The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 163. Is Everything Better Than We Think？｜ Bjorn Lomborg

00:00:00.000 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and

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00:00:48.080 the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Welcome to the JBP podcast, season four,

00:00:57.380 episode 18 with Bjorn Lomborg. This episode was recorded on January 21st, 2021. Dr. Bjorn Lomborg

00:01:05.880 is a Danish author and president of the think tank Copenhagen Consensus Center. Bjorn champions a path

00:01:13.280 to solving world problems through the use of economic research to determine where to spend our

00:01:17.800 resources based on the return on investment and severity of the impending issue. Dr. Lomborg's

00:01:24.400 more notable books include False Alarm and How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place.

00:01:32.360 Dad and Bjorn discussed a variety of topics in the realm of climate change and worldwide problems.

00:01:37.100 They examined the claims made in Bjorn's latest book, False Alarm. Throughout the episode,

00:01:41.660 they touched on sustainable development goals, prioritizing world issues, achieving the highest return

00:01:46.460 on investment, the apocalypse lens we apply to many global issues, making the poor richer, innovation,

00:01:52.620 adaptation, selling and market solutions and much more. I wanted to mention a few updates. The major

00:01:59.000 one, we will now be releasing three episodes per week, two to three anyway, probably three. One Q&A

00:02:06.680 and two interview podcasts starting this week, Thursday and Saturday. So that's big news. The other news,

00:02:14.200 if you haven't checked out dad's personality course, it's available at his website, jordanbpeterson.com

00:02:20.780 and it's currently on sale. And last but not least, you'll be hearing my voice, hopefully less stuffy.

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00:04:27.900 So today, I have the privilege of having as a guest Dr. Bjorn Lomberg, who I've spoken with before on my

00:04:55.800 podcast and who was recently on my daughter's podcast, Michaela Peterson, as well. And I came across Bjorn's

00:05:04.000 work, it's got to be six or seven years ago now, when I was working for a UN panel, the Canadian panel

00:05:13.060 devoted to analyzing economic problems in a hypothetically sustainable manner. It was for the

00:05:20.660 Secretary General's report on sustainable economic development, which was, I think, put out in 2016.

00:05:28.860 Anyhow, while I was working on that project, I read a lot of books on the various environmental crises that

00:05:36.860 apparently beset us, dozens of books. And of all the people I read, I think Dr. Lomberg's work was the most

00:05:50.360 compelling. And that was partly one of the things I realized when I was working for this UN committee, we were trying to

00:05:55.560 write the narrative,

00:05:58.560 to restructure the narrative

00:06:00.560 regarding what should be

00:06:02.560 priorities for

00:06:04.360 international consideration over the next

00:06:08.160 30 to 100 years. And what I realized while working on that was that

00:06:12.560 there were very few people in the world that were trained to think at that level.

00:06:15.760 People just don't have the expertise to do that. We don't have the methodology.

00:06:20.760 We don't know how to specify the problems. And we don't know how to specify the solutions. And we don't know how to rank order the problems in terms of their

00:06:28.760 Let's say they're the degree to which they're crucial. And we don't know how to rank order the solutions in terms of their appropriateness. And the only person that I ran across who had developed a methodology for me was a

00:06:41.560 methodology for doing this, which is of crucial importance to develop that methodology was Bjorn and the think tank, the Copenhagen consensus center, which we'll get him to talk about and Bjorn, maybe you could elaborate. Let's see. There's lots of problems.

00:06:59.560 We have lots of problems. Human beings have lots of problems. Some of them are familial. Some of them are

00:07:05.560 Civic at the city level, say some of them are at the state level. Some of them are at the national level and a handful are at the international level. And there's a good rule of thumb, which is that we shouldn't solve

00:07:14.560 family problems at the international level, right? You should work at the lowest possible level, but some problems are international and at least you could make that case. And you've been wrestling with this since

00:07:26.560 19, the mid 1990s. And you wrote a whole bunch of books, the structure of solutions in the iterated prisoners dilemma, I think was the first one, the skeptical environmentalist, which I think really established your reputation and your notoriety for that matter, global crises, global solutions, cool it, rethink HIV, how to spend $75 billion to make the world a better place, which I really liked. I thought that was a great book, like truly a great book.

00:07:55.560 Rajasthan priorities, Bangladesh priorities, Haiti prioritizes and Andhra Pradesh prioritizes and your latest book, which we'll talk about a fair bit today is false alarm, how climate change panic costs us trillions hurts the poor and fails to fix the planet. And so well with that introduction, I'm going to let you talk about your work for a bit.

00:08:21.560 Hey, thank you.

00:08:25.560 So look, what I try to do, and really, I have a big organization, well, actually fairly small organization, but lots and lots of researchers that work hard on all these problems, is simply as you say, we don't have infinite resources, we can't do everything first.

00:08:43.220 So it's incredibly important that we have this conversation about saying, if you are to spend an extra dollar or rupee or whatever your currency is, where can you spend that and do the most good first, because, as you also pointed out, there are lots of problems.

00:08:58.320 And while we tend to think about them in the international arena, of course, most problems actually hit people on a very personal level, it kills them.

00:09:08.720 And so, you know, one of the things I find slightly ironic, as we've just come out of 2020, and everybody has been very, very concerned about COVID, and rightly so, it's a big challenge.

00:09:22.280 But at the same time, of course, every year, about the same number of people die, as have died from COVID last year, every year, the same number of people die from tuberculosis.

00:09:34.900 This is a very simple disease. We've known about it, it's probably killed about a billion people over the last 200 years. So it's probably one of the biggest kills of humanity. And we know how to fix it. We fixed it in the rich world, which is why we don't worry about it anymore.

00:09:50.640 But it's also very cheap to fix in the developing world. But because it never gets any attention, we don't talk very much about it, we don't do very much about it. And that's why 1.6 million people every year die from tuberculosis.

00:10:04.020 And so my point simply is to say, let's have a discussion about saying, if you were to spend an extra dollar, would you do the most good if you spend it on tuberculosis, or on COVID, or on climate, or on infrastructure, or on the many, many other solutions that are out there.

00:10:22.160 And what we do is we simply work with lots of economists to take a look at what is the cost of a solution, and how much good will that deliver it, not just in terms of economics, that is, how much better off will we be or how less worse off will we be, but also how much better will we be off socially, that's typically people not dying, people not being sick, people not having to pay their doctors, not experiencing the loss of a loved one.

00:10:50.720 And also environmentally, that's not so much relevant for tuberculosis, but of course, when it comes to deforestation, or loss of wetlands, and the air pollution, indoor air pollution, and many of the other problems of the world also have an environmental component.

00:11:07.500 We try to add up all of those. And so basically say, how much will this cost? How much good will it do when you incorporate all of these things, and turn them into dollars? And then you can basically say for every dollar you spend, you do this much good of social benefit.

00:11:24.360 And then we simply ask, if there are lots of solutions where you'll spend a dollar and maybe do a dollar and a half of good for the world, that's nice. But there are some solutions where you can spend a dollar and do hundreds of dollars of good.

00:11:38.560 Shouldn't we focus on the hundreds of dollars first, the place where you make much, much more good for every resource you spend? That's really the thinking. It's not rocket science, but we just don't think about it very often.

00:11:50.840 It kind of is rocket science, because one of the things you want to do when you send a rocket into space is make sure that it doesn't explode.

00:11:58.100 And what that means is that you have to pay unbelievable attention to the details. I think it was an O-ring malfunction that brought down the Challenger.

00:12:06.520 Yeah.

00:12:06.860 So an O-ring was rocket science in that situation. And what really struck me when I started to think about international problems was precisely this lack of methodology.

00:12:16.680 So I'm going to recapitulate the claims you just made, so that the listeners and viewers are very clear about, like, you make a number of assumptions, and all of those assumptions are questionable.

00:12:28.120 But anyone who questions them bears the burden of coming up with a better set of assumptions and justifying them.

00:12:34.540 And so, you know, you can imagine someone objecting to your rather casual acceptance of the idea that you can put a cost value on all of these problems.

00:12:45.860 You know, anybody who might object to, who might have some emotional objections, even to something like the monetary system and to capitalism, for example, might be appalled at the idea that you could put a dollar value to human life, essentially.

00:13:00.440 But in the absence of a better solution, well, that's exactly what I mean. You have to have a better solution.

00:13:06.900 So your first claim is that we have limited resources. Okay, so that seems reasonable. We have limited time. We have limited energy.

00:13:15.640 We have limited resources that are at our disposal as individuals and as states. And so we can't devote an infinite amount of resources to every problem.

00:13:23.840 So that seems pretty much, pretty much clear. If we're going to solve problems, we might as well start with the ones that are the most serious.

00:13:32.260 So we've got to figure out how to define that. Then we want to concentrate on the serious problems that we can fix.

00:13:38.800 And then we want to concentrate on the serious problems that we can fix most effectively, so that we have some resources left over to solve other problems.

00:13:45.920 Okay, so let's start with the problem set itself. So, for example, in your book, False Alarm, you talk about climate change, and you're a supporter of the claim that there is going to be climate change of approximately the degree, so to speak, that the International Climate Commission projects.

00:14:08.900 And you also accept the claim that much of that is man-made. But then you situate climate change as a problem in a host of other problems.

00:14:22.220 So I'd like to know how you came up with the set of problems to begin with.

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00:15:17.520 So I'd like to know how you came up with the set of problems to begin with.

00:15:23.860 So very clearly, it's impossible to enumerate all the problems that we have, but what we try to do is we've taken our starting point of the UN's different definitions.

00:15:35.920 So for the SDGs, the last set of goals that the UN has used, the ones that are running from 2016 to 2030, they look at sustainable development goals.

00:15:49.580 So they've basically looked across a wide range of areas.

00:15:53.940 So talking about health, obviously a big issue.

00:15:57.580 Poverty, obviously a big issue.

00:16:00.040 The issue of education, the issue of being able to live securely, that is without violence in many different ways.

00:16:08.760 And they enumerate a lot of different other things, clearly avoiding loss of biodiversity, avoiding living on an uninhabitable planet like climate change, many of these other things.

00:16:20.420 Now, I'm not saying that this is a perfect list, it's made by a committee, but it's probably one of the best ways that we can say humanity has tried to enumerate all the different challenges that we're facing.

00:16:33.120 Right, so that's the political aspect of this, is a consensus, there's been somewhat of a consensus with regards to the set of problems, even if not with regards to their prioritization.

00:16:45.240 And so the UN has made itself open to some degree to its constituent members to list whatever problems they see as pressing, and those would include women's rights and diversity and oceanic management.

00:16:58.180 And, well, virtually every problem that you can think of that might have hit the headlines or been a target of media attention over the last, say, two or three decades.

00:17:09.000 And so, again, people might quibble with that list, but then it's instrumental that they develop a better list and justify it.

00:17:16.800 So, you start with the UN list, and that's been derived as a consequence of lobbying pressure and political machination and all those sorts of things, and hypothetically, that's good enough.

00:17:29.880 And then the next question is, how to address these?

00:17:33.900 And I was very frustrated when I first encountered that list of goals because I thought, well, there is no possible way that these can all be addressed in the next 30 years with any degree of success.

00:17:44.960 It's just too complex.

00:17:46.360 We have to start somewhere.

00:17:47.740 The problem with that is that as soon as you say that you have to start somewhere, then you take one need above all others, and you say that those who lobbied for that particular need take priority, and you need a justification for that.

00:18:02.140 That's something other than power struggle or political expediency or, you know, even effective messaging.

00:18:11.080 It might be nice to have a more hands-off, objective method.

00:18:16.980 Okay, so then you organized a team of economists fundamentally, right?

00:18:21.300 Why economists and not biologists, say?

00:18:23.680 So you definitely need all the knowledge from biologists, especially when you're talking about things that impact the natural world.

00:18:32.420 You need to talk to epidemiologists when you're talking about diseases.

00:18:36.580 You need to talk to doctors also about diseases.

00:18:39.240 You need to talk to educational experts when you talk about education.

00:18:43.080 But the crucial bit that's connecting all of them is to talk about what are the resource needs that is basically how much money are we going to have to pay in order to get a solution when you talk about global warming or a solution for education or a solution for tuberculosis or COVID or any other thing.

00:19:03.220 So what we're talking to is all those economists who do that, so climate economists or education economists or health economists, these are all guys who interface with all of these specific knowledge, but they also study how much is this going to cost and how effective is this solution going to be.

00:19:23.900 So it's basically about saying, what can you do about global warming or what can you do about COVID?

00:19:29.760 Remember, no solution is going to fix all of the problem.

00:19:33.940 Most solutions will fix part of the problem.

00:19:36.520 And so what we're saying is, what will a realistically best sort of effort look like?

00:19:42.380 How much will it solve and how much will it cost?

00:19:45.780 And then we try to estimate what's the relative value that you provided to the world.

00:19:50.700 And as you started off saying, that's a difficult task, but it is crucial if we want to know that we're not just focused on the topics that have the most cute animals or the people who scream the loudest in the media, but actually know what works.

00:20:07.340 A postmodern critic of your work might claim that it's ineradicably contaminated with the bias brought to it by the discipline that you chose to do this election and by the, what would you say, by the unexamined political motivations of the participants, those being the economists.

00:20:28.060 But you don't rely on the judgment of one economist, you have a sequence of economists analyze these problems, that's correct.

00:20:37.200 And then you aggregate across their findings.

00:20:39.460 I believe that's the method.

00:20:41.360 Yes.

00:20:41.800 And again, look, it's impossible to imagine that anyone can do this entirely objectively.

00:20:48.380 So as you were pointing out, clearly economists come with a certain way of looking at the world.

00:20:54.720 They typically start, take the starting point of saying there's limited resources.

00:20:58.620 How much will the resources do here?

00:21:00.960 How, what's the opportunity cost?

00:21:02.880 So typically, for instance, if you want to vaccinate children in third world countries, it means that their moms will have to take off typically the whole day.

00:21:13.960 Walk with their kid to this place where they're going to get vaccinated.

00:21:17.480 That has a significant cost for the family.

00:21:20.320 You need to incorporate that cost.

00:21:22.600 Economists will tell you not taking that into account is a failure of recognizing that's part of the cost of vaccination.

00:21:29.940 But of course, it is only one way of looking at it.

00:21:32.360 I happen to think that it's a fairly convincing way.

00:21:34.680 And as again, as you point out, at least you have to come up with another way of looking at this if you want to criticize and say we should do something else.

00:21:43.060 And what can't be reiterated too many times is that it isn't good enough to point out the hypothetical flaws of this approach.

00:21:50.880 It's only good enough to put forward a viable alternative.

00:21:54.620 And I haven't seen a viable alternative.

00:21:56.760 No, right now, the way the world organizes its priorities is very much about who gets to set the agenda, who have the cute examples, the things that we care the most about, the things that are easy to get into the media and so on.

00:22:13.820 And surely that's not necessarily the best way to decide how we spend trillions of dollars on global issues.

00:22:23.180 So what we're simply trying to do is to give the world a sense of how much good can you actually do if you spend money really smartly on climate, or if you spend it really smartly on education, or if you spend it really smartly on all these other things.

00:22:38.580 And then we have a good sense of it.

00:22:40.500 Look, at the end of the day, it's still going to be a political battle.

00:22:43.300 It's still going to be a discussion about what captivates people's attention.

00:22:48.800 There's a reason why we haven't talked about tuberculosis for about 100 years.

00:22:53.360 But of course, once COVID hits rich people and hits home, we talk a lot more about infectious diseases.

00:23:01.480 I'm not saying it's wrong.

00:23:02.660 We should definitely talk about how we deal with COVID.

00:23:05.100 But I think we should perhaps talk more about also how do we deal with tuberculosis?

00:23:09.600 Not only because it doesn't affect rich people, but because it affects a lot of people around the world.

00:23:17.520 So getting that conversation going, getting a sense of the proportion of the problem, getting a sense of what can we do, what's the cost, what is the total benefit in terms of making economies, making people, and making the planet or the environment better off.

00:23:33.920 What are the benefits there?

00:23:35.300 What are the costs in getting that balance is crucial?

00:23:38.640 Okay.

00:23:39.160 Now, my sense is that you're...

00:23:41.440 Tell me if I'm wrong.

00:23:42.380 But my sense is that you're often lumped in by people who have made climate change the center of their ideological universe.

00:23:51.660 You're often lumped in with climate change deniers of questionable motive.

00:24:00.640 And this is...

00:24:02.860 The first question might be, do you think it's fair to do that?

00:24:08.820 And if not, why not?

00:24:10.740 And if it's not fair, why does it happen?

00:24:13.900 So there's definitely a lot of people who just approach what I say and many others say, oh, it's just a deny.

00:24:21.500 He doesn't accept the reality of global warming.

00:24:24.200 And that's just simply false.

00:24:26.180 I think what has happened is that the climate conversation has become so politicized that to many people, it's just simply easier to sort of, what do you say?

00:24:38.920 Just get rid of that, an inconvenient argument by saying, oh, you're a denier and somehow being able to shut down the conversation exclusively by saying, oh, Bjorn is a denier.

00:24:50.560 I'm not a denier.

00:24:51.780 I've very clearly been stating ever since my first book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, as you mentioned, global warming is real.

00:24:59.100 It's man-made.

00:25:00.280 It is a problem.

00:25:01.840 I'm simply accepting what the UN Climate Panel, the IPC, is telling us about global warming.

00:25:06.400 What I'm arguing is, how much will a potential solution cost, and how much good will that solution deliver to humanity?

00:25:17.460 So the real question here is, are we spending lots of resources doing not very much good for climate, when we could be spending those resources much better on climate, that is, doing much more to actually tackle the climate problem.

00:25:30.580 And of course, also, that we could spend those resources and do much, much more for the whole world with its many, many other problems.

00:25:38.920 Those are two important questions, I think.

00:25:40.900 And the reason why they matter so much is because, in many ways, if you're just going to talk very, very rough numbers, the world spends about $150 billion on all the big problems in the world,

00:25:55.140 So, you know, from peacekeeping forces, to dealing with malaria and tuberculosis, to HIV, to education, to gender equality, to many, many other problems.

00:26:07.560 But we spend in the order of $400 billion or more per year on climate change.

00:26:12.860 So, if you look at the money that we spend on doing good in the world, the vast amount of that money goes to climate change.

00:26:21.500 So, if we get it wrong on climate, we're really getting it wrong on how we tackle the world's big problems.

00:26:27.920 Okay, so I'm going to read something from the UN Climate Panel that you quote in your book.

00:26:33.100 Okay, so that's the IPCC panel itself.

00:27:02.360 that penned those words.

00:27:03.960 Now, you never guessed that, I don't think, by...

00:27:07.660 You wouldn't infer that codicil if you only paid attention to the way that the climate change projections are covered by the media.

00:27:17.840 And so now we've got a psychological question, and I suppose this is partly a question of the problems of communication.

00:27:26.180 So, when you're trying to solve a problem, you've got two problems.

00:27:29.320 One is to generate the solution, the practical solution.

00:27:33.700 That might be analogous to producing a new technology.

00:27:36.800 But then you have the problem of communicating about that technology so that people purchase it.

00:27:41.800 So, you have a production problem and a sales and marketing problem.

00:27:44.900 Now, you'd think that one of the things that you point out in the introduction, for example, is that the cost of climate change interventions often involve an increase in energy prices.

00:28:05.120 And that increase in energy price falls most heavily on the poor.

00:28:10.500 And you make a credible case, a strong case, I would say, that much of the climate change intervention, as currently conceptualized, is going to further impoverish the poor.

00:28:22.060 And this really confuses me, I would say, because I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that most of the motivation, most of the efforts to put climate change at the forefront of modern consideration comes from the left.

00:28:44.160 You think that's reasonable?

00:28:46.900 Yeah, that's certainly what's happening.

00:28:49.040 Okay, then you'd also think that the primary concern of the left would be the absolute or the relative poverty of the most impoverished or relatively impoverished people.

00:28:59.600 So, I can't understand why, since you've continually made the case that climate change policy, as presently construed, is differentially going to affect the poor, that that doesn't attenuate the left's insistence that climate change is the predominant problem.

00:29:19.000 And now, I have a hypothesis about that, and my hypothesis, I don't think it's particularly original, and it could easily be wrong, but I think that there's an intrinsic anti-capitalism that is contaminating the discussion about climate change and perhaps even the science, and that the fundamental goal is to advance a criticism of free market capitalism by other means.

00:29:47.160 And climate change actually produces that outcome, that practical outcome, and if it happens to negatively affect the poor, then that's an okay price to pay, even though that's perverse, because the whole reason for the criticism of capitalism to begin with, hypothetically, is because of desire to help out either the absolutely impoverished or the relatively impoverished.

00:30:12.240 So, that leaves me with something like resentment as the only other motivation.

00:30:17.120 Now, you know, I don't think any of that's necessarily right, but I haven't been able to come up with a better hypothesis.

00:30:23.640 So, you face tremendous opposition in your work, and I don't understand why.

00:30:31.660 What's going on?

00:30:33.520 Yeah, it's a good question.

00:30:35.080 I tend to take people on face value of what they talk about.

00:30:41.180 I think there's a number of different things that are going on.

00:30:44.040 So, a lot of people, I think, I meet a lot of really well-meaning, very, very concerned people on climate change.

00:30:54.840 They basically believe that the world is ending unless we do something about global warming.

00:31:00.900 I mentioned in my book that a new survey across the world shows almost half the world's population believe that it's now likely that global warming will lead to the extinction of the human race.

00:31:12.880 That's a huge and absolutely unwarranted argument.

00:31:17.320 But, you know, if you believe this is the end of the world, everything else moves off the conversation.

00:31:23.840 If global warming is the end of the world, if it's the sort of asteroid hurtling towards Earth, we should just drop everything else and just, you know, send up Bruce Willis and, you know, do something about that asteroid.

00:31:36.640 So, the idea here is to recognize, and I've heard sensible people say, look, there's going to be poor people in 2030.

00:31:43.500 We'll help them then.

00:31:45.380 Right now, we need to help global warming.

00:31:48.520 That makes sense if this is the end of the world that we're trying to get rid of.

00:31:52.280 That's why one of the big points that I try to make in the book is to say that is not what the UN Climate Panel is telling us.

00:32:00.760 Actually, as you just mentioned, climate change is a problem, but it's a fairly small one compared to most of the other things that we talk about.

00:32:07.880 We never talk about our pension problems, but those are probably going to be much, much bigger than climate change.

00:32:14.120 The other part, so just to finish your conversation about the poor, I think that when we were not nearly as scared about global warming, in some way you could argue that the reason why we've become so scared is because the media, the selling argument of climate change has just been way too successful.

00:32:34.260 It's become the self-perpetuating machine that just takes any storm or anything that happens out there and say, see, global warming, and make us all believe that the end is nigh.

00:32:43.860 But before that, I think there was a real challenge in the way, especially the left, was very worried about global warming, but also worried about the world's poor.

00:32:54.220 And I think it was simply an oversight that we focused so much on global warming and so little on the world's poor.

00:33:03.560 And I think if you were going to be very rude about it, you could possibly say it's also a little bit because we care about our own children.

00:33:11.800 So our own children, we worry, will grow up in a world where it's global warming and it's going to be terrible for them, compared to the world's poor, which are mostly not our kids.

00:33:20.660 It's someone else's kids, typically in Africa or Latin America or in Southeast Asia.

00:33:27.020 So in some sense, this is really, I'm going to pick my kids over all the other unfortunate kids.

00:33:34.900 I think that was also a big driver.

00:33:36.800 And I try to argue both of these and get people to realize maybe that's not the right priority for our planet.

00:33:42.500 Okay, I do think that, generally speaking, it's best to take people at face value, because to not do so means that you're not extending a hand of trust and it gets you into a terribly complex cognitive situation.

00:33:56.980 But I would point out that you did question their motives at the end of that answer, you know, saying that perhaps people are more concerned with their own children and willing to sacrifice the world's poor, so to speak, in their prioritization as a consequence of that.

00:34:14.660 I looked at the potential dark motivation of a kind of lurking anti-capitalism.

00:34:24.140 Another possibility, perhaps, is that a lot of the problems that you list do fall into the same conceptual category as the world's poor.

00:34:38.340 The hypothetical person that you described said, well, there'll still be poor people in 2030 and we can worry about them.

00:34:46.220 And so you might say that you can't make poverty into an apocalyptic catastrophe plausibly.

00:34:53.900 And you can't even make tuberculosis into a cataclysmic problem or apocalyptic problem plausibly.

00:35:02.280 We know how that's going to go.

00:35:04.320 It's going to stay pretty much the same way that it is, you know, barring mutation and and but with climate change, there's a there's a non-zero possibility of cataclysmic collapse.

00:35:20.140 The the green the the Greenland ice pack melts and slides into the ocean or the the Gulf Stream reverses or something like that.

00:35:30.880 And and and and and we get a situation where positive feedback loops spiral out of control and everything comes to a.

00:35:40.780 Everything culminates in catastrophe.

00:35:42.580 It might be that we don't know how to deal with a problem that has a non-zero probability of being infinite.

00:35:50.720 Hmm. And and and that is a good comment that that is a good theoretical conversation might take on that is really twofold.

00:35:59.500 It's it's partly I think it's just simply a question of imagination.

00:36:03.540 Everything when you run it out to 2100 has a non-zero probability of going really, really wrong.

00:36:10.360 So one very good argument would be to say, take HIV AIDS, which laid bare much of sub-Saharan Africa. 0.89

00:36:20.180 If you imagine if we did nothing about HIV AIDS, you could very easily imagine one or more states in Africa collapsing over the 21st century.

00:36:30.980 Throw in some bioterrorism and some geoengineering.

00:36:34.320 Sorry, some geo, no, some bioengineering.

00:36:38.720 And, you know, you can get a catastrophe, you know, that it drives up some terrorists who are going to basically eradicate humanity.

00:36:45.340 You can come up with almost any kind of scenario that will end the world.

00:36:50.780 And clearly, we also have many, many other scenarios that we're not particularly worried about.

00:36:56.880 You know, one would be North Korea. 0.94

00:36:59.440 That seems a non plausible outcome that they could end up ending the world if we don't do something about North Korea. 0.95

00:37:08.140 I'm not sure what that something would be.

00:37:10.380 But the point here is to say that it's very clear we're saying, yeah, we're going to be a little worried about North Korea, but not very much.

00:37:18.060 OK, so so are you are you criticizing my hypothesis or are you pointing?

00:37:24.180 So like because I said that that climate change seems to slide pretty easily into an apocalyptic vision.

00:37:30.820 And one interpretation of your criticism would be, well, that's not valid.

00:37:38.540 It's not valid to make it apocalyptic like that because many other things can be made apocalyptic.

00:37:44.540 But do you think that it's plausible potentially that it is easier to do that with climate change or and I mean, it's not clear why.

00:37:52.740 Maybe it's because it also involves the non-human actors in the world and people feel additional guilt about that.

00:37:59.360 So do we have a do we have a rule of thumb that something like, well, when we're discussing practical moves forward, we don't get to

00:38:10.860 extrapolate from the present apocalyptically and say that this problem is so severe that it requires an infinite amount of resources or it morally obligates us to devote an infinite number of resources to its solution.

00:38:26.920 We don't get to play that game.

00:38:29.060 That was exactly my point.

00:38:30.880 So there's there's been a wonderful discussion between a Harvard professor who was arguing essentially that point that global warming might be infinitely bad.

00:38:42.060 So we should be spending infinitely resources on it.

00:38:45.560 And a Yale economics professor, William Nordhaus, who got the Nobel Prize in climate economics.

00:38:51.920 And his point was exactly to say, look, there are infinite infinities everywhere else.

00:38:57.620 You know, so you might have heard Elon Musk is worrying about the fact that robots will will take over will will possibly take over the world.

00:39:05.820 There's the possibility that nanotech will lead to gray goo taking over the entire world.

00:39:12.380 There's potential lurking catastrophes in everything we do.

00:39:16.100 You can't and that was Nordhaus's point, you can't just take one and say, I'm going to spend infinity over here, because you should be spending infinity on pretty much everything else.

00:39:26.300 Of course, that doesn't actually compute.

00:39:28.600 And so what real people do all the time is we're faced with things that have a tiny probability of going really, really badly.

00:39:36.500 We spend more resources on them, we try to find more ways to tackle them smartly, but we also recognize there's no way we're going to get rid of all apocalyptic problems.

00:39:47.960 We simply have to be smart about it.

00:39:49.880 And in my book, I talk about how we should also be smart about climate change.

00:39:53.920 If you worry about the apocalyptic prospects of global warming, the only way to fix that is by investigating, not doing, but investigating geoengineering, which is basically a way of being able to, without climate policy, be able to stabilize the planet's climate.

00:40:12.320 Right. And I don't I don't have the feeling that geoengineering solutions are going to be an easy sell, even to people who are apocalyptically minded.

00:40:20.200 And maybe it's maybe it's because they envision geoengineering apocalypses as a consequence.

00:40:26.900 And they and they do. But what you also have to remember is a lot of people will tell you, I believe global warming is the end of the world.

00:40:34.720 And certainly lots of kids are really, really scared about this.

00:40:37.600 And I think we should come back to talking about how this is this is just simply not real.

00:40:41.500 But I often find it really surprising that if you really, really, really believe this could be the end of the world.

00:40:48.080 So why is it you're not advocating the only technology that we know right now how to fix global warming with, which is nuclear power?

00:40:57.440 Why is it you're not just putting up nuclear power everywhere?

00:41:00.680 Now, I'm actually not arguing for that because economically, nuclear power is not very advantageous.

00:41:07.060 But if you think this is the end of the world, I wonder why it is that you would be arguing, let's do the policies that haven't worked for the last 30 years.

00:41:15.300 Let's put up solar panels, wind turbines that cover a couple of percent of the world's energy consumption.

00:41:21.260 And that may, by 2040, cover maybe even four, maybe even five percent of that energy consumption.

00:41:28.680 If you really worried about it, you would be using the technologies that would actually work.

00:41:34.460 And the fact that you don't also kind of belies that even though you talk a lot about these end of the world scenarios, you don't quite believe them because you'd be a lot more focused on solutions.

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00:44:30.640 You also make the point in the introduction that when you ask people by poll how concerned they are about global warming, there's many people, a majority of people, if I remember correctly, who are very concerned about global warming.

00:44:47.460 But if you ask them how much they would be willing to spend to ameliorate it, I think the average American agreed to spend $24, if I remember correctly from your book.

00:44:58.060 And so then that does, the problem then is by pointing that out, you belie your other claim, which is that you want to take people at face value.

00:45:06.940 Now you've got a real problem in that situation because you can take them at face value with regards to their explicit claims about what they, what they're afraid of, which is global warming.

00:45:17.540 But then equally explicitly, they tell you they don't want to spend any money on it.

00:45:22.060 And so then you have to wonder, well, which of those two competing claims do you actually believe?

00:45:26.140 I would tend to go with the one that actually, it hasn't, saying that you're afraid of global warming has zero cost.

00:45:32.660 Spending money on it has a cost, obviously.

00:45:36.060 So the thing is, as soon as you put a cost to it, then you find out that people don't appear to believe it.

00:45:42.700 They're not concerned.

00:45:43.520 So the question then is, well, what does saying that they're concerned about buy them?

00:45:50.380 And it might be something like, well, this is, again, not a particularly original thought, but it's moral virtue to advertise that I'm the sort of person who's intelligent enough

00:46:01.380 to conceptualize global concerns and empathic and noble enough to be concerned by them.

00:46:06.940 And then you say, well, what are you doing about it?

00:46:09.140 And the answer is, well, I'm not doing anything.

00:46:11.400 And then you say, well, then I don't buy your claim, but that's pretty rude.

00:46:15.940 And two people who get together who are both concerned about global warming aren't going to be criticizing each other's lack of diligent attention to the sacrifices.

00:46:26.100 They can just embrace one another.

00:46:28.980 And I'm not being entirely cynical about that.

00:46:31.800 I know why people advertise virtue.

00:46:34.120 And people are relatively virtuous.

00:46:38.340 And so it's not such a terrible thing to advertise it.

00:46:40.800 But it does seem to interfere in this particular situation with practical movement forward.

00:46:46.420 Now, one of the things you drive home continually is that there are real costs to getting this wrong.

00:46:55.960 The costs are the money spent and what that money could have been spent on instead.

00:47:01.500 So maybe you could make a case for everyone who's watching.

00:47:08.260 What do you see as the proper set of priorities?

00:47:11.180 Where do we as a species get the most bang for the buck with regards to these international problems?

00:47:17.240 What are the top 10 things we should be concentrating on?

00:47:20.580 Yeah, so just to give you a sense of the $24 you were just talking about before, that people are not willing to spend very much.

00:47:31.940 I think that's one of the reasons why, for instance, a carbon tax is so hard to do.

00:47:36.640 Carbon tax is one of the smart solutions for climate change.

00:47:39.740 But it also makes it very explicit that you're spending lots of money.

00:47:43.460 So instead, what most people support is that we should be subsidizing green energy, that we should be subsidizing electric cars, that we should be doing a lot of other things that make you feel virtuous.

00:47:55.600 It doesn't feel like it costs all that much, but it actually ends up costing huge amounts of resources.

00:48:01.700 So while people are saying they're not willing to spend very much, their sentiment actually allows politics to end up spending huge amounts of money.

00:48:11.240 So this really matters.

00:48:12.180 So, sorry, you asked me, what are the things we should be spending our resources on?

00:48:16.420 Yeah, and so that also means, what are we sacrificing if we concentrate too much on the moral virtue of driving a Tesla, for example, which is a clear status symbol, very expensive, and not obviously related to ameliorating climate change.

00:48:31.220 What are we sacrificing?

00:48:32.420 So as long as we're driving this Tesla, because the government, and that's typically almost everywhere in the world, because the government has spent $5,000 or $10,000 on subsidizing us in order to make us afford to drive this Tesla.

00:48:47.980 So that's $10,000 that couldn't go to other things either in our own states, our own nations, where we obviously could have spent, according to what the political decision making process would decide, you know, on better education and better care for our elderly, on better COVID care.

00:49:07.020 Right now, there are lots of other things that are demanding attention.

00:49:11.260 What we tried to look at was, where could you spend this globally?

00:49:15.840 And I'm going to talk about a few things, because I, you know, I'm sure we can get back to more of them.

00:49:21.180 So one of the things that we talked about was free trade.

00:49:24.520 So free trade, we know, is one of the reasons why almost everyone has gotten rich.

00:49:31.080 The basic point is that instead of me trying to do everything, I specialize, I do one thing, and then I have a baker bake my bread, I have a butcher do my meat, if I'm not vegetarian, and, you know, you do all these other things, and you have all these specialists doing it.

00:49:49.080 Having it on an international scale means even more opportunity to have smarter people do what they do best for everyone else.

00:49:59.120 And that's why we've gotten rich.

00:50:00.760 That's why China has lifted about, what, 700 million people out of absolute poverty over the last 30 years, which is one of the biggest achievements in the world.

00:50:09.620 It's impossible not to be very, very impressive just simply on the humanity of that project.

00:50:15.300 And, of course, we should be doing more of that.

00:50:17.960 But, unfortunately, we have, you know, for a variety of reasons, Trump is obviously a big part of this, but it's also, it started way before Trump.

00:50:27.920 The resentment towards free trade, the sense that this was wrong, has not only meant that many people in the rich world has become less better off than they otherwise could have been,

00:50:39.380 but it's also meant that we have left a lot of people, especially in Africa and South Asia, much less well off.

00:50:46.680 We should be spending some of our resources on making sure that we get more free trade, not less free trade.

00:50:53.500 How do we do that?

00:50:55.000 How do we do that effectively?

00:50:56.200 And the simple way that we do that, unfortunately, is by subsidizing agriculture.

00:51:04.100 So one of the best, most vested interests against free trade has turned out to be agriculture.

00:51:10.580 It's agriculture in the EU, in the US, Japan, many other places, because they don't want to have that competition.

00:51:17.720 Look, from a private part of view, I understand that.

00:51:20.620 If I was a farmer, I wouldn't want, you know, cheap, cheap agricultural produce come in and essentially eradicate my business model.

00:51:28.780 So we need to recognize that we need to subsidize these people.

00:51:32.500 We probably also need to subsidize other people, the people who would otherwise have lost their jobs.

00:51:37.380 So there's an enormous amount of money that needs to be spent, but it's a trivial amount of money.

00:51:43.080 I got confused.

00:51:44.420 Are you speaking about eradicating agricultural subsidies in the West, or are you speaking about subsidizing agricultural productivity in third world countries?

00:51:55.420 Or I missed the mechanics there.

00:52:00.060 So, sorry, I'm talking about subsidizing the people who would otherwise block more free trade.

00:52:07.260 So this is basically subsidizing rich Western farmers to make sure that they're okay with more free trade.

00:52:13.420 Right, so if their livelihood is endangered by the necessity of allowing for competition on the agricultural market, you just buy them out.

00:52:21.420 Like you might do with fishermen who are overfishing the ocean.

00:52:25.200 Yes, exactly.

00:52:26.100 And this is not a potential, this is not perfect by any means, but it's a way to actually solve the problem of getting more of the stuff that will help humanity.

00:52:36.060 Any idea what the benefit is of that compared to the cost?

00:52:40.220 And is that calculable?

00:52:41.760 Yes.

00:52:42.220 So we made the estimate that for every dollar you spend on these subsidies, you will help the world about $2,000.

00:52:50.120 Basically, because you can generate an enormous amount of internal growth.

00:52:56.800 So we estimate that you could actually make every person in the developing world about $1,000 richer per person per year in 15 years.

00:53:06.340 That's it.

00:53:06.680 Okay, so wait, you got it.

00:53:07.620 We're going to slow down there because those are unbelievable claims.

00:53:10.160 Those are unbelievably massive claims.

00:53:13.320 Okay, so you said to subsidize rich agricultural producers in the West to the tune of $1 a year buys you $1,000 in increased revenue globally.

00:53:26.800 $2,000.

00:53:27.420 It's a $2,000 to $1 return.

00:53:30.100 Yes.

00:53:30.340 And this is basically because this is the World Bank's dynamic trade models that show that once you get a society that's able to trade internationally and openly, you also get enhanced growth within those countries.

00:53:46.820 So that means they by themselves get to be better so that, and these would mostly be poor countries.

00:53:53.400 There would also be a lot of rich countries, but these would mostly actually help the world's poor because they have the most catching up to do.

00:53:59.360 And they will then be much better off.

00:54:02.660 Not only would that be better for them, because if you're poor, $1,000 is a lot better than if you're rich, getting another $1,000, but also because it will help them generate all the other things they would like to have, education, health, resilience to global warming.

00:54:18.720 So the whole point here is to recognize that this is one of the things that are hard to have a discussion about.

00:54:25.060 There are very few people advocating global free trade.

00:54:29.200 There are lots of people advocating against it.

00:54:31.360 But we need to recognize that this is one of the things that have helped pull out most people of poverty that we know could do even more in the future and that we have a real opportunity to achieve.

00:54:43.140 Well, you don't have ice flow, abandoned, cuddly polar bears as portraits of the farmers that you're going to help abstractly in third world countries.

00:54:53.380 So you have a sales and marketing problem there.

00:54:56.000 And that's a real problem, right?

00:54:57.680 You know, it's interesting that the economic models don't take into account the difficulty of propagating the message.

00:55:08.040 You know, you know what I mean is that because there is a sales and marketing problem there and it's not trivial.

00:55:13.300 And it might be that a dollar spent in agricultural subsidies to rich farmers in the West would produce that $2,000 return.

00:55:21.300 But the question might be how much money would you have to spend advertising that before people would believe it.

00:55:27.480 And that's a crucial question.

00:55:30.160 You know, with a standard entrepreneurial product, I don't think it's unreasonable to estimate that 65% to 95% of the cost is in sales and marketing.

00:55:42.200 You know, 5% is production.

00:55:44.880 And that's a great argument.

00:55:46.200 So in some sense, you could argue what we try to do with the Copenhagen consensus where we make these priority lists is just simply give you the raw data for what would academically be the smartest things to invest in.

00:55:58.820 But you're absolutely right.

00:56:00.040 There's no cute and cuddly, you know, selling points to free trade.

00:56:05.080 And actually to most of our top outcomes.

00:56:08.020 So let me just give you a few of the other ones.

00:56:09.820 So the second best is family planning and probably also basic emergency care to women. 0.63

00:56:17.820 This will deliver about $100 back for every dollar spent.

00:56:21.060 You think that would also be extremely attractive to people on the left?

00:56:25.580 It should be attractive to everyone.

00:56:27.760 Yeah.

00:56:27.860 Because, look, remember, right now about 400,000 mothers die in childbirth.

00:56:34.460 And about 2 million kids die in the first 28 days of their life here on Earth.

00:56:41.020 And we know we could save many of these, not all of them, but many of these by simple measures, you know, for instance, making sure that you don't get that the pregnant women don't get high blood pressure, preeclampsia and eclampsia, which kills more than 100,000 women every year.

00:57:00.100 And by simple emergency measures, when you come into a facility, give birth and you have a problem.

00:57:07.440 If you have simple procedures to make sure that that problem can be dealt with, often with fairly cheap, you don't need more doctors, you just need nurses or even assistant helpers.

00:57:19.460 You can do a lot of these things.

00:57:21.200 We know that you can do this for very low cost.

00:57:23.820 And then again, if you have, there's about 215 million people, women who don't have access to prevention. 0.99

00:57:30.920 So family planning, if you could get them family planning, not all of them would use family planning all of the time, but it would mean that they would space their kids better, they would be able to give more investment into each one of their kids, that would get them better educated, there would be a lot of

00:57:47.180 knock on effects, but mostly, this would mean that a lot of moms wouldn't die in childbirth, and their children that they do give birth to would have better lives. 0.99

00:57:59.740 And again, we estimate this would cost about $3 billion a year, but it would pay dividends, both in terms of saving moms, saving kids, but also growing the economy because of what's known as the demographic dividend.

00:58:13.860 If you have slightly fewer kids, you have more productivity because you have the same amount of capital, but for fewer kids, that means you get to be faster, richer.

00:58:23.980 That's essentially what China has done in a sort of boosted way by their one child policy.

00:58:29.980 I'm not advocating that at all, but it gives you a good sort of insight.

00:58:34.860 Then there are lots of health things.

00:58:36.540 We talked about tuberculosis.

00:58:38.720 We could probably spend a dollar on tuberculosis and help people not die, help people being better off, help families not dealing with tragedies of losing their mom and dad.

00:58:49.580 It's typically, you know, people in their middle ages that die from tuberculosis, every dollar spent would avoid about $43 of social benefits.

00:58:59.680 Sorry, would generate $43 of social benefits.

00:59:04.040 If you look at childhood immunization, we've stopped a lot of the really damaging childhood diseases.

00:59:14.100 So we've gone from a world where about 12 million children died just in 1980 to now only about 5 million children die every year below the age of five.

00:59:27.740 But clearly that's still way too many.

00:59:29.600 We could probably save a million children for a billion dollars a year.

00:59:34.980 Just think about that.

00:59:36.140 We estimate that for every dollar spent there, you do about $60 worth of good.

00:59:41.560 So again, the whole point here is to recognize there are lots of lots of amazing things that you can do.

00:59:47.700 And I was letting my internal cynic respond to your arguments and trying to adopt the position of someone who might be critical of them.

00:59:56.320 I know that arguments for ameliorating the lot of the poor that were put forth in the 60s were often countermanded by the claims often of environmentalists that you don't want to help the poor because they'll breed more.

01:00:14.220 And that will just lead to more of the kind of problems that you're trying to solve.

01:00:18.200 And so, you know, the question might be why would someone object to saving a million children a year through immunization or I think you said 2 million children as a consequence of enhanced maternal care.

01:00:30.760 And I can imagine similar arguments like that being raised, you know, whether consciously or implicitly.

01:00:40.100 But those things should be made implicit.

01:00:42.960 So I would encourage people who are watching this or listening to this, you know, a lot of you have chopped up my YouTube videos into small videos.

01:00:54.640 And sometimes animated sections of them and otherwise distributed them Bjorn just outlined four, the top four investment strategies for a better planet.

01:01:06.560 And it might be useful to consider ways that that can be, that that information can be distributed as widely as possible.

01:01:17.300 I mean, Bjorn's writing his books, but those sell at how many books, if you don't mind me asking, how many copies of False Alarm did you sell?

01:01:26.180 I think it's in the, it's 10,000, 15,000 thereabouts.

01:01:30.180 Right.

01:01:30.480 So that's a good, that's a good selling book from an academic book perspective, but it's a drop in the bucket.

01:01:37.920 Right.

01:01:38.560 I mean, and that's not a criticism, obviously.

01:01:41.200 What about total for your books?

01:01:42.620 So it's, you know, two, three hundred thousand.

01:01:48.000 Right, right.

01:01:48.880 And so a good YouTube video will get a million views.

01:01:52.920 And if this was chopped up properly, maybe it would get five or, you know, five to 10 million views.

01:01:57.920 So that would be good.

01:01:58.700 But we, we don't want to.

01:02:03.560 Have you thought about allying yourself with an advertising firm?

01:02:07.460 So we, we've talked to some of those, there's been people coming and asking, how can we help?

01:02:15.160 Can we help do some of this?

01:02:17.400 And, and what I find is that when, when it ends up part, partly these advertising firms sort of retract their offers when they start realizing this is really complicated, that they, that it's not just, you know, the, the cute polar bear on the ice flow kind of argument.

01:02:33.440 Um, and, and I get that.

01:02:36.440 And part of it, of course, is also that unlike when you talk to someone who's just saying, we should do more about this, a good thing.

01:02:45.100 We should, you know, save more moms, or we should do more about climate change. 0.80

01:02:49.480 We're the guys who actually say you should do this before this.

01:02:53.700 And that always antagonizes people.

01:02:56.260 I think it's the only intellectually honest argument, uh, because we have limited resources.

01:03:01.820 So we're simply saying, do this first, do this first.

01:03:04.740 Don't do this first.

01:03:06.080 Don't do this first.

01:03:07.260 I think that's important, but that always creates a lot more antagonism.

01:03:11.340 And I think that's one of the reasons why this is a much harder argument, uh, to make.

01:03:16.360 And obviously my whole book on climate is very much from the, you don't, you don't have the problem of having to say no, if you stay in the hypothetical, you know, that's another advantage to not actually trying to solve a problem when you're making a moral claim that you're concerned about it.

01:03:31.960 Because you can be concerned about global warming and world poverty and, and, uh, the lack of education of women and, uh, a host of other issues and never make a sacrifice in your concerns as long as you actually don't try to practically address those problems.

01:03:47.880 Because then you're faced with the horrible necessity of prioritization.

01:03:51.960 And maybe that is part of what makes you unpopular to the, to the degree that people are, uh, not so much resisting your message, but critical of, of your approach.

01:04:02.300 You force, you force the recognition that, that no has to be said in order to make progress forward.

01:04:09.500 And that, that interferes with a utope, with an imaginary utopian vision, but it, it, and, and so that makes, that makes romanticizing the venture much more difficult.

01:04:23.040 It doesn't seem impossible though.

01:04:24.640 I mean, you could imagine, um, um, a heart rending and emotionally compelling video addressing the utility of restoring to health someone who was suffering from tuberculosis

01:04:38.680 or preventing it in the first place.

01:04:40.340 I mean, these things don't seem completely impossible.

01:04:42.900 You haven't found any marketing or advertising agency that's willing to partner with you in, in, in the sale of any of these ideas.

01:04:51.600 Oh, we, we found lots of people who, who love to jump on board and, you know, look, there are lots of videos out there that, that tells you how incredibly important it is to do something about tuberculosis

01:05:03.480 and how important it is to do something about maternal health and, and about immunization and about malaria and all these other things.

01:05:10.320 It, I think it's much more a question of saying, what is it that you overwhelmingly see when you see open, you know, your TV or your look at YouTube.

01:05:20.200 And I think there's just a level difference in the amount of knowledge that you have about tuberculosis compared to the amount of knowledge that you have about COVID certainly now, uh, and about climate change and these other things.

01:05:33.020 It's just simply a question of saying one of them, or the two last ones resonate much, much clearer to most people and to a lot of, uh, interest organizations.

01:05:44.180 Whereas the other one is sort of the, yeah, of course, I also think we should do some of that tuberculosis now back to what we were talking about before.

01:05:51.500 Yeah.

01:05:52.860 So the climate, the other, the issue with regards to the climate is that the weather affects everyone all the time.

01:06:00.820 If you're going to talk about some, if you're going to talk to someone and you don't really know what to talk about, you'll make small talk about the weather.

01:06:08.460 And so it's an immediate day-to-day concern in a way that even infectious disease isn't or wasn't before COVID.

01:06:17.400 And so maybe that's another reason that, that the climate issue has been, has occupied the, the, the space for apocalyptic attention.

01:06:26.940 If there is a, uh, too hot summer or an extraordinarily hot summer, you have an explanation for it.

01:06:33.620 And it's something that affects you while it's happening or a too cold winter day or too much wind or too much rain or, you know, any of the extreme weather events that can manifest themselves.

01:06:42.840 So there's an immediacy to weather that seems to be associated perhaps with the, with the emotional resonance of climate change.

01:06:50.560 That's also perhaps working against these rational arguments.

01:06:53.640 Well, there's certainly something, so we have research that shows that when it's hot, people believe more in global warming than when it's cold.

01:07:02.580 So there definitely is these kinds of very, very simple, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, connections.

01:07:09.020 On the other hand, if you think about it, when you talk about global warming, it's going to be, let's say four degrees centigrade hotter in a hundred years.

01:07:19.120 That's actually really hard to imagine that most people would get very worked up about.

01:07:23.640 And that's of course, also what you saw for the first 20 years or so of global warming.

01:07:28.820 What has happened is that shift from the focus on the, uh, the basic outcomes of global warming to these catastrophic outcomes.

01:07:37.820 So that every time you see a storm, every time you see a heat wave, every time you see any kind of change in weather, people will often say, see global warming.

01:07:48.760 And there, the problem is that that leads you to believe this could be the end of the world.

01:07:54.780 Right.

01:07:55.440 And, and, and that's what I think, and that's universal explanatory rubric and hard to, so it buys you explanations for weather alterations and it buys you moral virtue.

01:08:06.180 It buys you a sense that you understand the most important problems in the world and it occupies that apocalyptic space.

01:08:13.980 Another reason that climate change might've become such a concern because, you know, people have always believed in the apocalypse and that's because things can go cataclysmically wrong.

01:08:24.740 And, and, and maybe we have a, we have a need for a cultural representation of that.

01:08:30.500 And before global warming, we had this, the cold war and the, and the battle between the United States or the West, more broadly speaking in the Soviet Union, that was a pretty plausible apocalypse.

01:08:40.220 And of course it did garner much more attention or maybe an, an amount of attention that's equal to the attention that global warming attracts now.

01:08:49.800 So that doesn't solve the, the sales and marketing problem.

01:08:57.040 Um, it just highlights its, its difficulty.

01:09:00.580 Can, can I ask you, I noticed you have these prioritizes books, Bangladesh priorities, Haiti prioritizes, Andra Pradesh prioritizes.

01:09:12.480 Now you've opened up your economic team to use by states, correct?

01:09:20.980 Yes.

01:09:21.380 Can you tell us a little bit about that?

01:09:23.400 That's another, that's something else that's extremely practical.

01:09:26.380 And I'd like to know how you do it and what the effect is.

01:09:29.620 Does it work?

01:09:31.280 Yes.

01:09:31.920 Yes.

01:09:32.260 So, so, uh, one of the things we found, uh, so we did a prioritization of the sustainable development goals for the UN that we talked about in the beginning.

01:09:41.020 Uh, and, and what's, what's sort of very noticeable is if you talk about what should the world do, everybody thinks that's intellectually interesting, but nobody feels like they live in the world.

01:09:52.500 You know, they, well, we're Canada, we're the U S or Denmark or whatever.

01:09:56.860 And so you feel like I want something that's actually relevant for my political conversation.

01:10:02.420 And so one of the things we want it to do, we, we also did this in Latin America, uh, with the Inter-American Development Bank.

01:10:08.980 And we found, you know, these are some of the best things to do in Latin America.

01:10:12.280 And then, you know, obviously Argentina would say, yeah, that's probably true in Mexico, but not here.

01:10:17.300 We're special.

01:10:18.000 And, and likewise, Brazil would say, yeah, that's true in Argentina, but not here.

01:10:21.600 So, you know, the constant, you could constantly get the sense of it's true somewhere else, but not here.

01:10:26.220 And that's why we wanted to have this conversation specifically for nations.

01:10:31.860 So we've done this for Bangladesh. 0.59

01:10:33.420 We've done this for two States in Indiana, Pradesh and Rajasthan.

01:10:36.800 We've done it in Haiti.

01:10:38.340 Uh, we've just completed this in Ghana and Africa.

01:10:41.080 And we're right now working with Malawi.

01:10:43.280 That must be ridiculously exciting and interesting.

01:10:47.060 I mean, it's such a combination of rich intellectual possibility because these problems are so compelling.

01:10:53.560 And, and the, the potential excitement of actually operating in the real world.

01:11:00.400 Yes, it is very exciting.

01:11:01.960 It's also at times very frustrating as you, I'm sure you could imagine.

01:11:05.720 Uh, so, so, uh, what happens is everybody thinks that this is a great idea in principle, but of course, everyone worries also, what if my favorite things turn out to be not a very good investment?

01:11:19.980 That's suddenly going to, you know, make it much harder for me to get money for next, from next year's budget.

01:11:25.940 So there's this, there's this, uh, sense of, do we want this to be too successful?

01:11:31.520 On the other hand, the finance ministry often loves this approach because they're the ones who get inundated from all ministries and saying, we need more money for this project.

01:11:41.080 We need more money for that project.

01:11:42.940 And of course, politicians also need, uh, projects that sell essentially buys them votes. 0.78

01:11:50.340 And so clearly they're also very ambivalent about this.

01:11:54.120 On the one hand, they want to do as much good as they can for their country.

01:11:57.040 On the other hand, often the best political promises are the ones that are not very effective.

01:12:03.080 They're the ones that you can sell because they sound good, but don't actually work very well.

01:12:08.300 Uh, so for instance, you can put off endlessly and still promise that you're going to deliver or, or just deliver and do it really badly.

01:12:15.400 So in India, for instance, uh, one of the things that have turned out to be incredibly good vote winner winners is to give, uh, uh, forgiveness for loans for small, small hole farmers. 0.53

01:12:27.980 Uh, you can imagine how that, you know, if, if I'm a farmer, I've put myself in almost, uh, impossible debt.

01:12:36.040 There's a politician who promises he's going to forget that.

01:12:38.940 That sounds great.

01:12:40.060 But of course, the problem with that argument is that partly they often don't pay.

01:12:44.620 Uh, but what happens is it actually ends up shifting loaning from the very poorest to the not so poor farmers, typically to the rather rich farmers,

01:12:55.740 because the lenders don't want to see the politicians ending up saying, no, we're not going to, uh, uh, uh, keep your, your loans on, uh, on the books.

01:13:07.360 So you end up spending huge amounts of money, encouraging bad loans, and then not helping, uh, the, the poor when they need it further on.

01:13:17.640 That's a lose, lose, lose outcome.

01:13:20.640 Um, and one of the things we tried to point out was don't do that.

01:13:24.320 I'm sure we weren't very successful because it's an incredibly successful political strategy, but it becomes a little harder to do.

01:13:31.120 And likewise, some of the things that we found were incredibly effective becomes a little easier to do.

01:13:37.100 So for instance, for, uh, for Bangladesh, uh, we found, and again, this is not, this is not dramatic news,

01:13:43.100 but it's just a really, really good, uh, approach to, uh, uh, to basically put your, uh, procurement online.

01:13:50.880 Uh, so for many states in the developing countries, uh, procurement makes up about one third to two thirds of their budgets.

01:13:58.040 Uh, so everything from pencils to roads, uh, but obviously roads are much, much more expensive.

01:14:02.840 So it's typically infrastructure projects.

01:14:04.840 They're dramatically, uh, corrupt, uh, because they lend themselves to be very corrupt.

01:14:10.620 And one of the things we find is if you put these online, it becomes a little harder to rig the auctions.

01:14:17.600 So in Bangladesh, for instance, you have to hand in a sealed envelope with your bid to a specific government office.

01:14:25.560 And what not surprisingly happened was they put up goons outside that office. 0.94

01:14:30.380 So the people who shouldn't come in with a cheap bid just couldn't physically come in.

01:14:35.740 If you put it online, you can get bids from further afar.

01:14:40.080 It's harder to manipulate.

01:14:41.740 You can still manipulate, but it gets harder to do so.

01:14:44.660 So what we found was we, we took 4% of Bangladesh spending, put it online and actually found you get higher quality.

01:14:51.340 You get it much cheaper.

01:14:52.960 That means you have to spend less money.

01:14:55.200 You get more for your government tax dollars or taxes in Bangladesh. 0.79

01:15:00.360 And that saves Bangladesh about $700 million a year.

01:15:04.940 Right.

01:15:05.620 So, but there's something else that's very hard to romanticize.

01:15:09.360 Oh, it's absolutely impossible.

01:15:12.300 And, and, and, and again, remember, this is simply a question of saying, we look across a wide range of things that you could do in Bangladesh.

01:15:19.880 Some of these things got picked up by politicians because they save the money.

01:15:25.300 Obviously the finance minister wants to save $700 million.

01:15:28.480 Some of these things have really, really good long-term growth potentials.

01:15:33.060 Like for instance, getting digitized, you're getting your land digitized.

01:15:37.640 Some of these are very obvious things like tuberculosis, but many of them also don't happen just simply because they're not the right set of things to do right now.

01:15:49.720 So again, our point is not that we somehow magically make Bangladesh right.

01:15:53.920 That would also be impossible to imagine.

01:15:56.380 And, and look, you shouldn't have, you know, economists prioritizing the world.

01:16:00.540 You should have economists informing the electorate in Bangladesh.

01:16:04.780 How do you want to run your country?

01:16:06.580 But we help make slightly better.

01:16:09.800 Some of the proposals help spend slightly less money really badly.

01:16:14.440 And overall, that means you end up in a place where you're better off.

01:16:17.720 Yeah.

01:16:17.840 It doesn't make a good t-shirt slogan though.

01:16:19.960 Does it spend your money slightly less badly with Bjorn Lombard.

01:16:24.780 There you go.

01:16:25.800 Yeah, no, it's a real problem.

01:16:27.300 You know, I've been talking, I talked about this a little bit with Douglas Murray just a week or so ago.

01:16:32.300 Um, about the, about the rise of extremism.

01:16:36.960 Um, well, it's a continual problem, but the polarization of the right and the left that seems to be occurring at an ever escalating rate, particularly in the U.S., but I would say in the West more broadly.

01:16:49.380 Um, we talked about the collapse of grand narratives.

01:16:54.380 You know, the right, the centrists on the right and the centrists on the left don't seem to have anything to offer now except something like incremental and gradualist improvement.

01:17:05.600 And they might quibble about how that could be accomplished with the right-wingers taking one viewpoint and the left-wingers taking another, whereas the radicals have a much more romantic cell.

01:17:15.720 And so, since the right and the left, the moderates can't come up with a narrative, even one of progress, that's, you know, back, say, in the post-war period, post-World War II, people were still poor enough, broadly speaking, so that you could sell them the vision of a wealthier future for them and their kids.

01:17:37.840 And there was enough gap between where they were and that hypothetical future for it to be motivating, but now, you know, you might be able to tell your electorate that, well, we could make things 20% better over the next 10 years.

01:17:54.080 And that's true, and it's good, but it's not punchy, and that's a big problem, and I've been struggling.

01:18:01.600 I also talked to Matt Ridley, you know, and he's a guy, I think, who thinks like you.

01:18:10.380 You know, he's fundamentally optimistic in his view, and he thinks things are getting better, and that we could continue to make them better, and that we should continue to make them better.

01:18:18.880 But all of this incremental gradualism, this optimistic incremental gradualism, has the same problem, which is, it's difficult to get excited about it.

01:18:31.940 And I don't know, I've racked my brains trying to figure out how that might be, how that problem might be addressed, but I can't say that I've come up with any solutions that seem useful or credible.

01:18:46.340 So, man, I don't know, I'd like you to comment on that.

01:18:51.380 I'm sure you've thought about it.

01:18:53.480 I think you're absolutely right.

01:18:55.080 It is much, much harder to make the argument, look, we're going to muddle through, it's going to be a little bit better, this is a little bit smarter, please do this, rather than these very grand narratives.

01:19:06.540 And I think that's exactly what I try to make with global warming.

01:19:10.440 The grand narrative on global warming is, this is the end of the world, we've got to throw everything in the kitchen sink at this.

01:19:16.720 And the reality is, no, this is a problem.

01:19:21.060 You know, we estimate that by the end of the century, this will cost us about 4% of GDP.

01:19:26.520 So maybe one or two years of growth.

01:19:29.580 That's a problem, not by any reasonable means, the end of the world.

01:19:35.240 And that's why you need to be careful not to end up spending lots, lots more to tackle part of this problem.

01:19:40.840 But the reality, of course, is, if we go down the route of these very alluring, but incorrect arguments, this is the end of the world, you know, let's spend everything on climate change.

01:19:51.320 What really could happen is, two things, we end up spending lots of our resources on things that are not very productive and won't leave us very well off, that will cut maybe half or full or maybe one and a half percent of GDP growth from our growth rate.

01:20:06.760 That could be potentially dramatically damaging in 10, 20, 30 years, once we're a lot less richer, lot less better off.

01:20:17.140 Because remember, one of the things that keeps societies peaceful is that we all have a future to look forward to that's going to be much better.

01:20:26.620 Once we start realizing we're entering into a stable state where if you are better off, it's because I'm less well off, we will get much, much more antagonism.

01:20:37.980 So I think it's realistic to say, if we follow down those alluring roads, we might actually end up leaving our future of our grandkids much less better off, not just in the economic sense, but also just simply in a wildly sort of rioting kind of way that everybody will be at each other's throat.

01:20:59.300 That's one part of it. But the other part is to remember, we're right now talking about how the West or the rich part of the world thinks about this problem.

01:21:08.260 Most people in the rich world actually think the future is going to be a lot worse off, which is one of the reasons why global warming fits into that whole pattern.

01:21:16.700 I think it's wrong. That's also what the model said. It's even what the UN Climate Panel says, but that's how people feel.

01:21:21.880 The other three quarters of the world, which are China, India, Latin America, Africa, they actually believe that their world is going to be much better in 10, 20, 30 years. 0.83

01:21:34.380 They have this future belief that you were just talking about from out of the Second World War.

01:21:40.780 They are not going to say, yeah, we're going to do strong climate policy and become poor.

01:21:47.520 They want to mostly become middle income countries and maybe even rich countries eventually.

01:21:53.440 They will want to do this. So what will happen is both that we're leaving ourselves in the rich world to become much more infighting and much less well off than we otherwise would be.

01:22:03.820 And that we're actually seeing the other three quarters of the world just simply running possibly even ahead of us, but certainly running ahead without looking at the same kind of problems that we are.

01:22:16.020 Okay. So do you think, do you think you could make this case?

01:22:19.240 So what you basically outlined there is a hypothesis that ill spent money will have dramatic consequences.

01:22:26.800 I think I can make that argument, but I also feel a little uncomfortable.

01:22:30.660 I'm just the guy who wants to tell you, you can spend a little smarter here. 0.98

01:22:35.300 You can spend a little more dumb here. 0.94

01:22:37.240 I think there's something, there's something I think that's a little sort of ugly in saying, all right, everybody else is making up their own doomsday scenarios. 0.97

01:22:48.320 So let me make up another one here, because I think fundamentally doomsday scenarios is what got us into these kinds of problems.

01:22:54.980 Fair enough, but you were trying to address the problem of compounding returns, right?

01:23:01.160 So bad economic decisions or poor economic decisions compound with time.

01:23:06.860 And so is it reasonable to point out when we're talking about risk?

01:23:13.100 I talked with Matt Ridley about this, and I've thought about it a fair bit as well.

01:23:18.280 And I think the data support the proposition that making poor people richer is an extremely intelligent environmental move for a variety of reasons.

01:23:29.500 I mean, the first is perhaps that once you get people above a certain level of income, they can start buying fuels that are cleaner than the fuels they use now.

01:23:41.320 Dung and wood and that kind of thing.

01:23:44.680 But also that as people move up the economic hierarchy, they have time to be concerned about things that are more abstract, like what the environment is going to be like for their children, which they're not going to be.

01:23:57.860 Or when they go on holiday, for example, you know, or even where they live as they have some options to choose where to live.

01:24:06.080 And so it could be, you know, we often construe the relationship between the economy and the environment as a zero-sum game, right?

01:24:16.800 And the biologists in particular, broadly speaking, the political biologists have a proclivity to do that, that as the economy grows, we sacrifice the environment to it.

01:24:28.000 But it could be the case that we get the best environmental bang for the buck by making the poor rich as fast as we possibly can around the world.

01:24:38.560 And if we make poor economic decisions because we're catastrophizing a certain kind of environmental calamity, we're inviting, we're actually increasing the risk of environmental degradation in the medium and the long term.

01:24:53.640 Do you think that's reasonable?

01:24:56.400 Yes, absolutely so, and in a number of different ways.

01:24:59.200 So I think it's funny how we don't recognize how terrible it is to be poor.

01:25:06.060 If you're poor, you're vulnerable in all kinds of ways.

01:25:09.600 You're very clearly incredibly vulnerable to global warming.

01:25:13.760 So, you know, if you remember, there was a big hurricane hitting Haiyan, the Philippines, and back in 2013, it was made a big deal out of as global warming.

01:25:24.380 It hit this very, very poor city, you know, where most of their citizens live on the corrugated roof. 0.99

01:25:32.860 Not surprisingly, having a hurricane five is terrible when you live on a corrugated roof.

01:25:38.800 The best way to help these people, obviously, would be to lift them out of poverty.

01:25:42.900 What actually is, we can see back in the early part of last century, a similar hurricane hit and eradicated about half the city.

01:25:51.760 This time, it was only about a 20th of the city.

01:25:55.940 So much, much better because the city was much richer.

01:25:59.080 But if we focused on making them even richer, they would be much better off just simply from the point of view of being more protected from hurricanes.

01:26:08.860 So, you know, fundamentally, there's something weird about us saying, oh, those poor people in the Philippines, we should help them by not driving our car today.

01:26:17.900 What? No, you should help them by becoming rich, becoming part of the integrated global economy, making sure that their kids would be better educated, not die from easily curable infectious diseases, and so on.

01:26:30.840 So not only would it be better environmentally, but it would obviously also be better for them educationally, for them health-wise, and all these other things.

01:26:39.360 It would simply generate much, much better lives in the Philippines.

01:26:45.340 But, as you also pointed out, as you get richer, you're actually cleaner in almost all ways.

01:26:51.460 You don't use dung and cardboard and wood to cook inside.

01:26:55.840 But also, you stop cutting down forests.

01:26:59.140 You move to the city instead.

01:27:00.640 You become a web designer or something else that's very, very little related to actually clearing out forest land.

01:27:08.640 You do a lot of things in cities that are much more ecologically sustainable.

01:27:13.720 And, of course, in the long run, you will actually also say, I would like to make sure that we have better regulations, so we have less air pollution, so we have many of the other things that drive environmental benefits.

01:27:24.360 So, absolutely, by getting people out of poverty, we fix most environmental problems.

01:27:30.980 But, and this is the important but, we don't fix global warming.

01:27:34.300 As you get richer, you just simply emit more and more CO2, because these guys will then start flying around the world.

01:27:40.700 They'll start, you know, consuming a lot more meat.

01:27:43.160 They'll be doing a lot of other things because they're richer.

01:27:45.640 That's wonderful for them, but it will mean higher emissions of CO2.

01:27:49.980 So, we do need to have a conversation about how we're going to fix that problem.

01:27:54.860 Okay, so, why don't you lead us down that path?

01:27:57.420 Okay, let me comment a bit on what you just said, and then let's go down that pathway.

01:28:01.920 Okay, so, to swallow what you just said and to believe it, there's a set of beliefs that you have to have already in place.

01:28:11.320 You have to believe that the current economic system isn't fatally flawed and basically works, or at least works better than any hypothetical alternatives that have been tried or that we can dream up.

01:28:23.580 So, it basically works, and works means as it runs, it tends to lift people out of absolute poverty.

01:28:29.740 There's still a maintenance of relative poverty, but absolute poverty tends to disappear.

01:28:35.860 And there seems to be really good evidence for that, especially across, well, since the Industrial Revolution, but it's really taken off in the last 30 years, maybe non-coincidentally with the demise of communism, which was a competing economic theory and produced all sorts of bad economic decisions.

01:28:54.780 In any case, you have to buy the hypothesis that the current system works and that extending it is going to be better.

01:29:02.040 And so, you don't get to adopt revolutionary, a stance of revolutionary criticism of the Western capitalist hierarchy.

01:29:13.180 So, that's a big sacrifice if your thinking is oriented in that direction.

01:29:17.960 Now, I don't know really what to make of that, because you'd think the evidence that the poor had been lifted out of poverty at an unbelievable, like an astonishing rate since the year 2000, not just in China, but all over the world, would be essentially irrefutable evidence that the current system works.

01:29:42.740 And then, if you look at China, after they adopted free market policies, compared to before they adopted free market policies, there's absolutely no comparison with regard to growth.

01:29:53.100 And so, it isn't obvious to me how, if you were truly concerned with the poor, you'd be able to deny the sorts of propositions that you put forward.

01:30:05.020 I don't understand that, maybe it's partly because people just don't know how much better things have gone in the last 20 years and why, you know, because it has been difficult news to bring forward and it's difficult to market.

01:30:19.660 If I can just, yes, so, one of the things I think people don't recognize, if you look at a graph over the last 200 years, 200 years ago, almost everyone in the world were absolutely poor, in the sense of less than a dollar a day.

01:30:37.220 Yeah, 95% of humanity was below that level. And we've just seen a dramatic decline. As you mentioned, we're now down below 10%. Even despite of COVID, which a lot of people have pointed out, have actually made more poor people, we've gone from seven up to about 9%.

01:30:56.520 And so, we've delayed the benefit for a couple years. That's terrible. And I would rather not have had that happen. But it doesn't change the long term trajectory that's amazingly downwards in the sense that we have many, many fewer people that are poor.

01:31:10.880 One of my favorite guys who runs the World in Data website, he points out that every year for the last 25 years, the headline of every newspaper around the world could have been over the last 24 hours, 138,000 people have been lifted out of poverty.

01:31:31.820 138,000 people every day for the last 25 years. But of course, it's not news because it happened every day. It was not, you know, some, oh, this day it happened. We don't get these good news. And I think we need to get them in order to be able to understand the magnitude of what we're talking about.

01:31:52.280 Well, you know, the problem with accepting that good news or a problem with it is that it pretty much eradicates the romantic rebel, you know, because it all of a sudden makes it very difficult for you to be cool, to find something cool to stand up against and to resist, you know, you have a benevolent, relatively benevolent society that's getting incrementally better. It's not a villain that you can heroically resist.

01:32:22.280 And that's, that is, and I'm not being cynical about that. That is actually a problem because resisting arbitrary authority is a good story and, and it served people well for a very long time. And if you don't have that to catalyze your identity, you have to search for something perhaps equally grand.

01:32:43.620 And, and that's difficult, especially when you also don't have to go out and contend with the brute force of mother nature to anywhere near the degree that you once had to.

01:32:53.520 But, but, but if you look at it, there's plenty of other things you could stand up to. And that was what we were talking to instead of being the romantic hero that stands up against society.

01:33:03.500 Why aren't you the romantic hero that stands up against tuberculosis or the one that stand up against maternal death or the one that stands up for a free trade or the ones that stand up for all these other things where we know for very little money, we can make a tremendous benefit.

01:33:18.680 So, so again, I, I get why it's not a hard question, man. I mean, I think it might have something to do also with the inability to utilize your resentment.

01:33:28.020 You know, if you're resentful about things and you oppose the capitalist state, you can easily identify an enemy, but if you stand up against tuberculosis, like obviously tuberculosis is bad.

01:33:40.680 It doesn't make you look good, it doesn't make you look good by comparison.

01:33:45.680 All right. So you mentioned you do promote CO2 emission amelioration strategies in false alarm.

01:33:54.680 And you did just point out that, although we should be striving to make the poor around the world as much less poor as we possibly can as quickly as we can.

01:34:03.680 So everyone wins, including us, just like Henry Ford won when he paid his workers enough to buy his cars, the cars they made.

01:34:14.680 They are going to increase the rate of carbon dioxide emission and for some people that would be enough reason to scrap the whole enrichment process.

01:34:24.680 But you have some strategies that you think are wise to ameliorate the problems that would be associated with that.

01:34:31.680 Yes. So I talk about five different solutions in the book.

01:34:35.680 So the first one is a carbon tax.

01:34:38.680 Any economist would say, you know, look, you have a problem, you emit CO2, but you don't actually take it into consideration because it's free to emit.

01:34:47.680 So that's how we think about the polluter pays. You put a price on carbon.

01:34:54.680 In principle, you should do this across the world. You should do it so that it slowly rises with time.

01:34:59.680 It's the most efficient way to deal with it. There's two things we need to recognize with it.

01:35:03.680 One is it turns out to be very, very hard because it makes it very explicit to people that tackling global warming is actually costly.

01:35:11.680 Secondly, we know that politicians are just really, really bad at doing something for a long time, very consistently across all areas.

01:35:19.680 What politicians typically end up doing is they'll put it on something.

01:35:23.680 So, you know, in many places in Europe, for instance, you have enormously high taxes on cars and you have enormously low taxes on people who are good at lobbying their governments for their particular interests.

01:35:36.680 So, you know, greenhouse gardeners, greenhouse growers don't have to pay the carbon tax because that would make it really hard for them to grow their tomatoes or whatever.

01:35:49.680 And you can see how this happens across a wide range of areas.

01:35:53.680 So that's one part of the problem.

01:35:56.680 The other part is that even if you do this really, really well, it'll only solve a smaller part of the problem.

01:36:01.680 So you should do this. We should focus on on a carbon tax, but we should also be realistic.

01:36:07.680 This is not what's going to fix climate change. This will fix a smaller part of climate change.

01:36:12.680 So it's part of the solution, but it's not the most important part.

01:36:15.680 The second part, and that's where I think we actually have the biggest opportunity is innovation.

01:36:21.680 So if you talk to Matt Ridley, this is certainly also his ballpark, but it's basically recognizing that most things that we have solved in this world are about innovation.

01:36:33.680 So you rarely get people to solve a problem by saying, I'm sorry, could you please not do all that cool stuff that you like?

01:36:40.680 Could you please stop feeling good about all of that?

01:36:43.680 That rarely works out as a political strategy. Unfortunately, that's typically what we say.

01:36:48.680 Could you please not fly, not eat meat, not do all these things?

01:36:52.680 Could you please have it a little hotter in the summer and a little cooler in the winter?

01:36:56.680 That's really, really hard to sell to most people.

01:36:59.680 What you need is innovation.

01:37:02.680 And let me just give you an example.

01:37:04.680 Back in the 1950s, Los Angeles was one of the most polluted places on the planet because there are lots and lots of cars and they have the special sort of geographical notion that just leaves all of the pollution inside this little basin of Los Angeles.

01:37:20.680 It was terrible to live there in many ways.

01:37:23.680 And obviously the simple answer is to tell people most of this came from cars.

01:37:28.680 So the simple answer would be to say, stop driving your car.

01:37:31.680 Of course, if you've ever met someone from Los Angeles, you know that that's not a solution that's actually viable to them.

01:37:37.680 Well, there aren't even any sidewalks.

01:37:39.680 No, it's not really viable for anyone in any city.

01:37:45.680 What did solve the problem was the innovation of the catalytic converter.

01:37:49.680 This little thing that costs money, you put on the exhaust pipe, and then basically you have much, much cleaner cars.

01:37:56.680 That made it possible for people to keep their cars, drive a lot and have much, much cleaner air in Los Angeles.

01:38:04.680 Now, I'm not saying everything is perfect in Los Angeles and there's still air pollution problems, but it made it a lot better for very little money.

01:38:12.680 That's the way that we need to solve global warming.

01:38:15.680 If we could innovate the price of green energy down below fossil fuels, and this green energy could be nuclear, it could be fusion energy, it could be solar or wind with batteries.

01:38:26.680 It could be lots of other possible solutions.

01:38:29.680 If we could innovate one or a few of these solutions down below fossil fuels, everyone would switch.

01:38:35.680 You wouldn't need sort of a Paris Accord where you have to twist everybody's arm.

01:38:40.680 Let me ask you about that for a minute.

01:38:42.680 So, it's not a straightforward matter to set up governmental policy to support innovation.

01:38:52.680 I mean, innovation is a very abstract idea, and I've seen much evidence of failure at the governmental level here in Canada.

01:39:00.680 When governments have set out to foster entrepreneurship and to seed, you know, the development of high-tech industry, for example, generally it's a cataclysmic failure.

01:39:12.680 I mean, obviously, it's self-evident in some sense that a good idea is good because it solves a complicated problem and the more good ideas we have, the better.

01:39:22.680 But do you think that it's, like, it seems on the face of it, unless you dig down into the details, it seems like hand-waving.

01:39:30.680 Obviously, we should have better ideas to solve our problems.

01:39:34.680 But you, what do you think constitute concrete, realistic, evidence-based solutions to the problem of fostering innovation?

01:39:45.680 Do you think it's actually possible to set up policy that does that?

01:39:48.680 Yes.

01:39:49.680 So, the short answer is yes.

01:39:51.680 And the reason is that what's lacking is mostly long-term investment.

01:39:58.680 So, investment that will only generate the solutions in 20, 30, 40 years.

01:40:03.680 Remember, this is why we invest a lot of money in healthcare basic research that then eventually becomes research that, you know, for instance, pharmaceuticals can make into products that they can make money off of.

01:40:17.680 There's always too little investment societally in things that you can't monetize right away.

01:40:26.680 It's very hard to invest in things that you can't monetize right away.

01:40:30.680 Yes.

01:40:31.680 If I make an innovation that then in 20 years, say, will help us generate this enormously beneficial breakthrough, unfortunately, I won't get any money because my patent has run out.

01:40:43.680 That's why most companies will not be investing in these long-term development.

01:40:48.680 What happens is that you then have a dearth of investment into these terms, these sorts of long-term innovations, unless you have the public invest in them.

01:41:00.680 And I'll get back to how we do that smartly.

01:41:03.680 Okay.

01:41:04.680 But we do that in medical research for many reasons.

01:41:07.680 You know, people recognize this is part of the place where we need to, you know, produce lots of professors, lots of medical Nobel laureates.

01:41:13.680 And then, you know, eventually the pharmaceuticals will take over and actually make products out of this.

01:41:19.680 That's a great setup.

01:41:20.680 We don't do this in energy for a variety of reasons.

01:41:24.680 It is one of the places where we spend very, very little money, partly because it doesn't feel like you're solving global warming because you're not solving it right now.

01:41:33.680 You're only solving it in, you know, 20 or 40 years.

01:41:35.680 That feels like you didn't really care.

01:41:37.680 But the reality is, this is the only way that we're going to get these sorts of long-term breakthroughs.

01:41:44.680 Now, one reason why politicians often screw this up is because they are not willing to invest in these long-term investments.

01:41:52.680 They'll say, we want a, you know, a Silicon Valley in Canada in three years.

01:41:57.680 Yeah.

01:41:58.680 That makes sense if you need to get reelected in four, but you can't do that.

01:42:02.680 And so you shouldn't be trying to do this in a very short-term way.

01:42:07.680 Another way is that you end up giving this away to companies.

01:42:11.680 And companies, of course, are just going to spend it on the product that they were going to do next year anyway.

01:42:17.680 But, hey, thanks for the money.

01:42:19.680 So the point here is you need to do this carefully in a way that will generate long-term innovation.

01:42:26.680 This is not easy.

01:42:27.680 You are going to waste a lot of money.

01:42:29.680 But we know that governments around the world has done this in a variety of different ways.

01:42:34.680 We know, for instance, you know, the internet, the transistor, the fracking in the U.S.

01:42:42.680 There's a number of places where you have been successful.

01:42:45.680 And all we have to do is to spend lots of money, and I'd love to talk more about specifically how we should set this up, how we should evaluate it, and we should be careful about it.

01:42:55.680 But fundamentally, we should do this in a way that we say we want to generate a lot of knowledge that we believe in the long run can deliver benefits that will actually help companies produce energy that will be viable.

01:43:07.680 But we are not going to try and do this for the next three or five years.

01:43:11.680 So we've got to stop that panic mode and start this long-term thinking.

01:43:15.680 We do have realistic knowledge about both that we're investing very little compared to typically almost all other areas, and that more investment here would make it more plausible that we would faster get cheaper green energy.

01:43:30.680 So, okay, so in Canada, there's a Medical Research Council and a Social Sciences Research Council and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council.

01:43:39.680 That might be a bit dated, that information, but essentially that's how it's been set up.

01:43:44.680 But there isn't an Energy Innovation Research Council.

01:43:49.680 And, you know, I'm thinking that way because I'm an academic and I've seen these granting agencies.

01:43:55.680 I've seen how they work and they're set up to provide funds for basic research.

01:44:00.680 And something like that doesn't exist.

01:44:04.680 So, why aren't we funding research into energy, into the generation of cheap and clean energy?

01:44:17.680 What's got in the way?

01:44:19.680 Every year, we want to spend it on solar panels that makes us feel like we're doing something right now.

01:44:26.680 The surprising thing is, in 2015, when all countries signed the Paris Climate Agreement, on the sidelines of that event, Obama and 20 other global leaders, Bill Gates and lots of billionaires, actually signed another agreement that I'm happy to say we were a tiny part of pushing, which was, we're going to double our investment into green energy research and development.

01:44:53.680 So, all countries both promised the thing that you heard about, namely, we're going to cut our carbon emissions, but they also promised to double their green energy investment in five years, so in 2020.

01:45:08.680 They did quite a bit of the cutting carbon emissions.

01:45:11.680 They did nothing of the increase spending in green energy R&D.

01:45:16.680 And I think, fundamentally, because it doesn't feel like a solution.

01:45:20.680 It doesn't feel like something urgent.

01:45:21.680 It feels like something you can do next year.

01:45:24.680 It feels like something that's nice to have, but putting up the solar panel is urgent and we need to do it.

01:45:30.680 The reality is, the over-worry about global warming that we have because we have this existential feel that this could be the end of the world, surprisingly also, not only is wrong, but it also leads us down the wrong path, namely the path where we say, let's do anything that just makes it look like we're doing something next year, rather than actually laying the groundwork for fixing this problem.

01:45:54.680 Now, obviously, and some people will say, well, we should have done this 20 years ago, and yes, that would be wonderful, we should have done that, but we didn't.

01:46:00.680 You know, it's sort of too late to do something about what we should have done 20 years ago, but we can do something about what we're going to spend our money on in 2021.

01:46:09.680 And if you look, for instance, on Biden's proposal to fix climate change, he's thinking about spending $2 trillion, you'll probably not get to spend all that money on a vast array of things, many of which are not going to be very effective, but he's also saying he wants to dramatically increase, actually, I think probably too much, but certainly a very, very large amount of increase in American spending on R&D.

01:46:35.680 This is what he should be focusing on, but I do worry that he's going to end up having much more success with all his other, much less effective proposals, simply because they are more glamorous.

01:46:46.180 All right, so you don't seem to be an admirer of the Paris Accords, and so my sense of your argument is that the proposals that are part of that accord are extremely expensive, and they're not cost effective, especially when viewed in this larger framework that encompasses a whole host of problems, instead of focusing just on climate change.

01:47:12.300 And so maybe, if you don't mind, could you lay out your critique of the Paris Accords for us?

01:47:22.820 Yes, so two things. The Paris Agreement is really just an extension of what we've been trying for the last 30 years and failed to do the last 30 years.

01:47:31.720 Namely, let's try to do something that's really hard, that costs a lot of money, that will have a little bit of impact in 100 years, and try and see if we can't get everybody to do it.

01:47:40.560 Not surprisingly, that's a really, really hard thing to get going.

01:47:44.080 And to do what? And to do what, exactly?

01:47:45.940 So basically, get Canada, get the US, get Denmark, get everybody else to cut their carbon emissions, which privately for them is going to be costly.

01:47:55.320 They have to reduce their use of cheap energy and use a little bit more expensive energy, sometimes less reliable energy.

01:48:03.920 Basically, it puts a slight slower dampener on their economic growth.

01:48:10.820 That's always going to be hard. That's always going to be unpopular.

01:48:13.940 You're basically asking people, could you please pay some more and use a little bit less?

01:48:19.080 That's a hard sell. Not surprisingly, you do a little bit of it.

01:48:23.300 You typically don't do a lot of it. You don't live up to all of your promises.

01:48:26.480 But even if you do, so let's just take the Paris Agreement, even if everyone did everything they promised to 2030, that would cut as much CO2 that if you run it through a climate model, it would cut temperatures by 0.025 degrees centigrade by the end of the century.

01:48:45.300 So literally nothing, we wouldn't be able to measure magnitude of increase.

01:48:51.320 So it's about four degrees of temperature rise. We've already seen one, so about three degrees more.

01:48:58.240 So this would be a trivial part of reduction. Now, it would be a reduction.

01:49:03.420 It would mean we would have less problems because global warming is a problem.

01:49:07.200 So we estimate there would be benefits, but there would also be huge costs because you'd actually have to pay for this.

01:49:15.300 So if you look at how much you're going to pay, which is in the order of one to two trillion US dollars per year in 2030, for every dollar spent, you will avoid climate damages across the centuries worth about 11 cents.

01:49:31.020 That's a very poor way of spending money, paying a dollar and actually achieving 11 cents.

01:49:36.880 You could just have paid out the dollar and done, you know, almost 10 times as much good in the world.

01:49:41.960 So the reality here is the Paris Agreement is a really well-intentioned agreement, but it will fail just like all the other agreements.

01:49:50.580 So, you know, Rio, Kyoto, and all the other national policies that we've done, it'll mostly fail.

01:49:56.900 But even if it succeeded, it would be a very expensive way of achieving very little.

01:50:01.640 And this, of course, is the big problem of the climate conversation, that because we're so worried, we've decided, yeah, we're not going to spend all that much money on all these other problems in the world, tuberculosis, all this other stuff.

01:50:14.640 But we are going to spend one to two trillion dollars.

01:50:17.600 Remember, it's not going to bring us to the poor house, but it's a lot of money.

01:50:20.880 That's one to two percent of global GDP on something that will basically not bias any measurable impact in 100 years.

01:50:30.360 That's a bad deal.

01:50:31.920 That's why we need to do better.

01:50:34.300 Okay, well, that's a good place to sum up, I would say, unless you think there's something particularly important that we didn't cover.

01:50:41.300 I would have liked to have heard perhaps more description of, you know, you listed out the top four things or the top five things that we could be investing in where there's a huge bang for the buck.

01:50:51.740 But people can get that directly from your website or your book.

01:50:55.480 So, yes, we've I've shown you this before, but we have a whole folder.

01:51:00.000 I'm sure you can put that up where you can actually see all the different investments here.

01:51:04.700 And you can see for that again.

01:51:06.640 So, yes, yes.

01:51:07.740 So, so I've been talking with Bjorn Lomborg today, the author of False Alarm, and we've been talking about global governance, I would say, sustainable global governance with an emphasis on two things.

01:51:20.160 And one would be economic growth, which means alleviation of absolute poverty for those who are poorest and some incremented wealth, hypothetically, for the rest of us, which seems on the face of it to be a good thing, especially at the lower ends of the distribution.

01:51:35.900 And discussing also how that might be done in the most appropriate ecological manner, keeping in mind the host of other problems that have to be solved.

01:51:46.960 And Dr. Lomborg has developed a methodology for assessing and rank ordering the problems that we face at an international level and as well at a national level.

01:52:00.120 So, I'm going to interrupt my summary for one thing.

01:52:03.600 How, what's been, what's been your experience with regards to your success in those countries where you've gone in and done this prioritization?

01:52:14.380 What's been the practical consequence of that?

01:52:17.040 So, we've very clearly, so we're an organization that will look at how effective are you.

01:52:22.960 So, obviously, we should be looking at how effective are we in what we do.

01:52:27.440 Also, you know, I'm using my life on this.

01:52:29.480 I'd like to know that actually has an impact.

01:52:31.760 So, yes, we are effective.

01:52:33.700 So, what we found is in these countries will change some of those policies and will change them somewhat towards being smarter, not by any means the whole way or anything.

01:52:45.360 But towards better spending and because most nation states spend billions of dollars on making lives for their own citizens better, if they just change a little bit of their increased spending as they get richer over the years, that will have a much, much bigger impact.

01:53:04.300 So, you know, to give you a sense of proportion, the whole project that we do costs about two and a half million dollars, and we probably have impacts in the, you know, we change hundreds of millions of dollars, possibly billions of dollars in spending, and each one of those dollars will have impacts in the order of, you know, somewhere between five and up to 20 or $30 more well off.

01:53:28.460 Okay, so that's great, you know, because what that actually indicates is that a rationally designed program aimed at incremental gradual improvement actually works extraordinarily well.

01:53:41.980 It isn't revolutionary by any stretch of the imagination, but as a strategy, it pays off extraordinarily handsomely.

01:53:49.240 I wish I, for many reasons, that I hadn't been so ill for the last while, because I was going to lobby hard for the utilization of your team here in Ontario.

01:53:58.280 And in Canada, and I suppose that could still happen in the future, hypothetically, but I'm very, very pleased to hear that the consequences have been positive, and also that you had the fortitude and methodological integrity to include an evaluation of your own process in your evaluation process.

01:54:18.020 There's a rule for social science intervention, which has almost never followed, which is don't intervene without assessing the outcome of your intervention.

01:54:26.940 It's a mistake. It's an ethical error and can have terrible practical consequences.

01:54:31.700 Okay, so back to the summary.

01:54:34.020 So Bjorn's team has rank-ordered and prioritized a whole set of global concerns.

01:54:40.500 They've also started to work at the state level, the country level, instead of the international level.

01:54:45.500 As we just discussed, that's also paid off.

01:54:48.840 And all of this lays out a lovely pathway, I would say, for people who, for people to inform themselves

01:54:55.840 about those issues that they could adopt as salient to themselves politically and ideologically,

01:55:03.640 to provide some meaning for their life, some practical meaning, and to actually further the development, further positive development in a whole host of areas.

01:55:13.080 And so, if you're interested in that as a viewer or listener, then I'd highly recommend Bjorn's books.

01:55:19.060 But more importantly, his approach and some intelligent investigation as to the methods of that approach and the consequences.

01:55:26.740 And so, more power to you, as far as I'm concerned, that's for sure.

01:55:32.660 And I was very pleased, as always, to talk with you.

01:55:35.880 Is there anything else that you'd like to tell people before?

01:55:39.380 So, if you wouldn't mind, I'd love to just, because I tried to go through the five things that you can do.

01:55:45.700 So, I'm just going to really quickly mention the last three.

01:55:48.580 Is that okay?

01:55:49.180 Yes, yes.

01:55:49.660 And then I'd love to also make one more point about my book.

01:55:52.700 But, you know, so we talked about carbon tax and innovation.

01:55:57.200 Innovation is crucial.

01:55:58.840 You should also focus on adaptation.

01:56:01.520 It's sort of a naughty word in much of the conversation in global warming.

01:56:06.420 But very clearly, adaptation is going to be one of the big ways that we're going to fix many of the problems.

01:56:11.500 It's going to happen to a large extent, simply because people do that.

01:56:14.740 If you're a farmer, you're going to plant later or earlier, depending on the climate changes.

01:56:19.680 And eventually, you might plant something else.

01:56:21.900 You should also look at geoengineering.

01:56:24.920 We talked about that very briefly.

01:56:26.900 But basically, the idea of saying, if there were to be a really catastrophic impact, geoengineering is basically a way of making sure that you can restore the temperature of the earth very quickly at fairly low cost.

01:56:42.440 We should not just go ahead with it, but we should certainly be thinking about it.

01:56:46.640 And that's all I'm going to say about this right now.

01:56:48.900 The last bit, and we also talked extensively about that, is to make sure that prosperity is also a big solution to climate change.

01:56:57.860 Most of the things you're impacted with, you're impacted with because you're poor.

01:57:02.680 If you're really poor, everything hits you hard, but climate hits you hard as well.

01:57:07.460 If you're rich, you're much, much less impacted.

01:57:11.140 And so very clearly, the question is, do we want to help Bangladesh a little bit by cutting carbon emissions and basically then leaving them poor?

01:57:20.400 But hey, at least sea levels rose this much less by the end of the century?

01:57:24.780 Or would we rather make sure that we actually leave Bangladesh much richer, which means that they'll be much better able to handle hurricanes, that they'll be much better able to handle sea level rise and so on?

01:57:36.500 There is a very strong basis of evidence that shows that prosperity is actually much better for most countries, not just because it's wonderful in all kinds of other ways.

01:57:45.700 You can avoid your kids dying and get them better education and all these other things, but also for climate.

01:57:51.240 So those were the five points and innovation is by far the most important thing.

01:57:56.400 I just want to say one last thing about, you know, because my book is very much, we've talked a lot about all the big problems in the world.

01:58:04.280 The reason why I talk about global warming is because it is the one thing that I experience most people actually talking about all the time as this existential threat.

01:58:15.160 This is the big thing that we should all be concerned about.

01:58:17.520 Certainly a lot of people, the UN Secretary General, many others are telling us this is the top priority for humanity, because if this is going to eradicate all of us, surely this should be the thing that we focus on.

01:58:32.220 I think that makes intellectual sense if it was true, but that's not what the UN Climate Panel is telling us.

01:58:39.300 It's not what the science is telling us.

01:58:41.400 It tells us this is a problem by no means the end of the world.

01:58:45.240 And that is not only important because you can't really get to all the other things we were talking about unless you stop believing this is the end of the world.

01:58:54.360 If this is the end of the world, you are going to set everything else aside.

01:58:58.000 But also, of course, it's the only way that you can actually get a better life.

01:59:02.720 You know, when you see all these kids being really worried about, am I going to have a future when I grow up?

01:59:09.700 People believing literally that humanity is going to end.

01:59:13.320 That must be terrible.

01:59:14.860 Now, if it was true, we should be telling people, but it's not true.

01:59:17.920 And therefore, being able to relieve yourself from that scare is also really, really valuable on a personal level.

01:59:26.520 So this book was written not just to make sure that you can get rid of the scare, but also that you can start realizing this is a problem among many others.

01:59:34.820 Now let's think about how do we prioritize?

01:59:37.220 And that's what I'm hoping this conversation will help us.

01:59:40.480 So in a sense, you could say the false alarm book is the stepping stone to be able to have that more general conversation, namely, what is it that the world should be prioritizing if we're not scared witless about global warming, but actually see it as it is, a problem among many problems.

01:59:59.240 Great.

01:59:59.820 Well, that's a really good place to end.

02:00:02.120 So thanks very much.

02:00:04.100 And I hope we get a million people to watch this and another 500,000 to listen to it.

02:00:09.020 And we'll see how it goes.

02:00:11.320 So thanks very much for talking to me today, Bjorn.

02:00:13.680 It was a pleasure listening to you.

02:00:15.860 I always learn a lot reading your books and listening to you.

02:00:19.100 And it's been a, it's been, well, it's very nice to come across sources of realistic hope, you know, and that's what your books provide.

02:00:29.180 They provide sources of realistic hope.

02:00:31.440 Man, those are in short supply.

02:00:32.740 So even though there's lots of reasons to be hopeful and perhaps the supply shouldn't be so short, but it's nice to be able to maintain critical intelligence and not to have to descend into a well of pessimism as a consequence.

02:00:48.640 Yes, it's wonderful to talk to you.

02:00:52.100 And it's always, you give me a lot of different perspectives on what we're doing, which is just as valuable.

02:00:58.160 You know, you're sort of, you're stuck in your own little way of thinking about this.

02:01:02.440 And it's wonderful to sort of be able to say, oh yeah, yeah.

02:01:04.780 There are all these other perspectives and all these ways that you also need to have that conversation.

02:01:09.460 It's great.

02:01:10.000 So it's always wonderful to talk to you.

02:01:11.420 Thank you.

02:01:11.800 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - April 26, 2021

163. Is Everything Better Than We Think？｜ Bjorn Lomborg

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - April 26, 2021

163. Is Everything Better Than We Think？ ｜ Bjorn Lomborg

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript

163. Is Everything Better Than We Think？｜ Bjorn Lomborg