TRIGGERnometry - Climate Change: No Need to Panic - Bjorn Lomborg

Episode Date: November 25, 2021

Dr Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and the author of numerous books, including his latest title "False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet" Get TICKETS to TRIGGERnometry Live with Ayishat Akanbi here: https://leicestersquaretheatre.ticketsolve.com/shows/873621622 Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Global warming will mean more problems that will mean benefits. That's why it's a problem. But making it into this unmitigated disaster is simply silly. It's not like a one degree temperature rise has actually made us poor or worse off. Again, what we've seen is we've dramatically increased our benefits. We're much better educated. We live longer. We have a better opportunity in almost all kinds of ways.

And we don't die more from climate disasters. We die 99% less from climate disasters. So what the world shows us is that despite this somewhat small problem of climate change, we have dramatically improved our life quality in all kinds of areas. Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

Our brilliant guest today is an author and the former director of the Danish Environmental Assessment Institute, Bjorn Lombog. Welcome to Trigonometry. Hey, it's great to be here. Thank you. It's great to have you here joining us in our new studio. We really appreciate you coming on the show. Bjorn, before we get into talking about the climate, the environment, and all of that good stuff, tell us a little bit about who are you, how are you where you are. What has been the journey that leads you to be sitting here talking with two comedians over the internet?

Oh, just my life story and preferably in two minutes, right? Exactly. So I've always been sort of an academic. I like numbers. I like reading books and I was like totally thrilled when I realized that university I could actually get paid for reading books and being somewhat smart. But one of the things I constantly also said was you've got to sort of pay back. It's amazing that society is actually funding you. So I wanted to make sure that they also hear the stuff we figure out. And so I wrote a PhD on stuff you really don't want to know, but I also, you know, did like a three-minute radio interview on this

in, you know, between two pop songs and the most popular Danish radio show to just talk about what did I find? You know, I think those kinds of things are important. And that's really how this whole thing started with the environment. So, you know, I'm an old green piece and not out in a, in a rubber boat or anything, but I had like the backpack and the badges and the posters, you know, once you've felled all the trees and caught the last fish, people will realize they can't eat gold, all that stuff. And then I read an interview with an American economist saying a lot of what you think about the environment is wrong. Actually, things are mostly getting better, not worse, and we have no sense of what we're focusing on. And my initial sort of reaction was, ah, right-wing American propaganda.

But he said something that really annoyed me. He said, go check the data. And so I got my students together, we figure out we're going to check the data and show him wrong. Turns out that a lot of what he said was right, not all of it. He certainly was American and right wing. But the fundamental point was it's a very different message when you actually study the data. And that's really where this whole conversation on climate comes from. I kept believing that this was just going to be a tiny detour of my academic life where I was just going to write articles that 100 people would read.

if I was lucky. But this is where I am now. I've sort of, you know, come to realize my point in life is simply to say, look, we've got to not just listen to what we hear in the media, but actually listen to what the data tells us and be smart about it. And I'm sure we're going to be talking a lot about that. Well, very much on that subject, Beyond Francis and I recently recorded a conversation between the two of us, in which I said something, which actually, I think is representative of many, many other people across the world, which is I genuinely don't know whether climate change is caused by humans or not. I hear a lot of people saying that it is who I respect. I hear a few people who I respect saying it's not. And people like us

who are not experts, who are not climate scientists. The truth is we all make our minds up about this issue, not based on the data, but on what people are saying, right? So what is the truth about climate change and whether it's being caused by human beings, in your opinion? Well, so you're asking a social science guy, what's real with the natural science? I'm just simply going to tell you, you know, I know a lot of these people who have been studying climate. I totally trust them. Like, I trust people who, you know, do my GPS for me. I, you know, I kind of know how it works, but I'm really happy somebody else has figured this out. So fundamentally, they tell us global warming is real. It is manmade. It is a

problem and and I'm wholesale buying into that. So the UN climate panel has, you know, I think has produced some of the best reports where they gather like thousands of period studies together and say, what do we know? And fundamentally, yes, because we're burning more fossil fuels, we put out more CO2 and other greenhouse gas in the atmosphere and all the things equal. That heats up the planet. And remember, anything that changes the temperature from what it is today is going to be negative, both if it went up or down, simply because we have made our society with the historical climate in mind. So, London, if you're based in London, I'm actually sure, but, you know, let me just go ahead and say London is comfortable where it is placed and Athens is comfortable where it is placed. But if you switched the temperatures of those two places, of course, both of these cities would be very uncomfortable. So the point here is it's a question of saying, given that we have adopted to our historical climate, there will be a problem as we're moving away from that historical equilibrium.

And so that being the case, what is it actually going on beyond? Because I hear on certain people say, you know, we've got 50 goods harvest left. We've interviewed the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, who is painting a doomsday scenario. What is actually going on then? So global warming will be a problem. But the way it's often being communicated is sort of late the end of the world. I would imagine if you had the Extinction Rebellion Hallam, right? Roger Hallam, yes.

Now, for balance, I should say we also had Patrick Moron, who's a former... Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a lot of doomstery. I'm not sure whether that's a word. But, you know, the feeling of end of times. And it's very easy to sort of say, you know, look at any one thing that you just saw in the media and sort of project that out into the next 80 years and say, oh, my God, we're all going to die. The reality is global warming is going to be a problem.

That's absolutely true. It's by no means going to be the end of the world. And perhaps one good way of seeing that is if you look at the number of people that die, remember, it's very easy to sort of count catastrophes. What counts as a catastrophe? We typically much, much better at finding catastrophes when we're close to our age, but it's hard to remember what was catastrophes in the early part of last century. But if you count the number of dead, that's much, much harder to fudge. And we have good data for that for globally on all the weather-related disaster. So that's droughts, storms, floods, and wildfires and extreme temperatures. If you count all of those people who died, a hundred years ago, on average, about half a million people died each year. This year in 2021, we expect that number to be about 7,000, a little less than 7,000 people. So we have dropped that number of people dying every year by about 99%. This has virtually nothing to do with climate, but has everything to do with the fact that we're richer,

we've lifted billions of people out of poverty, and that means that people are much more resilient. So the fundamental point here is if we only look at climate, we see a problem, that's right, but you also have to remember people act, react, they actually do stuff to make sure that their kids don't die, that their societies don't collapse, and what they do turns out to matter a lot more. And that's why, you know, without climate change, it's possible that we would only have seen 6,000 people die instead of 7,000 people. And I'm making up that number because, honestly, we have no idea. But it couldn't have been much less than that. So in reality, we've seen a slight decrease in the – it's gotten slightly less good than it otherwise could have been.

But it's still an amazing achievement for humanity that we have pretty much eradicated all climate deaths because we're resilient. And like I said, that being the case, what are the negative impacts? Because there have been people who said it's going to spark a migrant crisis, that you're going to see huge swaves of people moving across the planet, as the places that they come from, the countries that they come from, become uninhabitable, whether it's through drought, flood, etc. Well, so migration is actually one of the things that are least obvious how people are going to react because most migration has become much, much easier.

That's one of the main reasons. So it's incredibly cheap to move people compared to what it was 50 years ago. That's why you see a lot more migrants. But the reality, of course, is that almost everywhere in the planet, when people tell you it's going to be unlivable, that's only in the same way that most of London and most of England is unlivable unless you have heating. So, you know, look, of course, if you don't have heating and if you don't have heating and if you don't have cooling. A lot of places are very, very uncomfortable. Actually, a lot more places are

uncomfortable without heating because we're tropical species. We originate in Africa. But the reality is, as people get lifted out of poverty, and we now, down to less than 10% of the population, of the global population being extremely poor, it used to be 200 years ago, almost 100%. So 96, 94%. So we've dramatically reduced poverty. We're likely to continue to do that. And that's why, most people are actually not going to move because they will be much richer where they are being part of the global economy. So what is going to happen with global warming

is that your heating costs are going to go down, your cooling costs are going to go up, probably for most places, actually not quite as much, and what you will see is it will reduce your yield increases in food, so we will still produce more food, still fewer people will be starving and still fewer people will problem with malnutrition, but slightly fewer more.

So we'll not be doing it as fast as we otherwise would have been doing. That's a problem. But again, it's nowhere near that catastrophe that you typically hear that, oh, my God, we won't be able to feed anyone. Of course we will. And what we've seen is as temperatures have risen, we have seen increasing yields. We've seen increasing crops as well, both because we have higher yields and because we have grow on more land. And that's because an economy that tries to sell food is actually really good

at selling food, both cheaply and effectively, to everyone. So again, the point here is we somehow focus very much on saying the knob is CO2. It's one of the things that we should focus on. But if you actually want to get people, for instance, out of malnutrition, it's about getting them out of poverty. If you're poor, you starve. If you're not poor, you don't starve. I want to come back a little bit because you're making some really interesting points, but one of them I want to explore, first of all, to start with, is the idea that actually climate change is bad, whatever direction it happens in, because it disturbs the status quo.

So if we abstract from that for a second, some people would argue, as you said yourself, we're a tropical species. Surely the climate getting a bit warmer is actually a good thing. So the climate getting warmer is good for some things. But again, the main thing is it's just simply bad to leave the equilibrium where we have built most of our infrastructure too. But one way you can see this, and I think, again, because we have this conversation where you could only say stuff that climate is bad, we get a very skewed picture of the world. Remember, as temperatures rise, you're going to see more heat, and hence more heat waves, and hence more people dying from heat. That's absolutely true.

But as temperatures rise, you're also going to see fewer cold, less cold, and fewer cold waves, and hence fewer people dying from cold. That matters because everywhere on the planet, many more people die from cold than heat, even in sub-Saharan Africa. So the estimates show that about 500,000 people each year die from heat, and about 4.5 million or nine times more die from cold. So when temperatures rise, over the next, at least couple of decades, we will likely see, and we certainly have seen in the last couple of decades, more people not dying from cold than extra people dying from heat. That's a net plus.

Now, again, that doesn't mean we should just say, hey, let me have more global warming, because overall, the problems with global warming are bigger than the benefits. That's why it's a problem. but we're very, very badly informed if we only hear about the problems, and especially, of course, if we only hear about the exaggerated part of the problems. So let me follow up on that then. So if you're saying that, you know, the bigger problems are still major, and also the other thing is people often talk about the runaway effect, that if you just let it get out of control,

then eventually you start to see temperature increases that are, you know, that do cause a lot of damage. So what are these bigger problems? that do need to be addressed? Why should people who are maybe skeptical be concerned about climate change? Why, you know, we'll talk about the suggestions that people are making in order to remedy the problem

because they're very, very significant and will have a significant impact on people's lives. But why should people who are skeptical now take climate change seriously? Well, so I'm navigating what I think is the correct way to think about climate change, but it's a very, very complicated argument because it's much easy to say, oh my God, at the end of the world, we've got to do everything.

Or it's not a problem at all. Don't give a damn. And I'm sort of trying to stay on that narrow road where I say, this is a problem, but not the end of the world. And that's, of course, why it's going to be somewhat costly for us in a wide range of different ways, as I mentioned, it's going to slightly reduce the yield increases. So we'll still see more food, but we'll see slightly less more food towards the end of the century. That means if we could reduce CO2 emissions cheaply, we could do more for food

at the same level of effort from every other parameter. That's a good, but it's not, you know, like the saving of humanity. And likewise, in pretty much all other areas. And that's, of course, why this, this, and you're asking me, why should people take this seriously? You should take it seriously because the economic evidence, so William Nordhaus, he's an economist at Yale University, he's the only climate economist to get the Nobel Prize he won in 2018 for his work on climate. And the point that he tries to make is when you look at all the evidence on the planet, it turns out that if we do nothing about climate, the impact by the end of the century will be on the order of three to four percent reduction in your income. Now, remember, that's a bad. Remember,

by then we will also be much, much richer. So the UN estimate will probably be about 450% as rich in 2100 as we are today. So instead of being 450% as rich, we will be, say, 434% as rich. That's a problem because we could have been rich or we could have lifted more people out of poverty. But of course, it's not the end of the world. We're still going to be much. much better off. Our kids and grandkids are going to do much better on pretty much all accounts, but they will be slightly less well off. And so it's a problem that we should fix. But what we, of course, need to be careful about. And that's the conversation that I try to have right now, is we should be careful not to enact measures that are so costly that the policies end up being

more costly than the problem that we're trying to solve. It's a little bit like having a wristache and then cutting off your arm to avoid the wristache. That's a bad idea. We need to find a proportional measure, if you will, for climate change problem, not end of the world. And then let's find a cheaper policy that actually fixes a large part of climate. And that's a very unsexy.

You can see why I'm not being, you know, as famous a Howland, the Extinction Rebellion guy, or even, you know, people who are just saying, oh, it's all crap. It's a real problem, but it's not the end of the world. Bjorn, what we've been talking about is the effect on humanity. And I understand looking it through that lens, because we're all human beings and we're worried about our own interests.

But we haven't talked about the effect this is going to have on the world, on animals, on the ecology, on the ecosystems, et cetera, et cetera. Could you go into that a little bit for us, please? So there's no doubt that it'll have a negative impact on animals, simply because animals also are adapted to the current temperature. Remember, temperatures have fluctuated wildly over the level. last, you know, 100 million years. So it's not like this is unprecedented in that context, but it still will be a problem. But again, if you care about biodiversity, it turns out that

there are many other ways that are much, much more effective in helping animals and plants in general in the world. That's about making sure that you set off reserves where people don't shoot the animals, where they don't chop down the forests. It's about making sure that we have a clear distinction between where people can live and where nature can live. One of the ways we achieve that is by having more effective agriculture. If you produce a lot of food on your existing land, you don't have much incentive to go out and cut down more forest in order to grow more land. Sorry, in order to grow more food. And likewise, it's about making sure that you don't take in invasive species, all these things. So even the World Wildlife Fund, many others, sort of rank all the things that matter for by it ever.

and typically climate change comes at the very bottom. So again, if you really care about animals, and if you care about plants, there are many other things that would be much, much more effective. The second part, and that's another sort of entry in your conversation on the positives of global warming, remember that because CO2 is actually a fertilizer, it simply acts to make plants grow more.

And one of the ways we know that is because if you talk to tomato growers, for instance, they'll typically pump an extra CO2 in their greenhouses because it simply gives more plump tomatoes. Global warming and CO2 actually increases the total amount of green stuff on the planet over the last 30 years. NASA has found, and many other studies have found, that we have increased the amount of leaf area almost to the point of three United States more,

or three Australia's if you want. So the point here is we get much more. or biomass. We get much more green stuff from global warming. But we may still think it's, you know, it's not the right kind of green stuff. There's, there's an argument in saying, much of this is going to be algae, and we don't like algae. We'd rather have, you know, lobsters or pumas. But we need to get a sense of saying, this is not all bad, and tackling climate change that by no means the most effective way of helping biodiversity. This is Euphoria Calvin Klein, the new Elixir Collection, featuring three perfume, intense

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I will ride bare with my shirt off. I didn't realize we were going for that demographic, mate. Oh, yes, we are. Excellent. Looking at the politics of climate change, which is what I found really fascinating, one of our former guests, Matt Wood, Matt Goodwin, was saying that this is actually going to be the next frontier of politics. It's a climate activism, green politics.

What do you think of these activists who are very, very hard line where you've got, I can't remember... He's talking about Greta, Bion. Tell us about Greta. But, no, it's not. But, you know, you've got the... people gluing themselves to roads, et cetera, insulate Britain. That was the one that I was looking for. What do you think of these people? Do you think that they're hard line, but in a way they're

necessary because they're getting us to talk about it? They're putting it to the forefront. Or do you think these people simply hinder the conversation? So I don't know the people from Insulate Britain. I mean, I've seen some of those videos. I think they're probably harming the cost overall because they're very extreme. But if you look at someone more, more, you know, sort of mainstream like Greta Thunberg, I totally get where she's coming from. I mean, look, if you watch most TV today, you get the impression that this is the end of times. You get the impression that, oh, my God, there were, you know, the heat dome in the U.S.,

and there were floods down in Germany and Belgium. Now there were floods and India and floods and China, you know, everybody must be dying. And, of course, what I just, we talked about before, no, actually, there's many few people dying, and there's never been as few people dying as there is today from climate-related disasters. But the media impression is so strong that you get the feeling, this is the end of times. If you think this is the end of times, it's no wonder, it makes good sense to say we should throw everything else to the side and just focus on climate policy. The problem with that argument, of course, is when you actually ask most people, what are your big concerns? You know, not surprisingly

they're not all that concerned about global warming. They actually need to get the kids to soccer or whatever it is. There are lots of other things you care about. So you typically get an answer from people that they're willing to spend, you know, in the order of tens of pounds per year in climate, maybe even in the low hundreds of pounds per year fixing climate. And that means when you start making laws and climate policies that will cost thousands or even tens of thousands of pounds per year per person,

you're setting yourself up to get deelected. You just can't make this work out as a policy. And so my main concern with Insulate Britain and the many policies that are very extreme that are simply saying we need to fix this and we need to fix it fast and never mind the cost, we're setting ourselves up for a policy that's not sustainable. People are simply going to vote those politicians out of office eventually

as we saw, for instance, with the yellow vests in France. But that's really just a very, very tiny start. Once we start getting to the 55% as Europe has promised, the 50% as Biden has promised, that's going to cost a fortune. We're talking about in the order, a new nature study seems to estimate that this will cost perhaps a couple of thousand dollars per person per year,

and getting to net zero is likely going to cost us more than $11,000. again in the U.S., we don't have good data. We also have it for New Zealand, but we don't have good data for other places. But in the order of more than $10,000 per person per year. And there's simply no electoral will to give up that much of your hard-earned cash in order to do climate policies. So we're barking up the wrong tree. We're trying to do something, but the only thing we'll achieve is getting a lot of bolts and arrows elected, if you want to be very quick about it.

Wow, well, that's a really good point. And I mean, when you put it into figures like that, $10,000 a year to the average person is a huge amount of money, particularly, you know, if you are correct, and this is all about making sure our great grandchildren are slightly less worse off than they would have been, even though they're going to be way better off than we are. I mean, it's not a very, I can see why the extremists are pushing a different line, because that's not a very convincing argument to really do much about this problem, Bjorn. If I'm honest with you, if you say to me, you've got to give up. 10 grand a year to make sure your great-grandparents, great-grandchildren are going to be slightly less worse off, even though they're going to be way better off than you are. Why would I do anything? And that's exactly the problem and dilemma of climate policy. So look, climate economics, as I mentioned, the only guy who got the Nobel Prize in climate economics, and everyone else

in the field points out that doing nothing is a bad idea because the first ton of CO2 you cut is very cheap to cut, and it cuts the worst amount of temperature rise. So it makes sense to cut the first ton. Likewise, they also point out, you should not be cutting the last ton of CO2 because it'll cut a very undangerous temperature rise, and it'll be phenomenally expensive to do. So what they try to say is, you should do somewhere in between. That's not totally original to point out. But what they typically show is we should do some, but by no means a lot, which is what most people are saying. And that's why I think a lot of the climate movement has gone into alarmist mode because they figure it out. If we just say the truth and we say, yeah, this is a problem.

So come on, guys, let's pay everything to fix this problem. That doesn't play with most people. So you've got to say, the world is ending unless we do something about this. You and your kids are basically going to, you know, it's going to be Lord of the Flies in 20 years or something. Then, of course, it makes sense. But it's also untrue. and that's why you need to find a policy that can fix climate change because it is a problem,

but smartly and cheaply. And that's the conversation that we don't have because everybody's screaming right now. And when you scream, you don't do good policy. Francis, let me ask a quick political question before you jump in. Bjorn, so I know you're not a politician or political analyst, but let me ask you this, and I know it's an unfair question. Why are these politicians then running off this cliff? I would say like Lemmings, following each other to, as you say, to their own destruction. Because

even Boris Johnson, we have a conservative prime minister in this country who you would think would be on the other side of that argument, just stereotypically speaking. And yet all of these people are talking about doubling our heating bills, doing, you know, getting rid of petrol and diesel cars, all of this stuff that's going to have a huge impact on people's lives. And it's going to, as you say, result in their electoral demise. Why are they all rushing off this cliff? So my sense, and again, I'm not the expert on this, but my sense is for a very long time, politicians basically got to promise you to save the world, but somebody else would pay far off in the future, right? And there's nothing better for a politician. Remember, they actually have to

assemble a coalition of a majority, and that's typically costly. But imagine if you can say, I will save the world for you. Not my opponent. I will save the world and somebody else will pay out in the future. That's an optimal outcome for most politicians. I think that's why originally they just simply assembled around this point. Politicians need catastrophes and crises in order to be the savior that people want. And climate change certainly offered one of those.

Now we're getting to the point where they've sort of gotten all involved in this conversation and sort of promised and pre-promised a lot of the stuff, it's hard to get out of. I also think a lot of politicians, again, just like Greta Toonberg, if you listen to the media, if you listen to most people talk about climate, it really feels like it's the end of time. And, you know, if the Nazis are right around the corner

or if, you know, if it's a meteor or hurtling towards Earth, we've got to just drop everything else and, you know, send Bruce Willis up and fix it. So the reality here is, If this is the end of times, which I think a lot of people have now talked everyone into, we're likely to say, well, then let's get on with it and let's just pay up all of the costs. But of course, as you point out, once your actual heating bill doubles, once your actual bills on everything start skyrocketing, people are just going to say, no, you can't say that on a family-friendly program.

No, you can. They're going to say, fuck this. You're absolutely right. That's exactly what they'll say, thank you. So, so, you know, they'll just simply vote for the other guy. And it's such an obvious point than to say, look, guys, why don't we just stop all this and, you know, spend it on schools and health care and all this other popular stuff or maybe give you some tax relief, depending on, you know, what kind of politician you are? That's just going to be such a winner. And the real point, and this is one of the things that we forget as well, this has very little to do with the rich world. Remember if every rich country in the world went net zero today. That's the UK, the EU, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, a lot of other countries.

If all of these countries went net zero and stayed that way for the rest of the century, this would be a catastrophe in so many other ways. But even if we did so, it would reduce temperatures by the end of the century by less than half a degree centigrade. It would not be nothing, but it certainly would not be the dramatic impact that you think. The reason is most of the emissions in the 21st century will come from all the other nations that are trying to get out of poverty. So that's China, India, the rest of Southeast Asia, and Africa and a little bit of Latin America. These are all the countries that are actually going to be emitting most in the 21st century.

And of course, it's not, whereas it's unplausible that we'll manage to get the UK population and the American population, the EU, to say, sure, I'm going to pay $10,000 a year to. to save us, but you're never going to get the average Indian, which makes less than $2,000 a year to say, sure, I'll pony up $10,000. They don't even have $10,000. So what is basically going to cost them is their entire opportunity of lifting them themselves, and especially the kids and grandkids out of poverty. They're not going to do that. And that's why we really have to back up this conversation. We're right now trying to make a policy that's unlikely to work, even the rich world, and even if it did, would have a fairly small impact on climate policy, but we'll have

absolutely no selling point in the rest of the world. Instead, what we need to do is to focus on innovation. And let me just give you this very, very simple picture. Right now, we're trying to get everybody else to promise to do stuff that's harmful to themselves. So I'm sorry, China, could you please turn down the heat? Could you please freeze a little more and be a little poor and, you know, eat little less meat and all that stuff, just like we're trying to do, just like everybody else is trying to do. Not surprisingly, that doesn't work. If we could come up with a cheaper technology, a green technology that was cheaper than fossil fuels, everyone would switch. Just, you know, one example, fourth generation nuclear, which a lot of people are advocating. The problem

with third generation, which is the one that we have today, is not that it's unsafe or anything, but simply that it's too expensive. But they're saying fourth generation nuclear could be fantastically both safe and cheap. Let's just assume that for a second. If that was the case, we could get base low power, that is 24-7 power,

incredibly cheap. Of course, everyone would switch. The point here is, instead of trying to force everyone to do what they don't want to do, let's focus on innovation, because that's the way you solve global problems. Simply make the solution cheaper

than the original problem, the fossil fuels. Everyone will switch. Bjorn, what I wanted to ask you right from the start is this. I've heard this term net zero get bandied about all the time. To me, it sounds like a bar that I used to visit back in the late 90s. You know, let's all go down to net zero. Equally depressing. Yeah. You know, equally hopeless. But what does that actually look like? What does net zero mean? Because I don't think any politician has actually explained in detail what that term means. Yeah. Well, I mean, the simple technical term is, of course, that we will emit no extra and really greenhouse gas on average. And that's simple to say. And it sounds like, yeah, we could probably do that. But the reality, of course, is going to be incredibly hard. Remember, the UK has actually been one of the countries that have decarbonized the most in the world. And one of the reasons, of course, is because you basically stop doing manufacturing and you just become a service industry for a while. You were incredibly big on banking, which emits almost no CO2,

but makes you a lot of money. But the reality, of course, is you can't actually outsource all of the manufacturing everywhere to somewhere else. We don't have another planet that could produce it. So to a very large extent, you're just simply pushing your emissions elsewhere. And the things that are really hard to do is, for instance, transportation. That's what we're seeing with electric cars. Sure, you can have electric cars in Norway that is incredibly rich and basically give away electric cars compared to the cost of non-electric cars. Of course, people will pick them up. But unless you dramatically subsidize them, it turns out that most people actually don't want an electric car for a variety of reasons that I'm sure we could get into. So the real point here is

it's hard to cut most emissions. It's hard to imagine how you're going to stay warm. if you can't use any fossil fuels. And as you've discussed, it turns out you need very expensive heat pumps. You can do it. But it's much harder, much more costly, and sometimes less convenient. And of course, we totally forget our society is built in steel and cement, which absolutely requires fossil fuels. And we don't really know how to do this in any realistic way right now.

And the last thing, it requires food. Half the world's protein comes full. from food that's produced with fertilizer that has been done with fossil fuels. So basically, we're looking around and saying, I'm sorry, is there like 4 billion people here who opt to not live here? And that's unlikely we're going to get 4 billion volunteers for that. Again, all of this can in principle be fixed, and you can do this for a very high cost, but it's not going to be something that's a walk in the park for most politicians.

And again, as you say, once people start realizing, these costs, many of them are just going to say, nope, not going to do that, and I'm going to vote for the other guy who says we don't have to. And that's, of course, why you're not going to solve the problem with the current set of policies. And it's not just that, Bjorn, after Corona, every country, well, particularly the UK, has now trillions of dollars more in debt. How are we going to afford this? Exactly. The world has actually become about 25% more in debt over the last two years because of Corona. We've just spent money we didn't have. And the fun thing, of course, is that's basically a bill for our kids and grandkids. A lot of people like to say global warming

is something that we're leaving our kids and grandkids. And that's true. It's a bigger problem for the future. But just boring lots of money to not be uncomfortable now and just leaving the bills to your kids and grandkids. The fact that almost everywhere on the planet, we have not fixed pensions. so we don't really know how we're going to make sure that the people who are working today will actually be taken care of when they retire in 20, 30, 50 years from now. But that means we're leaving enormous bills for our kids and grandkids. I would say that what we should be doing is having a sensible conversation about how are we going to make sure that our kids and grandkids are both better off and that we make sure we do policies that are both sustainable,

that is people will keep voting for them, and actually work. for climate change and all these other issues. And we're not because we're simply just running around scared and a little headless and just saying, no, no, no, let's just fix climate change by making grand promises that we can't really deliver. And of course, that we can't get China, India, Africa, and everybody else to buy into. I was going to say, this is a question that I particularly wanted to ask. All I've heard time and time again with the climate crisis is doom.

It's gloom. It's, you know, the world is ending. Fifty harvest left. You know, this is good, this place has got the highest temperature ever since ever recorded. Is there some good news, or is it all an unmitigated catastrophe? Well, so fundamentally, you're hearing a tiny bit of the conversation. So yes, again, global warming will mean more problems that will mean benefits. That's why it's a problem. But making it into this unmitigated disaster is simply, you know, is simply silly. It's not like a one degree temperature rise has actually made us poor or worse off. Again, what we've seen is we've dramatically increased our benefits. We're much better educated. We live longer. We have a better opportunity in almost all kinds of ways. And we don't die more from

climate disasters. We die 99% less from climate disasters. So what the world shows us is that despite this somewhat small problem of climate change, we have dramatically improved our life quality in all kinds of areas. And the real problem with climate policy could very well be that if we're so over-focused on climate policy, it means we forget all the other things, as we've just talked about, how do we do pension reform? How do we make sure, you know, one thing's that blow my mind. Almost every kid in the world is now in school, which is a great achievement. But about half of them in developing countries still don't learn anything.

and so we need to get the school crisis fixed. We need to still get people out of poverty. We need to get people out of hunger. We need to do so many other things. There's one and a half million people to die every year from an entirely curable tuberculosis. Remember, we don't care about it anymore because we fixed it 100 years ago,

but there's still 1.5 million people who died just from that one disease every year. We should do something about all those catastrophes as well. We are smart species. So, you know, we can walk and chew gum at the same time. we can actually focus on all of these issues, but when people are just screaming the lungs off on just one issue, climate, it means we end up under-focusing on all the other problems. So look, the future is bright.

If we fix this smartly, the future can be even brighter. But if we screw this up and if we only focus on climate, we'll likely both make bad climate policies, we'll actually not fix it because people will end up electing balls and hours, and we'll have neglected all the other opportunities will probably still be better off simply because the underlying growth engine will still be humming along, but we'll be much less better off

than we otherwise could have been. So that's really my argument here. Let's not underworry, but certainly let's not over-worry as well because both of those are actually bad outcomes. Hey, Constantine, do you love trigonometry? Of course, incredible interviews. hilarious live streams, hard-hitting satire, plus my handsome jawline.

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memes and discuss the show. You can enjoy it for free, but it also gives you the option of supporting us for as little as $7 a month. And if you want to give more, you can. We have incredible rewards for our higher tier supporters as well. We've got everything for mugs, monthly group calls and one on two chats with me and KK. Get in. Join our community by hitting the link in the description and the pin comment below. See you there, guys. And Bjorn, I'm really enjoying this conversation so much because it speaks to my pre-existing biases, which is, I believe, we're in the ingenuity of humanity. And we've seen that throughout our history. If we focus on solving a problem, we can create technology and solutions that will work. And one of the things I found really puzzling

about the environmental movement of late. And I say this as someone whose wife was born and grew up in Kiev, near Chernobyl. She had to be evacuated as a kid and sent to the far east of Russia to be away from all this stuff is the absolute reluctance to see that nuclear energy is a big part of the answer here. Can you talk to us about renewables, nuclear, etc.? What is the energy package that takes us away from fossil fuels in the long run? And particularly, why are some of them not being given the appropriate levels of attention that I think we'd both agree that it deserves? Yeah. So first of all, we don't know what the future energy is going to look like. If we did both you and I would be incredibly rich,

and we'd also fix the problem in some way. The challenge here is that as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest base load power, people will keep using. Remember, people love to say, solar and wind are the cheapest ever, and they're cheaper than anything else. Well, that's true somewhere sometimes,

but only sometimes. You know, the solar power is only cheaper than fossil fuels when the sun is shining, But most people actually want power 24-7, which means that unless you have really, really good batteries, we don't have yet, you basically need to both buy a solar panel and a backup gas generator. And that suddenly makes it a lot more expensive. So they're really fiddling on these points. And that matters because that's, of course, why you can't convince the Chinese and the Indian to just build lots of solar panels.

If it really was cheaper, everyone would be building these. So the reality is, unless we get much, much better batteries, and we're not talking a little bit better batteries. Remember, right now, the world has enough batteries to save about one minute of our electricity consumption, and electricity is still just about a fifth of all the energy that we use. So that's a terribly tiny bit. We need batteries for months in order to make this work out. I'm not sure we'll ever get there, but possibly with enough ingenuity, we can get there. As you mentioned, fourth generation nuclear, you know, the reason why we're not doing third generation is because it's phenomenally expensive, but maybe fourth generation nuclear will get us.

Fusion has always been this science fiction kind of idea that you could basically do what the sun does, but you could do it all the time and very, very cheaply. Maybe it's coming along. There's this one great idea by Craig Ventry, the guy who cracked the human genome back in 2000. He has this idea of growing algae that is specifically designed to be grown out. on the ocean surface, they would soak up CO2 and sunlight and produce oil. And so you could harvest that out on the ocean surface and we could basically grow our own oil field. We could keep the entire fossil fuel infrastructure, but without emitting CO2 because we just have collected that

CO2 out on the ocean surface. Now, all of these technologies have one thing in common. They're still too expensive. That's why they haven't taken over the world. But with innovation, if we spent a lot more resources on innovation in all of these areas. Batteries, solar, wind, nuclear, fusion, these algis, and many, many other ideas. If we spent a lot more money on that, we just need one of these technologies to come through. Most of them are going to fall by the wayside, and that's the way technology works. But if just one or a few of them would come through, we would have fixed global warming. And that's why, you know, I ran a, uh, uh, uh, uh, a, uh, a, uh, a big conference together with more than 40 climate economists and top climate economists in the world

and three Nobel laureates where we looked at how can you spend an extra dollar or an extra pound and do the most good for climate. And they found the long-term solution that is dramatically ramp up investment in green energy R&D. Just to give you one sense of proportion here, right? We constantly talk about we need to fix climate and we have all the technology. We just need to throw lots and lots of money behind it. Remember the other crises that humanity have had, we haven't solved that by telling everyone, I'm sorry, could you eat a little less? We have done this through innovation. So if you think back in the 1970s, you know, we worried a lot about, and correctly so, that a lot of people were starving in this world and there's not enough food. I remember my mom telling me,

you know, you've got to finish up your plate because of all the poor people in Africa. I never quite got the connection between my plate and that. But the point is, you don't solve, starvation. by eating a little less and then sending it down to Africa. The way we solved it was the Green Revolution. It was innovation of better yielding seeds. So you could basically plant these seeds that were just genetically made to grow much, much more food. So for every hectare, you just simply grew twice or three times as much food as you'd otherwise have done. That's why India has gone from being a basket case to being the world's biggest net exporter of rice.

And likewise, for most other places, that's how we solve problems, not by telling people, I'm sorry, could you eat a little less? But here's an innovation that'll actually make you richer and feed your kids. And of course, everybody takes that up. We need the same solution for climate. We need a solution that says, here's the technology that's cheaper, better than fossil fuels and don't emit CO2. As a naturally greedy man, I'm fully behind that statement, Bjorn. I'm going to ask a question, which is a taboo.

question, but it's one that everyone secretly thinks, which is, isn't it a large part of this problem simply due to overpopulation? So, there's no doubt all other things equal. If we were half the number of people on the planet, there would be less of a problem. But it's one of those things that I think are very, very much a past kind of conversation, and also one of the things that we can do virtually nothing about. Remember, when most people talk about overpopulation, they're sort of like, just right number of me, but too many of you, right? It's always someone else who's the problem. And again, it's very hard to imagine that there's a billion people out there who'd volunteer to not be here. So the reality is it is not something that we can easily solve, except for the way that we're already solving it. By getting people out of poverty, that means that more kits are not actually an economic benefit. If you, work on really small plot of land and you don't have any social security and a pension opportunity when you get old. And also as you get richer, kids go from being a net resource to actually being

a net drain. We still love them. But, you know, they end up costing you lots of money. And so you decide to have fewer of them. And then, of course, as you get more women educated, they start having careers of their own instead of just being birth machines. What really happens is what we see is we've we already back in the late 1960s early 1970s saw the peak increase in human population and most of what we're seeing today is simply a question we still have a very young world where a lot of young people still haven't had their own kids but we're way past the problem really of overpopulation so it's neither something you can really do anything about and also remember people are not just a problem they're also a resource so

you know, this sort of simple way to put it as, sure, they have a mouth and they're going to gobble up resources, but they also have two arms that can actually, you know, help you when you get old, change your diaper. And they also have a mind that can be one of the guys who actually end up solving, for instance, climate change. So we shouldn't just see people as a problem. They're also a resource and an opportunity. And I think overall, we're probably pretty lucky to be in a place where we have lots of people, meaning lots of opportunity. You know, when you go to, there's a reason why you live in London, not, I don't know, of really, really small town in England, right? Because it's much more fun to be in a place where there are lots of people.

So the reality is, yes, it used to be a problem. It's no longer, and it's not something we can do very much about anyway. I find this such a reassuring conversation in many ways. It doesn't mean it's true, but it is very reassuring, of course. I'm not disputing that it's true, by the way. I'm just saying, And of course, the important part is this is, you should not buy into it because it's reassuring. You should buy into it because that's actually what the UN Climate Panel says. You know, so when the latest report came out from the UN Climate Panel, it's 4,000 pages long. The UN Secretary General, who loves to go way over the top, said it was code red for humanity.

And I was asked in on many TV programs, I'm sorry, I have to actually read the stuff first. can't do this in like half an hour. But after I'd read it, of course, nobody then wanted to talk about it because of the past week. But when you've actually read it, it says very much what the other five reports have said before. Yes, it's a problem. No, it's by no means the end of the world, as you think. You know, for instance, hurricanes, they will probably be slightly stronger, but there'll probably be slightly fewer hurricanes in the future. Have you heard that? No, you've heard, we're going to have killer hurricanes everywhere. And remember again, hurricanes being stronger is actually worse than there being few of them. So there will be a greater impact. But because

we're much richer and much more resilient, the damage cost and percent of our total wealth will actually still be lower, but not quite as much lower as it could otherwise have been. And that's, of course, nothing you can put on a sign and go out and glue yourself to the highway. Is that why, I was going to ask you because as I, you know, I was leading up to it by saying it's a reassuring conversation. And I think a constructive conversation, you're focusing on the solutions that are actually pragmatic and practical and that you can get people behind and that match up our past experience of solving problems. We solve problems through innovation, through new technology. Why are people like you and voices like yours being heard a lot less than the doom mongers

and the doom merchants that we see glued to our pay for? here in London? Well, I think one reason is it's just much, much less sexy, right? I mean, talking about the end of the world, there's such a thing as climate porn, as they call it, the secretly thrilling end of the world. This is why we like, you know, seeing these American movies where they blow up the White House. You know, it sort of seems, you know, it's a terrible thing, but it's kind of secretly thrilling. And I think, you know, the end of the world has that, has that same feel. And of course, that's why our history is literate with people who said we're going to, you know,

fail in all kinds of ways and the world is going to end in all kinds of terrible ways. It's secretly thrilling. And of course, you know, if it bleeds, it leads. It's just much, much better for clicks and views. So the fundamental point is they have a much, much better story to sell. I think the second part is if you want to get climate policy done. And even I think there's, you know, quite a number of. reasonable people who say, even if we're going to get some climate policy done, we've got to

exaggerate the message in order to get people a little bit along. And I see the sort of political argument in that. But of course, as an academic, I just think, no, it's not a good outcome where you start lying a little bit because it's in a good, it's in a good cause. Because, remember, there's all, so all kinds of other problems that we need to fix. You know, we have an education crisis, We have a health crisis. We have lots of other issues in our society. And what happens, of course, is, you know, our school teachers will say, sure, it's not the end of the world,

but we better ramp it up a little bit. So they give us more money to the schools and likewise with health care and likewise everywhere else. Then we end up in a society where all of the people who are going to inform us are just screaming at us and we have no idea where we should be spending our money. And we end up giving the money to the guy who screams the louder. So have the cutest pictures of the most crying babies. which is not a good outcome. So I think the reason why you don't hear the argument that I'm making

is because it's not nearly as media friendly. And also it doesn't serve a particular purpose. It doesn't serve this one goal of saying, we should do something about climate because it seems like I'm not really pulling as hard as I could. And it doesn't serve the people who say, let's not do anything about climate, because I'm still saying it is a problem,

we should do some things about it. So I'm stuck in that weird middle, which in our polar society increasingly is abandoned by all the vocal people. But of course, remember, there's still like the 95% of all the moms that just have other things to do. And very quickly, Bjorn, do you think that COP26 was a success because Greta came out and lambasted it and said it was a festival of blah, blah, blah, whatever? Or were there actually some things put in place that are going to help the situation 5, 10, 20 years down. the loin. So it's a tiny bit better than had it not been there, but it really is not the right way to solve it. And one of the ways you can know that is it was cop 26. We tried this 25 times before. And I think one of the great underappreciated stories of our age is the UN Environment Program

actually did a study of the last 10 years of climate policy. And what they called it was, This was, remember, the climate policy, a decade of the 2010s where we did the Paris Agreement and everything else. And they called it a decade lost. They said, we can't tell the difference between it actually happened in the 2010s and a policy scenario where nobody had cared about climate change since 2005. And that should tell you something. We have all these meetings.

We have all these promises. But the reality is it has very little or possible. no impact whatsoever. So yeah, I'm happy that some people went there. I think they probably did some smart things, especially about methane. But honestly, this is not where it's going to solve the problem at best. It's a tiny, tiny little bit. So in that sense, Greta, which, whom I respect quite a bit, is right about the fact that we're mostly talking and not doing anything about it. Of course, she would like us to just shut down society because that seems to be the argument that most people are making. But of course, what she should be saying and what I think is the right way for is to say,

we should be spending much, much more on innovation. That was actually, and I don't know, you've probably not heard it either. Actually, in the sidelines of Paris back in 2015, the UK prime minister, what was his name? The guy who lost Brexit. Cameron. Cameron. Cameron, right? And Obama and everybody else was there, Bill Gates. I'm happy to say we had a tiny, tiny roll of this. They actually went in there and promise to double spending on research and development in green energy. And of course, nobody did any such thing because everybody was focused on putting up the new and the next solar panel park because that looks great on TV, whereas funding eggheads really doesn't.

But the reality is if Greta started asking and if everybody started asking for the thing that really will fix this problem, just like we fixed most problems in the past, more innovation. We could do wonders. And we'd also make the world a better place in all kinds of other ways. Imagine if everyone, especially in the poor world, had much more access to cheap green energy. That'd be an amazing place. Beyond we go to our last question, because we could talk for hours, but we're rapidly running out of time and you're a busy guy. You say Greta wants to shut down society, yet you have a lot of respect for her. Why is that?

Well, I think. So when you talk to teenagers, a lot of them are terrified by climate. change. And I think Greta has taken that to a logical conclusion. Look, you're telling us the world is going to end, but you're not doing anything. What the hell? And that makes good sense. If you're telling us the world is going to come to an end, you should be doing everything to avoid this. And I think she's calling out the hypocrisy and much policy. Of course, it's the argument that the world is coming to an end that's wrong. And hence, the conclusion is not we should do everything, but we should do stuff smarter. So I think she's much more honest in this conversation than many others. But, but, you know, her fundamental analysis is still wrong. But I understand why that is the case,

because she's simply saying, look, this is what I'm being told by almost everyone the world is ending. So we've got to throw everything at it. Look, that's the right analysis, but based on the wrong facts. If you actually read the UN Climate Panel problem, and then let's solve that problem, by spend less resources than the original problem will actually cost. Again, don't cut off your wrist in order to cure, sorry, cut off your arm in order to cure wristache. Bjorn, it has been an absolutely brilliant interview. Like Constantine said, I could happily sit here and talk to you for hours, but it has to come

to an end. And the question we always ask at the end is, what's the one thing we're not talking about, but we really should be? So I would love to talk to you about lots of things. But actually, I just want to briefly mention, you know, this is a one. is not actually my day job. I run a think tank called the Copenhagen consensus where we look at the world's big problems and how we can smartly fix them. And what we never talk about are all these other issues we briefly mention in the interview, right? The fact that people die from easily curable

infectious diseases, that we don't have good education, that we have terrible health, that we have all these other problems. Remember, about 300,000 women die in childbirth every year. and 2.1 million kids die in their first month of life. And we know how to fix all of these problems and often very, very cheaply. So my day job is actually trying to point out all these other great things that we can do at very low cost that could help humanity enormously. And as you might have surmised, nobody cares. A little bit in the third world, right? But this is not sexy.

when you can sort of run to the next hurricane that just hit the U.S. and say global warming, that it is a problem, but somehow we have lost track of what really matters and what are the important things. You know, if you look at what is the most environmentally damaging, what a problem, what kills most people? Not global warming. The World Health Organization estimate about 150,000 people die from global warming every year, and I would dispute that, but we could get into that. No, it's the 7 million people who die from indoor and outdoor air pollution. Now, outdoor air pollution, most people know that's basically a problem of low development.

You need to put scrubbers in your coal-fired power plants. Boring, but would help a lot of people. Indoor air pollution is the fact that about 3 billion people every year, so almost half this world's population are so poor, they cook and keep warm with dirty fuels like dung, cardboard, and wood. that's a terrible way to heat and cook. And what that means is most of these people, so 3 billion people, live indoors

where it's about 10 times more polluted than it is outdoor in Beijing. We don't hear about that because it's not sexy. So again, the thing we don't talk about are all these other problems that we could do so much about at very low cost. So, you know, for instance, we could do something about maternal and child deaths.

One pound would say, so many people that you would do about 87 pounds of social good for every pound spent. That's a phenomenal payback compared to, you know, for instance, climate change. If we do it really smartly, you can get 11 pounds back on your pound. That's still pretty good. But much of our climate policy, you pay a pound, for instance, in Paris, and you get 11 pence back, which is a really terrible outcome. So my job, and the thing we don't talk about, is how we prioritize.

the entire world, not just the thing that gets to the top of the news. Bjorn, thank you so much for that. The king of all things unsexy. We're going to ask you a couple of questions for our local supporters in a second. But for now, guys, thank you so much for watching. We'll see you very soon with another brilliant interview like this one, Oraw Show. All of them go out at 7pm UK time. And if you want your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast.

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