Russell chats to Danish academic and author of the best-selling books: 'False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet' and 'The Skeptical Environmentalist' about how we change to the system to help the planet and whether corporate involvement only really benefits their interests. Find out more about Bjorn, here - https://www.lomborg.com/Become a member of our Stay Free A.F Community on Locals, for exclusive access to watch these interviews recorded, weekly meditations, Q&As and a new weekly show - https://russellbrand.locals.com/ Watch Stay Free With Russell Brand, here https://rumble.com/v264p0c-mainstream-or-misinformation-whats-the-difference-061-stay-free-with-russel.htmlCome to Community 2023 - our 3 day festival in Hay-on-Wye, UK - https://www.russellbrand.com/community/
Hello and welcome to Stay Free with Russell Brand.
Every week I have one in-depth conversation with someone with a fascinating and illuminating mind and expansive consciousness and unique insights.
Previously I've spoken with Rick Rubin, he's amazing, Tim Robbins, the actor, Maya, Tulsi Gabbard, Graham Hancock, and on today's show we've got Danish academic and the author of False Alarm and sceptical environmentalist Bjorn Lomberg.
Bjorn and I are going to be... kissing.
If you're a member of our Stay Free AF community, you're joining us live now on Locals.
Welcome to you.
If you've got any questions for Bjorn, please pass those on.
But not silly questions, like this person who's asking, what musical genres does Bjorn listen to?
Classical.
Make the next questions very grown up and a little more serious next time.
Bjorn, you're famous for these things.
You are broadly regarded as left-wing.
You wrote that book, The Environmental Skeptic.
And what I want to say is that your position on climate change is what's brought you to prominence and I believe garnered you a good deal of criticism in some Yeah, it has, hasn't it?
This is what I most want to understand.
This is what I most want to understand.
I believe your position is that you say climate change is real, that climate change is man-made, but the efforts that are being suggested to amend it will not make a sufficient difference and there are other things that could be done that will be more meaningful.
One of the questions that I have is that I know that polluting the planet cannot be good on a spiritual level and it seems that there's significant evidence to suggest that, you know, that man-made climate change is real.
What I know and what I understand is that global elites do not promote ideas which are harmful to their interests.
I know that.
And I know that industrialization and consumerism and the commodification of everything on the planet must be in numerous ways harmful.
Why are they promoting this climate change idea and advocating for the solutions that they are, including things like ESG, if those things will not be effective?
And what about the other side of the argument, energy giants who are clearly pollutants?
I feel like of the biggest pollutants in the world, 70 of them are Corporations, you know.
So what I want to unpick is, where is the power in this argument?
I recognise that if something like the argument for climate change is being as promoted as broadly as it is and is supported by powerful interests, that means that they are somehow benefiting from it, likely financially, and that the ultimate solutions that will be suggested will inhibit and impede the motion, movement and freedom of ordinary people.
But I don't quite understand how it is, because it sort of seems to me like the sort of thing that typically I would believe in, because I do care about the planet, I love the environment, I'd love to impede the interests of the powerful, regulate, control their businesses and their polluting behaviours.
So tell me how you've arrived at this position, and tell me how powerful, in particular as a starting point, how do the powerful benefit from their current climate change rhetoric?
All those guys who went to Davos last year and, you know, go to listen to Greta Thunberg.
A lot of them arrive in their own private jets.
So, in some sense, what you can see is they're telling us, well, we should cut down on all kinds of stuff.
But, of course, they're not actually interested in cutting down on their private planning.
You know, there's this fun point of Kerry.
John Kerry, the climate czar from Biden, who went to Iceland to pick up his environmental award in private plane.
And, you know, so it's sort of like, yeah, that's not how you're going to solve this problem.
So there is a real problem.
It is a thing that we need to fix.
But currently it's being suggested that we should fix it by buying, say, lots of solar, lots of wind.
Most of this is subsidized and obviously a lot of people are making a lot of money off of it.
But the problem is it cuts very little at fairly high cost.
So actually what we're doing is we're doing a tiny bit of fixing climate change.
So if you actually look at the whole Paris Agreement, for instance, it will solve about 1% of all the stuff that we're talking about trying to solve.
So it'll cut a very, very minimal part of what we're trying to solve.
yet it is going to be fantastically costly you know we're talking several trillion dollars and of course it's not going to be mainly the guys flying to Dava so pay it'll be you and me and everybody else and so what I'm trying to say is look you're never going to solve this problem partly by making Poor solutions, that is.
Expensive solutions, I'll fix very little.
But also, you're not going to do this by telling people you have to pay an insane amount of money.
So one study in Nature Magazine showed that the average American by mid-century, if we actually tried to do the Biden plan of cutting all emissions to net zero by 2050, would cost in the order of $11,000 per person per year.
So you're saying that what they're doing is they're manipulating this situation so that the solutions fall, ultimately affect ordinary people financially negatively?
I tend to believe that they're not being that cynical.
I think more it's the easy way to solve this problem.
See we're doing something, we're putting up solar panels, we're putting up wind turbines, it feels like we're doing something but the reality of course is Emissions keep going up.
And why?
Partly because these only do a tiny bit in rich countries.
And of course, poor countries have very, very different issues.
You know, if you look at India and Indonesia and many other places, fundamentally, they want to get their population out of poverty.
How do we get out of poverty?
I mean, Britain is a great example.
You got by burning coal for 200 years.
Let's hope that the developing world won't have to do the same thing.
But I understand that they are sort of making the same priority and saying, look, we'd actually like to get out of poverty first.
I see that that's why they think that people regard globalism as an issue and globalism as a solution, because it would appear that you would not be able to create a homogenized solution without accordance across nations, that all of those narratives would have to collapse.
You'd have to say, China, India, nations that haven't benefited from a couple of hundred years of fossil fuel burning, industry, you're going to have to get up to speed because ultimately this is one planet.
Can I ask you this?
If we had 100% solar energy, or 50-50 wind and solar, would that not solve the fossil fuel issue?
It would solve surprisingly less than what you think.
Why?
How is that?
Electricity is only about a fifth of all energy use.
So you have this idea, and it's a very typical thing when you live in a house where all the stuff that you have is powered by electricity.
But actually, your heating here is probably not electricity.
It's gas.
What is it?
Wood?
I don't know.
But it's probably not electricity.
I like to burn fur coats.
I go out and I shoot animals, and then I burn kittens, I burn them.
So yeah, no, of course, I think it's probably oil.
It might be oil.
It might actually be oil, yeah.
And of course, most industrialized processes, most heating, a lot of cooling, and this is crucial, all the stuff that actually underpins civilization.
So fertilizer, half the world's population is dependent on fertilizer that's produced with gas.
Steel and cement, These things we don't have any good way of doing with electricity.
I see.
Again, we could eventually get there, but we're not anywhere close.
And the second part, sorry, just very briefly, is even if you had solar and wind, a hundred percent, what happens on days when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing?
Well, you're not storing it.
Well, see, that's the other problem.
It's incredibly costly to store it for a very long time.
Costly?
Yes, costly.
Right now, The world has batteries enough to store enough electricity for 1 minute and 15 seconds.
By the end of this decade, we'll have to 11 minutes.
Remember, Germany routinely... 11 minutes?
11 minutes.
Germany routinely, every year, they have what they call Dunkelflaute.
How typical of the Germans!
It's Dunkelflaute!
What happens in Dunkelflaute?
when the sun is really not shining very much and there's no wind for five days
that's 7,000 minutes so you have you know batteries for five eleven minutes
or what and then you need electricity for 7,000 minutes.
Right but let me keep going because you've got a lot of information remember and I'm just trying to appreciate and
understand it as you're going along.
Electricity and because I'm sort of Western and live in comfort and luxury I feel like oh electricity that's the
issue.
But that's only one-fifth of the issue.
You've highlighted cement, power generation in other areas.
No, not power generation, but industrial processes and heating.
And the impossibility of storing electricity, even if you were able to generate that.
So quite quickly, it seems, Bjorn, we arrive at the point that in order to solve these problems,
if that truly were the intention, we would have to radically re-evaluate our entire economic models.
Because you'd quickly have to say, well, the cost and value of batteries is only built upon
our current understanding of supply, demand, economics, manufacture.
If we had a truly globalist project, you'd say, we're making those fucking batteries because we're solving that problem because this is how we have to resolve it and we're going to flatten out and regulate all cost.
Right, so what you're essentially saying is that what's being highlighted by the current climate change movement are sort of problems that are manageable that don't make a meaningful difference.
Like the current capacity for solar and wind being an example of something that isn't going to significantly move the needle.
And in order to significantly move the needle, you would have to radically interrupt the ascent of certain powerful interests.
And I think that you're absolutely right.
If we tried to go net zero, remember, society can do pretty much anything they want.
It's just going to be Very, very uncomfortable to do some things, right?
We could certainly go net zero, but, you know, imagine your life without your phone, without this lighting, without the heating, without all the other stuff, you know, and without, you know, food for four billion people.
There's a lot of unpleasantness built into that setup, which is why it's not going to happen.
And so, yes, we are currently just merely suggesting sort of, you know, very tiny solutions.
They're not tiny in the sense that they're not costly, but they won't solve very much.
My point has been, and I think this, so I worked together with more than 50 of the world's top climate economists and three Nobel laureates on finding out where can you actually do the most good for climate.
What they said was, this is all about innovation.
And let me just tell you a story before I tell you this thing, but if you may have heard about this, back in the 1860s, whales, we hunted whales, we almost hunted whales to extinction.
Uh, because whales provide this incredibly bright and clean burning, uh, fuel.
So basically it lit up most of Western Europe and North America.
And, you know, you could tell, and you know, if there'd been green pieces and Fridays for the future, they would have gone back and said, you know, you've got to change this out and live with slightly dimmer lighting and more polluting lighting, but hey, go back and, you know, save the whales.
And of course people weren't actually willing to do that.
What did happen was, We found oil.
So we found an alternative.
And then suddenly that oil burnt cleaner, brighter, it was cheaper.
You don't have to go out in the middle of the ocean and kill whales.
And that was basically what saved the whales.
It was an innovation rather than trying to tell everyone, you got to stop doing all that stuff you do, which is bad.
It doesn't work very well in telling people, I'm sorry, could you be a little colder, a little poor, a little less content?
That's not going to work.
But what will work is innovation.
That's happened a lot of times.
One thing I will outright reject there, Björn, is the idea that political power lies with ordinary people.
That it's, we, the people, refuse to stop using whale blubber until there is a better and greater innovation.
It was profitable for the whaling industry, then it became profitable for the oil industry.
And also what this points to for me is that we have no ethical substrata to call upon.
No one is willing, there is no recourse for, if we are a species that has a shared responsibility to one another and the planet to improve or alter our conditions, no one has the resources mentally, I don't think there's anything spiritually anymore to do that.
Ultimately, all that we've been coached, trained, conditioned to a point where ultimately everybody will just do what's best for them.
No one has any belief that there is no prevailing ideology that people say, well, this is what I care about.
This is what I love.
I will sacrifice.
I will kill, die for these set of beliefs.
No?
I tend to be a little more optimistic than that.
I'm optimistic!
I get your point.
I think there's a lot of people who would prefer to just watch TV than, you know, take hard choices.
I'm not blaming people, I'm saying... No, no, but on the other hand, I think there's a lot of people out there who are actually, every day, you probably have quite a few on your show, you know, people that I meet every once in a while, certainly a lot of the climate worries, you know, the Friday for Future and many others, they actually want to do something, you know, Greta Thunberg, I have strong disagreements with her, but I think, you know, she's actually said, you know, I don't want to go by airplane.
So I'm, you know, I'm going to go through all this extra trouble to showcase that I actually care about the planet.
I think a lot of people want to do at least a moderate, moderate, moderate, sorry, moderate part of, I should just say I'm Danish.
So English, English is not my first language.
But so a moderate amount of damage.
School.
Carlsberg.
Carlsberg, of course, yes.
Preben, Elkia, Michael Laudrott.
Okay, there you go.
Brian Laudrott.
Hey, so you speak Danish.
Anyway.
Modicum might have been what you were looking for.
Yes, that was probably what it was.
So I think people are willing to do some, but I think we just have to realise the current way we're trying to solve climate change, we're essentially saying, let's go far beyond what people are willing to do.
That's just not going to happen.
And of course, let's try to convince the Africans You know, development, that's not really for you.
Of course they're not gonna...
Accept that, right?
They want to get their people out of poverty.
But I do think that we have to start having a conversation that's about altering ideology.
That's about the, I think the problem is, is that we're not being radical enough.
That we're not willing to say, we have to look at the world differently.
This is not working.
I don't know what thing's going to kill us first, whether it's going to be climate change,
civil war, inequality.
I don't, you know what I mean?
I don't know enough about it, but it seems to me that we're in a place of existential
crisis and I believe it is a spiritual crisis.
I believe we have lost our connection to meaning, purpose, God.
And I feel that if you're saying, oh, well, you have to let various African nations undergo their own version of an industrial revolution, commercialization, commodification, various sets of corrupt organizations and influences, that's not enough of a vision.
The vision I want is, Guys, we're in serious trouble!
And the climate change thing, I agree with your cynicism about the way that the climate change argument is being presented because I know that you do not get elitist, globalist interests Backing ideas that will be pejorative to their desired outcomes.
I just know that.
I'd love to hear more about how this particular trick works because I can't fully see it yet.
I can't see that.
You know, for me, it seems, you know, for example, you talk about Greta Thunberg, she appears to me to be an entirely authentic and passionate, saintly, you know, savantish figure that really deeply cares about an issue.
But I recognize when you see someone all over the same kind of newspapers that ultimately support corporate interests, I recognize, oh, what she's saying mustn't negatively impact their desires, because otherwise you would be seeing her.
So I take your worries.
One of the things that I try to do is two things.
It's try to show people that actually it's not like the world is coming apart right now.
I'll give you a few statistics on that.
And the second one is to say, look, I get that it would be wonderful
and I fully support your sort of crusade to get a lot more people back in contact
with their own native selves and get everything done.
That's all wonderful.
I'm going to go the other way and try and see if we can't fix, you know, some of the world's big problems with simple things that we know work.
And so let me just, on the catastrophe side, let's just remember over the last, what, 25 years?
One and a quarter billion people have come out of poverty.
That's a hundred and thirty-five 1,000 people every day.
While we've been talking, you know, it's a couple thousand people have come out of poverty.
How amazing is that?
I don't know, I'm just not that amazed by it when I hear things like that.
Really?
Yeah, because I feel that the general trend is we're fucked.
I don't feel like things are... But it's certainly not fucked for them, right?
There's a guy over there, got a McDonald's!
I don't feel like that's... Is it correct that for those people, for the...
1.25 billion people.
That's pretty significant.
No, I disagree.
I feel like these are the arguments that are used when people say, here's an area which sounds comparable but is somewhat distinct.
Of course, who am I to say that those 1 million people don't have the rights to buy their consumer objects or be lifted out of poverty or whatever it is you're saying.
But when I say, for example, hey, American democracy is Meaningless.
The Republican Party and the Democrat Party are ultimately controlled by the same financial interests and nothing will meaningfully change for ordinary people.
They go, yeah, but the Democrats are going to do this thing that cuts things by 10%.
And it's, who are you to say?
You know, you wouldn't think that if you were a person.
I'm like, well, because of that, we are not going to radicalise to the degree that's necessary.
That's right.
And I fully take that point.
I think it's easier when you're actually close to starving and you almost have no life, that it's easier to just simply say that is desperation.
Well, but it's actually really, really good.
If you get a chance to be lifted out of poverty, be able to teach your kids, all that kind of stuff.
Not poor like you're describing.
I've not ever had to live in an African hut.
I've had to live like on benefits and be a crackhead and all of that kind of stuff.
And it's definitely better not being that.
It's definitely better not being that.
And now I have the luxury of contemplating, what is it?
What is it we're actually trying to do here?
And I don't know.
You say you're optimistic.
I'm optimistic.
And what I'm optimistic about is we can create entirely new ideologies.
We can radically alter reality at an almost fundamental level.
And I don't want to just move around the chess pieces a little bit of, now these elites are benefiting.
Because what I feel like is the climate change argument is benefiting probably some kind
of big tech digital surveillance type of billionaire oligarch elite.
And the anti-climate change is benefiting energy fossil fuel elites.
And what I want to advocate for is the ordinary people of the world to rise up and demand
democratic control of their communities and the new systems of confederacy where we can
accept differing ideologies around traditionalism and progressivism and libertarianism and anarchism
as long as we are not all laboring under the yoke of globalist hegemony and tyranny.
And I don't know how to, Bjorn, I'm really trying to work it out.
Yes.
Yeah, I'm sorry, I don't have the right solution for coming here and not actually telling you how to fix the world.
That is that is pretty terrible.
What I do have, though, are very specific solutions that could actually help all of us.
So, you know, for climate, imagine.
So, you know, there's been research on fourth generation nuclear.
Imagine, and there's a lot of reasons why this may not come true, but you could imagine that fourth generation nuclear would be incredibly cheap, very safe, that seems reasonable, and it'll have no CO2 emissions.
If you could do that, and there's a lot of people who say this will happen, I'm still, you know, somewhat skeptical, but let's see.
If that would happen...
No, because Chernobyl was a bad third generation.
There's a lot of reasons why fourth generation, for instance, can't do, it'll be physically impossible to do sort of Chernobyl thing.
But fundamentally, the idea is, if you could innovate something that would basically be very cheap and powerful, and could give power 24-7, And would actually deliver no CO2.
Everyone would switch, not just rich countries like England and the US and the rest of Europe, but also Chinese, Indians, Africans.
So again, if we could innovate our way to finding smart solutions to this, That's the way you solve these problems.
So it's a little bit like the whale example.
Instead of trying to tell people, don't kill the whales, because there's all these financial interests and people want the clean light.
But if you could actually say, oh, here's a nicer, better, cheaper, that doesn't, a product that doesn't kill the whales, that would actually be really cool.
And that's what I tried to do, not just in climate, but across the world and saying, there are all these amazing things that we're sort of forgetting because they're not very sexy.
But we could, for fairly little money, change the world in amazing ways that would really make a big difference.
That's really what I'm trying to do.
That's what brings me to my optimism.
I recognize I'm not going to get the total mental breakthrough for everyone.
In some ways, I'm operating within the world, but trying to make it better even though.
And I think that's also worthwhile.
Yes, absolutely.
Of course, it is valuable to offer solutions that are in advance on what is currently being discussed and offered.
And your example of How, that one way to end an inefficient and transgressive technology is to try to sort of tell people, oh please stop, it's, you know, the whales, the plants, whatever.
But another way is, yeah, this is better and cheaper.
But the problem is, it feels to me that progressivism and the ongoing technologisation of everything is broadly I love you!
for us. It seems that and one of the and by the way, I sort of
think that I do exist in a very particular space where I love
you. You have to do this while you're saying all right.
Yeah, my particular space is there is a requirement for a shift
in the consciousness of individuals and cultures. And so I'm
pleased to understand that I'm not saying I'm not trying to nullify or
even gainsay what you're explaining to me.
I'm just always, when I feel like, oh God, we can't break people out of the idea that the solution is He's comfort and privilege and the acquisition of more material goods and there's this thing I think about a lot like sort of obviously you know Gandhi said like that you know we're never gonna meaningfully change the world if we don't overcome our infatuation with gadgets and trinkets he's saying this in like the 1940s and
Yes.
what I feel like is there is... And you're sitting with your cell phone. Yeah, absolutely.
And like, you know, there is no sign that we're going to be able to break this obsession
with the material. Okay, so now I think, Bjorn, I think I understand a little better now what you
are saying. That the way that firstly, well, is part of your argument that climate change isn't
the most significant threat to our time? It certainly is.
It's certainly exaggerated in much of the general storytelling, so it is a problem.
But again, you hear about this one catastrophe after another from climate, and then you see at the same time If you actually look at the data, how many people die from climate-related disasters?
So that would be floods, droughts, storms, wildfires, and extreme temperatures.
And we have good data for that for the last hundred years.
So if you think back in time, in the 1920s, on average about half a million people died every year from these climate-related disasters.
Today, so last year in 2022, it was 11,000 people.
So the ones that died in Pakistan, all the people who died in India from big floods and many, many other places, that sums up to 11,000 people.
So that's like 99%, almost 99% lower, despite the fact that the world has quadruple in size.
Why is that?
It has nothing to do with climate, but has everything to do with the fact that when you get people out of poverty, they become more resilient.
They basically have much better technology.
So we work with Bangladesh, for instance.
I don't know if you know, Bangladesh in 1970 had the world's worst hurricane.
It killed somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 people.
And a lot of them didn't hear that it was coming before it was too late.
So we worked with the Bangladeshi government and we were looking at should we build more shelters for people for where they can go to.
And it turns out, no, they've already done that.
They've basically made sure that everyone has places to go for these shelters.
So basically they've gone from, you know, like having hundreds of thousands of people die in a hurricane To having somewhere between ten and a thousand people dying.
That's still terrible, but it's much, much less terrible.
What they actually told us was, now we'd like to have shelters for our animals.
Because, you know, animals are a big part of their value.
They, you know, they worry about the fact that if I'm a farmer and this is my only cow, I'd like to know that that's safe.
But it's a wonderfully better world where you have to worry about your cow than you have to worry about your kids dying from a hurricane.
So what are you saying?
That there's a kind of a hysteria around this issue?
Yes, definitely.
And why is that?
Oh, I think if you look at any political conversation, it's easy to sort of get Overtaken by hysteria, right?
When you talk to teachers, they'll tell you, our kids are not learning enough.
The schools are not working.
If you talk to doctors, they'll tell you, we need to spend more on hospital.
I mean, it kind of happens in all kinds of political conversations.
And I think climate is such a great opportunity because you can basically point to everything that happens.
You know, it's raining today.
I don't think it'll take all that long before people start saying, see, climate change.
And, you know, you can always blame this.
And it's a great sort of story.
Any hurricane, any heat wave, any cold wave is because of climate change.
Now, again, climate change is a real problem, but the way it's being presented is fascinating.
Why is it a real problem?
So the economist argument for this would simply be to say, We've all built our cities and our infrastructure, so all houses and everything, to a particular temperature.
So, you know, houses in Helsinki work great.
Houses in Athens, I'm not... reasonably great, right?
But they both work because they're at the temperature that they were built.
If you change that temperature, it becomes a little less optimal.
Basically, you have to change a lot of your infrastructure in the long run.
That's costly.
It is not the end of the world, but it is a problem.
Your crops, you basically have to grow slightly new crops.
You have to change your behavior slightly.
You will have more people dying from heat waves.
You'll have fewer people dying from cold waves.
So you have to change your focus on getting more air conditioning and less heating, all that kind of stuff.
It's troublesome.
But of course, that doesn't fit very well with the it's the end of the world kind of argument.
So far, it's not as bad as they say, like not as many people are dying as previously used to die.
Yeah.
That the solutions that they're suggesting will only address a fraction of it and will be disproportionately costly.
And so then, what is it?
Do you think that this is a case of genuine error and misinterpretation?
Or do you think that this is something more sinister than that?
So again, just like before, I tend to believe that most people are actually good-willed.
Maybe I'm just being incredibly naive, but most of the people I've met, even people I strongly disagree with, want to do good.
I think it's more sort of a mindset.
If you're focused on one thing in the world, if your thing is this, we should do this, right?
Then obviously that becomes incredibly important.
You latch onto everything that sort of works as an argument for it,
and you become slightly focused on that, perhaps a little overblown on that thing.
But to this degree, you're suggesting that this is a critical and categorical error
that's consuming the entire planet.
I don't think that can happen just because a few people have gotten a bit carried away themselves.
There must be some central power that is benefiting significantly.
So I think newspapers love bad stories.
And look, it's not, again, because newspapers are ugly.
It's actually because when you give people a pile of good news and a bad news...
They say they want to read all the good news, they end up reading all the bad news, right?
So newspapers are basically giving us what we want, and we want bad news.
And climate is such a great bad news generator that I think we've sort of talked ourselves into that.
Now, clearly, there are also interests involved.
But I think there, as you would also be pointed out earlier, there's obviously also interest from the fossil fuel companies to say, oh, it's no problem.
Just keep on using your oil fire, your oil heater here in the house.
So obviously there are interests on all these sides.
I'm simply trying to say the evidence, so there's only one economist who ever won the Nobel Prize in Climate Economics, William Nordhaus from Yale University in 2018.
And he basically estimated, and this is what most of the big models also estimate, is that global warming is a problem, it will feel like, because if you try to add up all of the problems that will come from climate change, it will feel like by the end of the century, if we do nothing, that we will be 4% less well off than we otherwise would have been.
Now remember, in the UN standard scenario, we'll be about 450% richer by the end of the century, mostly in poorer countries.
So it will feel like instead of being 450% as rich, we'll only be 434% as rich.
That's a problem but it's certainly not the sort of the end of the world kind of categorization that we often hear.
Banshee asks, "Do we need to accept a reduction in our level of comfort to solve these problems regardless of the
method?"
So if you want to solve it now and completely solve it, yes, you will have to see a reduction in your well-being.
It'll be a little colder, it'll be a little darker, you'll be a little poor.
It's not going to be the end of the world, but it is going to be noticeable less comfortable.
But that's, of course, also why this will never happen.
And it may happen somewhat in rich countries where we're willing to sort of, you know, we're so well off that we can sort of accept to maybe become slightly less well off.
But it's not going to happen in most developing countries.
No African is going to say, sure, I'll just let my people stay in, my family stay in poverty and accept that for the good of the planet.
What do you think?
Part of what you've said, Bjorn, is that the threat and impact of climate change, while real and human made, is being exaggerated.
The solutions being presented are not appropriate.
The other thing you've said is that there are other Problems that are bigger and a more critical threat that are not being addressed.
What are they?
So it's I actually try to stay away from saying that they're bigger problems because how do you measure a bigger problem?
I mean, in some ways, the biggest problem in the world is that we all die, but we don't have, you know, immortality bottles for everyone.
So the argument is more where can you actually do the most good For the least resources.
That's what I try to do.
That's, you know, that's sort of an economist approach to the world of saying we have limited resources.
We have lots of problems.
Where could you spend an extra pound or an extra lira or an extra, they don't exist anymore, or an extra rupee and do the most good?
And what we try to find out is we the world has I don't know if you know the sustainable development goals.
Have you heard of them?
No.
So the world promised back in 2015, actually, for 2016 to 30, that we would solve all problems.
Literally all problems.
There would be no more war.
We'd have fixed HIV AIDS and malaria and tuberculosis and most chronic diseases as well.
We'd have fixed climate change.
We'd get gardens for handicapped people in urban areas and everything else you can imagine.
It's very very nice, but of course we're not actually succeeding.
We're actually dramatically failing in this.
Not surprisingly.
When you say we want to do everything, it's like you're not prioritizing at all.
So what we're trying to say is, We need to prioritize and say, if we can't do it all, why don't we do the smart stuff first?
So we've identified 12 amazing things that you can do.
Who's we?
So that's my think tank called the Copenhagen Consensus.
So we work for a lot of individual nations.
I mentioned Bangladesh.
We worked in India.
We worked in Malawi and Ghana and Haiti to try to look at how do you do smart stuff in urination?
So in Haiti, for instance, we actually managed to get them to put more folic acid and iron into wheat.
And it's a great way to make sure that women who are pregnant, they typically don't know, don't have miscarriages.
So you save about 150 kids every year, but you also can stop people from being anemic.
And the point was, it was an incredibly cheap way to achieve quite a lot of good.
And so we basically convinced the government and the president that this would be one of the great things that he should do.
It's not the only thing.
There's a lot of other things we, you know, asked them to do that they didn't do.
But my goal is sort of, you know, I would love for everyone to just pick up on all the smart stuff we say, but I'm happy if they just pick up on one, right?
And that was what happened in Haiti.
Novel innovation that is cost effective and achievable.
Yes.
It's not really an innovation.
A lot of these things are stuff we know how to do.
So let me just walk you through one of them.
Uh, so tuberculosis, for instance, um, it used to kill, you know, it used to kill about a quarter of everyone in the rich world, a hundred years ago.
We don't think about that anymore because we fixed it.
You know, you don't die from tuberculosis.
I don't die from tuberculosis.
But it's actually still the most deadly infectious disease.
In 2022, it was ahead of COVID.
Now, in 2020 and 2021, it wasn't.
But it's, you know, it's fundamentally, for the last 10 years, been the most killing infectious disease.
But we don't hear about it because it's just poor people.
We know how to fix it.
It's about, you know, making sure that people actually get diagnosed.
Because if you don't get diagnosed, you go around coughing on other people and transmitting the disease and then you die.
And secondly, about getting people, and this is the tricky part, you have to take the medication for six months.
And that's actually, yeah, that's hard.
And it's somewhat uncomfortable.
Talking through death again?
Well, death is you're not here anymore.
Right.
And then six months?
Yeah, no, I'll go with death.
Yeah, yes.
But, you know, if you've ever been sick and need to take something, you know, like antibiotics.
It's a pain in the arse, isn't it?
When they go three weeks.
You get fine after a week and then you're sort of like, oh yeah, I forgot yesterday.
And it's sort of like, I'm fine, but you're not, at least not for tuberculosis, right?
So the idea is you need to have like apps to make sure people take it.
Maybe, you know, uh, groups where you, uh, where you get together a little bit like Alcoholics Anonymous, but just for tuberculosis and just for those six months where you get together.
Yes, I took my, my, uh, my pills all the, all of last week or something like that.
There's lots of different local things, but the trick here is, That we estimate together with Stop TB, which is the world's biggest organization on tuberculosis, that for about $5 billion extra, we've actually promised to spend even more globally, but just for $5 billion extra, we could save almost all of these people for the rest of eternity.
And of course, very quickly, you almost don't need any money because there'll be no reservoir of death left over.
So you could save about 27 million people's lives.
And remember, this is crucial also because These people are typically middle-aged people.
They're not young people, but they're, you know, in the prime of their lives.
We've already schooled them.
They now have kids of their own, and then they die.
And that's terrible, not just for them, but also for the family and for the country.
So one of these things is simply to say, here is a way that you can spend a little bit of money and get an enormous amount of benefit.
So we do, and this is, you know, you might not like this, but this is what economists do, right?
We try to put a price on everything.
So we say, how much is it worth to save a life?
How much is it worth to avoid all the agony?
How much do you lose in productivity?
How much do you save in the healthcare sector?
If you try to add up all of that, it turns out that for every pound you spend, you do
46 pounds, sorry, I want to say dollars, 46 pounds of good for every pound spent.
That's an amazing achievement, right?
And so again, what we try to say is there's some really, really effective policies out
there that we're ignoring because they have no obvious constituency.
They're mostly about poor people.
It doesn't feel like it's all that important because, you know, we care more about, oh, I need organically grown carrots and that kind of stuff.
And that's all fine and good.
But I would love us to also care about, you know, some of these things.
So we're really pushing.
Here are 12 amazing things that we could do.
I suppose the reason people don't care, even though you said that that one pound or dollar is fine by the way, most people watching this are probably American, like the ideology, the kind of prevailing mentality does not appreciate or care about those, but you're saying even it's beneficial economically.
And you feel that when you translate these ideas into some kind of into the language of economics and it's more likely to be impactful or it's just it's real so you should tell that story.
Actually you're you're not going to get better off in the sense that you'll have more money right because these are people you're saving so it's it's it's not economically beneficial it just happens to be incredibly good thing to do so we try to translate good into into dollars, but that's really just a measure of trying to say, you've got to look at how much do you have to spend in order to achieve a certain benefit.
It's just like when we talked about climate, right?
I mean, how much do you spend on the solar panels and how much do you avoid climate, climate damage?
Here we're simply saying, if you spend a little bit on tuberculosis, you can actually get a huge benefit.
Let me, let me just tell you one other story.
I've lots of them, but you know, just stop, stop me.
But you know, there's, Globally, we have really bad education.
I mean, we have pretty bad education many places in the rich world, but in the poor world, it's really, really bad.
So, although we have gotten everybody into school, which was nice, and that was our promise back in 2000 to 2015, they learn almost nothing.
So, although we say that we don't have illiteracy anymore, they Functionally, a lot of these guys don't read very well.
So, you know, one of the tests you give 10-year-olds in the developing world is to say, read this sentence, and it says, BJ has a red hat, a blue shirt, and yellow socks.
What color is the hat?
It's red, right?
I would struggle in that.
There you go.
Anyway, I think about why Vijay is putting so many primary colors together.
There you go.
And he's really badly dressed.
This kid doesn't deserve to be dragged out of poverty until he starts working with some neutral color schemes.
There you go.
Yeah.
Anyway, so 80% of kids in the developing world fail this test.
That's terrible.
But it turns out that there is an amazing way to, and that's, of course, again, you know, this is the sort of optimism that I try to bring to the table.
When you ask people out there, there are lots of ways not to do it.
So Indonesia is shown as a couple of them.
They actually doubled teachers' salaries.
And because of the way they did it, some places got doubled before other places.
You can show that teachers are really, really happy, which you would kind of expect.
But it didn't affect the outcome on students at all.
There was no change in their outcome.
So, uh, there's a famous paper called, you know, double for nothing.
Uh, basically you pay a lot more money, but you didn't actually improve the schooling outcome.
However, there's an amazing way you can do this.
The big problem in education is that, and this is true everywhere, but especially in developing countries, if you have like, uh, you know, 60 kids that are all 12 year olds, because that's how we do classes, You know, if you try to teach them anything, some of them are going to be totally lost, and some of them are going to be incredibly bored because they're way ahead, and you're really only teaching a small segment of that class, right, because they're all over the board.
The problem is to teach them at their right level.
One way you can do that, and this has been tested in a lot of places, we're actually helping Malawi to do this for their entire country now, so one way you can do that is by putting these kids in front of a tablet One hour every day.
So the tablet will be shared.
Other kids will come in and do that as well.
But one hour a day, they get taught either mathematics or their own language in their own language.
By the tablet.
Obviously, it's a special program that's been developed and stuff, but the trick is that that tablet knows exactly where that kid is.
So, you know, if he or she is struggling, it'll sort of go back and be slower.
If that kid is really bored, it'll go fast and teach more.
Turns out that by that little thing, you can actually teach these kids the equivalent of what they would have learned in three years.
In just one year.
So you can, you know, you can teach them three times as much.
That means that they will become much brighter.
They will be better able to deal with all their problems in their nation at very low cost.
So we estimate that for every dollar you spend, so it costs about $25.
Per kid per year because you need you need solar panels to charge the typically they don't have power to charge the tablets you also need a safe to lock them in because otherwise they'll get stolen and and some of them will break up and all that kind of stuff.
So if you spend that $25 you actually make that kid smarter better educated and the long run he or she will be better equipped to deal with that country leaving them with about $54 of benefits.
I see what interests you is evident opportunities to improve that are achievable and popularising them.
Do you think it's a kind of inertia that prevents these ideas from being taken on board?
Or do you imagine as I do that reality is organised around the interests of a relatively small number of elite institutions and corporations and if they can't extract profit from these endeavours they're very unlikely to be carried out and the only sociological and humanitarian aid that is ever carried out is a panacea, palliative or distraction in order for the agenda and interests of the powerful to continue Unimpeded and that there isn't where even where there is interest there is no power to meaningfully change the trajectory of the if not world events the kind of the kind of solutions that you're presenting seems like that if you did have access to you know the Tunisian government or you know like you've had like you said in Bangladesh you were able to get these measures taken on board and it was relatively effective it but do you not
Imagine, mate, from what you know about climate change, that they must know that as well, and that they are not doing that because, presumably, the way that their agenda is organised... What is power other than the ability to influence and organise reality?
And the most powerful people, interests in the world, are the interests that organize reality.
So the agenda that gets set, the information that gets conveyed, the arguments that get advanced, the information that gets censored, is all being organized around those principles.
I understand that we are entering into an age where Information is now available in a way that is completely unprecedented.
So there is some new requirement for an ability to censor and control data, to condemn, cancel and criticize alternative voices.
All these things have become necessary because the potential to convey information is now Has radically advanced.
The potential to organize, dispute, disruption, radical activism and protest has radically advanced.
So now to counter that, the hegemonic powers need to be able to bleach out that problem through sort of reductivism, demonization.
So from pretty old school medieval social tools in fact.
And so Like, I obviously applaud your endeavours to create positive solutions and fascinated to hear that this is something that you're working on with Jordan Peterson, who obviously is a person that sort of meets head on the cultural and ideological challenges.
And I've spoken to Jordan a number of times and I adore him in many, many ways.
But I like that he faces so much criticism because I think he's attacking He's attacking some pretty entrenched systems of power.
And also, as I've said to him personally, I disagree with him in some of the areas.
I disagree with everybody.
I disagree with my own wife.
So, with this project that you're currently pursuing, Twelve Ideas, how is it that you are planning to advance these ideas?
Where are you looking to get traction?
So I'll answer your question first.
Sorry, answer your previous question first.
Isn't this hard if there's just all these entrenched power structures that basically want to sit on the entire planet, if you will?
And yes, I think there is certainly some argument to that.
Again, I tend to probably be a little more optimistic.
I think most people, even the richest kinds of people, They also want to do good.
They actually also want to be remembered to have done good stuff.
Why ain't Bill Gates promoting your gear?
Actually, he is.
He's funding this project.
Bill Gates is promoting this!
Holy shit!
So there you go.
Fundamentally, the idea here is to say that I think you're right that a lot of money gets spent on sort of this, you know, keeping everybody at check.
But some money, and what we're trying to say is, alright, if some money, if some resources are actually being spent on trying to do good.
And I think, you know, some of the money that we spend on climate is actually trying to do good.
What does Bill Gates think about your climate change hysteria perspective?
You've got to ask him.
He feels, I think, I mean, he's written a book about it.
I think he's somewhat more concerned, but he's very much aligned with the idea of saying, You are not going to solve this problem before it's sufficiently cheap that people will actually want to buy it.
So I think he feels that I'm probably a little too optimistic.
I think, obviously, he's wrong.
Otherwise, I would have changed my mind.
But he's probably a little more worried about climate.
But I think he agrees on a lot of the basic fundamental points, namely that we need To innovate in order to get better technology so that it'll basically become this whale versus petrol kind of solution.
That's also why he's investing in fourth generation nuclear.
There's a lot of different proposals in fourth generation, and it's very likely that only one of them will go through.
And that's, of course, why he may very well end up wasting all his money.
And that's what innovation is.
You waste a lot of money on a lot of different things, but it's a tiny bit.
Compared to the incredible opportunity of actually powering the world cleanly and very cheaply.
Yes.
All right, Bjorn, thank you so much for joining us for this conversation.
It's really kind of you to explain those rather complex global issues that are difficult to outline in such a candid and straightforward way.
I really appreciate your time.
Thank you very much.
On Monday, our guest is the investigative journalist Kit Clattenburg from the Grey Zone.
On Tuesday, we're talking to the president of the Amazon worker-led Labour Union, not Labour Union, Jesus Christ, Christian Smalls.
Catch up on our week of shows, including our alternative coverage of the WEF in Davos, only on Rumble.
And also you can download our podcast, Stay Free with Russell Brand.
Join me next week, not for more of the same, but for more of the different.
