The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1896 - Bjorn Lomborg

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!

00:00:04.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:06.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

00:00:12.000 Would you like coffee?

00:00:13.000 So, see?

00:00:14.000 I brought my Mountain Dew diet.

00:00:15.000 Oh, you're a Mountain Dew diet.

00:00:17.000 Oh, boy.

00:00:17.000 I like a man who prepares for his podcasts.

00:00:21.000 All right, we're rolling?

00:00:22.000 We're up?

00:00:22.000 Did you get that part?

00:00:23.000 This dude drinks Mountain Dew diet.

00:00:25.000 That is like the anti-environmentalist beverage of choice.

00:00:28.000 Is it?

00:00:29.000 No, I'm kidding.

00:00:30.000 Aluminum is actually good, right?

00:00:32.000 Because aluminum does get recycled.

00:00:33.000 You can recycle it, yeah.

00:00:33.000 It does get recycled.

00:00:34.000 Oh, yeah, yeah.

00:00:35.000 It's no problem.

00:00:35.000 We were so heartbroken reading this article recently about plastics.

00:00:39.000 It's like 5%, right?

00:00:41.000 Single-use plastics get recycled.

00:00:44.000 Every time you throw your bottle in the right bin, you feel like you're a good person.

00:00:49.000 I'm like, I'm a good person.

00:00:50.000 I put it in the blue bin.

00:00:51.000 I'm a good person.

00:00:53.000 The right way to probably handle that, that's a whole different conversation, is just simply to burn it and reuse the energy.

00:00:59.000 Right.

00:01:00.000 How would you do that, though, and not pollute the air?

00:01:03.000 We do that all over the world, especially in Europe.

00:01:06.000 You just put a scrub on the smokestack.

00:01:10.000 That's all you do?

00:01:11.000 Like, that's that simple?

00:01:12.000 Yeah.

00:01:13.000 It really is.

00:01:13.000 It doesn't have any—well, come on.

00:01:14.000 It's supposed to have some emissions.

00:01:16.000 Sure.

00:01:17.000 I mean, nothing is zero.

00:01:18.000 Right.

00:01:19.000 Is it like a car?

00:01:21.000 Or is it like a million cars?

00:01:23.000 No, no.

00:01:24.000 I think it's probably less than a car.

00:01:26.000 It's not something I've looked at.

00:01:28.000 A million cars sounds gross, but that's our city.

00:01:30.000 Every day in Austin, you get a million cars.

00:01:32.000 The emissions from waste burning, very, very low.

00:01:38.000 So I remember people worried a lot about dioxins and that kind of stuff.

00:01:41.000 It turns out we can get rid of virtually all of it.

00:01:46.000 So is that the trade-off?

00:01:49.000 You have some emissions from the burning of the plastics, but you're getting rid of the plastics, which is a real—is it a net gain for the environment?

00:01:58.000 Because the plastics are a real problem, particularly in the ocean and in landfills.

00:02:03.000 It's a real issue.

00:02:04.000 So the real issue here is once you decide to say you have to switch it into all these different bins, you have everyone sit.

00:02:13.000 I was just at a conference in Stanford, and you could just see everyone, and I did the same thing.

00:02:17.000 You're sort of like, oh my God, what am I going to do?

00:02:19.000 And you feel like you did the wrong thing no matter what you do, and you probably did.

00:02:23.000 And most of it, as you just said, won't get recycled.

00:02:26.000 Why?

00:02:26.000 Because back in, you know, five, ten years ago, we just took all of this and sent it to China.

00:02:32.000 And had them recycle it.

00:02:34.000 And this is why there's so much plastic in the oceans.

00:02:37.000 It's not because anybody just throw it out.

00:02:39.000 It's because we shipped it away to feel good about ourselves, but we didn't want to pay.

00:02:44.000 And then, of course, when you get this barge with all this crap plastic, you either say, should we recycle it and spend a lot of money?

00:02:51.000 Or maybe just happen to lose it on the ocean. 0.94

00:02:55.000 That's where most of this plastic actually comes from.

00:02:58.000 Really?

00:02:59.000 They just dump it out?

00:03:00.000 Yeah.

00:03:00.000 So if you burn it instead...

00:03:02.000 It's no problem.

00:03:03.000 You just throw everything in one bucket.

00:03:05.000 You recycle the energy, and it's very, very cheap for everyone.

00:03:09.000 Nobody has to sit and stand there and worry.

00:03:11.000 And you'll actually do what you just pointed out, 95% gets done anyway.

00:03:17.000 So if we just do that, it will have a net gain on the environment.

00:03:22.000 We'll remove plastics, like particularly from the ocean.

00:03:25.000 Who's that young gentleman that we've had on the podcast that developed that machine to extract the plastic from the ocean?

00:03:35.000 Yeah.

00:03:35.000 Tip of your tongue, son.

00:03:37.000 Very, very...

00:03:37.000 I mean, he was...

00:03:39.000 I believe he was 19 years old when he came up with the idea and implemented it.

00:03:45.000 You know, had like a few different models.

00:03:47.000 Boyan Slott.

00:03:48.000 Boyan Slott.

00:03:49.000 Thank you.

00:03:49.000 Sorry, Boyan.

00:03:50.000 My memory's shit in the morning. 0.98

00:03:52.000 But he figured out how to extract some of it, and then they took that plastic and then converted it into things you could buy, like sunglasses and things along those lines. 0.99

00:04:03.000 And all of this is nice.

00:04:05.000 And look, we should definitely try to clean up the ocean.

00:04:07.000 But again, I tend to think that we try to make it too hard.

00:04:12.000 If you actually want this to work for a population of 8 billion, you need to have simple municipal waste recycling.

00:04:20.000 And that's very often just that you recycle glass, you recycle paper, you burn most of the other stuff.

00:04:26.000 And then you recycle some of the really valuable stuff.

00:04:28.000 But doesn't that cost a lot of money to do in places that are strapped for resources?

00:04:33.000 One of the things that you always see when you see video footage of countries overseas that are impoverished is you see a lot of trash. 0.84

00:04:40.000 Oh, yes.

00:04:41.000 Because they don't have the money to process it.

00:04:42.000 No, no.

00:04:43.000 Right?

00:04:43.000 And that's why the first thing you want is just simply good trash collection.

00:04:48.000 So you get rid of it.

00:04:49.000 So we did a big project in Dhaka or for Bangladesh.

00:04:53.000 And one of the things we focused on was also just simply getting trash off the streets.

00:04:57.000 Because it's unsightly, it actually leads to more crime, it leads to...

00:05:02.000 More destitution.

00:05:03.000 Probably also transmit disease.

00:05:05.000 And it's fairly cheap to get rid of.

00:05:07.000 This is not rocket science.

00:05:08.000 So there's a lot of ways that you can do that.

00:05:10.000 But instead, we come in and say, no, no, you need to recycle.

00:05:13.000 You need to have three different baskets and all that kind of stuff. 0.92

00:05:16.000 No, you just need to get rid of it.

00:05:18.000 That's how you also get rid of the plastics in the ocean.

00:05:21.000 And I think we'll have that conversation a lot of times.

00:05:25.000 A lot of these, oh, we should do the absolute best for Hmm.

00:05:38.000 There should be a real...

00:05:43.000 Public understanding of the dangers of these plastics and microplastics getting into your body, too.

00:05:49.000 It's just so weird that we've developed this entire society based on this petrochemical product that ultimately gets into your body.

00:06:00.000 And has negative effects.

00:06:02.000 So the microplastics are possibly an issue.

00:06:06.000 It's not quite clear yet whether they are.

00:06:08.000 But that's a concern, and that's certainly something we should look at.

00:06:10.000 But also remember, pretty much everything else that you have with plastics is incredibly useful, right?

00:06:16.000 It packages which actually reduces loss of pretty much anything you can think of dramatically.

00:06:21.000 And of course, through COVID, we realized it's a really good thing to have one-use plastic stuff.

00:06:26.000 Yeah.

00:06:27.000 So, again, most things in the real world are both a problem and a benefit, and we need to find out how do we make it more of a benefit and less of a problem, but we need to stop having this conversation, oh, you can't have anything of this bad thing.

00:06:42.000 That's not how we organize our societies.

00:06:43.000 That's not how we think, and that's certainly not how we make good choices.

00:06:46.000 That makes sense, but if we know that there are alternatives to plastic, And we know that there's so many different problems with plastic, it being non-biodegradable.

00:06:57.000 Isn't there some plastic that they can make with plant fiber that's biodegradable?

00:07:03.000 Then there's the phthalate thing.

00:07:06.000 I'm sure you're probably aware of this, Dr. Shanna Swan.

00:07:09.000 Do you know this whole thing about what's happening to when women are pregnant and their bodies have levels of phthalates above a certain level, it has an effect on the reproductive cycle of the child.

00:07:23.000 And they can do studies in mammals and they show that when the female is pregnant and she encounters these chemicals from plastics It fucks with the gender of the child, like where their taints shrink,

00:07:40.000 which is weird, but in mammals, apparently that's a representation of whether or not it's a male or a female.

00:07:46.000 It's one of the best ways of distinguishing, whether it's a male or a female. 0.91

00:07:50.000 It's the size of the taint when it's a baby, because the male taint is 50 to 100% larger than the female taint. 0.86

00:07:55.000 She's hilarious.

00:07:56.000 She's got a really funny thing on her Instagram because it also causes a decline in sperm production. 1.00

00:08:05.000 And so her way of approaching it that's funny is she has the jizz quiz and she does this thing. 0.98

00:08:10.000 She's like this adorable petite lady who is a brilliant doctor. 1.00

00:08:16.000 But she's kind of being funny and at the same time sounding the warning shot. 0.98

00:08:21.000 Like, hey, this is fucking with human beings' reproductive cycles. 0.97

00:08:24.000 And since the invention of petrochemical plastics that we use in basically everything, from that point to today, there's a very clear drop in fertility rates, a very clear drop in male sperm count, a very clear drop in penis and testicle size, 0.95

00:08:40.000 and with females, there's higher rates of miscarriages. 0.99

00:08:44.000 And she believes through her research that this is connected and that these chemicals that we're getting from these plastics are literally affecting the development cycle of human babies.

00:08:55.000 Yeah.

00:08:55.000 And look, I've done some work on this.

00:08:59.000 And the thing you have to worry about.

00:09:01.000 So we should definitely be concerned.

00:09:02.000 That sounds like a giant issue.

00:09:04.000 And we should certainly be looking at it.

00:09:06.000 The best data, as I understand this, is the fact that sperm counts have gone down dramatically over the last 30 to 40 years.

00:09:15.000 You haven't looked at the taints?

00:09:17.000 No, I haven't.

00:09:18.000 This is a big-time taint study.

00:09:19.000 Sorry.

00:09:20.000 And what it turns out, of course, is that you tell people that they have to abstain for a week or four days or a week.

00:09:27.000 I can't remember.

00:09:28.000 And that's potentially possible that people would do in the 50s.

00:09:32.000 It's very unlikely.

00:09:33.000 It happens today and we know that they don't- So you think more people jerk off now?

00:09:36.000 That's an interesting perspective. 0.53

00:09:38.000 I bet you're right.

00:09:39.000 Hold on a second.

00:09:40.000 Now I'm on Team Bjorn.

00:09:44.000 That makes sense.

00:09:45.000 The point is not that we shouldn't be concerned about issues and that we should be investigating things, but you also got to remember Our civilization is actually really, really good at making sure that we are concerned about all the different things.

00:09:58.000 And how do we know?

00:09:59.000 Because we live much longer.

00:10:01.000 This is one of the things I think almost everyone forgets.

00:10:04.000 In 1900, the average life expectancy on planet Earth was 32 years.

00:10:09.000 Last year, it was 74 years.

00:10:11.000 Right, but you know why it was 32 years, right?

00:10:13.000 Infant mortality.

00:10:14.000 It was infant mortality about three quarters.

00:10:17.000 But what's happening is still that it goes up.

00:10:20.000 So this is a fantastic statistic.

00:10:22.000 You're going to be surprised about this.

00:10:23.000 So even in rich countries, it goes up for every year you live.

00:10:27.000 It goes up three more months.

00:10:29.000 So for every four years, you actually get one more year in life expectancy.

00:10:35.000 You could be young Jamie forever.

00:10:37.000 Kind of.

00:10:38.000 You're going to run out of runway eventually.

00:10:40.000 But the point here is that we're actually really good at doing these things.

00:10:44.000 And yes, we should still be concerned.

00:10:46.000 One of the reasons why we're good at it is because we're good at being concerned.

00:10:49.000 But we should not be so scared that we end up thinking, oh my god, all these things are going to happen.

00:10:54.000 Well, I don't think people are necessarily scared, but they should...

00:10:59.000 I think they should be concerned, and I think we should recognize when things are detrimental to human health, you know, like the plastics thing.

00:11:07.000 Like, just to dismiss that and go, well, everything's better than it was before, and you live longer.

00:11:12.000 Right, but it might, like, literally be affecting the way human beings develop in a negative way.

00:11:17.000 And who knows what...

00:11:18.000 I mean, right now they're looking at sexual side effects.

00:11:21.000 What kind of cognitive...

00:11:24.000 What cognitive impairment side effects does it have? 0.99

00:11:28.000 Who the fuck knows? 0.99

00:11:30.000 And we had a very good example of that with lead that we added to gasoline. 0.99

00:11:35.000 And that was a terrible idea.

00:11:36.000 Please explain the story behind that because it's really bananas.

00:11:40.000 So the fundamental thing is it makes your gasoline run a little better.

00:11:44.000 So you added this lead to all cars.

00:11:48.000 What stops your car from knocking?

00:11:50.000 Yeah.

00:11:50.000 Yeah, those old engines were like bang, bang, bang, bang.

00:11:53.000 And they didn't do it quite as much.

00:11:55.000 I love the sound effects. 0.93

00:11:56.000 You ever see those old shitty cars? 0.99

00:11:58.000 Man, it was like guns were going off. 1.00

00:12:00.000 Yeah, and it just had that huge side effect that actually makes us all dumber. 0.95

00:12:05.000 Yeah, the whole population.

00:12:07.000 Giant populations of cities lost many percentage points of IQ. Yeah, so like 3 to 5 IQ points.

00:12:13.000 That's nuts!

00:12:14.000 5%!

00:12:15.000 Just so your car could run smoother.

00:12:17.000 And this again...

00:12:19.000 Yeah.

00:12:19.000 Because we all remember, I don't know, thalidomide, the idea that you were giving...

00:12:25.000 Thalidomide.

00:12:26.000 Thalidomide.

00:12:26.000 Sorry, I just read these words.

00:12:28.000 I don't actually say them.

00:12:29.000 Oh, you never heard thalidomide baby before?

00:12:31.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:12:31.000 It's terrible.

00:12:32.000 Yes.

00:12:32.000 Terrible.

00:12:32.000 And the point is, there are these terrible stories and there are sign markers to tell us we should be careful.

00:12:38.000 But again, I also just want to come back to realizing that when you look at the whole picture, we're actually doing amazingly much better.

00:12:45.000 Remember, at the same time, while we lost these five IQ points, what we see now in IQ development is that kids are getting smarter and smarter, probably because you get better food, you get better childhood, you get better education, you get more stimulated.

00:12:58.000 There are all these kinds of things.

00:12:59.000 So we've actually gone up, what, 30 IQ points or something over the last 100 years?

00:13:03.000 So 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.

00:13:15.000 We've taken it out and it's mostly cleared up. 1.00

00:13:18.000 Now you say dramatic increase in IQ. What's that attributed to?

00:13:21.000 So there's a lot of controversy we don't quite know.

00:13:25.000 I mean, as I mentioned, we think it's because, you know, kids are no longer starving.

00:13:30.000 They get good nutrition.

00:13:33.000 They get much more stimulated.

00:13:35.000 One of the important things is that kids get stimulated when they're young, that they actually get to play around and learn stuff.

00:13:42.000 Video games is probably also one of the things that actually increase your eye-brain coordination.

00:13:48.000 You shouldn't tell people that.

00:13:50.000 Then they're just going to play video games.

00:13:51.000 I'm increasing my brain coordination.

00:13:53.000 I think that's actually been proven though, hasn't it?

00:13:56.000 Yeah.

00:13:56.000 That it has a similar effect on the brain as traditional games of intellect, like chess.

00:14:02.000 Yeah.

00:14:03.000 It's nuts.

00:14:04.000 Well, it again...

00:14:06.000 So I guess the point that I try to make, and I'm sure we'll get to that when we start talking about global warming and all the other problems, is that we need to recognize that we have real problems in this world.

00:14:15.000 But it's not that the world is sort of, you know, the wheels are coming off, which is very often the conversation that I think a lot of people feel like they're in.

00:14:24.000 When you ask, you know, kids and young people, for instance, on climate change, they're terrified.

00:14:30.000 Yeah, that's an unfortunate thing because a lot of these young kids that are gluing themselves to paintings, they don't have a real perspective.

00:14:37.000 They're like 18, 19 years old and they really think like they're saving the world.

00:14:41.000 Yeah.

00:14:42.000 Because their brains aren't fully formed and they've been like devouring propaganda like it's cheesecake.

00:14:47.000 Yeah.

00:14:47.000 That's the problem.

00:14:48.000 Yes.

00:14:49.000 You know, I had on Randall Carlson and Graham Hancock yesterday, and the podcast will be released on Thursday.

00:14:56.000 And it's this amazing podcast talking about moments in the Earth's history where the Earth experienced asteroid impacts, comet impacts.

00:15:07.000 And that there's a period around 12,000 something years ago where we for sure got hit by these big impacts of either exploding in the sky above Earth or hitting the ground.

00:15:23.000 And there's plenty of physical evidence of this, and it's called the Younger Dryas Impact Theory.

00:15:28.000 But they were talking about the rapid change in the climate.

00:15:31.000 How the sea levels rose, the ice caps melted, all because we got pummeled by asteroids. 0.99

00:15:36.000 This shit has gone on forever. 0.98

00:15:39.000 That's just natural stuff from getting hit by space. 0.99

00:15:42.000 If 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.

00:15:53.000 It's never been stable.

00:15:55.000 So I guess the question is, how much of an effect are we having on these wild cycles?

00:16:01.000 What can you really blame it on?

00:16:03.000 And what can we do, if anything, to turn it around?

00:16:06.000 Yeah.

00:16:07.000 Those are the reasonable questions, right?

00:16:09.000 Yes, and a long one.

00:16:11.000 Sorry.

00:16:11.000 Sorry about that.

00:16:12.000 I get a little carried away.

00:16:13.000 I get excited about this one because it seems kind of cultish.

00:16:15.000 It is.

00:16:16.000 So look, if you look around and if you look back in time, absolutely there's been huge changes, as you point out.

00:16:23.000 Sea levels from an ice age to today has gone up, what, 400 feet? 0.98

00:16:28.000 Without us even doing shit. 0.97

00:16:30.000 With nothing from our impact. 0.96

00:16:34.000 With all that said, so that's sort of the background, and that's important to know.

00:16:38.000 We don't live in thousands or millions of years.

00:16:41.000 We live right now, and we kind of care about what's going to happen in the next 100 and next 200 years.

00:16:46.000 To a large extent also because we've built all of our cities.

00:16:50.000 So Austin is built in a pretty warm climate, I'm assuming.

00:16:53.000 Coming from southern Sweden, I think it's a lot warmer here than it is where I'm in.

00:16:58.000 Yeah.

00:16:59.000 So, you know, cities are built to the temperature that they used to have for the last hundred years.

00:17:05.000 So if temperatures change, even if it's just somewhat, it'll be inconvenient.

00:17:10.000 It'll actually be a problem.

00:17:11.000 And that, I think, is really why we're talking about global warming.

00:17:14.000 It's a problem that we are causing.

00:17:17.000 So we are actually changing the temperature, not by these enormous amounts that you were talking about.

00:17:22.000 They're not the asteroids of the world.

00:17:24.000 But there's an issue that we should be careful about and that we should pay attention to and that we should talk about.

00:17:30.000 So how do we fix it in the best possible way?

00:17:33.000 Before you go to that, how do we know how much of an impact our society is having on the overall effect?

00:17:41.000 Like if there is a warming of the globe, how do we know?

00:17:45.000 How much of an impact?

00:17:47.000 Is there a real science that points out the amount of carbon and the emissions that we release has X amount of effect, which will equal this amount of temperature rise?

00:17:56.000 Is that solidified?

00:17:58.000 So, I'm a social scientist, right?

00:18:00.000 So, I basically just read all the- Oh, you're one of those guys.

00:18:03.000 I'm one of those guys, yes.

00:18:04.000 Sorry.

00:18:05.000 Should I leave now?

00:18:07.000 So I basically just take for granted what the UN Climate Panel guys are telling us.

00:18:12.000 I think they have – I've spoken to a lot of them.

00:18:15.000 I've read a lot of their work.

00:18:17.000 I think they're really trying hard to show that what they typically say is between half and all of the change that we've seen over the last hundred years is because of us.

00:18:27.000 And they've sort of trended towards all because of us.

00:18:32.000 It feels like that's possibly a little bit too much.

00:18:35.000 But most of it is certainly because of us.

00:18:37.000 Most of the change in climate is because of us.

00:18:39.000 So most of the change that is about 2 degrees Fahrenheit that we've seen in change over the last 150 years.

00:18:46.000 And that's all because of carbon.

00:18:47.000 It's all because of methane from carbon.

00:18:49.000 Cattle production.

00:18:50.000 It's basically because we use fossil fuels and then we also...

00:18:54.000 Coal.

00:18:54.000 Yes.

00:18:55.000 Coal, oil, gas, and then a little bit of farts from cows.

00:18:59.000 Yeah.

00:18:59.000 And so that has not necessarily been a good thing for the earth.

00:19:04.000 No.

00:19:05.000 Not when you just look at the impact on climate.

00:19:08.000 Because as I said, if you built your cities and if you built your lives around one temperature, if it changes a little bit, that's a problem.

00:19:15.000 If the oceans boil, just move in a little.

00:19:18.000 Well, but it's not...

00:19:19.000 The oceans are going to boil.

00:19:21.000 That's where we get into this.

00:19:22.000 Have you not seen the girl who throws the soup? 0.52

00:19:23.000 She has a whole video on YouTube.

00:19:25.000 The girl who throws the soup on the Van Gogh.

00:19:27.000 I saw that.

00:19:28.000 She's making some really good points.

00:19:29.000 She's making some really good points.

00:19:30.000 She might be able to turn you around. 0.76

00:19:31.000 Maybe I should leave.

00:19:32.000 No.

00:19:32.000 So really, the point here is this is a problem, but it's not the end of the world.

00:19:38.000 And I think that's really where we need to get back to in realizing this is not what is going to change our entire future.

00:19:45.000 It's going to have a negative impact.

00:19:47.000 But remember also, at the same time, fossil fuels have basically made it possible for us to have the Industrial Revolution and become incredibly safe in so many different ways.

00:19:57.000 I mean, how did you get here this morning?

00:19:59.000 I flew.

00:20:00.000 You flew?

00:20:01.000 It doesn't matter.

00:20:02.000 I drove.

00:20:03.000 I flew.

00:20:03.000 I drove an electric car.

00:20:04.000 I'm good for the environment.

00:20:06.000 There you go.

00:20:06.000 Yes, yes.

00:20:07.000 I'm doing my part.

00:20:08.000 I feel virtuous.

00:20:09.000 I bet you do.

00:20:11.000 But, you know, most people actually get around you.

00:20:14.000 Food is produced by fertilizer, which is very often from gas, natural gas.

00:20:21.000 Our transportation, our electricity, pretty much everything is mostly focused around fossil fuels.

00:20:27.000 It's pretty nuts to bank everything on this one thing.

00:20:30.000 It's very bizarre how society has moved completely in that direction.

00:20:34.000 How many things that we need fossil fuels to create, like containers and tires and this and that and clothing and sneakers and eyeglasses. 0.98

00:20:45.000 There's so much shit that we use fossil fuels for. 0.98

00:20:49.000 It makes you wonder. 1.00

00:20:50.000 I wonder what would have happened if we never took that path.

00:20:53.000 As a culture, if we only used fossil fuels for fuel and we never figured out how to turn it into stuff.

00:21:00.000 Yeah.

00:21:01.000 We would have been a lot poorer.

00:21:03.000 Yeah, we never had computers.

00:21:04.000 Well, we would, you know, think about what it looked like in around 1800 in England.

00:21:09.000 That would probably be where we'd be about, right?

00:21:12.000 Yeah.

00:21:12.000 The point is, of course, and you're making that argument really well, fossil fuels are just an incredible boon to civilization.

00:21:20.000 And then they also have this problem.

00:21:22.000 Yeah.

00:21:23.000 And so that's where we need to find a way to slowly and eventually find ways to produce all of that stuff you just talked about without the negative impacts of fossil fuels.

00:21:33.000 And that's going to be hard, and that's not an easy trip.

00:21:35.000 What about nuclear?

00:21:37.000 Nuclear absolutely could be part of the solution.

00:21:39.000 So people are incredibly frightened about nuclear.

00:21:42.000 But remember, if you look at what it actually takes to produce energy, nuclear is one of the safest things possible.

00:21:51.000 All technologies have risk, right?

00:21:52.000 If you put up solar panels, you'll have some people falling down from the roofs putting them up.

00:21:57.000 I'm not kidding.

00:21:58.000 This is an occupational hazard.

00:22:03.000 But solar panels are some of the safest things together with nuclear.

00:22:09.000 So Chernobyl, which was by all kinds of ways a terrible accident.

00:22:14.000 I'm glad you said that.

00:22:15.000 I thought you were pro-Chernobyl for a minute there.

00:22:17.000 I'm going to say...

00:22:19.000 No, no, I'm not.

00:22:20.000 So, Chernobyl, you know, probably killed in the order of 100 to 200 people, which is not nothing.

00:22:29.000 But remember, this is the biggest catastrophe we've ever had with nuclear power.

00:22:34.000 Regularly, coal-fired power kills, you know...

00:22:37.000 Millions of people.

00:22:39.000 Really?

00:22:40.000 Millions?

00:22:40.000 Millions across the world.

00:22:41.000 How do millions of people die from coal power?

00:22:42.000 So this is basically because, especially in the developing world, you don't put scrubbers on your smokestack, so it just makes it incredibly polluted.

00:22:51.000 If you've ever been to New Delhi in the fall, I'm assuming it's a little bit worse than it was to be back in London in the 1950s.

00:23:02.000 You almost can't see your way forward and you can just Feel it in your throat and everything.

00:23:07.000 Apparently...

00:23:08.000 And you inhale a lot.

00:23:09.000 Like fires, like fireplace fires.

00:23:12.000 Yes.

00:23:13.000 A lot of people think that's good.

00:23:16.000 That's terrible.

00:23:16.000 It's terrible, yes.

00:23:18.000 Burning wood like that is one of the worst things for the air.

00:23:21.000 Absolutely.

00:23:22.000 So what people don't get...

00:23:23.000 If everybody did it, it would be horrible.

00:23:25.000 And we're going to have a lot more of that in Europe this winter because of the whole Russian issue. 0.98

00:23:30.000 But what people don't get is most of the world's poor.

00:23:34.000 So about 3 billion people on this planet, they cook and keep warm with really dirty fuels like dung, cardboard, wood, whatever they can get their hands on.

00:23:43.000 And that means the average indoor air pollution in these homes is higher and worse than it is in outdoor Beijing.

00:23:52.000 Wow.

00:23:53.000 The World Health Organization estimated it's equivalent for each person to smoke two packs of cigarettes every day.

00:23:59.000 So they're cooking indoor with fires?

00:24:02.000 Is that what they're doing?

00:24:03.000 Wow.

00:24:04.000 And you keep warm with these because it gets cold at night.

00:24:08.000 And we don't have any sense of these impacts.

00:24:12.000 So let me just tell you a fun story.

00:24:15.000 In Denmark, the environmental agency, they were trying to find out how much indoor air pollution do you get if you're right next to a major street.

00:24:24.000 And so they were measuring, you know, they rented this apartment that was empty and put up measurements in there.

00:24:30.000 And every once in a while, they couldn't understand.

00:24:32.000 They just got these incredible spikes.

00:24:34.000 In there.

00:24:35.000 And they were like, this shouldn't be coming from outside, right?

00:24:38.000 Turns out it was when the neighbor lit candles.

00:24:43.000 Whoa.

00:24:43.000 That tells you how dangerous it is.

00:24:45.000 People think it's really nice to have the fire and the stove or these candles on, but actually incredibly polluting.

00:24:54.000 Oh, wow.

00:24:55.000 Well, some people go nutty with the candles.

00:24:57.000 That's got to be horrible.

00:24:59.000 Someone has their whole...

00:25:00.000 Like Ari Shafir's special, Jew, which is out right now on YouTube.

00:25:03.000 You're just going to bring that up.

00:25:04.000 Let's go to that.

00:25:05.000 Go to a clip of it.

00:25:07.000 My friend Ari Shafir was polluting the environment.

00:25:09.000 Not only does he not care about the environment, but he snuck in pollution. 1.00

00:25:14.000 I'm sure he did this shit on purpose. 0.99

00:25:16.000 It's available right now on YouTube. 1.00

00:25:18.000 Behind Ari...

00:25:20.000 Best special he's ever done.

00:25:21.000 Look at all those candles.

00:25:23.000 He's killing the air.

00:25:24.000 He's forcing people to breathe toxic fumes.

00:25:27.000 Yep.

00:25:28.000 While he's doing his jokes. 1.00

00:25:29.000 Son of a bitch. 1.00

00:25:30.000 They look real, though. 1.00

00:25:31.000 No, they're real.

00:25:32.000 They had a life of eight hours of lit when they were normal, but then when they turned the air conditioning on, the air was blowing down on the candles, so they were burning through this.

00:25:43.000 So this lady had to get extra candles overnight. 1.00

00:25:45.000 It was a giant affair.

00:25:46.000 Like 9,000 candles overnight.

00:25:49.000 Yeah.

00:25:49.000 And mind you, they just pumped up the air pollution as well.

00:25:52.000 Burn it extra fast.

00:25:53.000 It's available right now on YouTube.

00:25:56.000 He's got over 2 million views.

00:25:58.000 2.2.

00:25:59.000 So he's polluting the environment by doing that.

00:26:02.000 So people that do fireplaces, you think, oh, it's going to be so romantic.

00:26:06.000 Sit by the fireplace.

00:26:07.000 You're polluting the environment.

00:26:08.000 If everybody did, it would be horrible air quality.

00:26:10.000 You're polluting your own indoor environment.

00:26:13.000 In that sense, I'm like, alright.

00:26:15.000 It's a little bit like skydiving.

00:26:18.000 It's fine if you take it.

00:26:19.000 If you're camping and you have a little campfire going on, maybe it's a little bad for the environment, but how good is it for you?

00:26:26.000 That's where people draw that line.

00:26:28.000 Like, no one's out here.

00:26:29.000 No one is out here in the middle of nowhere.

00:26:32.000 Exactly.

00:26:32.000 And we're staying alive with actual fire warming up.

00:26:36.000 But when you go then to India, they burn all their fields right next to New Delhi. 0.96

00:26:41.000 So the problem is poverty.

00:26:42.000 Yes.

00:26:42.000 And what gets us out of poverty quicker?

00:26:44.000 And that's petrochemical products, fossil fuels.

00:26:48.000 It's basically energy.

00:26:49.000 Yeah, that's the capitalist versus the Marxist argument about this stuff.

00:26:54.000 Can I show you a graph?

00:26:54.000 Sorry.

00:26:54.000 No, no, no.

00:26:55.000 Go ahead.

00:26:55.000 I'm a graph guy.

00:26:56.000 Please show me a graph.

00:27:01.000 I like how you have a wood cover.

00:27:03.000 It looks cool, no?

00:27:04.000 On your MacBook.

00:27:05.000 Yeah.

00:27:06.000 So this is, you see how rich people are out the horizontal axis, and then you see how much energy you have up on the y-axis.

00:27:17.000 And what you basically see is, the richer you are, the more energy you use, or the other way around.

00:27:22.000 Well, of course.

00:27:23.000 Yeah.

00:27:23.000 This is not rocket science, right?

00:27:25.000 Climate change, people that fly around in private chats are the biggest hypocrites. 0.97

00:27:28.000 Yes. 0.98

00:27:29.000 You're selling that. 0.99

00:27:31.000 You're going to the World Economic Forum on a fucking chat with three people in it. 0.99

00:27:36.000 Yes. 1.00

00:27:37.000 Get out of here, man. 0.97

00:27:38.000 You hoser.

00:27:42.000 Are 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.

00:28:05.000 I assumed he was talking about four ratings.

00:28:09.000 Which makes sense.

00:28:10.000 If you're a producer and you work in Hollywood, if the Kardashians are fighting with their boyfriend, get in there!

00:28:16.000 Let's go!

00:28:16.000 That's money, right?

00:28:18.000 That's what you do.

00:28:18.000 And if that's happening, oh my god, the climate.

00:28:21.000 Everyone freaks out.

00:28:22.000 The climate.

00:28:22.000 They're glowing their hands to Picasso's.

00:28:24.000 Oh Jesus, the climate.

00:28:26.000 If that's going to get you ratings, your job is to get ratings.

00:28:29.000 Your job is not to educate the American people.

00:28:31.000 You can barely figure out life yourself.

00:28:33.000 Right?

00:28:33.000 You're 34 years old.

00:28:35.000 You got a half a million dollars in student loans.

00:28:36.000 Can't believe you work for CNN. What are you supposed to do?

00:28:39.000 You're supposed to fucking put the climate change in everybody's face. 0.98

00:28:42.000 Because that's how you're gonna sell tickets. 0.98

00:28:44.000 That's what they're doing.

00:28:46.000 So, climate has that wonderful opportunity that it can actually Fundamentally get us to talk about every time something out there happens, it can be news and it can be somebody's fault.

00:28:56.000 Right.

00:28:57.000 Every time there's a flood, every time there's a storm, every time there's anything.

00:29:00.000 Heart attacks.

00:29:00.000 Heart attacks and climate change.

00:29:02.000 I'm sure they'll come up with that.

00:29:03.000 Have you seen that?

00:29:03.000 I'm sure, yeah.

00:29:04.000 No, that's real.

00:29:05.000 Oh, God.

00:29:06.000 Yeah, there's articles written about the climate change may be causing all these sudden deaths and heart attacks.

00:29:11.000 And look, again, there is something to this.

00:29:14.000 So the idea that when you have very high temperatures, you actually have more heart attacks and you have more people dying.

00:29:21.000 So yes, heat deaths are bad.

00:29:25.000 You also have more people dying if they're not taking care of their body, and no one talks about that.

00:29:30.000 Climate change causes heart attacks.

00:29:31.000 A second look at the data.

00:29:33.000 Hmm.

00:29:34.000 How good is the evidence implicating climate change as a cause of heart attacks?

00:29:39.000 Not very.

00:29:40.000 Let's take a critical look at some of this research.

00:29:43.000 So a slew of recent studies suggested that climate change increasing the number of heart attacks worldwide.

00:29:47.000 The hypothesis suffers from many critical deficiencies, the most important being that rates of heart disease and thus heart attacks in the industrialized world have plummeted as our ability to prevent and treat coronary artery disease has improved.

00:30:01.000 Studies that have reported a slowdown in this trend have also detected rises in the prevalence of obesity, metabolic syndrome, and type 2 diabetes.

00:30:13.000 What we were just saying.

00:30:14.000 All well-known risk factors for heart disease.

00:30:18.000 It's not that climate change is causing heart disease.

00:30:21.000 It'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.

00:30:33.000 They need encouragement.

00:30:35.000 If you really wanted to lower costs for healthcare worldwide, especially nationwide, A national program encouraging people.

00:30:43.000 Instead of just putting like a black square on your Instagram on Tuesday, how about encouraging people through one entire month to do 100 sit-ups and 100 push-ups and go up, you know, walk 10,000 steps every day. 0.76

00:30:55.000 Just encouraging people and everybody have to fucking be accountable online.

00:30:59.000 If everybody did that, people would just shed weight. 0.99

00:31:03.000 They would shed weight.

00:31:04.000 All sorts of medical problems would go away, if they're capable of doing this, of course.

00:31:07.000 If they're not, if they already have a health problem, it's obviously not their fault.

00:31:11.000 There's so many people that can improve their life and there's no encouragement to do it.

00:31:14.000 All they talk about is like the fear of what happens if this comes for you.

00:31:19.000 The fear.

00:31:20.000 The climate is going to make you have a stroke.

00:31:22.000 The climate is going to make you stay indoors.

00:31:25.000 The oceans are going to boil.

00:31:26.000 It's like, Jesus Christ, tell me what I can do to make life better right now.

00:31:31.000 And so you're absolutely right.

00:31:32.000 We can do a lot ourselves.

00:31:34.000 With that said, though, it's not that there is nothing to this point.

00:31:38.000 So can I just show the same?

00:31:41.000 Well, I'd imagine if it gets hotter, people are going to have heart attacks.

00:31:43.000 Yeah.

00:31:44.000 Makes sense.

00:31:44.000 But that's because they're not very resilient.

00:31:46.000 Well, but, you know, it's especially old people. 1.00

00:31:50.000 And so, you know, it's not unreasonable to say that this is going to be an issue.

00:31:53.000 And, you know, there is a lot of people out there telling us, oh, my God, there are going to be more heat deaths because of global warming.

00:31:58.000 Yeah, it's scary.

00:31:59.000 It is scary, but...

00:32:00.000 You also have to then, if I can show B3, you also have to see... 1.00

00:32:05.000 So what this shows, this is a new Lancet study from 2021. What?

00:32:10.000 Each year, rising temps save 166,000 lives?

00:32:14.000 Yeah.

00:32:14.000 This is kind of surprising, right?

00:32:16.000 You know who told me that the first time?

00:32:17.000 I'm sorry to interrupt you.

00:32:18.000 Go ahead.

00:32:19.000 But Randall Carlson said, he goes, climate change where it gets warmer is not necessarily good, but climate change where it gets colder is bad.

00:32:29.000 That's bad.

00:32:30.000 Yeah.

00:32:30.000 He said, everybody's scared about global warming.

00:32:32.000 You should really be scared about global cooling.

00:32:35.000 He's not dismissing global warming.

00:32:36.000 He said, like, understand, like, when temperatures drop, you can't grow food, kids.

00:32:41.000 Like, it gets bad. 0.99

00:32:42.000 And then we're really fucked. 0.97

00:32:43.000 So if I can just show you this one up here. 0.96

00:32:45.000 So if you look, there's an enormous amount of cold deaths in the world.

00:32:48.000 So there's about four and a half million people die from cold every year.

00:32:52.000 In the U.S. How is that possible?

00:32:55.000 170,000 people die from cold every year.

00:32:58.000 What?

00:32:58.000 Why?

00:32:59.000 Because every winter, you actually have to keep your home heated well for six months.

00:33:06.000 Especially up in the north, right?

00:33:08.000 In 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.

00:33:26.000 So you actually have a lot of people that die because they don't get enough heat, especially older people.

00:33:32.000 I never would imagine that many people freeze to death.

00:33:34.000 And this is, of course, the point.

00:33:36.000 Do you remember the heat dome last year?

00:33:38.000 The heat dome.

00:33:39.000 The thing that killed a lot of people up in Washington and British Columbia.

00:33:46.000 Oh, that's right.

00:33:47.000 Yeah.

00:33:47.000 There was a huge heat wave.

00:33:49.000 It killed, what, 700 people.

00:33:50.000 Yeah.

00:33:51.000 Huge issue.

00:33:52.000 And, you know, got covers of all papers and CNNs and all that for a week.

00:33:59.000 And that is a real problem.

00:34:00.000 That's certainly something that we're going to see more of from climate change.

00:34:03.000 But you never hear about this fact that 170,000 people die from cold every year in the U.S. I've never heard that before.

00:34:11.000 And this is not, you know, some quack science.

00:34:14.000 This is The Lancet.

00:34:15.000 This is the global burden of the seas.

00:34:17.000 What's the number?

00:34:18.000 170,000.

00:34:20.000 Wasn't that what the Lancet just said?

00:34:22.000 What was the paper?

00:34:23.000 Put the paper up again so we can take a look at it.

00:34:25.000 So that's the global burden of disease.

00:34:29.000 I 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.

00:34:38.000 That'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.

00:34:49.000 That's, of course, very, very few.

00:34:51.000 Most of these are statistical deaths.

00:34:53.000 So these are deaths that happens because whenever the temperature is lower, there's a slightly higher risk of dying.

00:34:59.000 And that slightly higher risk is the cold death.

00:35:02.000 Oh, so is this like a died with COVID or died from COVID thing?

00:35:06.000 Are these people that are already dying and then it gets really cold and they die?

00:35:10.000 No, no.

00:35:11.000 They would not have had this problem had they not been experiencing this cold.

00:35:16.000 So every year you see...

00:35:18.000 So if you take over the year, you see this trend.

00:35:22.000 So from January, it's high and then the death rate is low and then it gets high again.

00:35:28.000 This is basically because cold is dangerous and heat not nearly as much.

00:35:33.000 Right, but how are they attributing those deaths directly to cold?

00:35:38.000 What is the statistic that you looked up and what's the source of that?

00:35:42.000 So key points.

00:35:44.000 So this is from, what is this from?

00:35:47.000 The EPA. Government.climate.

00:35:49.000 So this is the EPA. Between 79 and 2016, the death rate as a direct result of exposure to cold underlying cause of death.

00:35:57.000 So that's freezing to death.

00:35:58.000 That's not like strokes and heart attacks.

00:36:01.000 Right, okay.

00:36:04.000 Generally range from 1 to 2.5 deaths per million people.

00:36:08.000 With 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.

00:36:18.000 So what are they putting on the death certificate of these people that are dying that you're counting with the 166,000?

00:36:25.000 Sorry, 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.

00:36:35.000 Oh, I'm sorry.

00:36:36.000 So United States, 170,000.

00:36:39.000 That's the global burden of disease.

00:36:40.000 So they are an international study out of the University of Washington that tries to estimate all the deaths and where do they come from.

00:36:47.000 So, you know, people die from all kinds of things, but what was the proximate cost of this?

00:36:52.000 Was it too hot?

00:36:53.000 Was it too cold?

00:36:54.000 Right.

00:36:54.000 Was it that you were in an accident?

00:36:57.000 All these kinds of different things.

00:36:58.000 And a lot of, you know, this is the kind of thing where you say obesity causes a lot of, you know, deaths.

00:37:04.000 I can't remember what that is, you know, like a million deaths.

00:37:07.000 But it's not on the death certificate.

00:37:08.000 It's not on the death certificate because it's a statistical correlation that you died because or you died right after the cold or the heat snap.

00:37:19.000 Is there potential to manipulate that in one way or another?

00:37:22.000 I mean, look, again— If someone has a political bias to push one thing or another?

00:37:27.000 So, yes, there is a way.

00:37:29.000 So, for instance, curiously, everybody that dies from heat die after one or two days.

00:37:36.000 So that's why it's such good news, you know.

00:37:39.000 Sorry, sorry.

00:37:40.000 Such good newscasting, right?

00:37:42.000 When it happens, you can show the bodies right there.

00:37:45.000 When you have cold deaths, it typically happens after 15 to 30 days.

00:37:50.000 So you need to have cold for a long time because then you're starting to work that up and your body restricts your temperature.

00:37:58.000 That's what causes it.

00:37:59.000 So you really need to lag these.

00:38:00.000 A lot of times you don't do that analysis and so you only find the heat deaths but not the cold deaths.

00:38:06.000 So there's a wonderful study that actually showed back in the late 2000s when fracking came on board.

00:38:16.000 They found that gas prices went down, so about half of all Americans heat their homes with gas.

00:38:24.000 And so what happened was you actually could show that because people could now afford to heat their homes better, especially if they were poor, That actually every year saves about 11,000 people from dying from cold deaths.

00:38:38.000 Isn't that amazing?

00:38:39.000 It is amazing.

00:38:40.000 So these cold deaths, we're talking about people who, because of being in freezing cold temperatures, they have a variety of different detrimental health problems, like...

00:38:54.000 Is it just because they're older folks?

00:38:58.000 Yes.

00:38:59.000 It's almost entirely older people.

00:39:01.000 This is not because they're sitting and shivering and, you know, you can sort of see the ice rims.

00:39:07.000 It's just they're a bit more fragile when it's cold at night.

00:39:09.000 It's just that their homes are not all that well heated.

00:39:12.000 And you have to keep the heat on at night.

00:39:15.000 And they can't quite afford it.

00:39:16.000 And so they keep it, you know, like one or two or three degrees lower than they probably want it to.

00:39:21.000 No one thinks that kills people.

00:39:23.000 No.

00:39:23.000 I never would have taken that consideration.

00:39:25.000 And the reason why it kills people is because this is a lot of millions of people, and each one of them are put into this little risk factor.

00:39:33.000 And the overall point that I tried to make with that graph and with the Lancet study was just that, you know, you hear all this thing about more heat deaths, and that's absolutely true because of global warming.

00:39:44.000 But you never hear the fact that as temperatures rise, you're, of course, also going to see fewer cold deaths.

00:39:48.000 And actually, right now, it turns out that we're seeing many fewer cold deaths than we're seeing increasing heat deaths.

00:39:54.000 What's more preventable, the heat deaths or the cold deaths in terms of, like, medical intervention?

00:40:00.000 So it's actually not medical intervention.

00:40:03.000 It's just air conditioning.

00:40:04.000 No, like IVs, like fluid IVs.

00:40:06.000 They do that a lot to people that get really dehydrated.

00:40:08.000 But again, remember, these are not people that have been freezing water for 10 minutes or something.

00:40:16.000 Right.

00:40:16.000 These are people that are just a little too cold or a little too warm.

00:40:19.000 And the simple way to deal with that is air conditioning.

00:40:22.000 That'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.

00:40:29.000 And that's, of course, what we need to make sure that the rest of the world can afford.

00:40:32.000 So it's actually easier to deal with heat because we know how to do that, whereas cold requires you to have cheap energy for the whole heating season.

00:40:41.000 And that's much, much costlier and harder, especially for poorer people.

00:40:46.000 So when people talk about our impact on the world with oil and how we're ruining the future of our planet and so the hysteria of these young people, what do you think is the thing to tell them to try to give them a more balanced perspective of what's actually happening?

00:41:08.000 Like, if you think it's a problem, you think what people are doing is a problem, but it's not as big of a problem, that's what kind of has to be balanced out.

00:41:17.000 Because it's either everything or it's nothing.

00:41:19.000 That's the narrative that we hear today.

00:41:21.000 Either global warming is not an issue at all. 0.99

00:41:23.000 Oh, you silly goose, why are you worried about that? 0.99

00:41:26.000 Or it's, oh my god, we're all going to die. 1.00

00:41:29.000 Those are the only two options you have.

00:41:31.000 And I want to get people to understand that global warming is a problem, But it's actually mostly a problem in the sense that the world is getting better and better, but because of global warming, it gets slightly slower, much better.

00:41:45.000 That's a hard one to tell.

00:41:46.000 Can I just show you one graph?

00:41:47.000 Slightly slower, much better?

00:41:48.000 So it gets better and better, but slightly slower.

00:41:51.000 Let me show you two graphs.

00:41:52.000 So if I can show you from A22. So it's impeding our progress.

00:41:57.000 Yes, it's impeding our progress slightly.

00:41:59.000 Slightly.

00:42:00.000 What kind of a percentage are we talking about?

00:42:02.000 Let me just...

00:42:02.000 First, if I can just show you A22... So this one shows the deaths over the last century of all the things that you think of as climate, right?

00:42:17.000 Floods, droughts, storms, wildfires, and extreme temperatures.

00:42:19.000 They don't do a particularly good job on extreme temperatures, but let's just leave it at that.

00:42:23.000 This is the best data that we have for the world.

00:42:25.000 And what it basically shows is the complete opposite of what these guys that are gluing themselves to the Picasso, right?

00:42:32.000 This is fundamentally a situation of back when you were poor in the 1920s, about half a million people died every year.

00:42:40.000 You know what would be amazing to look at right next to that?

00:42:44.000 The death from donuts.

00:42:45.000 It would be the total opposite direction.

00:42:47.000 Oh, yeah, yeah.

00:42:48.000 Look, look, isn't that weird?

00:42:50.000 Getting richer means that you can allow yourself to go, you know, die from lots and lots of donuts.

00:42:56.000 Yeah.

00:42:56.000 But it's a decision.

00:42:57.000 Well, it's a lot of poor people as well.

00:42:58.000 Yeah.

00:42:59.000 I mean that food is cheap and it's filling.

00:43:02.000 But if you looked at food-related deaths, let's see if there's food-related deaths.

00:43:07.000 How would you make that distinction?

00:43:10.000 Would it be people who died from obesity and diabetes?

00:43:13.000 How would you say that?

00:43:15.000 Because it's obviously a lot of other autoimmune diseases that come from being obese.

00:43:20.000 Yeah.

00:43:21.000 There's not just a few.

00:43:23.000 So, like, the 500,000 from 1920, I bet we hit that every year. 1.00

00:43:28.000 From obesity?

00:43:29.000 Oh, I'm sure.

00:43:30.000 In America?

00:43:31.000 Like, what do you think it is in America?

00:43:32.000 Like, heart disease?

00:43:34.000 Heart disease is probably a couple million, isn't it?

00:43:36.000 That's a lot, right?

00:43:37.000 But the heart disease, one, can be attributed to genetics.

00:43:40.000 Two and a half million dead in total in the U.S., so it's probably one million or something.

00:43:44.000 And 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?

00:43:52.000 Because that happens as well.

00:43:54.000 What do you think, give me a, is there, does anybody do an accounting on how many people die from obesity every year?

00:44:01.000 Oh, God, yeah.

00:44:02.000 I'm very sure.

00:44:02.000 That's like the bottom line, right?

00:44:05.000 They're attributing it to you on your death certificate.

00:44:09.000 They're saying obesity.

00:44:11.000 That can't be that many, right?

00:44:12.000 How many is that?

00:44:14.000 I don't know.

00:44:15.000 I think all the other effects, like heart attacks, strokes.

00:44:18.000 All the things that come from being obese, diseases, susceptibility to diseases.

00:44:23.000 But I think your point is well taken, right?

00:44:25.000 Because it tells you that all these protesters are gluing themselves up there and are worried about the end of the world from climate change.

00:44:31.000 Should be much more worried about it.

00:44:33.000 They should glue themselves to Krispy Kreme.

00:44:34.000 There you go. 0.86

00:44:35.000 Krispy Kreme is damn good though.

00:44:37.000 Especially when it comes out warm.

00:44:38.000 When I look this up, it's a contributing factor.

00:44:41.000 I don't know that it's listed as, like...

00:44:43.000 Yeah, that's what I was getting at.

00:44:45.000 It seems like it'd be hard to quantify.

00:44:47.000 Is it hard to quantify?

00:44:48.000 Yeah, I mean, because, like, if someone's fat and they get cancer, like, is that what happened?

00:44:53.000 You know, what caused it?

00:44:54.000 Would they have gotten cancer anyway?

00:44:55.000 This is what burden of disease actually does.

00:44:57.000 So they do this for the whole globe.

00:44:59.000 They would probably parcel it out for obesity as well. 0.93

00:45:05.000 Yeah.

00:45:05.000 Obviously, that was one of the big things that people had a problem with with COVID deaths.

00:45:08.000 There'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.

00:45:15.000 And if you have like a major insult coming into your body, like being obese or a disease, or if you live in one of these horrible places that has massive amounts of pollution, that's something that must affect...

00:45:26.000 I mean, that's a big...

00:45:27.000 That has a big impact on longevity, right?

00:45:29.000 Like people that live in those polluted cities...

00:45:31.000 And just being poor, yeah.

00:45:31.000 Yeah, and just being poor.

00:45:32.000 Yeah.

00:45:32.000 Bad nutrition, bad health care, all the above, stress, violence, you know, all of that.

00:45:39.000 But that's not convenient, Bjorn.

00:45:42.000 That's not good for our little conversation. 0.99

00:45:44.000 Our conversation is, I have to glue myself to the Van Gogh and throw fucking soup at it. 0.98

00:45:48.000 Can I just show you on, sorry, B8? Yeah, I have a quick question on the climate one. 0.98

00:45:57.000 I was just watching a movie about World War I last night, that's why I asked this.

00:46:00.000 Wouldn't war deaths, shouldn't they maybe be included or would they be very high in like this first area, like 1920, 1940?

00:46:07.000 Oh, so this was only for- No, comparing like, you know, like millions of people died because of war and other things due to the war.

00:46:15.000 Oh, God, yes.

00:46:15.000 This would be much bigger and centered around 1940. But I'm only looking at the floods, droughts, storms, and wildfires.

00:46:26.000 I was also like, what giant floods?

00:46:30.000 I'm not saying there weren't.

00:46:31.000 I've just never heard of any.

00:46:33.000 No, I think what he's talking about with climate-related deaths is mostly people freezing to death.

00:46:37.000 Well, no.

00:46:38.000 Sorry.

00:46:38.000 This is exactly the point.

00:46:40.000 There was huge floods in China and India in the 1920s, 1930s.

00:46:47.000 Huge famines.

00:46:48.000 Things that we just never heard of.

00:46:50.000 Well, we heard a little bit about it back then.

00:46:52.000 But then we've forgotten it.

00:46:54.000 And then when we hear about these things that will cause a thousand deaths.

00:46:58.000 Remember, let me take an example I know a lot more about.

00:47:02.000 The 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.

00:47:14.000 This was mostly because, you know, they were totally unprepared.

00:47:18.000 There was very bad communication.

00:47:19.000 It was also East Pakistan back then.

00:47:21.000 That was one of the reasons why they broke loose, because they felt they weren't really being taken care of.

00:47:26.000 Today, and this in many ways defined Bangladesh, and so they have taken great care in getting much better prevention.

00:47:33.000 They have information.

00:47:35.000 They have these centers where you can assemble up on high areas where you can actually keep everyone safe and stuff.

00:47:40.000 So now the same kind of hurricanes come in, and they kill sort of tens or hundreds of people instead.

00:47:45.000 Did you see that community they established in Florida?

00:47:48.000 That survived this last hurricane with, like, flying colors.

00:47:53.000 Is that a word?

00:47:54.000 You know that expression.

00:47:55.000 If you go to, what was the hurricane called?

00:48:00.000 The last one, the big one that just hit Florida?

00:48:02.000 Ian?

00:48:02.000 If you go to Hurricane Ian, Solar Community, Florida, I believe it's 2,000 homes.

00:48:10.000 They're completely off-grid in the sense that they have a solar field, and it powers these homes, and they built homes to withstand hurricanes.

00:48:20.000 And so this is a bad hurricane.

00:48:21.000 So it was a really good test for them.

00:48:23.000 And it nailed them.

00:48:24.000 And everything was fine.

00:48:25.000 They kept their internet.

00:48:26.000 They kept their electricity.

00:48:28.000 So look at that.

00:48:29.000 Isn't that wild?

00:48:29.000 Look how they did that.

00:48:30.000 They have this massive, massive field of solar panels.

00:48:33.000 So it's called Babcock Ranch.

00:48:36.000 And this community was established just to give people a safe place from a natural disaster. 0.98

00:48:44.000 Because 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? 0.95

00:48:53.000 They just built a good house. 0.76

00:48:54.000 They tried their best, but see if you can get some photos of what the houses look like. 0.99

00:48:58.000 They 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. 0.97

00:49:08.000 It's not like they're space houses, like they're built like a fucking, like a wind turbine or something like that. 0.98

00:49:13.000 No, they're normal houses, but they're just really robust. 0.97

00:49:16.000 And these people all made it through, which is pretty wild.

00:49:19.000 And Joe, I think it emphasizes something.

00:49:22.000 We know how to fix many of these problems.

00:49:24.000 And if you just disregard the solar part, which of course kept them powered, but there's many other ways you could have done that with batteries as well.

00:49:32.000 But that's a great way.

00:49:33.000 Oh, absolutely.

00:49:34.000 But...

00:49:35.000 The main point is you should have better regulation for houses if you want most houses to survive.

00:49:41.000 This is very, very cheap.

00:49:43.000 There'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?

00:49:54.000 You know, these cost, what, $5 or something?

00:49:56.000 You could have avoided half of all the damage.

00:49:58.000 Because the roofs peel off.

00:49:59.000 Yeah.

00:50:00.000 This is very, very simple stuff.

00:50:02.000 And 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.

00:50:11.000 No, actually, you need to have clamps.

00:50:13.000 Right.

00:50:14.000 And this is the kind of conversation that we have a very hard time getting around to, that just like we started off talking about with plastics, They're not nearly as comforting, but they're just much simpler, much cheaper, much more effective.

00:50:28.000 So what is the solution in terms of reducing our carbon footprint without destroying the economy?

00:50:35.000 Well, so I think, first of all, we need to get rid of the panic, because panic is just a really, really bad way of dealing with issues.

00:50:42.000 But it's a really good way to get people to vote, and it's a really good way to get people to donate money to your party.

00:50:47.000 Yes, yes.

00:50:48.000 But it also leads to us all, you know, just screaming, running around screaming.

00:50:53.000 Because I wanted to show you this, that the progress is actually just slightly delayed.

00:50:58.000 So if I could just show you the B8. This is because of climate change.

00:51:04.000 Our progress is slightly delayed, you're saying?

00:51:06.000 Yes, yes.

00:51:07.000 So this is malaria death since 1900 until 2060. This is obviously prediction from 2020. This is the World Health Organization estimating what will happen next.

00:51:28.000 Right.

00:51:28.000 Makes sense.

00:51:42.000 So what we're looking at for folks who are just listening, there is a really high line in the 1900s and it goes from 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,

00:52:05.000 and it's below what it is now, by the way, but that point above it with climate is maybe two and a half.

00:52:11.000 It's on top of the line.

00:52:13.000 It's like touching the line.

00:52:14.000 So it's a very, very small number.

00:52:17.000 Not that it's good for people to die of malaria.

00:52:19.000 And what this tells you is they're right when they come out and tell you there's going to be more malaria with global warming.

00:52:24.000 But how much more?

00:52:25.000 Yeah, but you're missing the greater picture, which is, look, things are going to be a lot better, but slightly slower.

00:52:32.000 A lot better.

00:52:32.000 And could that be mitigated with malaria medication?

00:52:35.000 Of course it could.

00:52:36.000 Of course it could.

00:52:37.000 So 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.

00:52:46.000 No, the right answer is to make sure that people get malaria medication, that they get bed nets.

00:52:51.000 There's a lot of these simple things.

00:52:53.000 Remember, this does not mean That we shouldn't also try to fix global warming.

00:52:57.000 We're a smart species.

00:52:59.000 We can walk and chew gum at the same time.

00:53:01.000 But we seem to almost entirely just go to the straight answer.

00:53:04.000 Whatever the problem is, the answer is to cut carbon emissions.

00:53:08.000 And that's often not the best or the most effective way to help people first.

00:53:12.000 There are some real ironies.

00:53:15.000 One of the crazy ones is coal-fired plants powering Teslas.

00:53:21.000 That is one of the wildest...

00:53:24.000 Trade-offs that we make, and that happens every day in this country.

00:53:29.000 Someone is getting into their Tesla, thinking they're doing a really good job, and the electricity to power that Tesla is from a coal-fired plant.

00:53:37.000 It's bananas.

00:53:38.000 And a lot of that could be avoided with nuclear.

00:53:42.000 The problem with nuclear is, if it fucks up, you ruin that spot for a long time.

00:53:49.000 True.

00:53:50.000 That's what scares people.

00:53:51.000 But that's the initial applications of nuclear, like Fukushima.

00:53:55.000 They didn't have enough fail-safes.

00:53:57.000 These 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.

00:54:04.000 They can actually safely shut down.

00:54:06.000 Yeah, 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...

00:54:18.000 That one's nuts.

00:54:20.000 But even in that one, I don't believe very many people died from Fukushima.

00:54:23.000 No, nobody died.

00:54:25.000 So some people died because you evacuated everybody.

00:54:28.000 But, you know, it was really not a big risk.

00:54:31.000 But it was a big risk to the ocean, right?

00:54:33.000 Isn't there like a significant problem with...

00:54:35.000 Well, no, that was a very, very small bit.

00:54:36.000 Really?

00:54:37.000 Yeah.

00:54:37.000 I thought it was spilling over into the ocean.

00:54:39.000 Yes.

00:54:39.000 There's radioactive water in the ocean.

00:54:40.000 It did.

00:54:40.000 But again, remember, the Pacific Ocean is a big risk.

00:54:43.000 Very, very large.

00:54:44.000 So it dilutes it enough?

00:54:45.000 Yeah, and there's a lot of natural radiation in almost everywhere in the world, right?

00:54:49.000 I mean, most people don't get the idea that your vast exposure of radiation comes from living in a stone house.

00:54:58.000 So if you have like...

00:55:01.000 Like a brownstone in New York?

00:55:03.000 Yeah, because most stone has natural radiation.

00:55:09.000 But it's not a negative radiation.

00:55:10.000 It's not a terrible one.

00:55:11.000 By no means this is not, you know, don't freak out again.

00:55:15.000 But the whole point here is to recognize that we don't have a good sense of proportion of what's the risks that we're really exposing ourselves to.

00:55:23.000 The main issue with nuclear, and this of course is why we're not getting lots and lots of nuclear, is that nuclear is incredibly expensive right now.

00:55:30.000 So new nuclear power plants of the current third generation just cost a lot of money.

00:55:35.000 So they're actually more expensive than going to solar and wind, and that's really why we're not building a lot of them.

00:55:41.000 How much more expensive?

00:55:43.000 So, 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.

00:55:54.000 And so they're easily, you know, sort of two, three times more expensive.

00:55:59.000 Oh, more than they were planned to be?

00:56:00.000 Yes.

00:56:01.000 So they go way over budget.

00:56:02.000 And the total cost of the electricity they all produce could easily be two or three times the cheapest electricity you can get.

00:56:11.000 How much of that is fraud?

00:56:13.000 I don't know.

00:56:14.000 Because whenever they have construction that goes way over, I think about the Big Dig in Boston.

00:56:19.000 Yeah.

00:56:19.000 Do you know about that?

00:56:20.000 No.

00:56:20.000 The Big Dig was a thing that was going on when I was a kid, and a bunch of people went to jail.

00:56:26.000 So we can hear where it's going, at least.

00:56:28.000 Super slow playing the dig in this tunnel, because they didn't want the jobs to go away.

00:56:32.000 Right.

00:56:32.000 And they did a terrible job.

00:56:34.000 It took forever.

00:56:36.000 I think they called it one of the most corrupt construction projects in the history of the United States.

00:56:42.000 Hmm.

00:56:42.000 And that's saying something.

00:56:44.000 It finished more than 10 years after it was supposed to be finished.

00:56:47.000 I got already moved out of Boston, but I came back many, many years later.

00:56:51.000 I'm like, this thing's still around?

00:56:52.000 They're still doing this?

00:56:53.000 $14.8 billion later, the Big Dig finally complete.

00:56:57.000 When the clock runs out on 2007, construction of the Big Dig, the nation's most complex and costliest highway project will officially come to an end.

00:57:06.000 They were doing that when I was living in there in the 1980s.

00:57:09.000 They were working on it.

00:57:10.000 They finished it in 2007. It was super corrupt, right?

00:57:15.000 Didn't a bunch of people go to jail?

00:57:18.000 I'm not saying that the people that are making the nuclear power plants are doing the same thing.

00:57:22.000 It started at $2.6 billion and ended up at $14.8 billion.

00:57:25.000 Wow.

00:57:26.000 Whoa.

00:57:28.000 But I think it tells a different story. 0.99

00:57:31.000 Holy shit, that's so much money. 0.99

00:57:34.000 Certainly for nuclear, what happens is that you want one more fail-safe and then one more fail-safe. 0.99

00:57:39.000 Right.

00:57:40.000 They keep on changing the rules and making the regulations so it's going to be even harder.

00:57:44.000 And again, that's not a bad thing.

00:57:46.000 That sounds like a good thing.

00:57:47.000 Fail-safe's not good.

00:57:48.000 Yes.

00:57:49.000 But you also want to have a sense of, well, how safe are we going to be here compared to all the other stuff that is also risky?

00:57:57.000 We constantly make tradeoffs.

00:57:58.000 Right.

00:57:59.000 We should not pay attention to this, but I see what you're saying.

00:58:02.000 We should give equal focus to all these other problems that the world has.

00:58:05.000 Yeah.

00:58:05.000 And that's not what we do.

00:58:08.000 We focus on one thing.

00:58:09.000 So you asked me what should we say to these guys that, you know, glue themselves to famous paintings.

00:58:15.000 And I think first it is to get them to realize this is not the end of the work.

00:58:18.000 They should work in a coal mine. 0.55

00:58:19.000 This is not the end of the work.

00:58:21.000 For a year.

00:58:21.000 I would never ask that of anyone.

00:58:25.000 So they should realize this is not the end of the world.

00:58:28.000 And I think that would take away a lot of this, oh my god, we've got to do something right now.

00:58:32.000 And then we can start talking about, okay, how do you fix things smartly?

00:58:37.000 Well, you don't fix getting rid of fossil fuels by telling everyone, I'm sorry, would you mind being a little poor and a little colder and not being able to drive?

00:58:46.000 Would that be okay with you?

00:58:48.000 You don't win elections that way.

00:58:50.000 You don't actually get things done.

00:58:52.000 The way you fix problems is through innovation.

00:58:56.000 So if you think back to Los Angeles in the 1950s, it was a terribly polluted place, mostly because of cars.

00:59:04.000 There's special sort of geography that makes it very possible for all the pollution just to get stuck in that dome in Los Angeles.

00:59:11.000 And it's cars.

00:59:13.000 And so the current way we think about environment is basically, all right, the solutions back then would have been to tell everyone in Los Angeles, I'm sorry, could you walk instead?

00:59:22.000 And no, that wouldn't have worked.

00:59:25.000 What did work was the innovation of the catalytic converter.

00:59:29.000 So in 1974, this guy comes up with this little thing you put on.

00:59:32.000 It cost a couple hundred dollars, and basically it takes away all the pollution from the car.

00:59:37.000 How cool is that?

00:59:38.000 It's pretty cool, but not all the pollution.

00:59:40.000 No, no, no.

00:59:41.000 And look, but you can drive a lot longer and pollute a lot less, which is why Los Angeles is enormously much cleaner.

00:59:47.000 It's still not cleaner.

00:59:48.000 Here's a take for innovation.

00:59:49.000 Here's an interesting piece of information.

00:59:52.000 Yeah.

01:00:07.000 The air coming out the exhaust is actually cleaner than the air going in.

01:00:11.000 There you go.

01:00:12.000 Make sure that's true. 1.00

01:00:12.000 Make sure that's true, because I'd be an asshole if it's not true. 1.00

01:00:15.000 But Jeremy Clarkson definitely said that. 0.98

01:00:16.000 And I remember thinking, like, wow, maybe that is the solution.

01:00:19.000 We should buy a Porsche to everyone.

01:00:21.000 No, not a Porsche, but a car that's sucking in carbon.

01:00:24.000 Everyone should, before they die, own one of those, though.

01:00:26.000 But if you could get a car that is somehow or another utilizing that fuel that's in the air that's problematic, and if there's some sort of a way to extract that and convert it, maybe through some unforeseen technology, convert that into energy.

01:00:43.000 This sounds implausible.

01:00:45.000 Does it?

01:00:46.000 Yeah.

01:00:46.000 It sounds like it's very...

01:00:47.000 So we're doing the same thing with carbon, that you're trying to suck out the carbon from the atmosphere, and it turns out to be very expensive.

01:00:55.000 Well, all combustion engines require oxygen, right?

01:00:58.000 Would it be possible for a combustion engine at least to somehow work carbon neutral by pulling enough carbon out of the atmosphere that whatever comes out the back is actually not good?

01:01:11.000 This is what he said.

01:01:12.000 Here it is.

01:01:12.000 Jeremy Clarkson said, when you drive this car through a really polluted city, Los Angeles, Calcutta, I don't know what the other word is.

01:01:18.000 Harrogate.

01:01:19.000 I think he was joking around.

01:01:20.000 Something like that.

01:01:21.000 The gas coming out of the exhaust pipe is less toxic than the air going into the engine.

01:01:26.000 And I'm not joking.

01:01:27.000 That's true.

01:01:28.000 And then, this then, is like a small, efficient, easy to use vacuum cleaner.

01:01:35.000 Okay, so he's joking around about that.

01:01:37.000 But is that true?

01:01:38.000 Is that true?

01:01:40.000 Does it say it's true, Jamie?

01:01:41.000 It doesn't say that it's true or false.

01:01:43.000 It doesn't say it's true or false.

01:01:43.000 So that is his quote.

01:01:45.000 Well, I have seen concept cars that clean the air.

01:01:47.000 I seriously doubt any car existing.

01:01:49.000 Yeah, that's what this is.

01:01:50.000 But again, yeah.

01:01:52.000 Especially the Porsche 911. Oh, okay.

01:01:53.000 So this is bullshit. 1.00

01:01:54.000 So he's saying it's bullshit. 0.99

01:01:55.000 I seriously doubt any existing cars, especially the Porsche 911 Turbo, emits exhaust that is cleaner than air, even air in the most polluted cities. 0.98

01:02:04.000 Here's exactly what Clarkson says.

01:02:05.000 So this is by Autoblog. 0.98

01:02:08.000 So Autoblog is calling bullshit. 0.99

01:02:11.000 Which makes sense. 0.99

01:02:12.000 Doesn't make sense.

01:02:13.000 But it was a fun story.

01:02:14.000 But if it could be, is it an engineering issue?

01:02:18.000 Is it possible that some new invention would be able to do that with the air?

01:02:21.000 So I'm essentially an economist.

01:02:23.000 I'm sort of a pretend economist because I'm really a political scientist, but I like to pretend I'm an economist.

01:02:28.000 Why do you do that?

01:02:30.000 Because economists are smart people.

01:02:32.000 So anyway, economists would tend to say you can do anything you want if you're willing to pay the money, right?

01:02:37.000 So we can take people to the moon.

01:02:39.000 We could potentially take all of Austin to the moon.

01:02:42.000 It would just be fantastically expensive, right?

01:02:45.000 And it's not clear that it would be really cool either.

01:02:48.000 They shouldn't take everybody to the moon.

01:02:50.000 No.

01:02:50.000 Just the people with Beto signs in their lawn.

01:02:52.000 Oh, there you go.

01:02:54.000 So, fundamentally, you can do a lot of stuff, and you could also do this, but it would just be incredibly expensive, meaning you wouldn't have the resources to do all the other stuff you also want to do.

01:03:03.000 Hence, this is a Porsche Turbo.

01:03:05.000 This is not a Hyundai or a Fiat.

01:03:08.000 It's a very expensive car.

01:03:10.000 So...

01:03:12.000 In terms of what we can do now to slow the stem, like that's one of the fear-mongering things that you hear.

01:03:20.000 I don't know if it's accurate, but they're always saying if we don't do this now, with every day that passes by, if we don't enact legislation, the future is doomed.

01:03:30.000 This is the thing that people keep harping on.

01:03:32.000 How much of that is accurate?

01:04:02.000 You have to do everything before 2030, which was then 12 years away.

01:04:07.000 That's where the 12-year time limit come from. 0.96

01:04:10.000 It's basically saying if you want to do something incredibly stupid and incredibly expensive, you only have 12 years left. 0.95

01:04:16.000 But that's not what the UN is telling us. 0.98

01:04:19.000 We should switch and we should cut carbon emissions.

01:04:22.000 But there are much, much smarter ways to do this.

01:04:24.000 So perhaps the most obvious one is what the US did back from late 2000s, which was fracking.

01:04:33.000 Yeah.

01:04:34.000 This is basically something that was done by investment research and development from George W. Bush in the early 2000s, where they spent about $10 billion working with frackers to find out how do you frack gas and then later on oil.

01:04:52.000 And what that meant was you ended up—this was not at all meant as a climate policy.

01:04:57.000 It was meant as a way to get more energy.

01:04:59.000 But what it meant was you ended up getting much, much cheaper gas.

01:05:03.000 And because you had much cheaper gas, you switched out coal for gas.

01:05:07.000 This matters because gas is about twice as efficient.

01:05:09.000 It emits half as much CO2 per unit of energy.

01:05:12.000 So you basically have this situation where you made a somewhat cleaner source of energy much cheaper.

01:05:19.000 And so the U.S. actually cut its emissions more over the last decade than any other country has ever done.

01:05:24.000 But is there a detrimental effect on the environment because of fracking that has to balance that out?

01:05:29.000 There is.

01:05:30.000 How much of an impact is that?

01:05:32.000 Thank you for asking.

01:05:34.000 So there's a study that tries to look at what all the damages and all the benefits from fracking is.

01:05:40.000 And so they find the total damage from fracking is in the order of $25 billion, mostly from air pollution.

01:05:47.000 Air pollution.

01:05:48.000 Yes.

01:05:49.000 Interesting.

01:05:49.000 So does that negate the air pollution that it saves?

01:05:52.000 No.

01:05:53.000 So this is local air pollution, and this is mostly from the increased amount of emissions, especially of methane, but also just because you have lots of construction going on where you do the fracking.

01:06:04.000 And because fracking is a very rapid turnover, you need a lot of wells.

01:06:07.000 So there's a total cost, environmental cost, of about $25 billion.

01:06:12.000 That's not nothing, absolutely, per year.

01:06:15.000 But the benefit of fracking to the U.S. is estimated by one of the Federal Reserve estimates.

01:06:22.000 Right, but if I could push back against that, the real problem...

01:06:24.000 Yes, can I just say...

01:06:25.000 Yeah, please do.

01:06:25.000 Sorry, 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.

01:06:37.000 Well, shouldn't we be doing everything possible to mitigate the amount of environmental problems?

01:06:42.000 And when you're talking about just straight money, how much money is it worth to pollute the rivers and pollute the streams and pollute the air?

01:06:49.000 I would say that's not a benefit at all, that benefit in terms of like the negative impact of pollution.

01:06:57.000 And then trying to clean up that pollution is catastrophic.

01:07:00.000 It's very difficult and sometimes impossible.

01:07:02.000 When you're talking about polluting ancient waterways, that scares the shit out of people, including me. 0.91

01:07:08.000 Especially people that like to go outside and do outdoor activities and go camping and hiking and shit. 0.93

01:07:12.000 They get terrified by the idea of fracking, destroying the rivers, and that has happened before, right? 0.95

01:07:17.000 Sure.

01:07:18.000 And look, again, most of the impact was air pollution, but there's also some water pollution, and that is definitely an issue.

01:07:25.000 Again, we have to remember that running the current energy system that we have in the US causes lots of pollution.

01:07:35.000 And it causes lots of benefits, and we make those trade-offs all the time.

01:07:38.000 Right, but if we can contain it to the areas that it's already at, that would be more efficient than spreading it out to our rivers.

01:07:44.000 And we have done that.

01:07:45.000 Right.

01:07:45.000 Remember, air pollution, certainly in the U.S., has come down about 90% over the last 30 years.

01:07:52.000 So because of the Clean Air Act and many others, we've actually dramatically reduced air pollution.

01:07:59.000 And we know how to do that.

01:08:00.000 You can absolutely regulate fracking better, and you can decide that you want to have less air pollution.

01:08:07.000 But it is a trade-off in the sense of saying, how much more opportunity will you have?

01:08:12.000 And then you also actually cut carbon emissions, which is what the U.S. has done more than any other country, versus how much do you want, for instance, less air pollution?

01:08:20.000 Trevor Burrus No.

01:08:36.000 Are the ones who typically get most of the, or not most of the benefit, but a substantial benefit of the fracking.

01:08:41.000 That's not true in Europe, which is why everybody then gets annoyed about the air pollution.

01:08:45.000 But if you get air pollution, but you also get like $200,000, many people will say, hmm, I like that.

01:08:52.000 Now, they probably like to have less air pollution.

01:08:54.000 Doesn't RuPaul have, like, some crazy ranch where they extract natural resources?

01:09:01.000 I remember people reading about that going, wait, what?

01:09:04.000 There you go with the Mountain Dew.

01:09:06.000 Got excited.

01:09:07.000 First Mountain Dew of the day.

01:09:08.000 It is.

01:09:09.000 Are cigars bad for the environment?

01:09:11.000 They're certainly bad for you.

01:09:13.000 No.

01:09:13.000 What about George Burns?

01:09:14.000 He lived forever.

01:09:15.000 Do you think they're bad for you?

01:09:17.000 I'm pretty sure we know that.

01:09:19.000 Do you think they're worse for you than Mountain Dew?

01:09:21.000 I'm certainly hoping so, right?

01:09:23.000 You're over there sucking on Mountain Dew talking to me about cigars?

01:09:26.000 Yes.

01:09:26.000 Cigars are natural tobacco leaves.

01:09:28.000 You don't even inhale.

01:09:29.000 You just puff on it.

01:09:30.000 Okay.

01:09:32.000 I don't think you possibly, possibly we should have a little warning sticker that don't take medical advice from this man.

01:09:38.000 Yeah, for sure.

01:09:39.000 Hold up non-COVID content.

01:09:41.000 RuPaul was just on NPR Fresh Air and shared that he and his partner own 60,000 acres in Wyoming and they lease mineral rights and sell water to oil companies.

01:09:53.000 Okay.

01:09:54.000 Terry Gross did not follow up with one question about the fact that RuPaul is fracking.

01:09:59.000 Oh, so it is fracking.

01:10:02.000 We found that RuPaul...

01:10:03.000 Is that true?

01:10:04.000 Ru's partner...

01:10:05.000 It is true?

01:10:07.000 Australian rancher George Labar owns seven parcels of land in Wyoming, totaling some 66,000 acres, Labar's company.

01:10:13.000 Labar Ranch leases that land to at least three oil companies, Anadarko, EP Onshore, Chesapeake Operating, and Ann Schultz Oil Company.

01:10:24.000 Using Frack Tracker, we looked at just 10,000 of those acres and found more than 35 active oil and gas wells.

01:10:33.000 But then they also say all oil and gas drilling is bad.

01:10:36.000 All oil and gas drilling is bad.

01:10:39.000 You hear me, Bjorn?

01:10:40.000 This is a fact.

01:10:42.000 This is a fact. 1.00

01:10:42.000 It's on Gizmodo, you son of a bitch. 1.00

01:10:45.000 All oil and gas drilling is bad, but these three companies are no mom and pop shops. 0.99

01:10:51.000 Chesapeake Energy was a pioneer of the drilling method early in the nation's fracking boom.

01:10:55.000 It was the second most active drilling company in the nation, closely followed by Anadarko.

01:11:01.000 An Anschultz owner, Philippe Frederick Anschultz, made billions from fossil fuel extraction that earned him the 41st spot on the Forbes 400. Wow, interesting.

01:11:13.000 Well, RuPaul is fabulous.

01:11:15.000 Go get it.

01:11:16.000 Get that money.

01:11:17.000 So if it's your land, do you have the right to pollute the rivers and streams?

01:11:25.000 That's the question because these all have trickle-down effects.

01:11:30.000 Like that water is connected to other waterways.

01:11:32.000 And we should have better regulation.

01:11:34.000 We have gotten a lot better regulation.

01:11:36.000 But I was simply trying to get you a sense of, you know, when you do anything in the world, it has negative impacts and positive impacts.

01:11:42.000 You're a glass-half-full guy.

01:11:44.000 No, I'm a class that you need to.

01:11:46.000 No, I'm not.

01:11:47.000 I can't carry on that metaphor.

01:11:48.000 Okay, you don't have to.

01:11:49.000 I put you down the dark road.

01:11:51.000 The idea behind it is there's a trade-off with everything you do.

01:11:56.000 I mean, that's what Thomas Sowell said that, right?

01:11:58.000 There's no solutions.

01:11:59.000 There's trade-offs.

01:11:59.000 Yeah.

01:12:00.000 And what, again, we talked about what should we say to these guys that are gluing themselves on paintings.

01:12:07.000 And not only should you not be scared witless, you should think of this as a problem.

01:12:12.000 But then you also need to find out what actually works.

01:12:15.000 Remember, Germany...

01:12:17.000 Germany is, for many people, sort of this amazing green wonderland.

01:12:22.000 But no!

01:12:23.000 They've gone from 84% fossil fuels to now 77% fossil fuels, and they've spent half a trillion dollars trying to achieve that.

01:12:33.000 That's not how you do these things.

01:12:35.000 That'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?

01:12:51.000 It's partly that.

01:12:52.000 I 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.

01:13:00.000 But the problem is it's an incredibly expensive way of achieving almost nothing.

01:13:05.000 And that's why, you know, if you look at what fracking has done, Fracking is sort of a dirty word.

01:13:11.000 Do you work for big fracking?

01:13:12.000 No, I don't. 1.00

01:13:12.000 This son of a bitch works for big fracking. 1.00

01:13:14.000 But I simply point out that fracking, more than anything else, has cut carbon emissions dramatically because you've given an alternative to coal, which not only emits a lot of CO2, but also kills a lot of people through air pollution, and you can now do a lot less. 0.99

01:13:30.000 Imagine 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.

01:13:41.000 Now, this is not the whole solution, but it has the beauty of being cheaper so that you don't actually have to go to all these summits where everybody promises stuff and then don't do it, but you would actually have people do what's in their own private interest.

01:13:54.000 But that's an uncomfortable trade-off to me, this idea of exploiting the environment that way.

01:14:01.000 Because that's what it is.

01:14:02.000 It'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?

01:14:14.000 Of course.

01:14:14.000 I mean, look.

01:14:15.000 But is that?

01:14:16.000 Yeah.

01:14:16.000 Because if it's not, I don't think that should even be considered.

01:14:18.000 I understand that our emissions are an important issue, but our emissions are where they are now.

01:14:23.000 For a trade-off like that, where you decide you're going to do something that's going to definitely pollute rivers and streams.

01:14:32.000 You're going to do that because it's going to reduce the effect on the environment in terms of the emissions.

01:14:37.000 There's got to be a better way.

01:14:39.000 I think we need to go back.

01:14:41.000 Is there a better way?

01:14:41.000 I would love to look at the study again.

01:14:43.000 The vast majority is air pollution.

01:14:46.000 That's simply just that you have elevated levels near the fracking.

01:14:51.000 This is pollution from fracking, air pollution.

01:14:55.000 And it's localized?

01:14:57.000 It's localized, and it's mostly the people who are also getting the benefits.

01:15:01.000 That's why many people would accept this sort of tradeoff.

01:15:05.000 Absolutely, we should not have...

01:15:07.000 You're sort of switching over to this other place where we say, but what if it...

01:15:31.000 How can you regulate unseen water pollution?

01:15:38.000 So if you are – the method that they utilize in fracking is they drill holes and then they force liquids into these holes.

01:15:47.000 And these liquids are filled with chemicals and somehow or another there's a process and they use that to extract.

01:15:52.000 So how are they doing that and how could you possibly regulate that if you're not even seeing where it's going?

01:15:57.000 Would you have to – So the way you regulated it was to get rid of the most dangerous parts of those chemicals.

01:16:03.000 As I understand it, there's very little dangerous now, the chemicals that you put in, and then also have the overflow so you actually get the wastewater out and that you keep that or you treat that before you release it back.

01:16:15.000 Is that possible to do if they're pumping it into the earth?

01:16:18.000 No, no.

01:16:18.000 You pump it out again.

01:16:20.000 You pump it out again.

01:16:23.000 You're not leaving it down there.

01:16:25.000 The pollution, that's also why it gets back into the environment.

01:16:28.000 The pollution typically came in the water pollution that you're thinking of, I think.

01:16:32.000 Surface.

01:16:33.000 Yes, 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.

01:16:46.000 And this is something that we know very well how to do if you have...

01:16:50.000 Yes, there are always people who will cheat and stuff.

01:16:53.000 That's why you need some sort of follow-up as well.

01:16:57.000 And you probably also want to have bigger companies doing this because they follow standard procedure.

01:17:02.000 But this is fairly simple to manage, if you will.

01:17:06.000 That's what the EPA does in a lot of different senses.

01:17:08.000 Did you ever see the documentary Gasland?

01:17:11.000 Yeah.

01:17:11.000 What did you think about that documentary?

01:17:13.000 So my two cents in that was that it's a good thing to point out that there's a real issue here.

01:17:21.000 When you contrast it with what most of the actual operators said were the problems, I think it was somewhat misleading and it was certainly alarmist.

01:17:33.000 But again, I think it's good that we get these stories out there, but we need to keep a sense of perspective.

01:17:39.000 What about the people whose water was on fire?

01:17:41.000 Oh, and it was a great picture.

01:17:45.000 And very clearly, there were some of these things that needed to get regulated, and they now have.

01:17:52.000 They have?

01:17:52.000 They fixed it?

01:17:53.000 It's all done?

01:17:54.000 All better?

01:17:54.000 Well, it's certainly a lot better.

01:17:56.000 This is what the Environmental Defense Fund and many others are saying as well.

01:18:00.000 Do you know what the chemicals were that were really dangerous that they were using that they stopped using?

01:18:04.000 No.

01:18:05.000 I mean, I kind of know.

01:18:06.000 I've read it, but I can't remember.

01:18:08.000 So there's no damage whatsoever to the waterways that are under the ground if they're pumping all the toxic chemicals in there?

01:18:16.000 No, because they're pumping them way further down than where aquifers typically are, and they pump them into places that have held hydrocarbons.

01:18:25.000 That's why they're there.

01:18:26.000 For millions of years.

01:18:28.000 So they can extract basically everything they put down there.

01:18:32.000 Okay.

01:18:33.000 Well, that's better.

01:18:34.000 But this idea that we should accept some amount of water pollution and river pollution scares the shit out of me.

01:18:40.000 Because that's like one of the few amazing things about this country is that there are still unspoiled natural habitats. 0.93

01:18:48.000 And to fuck those up in the name of the economy.

01:18:52.000 Yeah, I think... 0.98

01:18:54.000 And I get that point.

01:18:55.000 I think you're sort of imagining that we're going to frack and then Yellowstone goes down and flames kind of thing.

01:19:02.000 No, I'm saying even for local areas, imagine if you're a person who, like, your family's always gone down to this river.

01:19:09.000 It's near your house and it's a source of recreation for everybody.

01:19:12.000 Now you can't go in there because it's polluted.

01:19:14.000 Yeah.

01:19:15.000 So again, I don't know this well enough, but it's not my understanding that we're anywhere near that situation.

01:19:21.000 It would be something that you could measure elevated levels of some constituents.

01:19:27.000 That would be it.

01:19:28.000 See if you can Google what the...

01:19:29.000 There was one river that I think that they were talking about in that documentary that got polluted directly because of fracking and the chemicals released from fracking, and that it was really damaging.

01:19:43.000 That scares the shit out of people when they start talking about extracting oil near where salmon spawn and stuff like that.

01:19:51.000 We've got to be really careful about doing stuff like that just to boost the economy.

01:19:55.000 That seems like a short-sighted thing that's going to cost us more money in the long run if ultimately it does lead to be not just more money but these unfixable areas of pollution.

01:20:06.000 Yeah.

01:20:07.000 I think this is way exaggerated.

01:20:11.000 The point that I try to make was when you do these estimates, and that's why I think economics actually have a good sort of contribution.

01:20:20.000 They tell you that when you look at all the disbenefits from fracking, those are significant.

01:20:26.000 There's a net positive.

01:20:27.000 That's $25 billion.

01:20:29.000 That means that there will be some people who will be more exposed to air pollution, which will lead to some diseases.

01:20:36.000 And that's the net worth of which is in the order of $25 billion.

01:20:40.000 It's a lot of other things and also some of these waterway things.

01:20:43.000 So that's people that are working on the fracking mines and working in those areas?

01:20:47.000 It could also be just people who are there, who live there.

01:20:50.000 Well, that sucks if you're there and you don't frack. 0.96

01:20:53.000 Yeah. 0.98

01:20:55.000 But I think if you look at any other thing, so if you look at the fact that we have roads in the U.S., they kill 40,000 people every year.

01:21:04.000 You mean car accidents?

01:21:05.000 Yeah.

01:21:06.000 And, you know, there's a very simple way to avoid that.

01:21:10.000 It's setting the speed limit at three miles an hour.

01:21:12.000 Mm, good call.

01:21:14.000 And, you know, we make that trade-off and we say, look, you can have a sensible conversation.

01:21:18.000 Should it be 55 or 75?

01:21:20.000 And that's a real conversation about how much faster do I get home versus how many more people die.

01:21:26.000 Right.

01:21:26.000 But none of us would be willing to say it's going to be three miles an hour.

01:21:30.000 Right.

01:21:31.000 And I think that's the conversation that we need to have.

01:21:33.000 Yeah, that's kind of a different conversation than mine.

01:21:36.000 Delaware's rivers and streams are the most polluted in the U.S., a new report says.

01:21:41.000 And is this directly because of fracking?

01:21:42.000 That's what I was trying to figure out.

01:21:44.000 So I just found another article that kind of contradicts that specifically and said it's particular right here.

01:21:50.000 So it's been cleaned up and it's now today like one of the top water quality success stories.

01:21:55.000 Oh, okay.

01:21:56.000 When was the other article written?

01:21:57.000 This is from NewJersey.gov, and the other one is also this year.

01:22:01.000 It's a report from another, like PBS. So a news station wrote this, and this is also from this year.

01:22:07.000 So which one is saying, this is where you got to...

01:22:10.000 So can I just say, and you get this a lot, I don't know this particular thing, but what we know is that all pollution levels have been going down in the U.S. So it could actually both be true, that everything is getting cleaner, but Delaware's rivers are getting less...

01:22:25.000 More clean.

01:22:26.000 Do you see what I mean?

01:22:27.000 They're getting cleaner slower.

01:22:29.000 Cleaner slower.

01:22:30.000 So even though it's one of the most polluted, it's one of the most polluted in relation.

01:22:34.000 Comparison with all the other very, very clean rivers.

01:22:38.000 And again, this is not untrue.

01:22:39.000 And certainly we want our environment to be cleaner rather than dirtier.

01:22:44.000 There's no doubt about that.

01:22:45.000 But it's just that we can't have this idea of saying we won't accept any damage anywhere.

01:22:51.000 Because then we end up—and this, of course, is what happens in many areas—we end up sending all our pollution to China and India and elsewhere and feel all virtuous about it.

01:23:01.000 We do?

01:23:02.000 How do we do that?

01:23:03.000 So, you know, there's a good chance—no, you have a Tesla, right?

01:23:06.000 So that's possibly produced here.

01:23:08.000 But most electric cars, their batteries are produced in China.

01:23:12.000 So, you know, all the pollution went in over in China, and then we drive around and feel virtuous about them.

01:23:19.000 You mean involved in the construction of the car?

01:23:21.000 Yes, yes.

01:23:21.000 And of course, that's true for everything else.

01:23:23.000 You know, most of the stuff, I don't know how much of the stuff in here, but probably a lot of it is from China. 0.99

01:23:29.000 God damn it. 0.99

01:23:30.000 And just like everyone else, it's not you. 0.99

01:23:32.000 There's anything wrong with, right?

01:23:34.000 But that's just how we put up our world.

01:23:37.000 So we actually can feel very virtuous about ourselves and make everything cleaner, but then just have the air pollution and all the other pollution impacts somewhere else.

01:23:46.000 Now, when you look at the overall landscape of proposed improvements and the impact it'll have on the environment, what stands out to you?

01:23:56.000 Like, what do you think is things that people are talking about in terms of helping the environment and reducing our carbon footprint?

01:24:04.000 Like, what makes sense?

01:24:06.000 So I'll tell you one thing that does, then one thing that does, right?

01:24:10.000 Sure.

01:24:10.000 So if you look at a lot of these things, oh, I'm not going to do this or I'm not going to do that.

01:24:15.000 I'm actually a vegetarian.

01:24:17.000 How dare you.

01:24:18.000 Yeah, sorry about that.

01:24:19.000 I knew it.

01:24:20.000 Moral choice.

01:24:20.000 Works for big fracking and he's a vegetarian.

01:24:23.000 This fucking guy. 1.00

01:24:24.000 But people... 1.00

01:24:26.000 People will tell you that, you know, going vegetarian is a great thing for the planet.

01:24:31.000 But actually, it's a fairly small impact overall.

01:24:34.000 So, you know, they'll tell you that it'll reduce your carbon footprint by 50%.

01:24:39.000 What they don't tell you, it's your food impact, your food footprint, which is a very small part of your total impact.

01:24:46.000 So we're talking about 4% or thereabouts.

01:24:48.000 And then remember also being vegetarian is cheaper.

01:24:51.000 So that actually means you have more money and you're going to spend that on a trip to Mexico or something.

01:24:57.000 So it actually turns out that when you take into account that people are going to spend the rest of their money on something else, it probably reduces your emissions by 2%.

01:25:05.000 When people talk about emissions and vegetarianism, do they take into account the difference in monocrop agriculture versus regenerative agriculture?

01:25:13.000 You can buy food.

01:25:15.000 We had Will Harris from White Oak Pastures, who has this very sophisticated regenerative farm that he converted his family's industrialized farm over a period of 20 years.

01:25:26.000 Amazing story.

01:25:27.000 Really interesting guy.

01:25:28.000 But doing so has basically...

01:25:31.000 They take out more carbon than they put out into the environment.

01:25:35.000 Everything is natural.

01:25:36.000 They don't use any pesticides or herbicides.

01:25:39.000 Everything is done the way nature intended.

01:25:42.000 Essentially, Recreated nature in a controlled environment in terms of like utilizing the manure and the chicken shit and the chickens roam around and the pigs root around and all these animals live as if they're supposed to live like 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,

01:26:13.000 when the water runs off, his is clear and then it hits where the neighbor's property is and it turns brown, like instantly.

01:26:19.000 There's a literal divide line in the river.

01:26:23.000 It's crazy to see.

01:26:24.000 So that's something you have to take into account when you think about vegetarianism.

01:26:28.000 How are you getting your vegetables?

01:26:31.000 Are you getting it from a place like White Oaks Pastures that raises everything in a regenerative way?

01:26:36.000 So it's natural, there's no pesticides or herbicides, no poison at all is getting leaked into the water supply.

01:26:42.000 Or 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. 0.95

01:26:49.000 But meanwhile, you're contributing to this fucking crazy eco-devastation on this river, and you don't even think you are.

01:26:56.000 So the numbers I showed you were the ones that are based on how we actually produce, and that's by far mostly what that other guy does. 0.96

01:27:04.000 Yeah, by far mostly doing it industrialized.

01:27:07.000 So you have to be a little careful, though.

01:27:10.000 So 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.

01:27:19.000 They basically get a lot of their fertilizer from other farms that are not because otherwise you can't make it run around.

01:27:27.000 A curious thing that I think most people don't recognize.

01:27:30.000 Say that again?

01:27:31.000 So there's not enough natural fertilizer in the world to keep 8 billion people fed.

01:27:37.000 There's actually only enough natural fertilizer to keep 4 billion people fed.

01:27:42.000 But isn't that under current farming models?

01:27:45.000 Well, it's just simply a question of nitrogen.

01:27:48.000 There's just not enough nitrogen in the world to make it run around.

01:27:52.000 That's why you have to have the other 4 billion people or half of every person fed with fertilizer that basically comes from natural gas.

01:28:04.000 And so when people say, oh, I have this very, very nice environmental farm, it often means that they're actually importing basically feces from other farms that have been grown with artificial fertilizer.

01:28:18.000 I don't necessarily think he does that.

01:28:20.000 Look, 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?

01:28:32.000 It's not enormous.

01:28:33.000 No.

01:28:34.000 And the point is we just can't make this happen for everyone, which is one of the things— When people go buy organic and all that stuff, it's great because it makes people feel really virtuous.

01:28:45.000 But the point is, we just couldn't do it all of us.

01:28:48.000 Right.

01:28:48.000 But for the humans that do it, they are having a smaller impact, which is doing something to make them feel better.

01:28:57.000 If you really are buying food from White Oaks pastures, if that's your sole source of food for your family.

01:29:02.000 Yes.

01:29:03.000 You 100% are contributing less to the carbon footprint in comparison to buying stuff from that farm that's leaking into the river.

01:29:11.000 Well, it depends on whether you're talking about the carbon footprint.

01:29:14.000 Not the carbon footprint.

01:29:16.000 They typically emit about as much organic farms.

01:29:20.000 Again, I don't know this particular farm.

01:29:22.000 How is that possible, though?

01:29:24.000 Because they're much less effective.

01:29:26.000 And so they use a lot more land to produce the same amount of food.

01:29:30.000 And so what is the carbon footprint coming from machines that they use?

01:29:33.000 Well, it both comes from methane that leaks from the land, from the inputs that go into the individual animals.

01:29:44.000 It depends also a lot on what kind of animals it is.

01:29:59.000 Really?

01:30:00.000 Even a regenerative farm?

01:30:02.000 Well, again, I don't know this particular farm.

01:30:04.000 I think the way he was describing it, he was very proud of the fact that it's essentially below carbon neutral, that it's actually taking out carbon from the way they grow their food to the way they utilize the manure and the way they feed the animals.

01:30:22.000 That's impressive because you can't...

01:30:24.000 And 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.

01:30:37.000 Look at this.

01:30:38.000 As a result, White Oak Pastures has a carbon footprint 111% lower than conventional beef.

01:30:45.000 Yep.

01:30:45.000 White Oak Pastures sequestered 919 tons of CO2 in the soil with the help of plants and compost.

01:30:55.000 That's like switching 31,679 incandescent light bulbs to LED. And so it shows white oak pastures versus other proteins, like how they're grown in other places.

01:31:07.000 So you see conventional beef, which is like a huge amount of carbon, plus 33. White oak pastures, it gets to them, their beef is negative 3.5.

01:31:17.000 Yeah.

01:31:18.000 So the only way that you can sequester CO2 on land is by not having it be productive.

01:31:25.000 You need to have it, you know, you need to basically have it build up carbon dioxide in the, in the, sorry, carbon.

01:31:32.000 But he's talking about like compost and manure extracting that.

01:31:36.000 Yeah, but you can't use it because if you use it, then you emit it again.

01:31:39.000 We store more carbon in the soil than our cows emit during their lives.

01:31:44.000 And so pounds of CO2 for every pound of white oak pastures be produced.

01:31:48.000 Like, this seems to contradict what you're saying.

01:31:51.000 And look, I don't know how this works.

01:31:55.000 I'm talking about how regular organic farms work, and there's been lots of studies done on that.

01:32:01.000 And the thing I'm a little worried about here is that it doesn't seem reasonable to me that you can actually keep this up.

01:32:08.000 You can certainly do it for a few short years where you build up your carbon storage in your land, but eventually you have to either use it productively or keep it fenced off.

01:32:21.000 I don't understand what you're saying.

01:32:22.000 Why would he have to do that if he's rotating the crops and rotating where the animals go and moving them around?

01:32:28.000 Well, so if you plant a forest, so that's the typical sort of way you think about this, right?

01:32:34.000 You put up a forest, you put up small saplings, they grow bigger and bigger, they store a lot of carbon.

01:32:40.000 They both store it in the crown but also in the root material.

01:32:43.000 But eventually they've grown full and then they can't store anymore and then you just have to keep it there.

01:32:48.000 If you cut them down, then obviously you now release all the CO2 again.

01:32:52.000 And what they're doing, as I understand it, is that they're basically building it up in their ground.

01:32:57.000 So they're having more roots in there, more stuff in there.

01:33:00.000 But if you don't release it, if you don't use it, if you don't grow on it, you have to keep not growing on it in order to keep it stored away.

01:33:10.000 Well, they're growing.

01:33:11.000 It's pastures.

01:33:13.000 So they have grass growing there.

01:33:15.000 That's like the main thing that these cows are eating. 1.00

01:33:18.000 They're all grass-fed.

01:33:20.000 No, I get that.

01:33:21.000 Yes.

01:33:21.000 So that's how they're doing it.

01:33:23.000 Okay.

01:33:23.000 Yeah.

01:33:23.000 No, that makes sense.

01:33:24.000 Sorry.

01:33:24.000 I was thinking about intensive farm.

01:33:28.000 Yeah.

01:33:28.000 No, that makes sense.

01:33:29.000 Yeah.

01:33:29.000 So his method, I think the only knock on it would be...

01:33:33.000 If you want to have a jack-in-the-box on every corner and you want cheap beef to feed people everywhere, you probably can't do it that way.

01:33:40.000 And if you want to feed everyone, you can't do it that way.

01:33:42.000 But his argument was that we really shouldn't be eating that way anyway.

01:33:46.000 That's also a fair point.

01:33:48.000 So the main point comes back to saying, we can't do this for everyone.

01:33:54.000 And that was the main point I was trying to make, that we have this idea of saying we can all go organic.

01:34:00.000 No, a few people can go organic and feel very comfortable about it, but there's just not enough nitrogen for everyone to do this.

01:34:06.000 And so that was the answer that I wanted to say.

01:34:10.000 Don't think that these sort of cheap, simple things where you vert your signal is how you're really going to switch.

01:34:17.000 The way you're going to switch, the way we're actually going to fix climate change, Is by focusing on technology.

01:34:24.000 So you mentioned one of them, nuclear.

01:34:26.000 If we could imagine that we could actually get fourth generation nuclear in some way to be incredibly cheap and safe.

01:34:32.000 That could solve a very large part of it.

01:34:34.000 Imagine if you come up with a technology that's cheaper than coal and gas and all that.

01:34:40.000 Everyone is going to switch, not just because they're rich, well-meaning Americans, but also the Chinese, the Indians, the Africans, everybody else. 0.84

01:34:48.000 So that will basically generate a lot of cheap energy that's both good for economic growth and will cut carbon emissions dramatically.

01:34:56.000 Now, 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.

01:35:04.000 Right now, only about 20% is electricity.

01:35:08.000 The rest of energy is industrial processes, heating, transport, all these other things that are much, much harder to switch out.

01:35:16.000 So obviously, also steel and cement and so on.

01:35:22.000 So there's a lot of issues that still remain, but the technology point still remains.

01:35:27.000 If we can come up with this technology that's cheaper than fossil fuels and does not emit CO2, we're done.

01:35:33.000 Now, if we don't do this and if we give in to climate fear, which is what a lot of people are using, it seems, if you want to be cynical, it seems like a political ploy.

01:35:46.000 Why would they want to do that?

01:35:47.000 What 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?

01:35:58.000 There's an economic impact to this.

01:36:00.000 There's a trade-off to that.

01:36:01.000 Here's why it's actually better for the atmosphere overall if we do it this way.

01:36:06.000 And the solution seems to be in technology, and it's not into halting all use of fossil fuels immediately, which would be devastating to the economy.

01:36:15.000 And ultimately, when the economy goes, it's devastating to almost all aspects of our civilization.

01:36:20.000 That's the very unfortunate reality of life, right?

01:36:23.000 So have you ever had a debate with someone about this?

01:36:27.000 Oh, gosh, yes.

01:36:28.000 Who's a climate fanatic?

01:36:29.000 Oh, yeah, yeah.

01:36:29.000 I have lots of those debates.

01:36:31.000 How do those go?

01:36:31.000 So my sense is that these guys are really well-intentioned.

01:36:36.000 So they really want to do good.

01:36:38.000 It's not sort of an evil ploy or anything, but...

01:36:42.000 They seem to believe that, you know, just by wishing we can somehow make it come true.

01:36:47.000 And I think a lot of the conversation that, you know, so when you're starting to see what is it going to cost to go net zero, for instance, a lot of people are talking about we should go net zero.

01:36:57.000 You know, Biden, President Biden is talking about that.

01:37:01.000 This will be fantastically costly, and that's what all these studies show.

01:37:05.000 So McKinsey shows it's going to cost nearly $6 trillion every year for the world.

01:37:10.000 That's two-thirds of the total global tax intake.

01:37:13.000 So basically imagine that two-thirds of everything the U.S. government spends Now would have to go to net zero.

01:37:20.000 Well, I think you said something that's very important, too.

01:37:22.000 You said the world.

01:37:23.000 And I think it's very unreasonable to assume that the rest of the world would take on this economic burden the way we're willing to take it on for the environment.

01:37:32.000 And that, in fact, there are countries that are not interested at all in releasing less carbon.

01:37:38.000 They're interested in economically becoming more and more powerful and spreading their wings.

01:37:43.000 And just lifting their populations out of poverty.

01:37:47.000 And also becoming more military, you know, more powerful militarily.

01:37:51.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:37:51.000 Look, China is not just a good guy nation by any means.

01:37:56.000 But I can understand them.

01:37:57.000 And I can understand why, you know, India and Africa wants to be a little bit like China. 0.89

01:38:03.000 Remember, China has basically lifted, what, almost a billion people out of poverty.

01:38:06.000 That's an amazing achievement.

01:38:08.000 And, you know, if you lived in China or you lived in India, you would want to do the same.

01:38:12.000 Sure.

01:38:13.000 But then at what cost?

01:38:15.000 Yes.

01:38:15.000 And so the reality is, even if just the U.S. tried to go net zero, there's a new study in Nature magazine that estimated that the cost per person...

01:38:26.000 I actually have that graph, so we can show that as well.

01:38:30.000 So the cost per person would be phenomenal.

01:38:35.000 Well, it'd be nice if I could find it, but...

01:38:37.000 Oh, there it is.

01:38:38.000 So it's number 28A. So the cost of reducing emissions, 80%.

01:38:49.000 This is per person per year in the U.S. by mid-century.

01:38:53.000 $11,000.

01:38:53.000 Well, that's almost entire net zero.

01:38:57.000 And the modelers say they're not sure whether this is true, but it's certainly a big number.

01:39:01.000 But even if you just went 80% towards the Biden promise, it would cost more than $5,000 per person per year.

01:39:09.000 Just get Bill Gates to pay for it.

01:39:11.000 I don't get it.

01:39:12.000 What's the problem?

01:39:13.000 Get a lot of money.

01:39:14.000 Get his wife. 0.99

01:39:15.000 She's very philanthropically inclined.

01:39:18.000 Half a year or something.

01:39:18.000 Mackenzie Bezos.

01:39:19.000 She's got a lot of cheddar.

01:39:20.000 She's put in towards good use.

01:39:22.000 But the fundamental point is people are just not going to be willing to pay that amount of money.

01:39:26.000 Well, they might be.

01:39:27.000 I mean, they might assume that the government could foot the bill for this. 0.64

01:39:31.000 If they can come up with so much money to send arms to Ukraine and to invade other countries and do a lot of shady shit that we don't appreciate them doing, we would think that they could fork out 11,000 per person and- Per year. 0.87

01:39:42.000 Per year. 0.89

01:39:43.000 And crank that up.

01:39:44.000 What is that?

01:39:45.000 What is that all told with 300 and- How many do we have now?

01:39:50.000 So this is 12% of US GDP. Jesus.

01:39:56.000 That's a chunk.

01:39:57.000 Yes.

01:39:59.000 So that's not feasible.

01:40:00.000 Not currently.

01:40:01.000 But we can work towards something like that.

01:40:05.000 That's why we need to get realistic and say, we're not going to do this by telling everyone you have to pay up right now.

01:40:12.000 What we can do is to do this innovation.

01:40:14.000 We should be spending lots, lots more into innovation because innovation is incredibly cheap.

01:40:21.000 So Craig Venter, do you remember him?

01:40:23.000 He was the guy who cracked the human genome back in 2000. He's sort of a crazy smart guy.

01:40:29.000 And he has this idea that he wants to grow algae, specific, special algae on the ocean surface that basically soak up sunlight and CO2 and produce oil.

01:40:42.000 Imagine that.

01:40:43.000 We could grow our own Saudi Arabias out on the ocean surface, and then we'd just simply harvest those. 0.99

01:40:48.000 We'd process them, make oil.

01:40:50.000 We could keep our entire fossil fuel economy going right now, but it would be CO2 neutral because they just soaked out the CO2 out in the ocean surface.

01:40:58.000 Would that have a detrimental effect on the ocean?

01:41:02.000 I'm sure that, you know, just like we've talked about before, nothing you do would have no impact.

01:41:08.000 There's always trade-offs.

01:41:10.000 Yes, everything is trade-offs, but we could potentially solve a very large part of the global warming problem at first.

01:41:18.000 Fairly low cost.

01:41:19.000 We can't do it right now because right now it costs a fortune and can't really be scaled very well.

01:41:25.000 But the point is, give this guy some money and try to investigate it because research is incredibly cheap.

01:41:32.000 This is how we've solved all problems.

01:41:33.000 Do you remember those Live Aid concerts and all that stuff?

01:41:37.000 Sure.

01:41:37.000 And even before then, we worried a lot about Africa, especially India and Southeast Asia, not being able to feed their own populations.

01:41:45.000 And sort of the standard way that we think about global warming now is to tell everyone, you know, could you not eat so much and then we'll send it down to, you know, the poor Indians and the poor Africans? 0.99

01:41:54.000 And of course that didn't work.

01:41:56.000 What did work was the Green Revolution. 0.89

01:41:58.000 We basically evolved these, we innovated these new seeds that produce two or three times as much per acre.

01:42:05.000 And that's what basically grew the world's food production dramatically.

01:42:11.000 India is now one of the world's – it is actually the world's leading rice exporter.

01:42:15.000 It's gone from a basket case to being able to feed its own population.

01:42:18.000 But aren't there a lot of problems with that too where the Indian farmers are getting fucked over and they get connected to these – 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, 0.80

01:42:33.000 and they're going bankrupt, and there's a ton of suicides from these Indian farmers. 0.85

01:42:38.000 That's a pretty big trade.

01:42:40.000 Well, it actually turns out that there's less...

01:42:43.000 So there's IFPRI, who's one of these institutions that look into farmers and farming policy.

01:42:50.000 They did an estimate and found that there are fewer people die from suicides.

01:42:55.000 But because there's a lot of farmers in India, there's a lot of farmer suicides.

01:43:00.000 But yes, there are absolutely problems in India as well.

01:43:04.000 But, you know, fundamentally...

01:43:06.000 Being 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.

01:43:20.000 But are they the only two solutions?

01:43:22.000 No, no.

01:43:22.000 Isn't there a solution where they have a more equitable sort of relationship with the people that provide them seeds and that they can both benefit from it?

01:43:31.000 Seems like they're getting exploited, right?

01:43:33.000 Sure.

01:43:34.000 So, again, my understanding of this is that you can, if you want to, you can buy the public seeds.

01:43:44.000 And so India and many other countries provide public seeds that don't have any copyright and that you can grow.

01:43:50.000 Or you can buy the private property seeds that grow more per acre.

01:43:57.000 And so it's basically a trade-off just like when you go to a store and decide between a slightly less good product, which is cheaper, or a more expensive product that's better.

01:44:07.000 It sounds like a creepy trade-off though.

01:44:09.000 If the stuff that doesn't work as well is the stuff that you could get from the state and people are economically poor and disenfranchised and You know, they have to take on loans to get the other seeds, and they get indebted.

01:44:22.000 Well, they don't have to get those seeds. 0.63

01:44:24.000 Right.

01:44:24.000 They can get the public seeds, but they won't be able to make it.

01:44:27.000 Well, they can't make it as much, no.

01:44:29.000 Right.

01:44:30.000 They're probably barely getting by as it is, though, don't you think?

01:44:33.000 So the problem is I think we're seeing the outcome here from the people who basically said, all right, I'm going to get a loan, possibly from a loan shark, and then invest this in order to get a higher payoff.

01:44:48.000 Right.

01:44:48.000 If it works out, if it's beautiful, if it was great weather, it works out really well.

01:44:52.000 If it didn't, I'm screwed and then I commit suicide.

01:44:55.000 I'm making a story here, right?

01:44:56.000 But 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. 0.85

01:45:13.000 Well, I think what we're really concerned with is predatory relationships between very poor farmers and giant multinational corporations that don't give a fuck about those people.

01:45:23.000 That's what scares us is that there's a dehumanizing aspect to this sort of method of producing agriculture.

01:45:31.000 Yeah.

01:45:31.000 So the real issue here is though that most of the big agricultural producers basically produce for rich countries because those are the ones who can pay.

01:45:43.000 So what we're stuck with and very often don't have very good is that we need much more research into getting yield enhancement in the things that you grow in many of the poor countries in the world.

01:45:57.000 I think?

01:46:16.000 Again, you're a glass-half-full guy.

01:46:18.000 I'm a guy where it says, we used to have, what, 7 million kids dying each year of malnutrition.

01:46:25.000 Now it's less than 3. That still means there's almost 3 million kids that die each year from malnutrition.

01:46:31.000 That's terrible.

01:46:32.000 But it's a much better world than 7. Yes.

01:46:35.000 And that's a weird conversation to have with people because all people want to think about generally is the negative aspects of any story.

01:46:44.000 They always want to do that.

01:46:45.000 And this is a big story that affects the whole world.

01:46:47.000 I was going to ask you in the middle of all that, I didn't want to forget, what percentage of the CO2 emission, the greenhouse gases, does the United States produce in relationship to the rest of the world?

01:46:58.000 What does the rest of the world produce? 0.99

01:47:00.000 So it's about 12% of emissions.

01:47:03.000 We produce 12%.

01:47:04.000 So if we cut back to net zero, you're still dealing with an 88% problem.

01:47:10.000 Just 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.

01:47:23.000 So you'll have this temperature increase instead of this temperature increase.

01:47:27.000 So the temperature will continue to increase.

01:47:29.000 Yes, but slightly less.

01:47:30.000 Do they really have an objective understanding of how much of this is a natural cycle and how much of this is being caused by human beings?

01:47:40.000 Can they quantify it?

01:47:43.000 So we started out talking a little bit about what do they think.

01:47:47.000 And again, my understanding is that they're saying it's a very large part, it's a predominant part that's caused by global warming.

01:47:54.000 But it's also obvious that we have less good understanding of these long-term cycles.

01:48:01.000 Right.

01:48:07.000 Right.

01:48:12.000 Right.

01:48:18.000 How do we get innovation going so that we get better, for instance, nuclear or better of this Craig Venter guy ideas or these many, many other ideas that are out there?

01:48:29.000 We should be funding all of those.

01:48:30.000 So I helped assemble together with, I believe it was 49 of the world's top climate economists.

01:48:38.000 And three Nobel laureates to look at how do you best and smartest invest in green energy?

01:48:44.000 So better deal with climate change.

01:48:47.000 And what they found was the long-term best strategy was invest in green energy research and development.

01:48:54.000 So that's the long-term because there could be some innovation that would be groundbreaking.

01:48:58.000 Basically, if you get innovation and you find a breakthrough, you will have fixed the problem.

01:49:04.000 If you don't get that innovation, We just won't fix the problem.

01:49:08.000 We'll do a little bit of it at very, very high cost and we'll end up a little bit like we talked about with Germany, right? 0.91

01:49:13.000 You'll end up spending half a trillion dollars and cut a tiny bit of your emissions.

01:49:17.000 To sort of shift the narrative and get people to stop Being terrified of a future with the climate increasing the way it is on a steady rate.

01:49:29.000 What can you say to people that would get them to...

01:49:34.000 Is there a real simple way of breaking this down that gives people an understanding of their perspective?

01:49:40.000 How much this has been exaggerated?

01:49:44.000 What the danger actually is?

01:49:47.000 One of the big ones is Miami.

01:49:48.000 In 10 years, Miami's going to be underwater.

01:49:50.000 Yes, yes.

01:49:51.000 But meanwhile, banks keep financing people building these giant skyscrapers next to the water.

01:49:56.000 What's going on?

01:49:57.000 Is Miami going underwater?

01:49:59.000 No.

01:50:00.000 I 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.

01:50:10.000 And Holland, obviously, is the great example, right?

01:50:13.000 Holland has, while sea levels have been rising, they've actually gotten much larger because they know how to do this and they're very, very safe.

01:50:22.000 Remember, 40% of the country is underwater.

01:50:24.000 If you go to Schiphol, which is the 14th largest airport in the world, Amsterdam Airport, They proudly say on their website that we're the only major airport in the world that was previously a site of a major naval battle.

01:50:38.000 But you don't feel it.

01:50:39.000 They're fine there.

01:50:41.000 So how would they do that with Miami?

01:50:49.000 The total cost of protecting Holland.

01:50:51.000 This is not nothing, but for a rich country over 50 years, that's almost nothing.

01:50:55.000 It's not that bad.

01:50:56.000 So what about Miami, though?

01:50:57.000 How would they protect Miami?

01:50:59.000 So I don't know specifically how you do this for Miami.

01:51:03.000 The point is, Miami is incredibly valuable.

01:51:06.000 Obviously, you find, as I understand it, there is actually some problems that it's built on coral.

01:51:11.000 Yeah, it's porous.

01:51:12.000 Yes, it'll be harder to do.

01:51:14.000 I'm not saying this is going to be easy, but this is the kind of thing.

01:51:16.000 But you did say it was going to be easy.

01:51:18.000 Well, In general, we know how to do these things.

01:51:21.000 And so I don't know how specifically you're going to do this for Miami.

01:51:25.000 But I do know that we've done this almost everywhere on the planet.

01:51:29.000 Remember, if you go...

01:51:30.000 So New York Times took me down to the waterfront cafe in New York when I published my first climate book.

01:51:38.000 And this is now, what, five streets away from the waterfront, right?

01:51:42.000 Because New York has actually grown.

01:51:44.000 We've seen the same thing happen everywhere on the planet.

01:51:47.000 So 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. 1.00

01:51:56.000 Has anybody done that with a model for Miami?

01:52:00.000 Because again, what you were saying, I had heard, was that the problem is the ground is porous.

01:52:05.000 And that whenever there's any sort of a water event in Miami, the streets are flooded.

01:52:10.000 And that they're worried that as the ocean level rises, this would be insurmountable.

01:52:14.000 Like, I don't know if that's as simple a problem as what they're dealing with in Holland or in a lot of other places where they make dams and seawalls and what they do with New Orleans.

01:52:23.000 Yes.

01:52:23.000 And I don't...

01:52:25.000 So I should possibly have been less quick and say... 1.00

01:52:28.000 You son of a bitch. 1.00

01:52:28.000 That's what you've done. 1.00

01:52:29.000 Miami, I don't know.

01:52:31.000 Everywhere else, we have...

01:52:32.000 So there are good global models that look at this.

01:52:35.000 If I can actually show you a graph of a global model on...

01:52:40.000 So it's number 23 on the A file.

01:52:45.000 So this is a model for the world that looks at how many people are getting flooded.

01:52:50.000 And what it shows you is that in 2000, about 3 million people got flooded every year.

01:52:56.000 And so you can see over there in 2000, 3 million people get flooded and it has a cost of 0.05% of GDP. Now, if you assume that there's going to be no adaptation, this is pretty much where all the catastrophic stories come from.

01:53:11.000 You end up in this situation where, you know, 187 million people will be flooded.

01:53:16.000 This 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.

01:53:31.000 Then, obviously, this is going to be terrible.

01:53:32.000 So it's going to cost 5% of global GDP. But this is not the world we live in.

01:53:37.000 We'll actually adapt.

01:53:39.000 So that's why I said in this general thing, it's not going to happen for Miami, but I don't know whether the model has actually modeled, particularly Miami.

01:53:47.000 It's modeled the world.

01:53:48.000 This seems like a real problem, though.

01:53:50.000 If there's not real adaptation...

01:53:53.000 Ideas that are on the books that seem like they could be implemented.

01:53:57.000 Eighty years will go by pretty quickly.

01:53:59.000 If 187 million people are flooded, if there's no adaptation, then you have to also think about population increase.

01:54:06.000 You have to think about the increase in the amount of CO2 we release.

01:54:11.000 There's a lot of other things you have to factor in along with no adaptation.

01:54:15.000 But the point is, we will not be in this world.

01:54:18.000 Are you sure?

01:54:19.000 Yes.

01:54:19.000 And the authors themselves say this is absolutely inconceivable.

01:54:23.000 Worst case scenario.

01:54:24.000 Everybody will actually adapt.

01:54:27.000 You will put up high sea dikes, and much of this is not going to be these amazingly big structures that are going to feel overwhelming.

01:54:35.000 It's just simply water management.

01:54:37.000 And 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,

01:54:55.000 where's this chart from?

01:54:56.000 So this is from one of the most quoted stories.

01:54:59.000 This is one of the few articles that actually both look at both adaptation and no adaptation.

01:55:04.000 So it's from Hinkle 2014. I think it's...

01:55:09.000 I don't have internet, so I can't actually show you right now.

01:55:12.000 So no adaptation, it drops down below the rate where it's at currently.

01:55:18.000 Sorry, with adaptation.

01:55:19.000 Excuse me, with adaptation.

01:55:21.000 The amount of people flooded drops below.

01:55:23.000 And much, much below, right?

01:55:25.000 I mean, from 3 million to virtually nobody.

01:55:27.000 To 15,000.

01:55:30.000 But that's globally?

01:55:32.000 That's globally.

01:55:33.000 What that tells you is that this is an issue that we fix.

01:55:37.000 We know how to fix.

01:55:38.000 And Holland is a great example of that.

01:55:40.000 If you're rich, you fix it.

01:55:42.000 If you're poor, you have a real problem.

01:55:44.000 This, of course, is why so many people died in China and India when there were floods back in the 1920s, as we were talking about before. 0.96

01:55:52.000 When you're poor, life sucks in so many different ways. 0.96

01:55:56.000 It also sucks from climate. 0.52

01:55:58.000 And that's, of course, one of the reasons why I think when people say, and they're right to say that, climate is going to harm the world's poor the most. 0.90

01:56:06.000 And they sort of jump to this unwarranted conclusion, so we need to do something about climate. 0.90

01:56:11.000 No, it's because it sucks to be poor. 0.67

01:56:13.000 We should do something about not being poor.

01:56:16.000 You know, there's a big hurricane that hit Tacloban in 2013, a Filipino city.

01:56:24.000 And it happened right when there was a global warming meeting, one of the big COP meetings.

01:56:31.000 And everybody outpoured and said, oh, this is because of global warming.

01:56:35.000 Of course, there was actually a pandemic.

01:56:36.000 Exactly similar hurricane 100 years before, 19-0 something, that followed the exact same path and killed half the city's population back then.

01:56:50.000 It was much, much worse.

01:56:51.000 This time, it only killed about 2% of the city's population.

01:56:57.000 But the people who got killed and the people who got harmed were still, you know, essentially living under corrugated roofs.

01:57:04.000 Our job is to make sure that they don't live under corrugated roofs, that they actually live in good buildings, that they have those clamps that we talked about, that they have all these other opportunities so that they can live well.

01:57:14.000 Of course, we should also in the long run find a way to actually make sure we fix climate change.

01:57:19.000 But it's wrong to say Because these poor people are going to be focused with more climate change.

01:57:25.000 We should do something about climate change.

01:57:26.000 No, these poor people are going to be focused with all kinds of bad things from malnutrition and bad education and from diseases because they're poor.

01:57:34.000 If we want to help them, we should lift them out of poverty.

01:57:38.000 That's a solution you don't ever hear before.

01:57:41.000 You hear very little of when it comes to dealing with the situation in terms of the amount of impact on deaths.

01:57:47.000 And the amazing thing is, of course, this is what made our lives great.

01:57:53.000 Of course, most of the rest of the world want the exact same thing.

01:57:57.000 And we should let them have it.

01:57:59.000 So the real challenge here is, how do we find a way that means the vast amount, so the 6.5 billion people who are not rich can actually get a great living by the end of the century?

01:58:12.000 And we can also fix climate change.

01:58:14.000 And that's only going to happen if we find the technological breakthroughs, not by telling everyone, I'm sorry, could you do with less?

01:58:20.000 Yeah.

01:58:42.000 I've heard multiple people say that those storms are worse than ever and more frequent than ever.

01:58:47.000 And then I've heard people say, no, they're actually less frequent than ever, but stronger.

01:58:51.000 I've even heard people say, no, no, no, they're more frequent and less strong.

01:58:55.000 So I don't know what's going on.

01:58:58.000 So, the biggest point on this, I think, is they're certainly much stronger on TV. I mean, you hear much, much more about them because they're such great stories.

01:59:09.000 Yeah, absolutely, they sell.

01:59:11.000 But if you actually look at the data...

01:59:13.000 We cannot tell right now.

01:59:31.000 That you can't see, oh, this increase or this decrease is because of global warming.

01:59:36.000 Is there an increased trend currently?

01:59:38.000 Well, so in the 1960s, sorry, in the 1970s and 80s, there was a lull in hurricanes that hit the U.S. That was also when satellite coverage started.

01:59:51.000 So much of what you see now is if you start from the 1970s or 1980s, there is an increase for the U.S. But that's probably spurious because if you go back in the 1950s and 1960s, there was actually just as many hurricanes.

02:00:08.000 So what you do, and this is by far the best estimate, so I actually have that.

02:00:13.000 I brought that with me.

02:00:15.000 If you take a look at slide four in the A file.

02:00:20.000 There 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.

02:00:30.000 Now we see them because we have satellites, but that's obviously the wrong way to count.

02:00:35.000 So if you just look at the hurricanes that landfall on the US, you get this graph.

02:00:40.000 So this is from 1900 to 2022. Yeah, so 2022 is obviously not done, but it's probably done.

02:00:48.000 And it looks incredibly similar.

02:00:51.000 It's actually slightly decreasing.

02:00:54.000 This is not...

02:00:55.000 Not significant.

02:00:56.000 Slightly decreasing from 2008. Sorry, no.

02:00:58.000 Or from 2004, rather.

02:01:00.000 If you try to put in the best line, as you can see, that's the dotted red line, you actually have a slightly decreasing line.

02:01:07.000 Oh, I see.

02:01:08.000 I see the overall, the average.

02:01:10.000 Yeah, the overall average used to be more like two hurricanes per season, and that's down to 1.6 or something.

02:01:17.000 Sorry.

02:01:18.000 What the hell was going on in 1980?

02:01:19.000 It looks like 86. Yeah, yeah.

02:01:22.000 I was going to pull up it.

02:01:24.000 This is a contradicting chart, though.

02:01:26.000 Okay.

02:01:27.000 Hit me with it.

02:01:28.000 It specifies, though, North Atlantic, which this does not.

02:01:33.000 Okay.

02:01:34.000 So North Atlantic is where the predominant amount of hurricanes exist in the United States, is that correct?

02:01:38.000 Or South Atlantic?

02:01:40.000 It's South Atlantic, so North Atlantic would have less of them because the water's colder?

02:01:44.000 Northern Hemisphere, I believe, is not North compared to the United States.

02:01:47.000 It's North versus South Hemisphere. 0.83

02:01:49.000 Oh, okay.

02:01:50.000 Why Atlantic hurricanes are getting stronger faster than other storms?

02:01:53.000 Yeah.

02:01:54.000 So, Hurricane Ian...

02:01:55.000 264% since 1980 compared to the globe.

02:02:00.000 According to this chart.

02:02:01.000 Yes.

02:02:15.000 And that's why, you know, when you do these numbers, it's very easy to get this result if you start in 1980 when they were much lower.

02:02:23.000 If I can just show you the other graph again, because I showed you for all of the hurricanes, but we also have, if you take the next slide, that's just the strong hurricanes, so that's exactly the same as what you just showed, category 3 and higher.

02:02:40.000 And what you see here again is that there are fewer hurricanes, not more hurricanes, hitting the U.S. today than there used to be back in the early part of 1990. Is this saying there's only one per year?

02:02:52.000 Yes.

02:02:52.000 That doesn't feel like that's right, though.

02:02:54.000 This is one major hurricane landfalling each year.

02:02:58.000 Yeah.

02:02:59.000 Is that usually what we get?

02:03:00.000 And so if you go all the way back to 2006, which is that year we were talking about, it looks like there was four.

02:03:07.000 Yeah.

02:03:07.000 So from 80...

02:03:09.000 So when you're looking at that major...

02:03:11.000 That was 2005. That was Hurricane Katrina and all these others.

02:03:14.000 Okay.

02:03:15.000 So when you're looking at that other chart that shows the increase from 1980, see with 1980, it's just...

02:03:20.000 All those years, it's just one.

02:03:21.000 And then it gets up to four in 2006. Yeah.

02:03:26.000 And that's a rough year.

02:03:26.000 So all that factors into the average, and that kicks the average up to 264%.

02:03:31.000 But 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.

02:03:41.000 On these charts, what is it differentiating as major or not major?

02:03:45.000 Because then we get to like, we almost got through all the names I thought a couple years ago.

02:03:48.000 So, yes, sorry.

02:03:50.000 So major is Category 3, but these are all landfalling.

02:03:54.000 Remember, a lot of hurricanes are not landfalling.

02:03:57.000 So the reason why we run out of names is because we are able to see a lot more of them.

02:04:03.000 So they actually estimate, this is a reanalysis by NOAA and all those guys.

02:04:08.000 So they actually found that we now name about four storms more than we would have named in the early 2000s.

02:04:17.000 Every year.

02:04:19.000 Because we've just become better at notice.

02:04:21.000 Oh, there was a hurricane and then it dropped off.

02:04:25.000 Right.

02:04:25.000 Because they don't hit.

02:04:27.000 Not only because they don't hit, but typically they're just one or two days.

02:04:31.000 What's the percentage of them that actually hit?

02:04:33.000 The problem is like when they get strong enough on the ocean that they can carry over onto the land and devastate the land.

02:04:40.000 So the reason why I'm looking at landfall is because in the early part of last century, it's very likely that someone would have noticed a landfalling hurricane anywhere in the U.S. But if it's out in the middle of nowhere, there's a very good chance nobody would have noticed.

02:04:55.000 Actually, you can see in the data that when the Panama Canal opened, Suddenly, ships started going a different route.

02:05:06.000 So there was a big part of the Atlantic that they no longer traversed.

02:05:10.000 And so the number of hurricanes dropped in those areas.

02:05:15.000 Because you needed to have sort of a ship to be out there and noticing.

02:05:19.000 That's why it's a very, very bad way to look at this if you just look at how many hurricanes do we know about.

02:05:25.000 Because we just know about a lot more now.

02:05:27.000 So that's from satellite radar.

02:05:28.000 And that was what year...

02:05:29.000 Start implementing satellite...

02:05:31.000 This is about 1980. 1980. Okay, so that's when...

02:05:34.000 Okay.

02:05:35.000 So, it's not clear, is what you're saying.

02:05:38.000 Your point was to basically say, what people are worried about is that there's going to be a lot more hurricanes.

02:05:44.000 Yes.

02:05:44.000 Well, actually, so the best evidence seems to indicate, that was one of the points that you said, that there will probably be fewer hurricanes, but they will be stronger.

02:05:54.000 And overall, stronger is worse than fewer is better.

02:06:00.000 Which means that overall, there'll be slightly more damage.

02:06:03.000 Right.

02:06:03.000 So, global warming is bad.

02:06:05.000 That's, you know, one of the many things that, you know, will actually be worse with global warming.

02:06:09.000 But it's not terribly bad.

02:06:12.000 It's somewhat worse.

02:06:13.000 And of course, at the same time, we're getting much better at dealing with this impact.

02:06:18.000 What you're actually seeing, if you look at the total cost, for instance, on hurricane impacts and all kinds of climate impacts, It's actually going down, not up in percent of GDP. Why?

02:06:31.000 Because we now know we have much better prediction.

02:06:34.000 We know how to deal with these things.

02:06:36.000 For instance, get a lot of stuff that can be moved, we get it out of harm's way.

02:06:41.000 So every time there's a hurricane, all trucks will go to other states, that kind of thing.

02:06:46.000 So there's a lot of things that don't get damaged.

02:06:49.000 We can also build better, as you talked about, with houses and so on.

02:06:53.000 So we have a lot of ways to reduce this, but what is happening is it'll reduce slightly less fast because of global warming.

02:07:00.000 Again, not the end of the world, but a problem.

02:07:02.000 So the fear-mongering would have you terrified about a future that's impossible to fix.

02:07:09.000 In that we're doomed.

02:07:11.000 You're simply saying it is a problem, but it's not our biggest problem.

02:07:14.000 It's a problem in the sense that it slows down progress.

02:07:19.000 And if I can just, you know, because people talk a lot about the fact that we won't have enough food either.

02:07:26.000 I have another slide in the B file.

02:07:33.000 God, I need glasses.

02:07:34.000 And number six.

02:07:35.000 I was just Googling this.

02:07:38.000 2020, it says 11 hurricanes made it to land.

02:07:44.000 Here.

02:07:45.000 A total of 11 named storms made land for the United States, breaking the previous record of nine in 1916. Sorry, 11 named storms?

02:07:52.000 Six of these were storms that struck the United States.

02:07:55.000 That's hurricane intensity.

02:07:56.000 They were talking about Category 3 and above.

02:07:58.000 That was just this one, though.

02:08:00.000 Right.

02:08:00.000 His chart, which was this.

02:08:02.000 Is it all hurricanes?

02:08:03.000 This is major hurricanes.

02:08:04.000 You need to go back.

02:08:04.000 So Category 1. What's the worst?

02:08:07.000 Is Category 1 the worst or 4?

02:08:08.000 No.

02:08:09.000 4 is the worst, right?

02:08:10.000 5 is the worst?

02:08:10.000 5 is the worst, yeah.

02:08:11.000 This 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.

02:08:21.000 I have no doubt, and the updates are for the guy.

02:08:23.000 This is 2020, Jamie?

02:08:25.000 Yeah, I just was trying to pick one year.

02:08:27.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great.

02:08:31.000 And these, and the one that, this was saying they're intensifying.

02:08:34.000 This says that, like, since 1950, only nine Category 4 hurricanes have hit the mainland, but six of those were in the last five years.

02:08:43.000 Whoa.

02:08:45.000 That seems like a problem.

02:08:48.000 That's a big problem.

02:08:51.000 Doesn't that seem like a big problem?

02:08:53.000 Seeing that, I would see why people would freak out.

02:08:56.000 So, we can't sit here and do period research in real time.

02:09:03.000 Right, but you do need contradicting statements.

02:09:06.000 Absolutely.

02:09:07.000 But I am saying...

02:09:09.000 So I'm happy to say that we should...

02:09:12.000 So there's very little four and five hurricanes.

02:09:15.000 That's why the major, and that was also why the other graph showed the change in three, four, and five.

02:09:24.000 Can you go back to that again, please, for a second?

02:09:26.000 Look at that, man.

02:09:27.000 Andrew was even more powerful than Ian in 92. That was 165 mile an hour.

02:09:33.000 What's the fucking strongest one that we've ever had? 0.98

02:09:37.000 Is that all of them that we've had during the last... 0.99

02:09:40.000 So that's the last 50 years?

02:09:41.000 In the 50 years, yeah.

02:09:42.000 I think that was like 92. So Ian was the strongest.

02:09:44.000 Or Andrew, excuse me, was the strongest.

02:09:46.000 That was 165. Katrina's not even on this list.

02:09:49.000 No.

02:09:50.000 Wow.

02:09:51.000 Why isn't Katrina on the list?

02:09:52.000 I don't know.

02:09:53.000 That was a big one, wasn't it?

02:09:55.000 Yeah.

02:09:56.000 Wasn't it Hurricane 3?

02:09:58.000 Category 3?

02:09:58.000 It could have just been big and long and just lasted for a long time.

02:10:01.000 Right.

02:10:02.000 The devastation was big because of where it hit.

02:10:04.000 Yes.

02:10:05.000 Wow.

02:10:06.000 Also, if you look at the major hurricanes, we had the biggest drought ever.

02:10:12.000 So there were 11 years where there were no major hurricane that hit the U.S. recently.

02:10:16.000 I don't know if you noticed, that was when nobody talked about hurricanes.

02:10:21.000 And then, of course, the hurricanes came back and then we say, oh, see global warming again.

02:10:25.000 This is how we're not being well served with this kind of conversation.

02:10:29.000 What is your book called?

02:10:29.000 False Alarm?

02:10:30.000 False Alarm, yeah.

02:10:32.000 Do you have one?

02:10:32.000 No, I don't have one yet.

02:10:34.000 Thank you very much.

02:10:36.000 I wouldn't say False Alarm. 0.95

02:10:39.000 I would say there's a lot of other shit to be worried about as well. 0.99

02:10:42.000 Yes. 0.99

02:10:43.000 But it also seems to be a problem.

02:10:45.000 That's the other book I brought you.

02:10:47.000 Prioritizing Development.

02:10:48.000 Yes.

02:10:48.000 Ah, I see.

02:10:49.000 So this is basically, this is what my day job really is, because as you also know, and as we talked a little bit about, so look, there is a lot of problems in the world, and for most people, so rich people Who are well ensconced in their lives and they don't have to worry about their kids dying from infectious diseases or not having enough food,

02:11:13.000 all that kind of stuff.

02:11:14.000 They clearly can worry about what the temperature is going to be in 100 years.

02:11:18.000 But for most of the planet's population, so the 6.5 billion people here, they actually worry about their kids might die tonight.

02:11:26.000 They might not have enough food.

02:11:27.000 They have terrible education.

02:11:29.000 There are all kinds of other terrible things.

02:11:31.000 Almost a billion people are extremely poor.

02:11:35.000 So in terms of the overall impact on human health and life, elevating the economy is the most important step that people can take.

02:11:44.000 It's certainly a very important part of it.

02:11:46.000 And again, sorry, if I could just show you the one on malnutrition, the slide from the B stack, number 6. Sorry,

02:12:03.000 so what I just want to show you was that malnutrition has come down dramatically.

02:12:07.000 And again, what you see here, so this is the number of deaths from kids that are less than five years old.

02:12:14.000 And again, this is very similar to the other chart, but a little bit of a difference, the difference between with climate change and without climate change.

02:12:21.000 Without 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.

02:12:30.000 This is what we talked about before.

02:12:32.000 They're much better in India. 0.99

02:12:33.000 They're much better everywhere.

02:12:34.000 So the overall net benefit is positive.

02:12:36.000 We're moving towards a world that's going to be much better.

02:12:40.000 So these guys that are protesting think it's the end of the world.

02:12:43.000 No, it's not.

02:12:44.000 It's a world that's going to be much better.

02:12:45.000 But they're right in saying that climate is one problem.

02:12:48.000 And we should definitely think about how we fix that.

02:12:51.000 But we should also remember a large part of this is how do we fix all the other problems?

02:12:56.000 There are still people, you know, there's one of the things that just blow my mind.

02:13:01.000 We all worried about COVID. But remember, the world's biggest infectious disease killer over the last 200 years has been tuberculosis.

02:13:08.000 It probably killed about a billion people in total.

02:13:11.000 It still kills one and a half million people every year.

02:13:15.000 And we know how to fix it.

02:13:17.000 We figured that out 100 years ago.

02:13:19.000 That's why no one in the rich world died from this.

02:13:22.000 But apart from COVID, it's the world's leading infectious disease killer.

02:13:26.000 And we do nothing against it.

02:13:28.000 We could, at very low cost, fix most of this problem.

02:13:31.000 And so one of the things I try to push is to say, look, for very little money, we could actually, so we're talking about $3 billion a year or thereabouts, we could actually save almost everyone from tuberculosis.

02:13:44.000 Why don't we make that one of the things we want to do?

02:13:47.000 Yeah.

02:13:47.000 It's interesting.

02:13:48.000 That's not a sexy headline.

02:13:49.000 No.

02:13:50.000 It gets people riled up and scared because they're not worried about tuberculosis over here.

02:13:53.000 And we're not worried about our kids getting tuberculosis, right?

02:13:56.000 So in some sense, it's because it's over there.

02:13:59.000 It's a lot of people in India and in Africa and so on.

02:14:02.000 But in some way, it doesn't quite make it okay, right?

02:14:06.000 I see what you're saying.

02:14:06.000 So what you're trying to promote is a balanced message, and you're trying to counter the climate change fear-mongering by saying it is one of our issues, but it is surmountable, at least in some aspects of it.

02:14:21.000 Oh, look, the world will be much better off by the end of the century.

02:14:26.000 But because of global warming, we'll be slightly less, much better off.

02:14:30.000 So 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?

02:14:47.000 Why does that one get the most heat?

02:14:49.000 So, as you just mentioned, it's partly because it's our kids rather than someone else's kids who are going to get influenced by this.

02:14:57.000 We also just love having something to worry about.

02:15:00.000 I think that's to a very large extent.

02:15:11.000 Is it just the media or is it also a political ploy?

02:15:26.000 The world is ending, but I can save you.

02:15:30.000 I can't do that voice, but you know what I wanted to do.

02:15:35.000 So 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.

02:15:48.000 Now, of course, this is catching up with us, because now we actually have to start paying for all of this.

02:15:54.000 And this is where, you know, the wheels come off because most people are just not willing.

02:15:59.000 Most people are willing to pay something to do good for the environment.

02:16:03.000 They're certainly not willing to pay, you know, $5,000 per person per year.

02:16:07.000 That's just not going to happen.

02:16:08.000 Most people.

02:16:10.000 Sure, a few, you know, a few very, very wealthy people.

02:16:13.000 The hardcore lefties will go, we got to take the billionaires. 0.97

02:16:16.000 They can fix it all.

02:16:17.000 Yeah, and that's just not true, right?

02:16:19.000 I mean, they would run out of money really quickly.

02:16:21.000 Yeah, unfortunately.

02:16:22.000 I mean, the U.S. budget is what, a thousand, what is it, two, three thousand billion, the federal budget?

02:16:30.000 A thousand billion dollars.

02:16:31.000 And what, Elon has two, three hundred million?

02:16:35.000 You know, he would run out in two weeks.

02:16:37.000 He's running out of it just with Twitter.

02:16:39.000 But, you know, the point is, these billionaires, sure, you know, I'm all for that they should do more, and I think some of them are doing excellent work, and some of them are probably not.

02:16:49.000 But this is not how you solve this problem.

02:16:51.000 This is about making sure that you actually responsibly can do it with the budgets that you have or with realistic tax increases.

02:16:58.000 And, you know, increasing your tax 5% or 10% of GDP is just not...

02:17:03.000 Do 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?

02:17:19.000 Oh, absolutely.

02:17:20.000 I mean, partly, if we're suggesting we should do policies, because we're worried that this is the end of the world coming up, that are enormously ineffective, which is what most of the world has done, then we're going to waste a lot of money.

02:17:33.000 But likewise, on the other side, so you could say this is sort of Democrats here in the US, right?

02:17:38.000 But likewise, there's a lot of Republicans that are just, oh, no problem whatsoever, you know, just keep fracking, do whatever.

02:17:46.000 I think?

02:18:11.000 We're good to go.

02:18:33.000 That's, in percentage, much less than we've done over the last 30 years because politicians want to go out and open new solar panel parks or wind turbine parks because that looks like something not, you know, fun eggheads.

02:18:45.000 Is that part of the problem?

02:18:46.000 Is the perception?

02:18:47.000 I'm sure it is.

02:18:48.000 And what we should do is we should five-fold increase that to about $100 billion.

02:18:53.000 President Obama and everybody else promised that back in Paris.

02:18:57.000 And I'm happy to say we had a very, very tiny, small role in that.

02:19:00.000 We should be spending lots more on research and development in green energy because that's how we're going to fix this problem.

02:19:06.000 But we'll only get to that if we actually get people to sort of calm down and realize, problem, not the end of the world.

02:19:14.000 And don't tank the economy while you're trying to fix the problem because then you'll limit the amount of available solutions.

02:19:21.000 And resources.

02:19:23.000 And one of the really depressing things that we're seeing now, if you've noticed, you know, growth rates are coming down.

02:19:30.000 The U.S. used to grow, what, per capita, 3% per year.

02:19:34.000 Your kids would be much richer than you.

02:19:38.000 But in many countries, both in the U.S. and Europe, we're seeing much, much slower growth.

02:19:44.000 One of the reasons, this is by no means the only reason, but one of the reasons is that we have somehow realized, oh, we should be sorry for all the things we're doing.

02:19:52.000 We should be doing more to counter global warming.

02:19:56.000 And one of the ways you can do that is by having little or no growth.

02:20:00.000 But the problem with that, of course, is that also impacts everything else.

02:20:04.000 It makes it much more of a distributional issue.

02:20:06.000 If the cake is no longer growing, everybody starts bickering about who gets what slice of the cake.

02:20:13.000 And it makes everything harder to deal with.

02:20:16.000 And of course, at the same time, we have the entire developing world that still just wants to get out of poverty.

02:20:22.000 And we're not really giving them a chance either.

02:20:24.000 We're, for instance, pretty much limiting them.

02:20:26.000 We've been telling Africa, for instance, for the longest time, sorry, you can't have gas.

02:20:30.000 You can't have coal.

02:20:31.000 You should just go straight to solar and wind, which, of course, can't really power an economy, or at least not right now.

02:20:38.000 And this while Europe is then, you know, starting to grind up more coal because we're cold and because of the war in Ukraine.

02:20:47.000 This is a very complex issue.

02:20:49.000 And the problem is that in sound bites on the news, you don't get to dive into all of the aspects of these complex issues.

02:20:59.000 Knowing what you're knowing and like how frustrating is this for you to try to spread this message because I'm sure you get labeled.

02:21:05.000 You're a climate change denier, you're a shill, you're a bad person.

02:21:12.000 How frustrating is this for you when you're trying to get this message out and you're writing these books and you're giving these speeches?

02:21:22.000 Fundamentally, it would be wonderful if everybody just said, hey, that sounds smart, let's do that.

02:21:27.000 But that's not how the real world works.

02:21:29.000 I think it's great to have the opportunity to actually push what kind of solutions work.

02:21:36.000 So what we're trying to do...

02:21:38.000 We work with lots of the world's top economists.

02:21:40.000 I've worked with seven Nobel laureates in economics, trying to say, where can you spend money and do the most good?

02:21:46.000 So on climate, we should be investing in green energy R&D. That's the way you fix this problem.

02:21:52.000 And then we should realize there are lots of other problems, most of which you haven't heard of.

02:21:56.000 So for instance, the frustrating thing and the thing that really drives most of global productivity is education.

02:22:04.000 Education almost everywhere sucks, but especially in the developing world.

02:22:08.000 You know, a lot of teachers just don't know the stuff that they're actually supposed to be teaching the kids.

02:22:14.000 How do you get kids to be better educated?

02:22:17.000 It turns out that there are some very, very simple ways that we know work incredibly well.

02:22:22.000 So it's called teaching according to level.

02:22:25.000 So the basic idea, you know, if you think about a sixth grade or something where, I don't know, is that 12-year-olds?

02:22:32.000 Yeah, sixth grade is 12, 11, 11-year-olds.

02:22:35.000 So, say you have all these 12-year-olds in the same grade, especially in the developing country, but even here.

02:22:43.000 They have very varying levels.

02:22:45.000 Some of them are just hanging on and don't quite know what's going on.

02:22:49.000 Some of them are far ahead of what the teacher is teaching, right?

02:22:52.000 So the problem is when you're in that kind of grade where we put all the 12 year olds in one grade, you're actually having a very hard time teaching all of these kids effectively.

02:23:02.000 What we've shown with, and this is not me, lots of really smart people have shown this, is in experiments, if you instead make sure that each of these kids are taught at their right level, at the level that they are, they can learn a lot more.

02:23:17.000 Now, you could do that in one or two ways.

02:23:19.000 You could actually shuffle these guys around.

02:23:22.000 So, you know, some 11-year-olds are going to be together with some 13-year-olds and maybe one 9-year-old and one 15-year-old and so on.

02:23:29.000 So they all have the same level.

02:23:32.000 That has some social problems, but they're doing it, for instance, in India. 1.00

02:23:35.000 You could also do it by every one hour every day.

02:23:38.000 You sit them down with a tablet.

02:23:40.000 And this tablet then finds out what is your level.

02:23:43.000 So it's teaching it in either your language or your mathematics, for instance.

02:23:47.000 And it very quickly adapts and find out what is your level and then teach you exactly at your level.

02:23:53.000 The beauty is you can actually teach these kids three years of schooling in one real year.

02:24:01.000 At very low extra cost.

02:24:02.000 We're talking about $20 per student per year.

02:24:06.000 So if you do this with a tablet, you can basically have a situation where you can educate these kids much better and teach them much more.

02:24:15.000 Isn't that amazing?

02:24:16.000 That's assuming they engage with the material, right?

02:24:18.000 Is it more difficult to get them to engage with tablets than it is to get them to engage with a teacher?

02:24:24.000 No.

02:24:25.000 Actually, it turns out often as the opposite.

02:24:28.000 They want to have more than just one hour.

02:24:30.000 It's probably true if you did this a whole day.

02:24:32.000 It's one hour a day.

02:24:34.000 It's partly because so other students can also use the tablet so it becomes cheaper.

02:24:38.000 It's also partly because we don't want to upset the teachers because if the teachers don't like this idea, if they are worried that computers are going to take over their jobs, they don't want to play along.

02:24:48.000 And it's also because they would eventually get bored.

02:24:51.000 But 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.

02:25:04.000 This tablet is actually challenging right on the level.

02:25:08.000 And the beauty of this is that this is research that has actually been done in randomized controlled trial studies, right?

02:25:13.000 So 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.

02:25:20.000 And this matters because they not only learn more, but then they'll go out when they become adults and become much more productive in their societies.

02:25:28.000 So again, one of the things that we try to do, so in that big book I showed you there.

02:25:33.000 Prioritizing Development.

02:25:34.000 We did that with 50 teams of economists and several Nobel laureates and trying to find out, of all the different things in the world, what could we do?

02:25:43.000 But that's a very long book.

02:25:44.000 You can't get most politicians to read it.

02:25:46.000 So we actually did also a one-pager.

02:25:49.000 So I brought that one.

02:25:50.000 I'm hoping we can put that up.

02:25:51.000 So this basically is the whole...

02:25:54.000 This is the whole outline of all the stuff that we did.

02:25:57.000 This one pager is smartest targets for the world, and what is this?

02:26:02.000 So you should look at this out here on this one side.

02:26:07.000 It has all the different things you can do for the world.

02:26:10.000 So this has come about with a lot of complicated stuff.

02:26:14.000 Is there a graph that we can see online of this?

02:26:17.000 Yes.

02:26:17.000 Oh, sorry.

02:26:18.000 Yes, there is.

02:26:19.000 Because I can barely read this.

02:26:20.000 Yes.

02:26:21.000 Very good point.

02:26:22.000 Social, economic, and environmental benefits for every dollar spent.

02:26:27.000 How can we direct people to it?

02:26:28.000 So we'll put up the link if that's okay.

02:26:32.000 Yeah.

02:26:34.000 A lot of graphs, buddy.

02:26:35.000 Yes.

02:26:36.000 Sorry about that.

02:26:37.000 So 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.

02:26:48.000 And so if it's a long line, it's a great idea.

02:26:50.000 Okay.

02:26:51.000 Sorry, yes.

02:26:52.000 So here it goes.

02:26:54.000 So what's the best bang for your buck?

02:26:56.000 So trade...

02:26:57.000 Trade restrictions.

02:26:58.000 Reduce world trade restrictions.

02:27:00.000 If we actually got much more free trade, that would make everyone incredibly much richer.

02:27:07.000 Sorry, there is...

02:27:08.000 In my slides, there is a better version that you can show online.

02:27:12.000 On the last slide on Lomborg A. So 51...

02:27:22.000 Um...

02:27:24.000 Kind of better?

02:27:25.000 Yeah, because it's at least not as long, right?

02:27:29.000 It fits this format.

02:27:30.000 Okay.

02:27:31.000 So basically, if you spend money and basically in order to get free trade, you need to pay off the world's rich farmers, but you will get an enormous amount of growth in the economy.

02:27:44.000 Freer regional Asia-Pacific trade.

02:27:47.000 So trade seems to be the biggest one.

02:27:49.000 That's one of the biggest ones, yes.

02:27:51.000 And then universal access to contraception.

02:27:54.000 Yeah.

02:27:54.000 So that's basically the idea.

02:27:56.000 If you get more contraception, it means two things.

02:28:00.000 It partly means that women give fewer birth and that means they die less. 0.99

02:28:05.000 It also means that each kid that then gets born will get more attention from their parents because there will be slightly fewer kids and they will have more capital available to them.

02:28:19.000 That means they become more productive and that means the economy will grow more.

02:28:23.000 This is what's typically called the...

02:28:28.000 Well, I think we should go...

02:28:30.000 It's okay.

02:28:30.000 I don't think we should go over this entire chart because it'll take forever.

02:28:32.000 But the idea is that there's a lot of things that we can do for the world that have great bang for the buck.

02:28:38.000 And climate is one of them, but it's just one of them, right?

02:28:41.000 And if you think this is the end of the world, you think that's the only thing we should be discussing.

02:28:46.000 I mean, I've heard some people say, you know, if we only have till 2030...

02:28:50.000 We've got to do everything for climate.

02:28:52.000 And then, you know, there'll still be poor people in 2030 we can help.

02:28:55.000 And I just think it's so, you know, patronizing, right?

02:29:00.000 Because clearly we both want to fix climate change and fix all these other problems in the world.

02:29:05.000 And we can do that, but only if we spend money smartly.

02:29:09.000 So let's spend money smartly on climate and research and development.

02:29:12.000 But let's also spend money on, you know, getting tablets into the educational system.

02:29:17.000 Making sure we deal with tuberculosis, malaria, malnutrition, there's lots of other things where we for very little money can make an enormous amount of benefit.

02:29:26.000 Well, I think that's the most important part of your message.

02:29:28.000 It's not just this idea that climate change is kind of being overblown.

02:29:32.000 It's a very terrifying prospect, but there's a lot of issues to deal with.

02:29:37.000 That's great.

02:29:38.000 I really appreciate that.

02:29:39.000 I think that we need more of that, more of a balanced, nuanced perspective on all of our issues.

02:29:44.000 I'm glad you brought up education as well and all those other things, contraception.

02:29:49.000 Poverty, and yeah, there's a lot going on there that we need to think about as well.

02:29:54.000 Yeah.

02:29:54.000 And if we start doing that, it can also be a real lift for a lot of these people who are terrified.

02:30:00.000 Remember, if you ask people in the rich world, do you think the world's civilization is going to come to an end?

02:30:07.000 60% now are saying they think it's likely or very likely that humanity is going to end.

02:30:13.000 That's petrifying.

02:30:15.000 And that's just not what's going to happen.

02:30:16.000 And they think this is because of climate change.

02:30:18.000 They think it's because of climate change, right?

02:30:20.000 So we can actually both liberate ourselves and realize, yeah, problem, not the end of the world.

02:30:24.000 And then also start talking about all these other issues and make sure that we actually leave this planet not just a little bit better, but a lot better.

02:30:31.000 I love your message.

02:30:32.000 Thank you, Bjorn.

02:30:33.000 That was really great.

02:30:34.000 Thank you.

02:30:34.000 I really appreciate it.

02:30:36.000 Even though you're working for Big Fracking and you're a show for Mountain Dew.

02:30:39.000 Stop saying that.

02:30:40.000 Yes.

02:30:41.000 I'm kidding.

02:30:42.000 Mountain Dew, yes.

02:30:42.000 So, False Alarm is your book, How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.

02:30:50.000 How do I pronounce your last name correctly?

02:30:52.000 Lomborg?

02:30:52.000 Lomborg.

02:30:53.000 Bjorn Lomborg.

02:30:54.000 And then the other one is...

02:30:56.000 This is all the other things you were concentrating on of all the different ways that we can prioritize spending that will benefit the whole world, and that's prioritizing development, a cost-benefit analysis of the United States sustainable...

02:31:07.000 United Nations.

02:31:08.000 Excuse me, United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

02:31:11.000 And if you're inclined, this is a very detail-oriented book.

02:31:16.000 Yes.

02:31:16.000 This will fill people's time.

02:31:18.000 Thank you, Bjorn.

02:31:19.000 I really appreciate you being on here, and it was a lot of fun.

02:31:22.000 I enjoyed it.

02:31:23.000 If people want to get a hold of you, do you have a website, social media?

02:31:26.000 Yes, yes.

02:31:26.000 Lombard.com and Twitter is Bjorn Lombard.

02:31:30.000 And L-O-M-B-O-R-G is the pronunciation for the spelling of the last name.

02:31:36.000 Thanks, sir.

02:31:36.000 Appreciate it.

02:31:37.000 Thank you, Jim.

02:31:37.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - November 09, 2022

Joe Rogan Experience #1896 - Bjorn Lomborg

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