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July 16, 2020 - Dennis Prager Show

06:52

Bjorn Lomborg: Climate Panic Costs Us Trillions

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	Bjorn Lomborg of Copenhagen and of the Hoover Institution at Stanford has written, False alarm, how climate change panic costs us trillions, hurts the poor, and fails to fix the planet.
	So you can't yell at this man as a quote-unquote science denier, given the fact that he fully acknowledges the world is getting warmer.
	So since you label it a panic, what if we did nothing?
	What would happen?
	So doing nothing would be a little worse than being smart about this because we would forego doing some things that could actually help dealing with climate change and at fairly low cost reduce some of the problems with climate change.
	But as we mentioned in the last segment, the UN Climate Panel actually tells us that if we do nothing about climate change, By the 2070s, so in about 50 years time, the net impact will be at worst equivalent to URI having an income reduction of 2%.
	Right, I got that, yes.
	And remember, by then it will be much greater.
	Of course.
	So is all of this that we will be inundated by rising seas, is it a lie?
	So it's a little bit of truth and a lot of, you know, making great headlines for newspapers.
	So take the story that, you know, went around the world and was heavily featured in Washington Post and many other places, where they told us because of global warming, by the end of the century, 187 million people will have to move.
	And not surprisingly, many turned that into will drown.
	But, you know, it's built on the right idea that because temperature rises, seawater will get warmer.
	When things like seawater get warmer, they expand, and that means you get sea level rise.
	So there is a real problem.
	But what they forgot to remember was to take into account that people actually act.
	So they were assuming that over the next 80 years, everyone would just sit still, watch the sea level rise, start lapping up over your feet and then your calves and then eventually your hips and eventually you'd have to move or drown.
	But of course, in reality, nobody actually does that.
	You adapt.
	You put up sea defenses, dikes, that kind of thing.
	We've done that plenty of times when we were much poorer.
	And so the very same research that told us if you do nothing, you will see 187 million people having to move.
	They showed that with any realistic adaptation, you would see 305,000 people having to move by the end of the century.
	So the headline and the story that went around the world was 600 times too large.
	It was scary because it makes for great headlines, but it was dramatically wrong.
	Just to give you a sense of proportion, 300,000 people that have to move by the end of the century is trivial.
	Every year, about twice that number moves out just of California.
	Clearly, it's something we could handle on a global level over the next 80 years.
	Well, we move out of California because we have something worse than rising sea levels.
	We have a state run by Democrats, but you don't have to respond to that.
	I just thought that I would share my worries.
	All right, so that's the panic element.
	Let's go to the next one on your subtitle, How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Porn, and Fails to Fix the Planet.
	The Green New Deal will cost us how much?
	So it's very hard to tell because the Democrats actually haven't costed their estimates, but probably in the order of $10 to $20 trillion.
	Remember, there's a lot of stuff in the Green New Deal that has nothing to do with Greens.
	I'm just looking at the green part of the Green New Deal.
	So $10 to $20 trillion.
	On top of the trillions just spent because of the lockdown, I know, I mean, economics may or may not be your area, but you have knowledge of a great many fields.
	If you just print, which is what we would have to do, we would have to print that amount of money.
	What does that do to the dollar?
	That's a good question.
	That's outside my area of expertise.
	But the reality, of course, is to say, You can't just spend free money.
	You're essentially making all of the money worth less.
	So at the end of the day, you're spending real resources on things that will only do a little good.
	So, you know, take, for instance, Biden's new proposal to spend $2 trillion on climate.
	And to a certain extent, you've got to say that's a lot better than wasting $10 trillion that he's only talking about spending $2 trillion.
	But some of the things that he's talking about, for instance, weatherizing homes.
	We know are ineffective.
	People say you should make your home, insulate your home because then you'll use less energy.
	But the problem is that these estimates are always way too high on the savings and way too low on the costs.
	So the biggest study in the U.S. done in Minnesota of about 40,000 houses showed that you don't actually make a profit.
	What you end up with is wasting about half the money on a weatherization.
	It's the kind of thing that sounds good, but it's just a waste of money.
	Biden is also talking about that we should be re-entering the Paris Agreement, and we should go to net zero by 2050, so basically the U.S. should stop emitting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by mid-century.
	This is going to be phenomenally hard to do.
	And it's probably going to be much, much more costly than just $2 trillion.
	Actually, estimates indicate that this could cost in the order of $5 trillion a year in lower economic growth to the U.S. economy.
	That's a lot of money.
	That's a lot of welfare.
	That's a lot of opportunity that we take away.
	But Biden, and I have to say this, he also proposes good ideas.
	He actually says we should be spending more money on innovating cheaper green energy.
	And that's smart because it's cheap, and it'll actually give us much better opportunity.
	All right.
	We'll be back in a moment.
	Bjorn Lomborg, L-O-M-B-O-R-G. False Alarm is the book up at DennisPrager.com.
	And it is really essential.

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