Behind the Bastards - Bjorn Lomborg: Patient Zero of Climate Denial

Episode Date: October 15, 2019

In Episode 89, Robert is joined by Eric Lampaert to discuss Bjorn Lomborg. FOOTNOTES:1. Bjorn Lomborg’s lukewarmer misinformation about climate change and poverty2. BJORN LOMBORG: PERFORMANCE ARTIST EXTRAORDINAIRE3, Bjorn Lomborg Bibliography4. Hot, It’s Not5. On Bjorn Lomborg and extinction6. The Skeptical Environmentalist: A Case Study In The Manufacture Of News7. Bjørn Lomborg: the dissenting climate change voice who changed his tune8. Bjørn Lomborg WSJ Op Ed Is Stunningly Wrong9. Who’s Behind Trump’s Claim the Green New Deal Will Cost $100 Trillion?10. Exclusive: Bjorn Lomborg Think Tank Funder Revealed As Billionaire Republican 'Vulture Capitalist' Paul Singer11. Common Core’s Global Warming Agenda12. James Harff13. Copenhagen Consensus III14. Bjørn Lomborg centre got $640,000 for report saying limiting warming rise to 2C not worth it15. Atmospheric engineering may help reverse global warming16. SCIENTIST AT WORK/Bjorn Lomborg; From an Unlikely Quarter, Eco-Optimism17. About Bjorn Lomborg18. UCS Examines 'The Skeptical Environmentalist'19. THE EXTINCTION CRISIS Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's badly introducing my podcast? Sophie's ashamed of me. I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards. The podcast where every week we talk about a different, terrible person and exhaustive detail. And I come up with an introduction that's either embarrassingly bad, entertainingly bad, or just plain lame. And today it was the latter.

Sophie agrees with that. My guest today, Eric Lamper, Eric. Hello, sir. How are you doing today? I'm doing really good, thank you. I'm actually very excited about this, because I don't often get thrown into a podcast without any prior knowledge of what's going to happen. Well, that's the way we like to do it here.

We like our guests or our subjects to be a mystery. The guests were a mystery. That would be very a different podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That would be Robert Evans invites people in off the street. I also like that you've got a machete on the table. Just to let me know who is boss here. Well, now, you know, this is a very democratic machete.

Anybody can use the machete for any purpose. If you feel the need to hit something, I have it on good authority that all of the equipment in here can be hit with the machete. Is that correct, Sophie? No. We're allowed to damage all the equipment, all the walls, the windows, the poison room. Absolutely not.

Well, technically, it can get hit. It can be. It is possible. I mean, theoretically speaking. This is a big machete. He's right. I think you want to hit something. It'd probably be throwned upon.

I'll tell you what, I don't want my fingerprints on there. I don't know you well enough to know what you're going to do with that machete afterwards. I had very different plans. What a smart man, though. I had very different plans for what to do with the machete before you said that. Well, I don't know who to guess to joke about murdering. Damn, that would have been a great time to joke about. A good old murder.

Yeah, a good old fashioned murder. Speaking of good old fashioned murder, today we're talking about newfangled kinds of murder. The kind of murder where you just talk to people and write bad books and it leads to unspeakable human suffering and possibly millions of deaths. Wow. Isn't that a cool thing to talk about? That's one hell of a murder. Yeah, it is, it is.

The guy that we're talking about today, the actual death toll from his work can't quite be quantified yet, but I think one of these days he'll be recognized as real piece of shit. I'm going to start with a little bit of a winding introduction, so I hope you'll forgive me for that, Eric. When I was 16 years old, Michael Crichton released State of Fear, the second to last novel he would publish in his lifetime. Now, I was a big fan of Crichton's work, ever since stumbling across the lost world in second or third grade. I dutifully devoured his canon.

State of Fear was decidedly different from his prior works, though. The plot was that a group of radical environmentalists using experimental technology were attempting to create a series of natural disasters in order to convince the public of the dangers of global warming. Because, of course, it wasn't real. Now, the book was filled with graphs and charts and quotes from actual scientific studies, which is not common for a sci-fi techno thriller. It included a 30-page bibliography, all of which was angled at convincing the reader

that global warming was not that big a deal, actually. Cool book, yeah. While a work of fiction, State of Fear also served as Crichton's manifesto against what he called the Politico Legal Media Complex, which had politicized science and unjustly scared people about the dangers of climate change. It was a fun book to read at age 16. Crichton's work was a massive success, as most of his books were, because the man did know how to write a crowd-pleasing thriller, even if it was a crazy piece of anti-climate

change propaganda. It received widespread praise from conservatives. Senator Jim Imhoff declared it required reading for the Senate Committee on Environmental and Public Works. He called on Crichton to testify before Senate Committee in 2005. Oh, shit. Yeah, if you want a real nutshell encapsulation of how fucked American politics has always been, the Senate called on a science fiction, the author of Jurassic Park, to testify on

climate change. Yeah, trust the guy that blends frogs with dinosaur DNA. Have they not seen Jurassic Park, Jurassic Park 2, 3, Jurassic World? It's bound to lead to disaster. Yeah, exactly. How can they trust him? It's like if there was a clown-focused terrorist group, and you called Stephen King to speak to the Senate about terrorism and stuff, because he wrote it.

But I guess King, though, it would be interesting to get into his mind. I'd love to have him in the CIA or FBI table. Yeah, I do feel like King would actually have some insight into the mind of a terrorist. Right? Yeah. Einstein says the true sign of intelligence is not knowledge, but imagination. And potentially, maybe that's why Crichton is trusted. He was not a dumb man, although like he had a very specific kind of intelligence.

So Michael Crichton, a lot of people don't know this, was a trained doctor. Yeah, he worked on ER. He created ER. Oh, he created it? Yeah, he's the creator of ER. And he was a medical student. He got his MD and then kind of pissed off the college he got his MD at, because he then didn't work as a doctor and went on to become a science fiction author and apparently just

got the MD so that he could like write good science fiction about medical stuff like terminal strain or whatever that book was. But yeah, so he's not a dumb man, but he has, this is the kind of problem you come up with a lot, especially in the global warming debate, people who are not dumb, but have a very specific kind of education and intelligence and then assume that they understand the climate science. That's like, yeah, that's what this episode's really about. So yeah, Crichton was called upon to testify before the Senate Committee on Environmental and Public Works in 2005.

In 2006, the AAPG awarded Michael its Journalism Award, which sounds impressive until you learn that the AAPG is the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, famed unbiased source on climate journalism. Actual climate scientists, of course, did not like state of fear. All of the people who authored studies that Crichton used to prove his points even spoke up to complain that he'd completely misinterpreted or outright misrepresented their research. Peter Doran, author of a nature paper on cooling in the Antarctic, echoed the concerns of many when he complained, our results have been misused as evidence against global warming.

This is a famous study that's cited by anti-climate change people at how like there's ice and like one of the poles is increasing and they're like, look, look at these ice sheets are actually getting bigger. So it's like, well, no, but the other one is getting smaller and the total amount of ice lost from the poles does not over like doesn't doesn't like balance. They don't balance out. We're net down a shitload of ice. Thank you, Sophie.

Sophie's correcting my mic placement because I'm here in the office this time and she gets to micromanage me. By the way, I love your tattoo. Ouch. I was just saying, I really like your tattoo. Oh, thank you. Is it a shattering Greek pillar? That's a shattering fascist from a, well, there's it's from a couple of places.

The Roman Empire is where, but they also, there's, there's big bronze ones up on Congress. All right. Oh yeah. Of course. Here is the symbol. Yeah. Sorry, Sophie. I didn't mean that.

I'm just going to go cry. I've heard Sophie. Do you want to hit something with the machete? I wouldn't hand that to me right now. Well, I'm just trying to make your podcast better. Well, Sophie, I think I want everyone to hear every single word that you say, Robin. Now you've shamed me. And now I feel bad.

Great. Continue your podcast. I'm once again the bastard of my podcast, which is. It takes one to know one though. You have to dive into the character to truly understand the complexities of bastardry. As Nietzsche said, if you stare into the abyss long enough, eventually you hurt your bosses' feelings. Right.

Nietzsche was a very poetic man. Yeah. He was a great podcaster. A little bit of a very anti-Semitic. Really. Yeah. He was a different time. Podcasting wasn't as evolved in art form.

Didn't even know how to record things. Anyway, I should continue with the episode. So Peter Durant, author of that nature paper on cooling in the Arctic, complained that yeah, Creighton had misinterpreted his results and misused them as evidence against global warming. The American Geophysical Union, which includes more than 50,000 scientists, stated unequitically that state of fear, quote, changed public perception of scientists, especially researchers and global warming towards suspicion and hostility.

This is a big book, it's like number one on the charts for quite a while. It was like a very popular release that had a real negative impact on global warming. And this is the place where I admit, shamefully, that young Republican Robert Evans found this book deeply compelling. Of course, even then, I was a bit too savvy to take the words of a science fiction author as the end of the argument against vast scientific consensus. So I started going through the bibliography, and while I was doing that, I came upon the one work that Michael seemed to hold in the highest regard, a book called The Skeptical

Environmentalist by Bjorn Lumborg. Have you ever heard of Bjorn motherfucking Lumborg? No, but I'm guessing he's Scandinavian. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think Danish. Right. Yeah, so there's a couple of versions of the Bjorn Lumborg story that you'll hear. I'm going to read one paragraph that's sort of like how he's generally introduced when you read a news article about this guy.

A former member of Greenpeace, a self-described leftist, a backpacking outdoorsman and a vegetarian, Lumborg in 1997 was paging through a copy of Wired Magazine in a bookstore in San Francisco. He happened across an interview with Julian Simon, a University of Maryland economist known for his optimistic prediction that population growth was unlikely to exhaust the planet's resources. Later that year, an intrigued Lumborg set about in Denmark with 10 of his brightest students to examine Simon's claims. Expecting to prove Simon wrong, Lumborg and his students were surprised to find that many

of the economist's predictions about the state of the environment were on the mark. His discovery led Lumborg to pin a few op-eds for a center-left Danish newspaper and eventually the publication in Denmark of the first edition of The Skeptical Environmentalist. Now the book was essentially a thoroughly argued case against the scientific consensus on global warming. Lumborg pointed out what he called a number of inconsistencies that he claimed to have uncovered between the hard scientific data and the party line of climate scientists and environmental activists.

Lumborg would use what looked to my 16-year-old Brian like compelling scientific data to argue his points. Among other things, Lumborg argued. Number one, species are not going extinct at a weirdly high rate. Number two, the world is not losing ice, and thus the seas are in no real danger of rising. Number three, global temperatures aren't increasing in any worrying way. And number four, there's more trees than ever, so what are environmentalists worried about? It sounds silly like talking about now in 2019, but in 2001 it was a different media

ecosystem, like the fact that the world was shitting its climactic pants was not quite as obvious to everybody. But the whole climate change debate has been around for quite a long time, hasn't it? Eighties? At least the eighties, right? Oh yeah, and really even before that, Murray Bookchin, who is a philosopher I'm a fan of, kind of an anarchist political thinker in the 1960s, wrote a lengthy series of essays talking about how carbon emissions and fossil fuels were going to lead to massive climate

catastrophe unless we adopted like vastly radically different ways of living that were like not compatible with kind of the consumptive capitalist system that we existed in currently. That's 1965, he's writing this stuff, very clearly later. So yeah, people knew about this for decades. It's just that nobody took it seriously until we had what, three category five hurricanes hit the US east coast in the course of like a year. But even that doesn't seem to be enough evidence for people. Well, I find fascinating and like there's an element of me that sort of not sympathizes,

but there's an, until you experience something, you can't actually know anything's real, right? And so when people say, oh, you know, it's all melting the ice and the poles and stuff until they actually visibly see it, they can't fully understand the complexities of it. So it's that, Christopher Nolan mentions it in Inception about how like once a seed is planted in your head, it's very hard to sort of unroot. Yeah. And if you don't have trust in your government, then why would you trust that they say that the climate is being destroyed?

And I'm just talking to here, like, because obviously the climate is changing drastically. All you need to do is rub your hands together and you understand the friction causes heat. And the more people there are on the planet, the more cars there are, the more food there needs to be grown, all of that. It is logical, but I am trying to understand why people don't believe. You know, there's a lot of reasons. I think a lot of it comes down to people like Lumborg because there's this kind of war that really started in the 90s, the late 90s against scientific consensus.

There was a time when if scientists in nature came out with a study saying like, we got a big fucking problem, the idea that you'd have a bunch of people just rejected out of hand because they believe there's a conspiracy by China to convince people global warming is real. That would sound absurd to people. And now the president has essentially spread that same line. Like, it's, this is a lot of this is like where we are right now is the culmination of a process that Lumborg was a major part in starting this, this war against kind of

an understate, a shared understanding of reality. And part of the problem is that this issue was so politicized and it's like, I don't think Al Gore was wrong in making it like a key cornerstone of like his presidential campaign and just like his personal activism, but the fact that Gore was associated with Clinton and that Republican, having grown up in a Republican home, I can tell you the kind of hatred of the Clintons that existed in the late 90s and in 2000 was beyond rational. It was, it was a kind of mania that overtook the conservative right and that is still very much present and prevalent.

And so because Al Gore, who was connected to the Clintons was making this point, it had to be fake. And so that was a big driver of all of this. So there's a lot of this that's tied together. It's the end of a process in which kind of at the apex point of the process, nobody believes anything. There's no sort of authority beyond the one guy that you like if you're that sort of person or whatever pundits you trust.

And yeah, it's, it's a real problem. Yeah. It's interesting. I also wonder though, if all the people that are pushing the climate change as a hoax thing generally are quite wealthy, well, and they won't be affected by it. Ultimately, ultimately, you know, the world and the humanity will survive, right? Now there may be millions, billions of death caused because of climate change, but ultimately humanity will survive.

And I think the very rich will always be good. They could just move somewhere else. Yeah. Somewhere that's going to go from having brutal winters to being like a Los Angeles when Los Angeles burns down. So ultimately they didn't give a shit. Well, yeah. Yeah.

That's actually kind of where this is headed a little bit. Right. Yeah. Apologies if I ruin that. No, no, no. This is, this is what the podcast is for. So the unavoidable conclusion from reading Lomborg's book and taking it seriously was that everything was more or less hunky dory with the climate.

Now Bjorn did not deny that there were some environmental problems he didn't even come out and deny that human beings were changing the climate. But his argument was that all of the issues we were having were things that could be solved by better conservation and modest infrastructure investments. Nobody needed to say stop driving cars or stop burning coal or stop fracking gas. The people telling us to do all that were just fear mongers. That's Bjorn Lomborg's line. Now 16 year old Robert Evans took Lomborg's book apart and used many bits arguments for

a series of debates in his speech and debate class. And then he grew up and entered the real world and stopped being a young Republican. Somewhere between reading the work of actual climate scientists, which Lomborg is not, and living through four of the hottest years on record, he came around on the whole climate change thing. But I was not the only person fooled by Bjorn Lomborg. The median narrative around him was just too good for bunches of overly credulous journalists to not flock to him.

One example of this was a 2001 New York Times profile released right before the publication of the English translation of The Skeptical Environmentalist. The title, Scientist at Work. From an unlikely corner, eco-optimism. That's nice, eco-optimism. Quote, strange to say, the author of this happy thesis is not a steely-eyed economist at a conservative think tank but a vegetarian backpack-toting academic who was a member of Greenpeace for four years.

He is Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, a 36 year old political scientist and professor of statistics at the University of Arhos in Denmark. Now the article went into loving detail about how Lomborg had been converted from environmental apocalypticism by reading the work of Dr. Julian Simon, who's that doctor we talked about a little earlier. Now, Simon is famous for having some very public arguments with a guy named Dr. Paul Erlich over resource scarcity. Erlich was kind of a doomsayer.

He wrote a book about how human population was going to reach an apocalyptic level and cause massive resource scarcity. And his predictions turned out to be largely untrue, and Simon actually made a bet with him about they picked five resources and Erlich bet that they would all increase in cost over the next couple of decades, and Simon bet that they would decrease, and Simon wound up being right. Can I ask, do you think that people are necessarily worried about the whole climate change thing as an actual doomsday possibility because they've gone through so many doomsday possibilities?

So we've had the millennium bug. You guys have had the nuclear threats from Russia. We are constantly barraged by these end-of-the-world scenarios that never usually happen. That when we are presented with one that's actually in front of us happening live in front of our eyes, that most people can just brush it aside because they've experienced other doomsday scenarios that have actually just sort of gone by in the wind. I absolutely think that kind of, particularly some of the Hollywood, like the day after tomorrow shit, that's actually really hurt the cause of getting people to take this seriously.

Because the problem is not that the world is going to end. Human beings are very adaptable. The majority of us will find a way to survive no matter what happens to the climate, like even if a fucking asteroid hits. I have no doubt that a lot of people will figure out how to make that shit work because we're cunning little bastards. The problem is that like, it's not an apocalypse thing, it's like, what do we want the world to be?

What do we want the world to be for our kids, for our grandkids? Do we want it to be the sunracked nightmare hellscape where people knife fight to death over jugs of water? A lot of people do, that's another scary thing. I am hoarding water and knives, but that's very little to do with the podcasting, Machete. It is weird how a lot of people hate being by themselves, which means that they always have like bad voices in their heads. And if they have bad voices in their heads, they don't really care about other people.

And so the idea of an apocalyptic scenario where their life gets twist turned upside down is actually welcoming because most people's lives are kind of difficult and challenging. Well if I can get into like my own fringe political beliefs on this, I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that there are some very dehumanizing aspects to the kind of capitalism that we enjoy in the United States and a lot of people's lives are incredibly difficult and there's very little hope that things will lighten up or that they'll be able to retire. There's like no light at the end of the tunnel, there's just a series of distractions.

And so the ideal that it might all come tumbling down and you would get to be king of the wasteland and not have to clock in at work at target the next morning, that is very attractive to a chunk of the population, especially the people who believe that they would thrive in that environment. Yeah, that's an important key, I think, is that they would believe they would thrive when the reality is two days in the woods. Now, Eric, speaking of the dehumanizing realities of modern American consumerist capitalism, it's time for an ad plug!

Is this a good one, Sophie? I like that one. It's pleasant. Yeah, nailing it, product! During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations, and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. But the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good-bad-ass way, he's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then, for sure, he was trying to get it to happen.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

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I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Boy, a lot happened in that break. Number one, I grabbed my throwing bagels.

Oh yeah? I don't know if you're aware of this, but I throw bagels on the show. It's a much in a kind of a substitute to a machete, I think. Well, for your guests. I actually plan to combine the two. So here's what I'd like to do when we hit a point of maximum rage in this episode. Or perhaps at the end of it, I'm going to throw these bagels and I want you to slice them out of the air like a modern samurai with the Fisker's machete.

You want to do that? All right. Sophie says that it's approved by everyone at corporate, so we're good to go. I also have to say, I just tried the Pear Editions Sugar Free Red Bull. I hate Red Bull as a general rule. I hate the company, the ad campaign. This is delightful. The Pear version is really tasty.

I hate that it's so good, but it's fantastic. Oh, nice. And I like that you gave it a little like, you are a commercial now. Thank you. You've become America. God damn it. It happens every time I come back to Los Angeles. When can I show him a photo of this Fokker?

Yeah, show him Young Bjorn Lumborg, so you can see how this guy. Oh, this is Bjorn. Okay, because I was going to say Michael's all right. Michael's an all right face. No, no, he's fine. So this is Young Bjorn Lumborg. So for anyone listening, he looks like Hitler's wet dream. He kind of looks like what Aaron Carter would look like if he didn't do drugs in 20 years.

You know, this little blue-eyed blonde hair and it works for him. But how does he look now? Well, we'll talk about that in a little bit. I want to get to where this guy winds up at, but not great, right? Now, where the hell is he? Is he a personification of what's going on inside his mind? Yeah, kind of, actually. It's a personification of what's happened to his arguments over the years, which I think

happens. I mean, look at Steve Bannon. If Steve Bannon, if he looks healthy, if he looked like Hercules and was like, just you know, I hate these types of people, I'd be like, I'm going to listen to that guy. He's a beautiful man. He must be healthy both physically and therefore mentally. But Steve is full of like red alert type skin, you know, where like clearly skirmishes have happened on this face.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's a war between his acne and his cirrhosis and like it's a vicious battle. Oh, poor Steve. No, don't for Steve Bannon. You know what? It doesn't get said enough.

Poor Steve Bannon. Oh, Steve B. So, yeah. Lumborg, we talked about Julie and Simon, the guy who got into that argument with Paul Ehrlich and he's like a frequently quoted scientist by people who want to deny climate change because one of the things that they'll always argue is that, well, back in the seventies and eighties, everybody was telling us there was going to be a population bomb, a population, a resource crisis and that didn't happen.

So clearly like this is the same thing and everybody's worried for nothing. And Simon is one of the apostles of, he was right about the population crisis and that is one of the things, whenever we're getting to talks about climate change and people bring up population as a problem, that's zero percent of the problem. The overall human population is not an issue. It's resource expenditure by people like us. It's not like, the issue is not that there's too many people being born in Sub-Saharan Africa or in India or in China, it's a little bit, but that's most, a lot of that's because

they're making stuff to be sold in Europe, in Europe, in the United States. It's not a population issue. It's the types of resources being consumed and also like more than anything related to the, yeah, it's more an issue of billionaires and millionaires and upper middle class people and the kind of resources they spend like celebrities flying their private jets from one airport in LA to the other to skip midtown traffic, which happens way more often than you would expect. Oh really?

Oh, you can track their planes. Yeah, it's more that than it is like, oh, look at all these people and yeah, that's part of like what Steve Bannon actually, that's one of the racist arguments that he'll make about like, well, if you're really concerned, we should like be concerned about all these population problems going. So it's like this weird thing on the right where they'll both point to Paul Erlich and his fears of a population bomb to be like, look, climate change isn't real because they were wrong about overpopulation.

And they'll also complain that like all these hordes of poor non-white people from like the global South are going to like are using up the world's resources when that's not at all the case. Like it's this double-edged sword of racism and also not doing anything about the core problems of climate change. It's very frustrating. I do wonder with these scientists who say, you know, they're opposing climate change and stuff.

I do wonder sometimes if that's just good money. It is with Lumborg. I'm not going to say it. Simon died, I think, before the debate really took off. He was right about the population stuff. So I don't want to lump him in with Lumborg, but Lumborg sees himself as that kind of figure. So Simon gains a lot of renown for being right about the fact that like there was alarmism

around the global population. And Lumborg painted himself as that kind of guy, and he would bring this story up specifically when he did news interviews so that people would, conservatives in particular, would see him as like, oh, this is the next iteration of that kind of scientist. This is the clear-eyed Galileo-type contrarian scientist who sees the reality through the political bullshit of climate change and understands that it's not really a problem we can keep fracking. Like that's how he's painting himself, so it's important to understand that.

So one of the reasons that Lumborg was so convincing, particularly to journalists who again didn't know anything about science, like the guys at the New York Times wrote this profile piece, is that his book had a shitload of citations in it. In many of the articles about Lumborg in the early 2000s, you would read quotes like this one from The Times. Dr. Lumborg has presented his findings in The Skeptical Environmentalist, a book to be published in September by Cambridge University Press. The primary targets of the book, a substantial work of analysis with almost 3,000 footnotes

are statements made by environmental organizations like the World Watch Institute, the World Wildlife Fund, and Greenpeace. Virtually every one of these pieces you would find includes references and often multiple references to the fact that Lumborg's book had like 3,000 footnotes. So like that's part of the claim of like how, like this is a really seriously researched scholarly look at how many footnotes it has, like people would like, there's, you can find like videos and stuff of people like opening the book and like pointing out how thick the section of footnotes is, and like I did that when I was in school to point out like, look,

this guy's really like, look at how many fucking work-cited he has. That means it's like a real solid work of science. So you were once sort of on his side? Oh yeah, absolutely. I was raised very conservative, very Republican. I thought that George W. Bush was the best president since Ronald Reagan, who was the best president. And how long did it take you to sort of distance yourself from him?

I mean, as soon as I went to college and made friends who both were not white and also had not grown up middle class. So bear in mind like how challenging it had to take you to be from one place to another, and you're clearly smart and you clearly have resources where you want to read and stuff. Then we're asking the general populace to just switch off Netflix for an hour and maybe read an essay. Yeah. I would like read an essay that's dense and hard to understand and they might come across

stuff like research on how one arctic ice sheet is increasing in density and like you have to also ask them, no, no, don't stop just because you read one thing that doesn't seem like, like it actually takes understanding a lot of different things, like not just like what's happening with like ice sheets, but what's happening with like air currents and like weather patterns and like species like, well, yeah, they have to understand chaos theory. Yeah. In its most complex form, which is, and then you get to the situation where like you wind

up telling people, just look all the scientists agree about this, so just believe them. But then there's maybe if you need to know comp chaos theory, maybe should talk to Michael Crichton about it. It's frustrating. He didn't get that. Yeah. And Crichton lost world still a fine book, but God damn it, dude. So yeah, journalists who liked Lumborg would point out like all of those fucking footnotes.

Like that was one of the biggest arguments to like why the skeptical environmentalist was a credible book. And most people who looked at all those footnotes assumed that his arguments were actually supported by the research included therein. Spoilers, it was not. As with Crichton, several of the scientists cited in Lumborg's book spoke out to warn that he had misinterpreted their work. A bevy of experts took to the field to complain that the skeptical environmentalists was nothing

but a pack of deadly lies. For one example of how dumb this shit is, I'd like to quote an article written by Dr. E. O. Wilson, a Harvard professor, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and an actual biologist. He's commenting on Lumborg's claims that fears of mass extinction brought on by climate change are bogus. Using bad data and lies, Lumborg estimated a species loss worldwide of just 0.7% over the next 50 years, 0.014% per year. Now Dr. Wilson, who's an actual biologist again and not a fucking statistician and economist

like Lumborg, wrote this. Before humans existed, the species extinction rate was very roughly one species per million species per year, 0.0001%. Estimates for current species extinction rates range from 100 to 10,000 times that, but mostly hover close to the 1,000 times pre-human levels, 0.1% per year, with the rate projected to rise and very likely sharply. Wilson goes on to note. Based on the work of Stuart Pym of Columbia University's Center for Environmental Research

and Conservation, anywhere from one to several bird species go extinct annually out of 10,000 known species. Hence say, 0.01 to 0.03% of all living bird species are extinguished per year. But birds are unusual in that threatens bird species receive an extraordinary amount of human intervention. The real figure of observed extinctions would be much higher, very likely 10 per year, 0.1% or more, if it were not for their heroic efforts to save species on the brink of extinction. That article, and that quote from Dr. Wilson, came from 2001.

But time has proved Dr. Wilson right, and Dr. Lumborg wrong. The Center for Biological Diversity notes, we're currently experiencing the worst spate of species die off since the loss of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Although extinction is a natural phenomenon, it occurs at a natural background rate of about one to five species per year. Scientists estimate we are now losing species at up to a thousand times the background rate with literally dozens going extinct every day. It could be a scary future indeed, with as many as 30 to 50% of all species possibly heading

towards extinction by mid-century. So Lumborg says 0.7% of all species by mid-century. The reality is 30 to 50% based on current numbers. Even that, the 30 to 40, I think most people don't care, right? But what it seems like people don't understand is if you lose one animal, it snowballs and sort of triggers effect. You need to win the hearts of people in different ways. I learned, so there's this woman called Dr. Erica McAllister.

She works at the Natural History Museum and she is a fly expert. And I did an interview with her about flies. And there is one fly that creates chocolate, pollinates chocolate. And because of global warming, we're actually losing that fly, which means that potentially we could lose chocolate. If you get to people in that way, I can see people protesting fast losing chocolate. If you can convince them it's real, like one of the problems is that like there's a lot of people who, when you tell them that we're losing species, we'll get angry and say, fuck

all those species. I want them dead. I'm going to drive the biggest, I'm going to modify my car to release more pollution so that it'll kill them faster because there's this big propaganda game that's been played in the US to make it look like the point at a couple of specific cases where like the Environmental Protection Act led to farmers losing access to pieces of their land to preserve like wetlands and keep a species of frog alive. And it like led to people murdering some of those species, like as an act of protest against

what they saw as government overreach. It's this, there's this hateful and utterly lunatic chunk of the right that has been trained to respond to any talk of global warming with just like violent rage, which is why you'll see people threatening to kill Greta Thunberg, that the young environmental activist. It's amazing to watch almost, I mean I'm obviously really sad for her and I almost kind of fear what could happen to her. There's a piece of me that's like as fucked up as it is and I'm horribly sorry that she is going through this and very proud of her for being an activist.

It's good that it's been made this obvious that there's this young girl just saying, I want the world to be habitable by current, like when I'm an adult, I want to be able to like enjoy wetlands and like glaciers, like I want to be able to live in the kind of world that y'all grew up in. And every like this chunk of the populace threatening to murder her. And like, like, like that we see this, this kind of hate unleashed that like it really is that irrational. It really has been.

Oh, hate is irrational. Yeah. Hate and fear is irrational. And Lumborg is ground zero for spinning that up. Right. Like he's a part of this convincing everybody. Like that was the first stage was convincing them, there's this conspiracy. And he didn't say it was a conspiracy.

He just said that like, look, there's this, the reality, if you look at the real data, it's actually not that bad on all these groups are just trying to scare you. Like there's this conspiracy of fear. Then that's like the whole idea behind Crichton's book is that there's a literal conspiracy to like make you believe this is happening when it's not. And that's the, that's step one to getting and the end stage of this like long. And I don't even think it was really a plan, but the natural conclusion of the start of this where you just gave everyone to distrust this information, believe they're being lied

to is when this young woman steps up, people are just like screaming, spittle, flecked, hatred at this, this girl for daring to be like, I'd like it if there were ice in the future. Yeah. Uh, it's pretty scary. The people, the people that are out there. Yeah. And Lumborg is an important guy to understand, to know how we got from like where we used

to be as a species about like kind of basic scientific consensus and where we are right now, particularly in the United States. Right. But, but also the thing is I do try and understand people that don't understand, right? And if most people, well, actually all people can only experience life through their own eyes, right? And if people are also not curious, because the majority of people are not curious, which is a shame.

They're curiously focused, they're curious about whatever they're into, they're not curious about. But even now some people just aren't, right? They just sort of float around, just sort of colliding into things and just life takes them in a different path and they almost have no control in where they're going. And most people just haven't got that curiosity to read more than one clickbait article. And so it's very so, it's so easy to be brainwashed into thinking that, yeah, what if it is a conspiracy?

Because all the proof I have is it's getting hotter, but because the news tells me it's getting hotter. How do I know? Look at this nicely dressed Danish man with beautiful blonde hair, holding up a book with like 3000 citations, telling me not to worry. All right. Well, I, I'm going to go back to worrying about like, you know, the fact that my kid doesn't have healthcare or whatever, like I have other shit to deal with.

Yeah. So yeah, the, it turns out that Lomborg also speaking of that bibliography puffed it up to a kind of ridiculous extent by including a lot of sources that were not rigorously researched scientific studies. So like the way that it was framed is like, this is all the scientific citations. It wasn't all scientific citations. I'm going to read a quote from an article by Matt Nisbet, a professor of communication and a writer with a skeptical inquirer.

He uncritically and selectively cites literature, much of it non peer reviewed and misinterprets or misunderstands the previously published scientific research. Several scientists observed that most of Lomborg's 3000 citations are to media articles and secondary sources. Lomborg's research is conceptually flawed. He ignores ecology and connections among environmental problems, taking instead a human centered approach. In several cases, he uses statistical measures that are not valid indicators of the problems

he reports are improving. On the topic of biodiversity, EO Wilson and a team of viewers find that Lomborg's work is strikingly at odds with what every expert in the field has stated. The review appearing in nature goes broader and includes that the skeptical environmentalist is a hastily prepared book on complex scientific issues, which disagrees with broad scientific consensus using arguments too often supported by news sources rather than by peer reviewed publications. So he picks news sources where people have misinterpreted scientific studies, then uses

those arguments in his book and then includes those citations to puff up his 3000 citation accounts that it seems like, because people think he's actually reading science and actually understands it. But of course he can't. One of the things you notice that's really frustrating that we're going to get to in a bit is how many different types of scientists it takes to debunk Lomborg's work, which points out that it's fundamentally absurd to assume that any statistician, any economist, period, anywhere in the world could write a competent book on climate change.

It's not possible because it requires so much different expertise from so many different fields to actually have a hope of understanding the whole scope of the problem and analyzing all this correctly, and Lomborg, that's not what he's good at. I'm sure he's fine enough at fucking economics, but this is not economics. Is there not artificial intelligent programs now to sort of create models of climate change and where it could possibly be going in the future? Well, that's just the chai comms trying to trick us. There is so much wrong with Bjorn Lomborg's book that I could literally write five or

six episodes just going through everything that's been debunked in it and not finish getting through everything Lomborg got wrong. And I'm not going to do that, because we all have better shit to do. And because a number of incredibly authoritative scientists have already gone through the trouble of doing line by line breakdowns of everything in the book, rather than just go over every single thing that Bjorn got wrong, I'm going to quote from the Union of Concerned Scientists. They invited a group of the world's leading experts on water resources, biodiversity, and climate change to review the skeptical environmentalist.

Quote, reviewing Dr. Lomborg's claims are Dr. Peter Gleek, an internationally recognized expert on the state of freshwater resources, Dr. Jerry Maulman, one of the most highly regarded atmospheric scientists and climate modelers, and top biologists and biodiversity experts, Drs. Edward O. Wilson, Thomas Lovejoy, Norman Myers, Jeffrey Harvry, and Stuart Pym. This is, again, that's, what are we at there? Seven doctors, seven different experts at the top of their fields, all reviewing this book.

Liars? Yeah, liars. And, of course, none of them are statisticians or economists. Quote, these separately written expert reviews, they all had them write separate things so that they weren't influencing each other, unequivocally demonstrate that on closer inspection, Lomborg's book is seriously flawed and fails to meet basic standards of credible scientific analysis. The authors note how Lomborg consistently misuses, misrepresents, or misinterprets data to greatly

underestimate rates of species extinctions, ignore evidence that billions of people lack access to clean water and sanitation, and minimize the extent and impacts of global warming due to the burning of fossil fuels and other human-caused emissions of heat-trapping gases. Time and time again, these experts find that Lomborg's assertions and analyses are marred by flawed logic, inappropriate use of statistics and hidden value judgments. He uncritically and selectively cites literature, often not peer-reviewed, that supports his assertions while ignoring or misinterpreting scientific evidence that does not. His consistently flawed use of scientific data is, in Peter Gleek's words, unexpected

and disturbing in a statistician. All this makes me think, you know what, maybe free speech isn't the right path for humanity. It's hard to read the story of Lomborg and not feel like we need to have a couple extra laws about when you, and I don't think free speech is a problem. I think it's that we too narrowly interpret the fire in a crowded theater rule. Nobody disagrees that like, yeah, if somebody's shouting, there's a fire and causes a stampede and someone dies. Yeah, of course that person should be criminally liable.

What happens when a guy does this? Why isn't he criminally liable for the impact? He knows what he's doing. Yeah, there should be more tests. You should just be allowed to have a book, I think. Speaking as a guy who's written a book, yeah, yes. You should just be allowed. You should have some basic knowledge, basic.

You should have some knowledge about what you're doing. It's frustrating. One of the difficulties with this is like, so many of these issues and the issues we have with getting people on board with a basic understanding of the consensus of climate change is that there's so many individual studies. If you just read the summary of the study, you could argue like, oh, this proves that climate change isn't a problem. Then if you actually go into what the scientists are saying, they're like, no, no, no, no, no.

This may seem like it's not a problem, but it actually plays into this problem and this problem and this problem. It's a part of this chain of events that leads to this thing that's exactly what scientists have been telling everybody for years. You're misinterpreting my research, but that doesn't matter because somebody just like waves. Look, this study says it's not a problem on Fox News, and then my parents are like, well, I guess we don't have to worry.

Right. Yeah. It's frustrating. You know what's not frustrating? Ice cream. Ice cream? And the ads for this podcast might be ice cream. Sophie, are we sponsored by ice cream?

I hope so. Let's hope that it's ice cream sponsoring the show and not another Coke Brothers ad. It might be another Coke Brothers ad. It's supposed to be. I hope it's a vaping ad and not a Coke Brothers ad. Same thing. No, it's not. Same thing.

I mean, technically vaping could reduce overall climate emissions if it really is killing people. So that's what I said on the Daily Zeit guys a couple of days ago. I said that I think that the NRA is actually the best thing America has currently in its fight against climate change. Every death leads to a fewer carbon footprint. I will say, if we really want to get down that road, the greatest ally the world has in fighting climate change is the tobacco industry.

Oh. I feel you, man, the best fight is climate change in itself, like it will kill a lot of people. It doesn't kill that many people. We've gotten too good at disaster recovery. Right. And this is how we get sponsors. Yes.

Sponsors like Philip Morris tobacco, solving climate change, 145-year-olds, lungs that had time. Was that a good ad plug, Sophie? Absolutely not. Products. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what?

They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. Because the FBI, sometimes, you've got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside this hearse was like a lot of guns.

He's a shark. And on the gun badass way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then, for sure, he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based

on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't

a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the

youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the

world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. So all of these debunkings we've gone through were public information, basically as soon as Bjorn Lumborg's book was out and serious people had time to read it. But none of the authoritative deconstructions of Lumborg's work seemed to matter. He kept right on making bank as the profit of, everything's fine and capitalism will

save us all from the climate catastrophe capitalism created. His website, Bjorn Lumborg, Get The Facts Straight, includes a short selection of the many awards he received. One of the 100 Top Global Thinkers, Foreign Policy 2011, Thought Leader, Bloomberg Summit 2011, One of the 100 Top Global Thinkers, Foreign Policy 2010, One of the World's 75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century, Esquire 2008, One of the 50 People Who Could Save the Planet, UK Guardian 2008, One of the Top 100 Public Intellectuals, Foreign Policy and Prospect Magazine 2008, One of the Top 100 Public Intellectuals, Foreign Policy

and Prospect Magazine 2005, One of the World's Most 100 Influential People, Time Magazine 2004. Wow. Wow, right? Isn't that fucked up? The fuck, Guardian? It's also not surprising though, because these people making those lists are probably interns.

Ultimately, the truth is that the people making lists aren't educated in that field. I think it's a mix of those and editors who come from a wealthy background, because a lot of news editors do, and who have friends in all these industries and stuff, and they're like, ah, this is the guy telling us it's fine. Right. Yeah. I think that's a chunk of it, especially for foreign policy in Esquire. Now, you know when you do your behind the bastard podcast?

Yeah. Do you have a lot of anger just boiling through your veins? Yeah. I go shooting about once a week. I have a lot of different machetes that I hit stuff with. I work out about 90 minutes a day. Yeah. Very nice.

Yeah. I wonder how just hearing all of that out, how you just stay zen. I do not stay zen. Right. I do a lot of drugs. It does help. Yeah. To be honest, speaking of the NRA, shooting is probably the best cathartic thing for dealing

with that kind of rage. I have to say. I'm very much sort of an anti-gun person, but at the same time, I don't want to judge people, especially once I've, until I've experienced it and I did get to a shooting range and it's fun. Whether or not you think they should all be banned, it's objectively fun. Oh, it's very fun. Yeah.

Yeah. That has nothing to do with what the laws should be. Right. Right. Right. Now, if you'd noticed from all of those Top Thinker awards, they all came out at latest in 2011 and a majority of them were from 2010 or earlier. It's weird that Lomborg seems to be considered a Top Thinker, much less often in these days

of category five hurricanes and apocalyptic mudslides in the Midwest and the hottest years ever on record in California's largest wildfires. Like, weird. Yeah. Because I guess what people's thought behind it is that things like that have always happened. So I know that, for example, in the UK, during the Roman times, there were melons. You can grow melons and then in Charles Dickens' times, in one of his books, I think it was David Copperfield, the Thames was frozen over, which is the river that runs through London,

which I've never seen it frozen. It was so frozen, they could build bonfires on it. So it's wild. So I understand that that, you know, time it does change all the time. Yeah. But I think people don't understand that it's sort of changing at a rate. I think part of Lumborg's falling from grace is that people have started to, like California has always had wildfires.

We've never had Malibu burned down. Like I think that was a wake up call to a chunk of people. I think that, like, especially in Florida and stuff, part of why it's gotten harder and why a lot of people on the right no longer say climate change isn't happening, they'll say that either humans aren't behind it or that, you know, we'll get to this, the line Lumborg is pushing down. It's like, oh no, it's absolutely happening. It's just what everyone says we should do, cut emissions and stuff.

What's wrong? And there's other things that we should do, but like you can't even like the arch conservatives living on the Florida coast, one of the most conservative, like you can't, you can't have those kinds of hurricanes hit as regularly as they are and be like, nothing's changing. It's at this point, it's like, oh wow, we've had three once in a century storms in like a couple of years, like maybe there's a problem. So now the debate has changed, like, well, what do we do about the problem and stuff? And Lumborg has tried to pivot on that.

He has been less successful, which again, we'll get to. But it's in the first few years after the skeptical environmentalist was published by the Oxford University Press in 2001, which fucking Oxford University Press, Lumborg was everywhere. He was on 2020. He was on Newsnight, 60 Minutes, The Late Show, Larry King, and he made regular appearances on CNN, MSNBC, and of course, Fox News. All of these sources accepted Lumborg as an expert, while the real expert shouted desperately that he was as shit filled as a poop factory.

You proud of that one, Sophie? Thank you. I think one hint as to why this happened is included inside that first Fawning New York Times article from 2001. Dr. Lumborg also chides, and this is him talking about like what he calls the litany, which is the term he used for like the doom and gloom, like stuff being said about climate change in the early 2000s. Dr. Lumborg also chides journalists, saying they uncritically spread the litany, and he

accuses the public of an unfounded readiness to believe the worst. The litany has pervaded the debate so deeply and so long, Dr. Lumborg writes, that blatantly false claims can be made again and again without any references and yet still be believed. This is the fault not of academic environmental research, which is balanced and competent, he says, but rather of the communication of environmental knowledge which taps deeply into our doomsday beliefs. And I think if you completely reverse everything that he just said, that is an accurate explanation for Lumborg's success.

The problem is not that journalists uncritically spread the gospel of climate change, the problem is that journalists uncritically accept people claiming to be experts and will write glowing articles about them if they just have a 3,000, you know, entry work cited page in their bibliographies. People don't want to buy into doomsday beliefs, not really. Most people want to believe that everything is going to be fine and they don't need to worry about a problem. So we'll happily listen to a handsome European who misreads real studies to show us that everything is fine.

And I think Lumborg's ability to tap into all of these things is why he's been successful, or at least why he was. Do you think that, I like sort of asking you questions, you're very smart and I want to see what comes out of your face. Do you think that the world is sort of experiencing a mass bystander effect? Yeah, always. It's like, always. Yeah.

They are just constantly just going, Oh, well, someone else will sort that out. Yeah. I think we always are. And I think it's like a natural consequence of, I think like one of the, I'm on record of saying like one of the worst things that ever happened is 24 hour television news. It's might be what destroys us as a species. Like if there is a big apocalyptic nuclear war or something, I think the core of it will lie in the 24 hour news cycle.

One way or the other, because it's just this machine that exists to exhaust people's ability to give a fuck and to productively deal with problems. And I think it's a big part of like why you have this kind of decision fatigue and this assumption that like somebody else will handle it, which is like, what a lot of people on the right will point to now that we think you can't completely deny climate change. So they'll say, well, scientists are going to figure out a solution. Like they'll figure out a way to fix the whole problem. Yeah.

As well. Yeah. They sure will. There won't be consequences. Hey, as a French person, I really miss beheading people. You know, honestly, I really think we should bring that back. You know what I think the actual solution would be? Like the worst thing you could do to the people who are actually responsible for most of this

is if you were to take away like the oil and gas executives, the people at like, what's the company? Starts with an E. Enron? No, no, no. Well, yeah, those guys too. The people at like these oil and gas companies who like knew back in like at least the 70s and stuff.

Yeah. Climate change was going to be a problem. Like the cigarette companies covered up evidence that it was going to be an issue so they can maintain their profits. I think you take all of those people's money. I think you take all of their family money and you lock them and anyone who profited from the family business into making no more than the like median American salary and make them live in a normal apartment and make them just be a normal person and you have that

enforced upon them so that they never will ever be able to get access to a yacht to anything like that. But on the way there though, they have to do the Cersei Lannister style of walking shame. I'm okay with a little bit of that. Yeah. With a bell and they have to walk around naked, Mitch McConnell naked walking around the streets of Washington DC with his big frog face, just yeah. Shame.

Shame. Shame. Shame on this. That makes him into, that gives him the opportunity to behave as a victim. If Mitch McConnell has to work seven shifts a week at the Applebee's to make rent on his one bedroom apartment and then he's got like number one, he's got to like depend on all these people and they have to depend on, he has no privileged position. But also like all these people are like, hey Mitch, it's 115 today.

Thanks asshole. I do think that like the worst thing you could do to a lot of these people. I think there's folks like your Paul's Manafort out there who need to be locked up because they're just too dangerous. But I think most of these people need to be locked away from the things that are most valuable to them, which is wealth and influence. And I think that will hurt more than any guillotine ever could.

Although I get the impulse. I don't know, it's just a restaurant chain. I like Applebee's. I didn't say it's bad. I don't want them, like. No, I want them at a shitty restaurant. Yeah, I don't want the people, I don't want to starve members of Applebee's

to have to deal with Mitch McConnell. I want to be able to go to an Applebee's and get problematically drunk off of their terrible cocktails and make Mitch McConnell serve me any- Terrible cocktails? Why are you shitting on Applebee's? Oh, you know what? We need to open a brand new Applebee's, right?

So all the staff members are- Mitch McCappelbee's. Mitch McConnell and Alex Jones, they're all just running. That'd be a great signal. Just an Applebee's staffed by the people who are largely behind our current era of post-truth. Yeah. Like nonsense.

That actually would be a great place to get, like I would never not be vomitingly drunk in that place. Like I would be a problem to that. That would be, oh man, it would finally be, like I try to be on good behavior when I get really drunk at like restaurants and stuff because I don't want to cause a problem for like the wait staff or something

because they're working people. But if Mitch McConnell was serving my table, I would make it my business to puke on it. Can I make a suggestion? Yes. So according to cheatsheet.com, the most hated restaurant in fast food chain in America is Red Robin.

And I think it's a great place for Mitch McConnell. Mitch McConnell at a goddamn Red Robin or a- Texas Roadhouse. Hey, hey, hey, hey. Okay, fair. I've not had the privilege yet of enjoying an Applebee's or a Red Robin. Oh man.

Applebee's is great. That's not about where all you- Applebee's is. Ooh, what if he's at a waffle house? Everybody's thrown up at a waffle house. Yeah, but they don't serve liquor. Like a waffle, I have been, I actually have never been sober in a waffle house.

But you, I want to go to a place where I could get, I want Mitch McConnell to hand me like a gigantic Margarita that's like a leader in length. And I want to, as he's handing it to me, take a sip from it while it's still in his hands and then vomit directly onto him. But now you can bring me another. But now you're victimizing him.

That's fine. I would rather shame him. That kind of victimizing is fine. That kind of victimizing is fine. I'm throwing it out there. What about a Dave and Buster's? Cause people also bring their screaming children there to play. Oh, that would be, or a Chuck E. Cheese.

Or a Chuck E. Cheese. I can't suggest Chuck E. Cheese as my friendship with Jamie Loftus is very important, but. Look, honest people can debate over which specific type of shaming would be most effective. Put him out of the red, Robin. All right, continue the podcast. Maybe have him circulate cause it would be fun

to have him like clean up after me at a Six Flags too. Cause I can fuck up a Six Flags. Or like a Burger King. I would really love to hear him say, would you like fries with that? These would all be very helpful. If we could just, if we could just establish like basic income and healthcare,

and then make it so that like our most unpleasant service jobs are all held by former Republican Congress people. Managed by the former people who used to do their jobs. Here's another question. A lot of these people, are they religious? In terms of like a lot of the American, South, Rich. They're religious in quotes. Right.

Because I do wonder like the real religious people, wouldn't they want to take care of their planet? You know, I've never understood that. Like the people that preach God's will and stuff. And then they're going, ah, it's God's will for me to be an asshole. And they're not taking care of the planet. That gets into a really complicated subject

of like theological debate. Cause there's a, there's a sizable chunk of American Christians in particular. It's not just the United States phenomenon, but it's big ear who believe that the apocalypse is preordained essentially. So this word, like why would you take care of this world? It's ending soon.

There's also a chunk of people like, who believe that like God gave us dominion over this planet. So we're supposed to use it and use it up and like use all the resources. And there's even people who will argue that like, God provides us with new resources when we use the old ones. And like, that's why we discovered all this,

this gas under the earth to frack. That was God being like, don't worry about those pesky Arabs holding all the oil here. Just suck it out of the earth and like, whatever problem. Yeah, there's a bunch of different frustrating things. And I think those people, once upon a time, you couldn't take them seriously, like in mainstream politics.

And what Lomborg provided was a chance for like kind of the more technocratic conservatives, like my parents who were like religious, but not really religious. They could look at this guy's arguments and be like, well, no, here's a smart educated scientist with a doctor in his name. And he's making, he's not saying like,

God's gonna take care of it. He's saying that like, you know, he's making what seemed like very logical arguments for why this isn't a problem or why what problems exist will be solved very simply without us changing our lifestyle or dealing with the problems and like a fundamental level of our society

and it's consumption of resources. So yeah, it's a- It's comfort that's killing humans actually, isn't it? Yeah, it always is. Yeah, it's just comfort. People are scared of change. Yeah, yeah, it's always comfort that's killing humans. From a literal point of view,

in terms of just the fact that we're eating stuff that's clogging our arteries and giving us heart attacks at a younger age up to like the fact that we'll ignore doom as it rules like leers down on our heads because we wanna go out to Applebee's and we don't wanna worry about climate change. I'm not saying Applebee's is bad.

Rad Robin, yes. You know what, I'm gonna go to an Applebee's after this. Not maybe not today, but I'm gonna- Maybe not today. I know that when I drive past one, I might stop just to experience it. You know, Applebee's is often a staple place for me to get wasted when I'm not at home

and I'm at like a roadside motel because you'll often run into an Applebee's next to a roadside motel and I have gotten drunk and many in Applebee's. And if Mitch McConnell were the one serving me, I would happily vomit into the pocket on his apron. That would be great. Especially if Paul Ryan came out with like the sawdust

that you used to soak up the vomit. And like, yeah, that would be really sweet. Now, back to Bjorn Lumborg. So another reason Lumborg was able to have such an outsized impact on the debate over climate change in the United States is the simple fact that misreading and misrepresenting a mix of actual scientific papers and news articles

is a lot easier than conducting authoritative research. The people who do conduct authoritative research are very busy. And when a guy like Bjorn comes along and shotguns out a book full of nonsense, they have to spend valuable time slowly debunking all of the many, many things he got wrong. I'm gonna quote here from something Dr. E. O. Wilson

wrote about the difficulty of combating this sort of misinformation. My greatest regret about the Lumborg scam is the extraordinary amount of scientific talent that has to be expended to combat it in the media. We will always have contrarians like Lumborg whose sallies are characterized by willful ignorance, selective quotations, disregard for communication

with genuine experts and destructive campaigning to attract the attention of the media rather than scientists. They are the parasitic load on scholars who earn success through the slow process of peer review and approval. The question is how much load should be tolerated before a response is necessary?

Lumborg is evidently over the threshold. And this is kind of what we were talking about. Like what do you do about these people in a perfectly sane world? Like I think that someone like Lumborg would face criminal charges for his misrepresentation of scientific fact for the same reason that like if you caught a diving instructor

telling kids that the safest way to dive was head first into the shallow end of the pool, that guy would face charges, even though all he was doing was giving people information because you're clearly misleading people into a dangerous situation. Parasitic scholars, that's a great quote from that. Yeah, parasitic scholars.

And that's another thing is why do these people go into that field? So do they go into the field because of the betterment of the world or the betterment of themselves? And do they do the betterment of themselves because they love themselves or because they have a desperate need for affection?

Because like all those go to different paths, right? And I think in Lumborg's case, it is that desperate need to be famous. I think it's this sort of narcissism that like he couldn't accept. He was a professor of like statistics and shit. Like that's not the most exciting life in the world. I'm sure it's very satisfying

for the people who legitimately like it. But I think Lumborg is the kind of guy that had a thirst to be famous and was like, well, this is the fucking easiest way to do that. I mean, yeah. Yeah. Now, we've just talked about sort of how Dr. E. L. Wilson was like expressing his frustration that like a guy like Lumborg

can just like shoot out a bunch of nonsense. And then real scientists whose time is incredibly valuable and limited have to like spend hours debunking all of it. And it's a very frustrating problem with our current system. And that might make it seem like there were no penalties Bjorn faced for lying constantly.

There were a little bit of, there was a little bit of a penalty he faced. Several official complaints were made to the Danish Ministry of Science Technology in innovation. They evaluated these complaints and found that the work that he had published was fundamentally dishonest, but they found that they couldn't punish him

because Lumborg wasn't an expert in any of the relevant fields. And thus he couldn't be considered guilty of like fraud essentially. Like because he was not really a climate scientist, they couldn't say that he was purposefully misrepresenting his case rather than just fucking up. That's insane.

Yeah. Isn't that crazy? Oh, the world is so annoying sometimes. Yeah. I'm glad it's burning. You know what? I'm glad it's burning. You've come around on climate change. Fuck it, fuck all you people. In 2007, Bjorn published a new book, Cool It, in which he explicitly accepted the reality

of human-caused climate change. This was seen by many as an abrupt reversal of his previous attitude. Bjorn clarified in an interview with The Guardian who declared him an influential thinker that it was not, or I think they were one of the ones he said he was gonna save the world. Yeah. Yeah.

They voted him one of the 50 people who could save the planet. So an interview with them, and they were more critical of him in this article. Lumborg denies performing a U-turn. He reiterates that he has never denied anthropogenic global warming and insists that he long ago accepted the cost of damage

would be between two and 3% of world wealth by the end of the century. This estimate is the same, he says, as that quoted by Lord Stern, whose report to the British government argued that the world should spend one to 2% of gross domestic product on tackling climate change to avoid future damage.

Incidentally, shit like this is why Rajenda Pachori, chairman of the UN climate change panel, compared Bjorn Lumborg to Adolf Hitler. Not because she thought he was a literal Nazi, but for the statistical crime of treating human beings like numbers. And the odd thing is, Bjorn isn't even all that great at numbers.

The Stern report estimated it would take between five and 20% of global GDP to effectively fight climate change. The Guardian pressed Lumborg on this. Quote, not unexpectedly, however, the Stern report estimates that damage at five to 20% of GDP, however, not two to 3%. The difference, according to Lumborg,

is that the two use a different discount factor. This is the method by which economists have recalculated the value today of money spent or saved in the future. Or to put it another way, the value today of this generation's grandchildren's lives. So, sorry, I got it wrong. The Stern report didn't say it would take five to 20%

of GDP to fight climate change. It said that the damage of climate change would be five to 20% of GDP if nothing was done to fight it. Lumborg said that the damage would be two to 3%. And then he claimed by sort of weasel math that the reason for the difference between the two numbers is the differing value that he and Lord Stern

put on the lives of our grandchildren, basically. So that's cool. Well, I mean, I guess in a way, there is a sad truth to that. Sure, I mean, I do hate kids, so. Oh, yeah. I hate them. Invaluable little fuckers.

Yeah. But I don't like too much when people just go straight for the ad Hitler and nausea or whatever that Latin phrase is that whenever people just want to use an example, they'll go to Hitler. Yeah. Because there is a truth to people being numbers. We're just algorithms walking around with little legs,

just walking around, right? That's what we are. We're just numbers. We're an algorithm. I think in her case, she was making a really, she wasn't like, I think she was making actually a pretty salient point, which is that when you treat people like numbers in this way,

you really are creating a kind of scientific crime. Yeah. You're devaluing their lives in the course of making into an argument that shouldn't be an argument over the numbers purely, like devolving it into that. But yes, but the reality is that it is like that, right? I mean, there's those beautiful paintings of generals on sort of horseback, right?

And you'll see behind them thousands of soldiers just sort of marching towards the war that they want to fight. But ultimately, the most important person is that person on the horseback and everyone else is just sort of chess pieces at the back, right? I mean, and we are using less and less humans to get the needs of humans.

So we don't need as many farmers, we don't need as many soldiers because we've got drones and we'll have robots one day and stuff. And I guess there is that sort of sad truth that we don't need that much manpower anymore to run society. And so the people at the top, and I'm not saying I agree with this,

but I'm just saying that the people at the top are gonna go, look, we don't need as many people anymore. Oh yeah, I think the people at the top think that way. And I think what you're getting at is sort of a debate that historians have like the great man theory versus like the trends and forces theory of history. But I think one reason why the people at the top never stay that way all that long

on like a generational basis, why things switch and turn and the nations and power change so much is because they think that way. They think that the most important guy is the guy marching like sitting on the horse with that army of nameless people around him. And then poor Serbian peasant named Gavrilo Princip

pulls out a gun and shoots the Archduke of Austria-Hungary. And empires fall and the British empires, no longer really a thing. And like that I think is, and that's the kind of thing that people like Lumborg always miss when they treat people like numbers like that. And it's the kind of thing, on the other side of thing, it's the kind of thing that people like Hillary Clinton miss

when they deride a bunch of people making memes on the internet is like unimportant to the overall thrust of the election. And then it turns out that actually that may have made a real difference. Oh, the deplorables. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that the people in power always disregard the potential impact of like one or a small group

of just random people who have a thought in their head. Agreed. And like I think that's, I think there's nothing that's more powerful than individual people's ability to fuck up the works. And that can be good and that can be bad because it means that a little girl like Greta Thunberg can make an international impact on a problem just by being the face of it.

I think that, is it the Dalai Lama? Yeah. I'm paraphrasing, but one of the best quotes is, if you think that you're not important or if you think you're not big enough to make a change, try and sleep with a mosquito. Yeah. And I'm really paraphrasing it and butchering it, but. You know, there's the positive side of that,

then there's the negative side, or so that a guy like Bjorn Lumbort can misread or directly misinterpret a bunch of scientific studies and lead to have a major impact on like why we don't deal with a problem back when the problem's manageable and instead it becomes something that might consume huge chunks of the world and its population.

So I think in both ways, the little person is always more important than the big people want to give them credit for being. That's just not entirely a good thing. It's a completely amoral factor in history, but it is, I think, a factor in history that the people at the top often misinterpret. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Now, the good news about all of this is that by 2007, people were starting to get wise to Bjorn's little schemes. The Guardian noted in their write-up of his second book, some statements appear to contradict each other directly. In the space of four pages of Coolit, he writes that climate change will not cause massive disruptions or huge death tolls,

that the general and long-term impact will be predominantly negative and that it is obvious that there are many other and more pressing issues. The point I've always been making, he explains now, is it's not the end of the world. That is why we should be measuring up to what everybody else says,

which is we should also be spending our money well. Speaking of spending money well, Bjorn has a bunch of suggestions for stuff that we should be investing in rather than reducing emissions to directly fight climate change. He's a big advocate in improving nutrition in poor countries, improved access to contraception, more vaccinations, all of which are great things.

In 2002, Lumborg formed the Copenhagen Consensus Center, which he billed as a way to bring the world's talk about economists together to solve the planet's greatest problems, because of course, economists are the best folks to solve our problems. If I had to think of one group of professionals most famous for never being wrong, it would be economists or maybe weathermen.

In 2008, the Consensus Center ranked 30 priorities in order of what should be confronted first to deal with the greatest challenges of the world. Mitigating global warming was ranked last, number 30. Sixth was improving crop yields, 17th was green energy research, and 12th, interestingly enough, was geoengineering. And this gets us onto the subject of what precisely

Lumborg thinks would be a better use of money than reducing emissions. He's come around to the necessity of climate engineering because now, more than a decade after he started urging everyone not to worry about climate change, reducing emissions is too expensive and slow a way to reduce climate change for his tastes. So that's nice.

So this is something Lumborg wrote in 2009. There is a significant delay between carbon cuts and any temperature drop. Even halving global emissions by mid-century would barely be measurable by the end of the century. Making green energy cheap and prevalent will also take a long time. Consider that electrification of the global economy

is still incomplete after more than a century of effort. Many methods of atmospheric engineering have been proposed. Solar radiation management appears to be one of the most hopeful. Atmospheric greenhouse gases allow sunlight to pass through but absorb heat and radiate some down to the earth's surface, all else being equal, higher concentrations will warm the planet.

Solar radiation management would bounce a little bit of sunlight back into space. Reflecting just one to two percent of the total sunlight that strikes the earth could offset as much warming as that caused by doubling the pre-industrial levels of greenhouse gases. When Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991, about a million tons of sulfur dioxide

was pumped into the stratosphere, reacting with water to form a hazy layer that spread around the globe. And by scattering and absorbing incoming sunlight, cooled the earth's surface for almost two years. We could mimic this effect through stratospheric aerosol insertion, essentially launching material like sulfur dioxide or soot into the stratosphere.

Another promising approach is marine cloud whitening, which sprays seawater droplets into marine clouds to make them reflect more sunlight. This augments the natural process, where sea salt from the oceans provides water vapor with cloud condensation nuclei. It is remarkable to consider that we could cancel out the century's global warming with 1,900 unmanned ships

spraying seawater mist into the air to thicken clouds. He sounds like he's learned his science from that Mr. Burns episode. He wants to cover the sun. He's just, we'll just shoot soot in the sky and build 2,000 boats to fire water up into the clouds. That's way better than reducing emissions, guys. That sounds economically friendly.

It's just so fucking dumb. He tells everyone, don't do anything for more than a decade. And then he's like, OK, we need to launch 2,000 giant boats to shoot seawater into the clouds. And also, we considered spreading sulfur over the stratosphere. Yeah, so he's gone so far on the other side that he's lost it again.

Yeah, that's clearly more rational than cap and trade, stopping rainforest logging, you know, in any of that stuff, like 1,900 unmanned boats. And sulfur into the sky, all perfect solutions with no conceivable downsides. Yeah, Bjorn's tactics have gotten no better in recent years. No better than that is suggesting thousands of boats shooting water into the sky.

In 2014, John Stossel, writing for Real Clear Politics, asked Bjorn Lumborg, how much President Obama's goal of getting 1 million electric cars on the road by 2015 would slow down warming. Lumborg replied, one hour, this is a symbolic act. Once again, Lumborg was very wrong. Greg Layden, a biological anthropologist writing for science blogs, actually spoke to an expert.

Quote, I asked atmospheric scientist and energy expert John Abraham about this, and here's what he said. If you put 1 million clean cars on the road and have them last 15 years before moving them and you take the typical admissions of a vehicle and you have saved over in the last 15 years, and there's a bunch of numbers, basically, he crunched the numbers on it and he came to the conclusion

that over their lifetime, just 1 million cars, if you did not build any additional cars after that point, you just put 1 million on the road and kept them there for 15 years, you would have saved the total equivalent of 21 hours of admission for the entire planet, which is a significant amount, and that's, again, just 1 million, not increasing it at all,

not replacing them after they wear out in 15 years, which means Lumborg's calculations to John Stossel was off by 2100%. It does seem like a lot of scientists are going, Bjorn, shut up. Yeah, constantly, for more, like 20 years now. Yeah, they've been saying, shut the fuck up, dude. You don't know what you're talking about,

but I think he knows what he's doing. In 2016, Bjorn's Copenhagen Consensus Center was paid $640,000 by Australia's Education Department to help producer report that, among other things, called limiting world temperature increases to two degrees Celsius, a poor use of money, since it would yield less than $1 of social, economic, or environmental benefits for every dollar spent.

Meanwhile, reducing world trade restrictions through the Doha trade round would, Bjorn calculated, yield $2011 of benefit for every dollar spent. Universal contraception access would return $120 per dollar spent. Now, reading stuff like that might make you question a couple of things. Number one, how good is Bjorn's math?

Are there any factors that might influence his calculation and might have led him to calculate that reducing global temperature increases only yields a dollar of value for every dollar spent while reducing trade restrictions leads to $2,000 of benefit? Like, are there maybe any conflicting interests he has that might be influencing his math in some way?

Well, he thinks like an economist. He does think like an economist. He thinks like an economist who might be being paid by a specific group of people. Well, yeah, and I do sometimes like some comedians. So a couple of comedians in the UK have gone, sort of gone to the right, politically speaking, when they weren't really like that

when I sort of first met them. And I was observing them from afar and sort of not admiring, but understanding that, oh, yeah, there's more money. If you're not getting that much work as a comedian that you are currently now and you understand that the right is rising, they went there and now they're going there

and they are getting more work. And it's interesting because I'm going, whoa, you've become something totally different because you have to survive. And you've decided that it's worth it to take money from, you're not gonna make that greater living as a statistician teaching at a college in Denmark. You'll be comfortable,

but you're not gonna be rich doing that. Whereas if you become Bjorn Lumborg and tell people that climate change isn't a big deal and open this consensus center that advises people that reducing trade restrictions is a better way to fight global warming than stopping global warming. Well, that actually turns out to pay pretty well. So I found a good breakdown

of where Bjorn Lumborg's funding comes from written by Graham Redfern of Deesmog, a website focused on cutting through the PR spin around climate change issues. Their research revealed that the Copenhagen Consensus Center, or CCC, registered as a nonprofit in the United States in 2008. Since then, it has received more than $4 million

in grants and donations. Three quarters of that came in 2011 and 12. Lumborg's salary for a single year was $775,000, representing it nearly a quarter of what it had received by 2012. He's basically an Instagram model that's pushing those drinks to lose weight. That's exactly what he's doing,

but instead telling everyone not to cut global emissions. Now, back in 2006, when the CCC first started to look at gaining support for its efforts in the United States, they hired Washington lobbyist and PR veteran James Harf. And so this is like a lobbying group for somebody. And the lobbying group's primary goal has been to convince people that emissions should not be cut, that carbon should not be taxed,

that fossil fuel use should not be reduced. Now, again, this leads us to the question of like, who's actually giving these people that money? And we don't know where all of it comes from. We know that in its first year, the center received $120,000 grant from the Randall Foundation. That foundation's money comes from the $1.2 billion

the Randall family made by selling the VIT chemical company to Procter & Gamble. The trustee of the Randall Foundation is Heather Higgins, the CEO of Independent Women's Voice and chairman of the Independent Women's Forum. And that sounds good, right? Independent Women's Voice, that sounds like a woke progressive organization.

Yeah, it's actually a hardcore right-wing lobbying group that accepts money from, among other people, Charles Koch. I look forward to when they start implementing like the transgenders against clouds and all of these different new groups coming along. We'll get it really woke. Yeah, Bjorn wouldn't be the right spokesperson now. You'd hire someone who is like very much like,

I don't know, you hire someone like non-white who's willing to take all of that money. Yeah, something like an eight-year-old. Like an eight-year-old kid from Cameroon. And you'd have him be like, I love fossil fuels. Like that is where we're going next, yeah. And then you'll call everyone racist who argues with them. And then you'll, while complaining that all the left

does is call everybody racist who argues with them. Like it's beautiful. I love the way the media works. It's perfect. There are no problems. So yeah, I'm going to read a quote from D. Smog about the Independent Women's Forum. What's the name?

D. Smog blog. Oh, okay. They do a lot of really good analysis on the disinformation campaign being carried out. The name of a company. I thought it was the name of a person. I was like, what a great name for someone that works in Canada. Graham Redfern, which is also a pretty good name

for something really good. Reedfern, actually. But I think it's pronounced Redfern. It's fucking Australian, I don't know. Nothing makes sense over there. Reedfern? Yeah. That's not an Australian accent.

No, that's not. That was like more Scottish. Yeah, well, Scott's Irish. Quote, staff writers of both organizations regularly express skepticism about the science of human clause climate change and cite Lomborg's views approvingly. A recent article from the International Women's Forum senior fellow Vicki Alger claimed,

a majority of scientists believe that global warming is largely nature made. Ignoring several studies that show the vast majority of research from scientists studying climate change believe exactly the opposite. Now, funders of the IWF include, as I said, the Claude Lamb Foundation, which is controlled by Charles Koch, and the Donors Trust,

a conservative political action fund that spent millions of dollars on climate change denial. This means that Charles Koch indirectly has helped fund Bjorn Lomborg. Now, Higgins continued to pump tens of thousands of dollars directly into Lomborg's center over subsequent years. But in 2014, when that D-smog article was written, the author was only able to track down

where about $500,000 of the $4.3 million in funding it had received up to that point had come from. However, in 2015, Reedfern revealed that Paul Singer, a Republican billionaire venture capitalist, was one of the CCC's major backers. He gave more than $200,000 to the group. Mr. Singer also helps fund the Manhattan Institute. The think-take behind the fallacious claim

that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's green new deal would cost $100 trillion. In recent years, Bjorn Lomborg seems to have dropped most of the pretense of being a leftist environmentalist. He's appeared in five videos for Prager University, with titles like, is climate change our biggest problem? Our electric car is really green,

and the Paris Agreement won't change the climate. His grift seems to be less profitable these days than it was in the era before mega-hurricanes regularly battered our shores in record-setting summers and wildfire seasons were a matter of course. But Lomborg still does a brisk business can media appearances. As of the writing of this episode,

his most recent appearance was in a Fox Business video with the title, green innovation Trump's spending when tackling climate change, colon expert. He was the expert. Show them what he looks like now. Show them what he looks like now. This is Bjorn Lomborg after 20 years of climate denial. Oh, does he look that bad?

I think you really oversold it, I think. I was expecting like a gruesome creature. I think he's Mick Jaggard, at least 50% in the last 20 years. And Mick Jagger hasn't Mick Jaggard that much, but Sophie definitely has a very negative reaction to his waddle. A waddle, it's a good word. Waddle shaming, this is waddle shaming.

Yeah, she's holding our skin and making it so thicker. Now, Eric, if I know my audience and I don't, the one thing they love more than anything else is when we hit things. Right, that's a lie. The one thing they love more than anything else is when we hit things. So I'm gonna give you the giant machete

and I'm gonna throw it right past all of the recording equipment because that's a good idea. Yeah, he's got Mike's in the front of him. Are you holding the whole bag? I'm gonna throw the whole bag. I always throw the whole bag. It would be irresponsible to throw a single bagel. All right, so I'm gonna throw them at Eric

who's wielding the machete as if it were a baseball bat and he's gonna try to hit him as hard as he can and really just swing it. There's nothing you can hurt in this room full of delicate electronic equipment. Nothing at all. Audience, I have Anderson, she is protected. Anderson's fine.

All right, I'm gonna throw it. Yeah! All right, toss it back to me. We gotta get him going across the room. I'm terrified because I can hear my subconscious going, what if you drop it? What if you throw it at the machete bag? No one's ever been hurt by a two-foot machete.

All right, ready? Never, not once in history. Yeah! Yes! Nailed it. I didn't make a very smooth samurai cut. It's okay, it takes practice to really be able to do damage with that thing.

But I definitely got burned. Everybody happy with how that went? How did it feel? I feel really manly. I wanna go to war now. Yeah! I see how easily I can be turned, you know? Everyone can.

And if people like Lumborg get their way, that I will be buying a lot more machetes for a lot of people to try to get him to feel that way. I see that there is a box of tissues on the table. I'm now gonna grab them and I will remove the prints from the actual machete. Not a dumb man. No!

No! There we go. I did grab the blade. I was gonna find Lumborg's Hollywood Hills home. There we go. Look at that. I don't have enough CSI to know how to get rid of evidence. Yeah.

I don't think he lives in the Hollywood Hills because it's one of the places that's gonna face the consequences of climate change. Fastest. Anderson is on the mic. And you get on a me for pouring liquids on the microphones. What's wrong with Anderson on the microphone? Anderson slobbers.

No, she doesn't. Sometimes. She's a classy broad. Classy broads can slobber. You're a good dog. She's a good dog. Eric, you got any pluggables to plug now that we're at the end of our episode?

Yeah, I do have an album called Alien of Extraordinary Ability which is the title that the American government gives you and I say you outsiders when they come in and apply for a visa. That is a sweet title. Like our immigration system is fucked but that's a great title. Alien of Extraordinary Ability.

So I like that. So that's an album. I've also got my show, if you're in Los Angeles, I've got a show called Born of Chaos which is about the time I escaped a psychiatric hospital. So I've got some things. Just basically follow me on Instagram. That title makes me want to marry a European,

renounce my US citizenship, become an EU citizen, go through that whole year's long process and then move back to the United States and get a green card so that I can be declared an alien of an extraordinary ability. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Also, I'm no longer it because now I have a green card. Oh, you use it when you get a green card.

Yes, and now I'm a permanent resident. Well, that's not as cool as being an alien with extraordinary abilities. No, but I once was and it felt good. And I'm sure it did. It felt right. Well audience, check out Alien of Extraordinary Ability. I will say as well,

I'm now leaving this podcast slightly angrier. Yeah, you should. Everyone should leave the podcast angrier. I mean, I hope the catharsis of hitting the bagels with the machete help. It goes some energy out for sure. Yeah, I see why people get there and grow out with violence. I am in no way training the audience for things to come

by pushing machetes and bolt cutters on people and teaching them that these objects can help them deal with their anger at the bastards or anything. I mean, that's not what I'm doing at all. I didn't wonder what your product placements are. Machetes, come and buy them. I, you know, any machete company that wants to sell branded behind the bastards machetes,

I feel like we can make a lot of money with them. Same thing with bolt cutters because we're big into the pushing bolt cutters. And right now I just have to suggest people get, basically anything about the cheap Harper freight ones cause those won't cut through theoretically the security gate. You really, you want some like heavy duty bolt cutters

you want to be spending. I'm sure it's available on that. You could in fact get the bolt cutters from it on that you use to break through his security. Yeah. Not that we encourage that behavior because we don't. It does seem like that's what's, that's where it is going to go.

Like in 20, 30 years time, like, you know, it's going to be hunger games style, you know, the masses versus Amazon. You know, my hope is that we can avoid that by making some pretty sharp course corrections now. But if we can't, Fiskers brand machetes resist rust very well. So, you know, they'll chop bagels. They'll chop through.

Please stop. Okay. Yeah. You're right. So how do we lead this out without me at like suggesting more crimes. A firm handshake. Do you have anything you want to plug? I already talked about bolt cutters. No, I mean like.

Hey, what about the environment, bro? I just want to plug trees. I do want to plug trees. What about tree frogs? Not mine. Sophie's wearing a sweater. It seems comfortable. You're the most frustrating person ever.

We have shirts on tpublic.com, behind the bastards. You can find the podcast on behindthebastards.com where the sources will be, although the coding of the site is sometimes broken, but you can generally figure out what the sources are. And you can find us on Twitter and Instagram at at bastard's pod. You can find me on Twitter at I write okay.

And I have a new podcast with my friends, Cody and Katie called worst year ever about the 2020 election. So we will definitely talk more about bolt cutters and machetes on that podcast. So if that's something you're into, check it out. Eric, thanks for being on the show. Thanks for having me, man.

Until next week, hug a cat, buy some bolt cutters, consider investing in a machete or three. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside this hearse we're like a lot of goods. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science

you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I oughta know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.