In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the host talks about the problem of single-use plastics and how we can fix it. Plus, a new machine that extracts plastic from the ocean and turns it into a useful tool to help clean up the environment. Thanks to our sponsor, for sponsoring this episode! and thanks to our patron, . for supporting this episode if you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! If you don't, please tell a friend about this episode and tell us what you think about it in the comments section below. Thank you so much for your support of this podcast, it means a lot to us and we can't wait to do it again next week! Cheers, Joe and Sarah Music: "Goodbye Outer Space" by Zapsplat and "Outer Space Warning" by Fountains of Wayne Logo by Courtney DeKorte, produced by Riley Bray Art: Mackenzie Moore Music: Hayden Coplen Editor: John Rocha, Jeff Perla Mixer: Alex Blumberg Additional production: Haley Shaw Audio Engineer: Ben Koppel Background Music: Bobby Lord Special thanks to: Andrew Kuchta ( ) Producer: Mike McLendon ( ) Editor: Matt Knott ( ) and Ben Kuchnikoff ( ) Additional mixing and mastering: Ben Kaufmann ( ) Music: Matthew McConaughey ( ) Thanks to: James Rook ( ) & Ben Kerts ( ) Thank you to: Patrick McElroy ( ) for the intro and Outer ( ) Jeff Perlan ( ) Mike McLennan ( ) and Jack Williams ( ) ( , & John Kacz ( ) of The Irishman ( ) thanks to ( ( ) , , Jake Barnard ( & ) ( ) Copyright ( ) Photography: Michael McLennon ( , Matthew Kuchner ( ) . (c) (featuring ) & Matthew McElennon is airdrope ( ) - (and ) and ( ), - , and . ( ) is a tribute to: , John Rooker ( ), , Jack Williams
00:01:49.000You have some emissions from the burning of the plastics, but you're getting rid of the plastics, which is a real—is it a net gain for the environment?
00:01:58.000Because the plastics are a real problem, particularly in the ocean and in landfills.
00:03:52.000But he figured out how to extract some of it, and then they took that plastic and then converted it into things you could buy, like sunglasses and things along those lines.
00:06:27.000So, again, most things in the real world are both a problem and a benefit, and we need to find out how do we make it more of a benefit and less of a problem, but we need to stop having this conversation, oh, you can't have anything of this bad thing.
00:06:42.000That's not how we organize our societies.
00:06:43.000That's not how we think, and that's certainly not how we make good choices.
00:06:46.000That makes sense, but if we know that there are alternatives to plastic, And we know that there's so many different problems with plastic, it being non-biodegradable.
00:06:57.000Isn't there some plastic that they can make with plant fiber that's biodegradable?
00:07:06.000I'm sure you're probably aware of this, Dr. Shanna Swan.
00:07:09.000Do you know this whole thing about what's happening to when women are pregnant and their bodies have levels of phthalates above a certain level, it has an effect on the reproductive cycle of the child.
00:07:23.000And they can do studies in mammals and they show that when the female is pregnant and she encounters these chemicals from plastics It fucks with the gender of the child, like where their taints shrink,
00:07:40.000which is weird, but in mammals, apparently that's a representation of whether or not it's a male or a female.
00:07:46.000It's one of the best ways of distinguishing, whether it's a male or a female.
00:07:50.000It's the size of the taint when it's a baby, because the male taint is 50 to 100% larger than the female taint.
00:07:56.000She's got a really funny thing on her Instagram because it also causes a decline in sperm production.
00:08:05.000And so her way of approaching it that's funny is she has the jizz quiz and she does this thing.
00:08:10.000She's like this adorable petite lady who is a brilliant doctor.
00:08:16.000But she's kind of being funny and at the same time sounding the warning shot.
00:08:21.000Like, hey, this is fucking with human beings' reproductive cycles.
00:08:24.000And since the invention of petrochemical plastics that we use in basically everything, from that point to today, there's a very clear drop in fertility rates, a very clear drop in male sperm count, a very clear drop in penis and testicle size,
00:08:40.000and with females, there's higher rates of miscarriages.
00:08:44.000And she believes through her research that this is connected and that these chemicals that we're getting from these plastics are literally affecting the development cycle of human babies.
00:09:45.000The point is not that we shouldn't be concerned about issues and that we should be investigating things, but you also got to remember Our civilization is actually really, really good at making sure that we are concerned about all the different things.
00:10:38.000You're going to run out of runway eventually.
00:10:40.000But the point here is that we're actually really good at doing these things.
00:10:44.000And yes, we should still be concerned.
00:10:46.000One of the reasons why we're good at it is because we're good at being concerned.
00:10:49.000But we should not be so scared that we end up thinking, oh my god, all these things are going to happen.
00:10:54.000Well, I don't think people are necessarily scared, but they should...
00:10:59.000I think they should be concerned, and I think we should recognize when things are detrimental to human health, you know, like the plastics thing.
00:11:07.000Like, just to dismiss that and go, well, everything's better than it was before, and you live longer.
00:11:12.000Right, but it might, like, literally be affecting the way human beings develop in a negative way.
00:12:32.000And the point is, there are these terrible stories and there are sign markers to tell us we should be careful.
00:12:38.000But again, I also just want to come back to realizing that when you look at the whole picture, we're actually doing amazingly much better.
00:12:45.000Remember, at the same time, while we lost these five IQ points, what we see now in IQ development is that kids are getting smarter and smarter, probably because you get better food, you get better childhood, you get better education, you get more stimulated.
00:12:59.000So we've actually gone up, what, 30 IQ points or something over the last 100 years?
00:13:03.000So at the same time, it's a little controversial because you try to standardize it at 100. But fundamentally, what you've seen is a dramatic increase in IQ. And yes, lead was a stupid idea.
00:13:15.000We've taken it out and it's mostly cleared up.
00:13:18.000Now you say dramatic increase in IQ. What's that attributed to?
00:13:21.000So there's a lot of controversy we don't quite know.
00:13:25.000I mean, as I mentioned, we think it's because, you know, kids are no longer starving.
00:14:06.000So I guess the point that I try to make, and I'm sure we'll get to that when we start talking about global warming and all the other problems, is that we need to recognize that we have real problems in this world.
00:14:15.000But it's not that the world is sort of, you know, the wheels are coming off, which is very often the conversation that I think a lot of people feel like they're in.
00:14:24.000When you ask, you know, kids and young people, for instance, on climate change, they're terrified.
00:14:30.000Yeah, that's an unfortunate thing because a lot of these young kids that are gluing themselves to paintings, they don't have a real perspective.
00:14:37.000They're like 18, 19 years old and they really think like they're saving the world.
00:14:49.000You know, I had on Randall Carlson and Graham Hancock yesterday, and the podcast will be released on Thursday.
00:14:56.000And it's this amazing podcast talking about moments in the Earth's history where the Earth experienced asteroid impacts, comet impacts.
00:15:07.000And that there's a period around 12,000 something years ago where we for sure got hit by these big impacts of either exploding in the sky above Earth or hitting the ground.
00:15:23.000And there's plenty of physical evidence of this, and it's called the Younger Dryas Impact Theory.
00:15:28.000But they were talking about the rapid change in the climate.
00:15:31.000How the sea levels rose, the ice caps melted, all because we got pummeled by asteroids.
00:15:39.000That's just natural stuff from getting hit by space.
00:15:42.000If you look at, like, the cycles of, like, if you go back a million years in Earth and look at all the highs and lows, you're like, oh, this thing's never been stable without us even existing.
00:17:47.000Is there a real science that points out the amount of carbon and the emissions that we release has X amount of effect, which will equal this amount of temperature rise?
00:18:17.000I think they're really trying hard to show that what they typically say is between half and all of the change that we've seen over the last hundred years is because of us.
00:18:27.000And they've sort of trended towards all because of us.
00:18:32.000It feels like that's possibly a little bit too much.
00:18:35.000But most of it is certainly because of us.
00:18:37.000Most of the change in climate is because of us.
00:18:39.000So most of the change that is about 2 degrees Fahrenheit that we've seen in change over the last 150 years.
00:19:05.000Not when you just look at the impact on climate.
00:19:08.000Because as I said, if you built your cities and if you built your lives around one temperature, if it changes a little bit, that's a problem.
00:19:15.000If the oceans boil, just move in a little.
00:19:47.000But remember also, at the same time, fossil fuels have basically made it possible for us to have the Industrial Revolution and become incredibly safe in so many different ways.
00:19:57.000I mean, how did you get here this morning?
00:21:23.000And so that's where we need to find a way to slowly and eventually find ways to produce all of that stuff you just talked about without the negative impacts of fossil fuels.
00:21:33.000And that's going to be hard, and that's not an easy trip.
00:22:41.000How do millions of people die from coal power?
00:22:42.000So this is basically because, especially in the developing world, you don't put scrubbers on your smokestack, so it just makes it incredibly polluted.
00:22:51.000If you've ever been to New Delhi in the fall, I'm assuming it's a little bit worse than it was to be back in London in the 1950s.
00:23:02.000You almost can't see your way forward and you can just Feel it in your throat and everything.
00:23:23.000If everybody did it, it would be horrible.
00:23:25.000And we're going to have a lot more of that in Europe this winter because of the whole Russian issue.
00:23:30.000But what people don't get is most of the world's poor.
00:23:34.000So about 3 billion people on this planet, they cook and keep warm with really dirty fuels like dung, cardboard, wood, whatever they can get their hands on.
00:23:43.000And that means the average indoor air pollution in these homes is higher and worse than it is in outdoor Beijing.
00:24:15.000In Denmark, the environmental agency, they were trying to find out how much indoor air pollution do you get if you're right next to a major street.
00:24:24.000And so they were measuring, you know, they rented this apartment that was empty and put up measurements in there.
00:24:30.000And every once in a while, they couldn't understand.
00:24:32.000They just got these incredible spikes.
00:25:32.000They had a life of eight hours of lit when they were normal, but then when they turned the air conditioning on, the air was blowing down on the candles, so they were burning through this.
00:25:43.000So this lady had to get extra candles overnight.
00:27:42.000Are you conspiratorial about this push towards a climate change crisis mentality where there was a famous Project Veritas video with a guy who worked for CNN and they caught him on undercover camera and they were talking about using climate change to get people excited.
00:28:05.000I assumed he was talking about four ratings.
00:28:46.000So, climate has that wonderful opportunity that it can actually Fundamentally get us to talk about every time something out there happens, it can be news and it can be somebody's fault.
00:29:40.000Let's take a critical look at some of this research.
00:29:43.000So a slew of recent studies suggested that climate change increasing the number of heart attacks worldwide.
00:29:47.000The hypothesis suffers from many critical deficiencies, the most important being that rates of heart disease and thus heart attacks in the industrialized world have plummeted as our ability to prevent and treat coronary artery disease has improved.
00:30:01.000Studies that have reported a slowdown in this trend have also detected rises in the prevalence of obesity, metabolic syndrome, and type 2 diabetes.
00:30:14.000All well-known risk factors for heart disease.
00:30:18.000It's not that climate change is causing heart disease.
00:30:21.000It's that people are doing things that they shouldn't be doing with their body in terms of letting their body get obese or not taking action and going to the gym and altering their diet.
00:30:35.000If you really wanted to lower costs for healthcare worldwide, especially nationwide, A national program encouraging people.
00:30:43.000Instead of just putting like a black square on your Instagram on Tuesday, how about encouraging people through one entire month to do 100 sit-ups and 100 push-ups and go up, you know, walk 10,000 steps every day.
00:30:55.000Just encouraging people and everybody have to fucking be accountable online.
00:30:59.000If everybody did that, people would just shed weight.
00:31:44.000But that's because they're not very resilient.
00:31:46.000Well, but, you know, it's especially old people.
00:31:50.000And so, you know, it's not unreasonable to say that this is going to be an issue.
00:31:53.000And, you know, there is a lot of people out there telling us, oh, my God, there are going to be more heat deaths because of global warming.
00:32:19.000But Randall Carlson said, he goes, climate change where it gets warmer is not necessarily good, but climate change where it gets colder is bad.
00:33:08.000In order to not have, you know, arteries clog, you have heart attacks, that kind of thing, what happens when it gets colder and you get cold, the body restricts its blood flow out to the surface and you get higher blood pressure and that's a very well-known risk factor for getting heart attacks.
00:33:26.000So you actually have a lot of people that die because they don't get enough heat, especially older people.
00:33:32.000I never would imagine that many people freeze to death.
00:34:23.000Put the paper up again so we can take a look at it.
00:34:25.000So that's the global burden of disease.
00:34:29.000I just typed in cold deaths in the U.S. per year and it said since 1979 only like 19,000 people have died from cold-related diseases.
00:34:38.000That's because if you ask and there's another organization that just keeps track of how many people died from cold And it got in the newspaper.
00:36:04.000Generally range from 1 to 2.5 deaths per million people.
00:36:08.000With year-to-year fluctuations, overall a total of more than 19,000 Americans have died from cold-related causes since 1979, according to death certificates.
00:36:18.000So what are they putting on the death certificate of these people that are dying that you're counting with the 166,000?
00:36:25.000Sorry, the 170 for the US? Yeah, whatever the Lancet study said, 166. Sorry, the Lancet study is a global study, and that was an increase in the number of people.
00:36:58.000And a lot of, you know, this is the kind of thing where you say obesity causes a lot of, you know, deaths.
00:37:04.000I can't remember what that is, you know, like a million deaths.
00:37:07.000But it's not on the death certificate.
00:37:08.000It's not on the death certificate because it's a statistical correlation that you died because or you died right after the cold or the heat snap.
00:37:19.000Is there potential to manipulate that in one way or another?
00:37:22.000I mean, look, again— If someone has a political bias to push one thing or another?
00:38:00.000A lot of times you don't do that analysis and so you only find the heat deaths but not the cold deaths.
00:38:06.000So there's a wonderful study that actually showed back in the late 2000s when fracking came on board.
00:38:16.000They found that gas prices went down, so about half of all Americans heat their homes with gas.
00:38:24.000And so what happened was you actually could show that because people could now afford to heat their homes better, especially if they were poor, That actually every year saves about 11,000 people from dying from cold deaths.
00:38:40.000So these cold deaths, we're talking about people who, because of being in freezing cold temperatures, they have a variety of different detrimental health problems, like...
00:38:54.000Is it just because they're older folks?
00:39:23.000I never would have taken that consideration.
00:39:25.000And the reason why it kills people is because this is a lot of millions of people, and each one of them are put into this little risk factor.
00:39:33.000And the overall point that I tried to make with that graph and with the Lancet study was just that, you know, you hear all this thing about more heat deaths, and that's absolutely true because of global warming.
00:39:44.000But you never hear the fact that as temperatures rise, you're, of course, also going to see fewer cold deaths.
00:39:48.000And actually, right now, it turns out that we're seeing many fewer cold deaths than we're seeing increasing heat deaths.
00:39:54.000What's more preventable, the heat deaths or the cold deaths in terms of, like, medical intervention?
00:40:00.000So it's actually not medical intervention.
00:40:16.000These are people that are just a little too cold or a little too warm.
00:40:19.000And the simple way to deal with that is air conditioning.
00:40:22.000That's why, as temperatures have risen in the U.S., we've seen declining levels of heat deaths because you guys can afford air conditioning.
00:40:29.000And that's, of course, what we need to make sure that the rest of the world can afford.
00:40:32.000So it's actually easier to deal with heat because we know how to do that, whereas cold requires you to have cheap energy for the whole heating season.
00:40:41.000And that's much, much costlier and harder, especially for poorer people.
00:40:46.000So when people talk about our impact on the world with oil and how we're ruining the future of our planet and so the hysteria of these young people, what do you think is the thing to tell them to try to give them a more balanced perspective of what's actually happening?
00:41:08.000Like, if you think it's a problem, you think what people are doing is a problem, but it's not as big of a problem, that's what kind of has to be balanced out.
00:41:17.000Because it's either everything or it's nothing.
00:41:19.000That's the narrative that we hear today.
00:41:21.000Either global warming is not an issue at all.
00:41:23.000Oh, you silly goose, why are you worried about that?
00:41:26.000Or it's, oh my god, we're all going to die.
00:41:29.000Those are the only two options you have.
00:41:31.000And I want to get people to understand that global warming is a problem, But it's actually mostly a problem in the sense that the world is getting better and better, but because of global warming, it gets slightly slower, much better.
00:42:02.000First, if I can just show you A22... So this one shows the deaths over the last century of all the things that you think of as climate, right?
00:42:17.000Floods, droughts, storms, wildfires, and extreme temperatures.
00:42:19.000They don't do a particularly good job on extreme temperatures, but let's just leave it at that.
00:42:23.000This is the best data that we have for the world.
00:42:25.000And what it basically shows is the complete opposite of what these guys that are gluing themselves to the Picasso, right?
00:42:32.000This is fundamentally a situation of back when you were poor in the 1920s, about half a million people died every year.
00:42:40.000You know what would be amazing to look at right next to that?
00:43:37.000But the heart disease, one, can be attributed to genetics.
00:43:40.000Two and a half million dead in total in the U.S., so it's probably one million or something.
00:43:44.000And how many of that, how many of those you could attribute to sedentary lifestyle and obesity and how many of it's just unfortunate genetics?
00:44:15.000I think all the other effects, like heart attacks, strokes.
00:44:18.000All the things that come from being obese, diseases, susceptibility to diseases.
00:44:23.000But I think your point is well taken, right?
00:44:25.000Because it tells you that all these protesters are gluing themselves up there and are worried about the end of the world from climate change.
00:45:05.000Obviously, that was one of the big things that people had a problem with with COVID deaths.
00:45:08.000There's people that were already terminally ill and got COVID and they attributed it to COVID. But, you know, your body is like an ecosystem.
00:45:15.000And if you have like a major insult coming into your body, like being obese or a disease, or if you live in one of these horrible places that has massive amounts of pollution, that's something that must affect...
00:46:54.000And then when we hear about these things that will cause a thousand deaths.
00:46:58.000Remember, let me take an example I know a lot more about.
00:47:02.000The world's biggest hurricane death It was in Bangladesh in 1970. It was a big hurricane that came in, killed somewhere between 300 and 500,000 people in Bangladesh.
00:47:14.000This was mostly because, you know, they were totally unprepared.
00:48:02.000If you go to Hurricane Ian, Solar Community, Florida, I believe it's 2,000 homes.
00:48:10.000They're completely off-grid in the sense that they have a solar field, and it powers these homes, and they built homes to withstand hurricanes.
00:48:36.000And this community was established just to give people a safe place from a natural disaster.
00:48:44.000Because a lot of the houses they built before, the engineering, when they were building these houses in the 1950s, did they really know how to survive a fucking hurricane?
00:48:54.000They tried their best, but see if you can get some photos of what the houses look like.
00:48:58.000They look like normal houses, but they built these houses with very strong tolerances, and they can take incredible winds And they look like a regular fucking house.
00:49:08.000It's not like they're space houses, like they're built like a fucking, like a wind turbine or something like that.
00:49:13.000No, they're normal houses, but they're just really robust.
00:49:16.000And these people all made it through, which is pretty wild.
00:49:19.000And Joe, I think it emphasizes something.
00:49:22.000We know how to fix many of these problems.
00:49:24.000And if you just disregard the solar part, which of course kept them powered, but there's many other ways you could have done that with batteries as well.
00:49:43.000There's a good study for Hurricane Sandy and also for Hurricane Andrew back in 1992. Had there been better regulation, so you just had clamps, for instance, on roofs?
00:49:54.000You know, these cost, what, $5 or something?
00:49:56.000You could have avoided half of all the damage.
00:50:02.000And so, again, because we're so worried about one thing, namely climate change, and saying, oh, my God, we've got to, you know, go to electric cars and stop using fossil fuels and all this other stuff.
00:50:11.000No, actually, you need to have clamps.
00:50:14.000And this is the kind of conversation that we have a very hard time getting around to, that just like we started off talking about with plastics, They're not nearly as comforting, but they're just much simpler, much cheaper, much more effective.
00:50:28.000So what is the solution in terms of reducing our carbon footprint without destroying the economy?
00:50:35.000Well, so I think, first of all, we need to get rid of the panic, because panic is just a really, really bad way of dealing with issues.
00:50:42.000But it's a really good way to get people to vote, and it's a really good way to get people to donate money to your party.
00:51:07.000So this is malaria death since 1900 until 2060. This is obviously prediction from 2020. This is the World Health Organization estimating what will happen next.
00:51:42.000So what we're looking at for folks who are just listening, there is a really high line in the 1900s and it goes from 0 to 200. The line is almost at 200 in the early 1900s and it drops all the way down to what looks like 2 in 2060. And it's pretty stable from like 2040 to 2060. And from that point,
00:52:05.000and it's below what it is now, by the way, but that point above it with climate is maybe two and a half.
00:52:37.000So if you actually care about malaria, your right answer is not to say, we've got to change the entire growth engine of the world and stop using fossil fuels.
00:52:46.000No, the right answer is to make sure that people get malaria medication, that they get bed nets.
00:53:24.000Trade-offs that we make, and that happens every day in this country.
00:53:29.000Someone is getting into their Tesla, thinking they're doing a really good job, and the electricity to power that Tesla is from a coal-fired plant.
00:53:57.000These are older plants, and they think that they can mitigate a lot of those problems with newer plants, and there's even designs for newer plants.
00:54:06.000Yeah, I mean, they should all be able to safely shut down, but clearly, Fukushima was not well enough to sign because they basically put them in a place where the backup generators could be hit by...
00:55:11.000By no means this is not, you know, don't freak out again.
00:55:15.000But the whole point here is to recognize that we don't have a good sense of proportion of what's the risks that we're really exposing ourselves to.
00:55:23.000The main issue with nuclear, and this of course is why we're not getting lots and lots of nuclear, is that nuclear is incredibly expensive right now.
00:55:30.000So new nuclear power plants of the current third generation just cost a lot of money.
00:55:35.000So they're actually more expensive than going to solar and wind, and that's really why we're not building a lot of them.
00:55:43.000So, you know, some of the new ones that are being done in France and Finland and the UK have ended up being, you know, two to four times more expensive than they were planned.
00:55:54.000And so they're easily, you know, sort of two, three times more expensive.
00:55:59.000Oh, more than they were planned to be?
00:56:53.000$14.8 billion later, the Big Dig finally complete.
00:56:57.000When the clock runs out on 2007, construction of the Big Dig, the nation's most complex and costliest highway project will officially come to an end.
00:57:06.000They were doing that when I was living in there in the 1980s.
00:58:25.000So they should realize this is not the end of the world.
00:58:28.000And I think that would take away a lot of this, oh my god, we've got to do something right now.
00:58:32.000And then we can start talking about, okay, how do you fix things smartly?
00:58:37.000Well, you don't fix getting rid of fossil fuels by telling everyone, I'm sorry, would you mind being a little poor and a little colder and not being able to drive?
00:59:13.000And so the current way we think about environment is basically, all right, the solutions back then would have been to tell everyone in Los Angeles, I'm sorry, could you walk instead?
01:00:21.000No, not a Porsche, but a car that's sucking in carbon.
01:00:24.000Everyone should, before they die, own one of those, though.
01:00:26.000But if you could get a car that is somehow or another utilizing that fuel that's in the air that's problematic, and if there's some sort of a way to extract that and convert it, maybe through some unforeseen technology, convert that into energy.
01:00:47.000So we're doing the same thing with carbon, that you're trying to suck out the carbon from the atmosphere, and it turns out to be very expensive.
01:00:55.000Well, all combustion engines require oxygen, right?
01:00:58.000Would it be possible for a combustion engine at least to somehow work carbon neutral by pulling enough carbon out of the atmosphere that whatever comes out the back is actually not good?
01:01:55.000I seriously doubt any existing cars, especially the Porsche 911 Turbo, emits exhaust that is cleaner than air, even air in the most polluted cities.
01:02:54.000So, fundamentally, you can do a lot of stuff, and you could also do this, but it would just be incredibly expensive, meaning you wouldn't have the resources to do all the other stuff you also want to do.
01:03:12.000In terms of what we can do now to slow the stem, like that's one of the fear-mongering things that you hear.
01:03:20.000I don't know if it's accurate, but they're always saying if we don't do this now, with every day that passes by, if we don't enact legislation, the future is doomed.
01:03:30.000This is the thing that people keep harping on.
01:04:34.000This is basically something that was done by investment research and development from George W. Bush in the early 2000s, where they spent about $10 billion working with frackers to find out how do you frack gas and then later on oil.
01:04:52.000And what that meant was you ended up—this was not at all meant as a climate policy.
01:04:57.000It was meant as a way to get more energy.
01:04:59.000But what it meant was you ended up getting much, much cheaper gas.
01:05:03.000And because you had much cheaper gas, you switched out coal for gas.
01:05:07.000This matters because gas is about twice as efficient.
01:05:09.000It emits half as much CO2 per unit of energy.
01:05:12.000So you basically have this situation where you made a somewhat cleaner source of energy much cheaper.
01:05:19.000And so the U.S. actually cut its emissions more over the last decade than any other country has ever done.
01:05:24.000But is there a detrimental effect on the environment because of fracking that has to balance that out?
01:05:53.000So this is local air pollution, and this is mostly from the increased amount of emissions, especially of methane, but also just because you have lots of construction going on where you do the fracking.
01:06:04.000And because fracking is a very rapid turnover, you need a lot of wells.
01:06:07.000So there's a total cost, environmental cost, of about $25 billion.
01:06:12.000That's not nothing, absolutely, per year.
01:06:15.000But the benefit of fracking to the U.S. is estimated by one of the Federal Reserve estimates.
01:06:22.000Right, but if I could push back against that, the real problem...
01:06:25.000Sorry, so it's $180 billion in increased growth for the U.S. So you get $180 billion, but you also have environmental problems of $25 billion.
01:06:37.000Well, shouldn't we be doing everything possible to mitigate the amount of environmental problems?
01:06:42.000And when you're talking about just straight money, how much money is it worth to pollute the rivers and pollute the streams and pollute the air?
01:06:49.000I would say that's not a benefit at all, that benefit in terms of like the negative impact of pollution.
01:06:57.000And then trying to clean up that pollution is catastrophic.
01:07:00.000It's very difficult and sometimes impossible.
01:07:02.000When you're talking about polluting ancient waterways, that scares the shit out of people, including me.
01:07:08.000Especially people that like to go outside and do outdoor activities and go camping and hiking and shit.
01:07:12.000They get terrified by the idea of fracking, destroying the rivers, and that has happened before, right?
01:08:00.000You can absolutely regulate fracking better, and you can decide that you want to have less air pollution.
01:08:07.000But it is a trade-off in the sense of saying, how much more opportunity will you have?
01:08:12.000And then you also actually cut carbon emissions, which is what the U.S. has done more than any other country, versus how much do you want, for instance, less air pollution?
01:09:41.000RuPaul was just on NPR Fresh Air and shared that he and his partner own 60,000 acres in Wyoming and they lease mineral rights and sell water to oil companies.
01:10:45.000All oil and gas drilling is bad, but these three companies are no mom and pop shops.
01:10:51.000Chesapeake Energy was a pioneer of the drilling method early in the nation's fracking boom.
01:10:55.000It was the second most active drilling company in the nation, closely followed by Anadarko.
01:11:01.000An Anschultz owner, Philippe Frederick Anschultz, made billions from fossil fuel extraction that earned him the 41st spot on the Forbes 400. Wow, interesting.
01:12:35.000That's not how you show yourself to the world and say, Is that a political posturing thing where they put policies in place because those policies are what the people have been sort of at least programmed by fear-mongering to expect and want from their politicians?
01:12:52.000I mean, obviously it's good politics because a lot of people get re-elected saying, I'm going to save your world and elect me and then I'm going to put up some more solar panels.
01:13:00.000But the problem is it's an incredibly expensive way of achieving almost nothing.
01:13:05.000And that's why, you know, if you look at what fracking has done, Fracking is sort of a dirty word.
01:13:12.000This son of a bitch works for big fracking.
01:13:14.000But I simply point out that fracking, more than anything else, has cut carbon emissions dramatically because you've given an alternative to coal, which not only emits a lot of CO2, but also kills a lot of people through air pollution, and you can now do a lot less.
01:13:30.000Imagine if we could make China frack, India frack, Europe would be good to track as well, because we could actually get all of these countries to switch away from coal towards gas.
01:13:41.000Now, this is not the whole solution, but it has the beauty of being cheaper so that you don't actually have to go to all these summits where everybody promises stuff and then don't do it, but you would actually have people do what's in their own private interest.
01:13:54.000But that's an uncomfortable trade-off to me, this idea of exploiting the environment that way.
01:14:02.000It's like if you're gonna agree to pollute a certain amount of the water, a certain amount of the land, is there any solution to extract that pollution and is that even feasible or possible?
01:15:07.000You're sort of switching over to this other place where we say, but what if it...
01:15:31.000How can you regulate unseen water pollution?
01:15:38.000So if you are – the method that they utilize in fracking is they drill holes and then they force liquids into these holes.
01:15:47.000And these liquids are filled with chemicals and somehow or another there's a process and they use that to extract.
01:15:52.000So how are they doing that and how could you possibly regulate that if you're not even seeing where it's going?
01:15:57.000Would you have to – So the way you regulated it was to get rid of the most dangerous parts of those chemicals.
01:16:03.000As I understand it, there's very little dangerous now, the chemicals that you put in, and then also have the overflow so you actually get the wastewater out and that you keep that or you treat that before you release it back.
01:16:15.000Is that possible to do if they're pumping it into the earth?
01:16:33.000Yes, from people taking this wastewater when it comes back up again and then just letting it seep in, putting it in places where if it rained a lot, it would just overflow or that kind of thing.
01:16:46.000And this is something that we know very well how to do if you have...
01:16:50.000Yes, there are always people who will cheat and stuff.
01:16:53.000That's why you need some sort of follow-up as well.
01:16:57.000And you probably also want to have bigger companies doing this because they follow standard procedure.
01:17:02.000But this is fairly simple to manage, if you will.
01:17:06.000That's what the EPA does in a lot of different senses.
01:17:08.000Did you ever see the documentary Gasland?
01:17:11.000What did you think about that documentary?
01:17:13.000So my two cents in that was that it's a good thing to point out that there's a real issue here.
01:17:21.000When you contrast it with what most of the actual operators said were the problems, I think it was somewhat misleading and it was certainly alarmist.
01:17:33.000But again, I think it's good that we get these stories out there, but we need to keep a sense of perspective.
01:17:39.000What about the people whose water was on fire?
01:18:08.000So there's no damage whatsoever to the waterways that are under the ground if they're pumping all the toxic chemicals in there?
01:18:16.000No, because they're pumping them way further down than where aquifers typically are, and they pump them into places that have held hydrocarbons.
01:19:29.000There was one river that I think that they were talking about in that documentary that got polluted directly because of fracking and the chemicals released from fracking, and that it was really damaging.
01:19:43.000That scares the shit out of people when they start talking about extracting oil near where salmon spawn and stuff like that.
01:19:51.000We've got to be really careful about doing stuff like that just to boost the economy.
01:19:55.000That seems like a short-sighted thing that's going to cost us more money in the long run if ultimately it does lead to be not just more money but these unfixable areas of pollution.
01:21:57.000This is from NewJersey.gov, and the other one is also this year.
01:22:01.000It's a report from another, like PBS. So a news station wrote this, and this is also from this year.
01:22:07.000So which one is saying, this is where you got to...
01:22:10.000So can I just say, and you get this a lot, I don't know this particular thing, but what we know is that all pollution levels have been going down in the U.S. So it could actually both be true, that everything is getting cleaner, but Delaware's rivers are getting less...
01:22:45.000But it's just that we can't have this idea of saying we won't accept any damage anywhere.
01:22:51.000Because then we end up—and this, of course, is what happens in many areas—we end up sending all our pollution to China and India and elsewhere and feel all virtuous about it.
01:23:34.000But that's just how we put up our world.
01:23:37.000So we actually can feel very virtuous about ourselves and make everything cleaner, but then just have the air pollution and all the other pollution impacts somewhere else.
01:23:46.000Now, when you look at the overall landscape of proposed improvements and the impact it'll have on the environment, what stands out to you?
01:23:56.000Like, what do you think is things that people are talking about in terms of helping the environment and reducing our carbon footprint?
01:24:26.000People will tell you that, you know, going vegetarian is a great thing for the planet.
01:24:31.000But actually, it's a fairly small impact overall.
01:24:34.000So, you know, they'll tell you that it'll reduce your carbon footprint by 50%.
01:24:39.000What they don't tell you, it's your food impact, your food footprint, which is a very small part of your total impact.
01:24:46.000So we're talking about 4% or thereabouts.
01:24:48.000And then remember also being vegetarian is cheaper.
01:24:51.000So that actually means you have more money and you're going to spend that on a trip to Mexico or something.
01:24:57.000So it actually turns out that when you take into account that people are going to spend the rest of their money on something else, it probably reduces your emissions by 2%.
01:25:05.000When people talk about emissions and vegetarianism, do they take into account the difference in monocrop agriculture versus regenerative agriculture?
01:25:15.000We had Will Harris from White Oak Pastures, who has this very sophisticated regenerative farm that he converted his family's industrialized farm over a period of 20 years.
01:25:36.000They don't use any pesticides or herbicides.
01:25:39.000Everything is done the way nature intended.
01:25:42.000Essentially, Recreated nature in a controlled environment in terms of like utilizing the manure and the chicken shit and the chickens roam around and the pigs root around and all these animals live as if they're supposed to live like like in normally in the wild and Because of that his water that runs off into the river is so noticeably different than the water of his next-door neighbor It's stunning His next door neighbor runs a traditional industrialized farm and when you see their property line,
01:26:13.000when the water runs off, his is clear and then it hits where the neighbor's property is and it turns brown, like instantly.
01:26:19.000There's a literal divide line in the river.
01:26:31.000Are you getting it from a place like White Oaks Pastures that raises everything in a regenerative way?
01:26:36.000So it's natural, there's no pesticides or herbicides, no poison at all is getting leaked into the water supply.
01:26:42.000Or are you buying your vegetables at, you know, regular supermarket, and they're, you know, oh, it's corn, great, corn's good for you.
01:26:49.000But meanwhile, you're contributing to this fucking crazy eco-devastation on this river, and you don't even think you are.
01:26:56.000So the numbers I showed you were the ones that are based on how we actually produce, and that's by far mostly what that other guy does.
01:27:04.000Yeah, by far mostly doing it industrialized.
01:27:07.000So you have to be a little careful, though.
01:27:10.000So a lot of farms that say, you know, for instance, they're organic and they don't use pesticides and they don't use artificial fertilizer and all that stuff.
01:27:19.000They basically get a lot of their fertilizer from other farms that are not because otherwise you can't make it run around.
01:27:27.000A curious thing that I think most people don't recognize.
01:27:31.000So there's not enough natural fertilizer in the world to keep 8 billion people fed.
01:27:37.000There's actually only enough natural fertilizer to keep 4 billion people fed.
01:27:42.000But isn't that under current farming models?
01:27:45.000Well, it's just simply a question of nitrogen.
01:27:48.000There's just not enough nitrogen in the world to make it run around.
01:27:52.000That's why you have to have the other 4 billion people or half of every person fed with fertilizer that basically comes from natural gas.
01:28:04.000And so when people say, oh, I have this very, very nice environmental farm, it often means that they're actually importing basically feces from other farms that have been grown with artificial fertilizer.
01:28:18.000I don't necessarily think he does that.
01:28:20.000Look, I don't know this particular— But it's not that big of a farm in terms of like the amount of humans— Do you remember what he said, like the amount of humans he could feed with his farm?
01:28:34.000And the point is we just can't make this happen for everyone, which is one of the things— When people go buy organic and all that stuff, it's great because it makes people feel really virtuous.
01:28:45.000But the point is, we just couldn't do it all of us.
01:30:02.000Well, again, I don't know this particular farm.
01:30:04.000I think the way he was describing it, he was very proud of the fact that it's essentially below carbon neutral, that it's actually taking out carbon from the way they grow their food to the way they utilize the manure and the way they feed the animals.
01:30:22.000That's impressive because you can't...
01:30:24.000And again, I don't know how you do that because you can certainly set some land aside and make sure you generate more and more carbon in that storage area for a while, but you can't keep doing that.
01:30:45.000White Oak Pastures sequestered 919 tons of CO2 in the soil with the help of plants and compost.
01:30:55.000That's like switching 31,679 incandescent light bulbs to LED. And so it shows white oak pastures versus other proteins, like how they're grown in other places.
01:31:07.000So you see conventional beef, which is like a huge amount of carbon, plus 33. White oak pastures, it gets to them, their beef is negative 3.5.
01:31:18.000So the only way that you can sequester CO2 on land is by not having it be productive.
01:31:25.000You need to have it, you know, you need to basically have it build up carbon dioxide in the, in the, sorry, carbon.
01:31:32.000But he's talking about like compost and manure extracting that.
01:31:36.000Yeah, but you can't use it because if you use it, then you emit it again.
01:31:39.000We store more carbon in the soil than our cows emit during their lives.
01:31:44.000And so pounds of CO2 for every pound of white oak pastures be produced.
01:31:48.000Like, this seems to contradict what you're saying.
01:31:51.000And look, I don't know how this works.
01:31:55.000I'm talking about how regular organic farms work, and there's been lots of studies done on that.
01:32:01.000And the thing I'm a little worried about here is that it doesn't seem reasonable to me that you can actually keep this up.
01:32:08.000You can certainly do it for a few short years where you build up your carbon storage in your land, but eventually you have to either use it productively or keep it fenced off.
01:32:21.000I don't understand what you're saying.
01:32:22.000Why would he have to do that if he's rotating the crops and rotating where the animals go and moving them around?
01:32:28.000Well, so if you plant a forest, so that's the typical sort of way you think about this, right?
01:32:34.000You put up a forest, you put up small saplings, they grow bigger and bigger, they store a lot of carbon.
01:32:40.000They both store it in the crown but also in the root material.
01:32:43.000But eventually they've grown full and then they can't store anymore and then you just have to keep it there.
01:32:48.000If you cut them down, then obviously you now release all the CO2 again.
01:32:52.000And what they're doing, as I understand it, is that they're basically building it up in their ground.
01:32:57.000So they're having more roots in there, more stuff in there.
01:33:00.000But if you don't release it, if you don't use it, if you don't grow on it, you have to keep not growing on it in order to keep it stored away.
01:33:29.000So his method, I think the only knock on it would be...
01:33:33.000If you want to have a jack-in-the-box on every corner and you want cheap beef to feed people everywhere, you probably can't do it that way.
01:33:40.000And if you want to feed everyone, you can't do it that way.
01:33:42.000But his argument was that we really shouldn't be eating that way anyway.
01:33:48.000So the main point comes back to saying, we can't do this for everyone.
01:33:54.000And that was the main point I was trying to make, that we have this idea of saying we can all go organic.
01:34:00.000No, a few people can go organic and feel very comfortable about it, but there's just not enough nitrogen for everyone to do this.
01:34:06.000And so that was the answer that I wanted to say.
01:34:10.000Don't think that these sort of cheap, simple things where you vert your signal is how you're really going to switch.
01:34:17.000The way you're going to switch, the way we're actually going to fix climate change, Is by focusing on technology.
01:34:24.000So you mentioned one of them, nuclear.
01:34:26.000If we could imagine that we could actually get fourth generation nuclear in some way to be incredibly cheap and safe.
01:34:32.000That could solve a very large part of it.
01:34:34.000Imagine if you come up with a technology that's cheaper than coal and gas and all that.
01:34:40.000Everyone is going to switch, not just because they're rich, well-meaning Americans, but also the Chinese, the Indians, the Africans, everybody else.
01:34:48.000So that will basically generate a lot of cheap energy that's both good for economic growth and will cut carbon emissions dramatically.
01:34:56.000Now, remember, this is not the only thing you need because you can't just run—well, you possibly— Possibly can run most of the world on electricity, but we don't right now.
01:35:04.000Right now, only about 20% is electricity.
01:35:08.000The rest of energy is industrial processes, heating, transport, all these other things that are much, much harder to switch out.
01:35:16.000So obviously, also steel and cement and so on.
01:35:22.000So there's a lot of issues that still remain, but the technology point still remains.
01:35:27.000If we can come up with this technology that's cheaper than fossil fuels and does not emit CO2, we're done.
01:35:33.000Now, if we don't do this and if we give in to climate fear, which is what a lot of people are using, it seems, if you want to be cynical, it seems like a political ploy.
01:35:47.000What do you think the motivation is of not having a balanced, nuanced perspective and expressing a balanced, nuanced perspective to people where you could explain things the way you're explaining them?
01:36:01.000Here's why it's actually better for the atmosphere overall if we do it this way.
01:36:06.000And the solution seems to be in technology, and it's not into halting all use of fossil fuels immediately, which would be devastating to the economy.
01:36:15.000And ultimately, when the economy goes, it's devastating to almost all aspects of our civilization.
01:36:20.000That's the very unfortunate reality of life, right?
01:36:23.000So have you ever had a debate with someone about this?
01:36:38.000It's not sort of an evil ploy or anything, but...
01:36:42.000They seem to believe that, you know, just by wishing we can somehow make it come true.
01:36:47.000And I think a lot of the conversation that, you know, so when you're starting to see what is it going to cost to go net zero, for instance, a lot of people are talking about we should go net zero.
01:36:57.000You know, Biden, President Biden is talking about that.
01:37:01.000This will be fantastically costly, and that's what all these studies show.
01:37:05.000So McKinsey shows it's going to cost nearly $6 trillion every year for the world.
01:37:10.000That's two-thirds of the total global tax intake.
01:37:13.000So basically imagine that two-thirds of everything the U.S. government spends Now would have to go to net zero.
01:37:20.000Well, I think you said something that's very important, too.
01:37:23.000And I think it's very unreasonable to assume that the rest of the world would take on this economic burden the way we're willing to take it on for the environment.
01:37:32.000And that, in fact, there are countries that are not interested at all in releasing less carbon.
01:37:38.000They're interested in economically becoming more and more powerful and spreading their wings.
01:37:43.000And just lifting their populations out of poverty.
01:37:47.000And also becoming more military, you know, more powerful militarily.
01:38:15.000And so the reality is, even if just the U.S. tried to go net zero, there's a new study in Nature magazine that estimated that the cost per person...
01:38:26.000I actually have that graph, so we can show that as well.
01:38:30.000So the cost per person would be phenomenal.
01:38:35.000Well, it'd be nice if I could find it, but...
01:39:27.000I mean, they might assume that the government could foot the bill for this.
01:39:31.000If they can come up with so much money to send arms to Ukraine and to invade other countries and do a lot of shady shit that we don't appreciate them doing, we would think that they could fork out 11,000 per person and- Per year.
01:40:23.000He was the guy who cracked the human genome back in 2000. He's sort of a crazy smart guy.
01:40:29.000And he has this idea that he wants to grow algae, specific, special algae on the ocean surface that basically soak up sunlight and CO2 and produce oil.
01:40:50.000We could keep our entire fossil fuel economy going right now, but it would be CO2 neutral because they just soaked out the CO2 out in the ocean surface.
01:40:58.000Would that have a detrimental effect on the ocean?
01:41:02.000I'm sure that, you know, just like we've talked about before, nothing you do would have no impact.
01:41:37.000And even before then, we worried a lot about Africa, especially India and Southeast Asia, not being able to feed their own populations.
01:41:45.000And sort of the standard way that we think about global warming now is to tell everyone, you know, could you not eat so much and then we'll send it down to, you know, the poor Indians and the poor Africans?
01:41:56.000What did work was the Green Revolution.
01:41:58.000We basically evolved these, we innovated these new seeds that produce two or three times as much per acre.
01:42:05.000And that's what basically grew the world's food production dramatically.
01:42:11.000India is now one of the world's – it is actually the world's leading rice exporter.
01:42:15.000It's gone from a basket case to being able to feed its own population.
01:42:18.000But aren't there a lot of problems with that too where the Indian farmers are getting fucked over and they get connected to these – There's seeds that they don't own and they can't reuse, and they owe a giant amount of money to the companies that provide them with the seeds,
01:42:33.000and they're going bankrupt, and there's a ton of suicides from these Indian farmers.
01:43:06.000Being in enthrall to big acro business because you have to buy more of the seeds or you have to pay more is probably a lot better than dying from not having enough food.
01:43:22.000Isn't there a solution where they have a more equitable sort of relationship with the people that provide them seeds and that they can both benefit from it?
01:43:31.000Seems like they're getting exploited, right?
01:43:34.000So, again, my understanding of this is that you can, if you want to, you can buy the public seeds.
01:43:44.000And so India and many other countries provide public seeds that don't have any copyright and that you can grow.
01:43:50.000Or you can buy the private property seeds that grow more per acre.
01:43:57.000And so it's basically a trade-off just like when you go to a store and decide between a slightly less good product, which is cheaper, or a more expensive product that's better.
01:44:07.000It sounds like a creepy trade-off though.
01:44:09.000If the stuff that doesn't work as well is the stuff that you could get from the state and people are economically poor and disenfranchised and You know, they have to take on loans to get the other seeds, and they get indebted.
01:44:22.000Well, they don't have to get those seeds.
01:44:30.000They're probably barely getting by as it is, though, don't you think?
01:44:33.000So the problem is I think we're seeing the outcome here from the people who basically said, all right, I'm going to get a loan, possibly from a loan shark, and then invest this in order to get a higher payoff.
01:44:56.000But the idea here is still that, you know, it's possibly not the right way to think about this if we're just concerned about, well, you know, the people who took chances shouldn't have been so exposed if they made the wrong choices.
01:45:13.000Well, I think what we're really concerned with is predatory relationships between very poor farmers and giant multinational corporations that don't give a fuck about those people.
01:45:23.000That's what scares us is that there's a dehumanizing aspect to this sort of method of producing agriculture.
01:45:31.000So the real issue here is though that most of the big agricultural producers basically produce for rich countries because those are the ones who can pay.
01:45:43.000So what we're stuck with and very often don't have very good is that we need much more research into getting yield enhancement in the things that you grow in many of the poor countries in the world.
01:46:45.000And this is a big story that affects the whole world.
01:46:47.000I was going to ask you in the middle of all that, I didn't want to forget, what percentage of the CO2 emission, the greenhouse gases, does the United States produce in relationship to the rest of the world?
01:46:58.000What does the rest of the world produce?
01:47:04.000So if we cut back to net zero, you're still dealing with an 88% problem.
01:47:10.000Just to give you a sense of proportion, if you actually take out the U.S. emissions from the U.N. climate model, it turns out that by the end of the century, you'll have 0.3 degree Fahrenheit lower temperatures.
01:47:23.000So you'll have this temperature increase instead of this temperature increase.
01:47:27.000So the temperature will continue to increase.
01:47:30.000Do they really have an objective understanding of how much of this is a natural cycle and how much of this is being caused by human beings?
01:48:18.000How do we get innovation going so that we get better, for instance, nuclear or better of this Craig Venter guy ideas or these many, many other ideas that are out there?
01:48:47.000And what they found was the long-term best strategy was invest in green energy research and development.
01:48:54.000So that's the long-term because there could be some innovation that would be groundbreaking.
01:48:58.000Basically, if you get innovation and you find a breakthrough, you will have fixed the problem.
01:49:04.000If you don't get that innovation, We just won't fix the problem.
01:49:08.000We'll do a little bit of it at very, very high cost and we'll end up a little bit like we talked about with Germany, right?
01:49:13.000You'll end up spending half a trillion dollars and cut a tiny bit of your emissions.
01:49:17.000To sort of shift the narrative and get people to stop Being terrified of a future with the climate increasing the way it is on a steady rate.
01:49:29.000What can you say to people that would get them to...
01:49:34.000Is there a real simple way of breaking this down that gives people an understanding of their perspective?
01:50:00.000I mean, and the simple reason is because we know around the world that when sea levels rise, it is very cheap and simple to avoid most of those problems.
01:50:10.000And Holland, obviously, is the great example, right?
01:50:13.000Holland has, while sea levels have been rising, they've actually gotten much larger because they know how to do this and they're very, very safe.
01:50:22.000Remember, 40% of the country is underwater.
01:50:24.000If you go to Schiphol, which is the 14th largest airport in the world, Amsterdam Airport, They proudly say on their website that we're the only major airport in the world that was previously a site of a major naval battle.
01:51:44.000We've seen the same thing happen everywhere on the planet.
01:51:47.000So even Bangladesh, which is a very poor country, has actually increased the land surface while sea levels have risen because we know how to do those.
01:51:56.000Has anybody done that with a model for Miami?
01:52:00.000Because again, what you were saying, I had heard, was that the problem is the ground is porous.
01:52:05.000And that whenever there's any sort of a water event in Miami, the streets are flooded.
01:52:10.000And that they're worried that as the ocean level rises, this would be insurmountable.
01:52:14.000Like, I don't know if that's as simple a problem as what they're dealing with in Holland or in a lot of other places where they make dams and seawalls and what they do with New Orleans.
01:52:45.000So this is a model for the world that looks at how many people are getting flooded.
01:52:50.000And what it shows you is that in 2000, about 3 million people got flooded every year.
01:52:56.000And so you can see over there in 2000, 3 million people get flooded and it has a cost of 0.05% of GDP. Now, if you assume that there's going to be no adaptation, this is pretty much where all the catastrophic stories come from.
01:53:11.000You end up in this situation where, you know, 187 million people will be flooded.
01:53:16.000This number has been both on the cover of Washington Post and the New York Times, and there's a New York Times-Obed, lots and lots of- This is at 2100, year 2100. 2100. If, you know, sea levels rise, we do nothing about it.
01:53:31.000Then, obviously, this is going to be terrible.
01:53:32.000So it's going to cost 5% of global GDP. But this is not the world we live in.
01:53:39.000So that's why I said in this general thing, it's not going to happen for Miami, but I don't know whether the model has actually modeled, particularly Miami.
01:54:37.000And so the realistic outcome is that by the end of the century, about 15,000 people will be flooded, and the cost Of GDP will be, both for protection and from flood costs, will be almost 10 times lower in percent of GDP. So this adaptation that you show on this chart,
01:55:58.000And that's, of course, one of the reasons why I think when people say, and they're right to say that, climate is going to harm the world's poor the most.
01:56:06.000And they sort of jump to this unwarranted conclusion, so we need to do something about climate.
01:56:13.000We should do something about not being poor.
01:56:16.000You know, there's a big hurricane that hit Tacloban in 2013, a Filipino city.
01:56:24.000And it happened right when there was a global warming meeting, one of the big COP meetings.
01:56:31.000And everybody outpoured and said, oh, this is because of global warming.
01:56:35.000Of course, there was actually a pandemic.
01:56:36.000Exactly similar hurricane 100 years before, 19-0 something, that followed the exact same path and killed half the city's population back then.
01:56:51.000This time, it only killed about 2% of the city's population.
01:56:57.000But the people who got killed and the people who got harmed were still, you know, essentially living under corrugated roofs.
01:57:04.000Our job is to make sure that they don't live under corrugated roofs, that they actually live in good buildings, that they have those clamps that we talked about, that they have all these other opportunities so that they can live well.
01:57:14.000Of course, we should also in the long run find a way to actually make sure we fix climate change.
01:57:19.000But it's wrong to say Because these poor people are going to be focused with more climate change.
01:57:25.000We should do something about climate change.
01:57:26.000No, these poor people are going to be focused with all kinds of bad things from malnutrition and bad education and from diseases because they're poor.
01:57:34.000If we want to help them, we should lift them out of poverty.
01:57:38.000That's a solution you don't ever hear before.
01:57:41.000You hear very little of when it comes to dealing with the situation in terms of the amount of impact on deaths.
01:57:47.000And the amazing thing is, of course, this is what made our lives great.
01:57:53.000Of course, most of the rest of the world want the exact same thing.
01:57:59.000So the real challenge here is, how do we find a way that means the vast amount, so the 6.5 billion people who are not rich can actually get a great living by the end of the century?
01:58:58.000So, the biggest point on this, I think, is they're certainly much stronger on TV. I mean, you hear much, much more about them because they're such great stories.
01:59:31.000That you can't see, oh, this increase or this decrease is because of global warming.
01:59:36.000Is there an increased trend currently?
01:59:38.000Well, so in the 1960s, sorry, in the 1970s and 80s, there was a lull in hurricanes that hit the U.S. That was also when satellite coverage started.
01:59:51.000So much of what you see now is if you start from the 1970s or 1980s, there is an increase for the U.S. But that's probably spurious because if you go back in the 1950s and 1960s, there was actually just as many hurricanes.
02:00:08.000So what you do, and this is by far the best estimate, so I actually have that.
02:00:15.000If you take a look at slide four in the A file.
02:00:20.000There we see, if you look at the number of hurricanes that have hit the US, because remember, we don't know about the hurricanes that we couldn't see back when we didn't have satellites.
02:00:30.000Now we see them because we have satellites, but that's obviously the wrong way to count.
02:00:35.000So if you just look at the hurricanes that landfall on the US, you get this graph.
02:00:40.000So this is from 1900 to 2022. Yeah, so 2022 is obviously not done, but it's probably done.
02:02:15.000And that's why, you know, when you do these numbers, it's very easy to get this result if you start in 1980 when they were much lower.
02:02:23.000If I can just show you the other graph again, because I showed you for all of the hurricanes, but we also have, if you take the next slide, that's just the strong hurricanes, so that's exactly the same as what you just showed, category 3 and higher.
02:02:40.000And what you see here again is that there are fewer hurricanes, not more hurricanes, hitting the U.S. today than there used to be back in the early part of 1990. Is this saying there's only one per year?
02:03:26.000So all that factors into the average, and that kicks the average up to 264%.
02:03:31.000But a lot of it is from 2006. And a lot of it is because you just, you know, go from a period when there was a relative low to a period when it's back up.
02:03:41.000On these charts, what is it differentiating as major or not major?
02:03:45.000Because then we get to like, we almost got through all the names I thought a couple years ago.
02:04:27.000Not only because they don't hit, but typically they're just one or two days.
02:04:31.000What's the percentage of them that actually hit?
02:04:33.000The problem is like when they get strong enough on the ocean that they can carry over onto the land and devastate the land.
02:04:40.000So the reason why I'm looking at landfall is because in the early part of last century, it's very likely that someone would have noticed a landfalling hurricane anywhere in the U.S. But if it's out in the middle of nowhere, there's a very good chance nobody would have noticed.
02:04:55.000Actually, you can see in the data that when the Panama Canal opened, Suddenly, ships started going a different route.
02:05:06.000So there was a big part of the Atlantic that they no longer traversed.
02:05:10.000And so the number of hurricanes dropped in those areas.
02:05:15.000Because you needed to have sort of a ship to be out there and noticing.
02:05:19.000That's why it's a very, very bad way to look at this if you just look at how many hurricanes do we know about.
02:05:25.000Because we just know about a lot more now.
02:05:44.000Well, actually, so the best evidence seems to indicate, that was one of the points that you said, that there will probably be fewer hurricanes, but they will be stronger.
02:05:54.000And overall, stronger is worse than fewer is better.
02:06:00.000Which means that overall, there'll be slightly more damage.
02:06:13.000And of course, at the same time, we're getting much better at dealing with this impact.
02:06:18.000What you're actually seeing, if you look at the total cost, for instance, on hurricane impacts and all kinds of climate impacts, It's actually going down, not up in percent of GDP. Why?
02:06:31.000Because we now know we have much better prediction.
02:06:34.000We know how to deal with these things.
02:06:36.000For instance, get a lot of stuff that can be moved, we get it out of harm's way.
02:06:41.000So every time there's a hurricane, all trucks will go to other states, that kind of thing.
02:06:46.000So there's a lot of things that don't get damaged.
02:06:49.000We can also build better, as you talked about, with houses and so on.
02:06:53.000So we have a lot of ways to reduce this, but what is happening is it'll reduce slightly less fast because of global warming.
02:07:00.000Again, not the end of the world, but a problem.
02:07:02.000So the fear-mongering would have you terrified about a future that's impossible to fix.
02:08:11.000This just says 4 hurricanes hit US and 4. And then when I Google it, it says there's at least 6, if not 11. Yeah, that's, I mean, this is period literature.
02:08:21.000I have no doubt, and the updates are for the guy.
02:10:49.000So this is basically, this is what my day job really is, because as you also know, and as we talked a little bit about, so look, there is a lot of problems in the world, and for most people, so rich people Who are well ensconced in their lives and they don't have to worry about their kids dying from infectious diseases or not having enough food,
02:11:29.000There are all kinds of other terrible things.
02:11:31.000Almost a billion people are extremely poor.
02:11:35.000So in terms of the overall impact on human health and life, elevating the economy is the most important step that people can take.
02:11:44.000It's certainly a very important part of it.
02:11:46.000And again, sorry, if I could just show you the one on malnutrition, the slide from the B stack, number 6. Sorry,
02:12:03.000so what I just want to show you was that malnutrition has come down dramatically.
02:12:07.000And again, what you see here, so this is the number of deaths from kids that are less than five years old.
02:12:14.000And again, this is very similar to the other chart, but a little bit of a difference, the difference between with climate change and without climate change.
02:12:21.000Without climate change is only slightly lower, but the overall trend is much, much, much lower than it was in 1990. And this is because we're getting better at making agriculture.
02:13:28.000We could, at very low cost, fix most of this problem.
02:13:31.000And so one of the things I try to push is to say, look, for very little money, we could actually, so we're talking about $3 billion a year or thereabouts, we could actually save almost everyone from tuberculosis.
02:13:44.000Why don't we make that one of the things we want to do?
02:14:06.000So what you're trying to promote is a balanced message, and you're trying to counter the climate change fear-mongering by saying it is one of our issues, but it is surmountable, at least in some aspects of it.
02:14:21.000Oh, look, the world will be much better off by the end of the century.
02:14:26.000But because of global warming, we'll be slightly less, much better off.
02:14:30.000So what do you think, if you contemplated the motivations for this fear-mongering and this distorted perception of this one very particular issue, you know, when you look at all the issues that we face that you've outlined, Why that one?
02:14:49.000So, as you just mentioned, it's partly because it's our kids rather than someone else's kids who are going to get influenced by this.
02:14:57.000We also just love having something to worry about.
02:15:00.000I think that's to a very large extent.
02:15:11.000Is it just the media or is it also a political ploy?
02:15:26.000The world is ending, but I can save you.
02:15:30.000I can't do that voice, but you know what I wanted to do.
02:15:35.000So fundamentally, imagine being able to say, I can save you, and we'll promise to do some stuff that will only happen long into the future, long after I've stopped being president or whatever it is.
02:15:48.000Now, of course, this is catching up with us, because now we actually have to start paying for all of this.
02:15:54.000And this is where, you know, the wheels come off because most people are just not willing.
02:15:59.000Most people are willing to pay something to do good for the environment.
02:16:03.000They're certainly not willing to pay, you know, $5,000 per person per year.
02:16:31.000And what, Elon has two, three hundred million?
02:16:35.000You know, he would run out in two weeks.
02:16:37.000He's running out of it just with Twitter.
02:16:39.000But, you know, the point is, these billionaires, sure, you know, I'm all for that they should do more, and I think some of them are doing excellent work, and some of them are probably not.
02:16:49.000But this is not how you solve this problem.
02:16:51.000This is about making sure that you actually responsibly can do it with the budgets that you have or with realistic tax increases.
02:16:58.000And, you know, increasing your tax 5% or 10% of GDP is just not...
02:17:03.000Do you have a fear that the fear-mongering and the way it's portrayed in the media is going to cause people to vote for things and to vote for people that are going to implement things that will ultimately be more destructive than they are beneficial?
02:17:20.000I mean, partly, if we're suggesting we should do policies, because we're worried that this is the end of the world coming up, that are enormously ineffective, which is what most of the world has done, then we're going to waste a lot of money.
02:17:33.000But likewise, on the other side, so you could say this is sort of Democrats here in the US, right?
02:17:38.000But likewise, there's a lot of Republicans that are just, oh, no problem whatsoever, you know, just keep fracking, do whatever.
02:18:33.000That's, in percentage, much less than we've done over the last 30 years because politicians want to go out and open new solar panel parks or wind turbine parks because that looks like something not, you know, fun eggheads.
02:19:23.000And one of the really depressing things that we're seeing now, if you've noticed, you know, growth rates are coming down.
02:19:30.000The U.S. used to grow, what, per capita, 3% per year.
02:19:34.000Your kids would be much richer than you.
02:19:38.000But in many countries, both in the U.S. and Europe, we're seeing much, much slower growth.
02:19:44.000One of the reasons, this is by no means the only reason, but one of the reasons is that we have somehow realized, oh, we should be sorry for all the things we're doing.
02:19:52.000We should be doing more to counter global warming.
02:19:56.000And one of the ways you can do that is by having little or no growth.
02:20:00.000But the problem with that, of course, is that also impacts everything else.
02:20:04.000It makes it much more of a distributional issue.
02:20:06.000If the cake is no longer growing, everybody starts bickering about who gets what slice of the cake.
02:20:13.000And it makes everything harder to deal with.
02:20:16.000And of course, at the same time, we have the entire developing world that still just wants to get out of poverty.
02:20:22.000And we're not really giving them a chance either.
02:20:24.000We're, for instance, pretty much limiting them.
02:20:26.000We've been telling Africa, for instance, for the longest time, sorry, you can't have gas.
02:20:49.000And the problem is that in sound bites on the news, you don't get to dive into all of the aspects of these complex issues.
02:20:59.000Knowing what you're knowing and like how frustrating is this for you to try to spread this message because I'm sure you get labeled.
02:21:05.000You're a climate change denier, you're a shill, you're a bad person.
02:21:12.000How frustrating is this for you when you're trying to get this message out and you're writing these books and you're giving these speeches?
02:21:22.000Fundamentally, it would be wonderful if everybody just said, hey, that sounds smart, let's do that.
02:21:27.000But that's not how the real world works.
02:21:29.000I think it's great to have the opportunity to actually push what kind of solutions work.
02:22:45.000Some of them are just hanging on and don't quite know what's going on.
02:22:49.000Some of them are far ahead of what the teacher is teaching, right?
02:22:52.000So the problem is when you're in that kind of grade where we put all the 12 year olds in one grade, you're actually having a very hard time teaching all of these kids effectively.
02:23:02.000What we've shown with, and this is not me, lots of really smart people have shown this, is in experiments, if you instead make sure that each of these kids are taught at their right level, at the level that they are, they can learn a lot more.
02:23:17.000Now, you could do that in one or two ways.
02:23:19.000You could actually shuffle these guys around.
02:23:22.000So, you know, some 11-year-olds are going to be together with some 13-year-olds and maybe one 9-year-old and one 15-year-old and so on.
02:24:34.000It's partly because so other students can also use the tablet so it becomes cheaper.
02:24:38.000It's also partly because we don't want to upset the teachers because if the teachers don't like this idea, if they are worried that computers are going to take over their jobs, they don't want to play along.
02:24:48.000And it's also because they would eventually get bored.
02:24:51.000But no, if you sit in a classroom where you're 40, 50, 60 kids, the teacher is teaching you something that you don't quite understand or you're way ahead of this, that's incredibly boring.
02:25:04.000This tablet is actually challenging right on the level.
02:25:08.000And the beauty of this is that this is research that has actually been done in randomized controlled trial studies, right?
02:25:13.000So you've done with some kids, you gave them the tablets, some kids you didn't give them tablets, and you see how much they differ.
02:25:20.000And this matters because they not only learn more, but then they'll go out when they become adults and become much more productive in their societies.
02:25:28.000So again, one of the things that we try to do, so in that big book I showed you there.
02:25:34.000We did that with 50 teams of economists and several Nobel laureates and trying to find out, of all the different things in the world, what could we do?
02:26:37.000So basically what it shows is all the different things you can do for the world, and then the length of the line shows how much bang for your buck you get.
02:26:48.000And so if it's a long line, it's a great idea.
02:27:31.000So basically, if you spend money and basically in order to get free trade, you need to pay off the world's rich farmers, but you will get an enormous amount of growth in the economy.
02:27:56.000If you get more contraception, it means two things.
02:28:00.000It partly means that women give fewer birth and that means they die less.
02:28:05.000It also means that each kid that then gets born will get more attention from their parents because there will be slightly fewer kids and they will have more capital available to them.
02:28:19.000That means they become more productive and that means the economy will grow more.
02:28:23.000This is what's typically called the...
02:28:30.000I don't think we should go over this entire chart because it'll take forever.
02:28:32.000But the idea is that there's a lot of things that we can do for the world that have great bang for the buck.
02:28:38.000And climate is one of them, but it's just one of them, right?
02:28:41.000And if you think this is the end of the world, you think that's the only thing we should be discussing.
02:28:46.000I mean, I've heard some people say, you know, if we only have till 2030...
02:28:50.000We've got to do everything for climate.
02:28:52.000And then, you know, there'll still be poor people in 2030 we can help.
02:28:55.000And I just think it's so, you know, patronizing, right?
02:29:00.000Because clearly we both want to fix climate change and fix all these other problems in the world.
02:29:05.000And we can do that, but only if we spend money smartly.
02:29:09.000So let's spend money smartly on climate and research and development.
02:29:12.000But let's also spend money on, you know, getting tablets into the educational system.
02:29:17.000Making sure we deal with tuberculosis, malaria, malnutrition, there's lots of other things where we for very little money can make an enormous amount of benefit.
02:29:26.000Well, I think that's the most important part of your message.
02:29:28.000It's not just this idea that climate change is kind of being overblown.
02:29:32.000It's a very terrifying prospect, but there's a lot of issues to deal with.
02:30:15.000And that's just not what's going to happen.
02:30:16.000And they think this is because of climate change.
02:30:18.000They think it's because of climate change, right?
02:30:20.000So we can actually both liberate ourselves and realize, yeah, problem, not the end of the world.
02:30:24.000And then also start talking about all these other issues and make sure that we actually leave this planet not just a little bit better, but a lot better.
02:30:56.000This is all the other things you were concentrating on of all the different ways that we can prioritize spending that will benefit the whole world, and that's prioritizing development, a cost-benefit analysis of the United States sustainable...