Yes, that's true.
It's not the end of the world.
But the end of the world is a great way to get funding.
And that's why people are playing it up.
But it doesn't make for good policy.
Remember, if you think the end of the world is near, you're going to throw everything in the kitchen sink at this, which of course is what the campaigners would like you to do.
But you will probably waste an incredible amount of resources because you're just going to try everything.
Climate change is a problem.
So I disagree with Trump there.
But yes, there is an incredible amount of exaggeration, and I agree with him there.
So there's, I mean, the climate changes is we're not living in a glass bubble.
And we've even in, I don't know, I guess it was the late 19th century, the Thames in London froze over and people went skating on it.
So there are these big changes and there have been ice ages, obviously.
How much of this, or do we know how much of this is caused by human beings?
So I have to preface this with saying I'm a social scientist, so I work a lot on the costs and the benefits of us doing policies against climate change.
I've met with a lot of the natural scientists who study all this.
I've read the please don't do this at home.
I've read the UN Climate Panel report, most of the 4,000 pages, not all of them.
And it's incredibly boring, but it's also very, very informative.
So I have a reasonably good take on this.
And what they tell us is that the majority of the recent warming that we've seen is due to climate change.
I have no idea to evaluate that, no way of independently evaluating that.
Is it due to natural climate change or man-made?
No, it's due to mankind.
So it's due to us mostly emitting CO2 from burning fossil fuels.
So there is a significant part of what's changed over the last, say, century or thereabouts, which is about two degrees Fahrenheit or one degree Celsius.
So that's something.
And that's something we should look at.
But also, we should get a sense of what's the total impact of this.
Well, actually, climate economics have spent the last three decades trying to estimate what's the total cost of everything that happens with climate change.
So there are lots of negatives.
There'll be more heat waves.
There'll possibly be stronger storms.
There's also going to be fewer cold waves, which is actually a good thing.
There's also going to be CO2 fertilization, so we'll have more greenery.
If you add all the negatives and all the positives, it become a net negative.
That's why it's a problem.
But also get a sense of this.
So if you look across all of the studies that we've done, we estimate the net negative impact today is about 0.3% of GDP.
So yeah, problem, not the end of the world.
And it's crucial to say, if you look out till 2100, which is sort of the standard timeframe, which is a long time from now, we estimate if we do nothing more about climate change, so we end up with three degrees Celsius, so about 5.6 degrees Fahrenheit, then the cost will be about 2% to 3% of global GDP every year.
That's certainly not nothing.
That's a lot of trillions of dollars.
But again, it's 2% to 3%.
It's not the end of mankind.
It's not anywhere near 100%.
And this is not me saying this.
This is the guy who, William Nordhaus from Yale University, the only guy to get the Nobel Prize in climate economics.
And Rich Atoll, one of the most quota climate economists in the world, they've done separate studies, one find 2%, the other one find 3%.
That's the order of magnitude we are talking about.
And just for added emphasis, remember, by 2100, everyone in the world will be much, much better off.
Just like if you compared people back from 1925 and compared it till today, the UN on its standard trajectory estimate the average person in the world by the end of the century will be somewhere around 450% as rich as he or she is today.
That's not the US.
You will, and people coming from Denmark and other rich countries might only be 200% as rich.
But many in Africa and elsewhere will be 1000% richer.
So on average, 450%.
Because of climate change, it will feel like they're only 435% as rich, which sort of emphasizes, yes, that's a problem.
I would rather have a world that's 450% as rich than one that's 435%.
But it's not the end of the world.
It's still a fantastically much better world, just a slightly less, fantastically much better world.
And that less money that people will have will be the money you have to spend, what, shoring up buildings.
So the way they measure that is actually in equivalence of how much you would need to get compensated to live with the problems.
So we don't actually look at whether people will fix it or not, but just simply, you know, a little bit like if you have a slightly dangerous job, you get more money.
And that's basically a way of saying, but you'll also have to live with that constant risk of dying, a slightly higher risk of dying, right?
So we're compensating you for that.
That's the amount that we're talking about.
So it'll feel like you're only 435% as rich, although you'll probably in reality get all that slight extra money to get up to 450%.
But then you will also have to live with some problems from climate change.
Yeah, this week I was arguing with a socialist, lovely guy, but just a guy who believes that all money should be redistributed.
And I was pointing out that this was giving a lot of power to the people in power.
And one of the things I sent him was this article you wrote in the New York Post, which was exactly the kind of article that makes me angry.
I mean, it makes me frustrated with our politics.
I just want to read just a couple of sentences.
Last year, the world spent over $2 trillion on climate policies.
This is Bjorn Lumbo writing in the New York Post.
By 2050, net zero will cost an impossible $27 trillion every year.
That's net zero carbon emissions, right?
So this will choke growth, spike energy costs, and hit the poor hardest and still will deliver only 17 cents back on every dollar spent.
Meanwhile, mere billions of dollars could save millions of lives.
I'd like to take this apart a little bit.
To begin with, all the stuff that we are spending this money on, is it doing anything?
Will it have any effect?
I mean, what are we spending money on?
And what will it do?
So these $2 trillion, that's sort of the official number from the International Energy Agency and many others.
It's a very soft number because obviously what goes into all this money.
Surprisingly, it's also all the cost to EVs, so electric cars, which of course gives you a thing that can drive you from place A to B, at least if it's been charged.
So, I mean, there are some benefits to this.
It's also spending on solar panels and wind turbines, which obviously, again, gives you electricity when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing.
It actually also gives you higher electricity costs all the other times because you now need to have backup power for when it's not shining and windy.
And that capital is being used less.
So there's a lot of, you know, it's a very headline number, this $2 trillion.
Everyone uses it, but it's not all that informative.
But of a global economy, which is about $100 trillion, it means we're spending 2% on stuff that we probably wouldn't have done had we not been scared witless on climate change.
And that's a waste.
I mean, remember, the total spend on healthcare is perhaps 8%.
The total spend on education globally is about 5%.
These are big numbers.
This is something that could have done a lot of good elsewhere.
But I think the real point here is to say what people want to take us to is a cost that's much, much, much higher.
So remember, all the world's governments, almost all the world's government, now, not Donald Trump and the U.S., but most governments have pledged in one form or another that we're going to go net zero around 2050 or shortly thereafter.
But nobody looked at what the costs will be of those, which is a little surprising because the numbers I'm going to show you are about, you know, suggest that this one single promise is about a thousand times more expensive than the second costliest policy the world has ever committed to,
which was the Versailles Treaty back in 1919, had Germany actually pay all the money that it was supposed to, which that cost was about half a trillion dollars in today's money, which of course is why Germany never paid it.
But now we're talking about something that is going to be in the order of 1,000 to 2,000 to 3,000 times more costly.
Yet nobody has looked at what will the cost be and what will the benefits be.
There's no official estimate of this.
So last year, Professor, sorry, 2023, so two years ago, a professor from Yale University, Robert Mendelssohn, gathered a lot of really smart climate economists to try to estimate what's the cost, what's the benefit of net zero.
A lot of them, really, really smart economists, ended up chickening out.
You can understand why.
It's a really hard question.
You're also asking what will happen in the next hundred years and you're trying to put estimates on it.
At the end of the day, they published a big study sort of compiled in the Journal of Climate Change Economics, which is a period article, and they had one benefit estimate and three cost estimates.
So this is obviously not great, but it's the only thing the world has.
And so that gives you a sense of how much will this cost and how much good will it do.
If you take the average of these three cost estimates, that gives you $27 trillion in cost per year throughout the 21st century.
That's where that number comes from.
$27 trillion.
So that's about a quarter of global GDP right now, because we're going to be much richer.
It's only going to be about 7% of global GDP across the 21st century.
But that's an enormous cost that's sort of on the magnitude of bigger than education, smaller than healthcare for everyone in the world.
That's a lot of money.
Now, if this gave you a lot of benefits, that might be worthwhile.
I mean, we pay a lot of money for stuff that's good, but we've already established that even if we could entirely get rid of climate change, it would get rid of 2% to 3% of the costs.
Why We Overpay for Life Insurance00:03:44
So spending 7% to get rid of 2% to 3% is a bad deal.
But unfortunately, net zero by 2050 will only get rid of part of it, right?
Because we'll already cost a lot of climate change.
So the net benefit is only about 1% of GDP across or about $4.5 trillion.
So there's a real benefit.
That's why climate change is real.
There's a real benefit to net zero, but the benefit is much, much lower than the cost.
So $4.5 trillion in benefits, $27 trillion in cost.
Every year in the 21st century, we'll be paying more and much, much more than the benefits will generate for the world.
That's just a bad deal.
There's no other way to put it.
And the fact that we're not honest about this and that most people just are not honest about it is one of the reasons why we're wasting money and spending it so badly.
The last bit of the quote that you just said was we could do so many other good things.
Remember, most people in the world are not living in nice countries like the U.S. or Denmark.
Most people are not considering the biggest problem, which of the many programs and series they want to follow am I going to take first or watch first or what kind of takeout am I going to have?
They worry about their kids dying from ethically curable infectious diseases, not having enough food, having terrible education, not enough jobs, corruption, all these other things.
And the truth is we could solve many of these problems, not all of them, but many of them to save millions of lives at a fraction, a tiny, tiny fraction of this cost.
So instead of talking trillions, we're talking billions.
Why is it that we're so obsessed with spending trillions to do almost no good 100 years from now instead of spending billions and doing a lot of good right now to avoid people dying from tuberculosis and malaria, avoid people having terrible education, getting better economies, all these things that we know work at much lower cost.
That's my central question to all these feel-gooders.
I mean, I know that they want to feel good about themselves, but in some sense, I would like to believe that they actually want to have done good at the end of the day.
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Why Millions Aren't Dying00:07:57
Is this?
I mean?
I know you can't answer this with a certainty, but I, i've always I I can't help noticing that every reporter on earth knows every evil thought that has ever gone through Donald Trump's head and every misspoken word, but nobody knows where the money for the fast train in California went.
No, no one has any idea where that money disappeared.
Is this?
Is this graft?
I mean, do you is that if you had to guess, would you say that a lot of this is graft?
So I don't think most of this, because graphs somehow suggest that the money goes into your private banking account.
I don't think, I mean, I'm sure some of that happens, but that happens in all politics.
I think it's much more a question of saying, if I am doing effective policies, there's not much money to hand out to friends and to buy more votes and all that kind of stuff.
Whereas if I am overseeing an enormous amount of spending on stuff that doesn't really matter, so I can just spend it on whatever, then clearly I have a lot more latitude and a lot more opportunity to get people to like me and to show what good person I am.
So I think in some sense, it's just plain politics.
If you're saying the world is on fire and you're at risk, but vote for me and I can save your kids and it's only going to cost you 7%.
I can see why people want to vote for that.
But if you're saying, look, things are fine and just give me a little bit of money and I'll fix the rest of the problems.
It doesn't quite have the same ring to it, does it?
Right, right.
So if we were to get to net zero, wouldn't that cripple poor countries?
I mean, in other words, it seems to me the people who burn the most fossil fuels are the people who are building up most and the people who are developing most, whereas we've sort of leveled off, haven't we?
I mean, so the truth about the $27 trillion is that this is an optimistic estimate.
It sort of assumes that we're going to be smart.
And I think that's probably true.
I don't know what 2050 is going to look like.
I don't think anyone really knows, but we have a good sense that we're good at innovating stuff.
And we know how to get CO2-free energy.
We can do it with nuclear.
We also know we can get some from solar and wind.
We'll probably have more batteries.
We'll have lots of things.
I think the world will sort of stumble through and we'll be okay.
But the point is we could have been much, much better off.
And of course, if you talk to most poor people, so I'm here in New York right now, and the piece you just quoted from was actually this sort of this weird juxtaposition that we have the UN in New York this week.
That's why you should only walk or go by bike.
Not the least because Donald Trump sort of gets in the way.
But we have every nation on the planet here, and they're all telling us we have all these basic problems.
But then we also have climate week in New York at the same time where we have all these rich people saying, oh my God, climate change is the only problem or the main problem.
And this is what we should all be worried about.
And there's something weird about the way that we focus so much on this one issue and forget all these very, very simple things where we could do so much more good at such lower cost.
And I think that's the real conversation that we need to have.
If you want to have done good in the world, where is it you could actually help?
Just to give you one example, 1.25 million people die each year from tuberculosis.
Remember, tuberculosis used to be a terrible disease.
It's probably one of the worst that mankind has had.
Over the last 200 years, we estimate it killed a billion people.
Every fourth person in the 1800 in the US and Europe died from tuberculosis.
This used to be a terrible disease.
And then we fixed it.
We got antibiotics and then it was done.
So we know how to fix this, but there's still 1.25 million people dying from this every year.
And the cost of fixing it would be trivial.
It would be about $5 billion.
So I don't have $5 billion.
I don't think you have 5 billion, but in the international scheme of things, this is really a rounding era.
And so again, why is it we're so obsessed with spending trillions to do almost no good and so little focused on spending billions and doing them incredible amount of good.
You talk in your article about vaccines as being one of the great benefits of mankind, which of course they are.
And the one person, I mean, I have objections to some people in the Trump administration, many in the Trump administration I like very much.
But RFK Jr. strikes me as a guy where there's this Venn diagram where he says some things that are important that need to be looked at.
And then there's this other part of the circle where he's absolutely out of his mind.
I mean, are they doing things?
Are we doing things in this country that are setting us back?
Or is there something that he is doing that we should all respect?
Is there something that's not?
I have a hard time squaring that circle.
So I'm looking at this very much from the outside.
I wrote an article very critical of his withdrawing money from the Gavi fund.
Look, there's a lot of things you can say about COVID, and I've also been part of that conversation.
There's a lot of things we did badly during COVID.
So I think there's some fair conversations to be had around that.
And that's, of course, what has driven a lot of this skepticism.
My reading of the evidence is that this whole idea of things causing autism is not very well established.
But I think it's perhaps sort of worth just stripping all this political flutter away and just saying, there are some very basic things we know.
Vaccinating kids against very simple diseases like measles and other things are just good.
And we know this because lots and lots of kids used to die from these diseases, and now they don't.
And of course, now with vaccine skepticism, a few of them are starting to come back on and die.
And that's a bad idea.
But there's still lots and lots of kids in the world that are not vaccinated.
So what we found was, and that's what Gavi does, the Global Alliance for Vaccines for kids.
So that's basically making sure that these kids get vaccinated against measles and mumps and all the other things.
And we have vaccinated about 80%.
So a lot of kids are not dying.
We're estimating about 3.5 million kids are not dying.
But of course, if you go further back, it's a lot more people not dying because we got rid of smallpox, which was a really good idea, which in the 20th century until we got rid of it, probably killed some 300 to 500 million people.
So there are lots of benefits to these vaccines, but we need to get it extended to 90%.
We'll probably never get to 100%, but getting from 80 to 90% would still save about half a million kids each year.
That's just a great thing to do.
And it's a very cheap thing to do.
So for about $1.7 billion a year, you could save half a million kids each year.
That's just amazing.
And sort of wrapping that up in your own uncertainty about whether you should have gotten that second COVID shot or something seems to me to be just missing the point.
Why Facts Matter00:04:31
Yeah.
I have to, this is kind of a personal question, but I'm really curious about this.
Many years ago, I was looking into homelessness, which I think is a really interesting subject and not at all what people say it is.
And I called the best activist expert on this subject that I could.
And he said to me, he said, you know, I'm an old hippie left-winger, and the only people who ever call me are conservatives.
You, you know, you've never struck me as a particularly politically conservative person.
And yet, the only place I, I mean, whenever something comes up in climate change, the first place I check is your website because you're always talking, it seems to me, very straight common sense and you always have the facts.
But the only people who talk to you are conservatives.
The only time I ever see you is on Fox or here or in the New York Post.
Does that affect your sense of politics at all?
Oh, of course it does.
And I'm a little disappointed that half the world would tend to sort of dismiss a lot of this because these are inconvenient facts.
With that said, though, because I also talk about all the incredibly important things we could do in the poor part of the world, this is not true for most part of the world.
This is a very Western, kind of rich world situation where we have this very clear distinction between right and left.
And a lot on the left, I think, have sort of gone off on the deep end on some of these things, like for instance, on climate change, it's become this identifying totem that they worship and not in a smart way.
Remember, a lot of left-wing, sort of standard left-wing, was about helping the downtrodden.
Yes.
Which I perfectly agree with.
And I think a lot of people would agree with, you know, we need to get poor people out of poverty.
That's a terrible situation and it destroys human dignity and liberty and all kinds of things.
We should absolutely do something about that.
But the truth is, that's where seven-eighths of the world's population is because they know poverty and they want to get out of it.
And so I think a lot of the people, although when you go to these things, these events in New York and hear even politicians from Africa and elsewhere, they'll, of course, say all the platitudes that come along with getting some funding from rich Western nations.
But in the private cocktail conversations afterwards, they're like, yeah, they don't look at Germany and the UK and see, oh, yes, deindustrialization and incredibly high energy costs.
That's what we want.
They look at China because they want to get rich like China did.
And China, of course, got rich famously by dramatically increasing its energy consumption, almost all of it powered by coal.
Remember, China at its very lowest got just 7.5% of its energy from renewables.
And now it's up to 11%.
So people think that China is this new green giant.
No, it's not.
It gets the vast majority of its energy from coal.
And not surprisingly, because that's what historically has been the cheap opportunity to get lots of energy to drive your economic opportunities.
Right, right.
Bjorn Lumberg, where can people find?
I go on your website, but now I don't, I Google you and then I go on the website.
What is the website called?
So lawnbork.com.
But I think if you just want sort of fun takes on a lot of different things, I try to make a lot of statistics good and reasonably available.
Check out my ex account, which is just Bjorn Lomborg in one word.
It's always a pleasure talking to you.
It's kind of like a breath of fresh air and so to speak, which could clear up the environment a lot better, I think, than what they're doing.
I hope you'll come back and talk again.
Thank you for coming on.
Thank you very much.
Yes.
And let's do it less than eight years from now.
Sounds good.
Sounds good.
Bjorn Lumborg, always just a joy to talk to the guy because he is talking common sense and just basic facts, especially when it comes to helping the poor, which I think should be what conservatives are thinking about as well, because the true answers are conservative answers almost always.