The Joe Rogan Experience - #1896 - Bjørn Lomborg

Episode Date: November 9, 2022

Bjorn Lomborg is a statistician and director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center. He is also the author of several books, among them "False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet," "The Skeptical Environmentalist," and "Cool It." www.lomborg.com

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. Would you like coffee? So, see, I brought my Mountain Dew Diet. Oh, you're a Mountain Dew guy? Oh, boy. I like a man who prepares for his podcasts. All right, we rolling?

We're up? Did you get that part? Yeah. This dude drinks Mountain Dew Diet. That is like the anti-environmentalist beverage of choice. Is it? No, I'm kidding. Podcasts all right we're rolling we're up. Did you get that part? That is like the anti environmentalist beverage of choice Aluminum is actually good right cuz aluminum does get recycled it does get recycled But we were so heartbroken reading this article recently about plastics about how it's like 5% right Five single-use plastics recycled. Yeah, yeah, like all that every time you throw your bottle in the right bin, you feel like you're a good person. Yeah.

I'm like, I'm a good person. I put it in the blue bin. I'm a good person. The right way to probably handle that, that's a whole different conversation, is just simply to burn it and reuse the energy. Right. How would you do that, though, and not pollute the air? We do that all over the world, especially in Europe. You just put a scrub on the smokestack.

That's all you do? It's that simple? Yeah. It really is. It doesn't have any – well, come on. It must have some emissions. Sure. I mean, nothing is zero.

Right. But it's very, very low. Or is it like a million cars? No, no. I think it's probably less than a car. So it's not something I've looked. A million cars sounds gross, but that's our city. Yes.

Every day in Austin you get a million cars. But the emissions from waste burning, very, very low. So I remember people worried a lot about dioxins and that kind of stuff. It turns out we can get rid of virtually all of it. So is that the trade-off? Is the trade-off you have some emissions from the burning of the plastics, but you're getting rid of the plastics, which is a real, is it a net gain for the environment? Because the plastics are a real, real problem, particularly in the ocean and in landfills and just, it's a real issue.

So the real issue here is once you decide to say you have to switch it into all these different bins, you have everyone sit. I was just at a conference in Stanford and you could just see everyone. And I did the same thing. You're sort of like, oh, my God, what am I going? And you feel like you did the wrong thing no matter what you do. And you probably did. And most of it, as you just said, won't get recycled. Why? Because back in, you know, five, 10 years ago, we just took all of this and sent it to China and had them recycle it. And this is why there's so much plastic in the oceans. It's not because anybody, you know, just throw it out. It's because we shipped it away to feel good

about ourselves, but we didn't want to pay. And then, of course, when you get this barge with all this crap plastic, you either say, should we recycle it and spend a lot of money, or maybe just happen to lose it on the ocean. That's where most of this plastic actually comes from. Really? They just dump it out? Yeah. So if you burn it instead, it's no problem. You just throw everything in one bucket. You recycle the energy and it's very, very cheap for everyone. Nobody has to sit and stand there and worry. And you'll actually do what you just pointed out, 95% gets done anyway. it will have a net gain on the environment,

will remove plastics, like particularly from the ocean. Who's that young gentleman that we've had on the podcast that developed that machine to extract the plastic from the ocean? Ah, yes. Yeah, tip of your tongue, son. Very, very, I mean, he was, I believe he was 19 years old when he came up with the idea and implemented it. You know, had like a few different models. Boyan Slot.

Boyan Slot. Thank you. Sorry, Boyan. My memory shit in the morning. But he figured out how to extract some of it and then they took that plastic and then converted it into things you could buy, like sunglasses and things along those lines. And all of this is nice. And look, we should definitely try to clean up the ocean.

But again, I tend to think that we try to make it too hard. You know, if you actually want this to work for a population of 8 billion, you need to have simple municipal waste recycling. And that's very often just that you recycle glass, you recycle paper, you burn most of the other stuff. And then you recycle some of the really valuable stuff. But doesn't that cost a lot of money to do in places that are like strapped for resources? One of the things that you always see when you see video footage of countries overseas that are impoverished is you see a lot of trash. Oh, yeah.

Because they don't have the money to process it. No, no. Right? And that's why the first thing you want is just simply good trash collection. So you get rid of it. So we did a big project in Dhaka or for Bangladesh. And one of the things we focused on was also just simply getting trash off the streets. Because it's unsightly, it actually leads to more crime. It leads to more destitution. It probably also transmits disease. And it's fairly cheap to get rid of. This is not rocket science. So there's a lot of ways that you can

do that. But instead, we come in and say, no, no, you need to recycle. You need to have three different baskets and all that kind of stuff. No, you just need to get rid of it. That's how you also get rid of the plastics in the ocean. Again, and I think we'll have that conversation a lot of times. A lot of these, oh, we should do the absolute best, feels like it's a really good solution, but very often it ends up meaning that you do stuff that will then only be implemented 5% and the other stuff is crap. There should be a real public understanding of the dangers of these plastics and microplastics getting into your body too. It's just so weird that we've developed this entire society based on this petrochemical product that ultimately gets into your body and has negative effects.

So the microplastics are possibly an issue. It's not quite clear yet whether they are. But that's a concern, and that's certainly something we should look at. But also remember, pretty much everything else that you have with plastics is incredibly useful. Packages, which actually reduces loss of pretty much anything you can think of dramatically. And, of course, through COVID, we realized it's a really good thing to have one-use plastic stuff. So again, most things in the real world are both a problem and a benefit. And we need to find out how do we make it more of a benefit and less of a problem. But we need to stop having this conversation, oh, you can't have anything of this bad thing.

That's not how we organize our societies. That's not how we think, and that's certainly not how we make good choices. That makes sense, but if we know that there are alternatives to plastic, and we know that there's so many different problems with plastic, it being non-biodegradable, unless it's like there's some, isn't there some plastic that they can make with like plant fiber that's biodegradable? Then there's the phthalate thing. I'm sure you're probably aware of this. Dr. Shanna Swan, do you know this whole thing about what's happening to when women are pregnant and their bodies have levels of phthalates above a certain level,

it has an effect on the reproductive cycle of the child. And they can do studies in mammals, and they show that when the female is pregnant and she encounters these chemicals from plastics, it fucks with the gender of the child, like where their taints shrink, which is weird, but in mammals. Apparently that's a representation of whether or not it's a male or a female. It's one of the best distinctions, ways of distinguishing whether it's a male or a female is the size of the taint when it's a baby

because the male taint is 50% to 100% larger than the female taint. She's hilarious. She's got a really funny thing on her Instagram because it also causes a decline in sperm production. And so her way of approaching it that's funny is she has the jizz quiz and she does this, she's like this adorable, like petite lady who is a brilliant doctor, but she's kind of being funny and at the same time like sounding the warning shot. Like, hey, this is fucking with human beings' reproductive cycles.

And since the invention of petrochemical plastics that we use in basically everything from that point to today there's a very clear drop in fertility rates a very clear drop in male sperm count a very clear drop in penis and testicle size and with females there's higher rates of miscarriages and she believes through her research that this is connected and that these chemicals that we're getting from these plastics are literally affecting the development cycle of human babies. Yeah. And look, I've done some work on this. So, and the thing you have to worry about. So,

we should definitely be concerned about these things. That sounds like a giant issue. And we should certainly be looking at it. The best data, as I understand this, is the fact that sperm counts have gone down dramatically over the last 30 to 40 years. You haven't looked at the taints? Well, no, I haven't. This is a big-time taint study.

Sorry. And what it turns out, of course, is that you tell people that they have to abstain for a week or four days or a week. I can't remember. And that's potentially possible that people would do in the 50s. It's very unlikely it happens today. And we know that they don't. More people jerk off now.

And that's why. That's an interesting perspective. I bet you're right. Hold on a second. Now I'm on team Bjorn. That makes sense. The point is not that we shouldn't be concerned about issues and that we should be investigating things. But you also got to remember our civilization is actually really, really good at making sure that we are concerned about all the different things.

And how do we know? Because we live much longer. This is one of the things I think almost everyone forgets. In 1900, the average life expectancy on planet Earth was 32 years. Last year, it was 74 years. Right. But you know why it was 32 years, right? It was to a large extent. It was infant mortality about three quarters. But what's happening is still that it goes up. So this is a fantastic statistic. You're going to be surprised about this. So even in rich countries, it goes up for every year you live, it goes up three more months. So for every four years,

you actually become, you get one more year in life expectancy. You could be young Jamie forever. Kind of. You're going to run out of runway eventually. But the point here is that we're actually really good at doing these things. And yes, we should still be concerned. One of the reasons why we're good at it is because we're good at being concerned. But we should not be so scared that we end up thinking, oh, my God, all these things are going wrong. Well, I don't think people are necessarily scared, but they should – I think they should be concerned. And I think we should recognize when things are detrimental to human health yeah you know like the plastics thing like to just to dismiss that and go well everything's better

than it was before and you live longer right but it might like literally be affecting the way human beings develop in a negative way and who knows what I mean right now they're looking at sexual side effects what kind of cognitive improved or cognitive impairment side effects does it have? What kind of, I mean, who the fuck knows? Yeah. And we had a very good example of that with lead that we added to gasoline. And that was a terrible idea. Please explain the story behind that because it's really bananas. So the fundamental thing is it makes your gasoline run a little better. So you added this lead to all cars.

It stops your car from knocking. Yeah. Yeah. Those old engines like bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And they didn't do it quite as much. I love the sound effects. You ever see those old shitty cars? Man, they were fucking – it was like guns were going off.

Yeah. And it just had that huge side effect that actually makes us all dumber. Yeah. The whole population. Giant populations of cities lost many percentage points of IQ. Yeah. So like three to five IQ points. That's nuts. Yeah.

Five percent. Yeah. Just so your car could run smoother. And this again, you know, it shows, because we all remember, I don't know, thalidomide, the idea that you were giving. Thalidomide. Thalidomide. Sorry. Yeah. I just read these words. I don't know, thalidomide, the idea that you were giving. Thalidomide. Thalidomide, sorry. I just read these words.

I don't actually say them. You never heard thalidomide baby before? Yeah, yeah. It's a terrible story. Yes. And the point is there are these terrible stories and there are sign markers to tell us we should be careful. But again, I also just want to come back to realizing that when you look at the whole picture, we're actually doing amazingly much better. Remember, at the same time, while we lost these five IQ points, what we see now in IQ development is that kids are getting smarter and smarter, probably because you get better food,

you get better childhood, you get better education, you get more stimulated. There are all these kinds of things. So we've actually gone up, what, 30 IQ points or something over the last 100 years. So at the same time, it's a little controversial because you try to standardize at 100. But fundamentally, what you've seen is a dramatic increase in IQ. And yes, lead was a stupid idea. We've taken it out, and it's mostly cleared up. Now, you say dramatic increase in IQ. What's that attributed to? So there's a lot of controversy. We don't quite know. I mean, as I mentioned, we think it's because kids are no longer starving.

They get good nutrition. They get much more stimulated. One of the important things is that kids get stimulated when they're young, that they actually get to play around and learn stuff. Video games is probably also one of the things that actually, you know, increase your eye-brain coordination. You shouldn't tell people that. Then they're just going to play video games. I'm increasing my brain coordination. I think that's actually been proven though, hasn't it?

Yeah. That it has a similar effect on the brain as traditional games of intellect, like chess. Yeah. It's nuts. Well, it again, you know, so I guess the point that I try to make, and I'm sure we'll get to that when we start talking about global warming and all the other problems, is that we need to recognize that we have real problems in this world.

But it's not that the world is sort of, you know, the wheels are coming off, which is very often the conversation that I think a lot of people feel like they're in. which is very often the conversation that I think a lot of people feel like they're in. When you ask kids and young people, for instance, on climate change, they're terrified. Yeah, that's an unfortunate thing because a lot of these young kids that are gluing themselves to paintings, they don't have a real perspective. They're like 18, 19 years old, and they really think like they're saving the world because their brains aren't fully formed. And they've been devouring propaganda like it's cheesecake. That's the problem. It's like, you know, I had on

Randall Carlson and Graham Hancock yesterday and the podcast would be released on Thursday. And it's this amazing podcast talking about moments in the earth's history where the Earth experienced asteroid impacts, comet impacts, and that there's a period around 12,000-something years ago where we for sure got hit by these big impacts of either exploding in the sky above Earth or hitting the ground. And there's plenty of physical evidence of this, and it's called the Younger Dryas Impact Theory. But they were talking about the rapid change in the climate, how the sea levels rose, the ice caps melted, all because we got pummeled by asteroids.

Like, this shit has gone on forever. That's just natural stuff from getting hit by space. If you look at the cycles of, like, if you go back a million years in Earth and look at all the highs and lows, you're like, oh, this thing has never been stable without us even existing. It's never been stable. So I guess the question is how much of an effect are we having on these wild cycles? What can you really blame it on and what can we we do, if anything, to turn it around? Yeah. So those are the reasonable questions, right? Yes. And a long one. Sorry. Sorry about that. I got a little carried away. I get excited about

this one because it seems kind of cultish. It is. So look, if you look around and if you look back in time, absolutely, there's been huge changes. as you point out. Sea levels from an ice age to today has gone up, what, 400 feet. Without us even doing shit. With nothing from our impact. With all that said, so that's sort of the background, and that's important to know. We don't live in thousands of millions of years. We live right now, and we kind of care about what's going to happen in the next 100 and next 200 years. To a large extent also because we've built all of our cities.

So, you know, Austin is built in a pretty warm climate, I'm assuming, coming from southern Sweden. I think it's a lot warmer here than it is where I'm from. Yeah, a lot warmer. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, cities are built to the temperature that they used to have for the last 100 years. So if temperatures change, even if it's just somewhat, it'll be inconvenient. It'll actually be a problem.

And that, I think, is really why we're talking about global warming. It's a problem that we are causing. So we are actually changing the temperature, not by these enormous amounts that you were talking about. They're not the asteroids of the world. But there is an issue that we should be careful about and that we should pay attention to and that we should talk about. So how do we fix it in the best possible way? Before you get to that, how do we know how much of an impact our society is having on the overall effect? Like if there is a warming of the globe, how do we know how much of an impact

our point is there a real science that points out the amount of carbon and the emissions that we release has X amount of effect, which will equal this amount of temperature rise? Is that solidified? So I'm a social scientist, right? So I basically just read all the UN climate. Oh, you're one of those guys. I'm one of those guys. Yes. Sorry. Should I leave now? So I basically just read all the UN climate – Oh, you're one of those guys. I'm one of those guys, yes. Sorry. Should I leave now? So I basically just take for granted what the UN climate panel guys are telling us. I think they have – I've spoken to a lot of them. I've read a lot of their work. I think they're really trying hard to show that what they typically say is between half and all of the change that we've seen over the last 100 years is because of us.

And they've sort of trended towards all as because of us. It feels like that's possibly a little bit too much. But, yeah, most of it is certainly because of us. Most of the change in climate is because of us. So most of the change that is about 2 degrees Fahrenheit that we've seen in change over the last 150 years. And that's all because of carbon. It's all because of methane from cattle production. It's basically because we use fossil fuels and then we also use coal, oil, gas, and then a little bit of farts from cows. Yeah. And so that has not necessarily been a good thing for the earth.

that has not necessarily been a good thing for the earth. No, not when you just look at the impact on climate. Because as I said, if you built your cities and if you built your lives around one temperature, if it changes a little bit, that's a problem. If the oceans boil, just move in a little. But it's not the oceans are going to boil. Have you not seen the girl who throws the soup? She has a whole video on YouTube. The girl threw the soup on the Van Gogh. She's making some really good points.

She's making some really good points. Maybe I should leave. No. So really the point here is this is a problem, but it's not the end of the world. And I think that's really where we need to get back to and realizing this is not what is going to change our entire future. It's going to have a negative impact. But remember also at the same time, fossil fuels have basically made it possible for us to have the industrial revolution and become incredibly safe in so many different ways. I mean, how did you get here this morning? I flew.

You flew. It doesn't matter. I drove. I was hoping you'd say that. I drove an electric car. I'm good for the environment. There you go. Yes, yes. I'm doing my matter. I drove. I was hoping you'd say drive. I drove an electric car. I'm good for the environment. There you go.

Yes, yes. I'm doing my part. I feel virtuous. I bet you do. But, you know, most people actually get around. Your food is produced by fertilizer, which is very often from gas, natural gas. Our transportation, our electricity, pretty much everything is mostly focused around fossil fuels. It's pretty nuts to bank everything on this one thing.

Like it's very bizarre how society has moved like completely in that direction. How many things that we need fossil fuels to create like containers and tires and this and that and clothing and sneakers and eyeglasses. I mean, there's so much shit that we use fossil fuels for. It makes you wonder. Like, I wonder what would have happened if we never took that path as a culture, if we only used fossil fuels for fuel and we never figured out how to turn it into stuff. Yeah. We would have been a lot poorer.

Yeah, we never had computers. Well, we would, you know, think about what it looked like in around 1800 in England. That would probably be where we'd be about, right? Yeah. The point is, of course, and you're making that argument really well, fossil fuels are just an incredible boon to civilization. And then they also have this problem. Yeah. And so that's where we need to find a way to slowly and eventually find ways to produce all of that stuff you just talked about without the negative impacts of fossil fuels. And that's going to be hard and that's not an easy trip. What about nuclear?

Nuclear absolutely could be part of the solution. So people are incredibly frightened about nuclear. But remember, if you look at what it actually takes to produce energy, nuclear is one of the safest things possible. Now, all technologies have risk, right? If you put up solar panels, you'll have some people falling down from the roofs putting them up. I'm not kidding. This is an occupational hazard. But solar panels are some of the safest things together with nuclear.

You know, so Chernobyl, which was by all kinds of ways a terrible accident. I'm glad you said that. I thought you were pro-Chernobyl for a minute there. I know. I was looking at the sky. I'm going to say, no, no, I'm not. So Chernobyl, you know, probably killed in the order of 100 to 200 people, which is not nothing. But destroyed the area.

This is the biggest catastrophe we've ever had with nuclear power. Regularly, coal-fired power kills millions of people. Yeah. Millions? Millions across the world. Millions of people die from coal power. So this is basically because, especially in the developing world, you don't put scrubbers in your smokestacks. So it just makes it incredibly polluted.

If you've ever been to New Delhi in the fall, I'm assuming it's a little bit worse than it was to be back in London in the 1950s. You almost can't see your way forward and you can just feel it in your throat and everything. Apparently- And you inhale all of that. Like fires, like fireplace fires, where you have in the heart. A lot of people think that's good. That's terrible.

It's terrible, yes. Burning wood like that is one of the worst things for the air. Absolutely. So what people don't get- If everybody did it, it would be horrible. And we're going to have a lot more of that in Europe this winter because of the whole Russian issue. But what people don't get is most of the world's poor, so about 3 billion people on this planet, they cook and keep warm with really dirty fuels like dung, cardboard, wood, whatever they can get their hands on. And that means the average indoor air pollution in these homes is higher and worse than it is in outdoor Beijing.

Wow. We have no – it's – the World Health Organization estimated it's equivalent for each person to smoke two packs of cigarettes every day. This is three billion people doing that. So they're cooking indoor with fires? Is that what they're doing? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. And you keep warm with these because it gets cold at night.

And we don't have any sense of these impacts. So let me just tell you a fun story. In Denmark, the environmental agency, they were trying to find out how much indoor air pollution do you get if you're right next to a major street. And so they were measuring, you know, they rented this apartment that was empty and put up measurements in there. And every once in a while, they couldn't understand they just got these incredible spikes in there. And they were like, this shouldn't be coming from outside, right? Turns out it was when the neighbor lit candles.

Whoa. That tells you how dangerous it is. People think it's really nice to have the fire and the stove or these candles on, but actually incredibly polluting. Oh, wow. Well, some people go nutty with the candles. That's got to be horrible. Like Ari Shaffir's special, Jew, which is out right now on YouTube.

You're just going to bring that up. Let's go to that. Go to a clip of it. My friend Ari Shafir was polluting the environment. Not only does he not care about the environment, but he snuck in pollution. I'm sure he did this shit on purpose. It's available right now on YouTube. Behind Ari, best special he's ever done.

Look at all those candles. He's killing the air. He's forcing people to breathe toxic fumes. Yep. While he's doing his jokes. Son of a bitch. They look real, though. No, they're real.

They had a life of eight hours of lit when they were normal. But then when they turned the air conditioning on, the air was blowing down on the candles. So they were burning through this. So this lady had to get extra candles overnight. It was a giant affair. Like 9,000 candles overnight. Yeah. And mind you, they just pumped up the air pollution as well.

But anyway, Ars Fyr Jew, it's available right now on YouTube. He's got over 2 million views. 2.2. So he's polluting the environment by doing that. So people that do fireplaces, you think, oh, it's going to be so romantic. Sit by the fireplace. You're polluting the environment by doing that. So people that do fireplaces, you think, oh, it's going to be so romantic, sit by the fireplace. You're polluting the environment. If everybody did it, it would be horrible air quality. You're polluting your own indoor environment.

So, I mean, in that sense, I'm like, all right. It's a little bit like skydiving. But, man, if you're camping and you have a little campfire going on, maybe it's a little bad for the environment, but how good is it for you? That's where people draw that line. Like, no one's out here. No one is out here in the middle of nowhere. Exactly. And we're staying alive with actual fire warming up.

But when you go then to India, they burn all their fields right next to New Delhi. So the problem is poverty. Yes. And what gets us out of poverty quicker? And that's petrochemical products, fossil fuels. It's basically energy. Yeah, that's the capitalist versus the Marxist argument about this stuff. Sorry, I'm a graph guy.

So if I can show on the B2. Okay, you have a wood cover. It looks cool, no? On your MacBook. Yeah. So this is, you see how rich people are out the X, the horizontal axis. And then you see how much energy you have up on the Y axis. And what you basically see is the richer you are, the more energy you use.

Or the other way around. Well, of course. Yeah. This is not rocket science, right? Climate change people that fly around in private jets are the biggest hypocrites. Yes. You're selling that. You're going to the World Economic Forum on a fucking jet with three people in it.

Yes. Get out of here, man. You hoser. Yeah. Are you conspiratorial about this push towards a climate change? I mean – or towards a climate change crisis mentality where there was a famous Project Veritas video with a guy who worked for CNN and they caught him on undercover camera. And they were talking about using climate change to get people excited. I assumed he was talking about four ratings, which makes sense.

If you're a producer and you work in Hollywood, if the Kardashians are fighting with their boyfriend, get in there. Let's go. That's money, right? That's what you do. And if that's happening, oh my God, the climate. Everyone freaks out. The climate.

They're glowing their hands to Picassos. Oh Jesus, the climate. If that's going to The climate. They're glowing their hands to Picassos. Oh Jesus, the climate. If that's going to get you ratings, your job is to get ratings. Your job is not to educate the American people. You can barely figure out life yourself. You're 34 years old. You've got a half a million dollars in student loans. You can't believe you work for CNN. What are you supposed to do?

You're supposed to fucking put the climate change in everybody's face because that's how you're going to sell tickets. That's what they're doing so climate has that wonderful opportunity that it can actually fundamentally get us to talk about every time something out there happens it can be news and it can be somebody's fault uh so right every time there's a flood every time there's a storm every time there's heart attacks heart attacks and climate change i'm sure they'll come up with that i'm sure yeah no that's'm sure, yeah. No, that's real. Oh, God, yes.

Yeah, there's articles written about the climate change may be causing all these sudden deaths and heart attacks. And look, again, there is something to this. So the idea that when you have very high temperatures, you actually have more heart attacks and you have more people dying. So, yes, heat deaths are bad. You also have more people dying if they're not taking care of their body, and no one talks about that. Climate change causes heart attacks. A second look at the data. Hmm. How good is the evidence implicating climate change as a cause of heart attacks? Not very. Let's take a critical look at some of this research. So a slew of recent studies suggested

that climate change increasing the number of heart attacks worldwide. The hypothesis suffers from many critical deficiencies, the most important being that rates of heart disease and thus heart attacks in the industrialized world have plummeted as our ability to prevent and treat coronary artery disease has improved. Studies have reported a slowdown in this trend, have studies that have reported a slowdown in this trend have also detected rises in the prevalence of obesity, metabolic syndrome, and type 2 diabetes.

What we were just saying. All well-known risk factors for heart disease. So it's not that climate change is causing heart disease. It's that people are doing things that they shouldn't be doing with their body in terms of like letting their body get obese or not taking action and going to the gym and altering their diet and they need encouragement and it should be if you really wanted to like

lower costs for health care worldwide especially nationwide a national program encouraging people instead of just putting like a black square on your Instagram on Tuesday, how about encouraging people through one entire month to do 100 sit-ups and 100 push-ups and go up, walk 10,000 steps every day. Just encouraging people. And everybody have to fucking be accountable online. If everybody did that, people would just shed weight. They would shed weight. All sorts of medical problems would go away if they're capable of doing this, of course. If they're not, if they already have a health problem, that's obviously not their fault.

But there's so many people that can improve their life and there's no encouragement to do it. All they talk about is like the fear of what happens if this comes for you. The fear. The climate is going to make you have a stroke. The climate is going to make you stay indoors. The oceans are going to make you have a stroke. The climate is going to make you stay indoors. The oceans are going to boil. It's like, Jesus Christ, tell me what I can do to make life better right now. And so you're absolutely right.

We can do a lot ourselves. With that said, though, it's not that there is nothing to this point. So can I just show the same? Well, I'd imagine if it gets hotter, people are going to have heart attacks. Yeah. Makes sense. But that's because they're not very resilient. Well, but, you know, it's especially old people.

Right, right, right. It's not unreasonable to say that this is going to be an issue. And, you know, there is a lot of people out there telling us, oh, my God, there are going to be more heat deaths because of global warming. Yeah, it's scary. It is scary. But you also have to then – if I can show a B3, you also have to see. So what this shows, this is a new Lancet study from 2021. What?

Each year, rising temps save 166,000 lives? Yeah. This is kind of surprising, right? You know who told me that the first time? I'm sorry to interrupt you. Go ahead. But Randall Carlson said, he goes, climate change where it gets warmer is not necessarily good, but climate change where it gets colder is bad.

That's bad. Yeah. He said, everybody's scared about global warming. You should really be scared about global cooling. It's not dismissing global warming. So understand, when temperatures drop, you can't grow food, kids. It gets bad. And then we're really fucked.

So if I can just show you this one up here. If you look, there's an enormous amount of cold deaths in the world. There's about 4.5 million people die from cold every year. What? In the US, 170,000 people die from cold every year. What? Why? Because

every winter, you actually have to keep your home heated well for six months. especially up in the north. In order to not have arteries clogged, you have heart attacks, that kind of thing. What happens when it gets colder and you get cold, the body restricts its blood flow out to the surface and you get higher blood pressure. And that's a very well-known risk factor for getting heart attacks. So you actually have a lot of people that die because they don't get enough heat, especially older people. I never would imagine that many people freeze to death.

And this, of course, the point, you know, do you remember the heat dome last year? The heat dome. The thing that killed a lot of people up in Washington and British Columbia. Oh, that's right. Yeah. There was a huge heat wave. It killed, what, 700 people. Yeah. Huge issue.

And, you know, got covers of all papers and CNNs and all that for a week. And that is a real problem. That's certainly something that we're going to see more of from climate change. But you never hear about this fact that 170,000 people die from cold every year in the US. I've never heard that before. And this is not some quack science. This is the Lancet. This is the Global Burden of Decease. How many did you say? Sorry. What's the number? Did you find it?

170,000. So you should- Wasn't that what the Lancet just said? What was the paper? Put the paper up again so we can take a look at it. So that's the global burden of disease. If you go to G, B, C. I just typed in cold deaths in the U.S. per year, and it said since 1979, only 19,000 people have died from cold-related diseases. That's because if you ask, and there's another organization that just keeps track of how many people died from cold and got in the newspaper. That's, of course, very, very few.

Most of these are statistical deaths. So these are deaths that happens because whenever the temperature is lower, there's a slightly higher risk of dying. And that slightly higher risk is the cold death. Oh, so is this like a died with COVID or died from COVID thing? Are these people that are already dying and then it gets really cold and they die? No, no. They would not have had this problem had they not been experiencing this cold. So every year you see, sorry, if you take over the year, you see this trend. So from December, sorry, from January, it's high, and then

the death rate is low, and then it gets high again. This is basically because cold is dangerous, and heat, not nearly as much. Right, but how are they attributing those deaths directly to cold? If like, what is the statistic that you looked up? And where's, what's the source of that? looked up and where's what's the source of that so key points so this is from what is this from the government dot climate so this is the epa between 79 and 2016 the death rate as a direct result of exposure to cold underlying cause of death so that's freezing to death that's not like strokes and heart attacks right okay um generally range from one to 2.5 deaths per million people. With year-to-year fluctuations, overall total of more than 19,000 Americans have died from cold-related causes since 1979, according to death certificates. So what are they putting on the death certificate of these people that are dying that you're counting with the 166,000?

So, sorry, the 170 for the U.S.? Yeah, whatever the Lancet study said, 166. Sorry, the Lancet study is a global study, and that was an increase in the number of people. Oh, I'm sorry. So, United States, 170,000. That's the global burden of disease. So, they are an international study out of University of Washington that tries to estimate all the deaths and where do they come from. So people die from all kinds of things, but what was the proximate cause of this? Was it too hot? Was it too cold? Was it that you were in an accident? All these kinds of different things. And a lot of, this is the kind of thing where you say obesity causes a lot of deaths. I can't remember what that is, like a million deaths.

But it's not on the death certificate. It's not on the death certificate because it's a statistical correlation that you died because or you died right after the cold or the heat snap. Is there potential to manipulate that in one way or another? Look, again, if someone has a political bias to push one thing or another? So, yes, there is a way. So, for instance,

curiously, everybody that dies from heat die after one or two days. So that's why it's such good news, you know. Sorry, sorry. Such good newscasting, right? When it happens, you can show the bodies right there. When you have cold deaths, it typically happens after 15 to 30 days.

So you need to have cold for a long time because then you're starting to work that up and your body restricts your temperature. That's what causes it. So you really need to lag these. A lot of times you don't do that analysis and so you you only find the heat deaths, but not the cold deaths. So there's a wonderful study that actually showed back in the late 2000s when fracking came on board. They found that gas prices went down. So about half of all Americans heat their homes with gas. And so what happened was you actually could show that because people could now afford to heat their homes better, especially if they were poor, that actually every year saves about 11,000 people from dying from heat – sorry, from cold deaths. Isn't that amazing? It is amazing. So these cold deaths, we're talking about people who, because of being in freezing cold temperatures, they have a variety of different detrimental health problems.

Like what takes – is it just because they're older folks? Yes. It's almost entirely older people. Okay. This is not because they're sitting and shivering and, you know, you can sort of see the ice. It's just they're a bit more fragile when it's cold at night. It's just that their homes are not all that well heated. Right.

And you have to keep the heat on at night. Yes. And they can't quite afford it. And so they keep it, you know, like one or two or three degrees lower than they probably want it to. No one thinks that kills people. No. I never would have taken that into consideration. And the reason why it kills people is because this is a lot of millions of people,

and each one of them are put into this little risk factor. And the overall point that I tried to make with that graph and with the Lancet study was just that, you know, you hear all this thing about more heat deaths, and that's absolutely true because of global warming. But you never hear the fact that as temperatures rise, you're, of course, also going to see fewer cold deaths. And actually, right now, it turns out that we're seeing many fewer cold deaths than we're seeing increasing heat deaths. What's more preventable, the heat deaths or the cold deaths,

in terms of medical intervention? So it's actually not medical intervention. It's just air conditioning. Like fluid IVs. They do that a lot to people that get severely dehydrated. But again, remember, these are not people that have been in freezing water for 10 minutes or something. Right. These are people that are just a little too cold or a little too warm. And the simple way to deal with that is air conditioning. That's why, as temperatures have risen in the U.S., we've seen declining levels of heat death because you guys can afford air conditioning.

And that's, of course, what we need to make sure that the rest of the world can afford. So it's actually easier to deal with heat because we know how to do that. Whereas cold requires you to have cheap energy for the whole heating season. And that's much, much costlier and harder, especially for poor people. So when people talk about our impact on the world with oil and how we're ruining the future of our planet, and so the hysteria of these young people, what do you think is the thing to tell them to try to give them a more balanced perspective of what's actually happening? Like if you think it's a problem, you think what people are doing is a problem, but it's not as big of a problem.

That's what kind of has to be balanced out because it's either everything or it's nothing. That's the narrative that we hear today. Either global warming is not an issue at all. Oh, you silly goose. Why are you worried about that? Or it's, oh, my God, we're all going to die. Those are the only two options you have. And I want to get people to understand that global warming is a problem, but it's actually mostly a problem in the sense that the world is getting better and better.

But because of global warming, it gets slightly slower, much better. That's a hard one to tell. Can I just show you one graph? Slightly slower, much better? So it gets better and better, but slightly slower. Let me show you two graphs. So if I can show you from A22. So it's impeding our progress? Yes. It's impeding our progress slightly. Slightly. What kind of a percentage are we talking about? Let me just, first, if I can just show you A22. So this one shows the deaths over the last century of all the things that you think of as climate, right? Floods, droughts, storms, wildfires, and extreme temperatures.

They don't do a particularly good job on extreme temperatures, but let's just leave it at that. This is the best data that we have for the world. And what it basically shows is the complete opposite of what these guys that are gluing themselves to the Picasso, right? This is fundamentally a situation of back when you were poor in the 1920s, about half a million people died every year. You know what would be amazing to look at right next to that? The deaths from donuts. It would be the total opposite direction. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Look, getting richer means that you can allow yourself to go, you know, die from lots and lots of donuts. Yeah. But it's a decision. Well, it's a lot of poor people as well. Yeah. I mean, that food's cheap and it's filling, you know. But if you looked at food-related deaths, let's see if there's food-related deaths. How many – like how would you make that distinction?

Would it be people who died from obesity and diabetes? Like how would you say that? Because it's obviously a lot of other autoimmune diseases that come from being obese. There's not just a few. So like the 500,000 from 1920, I bet we hit that every year from obesity. Oh, I'm sure. In America? Like what do you think it is in America? Like heart disease and that's- Heart disease is probably a couple of million, isn't it? That's a lot, right? But the heart disease one can be attributed to genetics. Two and a half million dead in total

in the US. So it's probably at 1 million or something. And how many of those you could attribute to sedentary lifestyle and obesity and how many of it's just unfortunate genetics? Because that happens as well. What do you think... Does anybody do an accounting on how many people die from obesity every year? Oh God, yeah. Very sure. That's like the bottom line, right? They're attributing it to

you on your death certificate. They're saying obesity. That can't be that many, right? How many is that? I don't know. I think all the other effects, like heart attacks, strokes, all the things that come from being obese, diseases, susceptibility to diseases. But I think your point is well taken right because it tells you that all these protesters are gluing themselves right there and I worried about the end of the world from climate change should be much more worried about they should move themselves to Krispy Kreme Krispy Kreme is damn good though especially when it comes out warm when I look this up it's

it's it's a contributing factor it I don't know that it's listed as like yeah that's what I was getting at. It seems like it would be hard to quantify. Is it hard to quantify? Yeah, I mean because like if someone's fat and they get cancer, like is that what happened? What caused it? Would they have gotten cancer anyway? This is what burden of disease actually does.

So they do this for the whole globe. They would probably parcel it out for obesity as well. Yeah. Obviously, that was one of the big things that people had a problem with with COVID deaths. There was people that were already terminally ill and got COVID and they attributed it to COVID. But, you know, your body is like an ecosystem. And if you have like a major insult coming into your body, like being obese or a disease, or if you live in one of these horrible places that has massive amounts of pollution, that's something that must affect. I mean, that is a big impact on longevity, right?

Like people that live in those polluted cities. Yeah, and just being poor. Bad nutrition, bad health care, all of the above, stress, violence, all of that. But that's not convenient, Bjorn. That's not good for our little conversation. Our conversation is I have to glue myself to the Van Gogh and throw fucking soup at it. Can I just show you on – sorry, B8. Yeah, I have a quick question on the climate one.

I was just watching a movie about World War I last night, that's why I asked this. Wouldn't war deaths – shouldn't they maybe be included or would they they be very high in this first area, like 1920, 1940? Oh, so this was only for war deaths? Comparing millions of people died because of war and other things due to the war. Oh, God, yes. This would be much bigger and centered around 1940. But I'm only looking at the floods, droughts, storms, and wildfires. I was also like, I didn't...

What giant floods or... I'm not saying there weren't. I've just never heard of any. No, I think what he's talking about with climate-related deaths is mostly people freezing to death. Well, no. So, sorry. This is exactly the point. I'm just asking for clarity. There was huge floods

in China and India in the 1920s, 1930s. Huge famines. Things that we just never heard of. Well, we heard a little bit about it back then. But then we've forgotten it. And then when we hear about these things that will cause a thousand deaths. Remember, let me take an example I know a lot more about. So the world's biggest hurricane death was in Bangladesh

in 1970. It was a big hurricane that came in, killed somewhere between 300 and 500,000 people in Bangladesh. This was mostly because, you know, they were totally unprepared. There was very bad communication. It was also East Pakistan back then. That was one of the reasons why they broke loose, because they felt they weren't really being taken care of. Today, and this in many ways defined Bangladesh, and so they have taken great care in getting much better prevention. They have information. They have these centers where you can assemble up on high areas where you can actually keep everyone safe and stuff. So now the same kind of hurricanes come in, and they kill sort of tens or hundreds of people instead. Did you see that community that they established in Florida that survived

this last hurricane with like flying colors? Is that a word? You know that expression. If you go to, what was the hurricanes called? The last one, the big one that just hit Florida? Ian. If you go to Hurricane Ian Solar Community, Florida, I believe it's 2,000 homes. They're completely off-grid in the sense that they have a solar field, and it powers these homes, and they built homes to withstand hurricanes. And so this is a bad hurricane. So it was a really good test for them, and it nailed them. And everything was fine. They kept their internet. They kept their electricity. So it was a really good test for them and it it nailed them and everything was fine They kept their internet they kept their electricity. So look at isn't that wild look how they did that They have this massive massive field of solar panels. So it's called Babcock Ranch and this

This community was established just to give people a safe place from a natural disaster Because a lot of the houses they built before you know the Engineering when they were building these houses in like the 1950s I mean did they really know how to survive a fucking hurricane you know they just built a good house They tried their best, but see if you can get some photos of what the houses look like they look like normal houses But they built these houses with very strong tolerances. And they can take like incredible winds. And they look like a regular fucking house. It's not like they're space houses, like they're built like a fucking – like a wind turbine or something like that.

No, it's normal houses. But they're just really robust. And these people all made it through. Yeah. Which is pretty wild. And, Joe, I think it emphasizes something. We know how to fix many of these problems. Joe, I think it emphasizes something.

We know how to fix many of these problems. And if you just disregard the solar part, which of course kept them powered, but there's many other ways you could have done that with batteries as well. But that's a great way. Oh, absolutely. But the main point is you should have better regulation for houses if you want most houses to survive. This is very, very cheap. There's a good study for Hurricane Sandy and also for Hurricane Andrew back in 92. Had there been better regulation, so you just had clamps, for instance, on roofs, these cost, what, $5 or something? You could have avoided half of all the

damage. Because the roofs peel off. Yeah. This is very, very simple stuff. And so again, because we're so worried about one thing, namely climate change, and saying, oh, my God, we've got to go to electric cars and stop using fossil fuels and all this other stuff. No, actually, you need to have clamps. And this is the kind of conversation that we have a very hard time getting around to. That just like we started off talking about with plastics, a lot of the solutions are not, they're not nearly as comforting, but they're just much simpler, much cheaper, much more effective. So what is the solution in terms of reducing our carbon footprint without destroying the economy? Well, so I think first of all, we need to get rid of the panic because panic is just a really,

really bad way of dealing with issues. But it's a really good way to get people to vote and it's a really good way to get people to donate money to your party. Yes. But it also leads to us all just screaming, running around screaming. Because I wanted to show you this, that the progress is actually just slightly delayed. So if I could just show you the B8. This is because of climate change. Our progress is slightly delayed, you're saying.

Yes, yes. And I just wanted to share. So this is malaria death since 1900 until 2060. This is obviously prediction from 2020. This is the World Health Organization estimating what will happen with global warming. You've heard this story, right? No, I haven't heard that everyone's going to die of malaria. Because of global warming, there's going to be more places where malaria can survive, and that's going to give us all malaria. Right. Makes sense. And there is some

truth to this. So what you see here is that you will actually, with climate, you will actually have slightly higher levels of malaria deaths than if there was no climate change. So what we're looking at, for folks who are just listening, there is a really high line in the 1900s. And it goes from zero to 200. The line is almost at 200 in the early 1900s. And it drops all the way down to what looks like two in 2060. And it's pretty stable from like 2040 to 2060. And from that point, and it's below what it is now, by the way. But that point above it with climate is maybe two and a half. It's on top of the line.

It's like touching the line. So it's a very, very small number. Not that it's good for people to die of malaria. And what this tells you is right when they come out and tell you there's going to be more malaria with global warming. But how much more? Yeah. But you're missing the greater picture, which is, look, things are going to be a lot better, but slightly slower, a lot better. And could that be mitigated with malaria medication? Of course it could. Of course it could. So if you actually care about malaria, your right answer is not to say we got to change the entire growth engine of

the world and stop using fossil fuels. No, the right answer is to to say we got to change the entire growth engine of the world and stop using fossil fuels. No, the right answer is to make sure that people get malaria medication, that they get bed nets. There's a lot of these simple things. Remember, this does not mean that we shouldn't also try to fix global warming. We're a smart species. We can walk and chew gum at the same time. But we seem to almost entirely just go to the straight answer. Whatever the problem is, the answer is to cut carbon emissions. And that's often not the best or the most effective way to help people first. There are some real ironies. One of the crazy ones is coal-fired plants powering Teslas. That is one of the wildest trade-offs that we make, and that happens every day in this

country. Someone is getting into their Tesla, thinking they're doing a really good job, and the electricity to power that Tesla is from a coal-fired plant. It's bananas. And a lot of that could be avoided with nuclear. The problem with nuclear is if it fucks up, you ruin that spot for a long time. True. That's what scares people. That's the initial applications of nuclear, like Fukushima.

They didn't have enough fail-safes. These were older plants. They think that they can mitigate a lot of those problems with newer plants, and there's even designs for newer plants. They can actually safely shut down, right? Yeah, I mean they should all be able to safely shut down. But clearly Fukushima was not well enough designed because they basically put them in a place where the backup generators could be hit by – That one's nuts.

But even in that one, I don't believe very many people died from Fukushima. No, nobody died. So some people died because Fukushima. Nobody died. So some people died because you evacuated everybody. But, you know, it was really not a big risk. But it was a big risk to the ocean, right? Isn't there like a significant problem with – Well, no, that was a very, very small bit. Really?

Yeah. I thought it was spilling over into the ocean. There's radioactive water in the ocean. It did. But, again, remember, the Pacific Ocean is a very, very large – So it dilutes it enough. Yeah, and there's a lot of natural radiation almost everywhere in the world. I mean, most people don't get the idea that your vast exposure of radiation comes from living in a stone house.

So if you have like bricks. Like a brownstone in New York? Yeah, because most stone has natural radiation. But it's not a negative radiation. It's not a terrible one. By no means this is not, you know, don't freak out again. But the whole point here is to recognize that we don't have a good sense of proportion of what's the risks that we're really exposing ourselves to. The main issue with nuclear, and this, of course, is why we're not getting lots and

lots of nuclear, is that nuclear is incredibly expensive right now. So new nuclear power plants of the current third generation just cost a lot of money. So they're actually more expensive than going to solar and wind. And that's really why we're not building a lot of them. How much more expensive? why we're not building a lot of them. How much more expensive? So some of the new ones that are being done in France and Finland and in the UK have ended up being two to four times more expensive than they were planned.

And so they're easily sort of two, three times more expensive. More than they were planned to be? Yes. So they go way over budget. And the total cost of the electricity they'll produce could easily be two or three times the cheapest electricity you can get. How much of that is fraud? I don't know. Because whenever they have construction that goes way over, I think about the big dig in Boston.

Do you know about that? No. The big dig was a thing that was going on when I was a kid and a bunch of people went to jail. So we can hear where it's going at least. Super slow play in the digging this tunnel because they didn't want the jobs to go away. Right. And they did a terrible job. It took forever. It was, I think they called it one of the most corrupt construction projects in the history of the United States. And that's saying something. It finished more than 10 years after it was supposed to be finished. I got already moved out of Boston, but I came back many, many years later. I'm like, this thing's still around?

They're still doing this? $14.8 billion later, the big dig finally complete. When the clock runs out on 2007, construction of the big dig, the nation's most complex and costliest highway project will officially come to an end. They were doing that when I was living in there in the 1980s.

They were working on it. They finished it in 2007. So what is the, like, it was super corrupt, right? Didn't a bunch of people go to jail? I'm not saying that the people that are making the nuclear power plants are doing the same thing. It started at $2.6 billion and ended up at $14.8. Whoa. But I think it tells a different story.

Holy shit, that's so much money. Certainly for nuclear, what happens is that you want one more fail-safe and then one more fail-safe. Right. They keep on changing the rules and making the regulations, so it's going to be even harder. And again, that's not a bad thing. It sounds like a good thing.

Fail-safe sounds good. Yes, but you also want to have a sense of, well, how safe are we going to be here compared to all the other stuff that is also risky? We constantly make tradeoffs. Right. We should not pay attention to this, but I see what you're saying. We should give equal focus to all these other problems that the world has. And that's not what we do. We focus on one thing.

So you asked me what should we say to these guys that glue themselves to famous paintings. And I think first it is to get them to realize this is not the end of the world. They should work in a coal mine. This is not the end of the world. No, I would never ask that of anyone. So they should realize this is not the end of the world. For a year. I would never ask that of anyone. So they should realize this is not the end of the world. And I think that would take away a lot of this, oh, my God, we've got to do something right now. And then we can start talking about, okay, how do you fix things smartly?

Well, you don't fix getting rid of fossil fuels by telling everyone, I'm sorry, would you mind being a little poor and a little colder and not be able to drive? Would that be okay with you? You don't win elections that way. You don't actually get things done. The way you fix problems is through innovation. So if you think back to Los Angeles in the 1950s, it was a terribly polluted place, mostly because of cars. There's special sort of geography that makes it very possible for all the pollution just to get stuck in that dome in Los Angeles. And it's cars. And so the current way we think about environment is basically, all right, the solutions back then would have been to tell everyone in Los Angeles, I'm sorry, could you walk instead? And no, that wouldn't have worked. What did work was the innovation of the catalytic converter.

So in 1974, this guy comes up with this little thing you put on. It cost a couple hundred dollars, and basically it takes away all the pollution from the car. How cool is that? It's pretty cool, but not all the pollution. No, no, no. But you can drive a lot longer and pollute a lot less, which is why Los Angeles is enormously much cleaner. It's still not clean. Here's a take for innovation. Here's an interesting piece of information. In polluted cities, some cars, like particularly Jeremy Clarkson was talking about this on Top Gear,

some cars like a Porsche Turbo, which is a very efficient car and has incredible air filters. The air coming out of the exhaust is actually cleaner than the air going in. Make sure that's true. Make sure that's true because I'd be an asshole if it's not true. But Jeremy Clarkson definitely said that. And I remember thinking, like, wow, maybe that is the solution. We should buy a Porsche to everyone. No, not a Porsche.

A car that's sucking in carbon. Everyone should before they die own one of those though. But if you could get a car that is somehow or another utilizing that fuel that's in the air, that's problematic. And if there's some sort of a way to extract that and convert it, maybe through some unforeseen technology, convert that into energy. This sounds implausible. Does it? Yeah.

It sounds like it's very – so we're doing the same thing with carbon, that you're trying to suck out the carbon from the atmosphere, and it turns out to be very expensive. Well, all combustion engines require oxygen, right? Would it be possible for a combustion engine at least to somehow work carbon neutral by pulling enough carbon out of the atmosphere that whatever comes out the back is actually not good. This is what he said. Here it is.

Jeremy Clarkson said, when you drive this car through a really polluted city, Los Angeles, Calcutta, I don't know what the other one is. Harrogate. Harrogate. I think he was joking around. Something like that. The gas coming out of the exhaust pipe is less toxic than the air going into the engine. And I'm not joking. That's true.

And then this then is like a small, efficient, easy to use vacuum cleaner. Okay. So he's joking around about that. But is that true? Is that true? Does it say it's true, Jamie? It doesn't say that it's true or false.

So that is his quote. Well, I have seen concept cars that clean the air. I seriously doubt any car existing. Yeah, that's what this is. But again, except... Especially the Porsche 911. Oh, because there's bullshit. So he's saying it's bullshit.

I seriously doubt any existing cars, especially the Porsche 911 Turbo, emits exhaust that is cleaner than air, even air in the most polluted cities. Here's exactly what Clarkson says. So this is by Autoblog. So Autoblog is calling bullshit, which makes sense. It doesn't make sense. But it was a fun story. But if it could be, is it an engineering issue? Is it possible that some new invention would be able to do that with the air?

So I'm essentially an economist. I'm sort of a pretend economist because I'm really a political scientist, but I like to pretend I'm an economist. Why do you do that? Because economists are smart people. So anyway, economists would tend to say you can do anything you want if you're willing to pay the money, right? So we can take people to the moon.

We could potentially take all of Austin to the moon. It would just be fantastically expensive, right? And it's not clear that it would be really cool either. They shouldn't take everybody to the moon. No. Just the people with Beto signs in their lawn. Oh, there you go. So fundamentally, you can do a lot of stuff and you could also do this, but it would just be incredibly expensive, meaning you wouldn't have the resources to do all the other stuff you also want to do.

Hence, this is a Porsche Turbo. This is not a Hyundai or a Fiat. It's a very expensive car. So in terms of what we can do now to slow the stem, that's one of the fear-mongering things that you hear. I don't know if it's accurate, but they're always saying if we don't do this now, with every day that passes by, if we don't enact legislation, the future is doomed. This is the thing that people keep harping on. How much of that is accurate? That's just wrong. I mean, if you look at the UN Climate Panel reports, there's nowhere they tell you this. The quote, I don't know if you remember, this was AOC and many others telling us we have just 12 years left.

Oh, my God. That was the argument that they asked the UN, what will it take to stick to 1.5 degrees centigrade, which is sort of an arbitrary target. Right. And almost impossible, probably impossible to do. And so the UN said, if you want to do this, almost impossible, you have to do everything before 2030, which was then 12 years away. That's where the 12-year time limit come from. It's basically saying if you want to do something incredibly stupid and incredibly expensive, you only have 12 years left. But that's not what the UN is telling us.

We should switch and we should cut carbon emissions. But there are much, much smarter ways to do this. So perhaps the most obvious one is what the U.S. did back from late 2000s, which was fracking. Yeah, this is basically something that was done by investment research and development from George W. Bush in the early 2000s, where they spent about $10 billion working with frackers to find out how do you frack gas and then later on oil. And what that meant was you ended up, this was not at all meant as a climate policy. It was meant as a way to get more energy. But what it meant was you ended up getting much, much cheaper gas. And because you had much cheaper gas, you switched out coal for gas. This matters because gas is about twice as efficient.

It emits half as much CO2 per unit of energy. So you basically have this situation where you made a somewhat cleaner source of energy much cheaper. And so the U.S. actually cut its emissions more over the last decade than any other country has ever done. But is there a detrimental effect on the environment because of fracking that has to balance that out? There is. How much of an impact is that? Thank you for asking. So there's a study that tries to look at what all the damages and all the benefits from fracking is.

And so they find the total damage from fracking is in the order of $25 billion, mostly from air pollution. Air pollution? Yes. Interesting. So does that negate the air pollution that it saves? No. So this is local air pollution, and this is mostly from the increased amount of emissions, especially of methane, but also just because you have lots of construction going on where you do the fracking.

And because fracking is a very rapid turnover, you need a lot of wells. So there's a total cost, environmental cost, of about $25 billion. That's not nothing, absolutely, per year. But the benefit of fracking to the U.S. is estimated by one of the Federal Reserve estimates. Right, but if I could push back against that. Yes, can I just say- Yeah, please do. Sorry. So it's $180 billion in increased growth for the US. So you get $180 billion,

but you also have environmental problems of $25 billion. Well, shouldn't we be doing everything possible to mitigate the amount of environmental problems? And when you're talking about just straight money, how much money is it worth to pollute the rivers and pollute the streams and pollute the air? I would say that's not a benefit at all. That benefit in terms of like the negative impact of pollution and then trying to clean up that pollution is catastrophic. It's very difficult and sometimes impossible.

When you're talking about polluting ancient waterways, that scares the shit out of people, including me. Especially people that like to go outside and do outdoor activities and go camping and hiking and shit. They get terrified by the idea of fracking, destroying the rivers. And that has happened before, right? Sure. And look, again, most of the impact was air pollution, but there's also some water pollution. And that is definitely an issue. Again, we have to remember that running the current energy system that we have in the U.S. causes lots of pollution.

And it causes lots of benefits. And we make those tradeoffs all the time. Right. But if we can contain it to the areas that it's already at, that would be more efficient than spreading it out to our rivers. And we have done that. Right. Remember, air pollution, certainly in the U.S., has come down about 90% of the last 30 years. So because of the Clean Air Act and many others, we've actually dramatically reduced air pollution. And we know how to do that.

You can absolutely regulate fracking better, and you can decide that you want to have less air pollution. But it is a trade-off in the sense of saying, how much more opportunity will you have? And then you also actually cut carbon emissions, which is what the U.S. has done more than any other country, versus how much do you want, for instance, less air pollution. But for the people that live around those areas where they're fracking, that's not a good relationship. Although a lot of these guys, this is one of the reasons why fracking is taken off in the US and not anywhere else, because in the US, you own your own mineral rights, right? So the guys who own the land are the ones who typically get most of the, or not most of the

benefit, but a substantial benefit of the fracking. That's not true in Europe, which is why everybody then gets annoyed about the air pollution. But if you get air pollution, but you also get like $200,000, many people will say, hmm, I like that. Now, they probably like to have less air pollution. Doesn't RuPaul have like some crazy ranch where they extract natural resources? I remember people reading about that going, wait, what? There you go with the Mountain Dew.

Yes. Got excited. First Mountain Dew of the day. It is. Are cigars bad for the environment? They're certainly bad for you. No. What about George Burns?

He lived forever. Do you think they're bad for you? I'm pretty sure we know that. Do you think they're worse for you than Mountain Dew? I'm certainly hoping so. You're over there sucking on Mountain Dew, talking to me about cigars. Yes. Cigars are natural tobacco leaves.

You don't even inhale. You just puff on it. Okay. I don't think you possibly, we should have a little warning sticker that don't take medical advice from this man. Yeah, for sure. Hold up non-COVID content. RuPaul was just on NPR Fresh Air and shared that he and his partner own 60,000 acres in Wyoming,

and they lease mineral rights and sell water to oil companies. Okay. Terry Gross did not follow up with one question about the fact that RuPaul is fracking. Oh, so it is fracking. We found that RuPaul, is that true? Ru's partner, it is true? Australian rancher George Labar owns seven parcels of land in Wyoming, totaling some 66,000 acres, Labar's company.

Labar Ranch leases that land to at least three oil companies, Anadarko, EP, Onshore, Chesapeake Operating, and Anschultz Oil Company. Using Frack Tracker, we looked at just 10,000 of those acres and found more than 35 active oil and gas wells. But then they also say all oil and gas drilling is bad. All oil and gas drilling is bad. You hear me, Bjorn? This is a fact.

This is a fact. It's on Gizmodo, you son of a bitch. Jeremy Bjorn, this is a fact. This is a fact. It's on Gizmodo, you son of a bitch. All oil and gas drilling is bad, but these three companies are no mom and pop shops. Chesapeake Energy was a pioneer of the drilling method early in the nation's fracking boom. It was the second most active drilling company in the nation, closely followed by Anadarko. by Anadarko.

And Anschultz owner, Philippe Frederick Anschultz, made billions from fossil fuel extraction that earned him the 41st spot on the Forbes 400. Wow, interesting. Well, RuPaul is fabulous. Go get it. Get that money. So if it's your land,

if it's your land, do you have the right to pollute the rivers and streams? That's the question because these all have trickle-down effects. Like that water is connected to other waterways. And we should have better regulation. We have gotten a lot better regulation. But I was simply trying to get you a sense of when you do anything in the world, it has negative impacts and positive impacts.

You're a glass-half-full guy. No, I'm a glass that you need to – no, I'm not. I can't carry on that metaphor. Okay. You don't have to. I put you down a dark road. The idea behind it is there's a tradeoff with everything you do. I mean, that's what Thomas Sowell said that, right?

There's no solutions. There's tradeoffs. Yeah. And what, again, we talked about what should we say to these guys that are gluing themselves on paintings. And not only should you not be scared witless, you should think of this as a problem. But then you also need to find out what actually works. Remember, Germany has been half, you know, Germany is for many people sort of this amazing green wonderland. But no, they've gone from 84% fossil fuels to now 77% fossil fuels, and they spent half a trillion dollars trying to achieve that. That's not how you do these things.

That's not how you really show yourself to the world and say, we're really amazing. Is that a political posturing thing where they put policies in place because those policies are what the people have been sort of at least programmed by fear-mongering to expect and want from their politicians? It's partly that. I mean obviously it's good politics because a lot of people get reelected saying I'm going to save your world and elect me and then I'm going to put up some more solar panels. But the problem is it's an incredibly expensive way of achieving almost nothing. And that's why, you know, if you look at what fracking has done, you know, fracking is sort of a dirty word. Do you work for big fracking? This son of a bitch works for big fracking. But I simply point out that fracking more than anything else has cut carbon emissions dramatically

because you've given an alternative to coal, which not only emits a lot of CO2, but also kills a lot of people through air pollution, and you can now do a lot less. Imagine if we could make China frack, India frack. Europe would be good to frack as well because we could actually get all of these countries to switch away from coal towards gas. Now, this is not the whole solution, but it has the beauty of being cheaper so that you don't actually have to go to all these summits where everybody promises stuff and then don't do it, but you would actually have people do what's in their own private interest. But that's an uncomfortable trade-off to me, this idea of exploiting the environment that way,

because that's what it is. It's like, if you're going to agree to pollute a certain amount of the water, a certain amount of the land, is there any solution to extract that pollution? And is that even feasible or possible? Of course. I mean, look- But is that? Yeah. I mean- Because if it's not, I don't think that should even be considered. I understand that our emissions are an important issue, but our emissions are where they are now. For a tradeoff like that, where you decide you're going to do something that's going to definitely pollute rivers and streams, and to decide the way that you're going to do that

because it's going to reduce the effect on the environment in terms of the emissions of the stream. There's got to be a better way. So, look, I think we need to go back. Is there a better way? I would love to look at the study again. So the vast majority is air pollution. That's simply just that you have elevated levels where you're near the fracking places.

This is pollution from fracking. Yes. Air pollution. So the water pollution. It's localized and it's mostly the people who are also getting the benefits. That's why many people would accept this sort of trade-off. Absolutely, we should not have, you know, you're sort of switching over to this other place where we say, but what if it, you know, dramatically damaged rivers downstream and, you know,

cultural place and all that stuff. That's much more regulatable. That's the kind of thing where you just simply say you can't do this. We had a lot of this impact in the early part of fracking where just everybody did it. It was sort of, you know, wild west for everything. But you can regulate a lot of this. And that's why I think it's a fairly small part of it. But again, how can you regulate unseen water pollution? So if you are, the method that they utilize in fracking is they drill holes and then they force liquids into these holes. And these liquids are filled with chemicals and somehow or another there's a process and they use that to extract it. So how are they doing that and how could you possibly regulate that if you're not even seeing where it's going? So the way you regulated it was to get rid of the most dangerous

parts of those chemicals. As I understand it, there's very little dangerous now, the chemicals that you put in, and then also have the overflow so you actually get the wastewater out and that you keep that or you treat that before you release it back. Is that possible to do if they're pumping it into the earth? No, no, you pump it out again. You pump it out again. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You're not leaving it down there. The pollution, that's also why it gets back into the environment. The pollution typically came – the water pollution that you're thinking of, I think, mostly came from – Yes, from people taking this wastewater when it comes back up again and then just letting it seep in, putting it in places where it wasn't you know, if it rained a lot, it would just overflow or that kind of thing. And, you know, this is something that we know very well how to do. If you have – yes, there are always people who will cheat and stuff. That's why you need some sort of follow-up as well. And you probably also want to have bigger companies doing this because they follow standard procedure.

But this is fairly simple to manage, if you will. That's what the EPA does in a lot of different- Did you ever see the documentary Gasland? Yeah. What did you think about that documentary? So my two cents in that was that it's a good thing to point out that there's a real issue here. When you contrast it with what most of the actual operators said were the problems, I think it was somewhat misleading and it was certainly alarmist. But again, I think it's good that we get these stories out there, but we need to keep a sense of perspective. What about the people whose water was on fire? Oh, and it was a great picture.

And very clearly, there were some of these things that needed to get regulated, and they now have. They have? They fixed it? It's all done? All better? Well, it's certainly a lot better. This is what the Environmental Defense Fund and many others are saying as well. Do you know what the chemicals were that were really dangerous that they were using that they stopped using?

No. I mean, I kind of know. I've read it, but I can't remember. So there's no damage whatsoever to the waterways that are under the ground if they're pumping all this toxic chemicals in there? No, because they're pumping them way further down than where aquifers typically are. And they pump them into places that have held hydrocarbons. That's why they're there for millions of years. So they're not going to- And that's how it gets it to release. So they can extract basically everything they put down there. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Well, that's better. But this idea that we should accept some amount of water pollution and river pollution scares the shit out of me. Because that like one of the few amazing things about this country is that there are still unspoiled natural habitats and to fuck those up yeah in the name of the economy yeah i think and i get that point i i think you're sort of imagining that we're we're gonna frack and then you know uh yellowstone goes down and flames kind of thing no i'm saying even for local areas imagine if you're a person who like your family's always gone down to this river it's near your Yellowstone goes down and flames kind of thing. No, I'm saying even for local areas. Imagine if you're a person who like your family has always gone down to this river. It's near your house and it's a source of recreation for everybody. Now you can't go in there because it's polluted.

Yeah. So again, I don't know this well enough, but it's not my understanding that we're anywhere near that situation. It would be something that you could measure elevated levels of some constituents. That would be it. See, if you can Google what the... There was one river that I think that they were talking about in that documentary that got polluted directly because of fracking and the chemicals released from fracking, and that it was really damaging. That scares the shit out of people when they start talking about extracting oil

and you're like, where salmon spawn and stuff like that. I mean, we've got to be really careful about doing stuff like that just to boost the economy. That seems like a short-sighted thing that's going to cost us more money in the long run if ultimately it does lead to be not just more money but you're going to have these unfixable areas of pollution. Yeah. I think this is way exaggerated.

The point that I try to make was when you do these estimates, and that's why I think economics actually have a good sort of contribution. They tell you that when you look at all the disbenefits from fracking, those are significant. That's what I was saying. That's $25 billion. That means that there will be some people who will be more exposed to air pollution, which will lead to some diseases. And that's the net worth of which is in the order of $25 billion. It's a lot of other things and also some of these waterway things. So that's people that are working on the fracking mines and working in those areas? It could also be just people who are there, who live there.

Well, that sucks if you're there and you don't frack. Yeah. But I think if you look at any other thing, so if you look at the fact that we have roads in the US, they kill 40,000 people every year. You mean car accidents? Yeah. And there's a very simple way to avoid that. It's setting the speed limit at three miles an hour. Good call. And we make that trade-off and we say, look, you can have a sensible conversation, should it be 55 or 75? And that's a real conversation about how much faster do I get home versus how many more

people die. But none of us would be willing to say it's going to be three miles an hour. And I think that's the conversation that we need to have. Yeah, that's kind of a different conversation. Delaware's rivers and streams are the most polluted in the US, a new report says. And is this directly because of fracking? That's what I was trying to figure out so I just found another article that kind of contradicts that specifically and said it's particularly here so it's been cleaned up and it's now today like the one of the top water quality success stories okay when was the other article written this is from New Jersey gov and the other one is also this year it's a report from another, like PBS, it's a news station wrote this, and this

is also from this year. So which one is saying, this is where you got to look. So can I just say, and you get this a lot, I don't know this particular thing, but what we know is that all pollution levels have been going down in the U.S. So it could actually both be true, that everything is getting cleaner, but Delaware's rivers are getting less more clean. Do you see what I mean? They're getting cleaner slower. Cleaner slower.

So even though it's one of the most polluted, it's one of the most polluted in relation. With all the other very, very clean rivers. And again, this is not untrue. And certainly we want our environment to be cleaner rather than dirtier. There's no doubt about that. But it's just that we can't have this idea of saying we won't accept any damage anywhere. Because then we end up, and this, of course, is what happens in many areas, we end up sending all our pollution to China and India and elsewhere and feel all virtuous about it.

We do? How do we do that? So, you know, there's a good chance. No, you have a Tesla, right? So that's possibly produced here. But most electric cars, their batteries are produced in China. So, you know, all the pollution went in over in China, and then we drive around and feel virtuous about them. You mean involved in the construction of the cars?

Yes, yes. And, of course, that's true for everything else. You know, most of the stuff, I don't know how much of the stuff in here, but probably a lot of it is from cars. Yes, yes. And of course, that's true for everything else. You know, most of the stuff, I don't know how much of the stuff in here, but probably a lot of it is from China. God damn it. And just like everyone else, it's not you there's anything wrong with, right?

But that's just how we put up our world. So we actually can feel very virtuous about ourselves and make everything cleaner, but then just have the air pollution and all the other pollution impacts somewhere else. Now, when you look at the overall landscape of proposed improvements and the impact that it'll have on the environment, what stands out to you? Like, what do you think is things that people are talking about in terms of helping the environment and reducing our carbon footprint? Like what makes sense? So I'll tell you one thing that does and then one thing that does, right?

Sure. So if you look at a lot of these things, oh, I'm not going to do this or I'm not going to do that. I'm actually a vegetarian. How dare you? Yes, sorry about that. I knew it. Moral choice. Works for big fracking and he's a vegetarian.

This fucking guy. But people will tell you that going vegetarian is a great thing for the planet. But actually, it's a fairly small impact overall. So they'll tell you that it will reduce your carbon footprint by 50%. What they don't tell you, it's your food impact, your food footprint, which is a very small part of your total impact. So we're talking about 4% or thereabouts. And then remember also being vegetarian is cheaper. So that actually means you have more money and you're going to spend that on a trip to Mexico or something. So it actually turns out that when you take into account that people are going to spend the rest of their money on something else,

it probably reduces your emissions by 2%. When people talk about emissions and vegetarianism, do they take into account the difference in monocrop agriculture versus regenerative agriculture? Like you can buy food. We had Will Harris from White Oak Pastures, who has this very sophisticated regenerative farm that he converted his family's industrialized farm over a period of 20 years. Amazing story. Really interesting guy.

But doing so has basically – they take out more carbon than they put out into the environment. Everything is natural. They don't use any pesticides or herbicides. Everything is done the way like nature intended. They've essentially recreated nature in a controlled environment in terms of like utilizing the manure and the chicken shit and the chickens roam around and the pigs root around and all these animals live as if they're supposed to live.

Like normally in the wild. And because of that, his water that runs off into the river is so noticeably different than the water of his next-door neighbor. It's stunning. His next-door neighbor runs a traditional industrialized farm. And when you see their property line, when the water runs off, his is clear and then it hits where the neighbor's property is and it turns brown, like instantly. There's a literal divide line in the river.

It's crazy to see. So that's something you have to take into account when you think about vegetarianism. Like, how are you getting your vegetables? Are you getting it from a place like White Oaks Pastures that raises everything in a regenerative way? So it's natural. There's no pesticides or herbicides. There's no poison at all that's getting leaked into the water supply. Or are you buying your vegetables at a regular supermarket?

And they're, oh, it's corn. Great. Corn's good for you. But meanwhile, you're contributing to this fucking crazy eco-devastation on this river. And you don't even think you are. So the numbers I showed you were the ones that are based on how we actually produce. And that's by far mostly what that other guy does. Yeah, by far mostly doing industrialized.

So you have to be a little careful, though. So a lot of farms that say, for instance, they're organic and they don't use pesticides and they don't use artificial fertilizer and all that stuff, they basically get a lot of their fertilizer from other farms that are not because otherwise you can't make it run around. A curious thing that I think most people don't recognize. Say that again?

So there's not enough natural fertilizer in the world to keep 8 billion people fed. There's actually only enough natural fertilizer to keep 4 billion people fed. But isn't that under current farming models? Well, it's just simply a question of nitrogen. There's just not enough nitrogen in the world to make it run around. That's why you have to have the other 4 billion people or half of every person fed with fertilizer that basically comes from natural gas. And so when people say, oh, I have this very, very nice environmental farm, it often means that they're actually importing basically feces from other farms that have been grown with artificial fertilizer.

I don't necessarily think he does that. Look, I don't know. White oak pastures. But it's not that big of a farm in terms of like the amount of humans. Do you remember what he said, like the amount of humans he could feed with his farm? It's not enormous. No. And the point is, we just can't make this happen for everyone, which is one of the things when people go buy organic and all that stuff, it's great, you know, because it makes people feel really virtuous.

But the point is we just couldn't do it all of us. Right. But for the humans that do it, they are having a smaller impact, which is doing something to make them feel better. If you really are buying food from white oaks pastures, if that's your sole source of food for your family, you 100% are contributing less to the carbon footprint in comparison to buying stuff from that farm that's leaking into the river. No, not the – well, it depends on whether you're talking about the carbon footprint.

Not the carbon footprint. They typically emit about as much organic farms. Again, I don't know this particular farm. How is that possible, though? Because they're much less effective. And so they use a lot more land to produce the same amount of food. And so what is the carbon footprint coming from machines that they use? Well, it both comes from the methane that leaks from the land, from the inputs that go into the individual animals. It depends also a lot on what kind of animals it is and what kind of grains or whatever

it is that you're producing. But the point is that overall, when you do these life cycle analysis, you get that they have about the same impact per pound of food. Really? Even the regenerative farm? Well, again, I don't know this particular farm. I think the way he was describing it, he was very proud of the fact that it's essentially below carbon neutral, that it's actually contributing. It's taking out carbon from the way they grow their food to the way they utilize the manure and the way they feed the animals.

And the way they feed the animals. That's impressive because you can't – and again, I don't know how you do that because you can't – you can certainly set some land aside and make sure you generate more and more carbon in that storage area for a while. But you can't keep doing that. Look at this. As a result, white oak pastures has a carbon footprint 111% lower than conventional beef. White oak pastures sequestered 919 tons of CO2 in the soil with the help of plants and compost. That's like switching 31,679 incandescent light bulbs to LED. And so it shows white oak pastures versus other proteins, like how they're grown in

other places. So you see conventional beef, which is like a huge amount of carbon, plus 33. White oak pastures, it gets to them, their beef is negative 3.5. Yeah. So the only way that you can sequester CO2 on land is by not having it be productive. You need to have it, you know, you need to basically have it build up carbon dioxide in the, sorry, carbon. But he's talking about like compost and manure extracting that. Yeah, but you can't use it because if you use it, then you emit it again. We store more carbon in the soil than our cows emit during their lives. And so pounds of CO2 for every pound of white oak pastures be produced. Like this seems to contradict what you're saying.

And look, I don't know how this works. I'm talking about how regular organic farms work. And there's been lots of studies done on that. And the thing I'm a little worried about here is that it doesn't seem reasonable to me that you can actually keep this up. You can certainly do it for a few short years where you build up your carbon storage in your land, but eventually you have to either use it productively or keep it fenced off. I don't understand what you're saying. Why would he have to do that if he's rotating the crops and rotating where the animals go

and moving them around? Well, so if you plant a forest, so that's the typical sort of way you think about this, right? You put up a forest, you put up small saplings, they grow bigger and bigger. They store a lot of carbon. They both store it in the crown, but also in the root material. But eventually they've grown full and then they can't store anymore and then you just have to keep it there.

If you cut them down, then obviously you now release all the CO2 again. And what they're doing, as I understand it, is that they're basically building it up in their ground so they're having more roots in there, more stuff in there. But if you don't release it, if you don't use it, if you don't grow on it, you have to keep not growing on it in order to keep it stored away. Well, they're growing. It's pastures, so they have grass growing there. That's like the main thing that these cows are eating. They're all white. They're all grass fed. No, I get that. Yes. So that's how they're doing it. Okay. Yeah. No,

that makes sense. Sorry. I was thinking about intensive farm. Yeah. No, I get that. Yes. So that's how they're doing it. Okay. Yeah. No, that makes sense. Sorry. I was thinking about intensive farm. Yeah. No, that makes sense. Yeah. So his method, I think the only knock on it would be if you want to have a jack-in-the-box on every corner and you want cheap beef to feed people everywhere, you probably can't do it that way. And if you want to feed everyone, you can't do it that way.

But his argument was that we really shouldn't be eating that way anyway. That's also a fair point. Yeah. So the main point comes back to saying we can't do this for everyone. And that was the main point I was trying to make, that we have this idea of saying we can all go organic. No, a few people can go organic and feel very comfortable about it, but there's just not enough nitrogen for everyone to do this. And so that was the answer that I want to say. You know, don't think that these are these sort of cheap, simple things where you where you virtue signal is how you're really going to switch.

The way you're going to switch, the way we're actually going to fix climate change is by focusing on technology. So you mentioned one of them, nuclear. If we could imagine that we could actually get fourth generation nuclear in some way to be incredibly cheap and safe, that could solve a very large part of it. Imagine if you come up with a technology that's cheaper than coal and gas and all that. Everyone is going to switch, not just because they're rich, well-meaning Americans, but also the Chinese, the Indians, the Africans, everybody else. So that will basically generate a lot of cheap energy that's both good for economic growth and will cut carbon emissions dramatically.

Now, remember, this is not the only thing you need because you can't just run – well, you possibly can run most of the world on electricity, but we don't right now. Right now, only about 20% is electricity. The rest of energy is industrial processes, heating, transport, all these other things that are much, much harder to switch out. So obviously also steel and cement and so on. So there's a lot of issues that still remain. But the technology point still remains. If we can come up with this technology

that's cheaper than fossil fuels and does not emit CO2, we're done. Now, if we don't do this, and if we give in to climate fear, which is what a lot of people are using, it seems, if you want to be cynical, it seems like a political ploy. Why would they want to do that? What do you think the motivation is of not having a balanced,

nuanced perspective and expressing a balanced, nuanced perspective to people? Or you could explain things the way you're explaining them. There's an economic impact to this, there's a trade-off to that. Here's why it's actually better for the atmosphere overall if we do it this way. And the solution seems to be in technology, and it's not into halting all use of fossil fuels immediately, which would be devastating to the economy. And ultimately, when the economy goes, it's devastating to almost all aspects of our civilization. That's the very unfortunate reality of life, right? So have you ever had a debate with someone about this?

Oh, gosh, yes. As a climate fanatic? Oh, yeah, yeah. I have lots of those debates. How do those go? So my sense is that these guys are really well-intentioned. So they really want to do good. It's not sort of an evil ploy or anything.

But they seem to believe that just by know, just by wishing we can somehow make it come true. And I think a lot of the conversation that, you know, so when you're starting to see what is it going to cost to go net zero, for instance, a lot of people are talking about we should go net zero. You know, Biden, President Biden is talking about that. This will be fantastically costly. And that's what all these studies show. So McKinsey shows it's going to cost nearly $6 trillion every year for the world. That's two-thirds of the total global tax intake. So basically, imagine that two-thirds of everything the US government spends now would have to go to net zero. Well, I think you said something that's very important, too.

You said the world. And I think it's very unreasonable to assume that the rest of the world would take on this economic burden the way we're willing to take it on for the environment. And that, in fact, there are countries that are not interested at all in releasing less carbon. They're interested in economically becoming more and more powerful and spreading their wings. And just lifting their populations out of poverty. Yes, lifting their populations. And also becoming more military, you know, more powerful militarily. Yeah, yeah. Look, China is not just a good guy nation by any means. But I can understand them. And I can understand why, you know, India and Africa wants to be a little bit like China.

Remember, China has basically lifted what almost a billion people out of poverty. That's an amazing achievement. And, you know, if you lived in China or you lived in India, you would want to do the same. Sure. So then at what cost? Yes. And so the reality is, even if just the U.S. tried to go net zero, there's a new study in Nature magazine that estimated that the cost per person, I actually have that graph so we can show that as well. So the cost per person would be phenomenal. Well, it'd be nice if I could find it, but oh, there it is. So it's number 28A. number 28A. So the cost of reducing emissions, 80%. This is per person per year in the US.

11,000 bucks. Well, that's almost entire net zero. And the modelers say they're not sure whether this is true, but it's certainly a big number. But even if you just went 80% towards the Biden promise, it would cost more than $5,000 per person per year. Just get Bill Gates to pay for it. I don't get it. What's the problem? Get a lot of money. Get his wife. She's very philanthropically inclined. Half a year or something. Mackenzie Bezos. She's got a lot of cheddar. She's putting in towards good use. But the fundamental point is people are just not going to be willing to pay that amount of money. Well, they might be. I mean, they might

assume that the government could foot the bill for this. If they can come up with so much money to send arms to Ukraine and to invade other countries and do a lot of shady shit that we don't appreciate them doing, we would think that they could fork out $11,000 per person. Per year. Per year and crank that up. What is that? What is that all told with 300 and how many do we have now? So this is a 30, 12% of, uh, of us GDP. Jesus. Yep. That's a chunk. Yes. Um, so that's not feasible, not currently, but we can work towards something like that. That's why we need to get realistic and say, we're not going to do this by telling everyone you have to pay up right now. What we can do is to do this innovation. We should be spending lots,

lots more into innovation because innovation is incredibly cheap. So Craig Venter, do you remember him? He was the guy who cracked the human genome back in 2000. He's sort of a crazy smart guy. And he has this idea that he wants to grow algae, specific, special algae on the ocean surface that basically soak up sunlight and CO2 and produce oil. Imagine that. We could grow our own Saudi Arabia's out on the ocean surface, and then we'd just simply harvest those. We'd process them, make oil. We could keep our entire fossil fuel economy going right now, but it would be CO2 neutral because they just soaked out the CO2 out in the ocean surface. Really? Would that have a detrimental effect on the ocean?

Look, I'm sure that just like we've talked about before, nothing you do would have no impact. There's always trade-offs. Yes. Everything is trade-offs, but we could potentially solve a very large part of the global warming problem at, you know, fairly low cost. We can't do it right now because right now it costs a fortune and, you know, it can't really be scaled very well. But the the point is give this guy some money and try to investigate it because researchers are incredibly cheap this is how we've solved all problems if you think you know do you remember those live aid concerts and all that stuff sure and even before then we worried a lot about

you know Africa and it was especially India and Southeast Asia not being able to feed their own populations and sort of the standard way that we think about global warming now is to tell everyone, you know, could you not eat so much? And then we'll send it down to, you know, the poor Indians and the poor Africans. And of course, that didn't work. What did work was the green revolution. We basically evolved these, we innovated these new seeds that produce two or three times as much per acre. And that's what basically grew the world's food production dramatically. India is now one of the world's – it is actually the world's leading rice exporter.

It's gone from a basket case to being able to feed its own population. But aren't there a lot of problems with that too where the Indian farmers are getting fucked over and they get connected to these seeds that they don't own and they can't reuse and they owe a giant amount of money to the companies so they provide them with the seeds and they're going bankrupt and there's a ton of suicides from these indian farmers that's a pretty big trade-off so well it actually turns out that there's less so there's uh there's IFPRI, who's one of these institutions that look into farmers and farming policy. They did an estimate and found that there are fewer people die from suicides. But because there's a lot of farmers in India, there's a lot of farmer suicides. But yes, there are absolutely problems in India as well. But yes, there are absolutely problems in India as well.

But fundamentally, being in enthrall to big agro business because you have to buy more of the seeds or you have to pay more is probably a lot better than dying from not having enough food. But are there the only two solutions? No, no. But are they the only two solutions? No, no. Isn't there a solution where they have a more equitable sort of relationship with the people that provide them seeds and that they can both benefit from it? It seems like they're getting exploited, right? So, again, my understanding of this is that you can, if you want to, you can buy the public seeds. And so India and many other countries provide public seeds that don't have any copyright and that you can grow. Or you can buy the private property seeds that grow more per acre. And so it's basically a trade-off, just like when you go

to a store and decide between a slightly less good product, which is cheaper, or a more expensive product that's better. It sounds like a creepy tradeoff, though. If the stuff that doesn't work as well is the stuff that you could get from the state, and people are economically poor and disenfranchised, and they have to take on loans to get the other seeds, and they get indebted. Well, they don't have to get those seeds. Right. They can get the public seeds, but they won't be able to make it. Well, they can't make it as much. No.

Right. No. The point is— They're probably barely getting by as it is, though, don't you think? So the problem is I think we're seeing the outcome here from the people who basically said, all right, I'm going to get a loan, possibly from a loan shark, and then invest this in order to get a higher payoff. If it works out, if it's beautiful, if it was great weather, it works out really well. If it didn't, I'm screwed and then I commit suicide. I'm making a story here, right?

But the idea here is still that it's possibly not the right way to think about this if we're just concerned about, well, the people who took chances shouldn't have been so exposed if they made the wrong choices. Well, I think what we're really concerned with is predatory relationships between very poor farmers and giant multinational corporations that don't give a fuck about those people. multinational corporations that don't give a fuck about those people. That's what scares us, is that there's a dehumanizing aspect to this sort of method of producing agriculture. Yeah. So the real issue here is, though, that most of the big agricultural producers basically produce for rich countries because those are the ones who can pay. So what we're stuck with and very often don't have very good is that we need much more research into getting yield enhancement in the things that you grow in many of the poor countries

in the world that are also better suited for their agriculture. This is a lot of what, for instance, research goes into and where we should be spending a lot more money. So I totally agree that we can do it even better. But I just think we need to step back and also realize we have managed to make the world and India and Africa a lot better off, which is why a lot fewer people are starving. Again, you're a glass half full guy. I'm a guy where it says we used to have, what, 7 million kids dying each year of malnutrition.

Now it's less than 3. That still means there's almost 3 million kids that die each year from malnutrition. That's terrible. But it's a much better world than 7. Yes. And that's a weird conversation to have with people because all people want to think about generally is the negative aspects of any story. They always want to do that. And this is a big story that affects the whole world. I was going to ask you in the middle of all that, I didn't want to forget, what percentage of the CO2 emission, the greenhouse

gases, does the United States produce in relationship to the rest of the world? What does the rest of the world produce? So it's about 12%. We produce 12%. So if we cut back to net zero, you're still dealing with an 88% problem. Yes. Just to give you a sense of proportion, if you actually take out the U.S. emissions from the UN climate model, it turns out that by the end of the century, you'll have 0.3 degree Fahrenheit lower temperatures. So you'll have this temperature increase instead of this temperature increase. So the temperature will continue to increase. Yes, but slightly less.

Do they really have an objective understanding of how much of this is a natural cycle and how much of this is being caused by human beings? Do they have, like, can they, like, quantify it? So we started out talking a little bit about what do they think it is. And again, my understanding is that they're saying it's a very large part, is a predominant part that's caused by global warming. But it's also obvious that we have less good understanding of these long-term cycles. So there is some of that concern. But, you know, fundamentally, I think you can sort of step back and say global warming is real. It is made by man. It is a problem that we're making. It's not the end of the world.

And we need to deal with it, but deal with it smartly, right? So instead of us gluing ourselves to pictures and saying, we've got to stop everything right now, we've got to look at, how do we get innovation going so that we get better, for instance, nuclear, or better of this Craig Venter guy ideas, or these many, many other ideas that are out there. We should be funding all of those. So I helped assemble together with, I believe it was 49 of the world's top climate economists and three Nobel laureates to look at how do you best and smartest invest in green energy, so better deal with climate change.

And what they found was the long-term best strategy was invest in green energy research and development. So that's the long-term because there could be some innovation that would be groundbreaking. Basically, if you get innovation and you find a breakthrough, you will have fixed the problem. If you don't get that innovation,, you will have fixed the problem. If you don't get that innovation, we just won't fix the problem. We'll do a little bit of it at very, very high

cost and we'll end up a little bit like we talked about with Germany, right? You'll end up spending half a trillion dollars and cut a tiny bit of your emissions. To sort of shift the narrative and get people to stop being terrified of a future with the climate increasing the way it is on a steady rate? What can you say to people that would get them to— is there a real simple way of breaking this down that gives people an understanding of the perspective? How much this has been exaggerated? What the danger actually is? One of the big, like how much this has been exaggerated, what the danger actually is. One of the big ones is Miami. In 10 years, Miami is going to be underwater.

Yes, yes. But meanwhile, banks keep financing people building these giant skyscrapers next to the water. What's going on? Is Miami going underwater? No. And the simple reason is because we know around the world that when sea levels rise, it is very cheap and simple to avoid most of those problems. And Holland, obviously, is the great example. Holland has, while sea levels have been rising, they've actually gotten much larger because they know how to do this and they're very, very safe. Remember, 40% of the country is underwater. If you go to Schiphol, which is the 14th largest airport in the world, Amsterdam Airport, they proudly say on their website that we're the only major airport in the world that was previously a site of a major naval battle. But you don't feel it.

They're fine there. So how would they do that with Miami? The total cost over the last 50 years for Holland is about $10 billion. The total cost of protecting Holland. This is not nothing, but for a rich country over 50 years, that's almost nothing. It's not that bad. So what about Miami though? How would they protect Miami? So I don't know specifically how you do this for Miami. The point is Miami is incredibly valuable. Obviously, you find, as I understand it, there is actually some problems with that it's built on coral. Yeah, it's porous.

Yes. It'll be harder to do. I'm not saying this is going to be easy. But you did say it was going to be easy. Well, in general, we know how to do these things. And so I don't know how specifically you're going to do this for Miami, but I do know that we've done this almost everywhere on the planet. Remember, if you go, so New York Times took me down to the Waterfront Cafe in New York when I published my first climate

book. And this is now, what, five streets away from the waterfront, right? Because New York has actually grown. We've seen the same thing happen everywhere on the planet. So even Bangladesh, which is a very poor country, has actually increased its land surface while sea levels have risen because we know how to do this. Has anybody done that with a model for Miami? Because, again, what you were saying I had heard was that the problem is the ground is porous and that whenever there's like any sort of a water event in Miami, the streets are flooded and that they're worried that as the ocean level rises, this would be insurmountable.

Like I don't know if that's as simple a problem as what they're dealing with in Holland or in a lot of other places where they make dams and seawalls, what they do with New Orleans. Yes. And I don't – so I should possibly have been less quick and say – You son of a bitch. That's what you've done. Miami, I don't know. Everywhere else, we have – yeah, so there are good global models that look at this. If I can actually show you a graph of a global model on – so it's number 23 on the A file.

And so it's number 23 on the A file. So this is a model for the world that looks at how many people are getting flooded. And what it shows you is that in 2000, about 3 million people got flooded every year. And so you can see over there in 2000, 3 million people get flooded and it has a cost of 0.05% of GDP. Now, if you assume that there's going to be no adaptation, this is pretty much where all the catastrophic stories come from. You end up in this situation where 187 million people will be flooded. This number has been both on the cover of Washington Post and in New York Times, and there's a New York Times op-ed, lots and lots of- This is at 2100, year 2100. 2100. If sea levels rise, we do nothing about it, then obviously this is going to be terrible.

So it's going to cost 5% of global GDP. But this is not the world we live in. We'll actually adapt. And that's where, so that's why I said in this general thing, it's not going to happen for Miami, but I don't know whether the model has actually modeled, particularly Miami. It's modeled the world. This seems like a real problem, though. If there's not real adaptation ideas that are on the books that seem like they could be implemented, 80 years will go by pretty quickly. If 187 million people are flooded, if there's no adaptation. Then you have to also think about population increase. You have to think about the increase in the amount of CO2 we release.

There's a lot of other things you have to factor in along with no adaptation. But the point is we will not be in this world. Are you sure? Yes. And the authors themselves say this is absolutely inconceivable. Worst case scenario. Because everybody will actually adapt. You will put up higher sea dikes.

And much of this is not going to be these amazingly big structures that are going to feel overwhelming. It's just simply water management. By the end of the century, about 15,000 people will be flooded, and the cost of GDP will be, both for protection and from flood costs, will be almost 10 times lower in percent of GDP. So this adaptation that you show on this chart, where's this chart from? So this is from one of the most quoted stories. This is one of the few articles that actually both look at both adaptation and no adaptation. So it's from Hinkle 2014. a few articles that actually both look at both adaptation and no adaptation. Okay. So it's from Hinkle 2014. I think it's – yeah.

I don't have internet, so I can't actually show you right now. So no adaptation, it drops down below the rate where it's at currently. Sorry. With adaptation. With adaptation. The amount of people flooded drops below. And much, much below, right? I mean, from 3 million to virtually nobody.

To 15,000. And that is, but that's globally? That's globally. What that tells you is that this is an issue that we fix. We know how to fix. And Holland is a great example of that. If you're rich, you fix it. If you're poor, you have a real problem.

This, of course, is why so many people died in China and India when there were floods back in the 1920s, as we were talking about before. When you're poor, life sucks in so many different ways. It also sucks from climate. And that's, of course, one of the reasons why I think when people say, and they're right to say that, climate is going to harm the world's poor the most. And they sort of jump to this unwarranted conclusion, so we need to do something about climate. No, it's because it sucks to be poor. We should do something about not being poor. There's a big hurricane that hit Tacloban in 2013, a Filipino city. And it happened right when there was a global warming meeting,

one of the big COP meetings, and everybody outpoured and said, oh, this is because of global warming. Of course, there was actually exactly similar hurricane 100 years before, 19-0 something, that followed the exact same path and killed half the city's population back then. Much, much worse. This time it only killed about two percent of the city's population. But the people who got killed and the people who got harmed were still essentially living under corrugated roofs.

who got harmed were still essentially living under corrugated roofs. Our job is to make sure that they don't live under corrugated roofs, that they actually live in good buildings, that they have those clamps we talked about, that they have all these other opportunities so that they can live well. Of course, we should also, in the long run, find a way to actually make sure we fix climate change. But it's wrong to say, because these poor people are going to be focused with more climate change, we should do with more climate change, we should do something about climate change. No, these poor people are going to be focused with all kinds of bad things from malnutrition and bad education and from diseases because they're

poor. If we want to help them, we should lift them out of poverty. That's a solution you don't ever hear before. You hear very little of when it comes to dealing with the situation in terms of the amount of impact on deaths from these events. And the amazing thing is, of course, this is what made our lives great. Of course, most of the rest of the world want the exact same thing. And we should let them have it. So the real challenge here is, how do we find a way that means the vast amount, so the 6.5 billion people who are not rich can actually get a great living by the end of the century. And we can also fix climate change. And that's only going to happen if we find the technological breakthroughs, not by telling everyone, I'm sorry, could you do with less? Not only is that not going to win any elections in the long run, but it's also just not going to be possible to convince China, India, Africa to do that.

Now, what about the impact on climate change and natural storms, hurricanes and the like? How much are they increasing? How much is the severity of them increasing? Because that's a big point of confusion for people. I've heard multiple people say that those storms are worse than ever and more frequent than ever. And then I've heard people say, no, they're actually less frequent than ever but stronger. I've even heard people say, no, no, no, they're more frequent and less strong. So I don't know what's going on.

No. So the biggest point on this, I think, is they're certainly much stronger on TV. I mean you hear much, much more about them. is they're certainly much stronger on TV. I mean, you hear much, much more about them because they're such great stories. Yeah, they absolutely sell. But if you actually look at the data, we cannot tell right now. So that's the conclusion from the government agencies of the US as well. We can't still tell that there's a fingerprint from climate change on hurricanes. We can't? No, we can't.

Why can't we? Because there's such a natural variability that you can't see, oh, this increase or this decrease is because of global warming. Is there an increased trend currently? Well, so in the 1960s, sorry, in the 1970s and 80s, there was a lull in hurricanes that hit the U.S. That was also when satellite coverage started. So much of what you see now is if you start from the 1970s or 1980s, there is an increase for the U.S. But that's probably spurious because if you go back in the 1950s and 1960s, there was actually just as many hurricanes.

So what you do, and this is by far the best estimate, so I actually have that. I brought that with me. If you take a look at slide four on A in the A file, there we see, if you look at the number of hurricanes that have hit the U.S., because remember, we don't know about the hurricanes that we couldn't see back when we didn't have satellites. Now we see them because we have satellites, but that's obviously the wrong way to count. So if you just look at the hurricanes that landfall on the U.S., you get this graph. So this is from 1900 to 2022. Yeah, so 2022 is obviously not done, but it's probably done. So this is from 1900 to 2022. Yeah.

So 2022 is obviously not done, but it's probably done. And it looks incredibly similar. It's actually slightly decreasing. This is not significant. Slightly decreasing from 2008. Sorry. Or from 2004, rather. If you try to put in the best line, as you can see, that's the dotted red line, you actually have a slightly decreasing line. Oh, I see.

I see the overall, the average. The overall average used to be more like two hurricanes per season. What the hell? And that's down to 1.6 or something. Sorry. What the hell was going on in 1980? It looks like 86. Yeah.

Yeah. I was going to pull up it. This is a contradicting chart, though. Okay. Hit me with it. It specifies, though, North Atlantic, which this does not. Okay. So North Atlantic is where the predominant amount of hurricanes exist in the United States.

Is that correct? Or South Atlantic? It's South Atlantic, so North Atlantic would have less of them because the water is colder? The Northern Hemisphere, I believe, is not north compared to the United States. It's north versus South Hemisphere. Oh, okay. Okay. Why Atlantic hurricanes are getting stronger faster than other storms.

Yeah. So Hurricane Ian. It's increased 264% since 1980 compared to the globe, according to this chart. Yes. Percentage of tropical cyclone activity with major intensity. According to this chart. Percentage of tropical cyclone activity with major intensity. So major intensity indicates that sustained wind speeds reach a category three level or higher.

So it seems like there's more of them. Yes. And notice what that happens. It starts in 1980. And that's why, you know, when you do these numbers, it's very easy to get this result if you start in 1980 when they were much lower. If I can just show you the other graph again, because I showed you for all of the hurricanes, but we also have, if you take the next slide,

that's just the strong hurricanes. So that's exactly the same as what you just showed, Category 3 and higher. And what you see here again is that there are fewer hurricanes, not more hurricanes, hitting the U.S. today than there used to be back in the early part of 1990. Is this saying there's only one per year? Yes. That doesn't feel like that's right, though. This is one major hurricane landfalling each year.

Yeah. Is that usually what we get? And so if you go all the way back to 2006, which is that year we were talking about, it looks like there was four. So from 80, so when you're looking at that major... That was 2005. That was Hurricane Katrina and all these others. Okay. So when you're looking at that other chart that shows the increase from 1980, see with 1980, it's just all those years, it's just one.

And then it gets up to four in 2006, and that's a rough year. So all that factors into the average, and that kicks the average up to 264%, but a lot of it is from 2006. And a lot of it is because you just go from a period when there was a relative lull to a period when it's back up. On these charts, what is it differentiating as major or not major? Because then we get to like, we almost got through all the names I thought a couple years ago. So yes, sorry. So major is category three, but these all landfalling. Remember, a lot of hurricanes are not landfalling. So the reason why we run out of names is because we are able to see a lot more of them. So they actually estimate,

this is a reanalysis by NOAA and all those guys. So they actually found that we now name about four storms more than we would have named in the early 2000s every year because we're just become better at notice. Oh, there was a hurricane and then then it dropped off or stormed. Right, because they don't hit. Not only because they don't hit, but typically they're just one or two days.

And what's the percentage of them that actually hit? The problem is when they get strong enough on the ocean that they can carry over onto the land and devastate the land. So the reason why I'm looking at landfall is because in the early part of last century, So the reason why I'm looking at landfall is because in the early part of last century, it's very likely that someone would have noticed a landfalling hurricane anywhere in the U.S. But if it's out in the middle of nowhere, there's a very good chance nobody would have noticed. Actually, you can see in the data that when the Panama Canal opened know, ships started going a different route. So there was a big part of the Atlantic that they no longer traversed. And so, you know, the number of hurricanes dropped in those areas because, you know, you needed to have sort of a ship to be out there and noticing.

That's why it's a very, very bad way to look at this if you just look at how many hurricanes do we know about, because we just know about a lot more now. So that's from Satellite Radar, and that was what year they started implementing satellite? This is about 1980. Okay, so that's when, okay. So it's not clear is what you're saying. Your point was to basically say what people are worried about is that there's going to be a lot more hurricanes. Yes. Well, actually, so the best evidence seems to indicate, that was one of the points that you said, that there will probably be fewer hurricanes, but they will be stronger. And overall, stronger is worse than fewer is better, which means that overall, there'll be slightly more damage. Right.

So global warming is bad. One of the many things that will actually be worse with global warming. But it's not terribly bad. It's somewhat worse. And of course, at the same time, we're getting much better at dealing with this impact. What you're actually seeing, if you look at the total cost, for instance, on hurricane impacts and all kinds of climate impacts, it's actually going down, not up in percent of GDP. Why? Because we now know we have much better

prediction. We know how to deal with these things, for instance, get a lot of stuff that can be moved. We get it out of harm's way. So every time there's a hurricane, all trucks will go to other states, that kind of thing. So there's a lot of things that don't get damaged. We can also build better, as you talked about, with houses and so on. So we have a lot of ways to reduce this. But what is happening is it'll reduce slightly less fast because of global warming. Again, not the end of the world, but a problem. So the fear mongering would have you terrified about a future that's impossible to fix and that we're doomed. And you're simply saying it is a problem but it's not our biggest problem. It's a problem in the sense that it slows down progress.

And if I can just – because people talk a lot about the fact that we won't have enough food either. I have another slide in the B file. And, God, I need glasses. And number six. Sorry. I was just Googling this. 2020, it says 11 hurricanes made it to land. Here.

A total of 11 named storms made landfall in the United States, breaking the previous record of 9 in 1916. Sorry, 11 named storms? Six of these were storms that struck the United States. That's hurricane intensity. They were talking about Category 3 and above. That was just this one, though. His chart, which was this.

Is it all hurricanes? This is major hurricanes. You need to go back. So category one. What's the worst? Is category one the worst or four? No, four is the worst, right? Five is the worst. This just says four hurricanes hit the U.S. in four.

And then when I Google it, it says there's at least six, if not 11. Yeah. I mean, this is period literature. I have no doubt. The updates are for the guy. This is 2020, Jamie? Yeah, I just was trying to pick one year. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great. And these

and the one that this was saying they're intensifying this says that like since 1950 only nine category four hurricanes have hit the mainland, but six of those were in the last five years. Whoa. That seems like a problem. That's a big problem.

Doesn't that seem like a big problem? Seeing that, I would see why people would freak out. Yeah, and this is, so we can't sit here and do period research in real time. I'm sure. Right, but you do need contradicting statements. Oh, no, no, no. Absolutely. But I am saying that... So I'm happy to say that we should...

So there's very little 4 and 5 hurricanes. That's why the major, and that was also why the other graph showed the change in 3, 4, and 5. Can you go back to that again, please? Look at that, man.

Andrew was even more powerful than Ian in 92. That was 165 mile an hour. What's the fucking strongest one that we've ever had? Is that all of them that we've had during the last, so that's the last 50 years? In the 50 years, yeah. I think when that was like 92. So Ian was the strongest. Or Andrew, excuse me, was the strongest.

That was 165. Katrina's not even on this list. No. Wow. Why isn't Katrina on the list? I don't know. That was a big one, wasn't it? Yeah.

Wasn't it Hurricane 3, Category 3? It could have just been big and long and just lasted for a long time instead of. Right. The devastation was big because of where it hit. Yes. Wow. Also, if you look at the major hurricanes, we had the biggest drought ever.

So there were 11 years where there were no major hurricane that hit the U.S. recently. I don't know if you noticed. That was when nobody talked about hurricanes. And then, of course, the hurricanes came back, and then we said, oh, see, global warming again. This is how we're not being well served with this kind of conversation. What is your book called? False alarm? False alarm. Yeah. Cause no, I don't have one yet. Thank you very much. Um, I don't, I wouldn't say false alarm. I would say there's a lot of other shit to be worried about

as well, but it is, but it also seems to be a problem. That's the other book I brought you. Prioritizing Development. Ah, see. So this is basically, this is what my day job really is. Because as you also know, and as we talked a little bit about, so look, there is a lot of problems in the world. And for most people, so rich people who are, you know, well ensconced in their lives

and they, you know, they don't have to worry about their kids dying from infectious diseases or, or, you know, not having enough food, all that kind of stuff. They clearly can worry about what the temperature is going to be in a hundred years. But for most of the planet's population, so, you know, the 6.5 billion people here, they actually worry about their kids might die tonight. They might not have enough food. They have terrible education. There are all kinds of other terrible things. Almost a billion people are extremely poor. So in terms of the overall impact on human health and life, elevating the economy is the most important step that people can take.

It's certainly a very important part of it. And again, when we, sorry, if I could just show you the one of malnutrition, the slide from the B stack, number six. Sorry. So what I just want to show you was that malnutrition has come down dramatically. And again, what you see here, so this is the number of deaths from kids that are less than five years old. And again, this is very similar to the other chart, but a little bit of a difference. The difference between with climate change and without climate change.

Without climate change, it's only slightly lower. But the overall trend is much, much, much lower than it was in 1990. And this is because we're getting better at making agriculture. This is what we talked about before. They're much better in India. They're much better everywhere. So the overall net benefit is positive. We're moving towards a world that's going to be much better.

So these guys that are protesting think it's the end of the world. No, it's not. It's a world that's going to be much better. But they're right in saying that climate is one problem. And we should definitely think about how we fix that. But we should also remember a large part of this is how do we fix all the other problems? There are still people, you know, there's one of the things that just blow my mind. blow my mind. We all worried about COVID. But remember, the world's biggest infectious disease killer over the last 200 years has been tuberculosis. It's probably killed about a billion people in total. It still kills one and a half million people every year. And we know how to fix it. We figured that out 100 years ago. That's why no one in the rich world died from this. But apart from COVID, it is the world's leading infectious disease killer. And we do nothing against it.

We could, at very low cost, fix most of this problem. And so one of the things I try to push is to say, look, for very little money, we could actually, so we're talking about $3 billion a year or thereabouts, we could actually save almost everyone from tuberculosis. Why don't we make that one of the things we want to do? Yeah. It's interesting. That's not a sexy headline. It gets people riled up and scared because they're not worried about tuberculosis over here. And we're not worried about our kids getting tuberculosis, right?

So in some sense, it's because it's over there. It's a lot of people in India and in Africa and so on. But in some way, it doesn't quite make it okay, right? I see what you're saying. So what you're trying to promote is a balanced message. And you're trying to counter the climate change fear-mongering by saying it is one of our issues, but it is surmountable, at least in some aspects of it. Oh, look. The world will be much better off by the end of the century,

but because of global warming, we'll be slightly less much better off. So what do you think, if you contemplated the motivations for this fear-mongering and this distorted perception of this one very particular issue, when you look at all the issues that we face that you've outlined, why that one? Why does that one get the most heat? So as you just mentioned, it's partly because it's our kids rather than someone else's kids who are going to get influenced by this. We also just love having something to worry about. I think that's to a very large extent. And then, of course, we have a lot of media that has an interest in pushing a catastrophic agenda about anything. So anything is catastrophic. Anything is something that we should worry intensely about.

Is it just the media or is it also a political ploy? Oh, of course, it's also politicians. For a very long time, this was the gift that kept on giving for politicians because they basically got to say, the world is ending, but I can save you. I can't do that voice, but you know what I wanted to. So fundamentally imagine being able to say, I can save you and will promise to do some stuff that will only happen long into the future, long after I've stopped being president or whatever it is. Right. Now, of course, this is catching up with us because now we actually have to start paying for all of this. And this is where the wheels come off because most people are just not willing. Most people are willing to pay something to do good for the environment.

They're certainly not willing to pay $5,000 per person per year. That's just not going to happen. Most people. Sure, a few very, very wealthy people. That's where the hardcore lefties will go, we got to take the billionaires. They can fix it all. Yeah. And that's just not true, right? I mean, they would run out of money really quickly. Yeah, unfortunately. I mean, the US.S. budget is what, a thousand, what is it, two, three thousand billion, the federal budget, a thousand billion dollars. And Elon has two, three hundred million. You know, he would run out in two weeks. He's running out of it just with Twitter. Well, but, you know, the point is these billionaires, sure, you know, I'm all for that they should do more. And I think some of them are doing excellent work and some of them are probably not.

But this is not how you solve this problem. This is about making sure that you actually responsibly can do it with the budgets that you have or with realistic tax increases. And increasing your tax 5% or 10% of GDP is just not realistic. your tax 5% or 10% of GDP is just not realistic. Do you have a fear that the fear-mongering and the way, concern I should say, about the fear-mongering and the way it's portrayed in the media is going to cause people to vote for things and to vote for people that are going to implement things that will ultimately be more destructive than they are beneficial? Oh, absolutely.

I mean, partly, if we're suggesting we should do policies because we're worried that this is the end of the world coming up, that are enormously ineffective, which is what most of the world has done, then we're going to waste a lot of money. But likewise, on the other side, so you could say this is sort of Democrats here in the US, right? But likewise, there's a lot of Republicans that are just like, oh, no problem whatsoever. You know, just keep fracking, do whatever. And, you know, because you get sick and tired of having to pay those extra taxes from the Democrats, you might very well end up electing Republicans as well that'll just not do anything to solve the problem. And so I really think this polarization, this it's the end of the world, it's not happening at all, is very unhelpful, both in the terms that scares people witless, but it also makes it very hard to make these sensible middle-of-the-road kind of arguments, which is, we're not going to solve this by huge taxation. We're not going to solve this by making lots of people pay for ineffective policies. What we are going to

solve this with is innovation. So we should be spending a lot more on innovation. But the beauty of it is right now, globally, the world spends about just under $20 billion per year on innovation into green energy. That's in percentage much less than we've done over the last 30 years because politicians want to go out and open new solar panel parks or wind turbine parks because that looks like something not fun to know, fun eggheads. Is that part of the problem, is the perception? I'm sure it is. And what we should do is we should five-fold increase that to about $100 billion. President Obama and everybody else promised that back in Paris.

And I'm happy to say we had a very, very tiny, small role in that. We should be spending lots more on research and development in green energy because that's how we're going to fix this problem. But we'll only get to that if we actually get people to sort of calm down and realize problem, not the end of the world. And don't tank the economy. Why are you trying to fix the problem? Because then you'll limit the amount of available solutions and resources. And one of the really depressing things that we're seeing now, if you've noticed, growth rates are coming down. The U.S. used to grow, what, per capita, 3% per year. Your kids would be much richer than you. But in many countries, both in the U.S. and

Europe, we're seeing much, much slower growth. One of the reasons, this is by no means the only reason, but one of the reasons is that we have somehow realized, oh, we should be sorry for all the things we're doing. We should be doing more to counter global warming. And one of the ways you can do that is by having little or no growth. But the problem with that, of course, is that also impacts everything else. It makes it much more of a distributional issue. You know, if the cake is no longer growing, everybody starts bickering about who gets what slice of the cake.

And it makes everything harder to deal with. And, of course, at the same time, we have the entire developing world that still just wants to get out of poverty. And we're not really giving them a chance either. We're, for instance, pretty much limiting them. We've been telling Africa, for instance, for the longest time, sorry, you can't have gas, you can't have coal, you should just go straight to solar and wind, which of course can't really power an economy, or at least not right now. And this while Europe is then, you know, starting to grind up more coal because we're cold and because of the war in Ukraine. This is a very complex issue.

And the problem is that in sound bites on the news, you don't get to dive into all of the aspects of these complex issues. Knowing what you're knowing and like how frustrating is this for you to try to spread this message? Because I'm sure you get labeled. Like immediately you're a climate change denier. You're a shill. You're a bad person. How frustrating is this for you when you're trying to get this message out and you're writing these books and you're giving these speeches?

I mean, fundamentally, it would be wonderful if everybody just said, hey, that sounds smart. Let's do that. But that's not how the real world works. I think it's great to have the opportunity to actually push what kind of solutions work. So what we're trying to do, we work with lots of the world's top economists. I've worked with seven Nobel laureates in economics trying to say, where can you spend money and do the most good? So on climate, we should be investing in green energy R&D. That's the way you fix this problem. And then we should realize there are lots of other problems, most of which you haven't heard of. So, for instance, the frustrating thing and the thing that really drives most of global productivity is education.

Education almost everywhere sucks, but especially in the developing world. A lot of teachers just don't know the stuff that they're actually supposed to be teaching the kids. How do you get kids to be better educated? It turns out that there are some very, very simple ways that we know work incredibly well. So it's called teaching according to level. So the basic idea, if you think about a sixth grade or something where, I don't know, is that 12-year-olds? It could be. Yeah. Sixth grade is 12, 11, 11-year-old. So say you have all these 12-year-olds in the same grade, especially in the developing country,

but even here, they have very varying levels. Some of them are just hanging on and don't quite know what's going on. Some of them are far ahead of what the teacher is teaching, right? So the problem is when you're in that kind of grade where we put all the 12-year-olds in one grade, you're actually having a very hard time teaching all of these kids effectively. What we've shown with, and this is not me, lots of really smart people have shown this, is in experiments, if you instead make sure that each of these kids are taught at their right level, at the level that they are, they can learn a lot more. Now, you could do that in one of two ways. You could actually shuffle these guys around. So,

you know, some 11-year-olds are going to be together with some 13-year-olds and maybe one 9-year-old and one 15-year-old and so on. So they all have the same level. That has some social problems, but they're doing it, for instance, in India. You could also do it by every one hour every day, you sit them down with a tablet. And this tablet then finds out what is your level. So it's teaching it in either your language or your mathematics, for instance. And it very quickly adapts and find out what is your level and then teach you exactly at your level. The beauty is you can actually teach these kids three years of schooling in one real year at very low extra cost. We're talking about $20 per student per year. So if you do this

with a tablet, you can basically have a situation where you can educate these kids much better and teach them much more. Isn't that amazing? That's assuming they engage with the material, right? Is it more difficult to get them to engage with tablets than it is to get them to engage with a teacher? No, actually it turns out often it's the opposite. They want to have more than just one hour. It's probably true if you did this a whole day, it's one hour a day. It's partly because so other students can also use the tablet, so it becomes cheaper. It's also partly because we don't want to upset the teachers, because if the teachers don't like this idea, if they are worried that computers are going to take over their jobs, they don't want to upset the teachers because if the teachers don't like this idea, if they are worried that computers are going to take over their jobs, they don't want to play along.

And it's also because they would eventually get bored. But no, if you sit in a classroom where you're, you know, 40, 50, 60 kids, the teacher is teaching you something that you don't either – you don't quite understand or you're way ahead of this, that's incredibly boring. This tablet is actually challenging you right on the level. And the beauty of this is that this is research that has actually been done in randomized controlled trial studies, right? So you've done with some kids, you gave them the tablets. Some kids, you didn't give them the tablets. Then you see how much they differ. And this matters because they not only learn more, but then they'll go out when they become adults and become much more productive in those societies.

So, again, one of the things that we try to do. So in that big book I showed you there. Prioritizing development. We did that with 50 teams of economists and several Nobel laureates and trying to find out of all the different things in the world, what could we do? But that's a very long book. You can't get most politicians to read it. So we actually did also a one pager. So I brought that one. I'm hoping we can put that up. So this basically is the whole, this is the whole outline of all the stuff that we do. This one pager is smartest targets for the world. And what is this?

So you should look at this, this out here on this one side. It has all the different things you can do for the world. So this has come about with a lot of complicated stuff. And basically, there's a cost. Is there a graph that we can see online of this? Yes. Oh, sorry. Yes, there is. Because I can barely read this. Yes. Very good point. Social, economic, and environmental benefits for every dollar spent. How can we direct people to it? So we'll put up the link if that's okay. Yeah. A lot of graphs, buddy. Yes. Sorry about that. So basically what it shows us, all the different things you can do for the world. And then the line shows, the length of the line

shows how much bang for your buck you get. And so if it's a long line, it's a great idea. Okay. Sorry. Yes. So here it goes. So what's the best bang for your buck? So trade. Trade restrictions. Reduce world trade restrictions. If we actually got much more free trade, that would make everyone incredibly much richer. Sorry, in my slides, there is a better version that you can show online on the last slide on Lomborg A. So 51. Kind of better? Yeah, because it's at least not as long, right?

It fits this format. Okay. So basically, if you spend money and basically in order to get free trade, you need to pay off the world's rich farmers, but you will get an enormous amount of growth in the economy. Freer regional Asia Pacific trade. So trade seems to be the biggest one. That's one of the biggest ones, yes.

And then universal access to contraception. Yeah. So that's basically the idea. If you get more contraception, it means two things. It partly means that women give fewer births and that means they die less. It also means that each kid that then gets born will get more attention from their parents because there will be slightly fewer kids. And they will have more capital available to them. That means they become more productive and that means the economy will grow more.

This is what's typically called the – Well, I don't think we should go over this entire chart because it will take forever. But the idea is that there's a lot of things that we can do for the world that have great bang for the buck. And climate is one of them. But it's just one of them, right? And if you think this is the end of the world, you think that's the only thing we should be discussing. I mean, I've heard some people say, you know, if we only have till 2030, we've got to do everything for climate. And then, you know, there'll still be poor people in 2030 we can help.

And I just think it's so, you know, patronizing, right? Because clearly we both want to fix climate change and fix all these other problems in the world. And we can do that, but only if we spend money smartly. So let's spend the money smartly on climate and research and development. But let's also spend money on getting tablets into the educational system, making sure we deal with tuberculosis, malaria, malnutrition. There's lots of other things where we, for very little money, can make an enormous amount of benefit. Well, I think that's the most important part of your message. It's not just this idea that climate change is kind of being overblown. It's a very terrifying prospect, but that there's a lot of issues to deal with. That's great. I really

appreciate that. Now, I think that we need more of that, more of a balanced, nuanced perspective on all of our issues. I'm glad you brought up education as well and all those other things, contraception and poverty. And, yeah, there's a lot going on there that we need to think about as well. Yeah. And if we start doing that, it can also be a real lift for a lot of these people who are terrified. Remember, if you ask people in the rich world, do you think the world's civilization is going to come to an end? 60% now are saying they think it's likely or very likely that humanity is going to end. That's petrifying. And that's just not what's going to happen. And they think this

is because of climate change. They think it's because of climate change, right? So we can actually both liberate ourselves and realize, yeah, problem, not the end of the world. And then also start talking about all these other issues and make sure that we actually leave this planet not just a little bit better but a lot better. I love your message. Thank you, Bjorn. That was really great. Thank you. I really appreciate it, even though you're working for big fracking and you're a show from Mountain Dew.

Stop saying that. Stop saying that. I'm kidding. Okay. Mountain Dew, yes. So False Alarm is your book, how climate change, panic costs Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet. How do I pronounce your last name correctly? Lomborg?

Lomborg. Lomborg. Bjorn Lomborg. And then the other one is, this is all the other things you were concentrating on of all the different ways that we can prioritize spending that will benefit the whole world. And that's prioritizing development, a cost-benefit analysis of the United States' sustainable... United Nations. Excuse me, United Nations' sustainable development goals. And if you're inclined, this is a very detail-oriented book.

Yes. This will fill people's time. Thank you, Bjorn. I really appreciate you being on here, and it was a lot of fun. I enjoyed it. People want to get a hold of you on... Do you have a website, social media? Yes, yes.

Lomborg.com and Twitter is Beyond Lomborg. And L-O-M-B-O-R-G is the pronunciation for the spelling of the last name. Thanks, sir. Appreciate it. Thank you, too. Bye, everybody. Thank you.