Stay Free - Russel Brand - Is Climate Change A Real Threat? With Bjørn Lomborg - #063 - Stay Free With Russell Brand

00:00:00.000 you.

00:00:10.000 I'm going to be doing a little bit of a research on this.

00:01:05.000 In this video, you're going to see the future.

00:01:17.000 Hello and welcome to Stay Free with Russell Brand.

00:01:20.000 Every week I have one in-depth conversation with someone with a fascinating and illuminating mind and expansive consciousness and unique insights.

00:01:29.000 Previously I've spoken with Rick Rubin, he's amazing, Tim Robbins, the actor, Maya, Tulsi Gabbard, Graham Hancock and on today's show we've got Danish academic and the author of False Alarm and Skeptical Environmentalist Bjorn Lomberg.

00:01:41.000 So global warming is real and it's a problem.

00:01:44.000 But we're not fixing it.

00:01:45.000 You're not going to solve global warming by telling people no.

00:01:50.000 I look at a lot of kids growing up and they're basically being told you're not going to reach adulthood.

00:01:54.000 But the reality is that when we're being told this it's the end of the world and hence this is the only thing that matters.

00:02:02.000 We're very likely to make very poor decisions.

00:02:05.000 If we can innovate the price of green energy down below fossil fuels, we'll have won.

00:02:11.000 Everyone will buy it, including China and India.

00:02:14.000 And that's why innovation is the solution to global warming.

00:02:18.000 Stay free with Russell Brand.

00:02:20.000 See it first on Rumble.

00:02:22.000 If you're a member of our Stay Free AF community, you're joining us live now on Locals.

00:02:27.000 Welcome to you.

00:02:28.000 If you've got any questions for Bjorn, please pass those on.

00:02:32.000 But not silly questions, like this person who's asking, what musical genres does Bjorn listen to?

00:02:39.000 Classical.

00:02:40.000 Alright, make the next questions very grown up and a little more serious next time.

00:02:46.000 Bjorn, you're famous for these things.

00:02:49.000 You are broadly regarded as left-wing, you wrote that book The Environmental Skeptic, and what I want to say is that your position on climate change How come?

00:03:03.000 brought you to prominence and I believe garnered you a good deal of criticism.

00:03:07.000 How come?

00:03:08.000 Yeah, it happens doesn't it?

00:03:09.000 Yes, yes.

00:03:10.000 This is what I most want to understand.

00:03:12.000 This is what I most want to understand.

00:03:14.000 I believe your position is that you say climate change is real, that climate change is man-made,

00:03:18.000 but the efforts that are being suggested to amend it will not make a sufficient difference

00:03:23.000 and there are other things that could be done that will be more meaningful.

00:03:28.000 One of the questions that I have is that I know that polluting the planet cannot be good on a spiritual level, and it seems that there's significant evidence to suggest that man-made climate change is real.

00:03:38.000 What I know and what I understand is that global elites do not promote ideas which are harmful to their interests.

00:03:47.000 I know that.

00:03:48.000 And I know that industrialization and consumerism and the commodification of everything on the planet Must be in numerous ways harmful.

00:03:57.000 Why are they?

00:03:59.000 Promoting this climate change idea and advocating for the solutions that they are including things like ESG if those things will not be effective and What about the other side of the argument?

00:04:12.000 Energy giants who are clearly pollutants I feel like of the you know like this maybe like of the biggest pollutants in the world 70 of them are So what I want to unpick is where is the power in this argument?

00:04:27.000 I recognise that if something like the argument for climate change is being as promoted as broadly as it is and is supported by powerful interests, that means that they are somehow benefiting from it, likely financially.

00:04:38.000 And the ultimate solutions that will be suggested will inhibit and impede the motion, movement and freedom of ordinary people.

00:04:44.000 But I don't quite understand how it is because it sort of seems to me like the sort of thing that typically I would believe in because I do care about the planet, I love the environment, I'd love to impede the interests of the powerful, regulate, control their businesses and their polluting behaviours.

00:04:59.000 So tell me how you've arrived at this position and tell me how powerful, in particular as a starting point, how do the powerful benefit from their current climate change rhetoric?

00:05:08.000 Well, so if you look at all those guys who went to Davos last year and go to listen to Greta Thunberg, a lot of them arrive in their own private jets.

00:05:18.000 So, in some sense, what you can see is they're telling us, well, we should cut down on all kinds of stuff.

00:05:23.000 But, of course, they're not actually interested in cutting down on their private planning.

00:05:28.000 There's this fun point of Kerry.

00:05:32.000 John Kerry, the climate czar from Biden, who went to Iceland to pick up his environmental award in private plane.

00:05:41.000 And, you know, so it's sort of like, yeah, that's not how you're going to solve this problem.

00:05:45.000 So there is a real problem.

00:05:46.000 It is a thing that we need to fix, but currently it's being suggested that we should fix it by buying, say, lots of solar, lots of wind.

00:05:55.000 Most of this is subsidized, and obviously a lot of people are making a lot of money off of it.

00:06:00.000 But the problem is, it cuts very little at fairly high cost.

00:06:04.000 So actually what we're doing is, we're doing a tiny bit of fixing climate change.

00:06:09.000 So if you actually look at the whole Paris Agreement, for instance, it will solve about 1% of all the stuff that we're talking about trying to solve.

00:06:17.000 So it will cut a very, very minimal part of what we're trying to solve.

00:06:20.000 Yet, it is going to be fantastically costly.

00:06:23.000 You know, we're talking several trillion dollars.

00:06:25.000 And of course, it's not going to be mainly the guys flying to Davos that will pay.

00:06:29.000 It'll be you and me and everybody else.

00:06:31.000 And so what I'm trying to say is, look, you're never going to solve this problem, partly by making Poor solutions, that is.

00:06:39.000 Expensive solutions, I'll fix very little.

00:06:41.000 But also, you're not going to do this by telling people you have to pay an insane amount of money.

00:06:46.000 So one study in Nature magazine showed that the average American by mid-century, if we actually tried to do the Biden plan of cutting all emissions to net zero by 2050, would cost in the order of $11,000 per person per year.

00:07:05.000 What they're doing is they're manipulating this situation so that the solutions ultimately affect ordinary people financially negatively.

00:07:14.000 I tend to believe that they're not being that cynical.

00:07:19.000 I think more it's the easy way to solve this problem.

00:07:23.000 See, we're doing something.

00:07:24.000 We're putting up solar panels.

00:07:25.000 We're putting up wind turbines.

00:07:27.000 It feels like we're doing something, but the reality of course is Emissions keep going up.

00:07:31.000 And why?

00:07:32.000 Partly because these only do a tiny bit in rich countries.

00:07:35.000 And of course, poor countries have very, very different issues.

00:07:38.000 You know, if you look at India and Indonesia and many other places, fundamentally, they want to get their population out of poverty.

00:07:45.000 How do we get out of poverty?

00:07:46.000 I mean, Britain is a great example.

00:07:48.000 You got by burning coal for 200 years.

00:07:51.000 Let's hope that the developing world won't have to do the same thing.

00:07:54.000 But I understand that they're sort of making the same priority and saying, look, we'd actually like to get out of poverty first.

00:08:00.000 I see that that's why they think that people regard globalism as an issue and globalism as a solution, because it would appear that you would not be able to create a homogenised solution without accordance across nations, but all of those narratives would have to collapse.

00:08:17.000 You'd have to say, China, India, nations that haven't benefited from a couple of hundred years of fossil fuel burning, industry, you're going to have to get up to speed because ultimately this is one planet.

00:08:28.000 Can I ask you this?

00:08:29.000 If we had 100% solar energy, or 50-50 wind and solar, would that not solve the fossil fuel issue?

00:08:38.000 It would solve surprisingly less than that.

00:08:41.000 Why?

00:08:41.000 How is that?

00:08:42.000 So, first of all, electricity is only about fifth of all energy use. So you have this idea and it's a

00:08:51.000 very typical thing when you live in a in a you know in a in a house where all the stuff that you

00:08:56.000 have is powered by electricity.

00:08:58.000 But actually your heating here is probably not electricity, it's gas, what is it? Wood? I don't

00:09:04.000 know but it's probably not electricity. I like to burn fur coats. I go out and I shoot animals.

00:09:13.000 So yeah no of course I think it's probably oil. It might be oil. It might actually be oil yeah.

00:09:18.000 And and of course most industrialized processes, most heating, a lot of cooling and and and this

00:09:25.000 is crucial all the stuff that actually underpins civilization. So fertilizer, half the world's

00:09:31.000 population is dependent on fertilizer that's produced with gas, steel and cement.

00:09:38.000 These things we don't have any good way of doing with electricity.

00:09:42.000 I see.

00:09:42.000 Again, we could eventually get there, but we're not anywhere close.

00:09:46.000 And the second part, sorry, just very briefly, is even if you had solar and wind, 100%, what happens on days when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing?

00:09:55.000 Well, you're not storing it.

00:09:56.000 Well, see, that's the other problem.

00:09:58.000 It's incredibly costly to store it for a very long time.

00:10:01.000 Costly.

00:10:02.000 Yes, costly.

00:10:02.000 Right now, The world has batteries enough to store enough electricity for 1 minute and 15 seconds.

00:10:10.000 By the end of this decade, we'll have to 11 minutes.

00:10:13.000 Remember, Germany routinely... 11 minutes? 0.78

00:10:16.000 11 minutes.

00:10:17.000 Germany routinely, every year, they have what they call Dunkelflaute.

00:10:21.000 They both have... That's typical of the Germans. 1.00

00:10:23.000 Everything sounds funny when you say it in German.

00:10:25.000 It's Dunkelflaute!

00:10:25.000 There you go.

00:10:26.000 What happens in Dunkelflaute?

00:10:28.000 When the sun is really not shining very much and there's no wind.

00:10:31.000 for five days, so that's 7,000 minutes. So you have batteries for 11 minutes or what,

00:10:37.000 and then you need electricity for 7,000 minutes. Right, but let me give you a little bit of

00:10:41.000 information, remember, and I'm just trying to appreciate and understand it as you're going along.

00:10:44.000 Electricity, and because I'm sort of Western and live in comfort and luxury,

00:10:49.000 I feel like, oh, electricity, that's the issue. That's everything.

00:10:52.000 But that's only one-fifth of the issue.

00:10:54.000 You've highlighted cement, power generation in other areas.

00:10:58.000 No, not power generation, but electricity.

00:11:02.000 Sorry, industrial processes and heating.

00:11:08.000 And the impossibility of storing electricity, even if you were able to generate that.

00:11:13.000 But so quite quickly, it seems, Bjorn, we arrive at the point that in order to solve these problems, if that truly were the intention, we would have to We're going to radically re-evaluate our entire economic models, because you'd quickly have to say, well, the cost and value of batteries is only built upon our current understanding of supply, demand, economics, manufacture.

00:11:39.000 If we had a truly globalist project, you'd say, we're making those fucking batteries because we're solving that problem, because this is how we have to resolve it, and we're going to flatten out and regulate all cost.

00:11:52.000 Right, so what you're essentially saying is that what's being highlighted by the current climate change movement are sort of problems that are manageable that don't make a meaningful difference. 0.64

00:12:07.000 Like the current capacity for solar and wind being an example of something that isn't going to significantly move the needle.

00:12:14.000 And in order to significantly move the needle, you would have to radically interrupt the ascent of certain powerful interests.

00:12:23.000 And I think that you're absolutely right.

00:12:26.000 If we tried to go net zero, remember, society can do pretty much anything they want.

00:12:30.000 It's just going to be Very, very uncomfortable to do some things, right?

00:12:34.000 We could certainly go net zero, but imagine your life without your phone, without this lighting, without the heating, without all the other stuff, and without food for 4 billion people.

00:12:44.000 There's a lot of unpleasantness built into that setup, which is why it's not going to happen.

00:12:50.000 And so, yes, we are currently just merely suggesting sort of very tiny solutions.

00:12:55.000 They're not tiny in the sense that they're not costly, but they won't solve very much.

00:13:00.000 My point has been, and I think this, so I worked together with more than 50 of the world's top climate economists and three Nobel laureates on finding out where can you actually do the most good for climate?

00:13:11.000 What they said was, this is all about innovation.

00:13:14.000 And let me just tell you a story before I tell you this thing.

00:13:17.000 But if you may have heard about this, back in the 1860s, whales, we hunted whales, we almost hunted whales to extinction.

00:13:26.000 Because whales provide this incredibly bright and clean burning fuel.

00:13:32.000 So basically, it lit up most of Western Europe and North America.

00:13:36.000 And, you know, you could tell and, you know, if there'd been green pieces in Fridays for the future, they would have gone back and said, you know, you've got to change this out and live with slightly dimmer lighting and more polluting lighting.

00:13:46.000 But hey, go back and, you know, save the whales.

00:13:49.000 And of course, people weren't actually willing to do that.

00:13:52.000 What did happen was, We found oil.

00:13:55.000 So we found an alternative.

00:13:56.000 And then suddenly that oil burnt cleaner, brighter, it was cheaper.

00:14:00.000 You don't have to go out in the middle of the ocean and kill whales.

00:14:03.000 And that was basically what saved the whales.

00:14:05.000 It was an innovation, rather than trying to tell everyone, you got to stop doing all that stuff you do, which is bad.

00:14:12.000 It doesn't work very well in telling people, I'm sorry, could you be a little colder, a little poor, a little less content?

00:14:19.000 That's not going to work.

00:14:20.000 But what will work is innovation.

00:14:23.000 That's happened a lot of times.

00:14:24.000 One thing I will outright reject there, Bjorn, is the idea that political power lies with ordinary people.

00:14:33.000 That it's, we, the people, refuse to stop using whale blubber until there is a better and greater innovation.

00:14:40.000 It was profitable for the whaling industry, then it became profitable for the oil industry.

00:14:47.000 And also what these points do for me is that we have no ethical substrata to call upon.

00:14:54.000 No one is willing, no, there is no recourse for, if we are a species that has a shared responsibility to one another and the planet to improve or alter our conditions, no one has the resources mentally, spiritually, There's not actually any more to do that.

00:15:13.000 Ultimately, all that we've been coached, trained, conditioned to a point where ultimately everybody will just do what's best for them.

00:15:21.000 Individualism, materialism, rationalism, atheism, nihilism.

00:15:26.000 No one has any faith in anything.

00:15:28.000 No one has any belief that there is no prevailing ideology that people say, well, this is what I care about.

00:15:35.000 This is what I love.

00:15:36.000 I will sacrifice. 1.00

00:15:37.000 I will kill, die for these set of beliefs. 1.00

00:15:40.000 No? 1.00

00:15:42.000 I tend to be a little more optimistic than that.

00:15:44.000 I'm optimistic!

00:15:45.000 I get your point.

00:15:46.000 I think there's a lot of people who would prefer to just watch TV than, you know, take hard choices.

00:15:51.000 I'm not blaming people, I'm saying... No, no, but on the other hand, I think there's a lot of people out there who are actually, every day, you probably had quite a few on your show, you know, people that I meet every once in a while, certainly a lot of the climate worries, you know, the Friday for Future and many others, they actually want to do something, you know, Greta Thunberg, I have strong disagreements with her.

00:16:12.000 But I think, you know, she's actually said, you know, I don't want to go by airplane.

00:16:18.000 So I'm, you know, I'm going to go through all this extra trouble to showcase that I actually care about the planet.

00:16:24.000 I think a lot of people want to do at least a moderate, moderate, moderate, sorry, moderate part of, I should just say I'm Danish.

00:16:32.000 So English, English is not my first language.

00:16:35.000 But so a moderate amount of damage.

00:16:38.000 School.

00:16:39.000 Uh, Carlsberg.

00:16:41.000 Carlsberg, of course, yes.

00:16:42.000 Preben, Elkia, Michael Laudrott.

00:16:44.000 Okay, there you go.

00:16:45.000 Brian Laudrott.

00:16:46.000 Hey, so you speak Danish?

00:16:49.000 Anyway, so... Modicum might have been what you were looking for.

00:16:51.000 Yes, that was probably what it was.

00:16:52.000 So I think people are willing to do some, but I think we just have to realize the current way we're trying to solve climate change, we're essentially saying, let's go far beyond what people are willing to do.

00:17:04.000 That's just not going to happen.

00:17:05.000 And of course, let's try to convince the Africans, you know, That's not really for you. 1.00

00:17:10.000 Of course they're not going to accept that, right?

00:17:14.000 They want to get their people out of poverty.

00:17:16.000 But I do think that we have to start having a conversation that's about altering ideology.

00:17:24.000 I think the problem is that we're not being radical enough, that we're not willing to say, we have to look at the world differently.

00:17:29.000 This is not working.

00:17:30.000 I don't know what thing's going to kill us first, whether it's going to be Climate change, civil war, inequality.

00:17:36.000 I don't know enough about it, but it seems to me that we're in a place of existential crisis.

00:17:42.000 And I believe it is a spiritual crisis.

00:17:44.000 I believe we have lost our connection to meaning, purpose, God.

00:17:49.000 And I feel that...

00:17:51.000 Look, if you're saying, oh, well, you have to let various African nations undergo their own version of an industrial revolution, commercialisation, commodification, various sets of corrupt organisations and influences, that's not enough of a vision. 0.96

00:18:07.000 The vision I want is...

00:18:09.000 Guys, we're in serious trouble!

00:18:12.000 And the climate change thing, I agree with your cynicism about the way that the climate change argument is being presented because I know that you do not get elitist, globalist interests Backing ideas that will be pejorative to their desired outcomes.

00:18:30.000 I just know that.

00:18:31.000 I'd love to hear more about how this particular trick works because I can't fully see it yet.

00:18:37.000 I can't see that, you know, for me it seems, you know, for example, you talk about Greta Thunberg, she appears to me to be an entirely authentic and passionate, saintly, you know, savantish figure that really deeply cares about an issue.

00:18:53.000 But I recognize when you see someone all over the same kind of newspapers that ultimately support corporate interests, I recognize, oh, what she's saying mustn't negatively impact their desires, because otherwise you would be seeing her.

00:19:07.000 So I take your worries.

00:19:12.000 One of the things that I try to do is two things.

00:19:15.000 It's try to show people that actually it's not like the world is coming apart right now.

00:19:20.000 I'll give you a few statistics on that.

00:19:23.000 And the second one is to say, look, I get that it would be wonderful

00:19:27.000 and I fully support your sort of crusade to get a lot more people back in contact

00:19:33.000 with their own native selves and get everything done.

00:19:36.000 That's all wonderful.

00:19:37.000 I'm going to go the other way and try and see if we can't fix, you know, some of the world's big problems with simple things that we know work.

00:19:46.000 And so let me just, on the catastrophe side, let's just remember over the last, what, 25 years?

00:19:53.000 Yeah.

00:19:54.000 One and a quarter billion people have come out of poverty.

00:19:58.000 Now that's 135,000 people every day.

00:20:02.000 While we've been talking, you know, it's a couple thousand people have come out of poverty.

00:20:05.000 How amazing is that?

00:20:07.000 I don't know, I'm just not that amazed by it when I hear things like that.

00:20:09.000 Really? 0.99

00:20:10.000 Yeah, because I feel that the general trend is we're fucked. 0.98

00:20:13.000 I don't feel like things are... But it's certainly not fucked for them, right? 0.97

00:20:17.000 There's a guy over there, got a McDonald's! 0.87

00:20:20.000 I don't feel like that's... Is it correct that for those people, No, I disagree.

00:20:29.000 I feel like these are the arguments that are used when people say, here's an area which sounds comparable but is somewhat distinct.

00:20:38.000 Of course, who am I to say that those 1 million people don't have the rights to buy their consumer objects or be lifted out of poverty or whatever it is you're saying.

00:20:45.000 But when I say, for example, hey, American democracy is meaningless.

00:20:50.000 The Republican Party and the Democrat Party are ultimately controlled by the same financial interests and nothing will meaningfully change for ordinary people.

00:20:57.000 They go, yeah, but the Democrats are going to do this thing that cuts things by 10%. 0.92

00:21:01.000 And it's, who are you to say?

00:21:02.000 You know, you wouldn't think that if you were a person.

00:21:04.000 I'm like, well...

00:21:05.000 Because of that, we are not going to radicalise to the degree that's necessary.

00:21:10.000 And I fully take that point.

00:21:14.000 I think it's easier when you're actually close to starving and you almost have no life. 0.99

00:21:20.000 That it's easier to just simply say... Yeah, do as you're fucking told. 0.98

00:21:23.000 Desperation, absolutely. 0.96

00:21:24.000 Well, but it's actually really, really good if you get a chance to be lifted out of poverty.

00:21:30.000 Of course.

00:21:30.000 Be able to, you know, teach your kids, all that kind of stuff.

00:21:33.000 I mean, I won't be poor.

00:21:34.000 Not poor like you're describing.

00:21:35.000 I'm not ever actually living in an African hut.

00:21:37.000 I've had to live like on benefits and be a crackhead and all of that kind of stuff and it's definitely better not being that.

00:21:43.000 It's definitely better not being that and now I have the luxury of contemplating what is it?

00:21:48.000 What is it we're actually trying to do here?

00:21:51.000 And I don't know, like you say you're optimistic.

00:21:53.000 I'm optimistic and what I'm optimistic about is what I'm, you know, is we can create Entirely new ideologies.

00:22:02.000 We can radically alter reality at an almost fundamental level.

00:22:06.000 And I don't want to just move around the chess pieces a little bit of, now these elites are benefiting.

00:22:11.000 Because what I feel like is the climate change argument is benefiting probably some kind of big tech digital surveillance type of billionaire oligarch elite.

00:22:23.000 And the anti-climate change is benefiting energy, fossil fuel elites.

00:22:30.000 And what I want to advocate for is for the ordinary people of the world to rise up and demand democratic control of their communities and the new systems of confederacy where we can accept differing ideologies around traditionalism and progressivism and libertarianism and anarchism as long as we are not All laboring under the yoke of globalist hegemony and tyranny.

00:22:54.000 And I don't know how to be one.

00:22:56.000 I'm really trying to work it out.

00:22:57.000 And it's yes.

00:22:58.000 I'm sorry, I don't have the right solution for coming here and not actually telling you how to fix the world.

00:23:08.000 That is that is pretty terrible.

00:23:09.000 What I do have, though, are very specific solutions that could actually help All right, let's hear those.

00:23:16.000 So, you know, for climate, imagine, so, you know, there's been research on fourth-generation nuclear.

00:23:25.000 Imagine, and there's a lot of reasons why this may not come true, but you could imagine that fourth-generation nuclear would be incredibly cheap, very safe, that seems reasonable, and it'll have no CO2 emissions.

00:23:37.000 If you could do that, and there's a lot of people who say this will happen, I'm still, you know, somewhat skeptical, but let's see.

00:23:43.000 If that would happen...

00:23:45.000 No, because Chernobyl was a bad third generation. 0.99

00:23:48.000 There's a lot of reasons why fourth generation, for instance, can't do, it'll be physically impossible to do sort of Chernobyl thing.

00:23:55.000 But fundamentally, the idea is, if you could innovate something that would basically be very cheap and powerful, and could give power 24-7, and would actually deliver no CO2.

00:24:09.000 Everyone would switch, not just rich countries like England and the US and the rest of Europe, but also Chinese, Indians, Africans.

00:24:19.000 So again, if we could innovate our way to finding smart solutions to this, that's the way you solve these problems.

00:24:25.000 So it's a little bit like the whale example.

00:24:29.000 Instead of trying to tell people, don't kill the whales, because there's all these financial interests and people want the clean light.

00:24:36.000 But if you could actually say, oh, here's a nicer, better, cheaper product that doesn't kill the whales, that would actually be really cool.

00:24:44.000 And that's what I tried to do, not just in climate, but across the world and saying, there are all these amazing things that we're sort of forgetting because they're not very sexy.

00:24:54.000 But we could, for fairly little money, change the world in amazing ways that would really make a big difference.

00:25:01.000 That's really what I'm trying to do.

00:25:02.000 That's what brings me to my optimism.

00:25:05.000 I recognize I'm not going to get the total mental breakthrough for everyone.

00:25:12.000 In some ways, I'm operating within the world, but trying to make it better even though.

00:25:16.000 And I think that's also worthwhile.

00:25:18.000 Yes, absolutely.

00:25:20.000 Of course, it is valuable to offer solutions that are in advance on what is currently being discussed and offered.

00:25:31.000 And your example of One way to end an inefficient and transgressive technology is to try to tell people, please stop, it's the whales, the plants, whatever.

00:25:48.000 But another way is, this is better and cheaper.

00:25:51.000 But the problem is, it feels to me that progressivism and the ongoing technologisation of everything is broadly I love you.

00:26:00.000 for us. It seems that... And by the way, I sort of think that I do exist in a very particular

00:26:07.000 space. I love you. You have to do this while you're saying it. My particular space is there

00:26:14.000 is a requirement for a shift in the consciousness of individuals and cultures. And so please

00:26:21.000 understand that I'm not saying, I'm not trying to nullify or even gainsay what you're explaining

00:26:30.000 I'm just always, when I feel like, oh God, we can't break people out of the idea that the solution is He's got his comfort and privilege and the acquisition of more material goods and there's this thing I think about a lot like sort of obviously you know Gandhi said like that you know we're never gonna meaningfully change the world if we don't overcome our infatuation with gadgets and trinkets and saying this in like the 1940s and

00:26:58.000 Yes.

00:26:58.000 And you're sitting with your cell phone.

00:27:01.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:27:03.000 There is no sign that we're going to be able to break this obsession with the material.

00:27:09.000 Okay, so now I think Bjorn, I think I understand a little better now what you are saying.

00:27:16.000 Firstly, is part of your argument that climate change isn't the most significant threat to our climate?

00:27:25.000 It's certainly exaggerated in much of the general storytelling, so it is a problem.

00:27:31.000 But again, you hear about this one catastrophe after another from climate, and then you see at the same time Uh, you know, if you actually look at the data, how many people die from climate related disasters?

00:27:44.000 So that would be floods, droughts, storms, wildfires, and extreme temperatures.

00:27:48.000 And we have good data for that for the last 100 years.

00:27:51.000 So, if you think back in time, in the 1920s, on average, about half a million people died every year from these climate related disasters.

00:28:00.000 Today, so last year in 2022, it was 11,000 people.

00:28:05.000 So the ones that died in Pakistan, all the people who died in India from big floods and many, many other places, that sums up to 11,000 people.

00:28:13.000 So that's like 99%, almost 99% lower, despite the fact that the world is quadruple in size.

00:28:20.000 Why is that?

00:28:20.000 It has nothing to do with climate, but has everything to do with the fact that when you get people out of poverty, they become more resilient.

00:28:28.000 They basically have much better technologies.

00:28:30.000 We work with Bangladesh, for instance.

00:28:32.000 I don't know if you know, Bangladesh in 1970 had the world's worst hurricane.

00:28:37.000 It killed somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 people.

00:28:41.000 And a lot of them didn't hear that it was coming before it was too late.

00:28:45.000 So we worked with the Bangladeshi government and we were looking at, should we build more shelters for people for where they can go to?

00:28:53.000 And it turns out, no, they've already done that.

00:28:55.000 They basically made sure that everyone has places to go for these shelters.

00:29:00.000 So basically they've gone from, you know, like having hundreds of thousands of people die in a hurricane, to having somewhere between 10 and 1,000 people dying.

00:29:08.000 That's still terrible, but it's much, much less terrible.

00:29:10.000 What they actually told us was, now we'd like to have shelters for our animals because, you know, animals are a big part of their value.

00:29:18.000 They, you know, they worry about the fact that if I'm a farmer and this is my only cow, I'd like to know that that's safe.

00:29:24.000 But it's a wonderfully better world where you have to worry about your cow than you have to worry about your kids dying from a hurricane.

00:29:33.000 So what are you saying?

00:29:35.000 That there's a kind of a hysteria around this issue?

00:29:39.000 Yes, definitely.

00:29:40.000 And why is that?

00:29:42.000 Oh, I think if you look at any political conversation, it's easy to sort of get Overtaken by hysteria, right?

00:29:50.000 When you talk to teachers, they'll tell you our kids are not learning enough.

00:29:54.000 The schools are not working.

00:29:55.000 If you talk to doctors, they'll tell you we need to spend more on hospital.

00:29:59.000 I mean, it kind of happens in all kinds of political conversations.

00:30:02.000 And I think climate is such a great opportunity because you can basically point to everything that happens.

00:30:08.000 You know, it's raining today.

00:30:10.000 I don't think it'll take all that long before people start saying, see, climate change.

00:30:14.000 And, you know, you can always blame this.

00:30:17.000 And it's a great sort of story.

00:30:18.000 Any hurricane, any heat wave, any cold wave is because of climate change.

00:30:24.000 Now, again, climate change is a real problem, but the way it's being presented is vastly exaggerated.

00:30:29.000 Why is it a real problem?

00:30:31.000 So the economist argument for this would simply be to say, We've all built our cities and our infrastructure, so all houses and everything, to a particular temperature.

00:30:41.000 So, you know, houses in Helsinki work great.

00:30:44.000 Houses in Athens, I'm not... reasonably great, right?

00:30:48.000 But they both work because they're at the temperature that they were built.

00:30:51.000 If you change that temperature, it becomes a little less optimal.

00:30:55.000 Basically, you have to change a lot of your infrastructure in the long run.

00:30:59.000 That's costly.

00:31:00.000 It is not the end of the world, but it is a problem.

00:31:03.000 your crops you basically have to grow slightly new crops you have to change your behavior slightly you will have more people dying from heat waves you'll have fewer people dying from cold waves so you have to change your your focus on getting more air conditioning and less less heating all that kind of stuff it's troublesome but of course that doesn't fit very well with the it's the end of the world kind of argument so so far it's not as bad as they say like not as many people are dying as previously used to die right yeah That the solutions that they're suggesting will only address a fraction of it and will be disproportionately costly.

00:31:42.000 And so then what is it?

00:31:45.000 Do you think that this is a case of genuine error and misinterpretation?

00:31:51.000 Or do you think that this is something more sinister than that?

00:31:57.000 So again, just like before, I tend to believe that most people are actually good-willed.

00:32:02.000 Maybe I'm just being incredibly naive, but most of the people I met, even people I strongly disagree with, want to do good.

00:32:10.000 I think it's more sort of a mindset.

00:32:12.000 If you're focused on one thing in the world, if your thing is this, we should do this, right? Then obviously that becomes

00:32:19.000 incredibly important. You latch on to everything that sort of works as

00:32:22.000 an argument for it and you become, you know, slightly focused on that, perhaps

00:32:28.000 a little overblown on that thing.

00:32:29.000 But to this degree, you're suggesting that this is a critical, critical and categorical error

00:32:34.000 that's consuming the entire planet. I don't think that can happen just because

00:32:38.000 a few people have gotten a bit carried away themselves.

00:32:40.000 There must be some central power that is benefiting significantly.

00:32:45.000 So I think newspapers love bad stories.

00:32:48.000 And look, it's not again because newspapers are ugly.

00:32:52.000 It's actually because when you give people a pile of good news and a bad news They say they want to read all the good news, they end up reading all the bad news, right?

00:33:00.000 So newspapers are basically giving us what we want, and we want bad news.

00:33:05.000 And climate is such a great bad news generator that I think we've sort of talked ourselves into that.

00:33:10.000 Now, clearly, there are also interests involved.

00:33:13.000 But I think as you would also be pointed out earlier, there's obviously also interest from the fossil fuel companies to say, oh, it's no problem.

00:33:21.000 Just keep on using it.

00:33:22.000 Using your oil heater here in the house.

00:33:27.000 So obviously there are interests on all these sides.

00:33:30.000 I'm simply trying to say The evidence, so there's only one economist who ever won the Nobel Prize in Climate Economics, William Nordhaus from Yale University in 2018.

00:33:41.000 And he basically estimated, and this is what most of the big models also estimate, is that global warming is a problem.

00:33:49.000 It will feel like, because if you try to add up all of the problems that will come from climate change, it will feel like by the end of the century, if we do nothing, that we will be 4% less well off than we otherwise would have been.

00:34:02.000 Now, remember, in the UN standard scenario, we'll be about 450% richer by the end of the century, mostly in poor countries.

00:34:10.000 So it will feel like instead of being 450% as rich, we'll only be 434% as rich.

00:34:17.000 That's a problem, but it's certainly not the sort of the end of the world kind of categorization that we often hear.

00:34:23.000 Banshee asks, do we need to accept a reduction in our level of comfort to solve these problems regardless of the method?

00:34:33.000 So, if you want to solve it now, and completely solve it, yes, you will have to see a reduction in your well-being.

00:34:42.000 It'll be a little colder.

00:34:44.000 It'll be a little darker.

00:34:47.000 You'll be a little poor.

00:34:48.000 It's not going to be the end of the world, but it is going to be noticeable less comfortable.

00:34:53.000 But that's, of course, also why this will never happen.

00:34:55.000 And it may happen somewhat in rich countries where we're willing to sort of, you know, we're so well off that we can sort of accept to maybe become slightly less well off.

00:35:04.000 But it's not going to happen in most developing countries.

00:35:07.000 No African is going to say, sure, I'll just let my people stay in, my family stay in poverty and accept that for the good of the planet.

00:35:17.000 What do you think of what you've said, Bjorn, is that The threat and impact of climate change, while real and human made, is being exaggerated.

00:35:28.000 The solutions being presented are not appropriate.

00:35:31.000 The other thing you've said is that there are other problems that are bigger and more critical threat that are not being addressed.

00:35:40.000 What are they?

00:35:42.000 So I actually try to stay away from saying that they are bigger problems, because how do you measure a bigger problem?

00:35:48.000 I mean, in some ways, the biggest problem in the world is that we all die, but we don't have, you know, immortality bottles for everyone.

00:35:54.000 So the argument is more, where can you actually do the most good for the least resources?

00:36:00.000 That's what I try to do.

00:36:01.000 That's, you know, that's sort of an economist approach to the world of saying, we have limited resources.

00:36:06.000 We have lots of problems.

00:36:08.000 Where could you spend an extra pound or an extra lira or an extra, they don't exist anymore, or an extra rupee and do the most good?

00:36:17.000 And what we try to find out is we, the world has, I don't know if you know the sustainable development goals.

00:36:21.000 Have you heard of them?

00:36:22.000 No.

00:36:23.000 So the world promised back in 2015, actually for 2016 to 30, that we would solve all problems.

00:36:32.000 Literally all problems.

00:36:33.000 There would be no more war.

00:36:34.000 We'd have fixed HIV, AIDS and malaria and tuberculosis and most chronic diseases as well.

00:36:40.000 We'd have fixed climate change.

00:36:42.000 We'd get gardens for handicapped people in urban areas and everything else you can imagine.

00:36:48.000 It's very, very nice.

00:36:49.000 But of course, we're not actually succeeding.

00:36:51.000 We're actually dramatically failing on this.

00:36:54.000 Not surprisingly, when you say we want to do everything, it's like you're not prioritizing at all.

00:36:59.000 So what we're trying to say is, We need to prioritize and say, if we can't do it all, why don't we do the smart stuff first?

00:37:07.000 So we've identified 12 amazing things that you can do.

00:37:11.000 Who's we?

00:37:12.000 So that's my think tank called the Copenhagen Consensus.

00:37:16.000 So we work for a lot of individual nations.

00:37:19.000 I mentioned Bangladesh.

00:37:20.000 We worked in India.

00:37:22.000 Uh, we worked in Malawi and Ghana and Haiti to try to look at how do you do smart stuff in urination?

00:37:29.000 So, in Haiti, for instance, we actually managed to get them to, uh, put more, uh, folic acid and iron into wheat.

00:37:37.000 Uh, and it's a great way to make sure that women who are pregnant, they typically don't know, don't have miscarriages.

00:37:43.000 So you save about 150 kids every year, but you also can stop being people from being anemic.

00:37:49.000 And the point was, it was an incredibly cheap way to achieve quite a lot of good.

00:37:55.000 And so we basically convinced the government and the president that this would be one of the great things that he should do.

00:38:01.000 It's not the only thing.

00:38:02.000 There's a lot of other things we asked him to do that they didn't do.

00:38:06.000 But my goal is sort of, you know, I would love for everyone to just pick up on all the smart stuff we say, but I'm happy if they just pick up on one.

00:38:15.000 And that was what happened in Haiti.

00:38:16.000 Novel innovation that is cost effective and achievable.

00:38:20.000 Yes.

00:38:21.000 It's not really an innovation.

00:38:22.000 A lot of these things are stuff we know how to do.

00:38:24.000 So let me just walk you through one of them.

00:38:27.000 So tuberculosis, for instance, it used to kill, you know, it used to kill about a quarter of everyone in the rich world a hundred years ago.

00:38:38.000 We don't think about that anymore because we fixed it.

00:38:41.000 You know, you don't die from tuberculosis.

00:38:43.000 I don't die from tuberculosis.

00:38:45.000 But it's actually still the most deadly infectious disease.

00:38:49.000 In 2022, it was ahead of COVID.

00:38:51.000 Now, in 2020 and 2021, it wasn't.

00:38:54.000 But it's, you know, it's fundamentally, for the last 10 years, been the most killing infectious disease.

00:38:59.000 But we don't hear about it because it's just poor people.

00:39:02.000 We know how to fix it.

00:39:04.000 It's about, you know, making sure that people actually get diagnosed.

00:39:07.000 Because if you don't get diagnosed, you go around coughing on other people and transmitting the disease and then you die.

00:39:14.000 And secondly, about getting people, and this is the tricky part, you have to take the medication for six months.

00:39:20.000 And that's actually, yeah, that's hard.

00:39:22.000 And it's somewhat uncomfortable.

00:39:23.000 Talking through death again?

00:39:24.000 Well, death is you're not here anymore.

00:39:25.000 Yeah.

00:39:26.000 Right.

00:39:26.000 And then six months?

00:39:28.000 Yeah, no, I'll go with death.

00:39:29.000 Yeah, yes.

00:39:30.000 But, you know, if you've ever been sick and need to take something, you know, like antibiotics. 0.99

00:39:35.000 Yeah, it's pain in the arse, isn't it? 0.98

00:39:37.000 When they go three weeks. 0.98

00:39:39.000 You get fine after a week and then you're sort of like, oh yeah, I forgot yesterday.

00:39:43.000 And it's sort of like, I'm fine.

00:39:45.000 But you're not, at least not for tuberculosis, right?

00:39:47.000 So the idea is you need to have like apps to make sure people take it.

00:39:51.000 Maybe groups where you get together, a little bit like Alcoholics Anonymous, but just for tuberculosis and just for those six months where you get together.

00:40:00.000 Yes, I took my pills all of last week or something like that.

00:40:05.000 There's lots of different local things, but the trick here is, That we estimate together with Stop TB, which is the world's biggest organization on tuberculosis, that for about $5 billion extra, we've actually promised to spend even more globally, but just for $5 billion extra, we could save almost all of these people for the rest of eternity.

00:40:24.000 And of course, very quickly, you almost don't need any money because there'll be no reservoir of death left over.

00:40:31.000 So you could save about 27 million people's lives.

00:40:35.000 And remember, this is crucial also because These people are typically middle-aged people.

00:40:40.000 They're not young people, but they're, you know, in the prime of their lives.

00:40:44.000 We've already schooled them.

00:40:46.000 They now have kids of their own, and then they die.

00:40:49.000 And that's terrible, not just for them, but also for the family and for the country.

00:40:53.000 So one of these things is simply to say, here is a way that you can spend a little bit of money and get an enormous amount of benefit.

00:41:00.000 So we do, and this is, you might not like this, but this is what economists do, right?

00:41:05.000 We try to put a price on everything.

00:41:06.000 So we say, how much is it worth to save a life?

00:41:09.000 How much is it worth to avoid all the agony?

00:41:13.000 How much do you lose in productivity?

00:41:15.000 How much do you save in the healthcare sector?

00:41:17.000 If you try to add up all of that, It turns out that for every pound you spend, you do 46.

00:41:24.000 pounds sorry i want to say dollars 46 pounds of good for every pound spent that's an amazing achievement right and so again what we try to say is there's some really really effective policies out there that we're ignoring because they have no obvious constituency they're mostly about poor people it's it doesn't feel like it's all that important because you know we we care more about oh i need organically grown carrots and that kind of stuff and that's all fine and good but i would love us to also Care about, you know, some of these things.

00:41:54.000 So we're really pushing.

00:41:56.000 Here are 12 amazing things that we could do.

00:42:00.000 I suppose the reason people don't care is even though you said that that one pound or dollar is fine by the way most people watching this are probably American and like the sort of the ideology the sort of the I the kind of prevailing mentality does not appreciate or care about those but you're saying even it's beneficial economically and you feel that when you translate these ideas into some kind of into the language of economics and it's More likely to be impactful, or it's just it's real.

00:42:32.000 So you should tell that story.

00:42:33.000 Actually, you're not going to get better off in the sense that you'll have more money, right?

00:42:38.000 Because these are people you're saving.

00:42:39.000 So it's not economically beneficial.

00:42:42.000 It just happens to be an incredibly good thing to do.

00:42:45.000 So we try to translate good into dollars, but that's really just a measure of trying to say, you've got to look at how much do you have to spend in order to achieve a certain benefit.

00:42:57.000 It's just like when we talk about climate, right?

00:42:58.000 I mean, how much do you spend on the solar panels and how much do you avoid climate damage?

00:43:04.000 Here we're simply saying, if you spend a little bit on tuberculosis, you can actually get a huge benefit.

00:43:10.000 Let me just tell you one other story.

00:43:12.000 I've lots of them, but, you know, just stop me.

00:43:15.000 But, you know, there's Globally, we have really bad education.

00:43:20.000 I mean, we have pretty bad education many places in the rich world, but in the poor world, it's really, really bad.

00:43:26.000 So, although we have gotten everybody into school, which was nice, and that was our promise back in 2000 to 2015, they learn almost nothing.

00:43:35.000 So, although we, we say that we don't have illiteracy anymore, they, Functionally, a lot of these guys don't read very well.

00:43:44.000 So, you know, one of the tests you give 10 year olds in the developing world is to say, read the sentence.

00:43:51.000 And it says, BJ has a red hat, blue shirt and yellow socks.

00:43:58.000 What color is the hat?

00:44:00.000 It's red, right?

00:44:02.000 I would struggle in that education system.

00:44:07.000 I was thinking about why Vijay is putting so many primary colours together in his outfit.

00:44:11.000 He's really badly dressed.

00:44:14.000 This kid doesn't deserve to be dragged out of poverty until he starts working with some neutral colour schemes.

00:44:21.000 Anyway, so 80% of kids in the developing world fail this test.

00:44:26.000 That's terrible.

00:44:27.000 But it turns out that there is an amazing way to, and that's, of course, again, you know, this is the sort of optimism that I try to bring to the table.

00:44:34.000 When you ask people out there, there are lots of ways not to do it.

00:44:38.000 So Indonesia is shown as a couple of them.

00:44:40.000 They actually doubled teachers' salaries.

00:44:44.000 And because of the way they did it, some places got doubled before other places.

00:44:48.000 You can show that teachers are really, really happy, which you would kind of expect.

00:44:53.000 But it didn't affect the outcome on students at all.

00:44:58.000 There is no change in their outcome.

00:45:00.000 So there's a famous paper called, you know, double for nothing.

00:45:03.000 Basically, you pay a lot more money, but you didn't actually improve the schooling outcome.

00:45:08.000 However, there's an amazing way you can do this.

00:45:10.000 The big problem in education is that, and this is true everywhere, but especially in developing countries, if you have like, you know, 60 kids that are all 12 year olds, because that's how we do classes, You know, if you try to teach them anything, some of them are going to be totally lost.

00:45:27.000 And some of them are going to be incredibly bored because they're way ahead.

00:45:30.000 And you're really only teaching a small segment of that class, right?

00:45:33.000 Because they're all over the board.

00:45:35.000 The problem is to teach them at their right level.

00:45:39.000 One way you can do that, and this has been tested in a lot of places.

00:45:42.000 We're actually helping Malawi to do this for their entire country now.

00:45:47.000 So one way you can do that is by putting these kids in front of a tablet One hour every day.

00:45:53.000 So the tablet will be shared.

00:45:55.000 Other kids will come in and do that as well.

00:45:57.000 But one hour a day, they get taught either mathematics or their own language in their own language.

00:46:04.000 By the tablet.

00:46:06.000 Obviously, it's a special program that's been developed and stuff.

00:46:09.000 But the trick is that that tablet knows exactly where that kid is.

00:46:14.000 So, you know, if he or she's struggling, it'll sort of go back and be slower.

00:46:18.000 If that kid is really bored, it'll go fast and teach more.

00:46:21.000 Turns out that by that little thing, you can actually teach these kids the equivalent of what they would have learned in three years.

00:46:29.000 In just one year.

00:46:30.000 So you can, you know, you can teach them three times as much.

00:46:33.000 That means that they will become much brighter.

00:46:35.000 They will be better able to deal with all their problems in their nation at very low cost.

00:46:40.000 So we estimate that for every dollar you spend, so it costs about $25.

00:46:45.000 Well, per kid per year, because you need, you know, you need solar panels to charge the typically they don't have power to charge the tablets.

00:46:52.000 You also need a safe to lock them in because otherwise they'll get stolen and some of them will break up and all that kind of stuff.

00:46:59.000 So, if you spend that $25, you actually make that kid smarter, better educated, and the long run, he or she will be better equipped to deal with that country, leaving them with about $54 of benefits.

00:47:13.000 I see what interests you is evident opportunities to improve that are achievable and popularising them.

00:47:25.000 Does it not sometimes, do you not wonder, Bjorn, do you think it's a kind of inertia that prevents these ideas from being taken on board?

00:47:36.000 Or do you imagine as I do that reality is organised around the interests of a relatively small number of elite institutions and corporations and if they can't extract profit from these endeavours they're very unlikely to be carried out and the only sociological and humanitarian aid that is ever carried out is a panacea, palliative or distraction in order for the agenda and interests of the powerful to continue unimpeded and that even where there is interest, there is

00:48:09.000 no power to meaningfully change the trajectory of, if not world events, the kind of solutions

00:48:17.000 that you are presenting.

00:48:19.000 Seems like if you did have access to the Tunisian government or like you said in Bangladesh,

00:48:26.000 you were able to get these measures taken on board and it was relatively effective.

00:48:32.000 Do you not imagine, mate, from what you know about climate change, that they must know

00:48:37.000 that as well and that they are not doing that because presumably the way that their agenda

00:48:43.000 is organised, what is power other than the ability to influence an organised reality?

00:48:50.000 And the most powerful people, interests in the world, are the interests that organise reality.

00:48:55.000 So the agenda that gets set, the information that gets conveyed, the arguments that get advanced, the information that gets censored, is all being organised around those principles.

00:49:07.000 I understand that we are entering into an age where information is now available in a way that is completely unprecedented.

00:49:14.000 So there is some new requirement for an ability to censor and control data, to condemn, cancel and criticize alternative voices.

00:49:24.000 All these things have become necessary because the potential to convey information is now has radically advanced.

00:49:32.000 The potential to organize, dispute, disruption, radical activism and protest has radically advanced.

00:49:38.000 So now to counter that, the hegemonic powers need to be able to bleach out that problem through sort of reductivism, demonization, from pretty old school medieval social tools in fact.

00:49:55.000 And so Like, I obviously applaud your endeavours to create positive solutions and fascinated to hear that this is something that you're working on with Jordan Peterson, who obviously is a person that sort of meets head-on the cultural and ideological challenges.

00:50:13.000 And I've spoken to Jordan a number of times and I adore him in many, many ways.

00:50:18.000 But I like that he faces so much criticism because I think he's attacking He's attacking some pretty entrenched systems of power.

00:50:28.000 And also, as I've said to him personally, I disagree with him in some of the areas.

00:50:31.000 I disagree with everybody.

00:50:33.000 I disagree with my own wife.

00:50:36.000 So, with this project that you're currently pursuing, 12 ideas, how is it that you are planning to advance these ideas?

00:50:48.000 Where are you looking to get traction?

00:50:50.000 So I'll answer your question first and sorry answer your previous question first on on isn't this, you know, isn't this hard if there's just all these.

00:50:58.000 Entrenched power structures that basically want to sit on the entire planet, if you will.

00:51:05.000 And yes, I think there is certainly some argument to that.

00:51:08.000 Again, I tend to probably be a little more optimistic.

00:51:11.000 I think most people, even the richest kinds of people, they also want to do good.

00:51:16.000 They actually also want to be remembered to have done good stuff.

00:51:19.000 Why ain't Bill Gates promoting your gear?

00:51:23.000 Actually, he is.

00:51:24.000 He's funding this project.

00:51:25.000 So there you go.

00:51:29.000 So so but you know, fundamentally, the idea here is to say that I think you're right that a lot of money gets spent on on sort of this, you know, keeping everybody at check.

00:51:41.000 But some money, and what we're trying to say is, all right, if some money, if some resources are actually being spent on trying to do good.

00:51:48.000 And I think, you know, some of the money that we spend on climate is actually trying to do good.

00:51:52.000 What does Bill Gates think about your climate change hysteria perspective?

00:51:59.000 You've got to ask him.

00:52:00.000 He feels, I think, I mean, he's written a book about it.

00:52:03.000 I think he's somewhat more concerned, but he's very much aligned with the idea of saying, You are not going to solve this problem before it's sufficiently cheap that people will actually want to buy it.

00:52:16.000 So, I think he feels that I'm probably a little too optimistic.

00:52:20.000 I think, obviously, he's wrong.

00:52:21.000 Otherwise, I would have changed my mind.

00:52:24.000 But he's probably a little more worried about climate.

00:52:27.000 But I think he agrees on a lot of the basic fundamental points, namely, that we need to innovate in order to get better technology so that it'll basically become this whale versus petrol kind of solution.

00:52:42.000 That's also why he's investing in fourth generation nuclear.

00:52:46.000 There's a lot of different proposals in fourth generation, and it's very likely that only one of them will go through.

00:52:52.000 And that's, of course, why he may very well end up wasting all his money.

00:52:56.000 And that's what innovation is.

00:52:57.000 You waste a lot of money on a lot of different things, but it's a tiny bit compared to the incredible opportunity of actually powering the world cleanly and very cheaply.

00:53:07.000 Yes.

00:53:08.000 All right, Bjorn, thank you so much for joining us for this conversation.

00:53:14.000 It's really kind of you to explain those rather complex global issues that are difficult to outline in such a candid and straightforward way.

00:53:24.000 I really appreciate your time.

00:53:25.000 Thank you very much.

00:53:26.000 On Monday, our guest is the investigative journalist Kit Clattenburg from the Grey Zone.

00:53:30.000 On Tuesday, we're talking to the President of the Amazon Worker-Led Labour Union.

Stay Free - Russel Brand - January 20, 2023

Is Climate Change A Real Threat? With Bjørn Lomborg - #063 - Stay Free With Russell Brand

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