The Megyn Kelly Show - The Truth About Climate Change, Climate Realism and Climate Alarmism, with Bjorn Lomborg and David Wallace-Wells | Ep. 239

Episode Date: January 12, 2022

Megyn Kelly is joined by Bjorn Lomborg, author of "False Alarm," and David Wallace-Wells, author of "The Uninhabitable Earth," for a wide-ranging conversation and debate about climate change - realism and alarmism. Topics include the worst and best case climate change scenarios, whether climate change is the most important challenge facing humanity or not, America's impact vs. China and India's impact, debating our tangible climate future, celebrity hypocrisy, whether extreme weather events can be connected to climate change, what average Americans can do vs. what governments need to do, the true costs, how innovation can help, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. I'm excited for today's show. I think you're going to love this. We have been warned that planet Earth is on a path to ruin by the media and democratic politicians. But on this episode today, we wanted to take a step back, take a look at the big picture, and figure out what the science really says about climate change. Is the alarmism justified? And if so, what can we do about it? Today, we are joined by two fantastic voices on this topic. They agree on some things, and on others, not so much. But we wanted to bring them together to have an informative, respectful, and lively conversation

and allow you, our audience, the chance to hear from both sides in a way that rarely happens these days. David Wallace-Wells is editor-at-large of New York Magazine and author of The Uninhabitable Earth, Life After Warming, a book that was based on an essay that I believe was the magazine's largest or most circulated, most read ever in the history of the magazine. All right. So this has been very, very popular. And he told us last time they're making a movie on it, too.

Also joining us today is Bjorn Lomborg. He's president of the Copenhagen Consensus and visiting fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. His latest book is False Alarm, How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor and Fails to Fix the Planet. So you can see where this is going. They disagree. They've debated before, but not quite like this. Welcome, David and Bjorn. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Good to be here.

All right, David, let me start with you as somebody who's pressing the case for, yes, it's bad and worse than you know, and immediate action is required. And we can maybe kick it off on where you guys agree, because I can remember when I first started at Fox News back in 2004, I guess it was. We were still at the point then, at least on Fox, where people we'd have on would debate whether we were even experiencing warming. Right. And if we are experiencing more warming, is any of it attributable to man? Right. Like that we were still at that point. I think everyone here agrees we're past that point. We are warming. The earth is warming. And men, man, women are causing it for the most part.

Maybe not 100%, but it's what we've done and are doing that's causing it. Do you guys, just quickly, do you both agree with that? Yes. Yes. Yeah. Okay. All right. So that's where we're going to start from that premise and figure out how bad is it

and what can be done about it. That's sort of our focus today. So David, your essay and then your book say it's bad. It's really bad. And we really do need to be alarmed. And when I read the book, I was alarmed. I was feeling, I was picking up what you were putting down. I felt better after I read Bjorn. But you, just to put it in perspective, are saying, we are speeding blithely along to more than four degrees Celsius of warming

by the year 2100. That could mean a sea level rise of between four and eight feet. Now, this is our children who are alive right now. I've got a 12, 10 and eight year old. You've got a new baby, I understand, would experience this, God willing. They'd still be around. So this is not that far off in the future. You say whole regions of Africa and Australia and the United States, parts of South America, Asia, South of Siberia would be rendered uninhabitable if that happened. And go on to talk about how we could eventually see Miami Beach as a new Atlantis city underwater. We could see more than 30 million people dealing with water scarcity, major cities along the equator becoming unlivable. Even in northern latitudes, heat waves that would kill thousands each summer, massively deadly heat waves in India and elsewhere, five times as long, 32 times as much extreme

heat. And you described that, that would be with just two degrees warming by 2100 as the best case scenario. So let me kick it to you from there and say, where are you now since you've written your book on best case scenario for 2100? And is it as bad as you predicted in that book? Do you still believe that? Well, the book was looking at warming scenarios, mostly in this range of two degrees Celsius of warming to four or four and a half degrees of warming. And actually, since I wrote it, and since it was published, I do think we're much likelier to end up on the better half

of that range than the worst half of that range. I think something between two and three as opposed to three and four and maybe even between two and two and a half is our likely future. I think that's in part because of market forces, because the cost of renewables have fallen really dramatically, making them a very appealing investment, especially for the developing world, which is planning almost from scratch energy build out. It's also because of political pressure and the changing perspective on the economics of climate change from where we were a decade or so ago, when much of this may have seemed moral to economists to undertake. It now seems like actually an opportunity for greater prosperity in the medium and long term. And I think that that consensus has really shifted the direction of policy, which combined

with market forces and the political change means that I think our baseline expectation should be something like three or two and a half degrees. And we're certainly in sight of something like two degrees of warming. Now, that is a best case scenario based on where we were a few years ago, I think. But it also is not fine. It's a level of warming that climate scientists have long warned is catastrophic. It would mean some estimates say 150 million additional people dying from the air pollution that's produced by the burning of those fossil fuels, storms that used to hit once, storms and flood events that used to hit once every century, hitting perhaps every single year.

As you mentioned, cities in the Middle East and South Asia regularly being so hot during summer that walking around outside, working outside would represent a real risk of heat stroke and for some death. And, you know, by some estimates, the possibility of climate refugees numbering in hundreds of millions and possibly more. Now, all of those predictions may not come precisely true at two degrees. But when you put together the whole body of climate science, it's not a pretty picture. It is only half the story. Human adaptation and resilience is the other half. But where I come from on this primarily is the understanding that we are already now outside the window of temperatures that have enclosed the entire history of human civilization. So from the dawn of agriculture

to the development of modern nation states and where we are today, all of that took place under climate conditions we've already left behind. We can live in the new future. We can live in a future of two degrees, at least in some parts of the world. But it will be an incredibly difficult task to adapt and respond to it, especially in the global south, where they have the least resources to do that build out, are most vulnerable to direct climate impacts, and have done the least to actually cause the scale of warming that is now inevitable. So from some perspective, I'm considerably more optimistic than I was a few years ago. But I think it's also worth keeping in mind that because of decades of inaction, decades which have enclosed record carbon emissions every single year, we are now in a very different place than in terms of what a best case scenario looks like than, say, 20 or 30 years ago when at climate conferences we might have said we were going to avoid dangerous climate change. That's no longer possible.

Dangerous climate change is already here. The question is, how dangerous is it going to get? What can we do to limit that warming? And what can we do to respond on the back end to make sure that human flourishing is maximal, optimal, given the climate conditions that we have already made inevitable? All right, Bjorn. So do you agree that the likely outcome that we're looking at here is by 2100, global warming of two degrees Celsius, which again, according to what I read would be our best case scenario, according to most, you know,

these climate scientists say two degrees at this point would be a win, but nobody thinks it's a great thing. But do you think that's correct? Do you think we're looking at two degrees warming by 2100? Two or three degrees, just like David is saying. And again, this is not surprising because we're using the same scenarios and we're using the same model. So yes, it is a better outlook. But we also have to be very careful. A lot of this comes from us hoping that countries far into the future will be cutting what they're promising to cut. But remember, our experience in the past has certainly not been that people and countries live up to what they promised. So, you know, a reservation, an asterisk on that. But yes, we are likely to see two to three degrees Celsius or upwards of five and a half degree

Fahrenheit by the end of the century. So that sounds bad, right? So why are you not alarmed? Why aren't you jumping up and down like David? So it's important to get a sense of proportion. And I think this is really the conversation that we'll probably be having for most of the next hour and a half. It's a question

of saying, how bad is this going to be? Overall, global warming is a problem. That's uncontrovertible. That's what we just started off and you asked us to sort of point out. But it's how bad is it compared to all the other challenges that humanity is facing. And of course, also, and at the same time, and David was very right in saying this, adaptation and human resilience means that many of these scenarios will actually not only not come to pass, but they will become much, much better than the living conditions and the human flourishing that we're seeing right now. We will be in a much better state. And what climate change really means is instead of being in a phenomenally much better place, we'll only be in a slightly less phenomenally much better place. It's a question of saying climate change slows down progress. It slows down human flourishing rather than this is the end of

the world. And I think that's the big difference. A lot of people that listen to the news think global warming is the end of the world. And it's certainly being sold that way. If you listen to Biden and many other politicians, they will regularly say, this is an existential problem. No, it's not. It's nowhere near that. That's not what the UN Climate Panel is telling us. It is a problem. And it will mean that by mid-century, by the end of the century, we will be much better off, but slightly less much better off than we otherwise would be. That's a very different sense of understanding. And I think that's the conversation that we need to have, partly understanding it's a problem,

it's not the end of the world. And then the second part is we're being asked to consider, or many people are just saying we should, do policies that are going to be phenomenally expensive, but actually deliver fairly little benefit in terms of climate. And that's why the real risk is that we not only exaggerate the problem, but we end up paying or arguing for really poor policies that will cost a lot, that will help very little, whereas other policies both could have fixed much more of the global warming problem, but also, of course, recognizing that we live in a world with many, many different problems, climate change being one of them, but not by any means the defining issue of the 21st century, which for most poor people, especially, of course,

is just simply having their kids survive easily curable infectious diseases, hunger, education, all these other issues. So yes, global warming is a problem. It's not the end of the world, and we're tackling it badly, which quite frankly hurts the world's poor right now, and we can do a lot better. Whereas you seem to suggest, David, in your book that it actually might be the end of the world and kind of has been the end of living species on Earth repeatedly in the past. This wouldn't be the first time climate change wiped out whatever was living on Earth. And you think we're right in the midst of the very next time. Explain that. Yeah, so there have been five what are called mass extinctions before in the Earth's planetary history. And four of them, we think the best scientific understanding now is that when they

were tied up in temperature changes, having to do with greenhouse gas changes. Some of those are quite devastating. I mean, the most brutal one killed off at least 90% of all life on Earth. Some of the others killed off more than half. And it is quite conventional wisdom now among those studying the deep history of the planet that we are in the midst of just such an extinction event now, where we're seeing many, many species declining and dying out. On the human timescale, in the space of a century or so, it's not like we're seeing, you know, all living Earth disappear. But that wasn't the pace of most of those changes in the past either. And in fact,

we're changing the climate much faster than it changed in those previous mass extinctions. I think by most estimates, about 10 times faster, which means that the pressure that we're putting on the living ecosystem that we've depended on for all of human history is really under some dramatic amount of threat. And ultimately, what we are doing is engineering an experiment in which we will be testing the capacity of the human species to manage the world

because the kinds of climate changes that we are initiating simultaneously are beyond many of these ecosystems' ability to adapt and respond to us or endure unchanged without any intervention. And that is quite a scary prospect. I have faith, I think like Bjorn does, that we can do a lot to protect many amount of response to, often at great expense, and often in places where people don't today, and I don't believe in the future, will have all that much abundant resources to respond adequately to. And so I think the recipe in the end is for some serious amounts of suffering, especially in those parts of the world that are

living closest to nature, most dependent on ecosystems. I do believe that if those places were to get more prosperous over the next few decades, that would certainly help in their ability to adapt to new conditions. But I'm a little, I'm a lot less confident than Bjorn that we are on that course, regardless of what happens with climate change. I've seen a number of studies that I take very seriously that suggest that global inequality has been increased over the last few decades because of the impacts of climate and that over the next few decades through to the end of the century, we could be seeing the possibility of economic growth

really dramatically cut in the global south. There are some estimates, global estimates, that are as high as our potential GDP could be cut by 20 or 30 percent. There are others that are lower, which we'll probably end up talking about during this conversation. But when you look at the effects concentrated in the global south, where people are most vulnerable and where that growth is most important, some of those studies show cuts of 50, 70 percent of potential GDP over the course of the century. And that is really quite a grim prospect to look at a future in which the global poor now to, you know, 30, 40, 50 years down the road are facing almost no opportunity for meaningful economic growth.

Explain why though, put some meat on those bones. Why? Why will the global South be suffering so in terms of their ability to sustain themselves, make money and, you know, support their families? Well, it's a complicated equation. I think the very basic, you know, as a baseline, economists have found that there's something like an optimal temperature for economic growth. And the farther you get from that in the temperature direction, you know, the worse off you'll be. Your productivity declines, your cognitive performance declines. And we've observed that even in well-off countries. It's, you know, this optimal temperature was the historical temperature of the United States. It was the historical temperature of Germany. It's now the annual temperature average of Silicon Valley,

but not the United States as a whole. And, but beyond that, you know, there are the impacts on agricultural yields, which without significant intervention will fall somewhat dramatically because of the impacts of heat and because of other unrelated factors having to do with the way that pests grow in hotter conditions, fungus, that kind of thing. It has to do with effects on outdoor labor and any business that's being conducted outside. Then there's the public health cost of both the direct heat impact and continuing to live with fossil fuel pollution, which I should just say, you know, these numbers are really enormous. They're so big you can't even wrap your head around them.

But almost all estimates suggest that air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels is today killing millions of people every year. There are some estimates that run as high as eight or nine million. Other estimates are on the lower end of the spectrum. But that is an unbelievably large human toll that we are enduring today. And every year that we don't cut our fossil fuel production, we will continue to impose that cost. It's most concentrated in India and the rest of the developing world, although we see even in the United States, there's some estimates that 350,000 Americans die every year from the effects of air pollution.

India's air pollution is really bad. And basically, their response, India, as far as I understand, and China for right now are saying, we realize that we're bad, but you, United States, were far worse than we were for most of history. And so you can't make all the money

and put all the fossil fuels to use and emit all these carbons. And then once you're in high cotton, turn around to us and say, no, you have to stop. You have to stop right now. So they're kind of saying, we'll curtail it by like 2060, we think. And then we'll stop. Then we'll stop putting out all these carbons. But by that point, we kind of need everyone to stop right now if we're going to avoid some of these numbers of, you know, two degrees Celsius, three degrees Celsius by the end of the, by 2100. I understand the point because we're the most guilty, but most of our sins are in the past. Not most. I mean, I guess most, but we're still sinning. Go ahead, David. Yeah, I would just say a few things. The first is, you know, estimates for what it would take

to keep global warming to two degrees, which is, as I said earlier, not a happy outcome, but is considerably happier than three or four degrees, suggest that we would have to get to net zero globally by somewhere like 2070, 2080, not 2050 or 2060. So while we can look at the plans that have been put forward by China and India to get to net zero by 2060 or 2060. So while we can look at the plans that have been put forward by China and India to get to net zero by 2060 or 2070, and say that they're failing the 1.5 degree goal, which they are, they are actually quite consistent with the goal of staying below two degrees, and are much more ambitious in terms of the pace of decarbonization than would have been considered possible a few years ago. And I think this is

connected to something I said earlier, it's really important. Five years ago, most economists, most policymakers all around the world would have said, we need to do something to make sure that the climate vulnerable people of the world are not suffering huge burdens in the future. But getting there, doing what is necessary is too hard for us, it's going to be too expensive. And that conventional wisdom really has changed over the last few years, in part because renewable But getting there, doing what is necessary is too hard for us. It's going to be too expensive. And that conventional wisdom really has changed over the last few years, in part because renewable energy prices have fallen so much, in part because we have a greater sense of the cost of inaction through pollution and other science about climate impacts. And that is why we've seen over the last year and a half this huge wave of commitments all around the world, China, India, South Korea, the EU, Joe Biden in the US, to get to net zero by 2050, 2060, India's a little later. Those pledges, which I agree,

as Bjorn pointed out earlier, we can only trust so much. Pledges have been made in the past and then unfulfilled. In fact, just about every pledge that's ever been made on climate has gone unfulfilled. But the fact that they're being made at all, to me, signals a real change in thinking of policymakers and leaders the world over, where they see that if at least they were designing their economic future on a whiteboard from scratch, they would see the value in moving to renewables quite quickly, quite rapidly. And in fact, that is borne out by what the IEA says, the International Energy Association, which calls solar power the cheapest electricity in history. Carbon Tracker, which is a sort of business focused environmental organization in England, says that 90 percent of the world's population now lives in places where new renewables are cheaper than new dirty energy. For all these reasons, we see a real phase shift. You know, the IMF, the World Bank,

these are not left-wing environmental organizations. Almost everybody who's looking at this, I think with clear eyes, sees that a faster transition, a full transition will lead us to a better place over the course of the next couple of decades. There won't be bumps along the way. It won't be a seamless transition. But all of these countries from all of these different political perspectives are looking at. want to listen to it. But he wrote the book Apocalypse Never. He's big on nuclear power as a solution. And he talked about renewables in a way that really cast doubt for me on their viability as the solution to this problem, because he was saying, for example, it takes, I think, I don't want to misquote him, but it was something like 450 times the amount of land um to you know for like a wind turbine uh farm then one little block of nuclear energy which could power your entire life right like i've we've i think we have the sound bite do we have it you guys have him talking about yeah yeah here it is number two he's talking about

the rubik's cube and the amount of power that that you could get from a Rubik's Cube size of nuclear energy versus it would take 450 times the land to get the same amount from like a wind energy, which is a renewable. Listen to him. Well, I think a really easy way to think about it is that uranium fuel, which is what we use to power nuclear plants, is just really energy dense. About the same amount of uranium as this Rubik's Cube can power all of the energy that you need in your entire life. Which is pretty good. It was episode 93. I think

my team just said it. Is that what you said, Deb? 94, episode 94, if you want to go back and listen to it. So what do you make of it, Bjorn? Because I mean, it's great to think about wind and solar, but the other thing Schellenberger was pointing out was solar doesn't work when the sun goes down, which is right when people get home from work. And wind turbines over time, we haven't figured out like the amount of lead that's in them and so on. And solar panels, same. The damage that could do to people and to the environment once the 25 or 30 years into their lifespan. They're not necessarily the Holy Grail. Yeah, no. So Megan, I think there's a lot of things to unpack because David and I obviously disagree on a number of different points. So let

me take your first point here. A lot of people like to say that solar is the cheapest thing on the planet. And David is absolutely right to say that that's exactly what the International Energy Agency said last year. But that's only true when the sun is shining. And now most people actually want their energy to be available 24-7. Then people sort of blithely say, oh, but batteries, we can fix that with batteries. set up any time soon because the U.S. right now just have batteries enough to power the electricity that the U.S. uses for three and a half minutes. In 2030, it might be even 12 or 11 minutes. The point is you need this for at least, obviously, a day or a night for solar. But in reality, because there's also less solar, sometimes it's overcast,

wind doesn't blow, you probably need it for days on end. In Germany, you have quiet wind periods every year for at least five days. That means you need much, much more batteries. And that's, of course, why most poor countries, David sort of suggests, oh, they're rebuilding their entire energy infrastructure because, sorry, they're not rebuilding it, they're building it for the first time. So they can just go renewable. A lot of people like this idea, oh, they're leapfrogging just like they did with cell phones, but they're not. This is why China used to get what about 40% of its energy from renewables, but now it gets just over 10% from renewables because they have industrialized and they get most of their power just like we do

from fossil fuels. The reality is that when you put up solar panels and wind turbines, sure, you can cut down on the time that you use your gas powered stations. That's nice because the gas then kicks in when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing. And so the gas really becomes your battery. That's how we solve this today. And you can save some of the gas cost, but then you have to say the cost of the new solar panel or the cost of the new wind turbine is not that you save the whole infrastructure. It's just that you save the gas. And that's why most renewable still turn out to be much more expensive, which of course is why we have all these

renewable conferences, or really climate change conferences, where you have to arm twist everyone to promise to cut their carbon emissions, go much more renewables, which they really don't because it ends up costing a lot of money. Now, eventually, and this I'm sure is one of the things that we'll be talking about, we will get to a point where we have better technology that people will want to buy. And once you're there, you can get everyone to switch. Remember what happened with the US when you innovate fracking around 2010, Fracking made gas much, much cheaper than coal. And so almost the entire US switched from coal to gas. That happens to be incredibly good for climate because it emits about half as much CO2 per unit of energy. That's why the US has reduced

its emissions more than any other country in the 2010s, not because of Obama, not because of Trump, but because of price. And that's crucial if we're actually going to make good policy decisions. And again, let's just rewind a little bit. So David was telling us that the global warming impact could be huge, especially on developing countries. The papers that he's talking about is by Burke and Company, and they basically investigate, as he was rightly telling us, that there's an optimal level of temperature. And once you get above that or below that, you actually grow less. The outcome, unfortunately, of their model, and this is really something you have to buy into, is that the countries that will win in the 21st

century is going to be Iceland. Iceland is going to be much richer than the US because Iceland is in a cool place. So they will actually grow a lot more. And the second largest winner is going to be Mongolia. This is, I mean, it doesn't really pass the smell test, but more importantly, and there's a lot of literature out there that's criticized, that fundamentally it shows that you believe that the world is mostly run on outdoor activity. It's not. Most activity and certainly most economic activity is indoor. And that's, of course, why most countries, even in the global south, will be run indoor where they'll often be air conditioned and they'll grow just as fast as they would any other place. What really matters and what is important and what these countries also get is that they want to make sure that they're well educated, that they're well fed, that they don't die from easily curable infectious diseases. That's why, yes, global warming is a problem. It's not by any means this earth shattering problem, but it is a problem. And that's why if we're going to get the rest of the world to say, yes, we want to actually do these things more than just promise it at fancy meetings in Glasgow and elsewhere, we have to make

sure that the cost of the policy is much lower than the benefit. It's not right now. And that's why most countries will promise stuff, but not actually deliver. And that's why the current problem is not whether this is a problem. We both agree that it is, but it's that the solutions that we're coming up with, oh, just give them a lot of solar panels is not actually the thing that will solve the problem. You know, I'm still fascinated by, we're talking a little bit about when the earth warms, what will we do to continue operating as a society to make sure people continue to be able to be fed, to be able to inhabit certain parts of the country, of the world. I'm still really interested in what does the world look like? What does it look like in 50 years? What does it look like in 100 years? I saw in your book, David, you had

predictions of in some of these regions, you can kiss the beautiful Northeast fall with the beautiful colors goodbye. Very likely we're driving around, it's just brown leaves and people are confused by the old portraits of these beautiful falls. And that kind of thing really brings it home, right? I think it's hard for a lot of people to imagine, wait, what's happening in India? And why do I care? And what's happening with the food supply? And I'm like, I'll always get food.

I'm an American, right? You start to talk about how there's not going to be any more skiing. Like you can say goodbye to that. There's not going to be any more beachfront property on the eastern coast of the United States because we're going to have a sea rise of eight feet and you get people's attention. And that's where we're going to pick it up right after this break. Much more with David and Bjorn ahead. Don't go away. So pick it up there, David, on the, you know, it's fair to say catastrophic predictions on there's no more colorful fall and the sea, the sea rise from your book.

You say even radical decreases on our part in carbon emissions could still lead to a six foot sea level rise by 2100. Six foot. 2100 six foot, you're right, even by intermediate to low sea level rise scenarios, by 2100, we could have high tide flooding on the East Coast every other day. Yeah, I mean, you know, just I'm summarizing climate science research. This isn't the work that I've done myself. And I think that one of the for me, one of the most powerful things about that portion of the book in which I'm going through that research is just to see how much of it there is out there. It's not one or two studies that are way out of the field. It is a huge body of research that even if you discarded half of it and half of the other half got rendered to extreme, would still paint a pretty dark picture of our medium term future.

And I just want to pick up, connect that to something that Bjorn said earlier, when he was talking about this particular wall and vapor by Marshall Burke at all about economic impacts of climate change. It's true that there are other estimates of those impacts. There are different ways of modeling the economic impacts of climate change. And there's a pretty wide range of what experts believe is likely over the course of the century. Even the quite Pollyanna-ish reads do still find some meaningful impact, but it is considerably smaller than Burke and et al have found. But when I look at, you know, the conventional business-friendly centrist figures and institutions in the world and the messaging that they've put out and the reports that they've put out over the last few years, you know, the World Bank, the IMF, these are not institutions that are, you know, freaky left-wing environmentalist groups.

They are focused on economic growth and prosperity above all. And they are very clear in stating their fears about the effects of climate change on economic growth. Mark Carney, who is the former head of the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada, has been saying lately that his quote unquote base case, so his baseline of expectation is that climate change will cut global GDP by 25%. Now, it's not from where it is today, it's from where we would be without climate change. But that's a quite dramatic impact. And I think it's often, you know, Bjorn and others like him will often talk about, you know, it's important to keep in mind perspective. And I think that's true. We should keep in mind that in the future, barring really extreme climate

disaster, we are probably going to be a more prosperous world than the world that we're living in today and the world that we've lived in the past. But that's not the only standard. And if we're trying to plot a course into the future in which we're choosing between one in which we have 75% of our potential economic growth or 100% of our potential economic growth, that's a really meaningful difference. And it would have to be a quite strong case that the cost of getting from that 75% to 100% was really large for us to avoid taking it. And I pretty strongly disagree with a lot of what Bjorn was saying about those cost issues. And we can get into the details, but as with everything, goal of more than 80 percent of global GDP and more than 80 percent of global emissions is now to get to net zero carbon by mid-century or 20 a little bit later. And that is a really dramatic break from where we've been in the past. It's true. There have been climate conferences in the past where people pledged to cut their emissions, but never in as direct and clear.

And I got it. But you're kind of getting ahead of me because I think I think people would benefit from understanding what in figuring out what the costs are and so on. What what does life look like? You know, we have, as I mentioned, you just had a baby. We've got three kids. I'm trying to picture when my kids are 80, 90. What does this earth look like? What is it like for my grandkids, basically? What is it like for your grandkids? And I really I would like to understand that, Bjorn, because I will say, you know, if we

have an eight foot rise in the Atlantic Ocean, America does look a lot different than it looks right now. The thought of Miami Beach, more like a city of Atlantis, the thought of no more colorful falls, ski mountains going away, that kind of like that that brings it home. But do you believe that's likely? So, Megan, there's a lot of things to unpack here. First of all, the UN climate panel, which I think both Dave and I agree are the goal is the gold standard on this.

They talk about two to three feet. They say very possible, but at a very outside range, it could be up to six feet of sea level rise. So it's certainly pushing at what David is talking about. And this often is the case that this is not actually what the best science from the UN Climate Panel tells us. But yes, two to three feet of sea level rise is a problem. And it is something that we should be concerned about. But we should also have a sense of proportion. Remember, over the last 150 years, sea levels rose about a foot. Yet I doubt anyone would ever talk about what happened over the last 150 years, that that was in any way important. We actually saw dramatically increasing areas,

for instance, of the US and many other places. Because as you know, if you live in New York, New York grew because you actually know how to do this. We know that very well from Holland, which is probably the best example. Holland is a wonderful place, which has about 40% of its land area below sea level. If you fly into the world's 14th largest airport in Amsterdam, you will fly into an airport that's much below sea level and is actually probably the only big international airport that is a former site of a big naval battle. The point is we are actually really, really good species at dealing with these issues. Of course, Miami is not going to go away. We know how to protect this very cheaply. Remember, the entire cost of the Dutch protection over the last

half century has cost about 10 billion euros. We estimate that globally, this is over 50 years, it's a very, very small cost. And of course, most rich countries and most upcoming countries will be easily able to afford that. Actually, what the models show is when you include adaptation is that we will be better situated. Right now, about three and a half million people are flooded every year. And remember, this is a model estimate because it's really, really hard to get good estimates on this. But if you look out into the future, and David quotes that very specifically in his book, he says, if we do nothing, you will see 187 million people being flooded by the end of the century. That's absolutely true. And that would be a terrible catastrophe. It would also cost a huge amount of money. David mentions more than $100 trillion. But of course, we won't just sit around and do nothing. And the very same models that show us what happens if we do something, if we actually take action just like the Dutch have done, which we will have strong individual and statewide incentive to do, we will reduce the number of people that will be flooded from about 3.5 million down to about 15,000 people per year, despite us being much richer, despite sea level being much higher, and despite there will be more people in the world. Why? Because resources and resilience is what really matters.

And so there's a real risk that we end up focusing on the wrong thing. We focus on these very extreme and slightly exciting scenarios. You ask, what is the world going to look like for your kids and grandkids? Look back at how well we have done these scenarios in the past. In 1970, the first Earth Day, there was a lot of scenarios about how the world was going to look for the next 50 years. The UN told us actually to the date on January 25, 1972, told us the world had only 10 years left to live. In 1970, the Earth Day, we were told that we would only be able to survive if we were wearing gas masks by 1985, because there would be so much pollution. Paul Ehrlich was talking about in 2000, the US

would be decimated. We'd basically just be down to 26,000, sorry, 26 million people starving in the US. Of course, nothing like that happened. We're a thriving nation living much longer, being much better off, and nobody needs gas masks. So you have to be really careful about these alluring and intoxicating scenarios that tell you, oh, the world is all going to fail. No, there's a very, very good chance that we'll be much better off. And again, if I can just make this point, because I think we'll be coming back to this again and again, even if you accept these incredibly high costs of 10%, Mark Carney, I mean, he's a climate campaign, honestly. But even if you accept the very high cost of 10%, the most of these sort of academically

acceptable estimates show 4%, 3% of cost by the end of the century. But even if you accept 10%, the UN estimate that each person in the world will be 450% richer by the end of the century. So yeah, we will then only be 400% richer. Yes, that's a problem. I certainly want to work with David and many others to make sure that we get closer to 450 rather than 400. But let's not fool ourselves. This is not a world that's going to be worse. Your kids, your grandkids, David's kids, his grandkids are going to be much better off living in a much better world. But yes, global warming will be a problem. Let's fix it smartly instead of making these policies that won't work. Go ahead, David. Oh, well, I think to some degree that people living in the global north will certainly be protected. I think they'll be dealing with a

world that is defined much more by climate impacts and climate disasters than the one today. But I hope that we can engineer some amount of adaptation to protect them and secure the sorts of promises that were extended to us into the future, that people can continue to live prosperous, flourishing lives. I'm much more concerned, and actually I think Bjorn's stated concerns line up with this, with the lives of people living in the global south. And there I have much bigger worries I don't think that um we can lively assume that um the world will respond to um dramatically intensifying weather and um much more common droughts and um flooding events and heat waves um in the same way that we can you know we've done in in Holland and in fact looking at the impacts in the U.S the US of extreme weather recently, I think even the American example is a much more complicated one than the Dutch one,

not to say that we haven't made some progress in making the country more resilient. But I think we've certainly failed to take the, you know, sort of dramatic total action that would protect people in the US from the kinds of impacts that we're already seeing. And, you know, the Hurricane Ida, which, you know, killed people in New York City. It's not like we're living in a perfectly protected world. Now, globally, you know, fatalities from climate disasters, from weather disasters have fallen over time. I expect that that will probably continue. And that's a very good thing. At the same time, the impacts of such weather disasters in dollar totals are growing. They seem, you know, roughly flat in terms of percentage of GDP, but in terms of total dollars, they're growing. And that's really concerning. And I'm, in all of these contexts, on all of these questions, you know, personally anchored from the perspective that we are really entering a new phase with climate change.

That's not to say that, you know, 1.4 degrees of warming is going to look like a completely different world than 1.2 or 1.6 than 1.4. These are differences that are, you know, it's a spectrum, not a binary. On the other hand, I think it's really important to keep in mind, we are already today living on a planet that is warmer than it has ever been in the entire history of human civilization. And that means that much of the infrastructure that we built to protect ourselves and to allow us to thrive under previous climate conditions simply won't hold up. Now, take, for example, what happened in Vancouver and British Columbia this past summer. You know, they experienced a heat dome that was not so hot. It wasn't like no humans had ever experienced temperatures of this kind. But this region of this country, which, of course, is a prosperous, climate-conscious, environmentally-friendly place, simply wasn't prepared in the way that they would

have hoped to be. Now, if that same heat wave had happened 50 years ago, maybe the death toll would have been in the tens of thousands rather than just in the hundreds. But that's not to say that the impacts are not quite dramatic and tragic when you see, you know, all those lives lost. And then as a partial result of the heat dome, record wildfires, mudslides crippling the Vancouver port, stopping trains and highways out of one of the busiest ports in the world for a period of a week or so. These are the sorts of disruptions that we're likely to see even in the developed world, in the rich world, I think in increasing number, even as we develop more and more of our resources to protecting ourselves against them. That's one of the big questions people have, right? Is like, what's going to happen

every time there's a major weather event, you know, whether it's a hurricane or it's a, you know, tornadoes that we saw recently, wildfires, certainly you start to hear droughts anyplace, climate change, climate change. And I know there's a real debate about whether that's actually what's causing these things or whether they are actually getting worse because of climate change. That's where I want to pick it up right after this quick break. Guys, don't go away. Thank you so much for being here. David and Bjorn, we continue with them after this quick ad and we will be right back.

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Or as I said, Michael Schellenberger, who's well worth your time, episode 94. I'll kick this one off with you, Bjorn. How much should we be blaming the hurricanes that we see, the tornadoes that we see, the flooding that we see in various parts of the world on climate change? Well, so there's two problems with this conversation. One, of course, is that everything you see is being blamed on global warming. So every hurricane, of course, it's not like there were hurricanes in the past. What we're actually expecting is that we will see fewer but stronger hurricanes. Overall, that will probably be a bad thing. But again, and I think it's important to just just before the break, David was telling us, sure, there are few people dying.

But the and the percent of cost stays about the same, but they're going up in real terms. Let's just be honest about what he just said. And this, of course, is what the numbers tell us. Over the last 100 years, the number of people that have died from climate-related disasters has gone down by 99%. It's gone down from about half a million people per year to about 6,000 people. That's a fantastic achievement. And he even said that it's likely to continue in that direction. It's hard to know, but it's certainly a lot lower than it's ever been. And likewise, with costs, obviously, they're going to go up as we get richer, because if you have twice the number of houses, you will

also get twice the number of damage from a similar kind of flood. But the real point here is that we're actually also getting lower damage cost and percent of GDP. What that tells you is very unlike the story that you hear, namely that this is just going to be worse and worse and that I fear that in the future we'll be all consumed by these terrible disasters. The reality is no, they are actually going to be less damaging both to lives and cost. But yes, we'll probably hear a lot about them because that's what fits into the narrative. And that's, of course, what gives us this bad conversation on climate change. Well, that makes sense because you think about, for example, the rise of the oceans.

It's not like it happens overnight like a tsunami. It happens over time and houses get built up and, you know, they do more sort of dumping from the Army Corps of Engineers. We've seen that just in our little New Jersey town. A lot to discuss there. And also with respect to the celebrities and world leaders who have been rather hypocritical on this issue. Don't go anywhere. So I want to pick it up again with the hurricanes and the natural disasters, guys, because what I understand on where we are now in terms of how bad the problem is, global temperature has gone up about 2.12 degrees Fahrenheit. That's 1.18 degrees Celsius since 1880. The rate of warming over the past 40 years is accelerating. And we've had 19 of the warmest years on record since the year 2000. The 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 2005. There's a phrase in your book, David, I want to make sure I get it right,

that reads, more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades. So we're experiencing a lot of warming right now, more than we have over the past hundred years. And we're not doing so well at cutting back on our fossil fuel emissions because of that stat we just read from David. So without sounding too cheeky, where are all the hurricanes? Like where's the increase in the hurricanes and the natural disasters and so on? Because what I read in terms of the hurricanes is if you look at sort of the worst ones and look at the stats over time, they took place a long time ago. Seasons with the most named storms 1851

through present 2005 was the worst 1933 second worst 2012 and 11 weren't so great 2010 to 1995 1887 had 19 1969 had 18 and so on. It doesn't

sound I don't see it reflected in the hurricanes exactly. Where am I going wrong there, David? Well, I would say a couple of things. The first is we are seeing some bigger, stronger storms. There's this, in particular, this problem that we've observed just over the last couple of years where hurricanes are slowing as they approach land, which makes them much more punishing when they do make landfall because they have accumulated more strength and move more slowly over the coast, meaning like more rainfalls, longer time with terrible wind. And, you know, on the big picture, I think the stats there are somewhat messy.

There's a lot of chance in weather data, but also I don't think it's really, looking at data over the course of a century is all that illuminating because most of the trend you're observing there is a period of time in which there's not been much climate change at all. I think we're likely to see, as I was saying earlier, significantly more changes over the next decade or two

than we've seen over the past decade or two, because we're in a meaningfully different climate state now than we have been for all of human history. And the patterns that we've observed and adjusted to over the last few generations are no longer going to hold precisely. But I would say, you know, beyond that, hurricanes are not the only measure here of climate changes. We you know, there are literally hundreds of different impacts that have been observed, projected, monitored. Some of them are more dramatic than others. Some of them are more intense than others. You know, droughts, heat waves, flooding, you know, wildfire, which is a complicated one, because there is a significant human contribution to, but nevertheless, human wildfire last year, wildfire last year, produce more, put more carbon

into the atmosphere than all, all but, you know, the only country in the world that produced more carbon than wildfire last year was China. And, you know, in all of these ways, there is, there's messy data. But the way that I read the science is that the directions are quite clear. The magnitude of change differs from impact to impact, but if we continue warming at the pace that we're warming on, we're going to see in a very predictable way dramatically more of these events. That's not to say that in any given year or even in any given half decade, you're going to be setting records on all of them. That's not the timescale at which climate changes, but we're moving into a different climate that is going to be dominated by extreme events

much more than the ones that we've lived through. And it's going to take an enormous amount to adapt to that future. The fact that we've been able to respond to some degree to this point is not, in my mind, all that comforting, given how much more dramatic the likely impacts are going to be in the decades ahead. Well, we certainly have adapted in some ways already on the hurricane front, right? It's like cities are built in a more strong way. The buildings can withstand

more of a beating if they're about to get more intense and or more frequent, you know, who knows whether it will hold up. But there are a bunch of things that we have to worry about. Now, the wildfires, that's, you know, that's another thing I guess we're going to have to adapt to. One other thing about the hurricanes is, yes, we are in a better place, especially in countries like the US, dealing with these issues that we have in the past. But the path of hurricanes is likely to change, which means the places dealing with them are likely to change too, which means a lot of local knowledge will be lost. We saw, for instance, with Hurricane Sandy, this was not a record storm that hit New York City. It was just hitting a city that was totally unprepared. Ideally, in the future, we'd be better prepared.. I don't think that's a very useful standard. I

think we should be trying to make ourselves as healthy, prosperous, and safe and stable as we possibly can. And I think climate represents a really dramatic threat to all of those promises into the future, even if we may still be better off in 2050 than we were in 1950 in dealing with, say, a Category 5 hurricane. I'd rather be much, much better off as well prepared as we possibly could be. And I think those standards are really important too, not just how far we've come, but also what we can do to protect ourselves going forward. And I think we've talked a lot about, Bjorn has talked a lot in this conversation, about the ways in which we are capable of changing to protect ourselves.

That really does imply, among many other things, a much larger appetite and budget for climate adaptation than almost anyone in the world, I think, is talking about openly. And I think that's an important thing to talk about as well. We can't just sit back and let these forces unfold and trust that everything will work out. It's working out fine. There's quite a lot to deal with, even the amount of extreme weather that we're dealing with today. And it's going to require a lot more of us to deal with the extreme weather. Well, it's almost like a form of Darwinism. It's like we will change because we have an inherent desire to live and to live well. And that's why that's the instinct from which most innovation is born. I will give you a quick aside, just a moment of levity. You mentioned Superstorm Sandy in New York and how New York wasn't prepared for it. I will give you a quick aside, just a moment of levity. You mentioned Superstorm Sandy in New York and how New York wasn't prepared for it. I remember being on the air right after it hit and there were all sorts of weird things happening in New York that people hadn't anticipated, like the flooding of this massive bank in downtown Manhattan, which they didn't anticipate the

water ever getting to it. And it did get to it. And they lost a bunch of old artifacts and different types of monies. And I remember reading the prompter at Fox News and it said they've lost thousands of irreplaceable bongs. Bongs? It was a young producer who had typed bongs instead of bonds with a D. It was one of those things I remember catching it thinking, okay, that could have been a great, great moment in anchor screw-ups. It was avoided. Okay.

Bjorn. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. So, I mean, look, I think the point is still valid. If you look at how the media represents every hurricane we see, you get the feeling that this really is a question. We're seeing a much, we're seeing many more hurricanes. We're seeing much more damage. We're seeing them linger longer. They flood more, all these kinds of things. But when you actually look at the statistics, that's not what you see. I think it's sort of amusing how the last two years we've been

told there's more Atlantic hurricanes than there normally is. Yes, that's true. But we're not being told the global picture, which of course is the one that matters when you're talking about global warming. We actually last year, and this is unreported, I haven't seen it reported anywhere. We have since 1980 had global coverage of satellites to identify all hurricanes in the world. There's normally about 47 hurricanes in the world. Last year, there were 37. We've never had this few hurricanes in the satellite history. Now, we may have had that before. We don't know. We don't have good enough data. But it's two less than the second lowest number of hurricanes we've ever had. How come we don't hear this? Well, it's because it doesn't fit the narrative. So again, this is not to say that hurricanes are not a problem. It's not to say, as David rightly points out,

that some places don't get hit often enough with hurricanes that they will build up sort of knowledge about this. And yes, there will have to be investment. But we also need to hear that this is not a world where you see more and more damage. You see 99% reduction in death. You see reduction in percent of GDP losses, even though you only hear about these great, great hurricanes. And we actually see fewer hurricanes, not bigger, more. And again, that's just a statistical artifact. It's not

likely that 2022 is suddenly also going to be smaller. That's not the point that I'm making. I'm simply saying you only hear one side. And let me show you another one, because David mentioned earlier on the idea of the heat dome in Northwest US. That certainly got a lot of attention. And yes, that was terrible. More than 700 people lost their lives during this heat dome. And if you actually look at the statistics, so there has been great modeling done in Lancet and many other places, we know that a lot of people lose their lives each year from heat waves. So about 20 to 30,000 people in US and Canada lose their lives because of high temperatures, of heat deaths every year. We should certainly be aware of that. And as temperatures rise, we are going to see more of those. We've

actually seen over the last 20 years, about 8,000 more people die every year because of increasing temperatures. That's terrible. But what you haven't heard is that 10 times as many people die from cold. So almost 300,000 people die every year from cold in the US and Canada. And every year, because temperatures have increased, we actually now see about 25,000, almost three times as many people not die every year. We're not well informed when we only hear one side of the story and not the other side. And again, my point here is not to say that overall global warming will be a net negative. That's why it's a problem that we should talk about. But when you only hear one side of the story, and especially

then you only hear these fantastical stories that go out to 2100 and, oh, we're not going to have any forest. We're not going to have any snow. The world is just going to be terrible. Well, those are the kind of predictions that we've heard many times before. They always turn out to be wrong. We will be much better off, but I totally agree with David. We should try to make sure that we're not just better off, but that we're the best possible off we can. And that, of course, comes down to, are we picking solutions that'll end up costing the world a lot and not doing very much, or are we picking smart solutions? And I think that's really where the meat of this conversation

should be. Yep. And we're getting that one second, but I do want to spend one minute on misinformation. On the hurricane front, I remember Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, of course. He used horrifying footage from 2005's Hurricane Katrina and suggested that climate change was the cause of frequent and more intense hurricanes. has gone down mostly, and the storm's intensity has not yet grown significantly. He also took the polar bear and really wanted us to believe the polar bear was going away. If we didn't do something about climate change, we actually have a clip. This is soundbite one. So there is a faster buildup of heat here at the North Pole in the Arctic Ocean and the Arctic generally than anywhere else on the planet. That's not good for creatures like polar bears who depend on the ice.

A new scientific study shows that for the first time they're finding polar bears that have actually drowned, swimming long distances, up to 60 miles to find the ice. Well, that pulls right at your heartstrings because there's nobody who doesn't love the polar bear. But Bjorn, is it true? Did that turn out to be true? No. I mean, again, there's some part of this that's true, that there are some concerns about the fact that polar bears might actually have a problem in the long run future. But the reality, of course, is what really kills a lot of polar bears is that we hunted them. We hunted them enormously back in the 1960s and 70s. And what we've seen when

we actually look at the inventory, so the number of polar bears, they've kept going up. And we're actually having more polar bears now than we've ever had since at least the 1960s. And again, I'm sort of, I'm blown away by the idea that people are saying, I love the polar bears. So we should stop all industrialization. We should stop all this fossil fuel nonsense to save a few polar bears. When right now, every year we shoot about a thousand polar bears. I don't know, but if we want to not damage polar bears, maybe we should stop shooting a thousand polar bears first. Good call.

However, David, when you think about the Arctic, there was just an article recently about how the Atlantic is spewing a lot more warmer waters into the Arctic Sea than we thought it was going to. And so the Arctic is getting warmer at a faster rate. NASA says the Arctic Sea ice, the extent of it is down 13% per decade since 1979. And satellite data shows Earth's polar ice sheets are losing mass, down 428 billion metric tons per year. So it's not wrong to say that the ice sheets are melting and that we have to keep a look on the icebergs and that the Arctic is getting warmer in a way

that could have profound effects on the rest of the earth. That's true. Yeah, what's happening? We agree. Yeah. And there's some concerning possibilities about the way that those changes may scramble weather patterns beyond the Arctic. We don't exactly know how likely those are or how quickly they will come about. But the changes to the circulation patterns of the ocean can have some quite dramatic climate effects that extend well beyond the Arctic. And indeed, a lot of the analysis, we were talking about how much of recent extreme events we can attribute to global warming and climate change. That's a booming field, and they're producing much more rapid response analyses now than they did in the past. And a lot of the analysis of the Pacific heat on the extreme event in the Northwest U.S. and Canada last year focused on the way that changing ocean

patterns has made some of these events considerably more likely. I wanted to go back to something that Bjorn said a few minutes ago, which is, you know, thinking about the impact of these disasters, thinking about, you know, declining mortality, thinking about, you know, declining, I would say that the impact in terms of percentage GDP is basically flat statistically, but technically, I guess there's been a small decline in any event. In the big picture, you know, there are all of these impacts that we're watching all the time. And they are all, they all present some amount of challenge to human flourishing. I am not all that concerned about the plight of polar bears personally. I'm much more concerned about the plight of humans. And I just think really big picture. This is not,

the views that I'm expressing here are not, they are not the views of fringe alarmist climate warriors. They are the views of the IPCC. They are the views of the IMF and the World Bank. They are the views of Hank Paulson and Mark Carney. These are people who represent the business and economic growth-minded perspective of the Western establishment. This is not Greta Thunberg talking. This is not Varkashini Prakash talking. I have great respect for those people. I don't mean to demean them. But I'm saying that the people who are at the very center of the cold cost-benefit calculus that runs the world in very general ways, see climate change as a

dramatic challenge, which is the number one challenge of our time. This is not, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, that was not the case. The business world, the central banks of the world, we're not talking about climate in these terms, and they very much now are. I think that is a very powerful message that whatever quibbles you wanna take with this study, that study, this data point, that data point, looking at the holistic collective picture, anyone who is worrying about the prosperity of the planet in the future is worrying about climate change

quite significantly. And well beyond that, of course, we know that there are many things that are being affected by these changes that are not easily captured by economic data and are not represented by matters of economic growth. I mentioned earlier, we're talking about air pollution produced by fossil fuels killing millions of people a year. That is an unbelievably large scale impact. And the benefits of reducing that pollution and reducing that public health impact would be, you know, astronomically positive for the flourishing of the planet. And they are

concentrated in countries in the world that we don't tend to pay all that much attention to in the US, but those lives are still very much worth our time and attention. You know, just in Delhi, the average resident is having their life expectancy cut by nine years by the effects of air pollution. Now, that's not entirely due to the burning of fossil fuels, but that's a significant contributor. And when you look at air pollution issues across sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, fossil fuels are a major, major force there. So even putting aside hurricanes, floods, droughts, which, of of course we shouldn't be putting aside, but just thinking about the direct impacts of burning fossil fuels, according to Our World and Data, which is, again, no fringe organization. It's a quite centrist data organization. For every thousand Europeans that coal power provides electricity for, it kills one. You have to

think, how much more expensive would renewable energy have to be for that bargain to be worth making? And as Bjorn pointed out, there are complications with it much earlier. There are complications with rolling out renewables to 100% capacity. There are limitations to wind and solar, but most industry analysts agree that getting to about 80% capacity is quite doable and in the relatively short term. And figuring out that last chunk is the challenge. And we're very, very, very, very far from that 80% level today, which means we're subjecting many more people all around the world, but even in the prosperous clean air places of the world to air pollution that damages their health and well-being in many other ways. Okay, just looking at- Okay, I got it.

Let me get Bjorn to weigh in on that, because what we're hearing on the other side, Bjorn, is like, like here domestically, you know, the Green New Deal, AOC's Green New Deal was like, well, stop, no more eating meat, right? And we got to reduce the amount of methane that comes from cows. And we need everybody to be in an electric car. You know, meanwhile, we don't have the batteries for that and we don't have you know we don't have the capacity to sort of make that happen on a country-wide basis but it's really the fossil fuels that's what's doing it it's not

me eating a hamburger that's if everybody gave up meat you tell me you're a vegetarian i know for because you don't like killing animals but it it's not about this. Realistically, there's no way of combating this right now without targeting the fossil fuels. It's not about meat. It's not about dairy. And it's it's not about even cars going into, you know, electric cars versus ones powered by gasoline. Well, I suspect David and I would actually agree, and this is also what the data shows. This is not predominantly about what you and I and everybody else make some personal choices. This is very much about how the world is set up. And that's, of course, the whole conversation that David also just engaged in. He says that the World Bank,

many other organizations are telling us we really need to focus on climate change. That's absolutely true. But remember, these organizations are driven by politicians who have decided that this is what voters, especially in rich countries, want. China, India are not doing this, and for good reason, because they want to focus on getting their populations out of poverty. And so in some sense, we're having this grand global conversation. Should we be spending most of our time and our focus on spending it on climate and often pretty badly? Or should we be more concerned about these many other things that are also going to decide most of what will happen in the 21st century? And most poor people are very clear in

saying this is much, much more about being able to lift my kids out of poverty, giving them an education, allowing them to survive and just not dying from easily curable infectious diseases and all these other things. And that gets back to this whole conversation of saying, so what should we do? We are talking about spending lots of money. And again, David is absolutely right that we can obviously, because we're a rich civilization, we can obviously allow ourselves to see electricity prices go up and pay more for having essentially two infrastructures, one that almost entirely powers us with green energy when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, and a fossil fuel infrastructure that powers us when that's not the case. But that's not what most countries in the world can afford. And so we're left with this situation where maybe the European Union, the US, a few other well-meaning countries will do some of this. They won't go anywhere near to what they've actually promised. They will incur huge costs, and they will have most of their voters eventually say, no, don't want to do it. So my concern about this, and that's also the subtitle of my book,

right, is that we really end up picking a solution that very easily makes it worse for the world's poor and it's unsustainable because it doesn't actually fix climate change. I think, you know, David and most other people who want to do something about climate change, they come from a good place. They certainly want to make sure this actually helps the world. And yes, we need to find a solution, but we need to find a solution that's so sufficiently cheap that not just rich, well-meaning Americans and Europeans will pay for it, but that everyone in the US, and that's certainly not what's the case right now, and that everyone in China and India

and Africa will pay for it. They're not anywhere close to this. We're talking about spending $5 trillion a year. And look, nobody, when you look around, and especially not after COVID, is willing to pay that amount of money. So I think the conversation really should be, how do we get a much cheaper and much more effective policy? That's not by forcing a lot of solar panels and wind turbines down people's throat right now, but it's about innovating them to become much, much better and innovating fusion and fission and all these other things. So that's really where the solution goes. Get cheap green energy going and everybody will want to buy it, but that's not where

we are right now. Well, yeah, get cheap green energy going and make it more reliable. But you also have some interesting passages in your book about innovation and what else we could do. Is there a way other than, you know, stopping with fossil fuels and so on

of some sort of technology that could actually lower the Earth's temperature. We're going to talk about solutions, innovations, and what we actually are prepared to do about this problem right after this quick break. More with David Wallace-Wells and Bjorn Lomborg in just a minute. So I cannot have this discussion without mentioning some of the hypocrisy. That's my word. We see with some of these Hollywood celebrities and climate activists, we just saw them go to the climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland.

And all these people flew in to lecture us on how we need to cut back on their private jets. Right. Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Prince Charles, Prince Albert of Monaco, others. I mean, of course, our president was on Air Force One. And, you know, you can say, OK, fine, you know, Prince Charles needs to be on a private jet. Tell it to my imaginary viewer, Madge, who's sitting in Iowa, who is being lectured to by AOC about how not only does she not need to stop eating meat, she needs to get rid of her cattle farm and she needs to lower the temperature in her house and she needs to get rid of her SUV because she uses it to drive around her four kids and use an environment or an electric car. And then she says she sees that and Madge says, you can pound sand. I'm going to continue living the way I live because in my life, I will never put out as much carbon emissions as Prince Charles did in that one flight.

How about it, David? Well, that's probably technically not true. She probably will put out more carbon than that one flight. Well, private jets are five to 14 times more polluting than commercial planes and 50 times more polluting than trains. And that's just talking about means of travel. The carbon footprint is huge, but it's probably not bigger than the lifetime carbon footprint of the average American, although it is probably bigger than the lifetime carbon footprint of the average sub-Saharan

African. You know, in general, I think that personal lifestyle changes are significant, primarily in this fight to signal to others that you are concerned and to sort of suggest to leaders your willingness to, you know, to push for a different future. I think it's a virtue signal. Well, no, I think it's more about organizing and signaling political commitment. I think, you know, systemic changes, what is required to meaningfully reduce our carbon emissions, it doesn't matter. You know, I can't build my own electric grid, I can't build my own EV charging station. I can't rebuild New York City's infrastructure to make it more carbon sensitive. Those are things that are well beyond my capacity to influence.

And I think the role of individuals is essentially to try to make those who can drive large scale policy changes, make them more sensitive to the demands of climate change and what mitigation will have to be. You can do that while eating meat and driving an SUV. Well, I just also want to be clear about, you know, the AOC thing, like the Green New Deal, as put forward, does not call for any abandonment of meat. There was like an unfortunate FAQ that was put out early on about that. I think that most people looking at this problem globally think that to get our carbon emissions down to 1.5 degree compliant will require some amount of consumer consumption changes in the wealthy West. Exactly what degree

of that is not entirely clear. But personally, I'd like to look past the net zero scenario and say, if we get to a place where we are doing all of this stuff in carbon neutral ways, then the amount of what we are consuming, the amount of travel that we're undertaking, the amount of energy that we're using, all of these are not ultimately material from a climate perspective. And if we can engineer that future over the course of the next half century, I think we're going to be in a much more prosperous and comfortable and stable place than we would be if we're going to have to, you know, if we're dealing with considerably more warming, but also worrying about the impact of the consumption that we're undertaking. I don't know. It's very hard for me to take John Kerry seriously when he flies over there in a private jet and he uses a private jet to fly his family around.

No, I'm not going to listen to somebody like that. I'm not lowering my thermostat. I'm not getting rid of my enormous Chevy Suburban, which I love. I'm not doing it. Let them start practicing what they preach before they look at the rest of us and tell us we've got to sacrifice while John Kerry doesn't sacrifice one thing. Prince Charles doesn't need to be on a private jet. Neither does Jeff Bezos. They don't need to be. They can go on a regular commercial jet like Leonardo DiCaprio, to his credit, finally did it going to this summit after he got pummeled on the earlier ones for doing it with a security guard. There's a way of doing it. And I'm telling you, I speak for I speak for middle America and most of the right half of the country on this. And you can laugh at me, but I'm telling you, this is an obstacle to people getting on board. This is what politics is for. We organize our societies differently than we live as individuals. And you don't ask Americans to donate their half their money to charity before they want more money for their local public schools.

We have great. Well, then I'll behave like John Kerry. I will do what I want to do. And I will just use words to advocate for the positions I want, just like he does. I'm not going to start changing my behavior while none of our leaders does. I mean, that's what politics is for, so that we can make changes at a systemic level rather than requiring individuals

to do everything on their own. That's why we have social organizations and politics. And I would say to your point about the difference between a private jet and your own carbon emissions, it's also really important for Americans to keep in mind that compared to most of the people in the world, we are consuming an unbelievable amount of carbon, even if we are living in very modest ways, even if we are never traveling much. Compared to the life of an average sub-Saharan Africa, we are doing unbelievably large amounts of damage to the environment. in foreign policy, suggesting that the average American fridge consumes more electricity than people living in dozens of sub-Saharan African countries.

So there's a difference between you and Leonardo DiCaprio, perhaps, but there's also an unbelievable difference between you and most of the people living on this planet, many of whom are subject to much more intense impacts from climate changes. Well, I don't disagree with that. I don't disagree with that. I don't disagree with that. But I also feel like I'm sorry I was born in America. I have the fridge I have. Like, by the way, most of my life I've lived in cities and, you know, high rise buildings,

which are very efficient when it comes to carbon emissions, way more so than the big house that John Kerry lives in out in Massachusetts and then his beach house on top of it and so on. I just feel like, you know, the hypocrisy is a real problem. And these people should understand how visuals work on the American public and beyond. And I just you tell me, Bjorn, because I just don't think the average American is going to be moved by the fact that sub-Saharan Africans have a different lifestyle and our refrigerators need to be guilted.

No, I think I think there's there's a large point. I totally get your point. There's something phenomenally wrong about all these airplanes, private airplanes going down to listen to Greta Thunberg. But the fundamental point is, yes, they're hypocrites, but we are all hypocrites in the sense that we say we want something done about climate change, but we actually really like our good life. And I think that tells us something about the solution that we're currently proposing, namely making a solution where everyone has to do with a little less, and it's going to be a little less good. And you have to turn down your thermostat, and you have to freeze a little more and be a little poorer and drive a little less and all that stuff. It's never going to work. It's not going to work for rich Americans. It's not going to work for normal Americans. And it's certainly not going to work for people who live in sub-Saharan

Africa. And I think that underscores why this is never going to work. The solution that we're being tried to being told here from the World Bank and many other places, you got to learn to live with less. No, the only way you're going to get political buy-in in the long run for this is if you can show you can live better, you can live more, and emit much less CO2. So we've gotten this wrong in a sense that we think this is all about squeezing everybody to buy a few more solar panels, even though they kind of don't want because they don't provide quite as good electricity as the one that we already have, instead of focusing on making green energy much cheaper.

Imagine, just for a second, nuclear power right now costs a lot, especially in the first world, for a variety of reasons that we can talk about. But it's very, very hard to get rid of this very high cost. But Bill Gates and many others are investing in what's known as fourth generation nuclear that potentially could be a lot cheaper for a wide range of reasons. Imagine if we could innovate the price of nuclear down below fossil fuels. Everyone in the world would switch. Imagine if we could do that for fusion. Imagine if we could do it for solar and lots and lots and lots of batteries. Imagine if we could do it for solar and lots and lots and lots of batteries.

Imagine if we could do it for a lot of different technologies. Now, the point is, we're not going to succeed with most of these, but we don't need to. We just need one of these technologies to come through and be cheaper than fossil fuels. Then everyone will buy them, not just rich, well-meaning Americans, but also the Chinese, the Indians, the Africans, everybody else. And so the solution to climate change is not first and foremost, these grand places where we all meet and make promises we don't actually intend to do. But the solution is to invest a lot more in research and development. Actually, on the sidelines of Paris in 2015, which everybody talks about, this was the place where we promised

to cut carbon emissions, and then we didn't. But we also had another promise. So President Obama and many other world leaders, Bill Gates and many other billionaires got together in what they called mission innovation to promise to double investment in green energy R&D. That's what's going to solve climate change. Unfortunately, we didn't live up to that either. Why? Because everybody focuses so much on pushing, let's get up the next solar panel part or the next wind turbine part instead of funding eggheads, which quite frankly, doesn't feel all that sexy, but just happens to be the way that we've solved all of the problems in the past and that we will solve this problem through innovation. We need better ideas.

That's what you're saying. We need better ideas that account for actual human nature. We need investment in getting those better ideas to be cost effective. I think the world that Bjorn's describing as an optimistic future is the one in which we are here already. I mentioned earlier the IEA calls solar power the cheapest electricity in history. But only when the sun is shining. But when you look around the world, you see, we've talked about the IMF, the World Bank, all of these recommendations. I also think it's quite important to recognize that many developing

nations, many middle-income nations, up to and including China and India, have made these quite dramatic promises over the last year, 18 months. China in particular is not promising to decarbonize quite as quickly as the US, but they're promising to decarbonize by 2060. They're building out a huge amount of solar and wind power to power that. They're also promising to dramatically expand their nuclear capacity. I believe they're promising to build as much nuclear in the next 15 years as the entire world has built in the last 30. That may also have cascading effects that make nuclear cheaper elsewhere. But when I look at all of these net zero pledges made, again, by 85 percent of the world's GDP and 85 percent of our global carbon emissions to get to net zero by 2050, 2060. When I see those pledges being made, what I see is policymakers

taking a really clear-eyed, cold-hearted look at the dollars and cents cost benefits, thinking about how they can design the next decades of their country's prosperity, and seeing clearly that the path through renewables will be better for them. They may not actually fulfill those pledges. I think that that's a real concern. And I think there are real obstacles, some of which Bjorn has mentioned, some of which we haven't talked about, to making them real. And those are concerns as well. But the fact that sitting in front of the whiteboard, mapping out these countries' future, countries from as diverse places as China and India and South Korea and the U.S. are all saying, well, if we were doing this in a laboratory, if we were really making plans from scratch, we would be

pushing very quickly towards decarbonization. And Bjorn talked a minute ago about the possible additional costs that would be shouldered by rich countries in the world to build a stable, renewable system. That is just not the analysis that I see or trust out there. Princeton University put out an incredibly thorough project called Next Zero America about six months ago that found that a transition to a renewable power sector in the U.S would be better for the average American simply just looking at the cost of electricity. And there have been other analyses showing that we could entirely pay for the green transition in the U.S. just through the public health benefits of cleaner air. And that's in the U.S., which has relatively clean air. And yet the additional benefits of cleaner air are such that the entire green energy transition could be paid for by those benefits. So I think both in the global south and in the

middle income countries in the world and in the rich countries of the world, we're talking about a new economic calculus, very different from the one five or 10 years ago, very different from the one that was sort of prevailing at the time that Bjorn was first writing about climate change, in which we are now seeing, and almost everyone engaged in long-term planning is seeing, that a greener, more decarbonized future will be more prosperous, healthier, and more stable. In addition- Go ahead. Go ahead and respond, Bjorn. Yeah. And it's wonderful because this really sets out the sort of argument very clearly.

David says he's seeing a lot more countries making grand promises. That's absolutely true. Almost everyone have made promises that they really don't believe. Remember, the reason why China and India have put them later on is because then they can reasonably claim, oh, the other countries, all the rich countries didn't actually live up to them, so we can also abandon them. I think the best example of how they don't really trust them is that India said that they were going to go carbon neutral by 2070, but they want a trillion dollars from the world by 2030 in order to start the process. Hands up anyone who actually believes that anyone is, and certainly the US is going to give India a trillion dollars. And remember, all the other countries will want that sort of a sum of money as well. This is pie in the sky.

This is basically to avoid being taxed, especially by the European Union. So you make these political claims. Again, yes, the world is moving towards cleaner energy, and that's great and wonderful. But most of it comes from the back of a lot of middle Americans and middle everywhere paying up huge extra cost for their electricity, fundamentally because you're now buying two sets. You're both having to pay for the gas generator and the solar panel, if you want to put it very bluntly. And that's, of course, why energy prices got doubled in the UK over the last two decades.

That's why we've seen almost everywhere where you have more renewable energy, it becomes more expensive. That's why the academic estimates show that if you actually want to go to two degrees, it's going to cost you in the order of $8 trillion by 2050. That's why studies show that for the US, it's going to cost much more than $5,000 per person per year in the US. I'm aware, and I agree, that there are some really outrageously optimistic studies out there that show we'll actually make money off of it. Well, if that was the case, then of course, we wouldn't actually see energy prices spiraling out of control. We wouldn't see nations say, oh, I'm not sure I really want to go down this road.

David makes it sound like we're all just happy and rushing towards this wonderful utopia. But the reality is we are all saying all these nice things, but we're not actually doing it. Let me just show you this one thing. So the UN Environment Program, so the guys who run part of the climate discussion, they did a survey of the 2010s climate policy, which includes the Paris Agreement. They did it in late 2019, just before COVID hit. What they found was that despite the fact that we have promised them we've had immense amount of talk and we have the Paris Agreement, they said they could not tell the difference between a world where we didn't care about climate change since 2005 and the real world.

And what that tells you is that there's this enormous amount of people saying we're doing all these things. We've certainly spent a lot of money. One academic study estimate we've spent about $500 billion every year for the last eight years on climate policies that have basically not changed the trajectory at all. Again, if you want to go much further, you have to spend a lot more. And most countries, most voters, most electorates are not willing to do that. And that's why when David says, I see a lot of countries carefully mapping this out. Well, if you look at Europe, if you look at

the US, all the leaders are phenomenally scared about the fact that energy prices are now going up, which of course is exactly what they're designed to do. It's not just because of climate policies, but exactly what they're designed to do if you want to do climate policies. And now politicians are really like, oh God, no, we don't actually want that because then we'll be thrown out of office. Again, my point is, I think David and I agree that we want to do stuff to actually fix climate change. But David's solution and the solution that most people have embraced, certainly most rich Western elites have embraced, will not get us there because it's phenomenally expensive

and it'll never get completed when people start realizing what the real costs are. Now, on that note, there's just a report that just hit that the United States saw an inflation rate soar by 7%. The inflation soared by 7% in the past year, which is the most since 1982. Americans definitely not in the mood to pay more for anything at the moment because they already are. All right, we're going to save until for anything at the moment because they already are. All right. We're going to save until the next time the discussion on geoengineering. This is from Bjorn's book. I'll just give you a little tease for our next discussion on this, where he says it essentially means deliberately adjusting the planet's temperature controls. This is uncharted territory.

Humanity has never purposefully made planet-wide efforts to change the climate. Many of the geoengineering technologies sound like science fiction. The entire field of study provokes fear, and it's not a policy we should implement right now, he writes, but it is a partial solution that is worth researching. I'm so intrigued. I sadly have to save it because we just filled the show with just chock full of goodness on other fronts. But you guys are great. And I learned a I learned a lot and I really appreciate the respectful back and forth. David and Gordon, thank you both so much for being here. We'll see you tomorrow. Don't miss the show. Check us out on YouTube in the meantime.

Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.