TRIGGERnometry - November 25, 2021


Climate Change： No Need to Panic - Bjorn Lomborg

Topics
global warming effects on biodiversity net zero overpopulation
Hosted by
Francis Foster Konstantin Kisin
Guests
Bjorn Lomborg
Mentioned
Greta Thunberg Bjorn Lomberg Will Nardi Insulate Britain Vladimir Lenin Patrick Moran Boris Johnson Craig Venter Matt Goodwin Bruce Willis Greta Bjorn
Kathleen Stock - Hounded Out for Trans Views An Epidemic of Narcissism with Richard Grannon

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 4 minutes

Words per minute

184.09

Word count

11,788

Sentence count

554

Harmful content

Misogyny

8

sentences flagged

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged

Hate speech

13

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Bjorn Lombog is an author and former Director of the Danish Environmental Assessment Institute. In this episode, he talks about his journey to becoming a climate scientist, why he thinks climate change is a problem, and why we should be worried about it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.300 Global warming will mean more problems than it will mean benefits.
00:00:04.300 That's why it's a problem. 0.85
00:00:05.840 But making it into this unmitigated disaster is simply, you know, is simply silly.
00:00:11.440 It's not like a one degree temperature rise has actually made us poorer or worse off.
00:00:17.960 Again, what we've seen is we've dramatically increased our benefits.
00:00:21.700 We're much better educated.
00:00:22.760 We live longer.
00:00:23.880 We have better opportunity in almost all kinds of ways.
00:00:27.020 And we don't die more from climate disasters.
00:00:29.240 we're dying 99% less from climate disasters. So what the world shows us is that despite this
00:00:37.520 somewhat small problem of climate change, we have dramatically improved our life quality
00:00:42.940 in all kinds of areas. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine
00:00:54.940 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
00:01:01.020 Our brilliant guest today is an author and the former director of the Danish Environmental
00:01:05.140 Assessment Institute, Bjorn Lombog. Welcome to Trigonometry.
00:01:08.920 Hey, it's great to be here. Thank you.
00:01:10.780 It's great to have you here joining us in our new studio. We really appreciate you coming on the
00:01:15.120 show, Bjorn. Before we get into talking about the climate, the environment and all of that good
00:01:20.400 stuff tell us a little bit about who are you how are you where you are what has been the journey
00:01:24.880 that leads you uh to be sitting here talking with two comedians over the internet oh just my life
00:01:30.420 story and preferably in two minutes right yeah exactly so um i've always been sort of an academic
00:01:37.120 uh i like numbers i like reading books and i was like totally thrilled when i realized that
00:01:42.280 university i could actually get paid for you know reading books and being being somewhat smart um
00:01:47.700 And but one of the things I constantly also said was you've got to sort of pay back.
00:01:54.160 It's amazing that society is actually funding you.
00:01:56.620 So I wanted to make sure that they also hear the stuff we figure out.
00:02:01.400 And and so, you know, I wrote a Ph.D. on stuff you really don't want to know.
00:02:05.140 But I also did like a three minute radio interview on this in between two pop songs and the most popular Danish radio show.
00:02:16.060 to just talk about what did I find?
00:02:18.520 You know, I think those kinds of things are important.
00:02:21.240 And that's really how this whole thing
00:02:23.300 started with the environment.
00:02:24.360 So, you know, I'm an old green piece
00:02:26.580 and not out in a rubber boat or anything,
00:02:28.840 but I had like the backpack and the badges and the posters.
00:02:32.420 You know, once you've felled all the trees
00:02:34.100 and caught the last fish,
00:02:35.480 people will realize they can't eat gold, all that stuff.
00:02:39.840 And then I read an interview with an American economist saying,
00:02:42.920 a lot of what you think about the environment is wrong.
00:02:46.060 actually things are mostly getting better, not worse. And we have no sense of what we're focusing
00:02:51.540 on. And, you know, my initial sort of reaction was, ah, right wing American propaganda. But he
00:02:57.860 said something that really annoyed me. He said, go check the data. And so I got my students together.
00:03:02.620 We figure out we're going to check the data and show him wrong. Turns out that a lot of what he
00:03:07.520 said was right. Not all of it. He certainly was American and right wing. But the fundamental
00:03:12.820 point was it's a very different message when you actually study the data. And that's really where
00:03:18.980 this whole conversation on climate comes from. I kept believing that this was just going to be a
00:03:23.780 tiny detour of my academic life where I was just going to write articles that 100 people would
00:03:30.340 read if I was lucky. But this is where I am now. I've sort of come to realize my point in life is
00:03:37.880 simply to say, look, we've got to not just listen to what we hear in the media, but actually listen
00:03:43.280 to what the data tells us and be smart about it. And I'm sure we're going to be talking a lot about
00:03:48.340 that. Well, very much on that subject, Bjorn, Francis and I recently recorded a conversation
00:03:52.880 between the two of us in which I said something which actually I think is representative of many,
00:03:58.020 many other people across the world, which is I genuinely don't know whether climate change is
00:04:04.380 caused by humans or not. I hear a lot of people saying that it is who I respect. I hear a few
00:04:09.160 people who I respect saying it's not. And people like us who are not experts, who are not climate
00:04:13.660 scientists, the truth is we all make our minds up about this issue, not based on the data, but on
00:04:19.100 what people are saying, right? So what is the truth about climate change and whether it's being
00:04:25.500 caused by human beings in your opinion? Well, so you're asking a social science guy what's real
00:04:31.980 with the natural science, but I'm just simply going to tell you, you know, I know a lot of
00:04:36.180 these people who have been studying climate and I totally trust them. Like I trust people who,
00:04:41.760 you know, do my GPS for me. I kind of know how it works, but I'm really happy somebody else has
00:04:47.680 figured this out. So fundamentally, they tell us global warming is real. It is manmade. It is a
00:04:52.860 problem. And I'm wholesale buying into that. So the UN climate panel has, you know, I think has
00:05:00.300 produce some of the best reports where they gather like thousands of period studies together and say
00:05:05.820 what do we know and fundamentally yes because we're burning more fossil fuels we put out more
00:05:12.260 co2 and other greenhouse gas in the atmosphere and all the things equal that heats up the planet
00:05:17.420 and remember anything that changes the temperature from what it is today is going to be negative both
00:05:23.720 if it went up or down, simply because we have made our society with the historical climate in mind.
00:05:33.120 So, you know, London, if you're based in London, I'm actually sure, but, you know, let me just go
00:05:38.560 ahead and say London is comfortable where it is placed and Athens is comfortable where it is
00:05:44.740 placed. But if you switched the temperatures of those two places, of course, both of these cities
00:05:50.380 would be very uncomfortable. So the point here is, it's a question of saying, given that we have
00:05:55.600 adopted to our historical climate, there will be a problem as we're moving away from that historical
00:06:02.160 equilibrium. And so that being the case, what is actually going on, Bjorn? Because I hear
00:06:10.380 uncertain people say, you know, we've got 50 goods harvest left. We've interviewed the co-founder
00:06:16.520 of Extinction Rebellion who is painting a doomsday scenario what is actually going on then
00:06:22.520 so global warming will be a problem but the way it's often being communicated is sort of like
00:06:30.340 the end of the world I would imagine if you had the Extinction Rebellion Hallam right
00:06:35.280 Roger Hallam yes now for balance I should say we also had Patrick Moron who's a former
00:06:40.800 Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a lot of doomstery. I'm not sure whether that's a word, but the feeling of end of times. And it's very easy to sort of say, look at any one thing that you just saw in the media and sort of project that out into the next 80 years and say, oh, my God, we're all going to die.
00:07:02.380 The reality is global warming is going to be a problem. That's absolutely true. It's by no means
00:07:08.920 going to be the end of the world. And perhaps one good way of seeing that is if you look at the
00:07:15.020 number of people that die, remember, it's very easy to sort of count catastrophes. What counts
00:07:21.000 as a catastrophe? We typically much, much better at finding catastrophes when we're close to our
00:07:27.540 age, but it's hard to remember what was catastrophes in the early part of last century. But if you
00:07:32.840 count the number of dead, that's much, much harder to fudge. And we have good data for that for
00:07:38.040 globally on all the weather related disasters. So that's droughts, storms, floods, and wildfires and
00:07:44.500 extreme temperatures. If you count all of those people who died 100 years ago, on average, about
00:07:50.820 half a million people died each year. This year in 2021, we expect that number to be about 7,000,
00:07:59.400 a little less than 7,000 people. So we have dropped that number of people dying every year
00:08:04.620 by about 99%. This has virtually nothing to do with climate, but has everything to do with the
00:08:10.400 fact that we're richer, we've lifted billions of people out of poverty, and that means that people
00:08:16.580 are much more resilient. So the fundamental point here is if we only look at climate, we see a
00:08:22.700 problem. That's right. But you also have to remember people act, react. They actually do
00:08:28.300 stuff to make sure that their kids don't die, that their societies don't collapse. And what they do
00:08:33.500 turns out to matter a lot more. And that's why, you know, without climate change, it's possible
00:08:38.320 that we would only have seen 6,000 people die instead of 7,000 people. And I'm making up that 1.00
00:08:43.760 number because honestly we have no idea but it couldn't have been much less than that so in
00:08:49.600 reality we've seen a slight decrease in the uh it's gotten slightly less good than it otherwise
00:08:56.400 could have been but it's still an amazing achievement for humanity that we have pretty
00:09:01.020 much eradicated all climate deaths because we're resilient and like i said that being the case
00:09:08.940 What are the negative impacts? Because there have been people who said it's going to spark a migrant crisis, that you're going to see huge swathes of people moving across the planet as the places that they come from, the countries that they come from, become uninhabitable, whether it's through drought, flood, etc.
00:09:26.400 well so uh my migration is actually one of the things that are least obvious how people are
00:09:34.240 going to react because most migration has become much much easier that's one of the main reasons
00:09:38.700 so it's incredibly cheap to move uh people compared to what it was 50 years ago that's why you see
00:09:44.580 a lot more migrants uh but the reality of course is that almost everywhere in the planet when people
00:09:50.700 tell you it's going to be unlivable uh that's only in the same way that most of london and most of
00:09:55.880 England is unlivable unless you have heating. So, you know, look, of course, if you don't have
00:10:02.580 heating and if you don't have cooling, a lot of places are very, very uncomfortable. Actually,
00:10:07.580 a lot more places are uncomfortable without heating because we're tropical species. We
00:10:11.720 originate in Africa. But the reality is, as people get lifted out of poverty and we now
00:10:17.600 down to less than 10 percent of the population of the global population being extremely poor,
00:10:23.280 used to be 200 years ago, almost 100%, so 96, 94%. So we've dramatically reduced poverty. We're
00:10:31.040 likely to continue to do that. And that's why most people are actually not going to move because
00:10:36.420 they will be much richer where they are being part of the global economy. So what is going to
00:10:42.740 happen with global warming is that your heating costs are going to go down, your cooling costs
00:10:48.540 are going to go up. Probably for most places, actually not quite as much. And what you will
00:10:55.060 see is it will reduce your yield increases in food. So we will still produce more food. Still
00:11:03.960 fewer people will be starving and still fewer people will problem with malnutrition, but slightly
00:11:09.960 fewer more. So we'll not be doing it as fast as we otherwise would have been doing. That's a
00:11:16.400 problem but again it's nowhere near that catastrophe that you typically hear that oh my god we won't be
00:11:21.400 able to feed anyone of course we will and what we've seen is as temperatures have risen uh we
00:11:26.660 have seen increasing yields we've seen increasing crops as well both because we have higher yields
00:11:32.540 and because we grow on more land and that's because at an economy that tries to sell food
00:11:39.460 is actually really good at selling food both cheaply and effectively to everyone so again
00:11:44.600 The point here is we somehow focus very much on saying the knob is CO2.
00:11:49.480 It's one of the things that we should focus on.
00:11:51.560 But if you actually want to get people, for instance, out of malnutrition, it's about getting them out of poverty.
00:11:56.160 If you're poor, you starve. If you're not poor, you don't starve.
00:11:59.900 Bjorn, I want to come back a little bit because you're making some really interesting points.
00:12:03.580 But one of them I want to explore, first of all, to start with is the idea that actually climate change is bad whatever direction it happens in because it disturbs the status quo.
00:12:13.000 So if we abstract from that for a second, some people would argue, as you said yourself, we're a tropical species.
00:12:18.700 Surely the climate getting a bit warmer is actually a good thing.
00:12:24.520 So the climate getting warmer is good for some things.
00:12:27.680 But again, the main thing is it's just simply bad to leave the equilibrium where we have built most of our infrastructure to.
00:12:35.180 But one way you can see this, and I think, again, because we have this conversation where you could only say stuff that climate is bad, we get a very skewed picture of the world.
00:12:46.700 Remember, as temperatures rise, you're going to see more heat, and hence more heat waves, and hence more people dying from heat.
00:12:53.520 That's absolutely true.
00:12:55.700 But as temperatures rise, you're also going to see fewer cold, less cold, and fewer cold waves, and hence fewer people dying from cold.
00:13:02.920 That matters because everywhere on the planet, many more people die from cold than heat, even in sub-Saharan Africa.
00:13:10.280 So the estimates show that about 500,000 people each year die from heat and about 4.5 million or nine times more die from cold.
00:13:21.340 So when temperatures rise over the next at least couple of decades, we will likely see, and we certainly have seen in the last couple of decades,
00:13:28.780 more people not dying from cold
00:13:31.260 than extra people dying from heat.
00:13:33.480 That's a net plus.
00:13:35.240 Now, again, that doesn't mean we should just say,
00:13:37.200 hey, let me have more global warming 0.71
00:13:38.880 because overall, the problems with global warming
00:13:41.860 are bigger than the benefits.
00:13:45.600 That's why it's a problem.
00:13:46.900 But we're very, very badly informed
00:13:49.080 if we only hear about the problems
00:13:50.980 and especially, of course,
00:13:52.120 if we only hear about the exaggerated part of the problems.
00:13:55.800 So let me follow up on that then.
00:13:57.000 So if you're saying that the bigger problems are still major,
00:14:03.280 and also the other thing is people often talk about the runaway effect,
00:14:06.420 that if you just let it get out of control,
00:14:08.480 then eventually you start to see temperature increases
00:14:10.780 that do cause a lot of damage.
00:14:14.160 So what are these bigger problems that do need to be addressed?
00:14:18.960 Why should people who are maybe sceptical be concerned about climate change?
00:14:23.420 We'll talk about the suggestions that people are making
00:14:26.040 in order to remedy the problem because they're very, very significant and will have a significant
00:14:30.660 impact on people's lives. But why should people who are skeptical now take climate change seriously?
00:14:36.920 Well, so I'm navigating what I think is the correct way to think about climate change,
00:14:44.140 but it's a very, very complicated argument because it's much easier to say, oh my God,
00:14:48.360 the end of the world, we got to do everything, or it's not a problem at all. Don't give a damn.
00:14:52.780 Right. And I'm sort of trying to stay on that narrow road where I say this is a problem, but not the end of the world. 0.83
00:15:00.140 And that's, of course, why it's going to be somewhat costly for us in a wide range of different ways.
00:15:06.900 As I mentioned, it's going to slightly reduce the yield increases.
00:15:10.840 So we'll still see more food, but we'll see slightly less more food towards the end of the century.
00:15:16.700 That means if we could reduce CO2 emissions cheaply, we could do more for food at the same level of effort from every other parameter.
00:15:27.120 That's a good, but it's not, you know, like the saving of humanity and likewise in pretty much all other areas.
00:15:34.440 And that's, of course, why this this and you're asking me, why should people take this seriously?
00:15:39.340 You should take it seriously because the economic evidence, so William Nordhaus, he's an economist at Yale University, he's the only climate economist to get the Nobel Prize he won in 2018 for his work on climate.
00:15:53.960 And the point that he tries to make is when you look at all the evidence on the planet,
00:15:59.320 it turns out that if we do nothing about climate, the impact by the end of the century will
00:16:05.200 be on the order of 3% to 4% reduction in your income.
00:16:11.060 Now, remember, that's a bad.
00:16:13.160 Remember, by then, we will also be much, much richer.
00:16:15.880 So the UN estimate will probably be about 450% as rich in 2100 as we are today.
00:16:22.640 So instead of being 450% as rich, we will be, say, 434% as rich.
00:16:28.780 That's a problem because we could have been richer, we could have lifted more people out
00:16:32.300 of poverty.
00:16:33.140 But of course, it's not the end of the world.
00:16:34.520 We're still going to be much better off.
00:16:36.440 Our kids and grandkids are going to do much better on pretty much all accounts, but they
00:16:41.260 will be slightly less well off.
00:16:43.420 And so it's a problem that we should fix.
00:16:45.700 But what we, of course, need to be careful about, and that's the conversation that I
00:16:49.720 try to have right now is we should be careful not to enact measures that are so costly that the
00:16:57.000 policies end up being more costly than the problem that we're trying to solve. It's a little bit like
00:17:02.580 having a wrist ache and then cutting off your arm to avoid the wrist ache. That's a bad idea. We need
00:17:07.540 to find a proportional measure, if you will, for climate change problem, not end of the world, and
00:17:13.120 then let's find a cheaper policy that actually fixes a large part of climate. And that's a very
00:17:19.620 unsexy. You can see why I'm not being as famous as Howland, the Extinction Rebellion guy, or even
00:17:28.400 people who are just saying, oh, it's all crap. It's a real problem, but it's not the end of the
00:17:32.740 world. Bjorn, what we've been talking about is the effect on humanity. And I understand
00:17:37.700 looking at it through that lens because we're all human beings and we're worried about our own
00:17:41.880 interests. But we haven't talked about the effect this is going to have on the world, on animals,
00:17:46.360 on the ecology, on the ecosystems, etc., etc. Could you go into that a little bit for us, please?
00:17:52.680 So there's no doubt that it'll have a negative impact on animals, simply because animals also
00:17:57.840 are adapted to the current temperature. Remember, temperatures have fluctuated wildly over the last
00:18:03.780 100 million years. So it's not like this is unprecedented in that context, but it still
00:18:09.160 will be a problem. But again, if you care about biodiversity, it turns out that there are many
00:18:15.080 other ways that are much much more effective in helping uh uh animals and and and plants in general
00:18:22.240 in the world that's about making sure that you set off uh reserves where people don't shoot the
00:18:27.700 animals where they don't chop down uh the forests it's about making sure that we have a clear
00:18:33.140 distinction between where people can live and where nature can live one of the ways we achieve
00:18:38.140 that is by having more effective agriculture if you produce a lot of food on your existing land
00:18:43.140 you don't have much incentive to go out and cut down more forest in order to grow more land.
00:18:49.200 Sorry, in order to grow more food.
00:18:51.820 And likewise, it's about making sure that you don't take in invasive species, all these things.
00:18:57.800 So even the World Wildlife Fund and many others sort of rank all the things that matter for biodiversity.
00:19:03.580 And typically, climate change comes at the very bottom.
00:19:06.960 So again, if you really care about animals and if you care about plants,
00:19:11.420 There are many other things that would be much, much more effective.
00:19:14.800 The second part, and that's another sort of entry in your conversation on the positives
00:19:20.320 of global warming, remember that because CO2 is actually a fertilizer, it simply acts to
00:19:27.320 make plants grow more.
00:19:29.040 And one of the ways we know that is because if you talk to tomato growers, for instance,
00:19:33.620 they'll typically pump in extra CO2 in their greenhouses because it simply gives more plump
00:19:39.020 tomatoes.
00:19:40.540 Global warming and CO2 actually increases the total amount of green stuff on the planet
00:19:46.160 over the last 30 years.
00:19:48.040 NASA has found and many other studies have found that we have increased the amount of
00:19:52.880 leaf area almost to the point of three United States more or three Australias, if you want.
00:20:00.160 So the point here is we get much more biomass.
00:20:03.780 We get much more green stuff from global warming.
00:20:06.220 but we may still think it's you know it's not the right kind of green stuff there's there's an
00:20:10.780 argument in saying much of this is going to be algae and we don't like algae we'd rather have
00:20:15.100 you know lobsters or or pumas uh but we need to get a sense of saying this is not all bad
00:20:21.140 and tackling climate change is by no means the most effective way of helping biodiversity
00:20:26.320 hey constantin do you like christmas no in ussr we canceled christmas and we had lenin fest instead
00:20:35.660 what's that we celebrated glorious leader and rewrote story of jesus to make it better really
00:20:41.740 yes in our story three wise men were killed and gifts meant for jesus redistributed to glorious
00:20:47.340 workers of the soviet union jesus was put on gulag for having wrong opinion as we call it in russia
00:20:53.260 happy ending right well if you do want to celebrate the festive season then there's only one way to do
00:20:59.820 it grab yourself a ticket to our final live show of the year at the leicester square theater on
00:21:06.380 saturday december the 11th yes it is discussion with one of our favorite guests aisha akambi
00:21:13.020 she is almost as good philosopher as vladimir lenin yeah exactly our two previous shows sold
00:21:20.540 out completely and this one will as well grab your ticket now before it's too late click on link
00:21:27.420 below during interval there will be special entertainment i will ride bare with my shirt off
00:21:33.340 i didn't realize we were going for that demographic mate oh yes we are x looking at the politics of
00:21:41.120 climate change which is what i found really fascinating one of our former guests matt wood
00:21:45.340 matt goodwin was saying that this is actually going to be the next frontier of politics it's
00:21:50.200 a climate activism green politics what do you think of these activists who are very very hard
00:21:55.600 line where you've got um I can't I can't remember he's talking about Greta Bjorn tell us about
00:22:00.700 Greta but no it's not but you know you you've got the people gluing themselves to Rhodes
00:22:05.360 etc insulate Britain that was the one that I was looking for what do you think of these people do
00:22:10.220 you think that they're hard line but in a way they're necessary because they're getting us to
00:22:14.700 talk about it they're putting it to the forefront or do you think these people simply hinder the
00:22:20.000 conversation? So I don't know the people from Insulate Britain. I mean, I've seen some of those 1.00
00:22:27.740 videos. I think they're probably harming the cause overall because they're very extreme. But if you
00:22:33.940 look at someone more, you know, sort of mainstream like Greta Thunberg, I totally get where she's 1.00
00:22:40.680 coming from. I mean, look, if you watch most TV today, you get the impression that this is the
00:22:46.760 end of times you get the impression that oh my god there were you know the heat dome in the u.s
00:22:51.920 then there were floods down in germany and belgium now there are floods and in india and floods in
00:22:56.620 china you know everybody must be dying and of course what i just we talked about before no 0.88
00:23:01.780 actually there's many fewer people dying and there's never been as few people dying as there
00:23:07.380 is today from climate related disasters but the media impression is so strong that you get the
00:23:13.340 feeling this is the end of times. If you think this is the end of times, it's no wonder it makes
00:23:18.480 good sense to say we should, you know, throw everything else to the side and just focus on
00:23:24.140 climate policy. The problem with that argument, of course, is when you actually ask most people,
00:23:30.380 what are your big concerns? You know, not surprisingly, they're not all that concerned
00:23:34.800 about global warming. They actually need to get the kids to soccer or whatever it is. You know,
00:23:38.660 there are lots of other things you care about. So you typically get an answer from people that
00:23:43.620 they're willing to spend, you know, in the order of tens of pounds per year in climate, maybe even
00:23:49.340 in the low hundreds of pounds per year fixing climate. And that means when you start making
00:23:57.320 laws and climate policies that will cost thousands or even tens of thousands of pounds per year per
00:24:04.860 person. You're setting yourself up to get de-elected. You just can't make this work out as
00:24:12.000 a policy. And so my main concern with Insulate Britain and the many policies that are very
00:24:17.780 extreme, that are simply saying we need to fix this and we need to fix it fast and never mind
00:24:22.460 the cost. We're setting ourselves up for a policy that's not sustainable. People are simply going to
00:24:28.040 vote those politicians out of office eventually, as we saw, for instance, with the yellow vests
00:24:33.400 in France. But that's really just a very, very tiny start. Once we start getting to the 55%
00:24:40.460 as Europe has promised, the 50% as Biden has promised, that's going to cost a fortune. We're
00:24:46.220 talking about in the order a new nature study seems to estimate that this will cost perhaps
00:24:51.120 a couple of thousand dollars per person per year. And getting to net zero is likely going to cost
00:24:57.740 us more than $11,000. Again, in the US, we don't have good data. We also have it for New Zealand,
00:25:03.520 but we don't have good data for other places. But in the order of more than $10,000 per person
00:25:09.640 per year. And there's simply no electoral will to give up that much of your hard-earned cash
00:25:16.120 in order to do climate policies. So we're barking up the wrong tree. We're trying to do something,
00:25:20.840 but the only thing we'll achieve is getting a lot of bolts and arrows elected, if you want to be
00:25:26.320 very quick about it. Wow, that's a really good point. And I mean, when you put it into figures
00:25:30.980 like that, $10,000 a year to the average person is a huge amount of money, particularly, you know,
00:25:37.620 if you are correct, and this is all about making sure our great-grandchildren are slightly less
00:25:43.220 worse off than they would have been, even though they're going to be way better off than we are.
00:25:47.520 I mean, it's not a very, I can see why the extremists are pushing a different line, because
00:25:52.180 that's not a very convincing argument to really do much about this problem, Bjorn, if I'm honest
00:25:56.640 with you. If you say to me, you've got to give up 10 grand a year to make sure your great
00:26:01.660 grandparent, great grandchildren are going to be slightly less worse off, even though they're going
00:26:05.960 to be way better off than you are, why would I do anything? And that's exactly the problem and
00:26:12.520 dilemma of climate policy. So look, climate economics, as I mentioned, the only guy who got
00:26:17.360 the Nobel Prize in climate economics. And everyone else in the field points out that doing nothing is
00:26:23.780 a bad idea because the first ton of CO2 you cut is very cheap to cut and it cuts the worst amount
00:26:30.040 of temperature rise. So it makes sense to cut the first ton. Likewise, they also point out you
00:26:35.760 should not be cutting the last ton of CO2 because it'll cut a very undangerous temperature rise and
00:26:41.320 it'll be phenomenally expensive to do. So what they try to say is you should do somewhere in
00:26:45.840 in between. You know, that's not totally original to point out. But what they typically show is we
00:26:50.680 should do some, but by no means a lot, which is what most people are saying. And that's why I
00:26:56.900 think a lot of the climate movement has gone into alarmist mode because they figured out if we just
00:27:02.480 say the truth and we say, yeah, this is a problem. So come on, guys, let's pay everything to fix this
00:27:08.480 problem that that doesn't play with most people. So you got to say the world is ending unless we
00:27:14.080 do something about this, you and your kids are basically going to, you know, it's going to be
00:27:17.700 Lord of the Flies in 20 years or something. Then, of course, it makes sense. But it's also
00:27:23.220 untrue. And that's why you need to find a policy that can fix climate change, because it is a
00:27:30.300 problem, but smartly and cheaply. And that's the conversation that we don't have, because
00:27:35.340 everybody's screaming right now. And when you scream, you don't do good policy.
00:27:39.700 Francis, let me ask a quick political question before you jump in. Bjorn, so I know you're not
00:27:43.420 a politician or political analyst, but let me ask you this, and I know it's an unfair question.
00:27:48.560 Why are these politicians then running off this cliff, I would say like lemmings, following each
00:27:55.600 other to, as you say, to their own destruction? Because even Boris Johnson, we have a conservative
00:28:02.020 prime minister in this country who you would think would be on the other side of that argument,
00:28:07.120 just stereotypically speaking. And yet all of these people are talking about doubling our
00:28:12.040 heating bills, getting rid of petrol and diesel cars, all of this stuff that's going to have a
00:28:19.560 huge impact on people's lives. And it's going to, as you say, result in their electoral demise.
00:28:24.300 Why are they all rushing off this cliff? So my sense, and again, I'm not the expert on this,
00:28:30.820 but my sense is for a very long time, politicians basically got to promise you to save the world,
00:28:37.440 but somebody else would pay far off in the future, right?
00:28:40.560 And there's nothing better for a politician.
00:28:42.980 Remember, they actually have to assemble a coalition of a majority
00:28:46.860 and that's typically costly.
00:28:49.740 But imagine if you can say, I will save the world for you,
00:28:53.560 not my opponent, I will save the world
00:28:55.860 and somebody else will pay out in the future.
00:28:57.840 That's an optimal outcome for most politicians.
00:29:00.720 I think that's why originally they just simply assembled around this point.
00:29:04.820 It's, you know, politicians need catastrophes and crises in order to be the savior that
00:29:11.240 people want.
00:29:12.000 And climate change certainly offered one of those.
00:29:14.940 Now we're getting to the point where they've sort of gotten all involved in this conversation
00:29:20.300 and sort of promised and pre-promised a lot of this stuff.
00:29:23.880 It's hard to get out of.
00:29:25.360 I also think a lot of politicians, again, just like Greta Thunberg, if you listen to 0.90
00:29:30.440 the media, if you listen to most people talk about climate, it really feels like it's the end of
00:29:35.400 times. And, you know, if the Nazis are right around the corner or, you know, if it's a meteor
00:29:41.860 hurtling towards Earth, we've got to just drop everything else and, you know, send Bruce Willis
00:29:47.400 up and fix it. So the reality here is if this is the end of times, which I think a lot of people
00:29:54.180 have now talked everyone into we're likely to say well then let's get on with it and let's just you
00:30:00.900 know pay off all of the costs but of course as you point out once your actual heating bill doubles
00:30:07.420 once your actual bills on everything start skyrocketing people are just going to say 0.99
00:30:12.160 no you can't say that on a family-friendly program no you can't they're gonna say fuck this 0.95
00:30:17.540 you're absolutely right that's exactly what they'll say thank you so so you know they'll 0.99
00:30:21.500 just simply vote for the other guy. And it's such an obvious point then to say, look, guys,
00:30:28.280 why don't we just stop all this and, you know, spend it on schools and healthcare and all this
00:30:33.100 other popular stuff, or maybe give you some tax relief, depending on, you know, what kind of
00:30:37.860 politician you are. That's just going to be such a winner. And the real point, and this is one of
00:30:44.020 the things that we forget as well, this has very little to do with the rich world. Remember, if
00:30:49.600 every rich country in the world went net zero today. That's the UK, the EU, the US, Canada,
00:30:58.340 Australia, New Zealand, Japan, a lot of other countries. If all of these countries went net
00:31:03.340 zero and stayed that way for the rest of the century, this would be a catastrophe in so many
00:31:07.180 other ways. But even if we did so, it would reduce temperatures by the end of the century by less than
00:31:12.180 half a degree centigrade. It would not be nothing, but it certainly would not be the dramatic impact
00:31:17.500 that you think. And the reason is, most of the emissions in the 21st century will come from all 0.77
00:31:23.200 the other nations that are trying to get out of poverty. So that's China, India, the rest of
00:31:28.440 Southeast Asia, and Africa, and a little bit of Latin America. These are all the countries that
00:31:34.440 are actually going to be emitting most in the 21st century. And of course, it's not, whereas
00:31:39.280 it's unplausible that we'll manage to get the UK population, the American population, the EU,
00:31:44.940 to say, sure, I'm going to pay $10,000 a year to save us, but you're never going to get the
00:31:51.320 average Indian, which makes less than $2,000 a year to say, sure, I'll pony up $10,000. They 1.00
00:31:57.420 don't even have $10,000. So what is basically going to cost them is their entire opportunity
00:32:02.800 of lifting them themselves and especially their kids and grandkids out of poverty. They're not
00:32:07.560 going to do that. And that's why we really have to back up this conversation. We're right now
00:32:12.760 trying to make a policy that's unlikely to work,
00:32:15.940 even in the rich world, and even if it did,
00:32:17.960 would have a fairly small impact on climate policy,
00:32:20.840 but will have absolutely no selling point
00:32:23.400 in the rest of the world.
00:32:25.400 Instead, what we need to do is to focus on innovation.
00:32:29.800 And let me just give you this very, very simple picture.
00:32:32.120 Right now, we're trying to get everybody else
00:32:34.420 to promise to do stuff that's harmful to themselves.
00:32:37.340 So I'm sorry, China, could you please turn down the heat? 1.00
00:32:41.120 Could you please freeze a little more
00:32:42.580 and be a little poor and eat a little less meat
00:32:46.300 and all that stuff.
00:32:47.320 Just like we're trying to do,
00:32:48.880 just like everybody else is trying to do.
00:32:50.440 Not surprisingly, that doesn't work.
00:32:52.420 If we could come up with a cheaper technology,
00:32:56.600 a green technology that was cheaper than fossil fuels,
00:32:59.400 everyone would switch.
00:33:00.940 Just one example, fourth generation nuclear,
00:33:04.300 which a lot of people are advocating.
00:33:06.460 The problem with third generation, 1.00
00:33:08.100 which is the one that we have today,
00:33:09.640 is not that it's unsafe or anything,
00:33:11.380 but simply that it's too expensive.
00:33:13.440 But they're saying fourth-generation nuclear
00:33:15.700 could be fantastically both safe and cheap.
00:33:18.660 Let's just assume that for a second.
00:33:20.380 If that was the case, we could get base-low power,
00:33:23.520 that is 24-7 power, incredibly cheap.
00:33:26.460 Of course, everyone would switch.
00:33:28.520 The point here is, instead of trying to force everyone
00:33:31.560 to do what they don't want to do,
00:33:33.400 let's focus on innovation
00:33:35.280 because that's the way you solve global problems.
00:33:38.660 simply make the solution cheaper than the original problem, the fossil fuels. Everyone will switch.
00:33:45.560 Bjorn, what I wanted to ask you right from the start is this. I've heard this term net zero get
00:33:50.800 bandied about all the time. To me, it sounds like a bar that I used to visit back in the late 90s.
00:33:56.340 You know, let's all go down to net zero. Equally depressing. Yeah, you know, equally hopeless. But
00:34:01.520 what does that actually look like? What does net zero mean? Because I don't think any politician
00:34:06.320 has actually explained in detail what that term means.
00:34:09.760 Yeah, well, I mean, the simple technical term is, of course,
00:34:12.920 that we will emit no extra and really greenhouse gas on average.
00:34:20.960 And that's simple to say.
00:34:22.560 And it sounds like, yeah, we could probably do that.
00:34:24.580 But the reality, of course, is going to be incredibly hard.
00:34:27.900 Remember, the UK has actually been one of the countries
00:34:30.560 that have decarbonized the most in the world.
00:34:33.820 And one of the reasons, of course, is because you basically stop doing manufacturing and you
00:34:38.640 just become a service industry. For a while, you were incredibly big on banking, which emits almost
00:34:45.180 no CO2, but makes you a lot of money. But the reality, of course, is you can't actually outsource
00:34:51.640 all of the manufacturing everywhere to somewhere else. We don't have another planet that could
00:34:56.920 produce it. So to a very large extent, you're just simply pushing your emissions elsewhere.
00:35:02.000 and the things that are really hard to do is for instance uh transportation that's what we're
00:35:08.580 seeing with electric cars sure you can have electric cars in Norway that is incredibly rich
00:35:14.440 and basically give away electric cars compared to the cost of of non-electric cars of course people
00:35:21.700 will pick them up but unless you dramatically subsidize them it turns out that most people
00:35:26.660 actually don't want an electric car for a variety of reasons I'm sure we could get into
00:35:31.040 So the real point here is it's hard to cut most emissions.
00:35:36.160 It's hard to imagine how you're going to stay warm if you can't use any fossil fuels.
00:35:41.180 And as you've discussed, it turns out you need very expensive heat pumps.
00:35:45.620 You can do it, but it's much harder, much more costly, and sometimes less convenient.
00:35:51.160 And of course, we totally forget our society is built on steel and cement,
00:35:56.080 which absolutely requires fossil fuels.
00:35:58.800 And we don't really know how to do this in any realistic way right now.
00:36:02.560 And the last thing, it requires food.
00:36:05.800 Half the world's protein comes from food that's produced with fertilizer that has been done with fossil fuels.
00:36:15.240 So basically, we're looking around and saying, I'm sorry, is there like 4 billion people here who opt to not live here?
00:36:21.600 And that's unlikely we're going to get 4 billion volunteers for that.
00:36:25.080 again all of this can in principle be fixed and you can do this for a very high cost but it's not
00:36:33.440 going to be something that's a walk in the park for most politicians and again as you say once
00:36:37.820 people start realizing these costs many of them are just going to say nope not going to not going
00:36:42.960 to do that and i'm going to vote for the other guy who says we don't have to and that's of course why
00:36:47.320 you're not going to solve the problem with the current set of policies and and it's not just
00:36:52.620 that, Bjorn? After corona, every country, well, particularly the UK, has now trillions in dollars
00:36:58.780 more in debt. How are we going to afford this? Exactly. The world has actually become about
00:37:04.440 25% more in debt over the last two years because of corona. We've just spent money we didn't have.
00:37:11.960 And the fun thing, of course, is that's basically a bill for our kids and grandkids. A lot of people
00:37:16.800 like to say global warming is something that we're leaving our kids and grandkids. And that's true.
00:37:20.840 It's a bigger problem for the future, but just borrowing lots of money to not be uncomfortable
00:37:26.420 now and just leaving the bills to your kids and grandkids.
00:37:29.260 The fact that almost everywhere on the planet, we have not fixed pensions, so we don't really
00:37:35.520 know how we're going to make sure that the people who are working today will actually
00:37:40.380 be taken care of when they retire in 20, 30, 50 years from now.
00:37:45.180 But that means we're leaving enormous bills for our kids and grandkids.
00:37:49.380 I would say that what we should be doing is having a sensible conversation about how we're going to make sure that our kids and grandkids are both better off and that we make sure we do policies that are both sustainable, that is, people will keep voting for them and actually work for climate change and all these other issues.
00:38:06.720 And we're not because we're simply just running around scared and a little headless and just saying, no, no, no, let's just fix climate change by making grand promises that we can't really deliver.
00:38:17.580 And of course, that we can't get China, India, Africa and everybody else to buy into. 0.83
00:38:22.780 I was going to say that this is the question that I particularly wanted to ask.
00:38:28.540 All I've heard time and time again with the climate crisis is doom.
00:38:33.840 It's gloom.
00:38:34.900 it's, you know, the world is ending, 50 harvests left, you know, this place has got the highest
00:38:40.600 temperature ever since it ever recorded. Is this some good news or is it all an unmitigated
00:38:46.920 catastrophe? Well, so fundamentally, you're hearing a tiny bit of the conversation. So yes,
00:38:53.340 again, global warming will mean more problems than it will mean benefits. That's why it's a problem.
00:38:58.940 but making it into this unmitigated disaster is simply, you know, is simply silly. It's not like
00:39:06.100 a one degree temperature rise has actually made us poorer or worse off. Again, what we've seen is
00:39:12.900 we've dramatically increased our benefits. We're much better educated. We live longer. We have
00:39:17.940 a better opportunity in almost all kinds of ways. And we don't die more from climate disasters. We
00:39:22.980 dying 99% less from climate disasters. So what the world shows us is that despite this somewhat
00:39:32.080 small problem of climate change, we have dramatically improved our life quality in all
00:39:36.920 kinds of areas. And the real problem with climate policy could very well be that if we're so
00:39:42.660 over-focused on climate policy, it means we forget all the other things as we just talked about.
00:39:48.120 How do we do pension reform? How do we make sure, you know, one of the things that blow my mind,
00:39:52.240 almost every kid in the world is now in school, which is a great achievement. But about half of
00:39:59.840 them in developing countries still don't learn anything. And so we need to get the school crisis 0.98
00:40:04.880 fixed. We need to still get people out of poverty. We need to get people out of hunger. We need to
00:40:09.500 do so many other things. There's one and a half million people that die every year from an entirely
00:40:14.860 curable tuberculosis. Remember, we don't care about it anymore because we fixed it 100 years ago.
00:40:19.680 but there's still 1.5 million people died just from that one disease every year. We should do
00:40:24.900 something about all those catastrophes as well. We are smart species. So, you know, we can walk
00:40:30.500 and chew gum at the same time. We can actually focus on all of these issues. But when people
00:40:35.040 are just screaming their lungs off on just one issue, climate, it means we end up under-focusing
00:40:41.940 on all the other problems. So look, the future is bright. If we fix this smartly, the future can be
00:40:48.620 even brighter. But if we screw this up and if we only focus on climate, we'll likely both make
00:40:54.260 bad climate policies, we'll actually not fix it because people will end up, you know, electing
00:40:58.980 balls and arrows, and we'll have neglected all the other opportunities. We'll probably still be
00:41:03.440 better off simply because the underlying growth engine will still be humming along, but we'll be
00:41:09.500 much less better off than we otherwise could have been. So that's really my argument here.
00:41:15.180 let's not under worry but certainly let's not over worry as well because both of those are
00:41:21.320 actually bad outcomes hey constantin do you love trigonometry of course incredible interviews
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00:42:20.800 in the description and the pinned comment below see you there guys and bjorn i'm really enjoying
00:42:27.740 this conversation so much because it speaks to my pre-existing biases which is i believe we're
00:42:32.940 you know in the ingenuity of humanity and we've seen that throughout our history if we focus on
00:42:38.700 solving a problem, we can create technology and solutions that will work. And one of the things
00:42:44.140 I found really puzzling about the environmental movement of late, and I say this as someone whose
00:42:49.440 wife was born and grew up near in Kiev, near Chernobyl, she had to be evacuated as a kid
00:42:54.840 and sent to the far east of Russia to be away from all this stuff, is the absolute reluctance
00:43:00.560 to see that nuclear energy is a big part of the answer here. Can you talk to us about
00:43:06.940 renewables, nuclear, etc. What is the energy package that takes us away from fossil fuels
00:43:12.900 in the long run? And particularly, why are some of them not being given the appropriate levels
00:43:18.280 of attention that I think we'd both agree that it deserves? Yeah. So first of all, we don't know
00:43:24.180 what the future energy is going to look like. If we did, both you and I would be incredibly rich,
00:43:29.280 and we'd also fix the problem in some way. The challenge here is that as long as fossil fuels
00:43:36.280 are the cheapest baseload power people will keep using remember uh people love to say solar and
00:43:43.940 wind are the cheapest ever and they're cheaper than anything else well that's true somewhere
00:43:48.880 sometimes but only sometimes you know the sun is solar power is only cheaper than fossil fuels
00:43:55.360 when the sun is shining but most people actually want power 24 7 which means that unless you have
00:44:01.520 really, really good batteries, which we don't have yet, you basically need to both buy a solar panel
00:44:06.420 and a backup gas generator. And that suddenly makes it a lot more expensive. So they're really
00:44:12.680 fiddling on these points. And that matters because that's, of course, why you can't convince
00:44:18.980 the Chinese and the Indians to just build lots of solar panels. If it really was cheaper,
00:44:23.560 everyone would be building these. So the reality is, unless we get much, much better batteries,
00:44:29.780 and we're not talking a little bit better batteries.
00:44:32.460 Remember right now, the world has enough batteries
00:44:34.580 to save about one minute of our electricity consumption
00:44:38.640 and electricity is still just about a fifth
00:44:41.240 of all the energy that we use.
00:44:43.080 So that's a terribly tiny bit.
00:44:45.000 We need batteries for months
00:44:47.260 in order to make this work out.
00:44:49.340 I'm not sure we'll ever get there,
00:44:50.820 but possibly with enough ingenuity, we can get there.
00:44:54.580 As you mentioned, fourth generation nuclear,
00:44:57.080 you know, the reason why we're not doing third generation
00:44:59.500 is because it's phenomenally expensive,
00:45:01.600 but maybe fourth generation nuclear will get us.
00:45:04.480 Fusion has always been this science fiction kind of idea
00:45:07.520 that you could basically do what the sun does,
00:45:09.860 but you could do it all the time and very, very cheaply.
00:45:12.400 Maybe it's coming along.
00:45:14.020 There's this one great idea by Craig Venturi,
00:45:16.300 the guy who cracked the human genome back in 2000.
00:45:18.780 He has this idea of growing algae
00:45:21.240 that is specifically designed
00:45:23.240 to be grown out on the ocean surface.
00:45:26.200 They would soak up CO2 and sunlight
00:45:28.160 and produce oil.
00:45:30.060 And so you could harvest that out on the ocean surface
00:45:32.780 and we could basically grow our own oil field.
00:45:35.540 We could keep the entire fossil fuel infrastructure,
00:45:38.780 but without emitting CO2
00:45:40.720 because we just have collected that CO2
00:45:42.900 out on the ocean surface.
00:45:44.300 Now, all of these technologies have one thing in common.
00:45:48.340 They're still too expensive.
00:45:49.340 That's why they haven't taken over the world.
00:45:51.300 But with innovation,
00:45:53.060 if we spent a lot more resources on innovation
00:45:57.280 in all of these areas, batteries, solar, wind, nuclear, fusion, these algaes, and many, many
00:46:07.100 other ideas. If we spent a lot more money on that, we just need one of these technologies to come
00:46:12.860 through. Most of them are going to fall by the wayside, and that's the way technology works.
00:46:16.500 But if just one or a few of them would come through, we would have fixed global warming.
00:46:20.800 And that's why, you know, I ran a big conference together with more than 40 climate economists and top climate economists in the world and three Nobel laureates where we looked at how can you spend an extra dollar or an extra pound and do the most good for climate?
00:46:36.040 And they found the long term solution is dramatically ramp up investment in green energy R&D.
00:46:41.440 Just to give you one sense of proportion here, right, we constantly talk about we need to fix climate and we have all the technology.
00:46:49.060 We just need to throw lots and lots of money behind it.
00:46:51.760 Remember the other crises that humanity have had.
00:46:55.480 We haven't solved that by telling everyone, I'm sorry, could you eat a little less?
00:46:59.460 We've done this through innovation.
00:47:01.780 So if you think back in the 1970s, you know, we worried a lot about, and correctly so, 1.00
00:47:06.200 that a lot of people were starving in this world and there's not enough food.
00:47:09.240 I remember my mom telling me, you know, you've got to finish up your plate because of all
00:47:12.620 the poor people in Africa.
00:47:14.100 I never quite got the connection between my plate and that.
00:47:17.340 But the point is, you don't solve starvation by eating a little less and then sending it down to Africa, right? 0.62
00:47:24.180 The way we solved it was the Green Revolution. 0.59
00:47:26.920 It was innovation of better-yielding seeds.
00:47:30.200 So you could basically plant these seeds that were just genetically made to grow much, much more food.
00:47:37.180 So for every hectare, you just simply grew twice or three times as much food as you'd otherwise have done.
00:47:43.680 That's why India has gone from being a basket case
00:47:46.540 to being the world's biggest net exporter of rice.
00:47:50.540 And likewise, for most other places,
00:47:52.040 that's how we solve problems,
00:47:53.500 not by telling people,
00:47:54.420 I'm sorry, could you eat a little less?
00:47:56.100 But here's an innovation
00:47:57.360 that'll actually make you richer and feed your kids. 1.00
00:48:00.180 And of course, everybody takes that up.
00:48:01.780 We need the same solution for climate.
00:48:04.080 We need a solution that says,
00:48:05.460 here's a technology that's cheaper,
00:48:08.280 better than fossil fuels,
00:48:10.720 and don't emit CO2.
00:48:12.420 As a naturally greedy man, I'm fully behind that statement, Bjorn.
00:48:17.060 I'm going to ask a question which is a taboo question, but it's one that everyone secretly thinks,
00:48:23.220 which is, isn't a large part of this problem simply due to overpopulation?
00:48:29.000 So there's no doubt all other things equal.
00:48:32.740 If we were half the number of people on the planet, there would be less of a problem.
00:48:36.660 But it's one of those things that I think are very, very much a past kind of conversation.
00:48:41.860 And also one of the things that we can do virtually nothing about.
00:48:45.660 Remember, when most people talk about overpopulation, they're sort of like, just right number of
00:48:51.960 me, but too many of you, right?
00:48:54.300 It's always someone else who's the problem.
00:48:56.360 And again, it's very hard to imagine that there's a billion people out there who'd
00:48:59.480 volunteer to not be here.
00:49:01.680 So the reality is, it is not something that we can easily solve, except for the way that
00:49:07.960 we're already solving it.
00:49:08.940 By getting people out of poverty, that means that more kids are not actually an economic
00:49:14.400 benefit if you work on a really small plot of land and you don't have any social security
00:49:19.720 and pension opportunity when you get old.
00:49:22.760 And also, as you get richer, kids go from being a net resource to actually being a net
00:49:28.280 drain.
00:49:29.080 We still love them, but they end up costing you lots of money, and so you decide to have
00:49:33.200 fewer of them.
00:49:34.060 And then, of course, as you get more women educated, they start having careers of their own instead of just being birth machines. 1.00
00:49:43.740 What really happens is what we see is we already back in the late 1960s, early 1970s, saw the peak increase in human population.
00:49:54.560 And most of what we're seeing today is simply a question.
00:49:57.640 We still have a very young world where a lot of young people still haven't had their own kids.
00:50:02.340 but we're way past the problem, really, of overpopulation.
00:50:06.920 So it's neither something you can really do anything about.
00:50:10.360 And also remember, people are not just a problem.
00:50:13.800 They're also a resource.
00:50:15.180 So, you know, the sort of simple way to put it is,
00:50:18.740 sure, they have a mouth and they're going to gobble up resources, 0.99
00:50:21.380 but they also have two arms that can actually, you know,
00:50:24.140 help you when you get old, change your diaper.
00:50:26.440 And they also have a mind that can be one of the guys
00:50:29.720 who actually end up solving, for instance, climate change.
00:50:32.100 so we shouldn't just see people as a problem they're also a resource and an opportunity
00:50:36.380 and i think overall we're probably pretty lucky to be in a place where we have lots of people
00:50:41.880 meaning lots of opportunity you know when you go to there's a reason why you live in london not
00:50:47.000 i don't know a really really small town and in england right because it's much more fun to be
00:50:53.060 in a place where there are lots of people so the reality is yes it used to be a problem
00:50:58.240 it's no longer, and it's not something we can do very much about anyway.
00:51:02.740 Bjorn, I find this such a reassuring conversation in many ways. It doesn't mean it's true,
00:51:07.960 but it is very reassuring, of course. I'm not disputing that it's true, by the way. I'm just
00:51:12.260 saying. And of course, the important part is you should not buy into it because it's reassuring.
00:51:19.320 You should buy into it because that's actually what the UN Climate Panel says. So when the
00:51:25.100 latest report came out, uh, the, uh, from the UN climate panel, it's 4,000 pages long. Uh, the UN
00:51:31.220 secretary general who loves to go way over the top said it was code red for humanity. Uh, and I was
00:51:37.420 asked in on many TV programs, I'm like, I'm sorry, I have to actually read the stuff first. I can't
00:51:42.820 do this in like half an hour. Uh, but after I'd read it, of course, nobody then wanted to talk
00:51:47.240 about it because it was, uh, but, but when you've actually read it, it says very much what the other
00:51:53.000 five reports have said before yes it's a problem no it's by no means the end of the world as you
00:51:58.960 think you know for instance hurricanes they will probably be slightly stronger but there'll probably
00:52:05.540 be slightly fewer hurricanes in the future have you heard that no you've heard we're gonna have
00:52:10.560 killer hurricanes everywhere and remember again hurricanes being stronger is actually worse than
00:52:15.900 there being few of them so there will be a greater impact but because we're much richer much more
00:52:20.440 resilient, the damage cost and percent of our total wealth will actually still be lower,
00:52:26.880 but not quite as much lower as it could otherwise have been. And that's, of course, nothing you can
00:52:31.860 put on a sign and go out and glue yourself to the highway. Well, is that why I was going to ask you
00:52:38.180 because as I, you know, I was leading up to it by saying it's a reassuring conversation and I think
00:52:42.880 a constructive conversation. You're focusing on the solutions that are actually pragmatic and
00:52:47.720 practical and that you can get people behind and that match up our past experience of solving
00:52:53.440 problems. We solve problems through innovation, through new technology. Why are people like you
00:52:59.420 and voices like yours being heard a lot less than the doom mongers and the doom merchants that we
00:53:06.020 see glued to our pavements here in London? Well, I think one reason is it's just much,
00:53:11.980 much less sexy, right? I mean, talking about the end of the world, there's such a thing as
00:53:17.540 climate porn, as they call it, the secretly thrilling end of the world. This is why we like,
00:53:23.960 you know, seeing these American movies where they blow up the White House. You know, it sort of
00:53:28.520 seems, you know, it's a terrible thing, but it's kind of secretly thrilling. And I think, you know,
00:53:33.140 the end of the world has that same feel. And of course, that's why our history is literate with
00:53:39.760 people who said we're going to, you know, fail in all kinds of ways and the world is going to end
00:53:43.640 in all kinds of terrible ways.
00:53:45.580 It's secretly thrilling.
00:53:47.020 And of course, you know, if it bleeds, it leads.
00:53:48.820 It's just much, much better for clicks and views.
00:53:51.280 So the fundamental point is
00:53:53.520 they have a much, much better story to sell.
00:53:57.100 I think the second part is
00:53:58.780 if you want to get climate policy done,
00:54:02.160 and even I think there's, you know,
00:54:03.840 quite a number of reasonable people who say,
00:54:06.740 even if we're going to get some climate policy done,
00:54:09.420 we got to exaggerate the message
00:54:11.200 in order to get people a little bit along.
00:54:13.920 And I see the sort of political argument in that.
00:54:17.500 But of course, as an academic,
00:54:19.660 I just think, no, it's not a good outcome
00:54:22.160 where you start lying a little bit
00:54:24.080 because it's in a good cause.
00:54:26.680 Because remember, there's also all kinds of other problems
00:54:30.580 that we need to fix.
00:54:31.580 You know, we have an education crisis,
00:54:33.360 we have a health crisis,
00:54:34.200 we have lots of other issues in our society.
00:54:37.220 And what happens, of course, is, you know,
00:54:39.440 our school teachers will say,
00:54:41.020 sure it's not the end of the world but we better ramp it up a little bit so they give us more money
00:54:44.780 to the schools and and likewise with health care and likewise everywhere else then we end up in a
00:54:49.920 society where all of the people who are going to inform us are just screaming at us and we have no
00:54:55.120 idea where we should be spending our money and we end up giving the money to the guy who screams
00:54:59.860 louder so have the cutest pictures of the most crying babies which is not a good outcome so so
00:55:05.880 I think the reason why you don't hear the argument that I'm making is because it's not nearly as
00:55:11.700 media friendly. And also it doesn't serve a particular purpose. It doesn't serve this one
00:55:18.580 goal of saying we should do something about climate because it seems like I'm not really
00:55:24.200 pulling as hard as I could. And it doesn't serve the people who say, let's not do anything about
00:55:29.620 climate because I'm still saying it is a problem. We should do some things about it. So I'm stuck
00:55:34.180 in that weird middle which in our polarist society increasingly is abandoned by all the
00:55:41.320 vocal people. But of course, remember, there's still like the 95% of all the moms that just 1.00
00:55:47.180 have other things to do. And very quickly, Bjorn, do you think that
00:55:50.840 COP26 was a success because Greta came out and lambasted it and said it was a festival
00:55:55.880 of blah, blah, blah, whatever? Or were there actually some things put in place that are
00:56:00.760 going to help the situation 5, 10, 20 years down the line?
00:56:04.180 So it's a tiny bit better than had it not been there, but it really is not the right
00:56:09.660 way to solve it.
00:56:10.500 And one of the ways you can know that is it was COP26.
00:56:14.180 We tried this 25 times before, and I think one of the great underappreciated stories
00:56:21.360 of our age is the UN Environment Program actually did a study of the last 10 years of climate
00:56:28.400 policy.
00:56:28.900 And what they called it was, this was, remember, the climate policy, a decade of the 2010s, where we did the Paris Agreement and everything else.
00:56:37.200 And they called it a decade lost.
00:56:39.620 They said, we can't tell the difference between what actually happened in the 2010s and a policy scenario where nobody had cared about climate change since 2005.
00:56:53.340 And that should tell you something.
00:56:54.800 We have all these meetings, we have all these promises, but the reality is it has very little
00:56:59.700 or possibly no impact whatsoever. So yeah, I'm happy that some people went there. I think they
00:57:05.660 probably did some smart things, especially about methane, but honestly, this is not where it's
00:57:10.420 going to solve the problem at best. It's a tiny, tiny little bit. So in that sense, Greta, whom I
00:57:16.940 respect quite a bit, is right about the fact that we're mostly talking and not doing anything about
00:57:22.120 Of course, she would like us to just shut down society, because that seems to be the argument that most people are making. But of course, what she should be saying, and what I think is the right way forward, is to say, we should be spending much, much more on innovation.
00:57:35.900 that was actually and i don't know you probably not heard it either actually in the sidelines of
00:57:41.100 paris back in 2015 uh the uk prime minister uh what was his name the guy who lost brexit
00:57:48.320 cameron cameron right and obama and everybody else was there uh bill gates i'm happy to say
00:57:53.820 we had a tiny tiny role in this they actually went in there and promised to double spending
00:57:58.940 on research and development in green energy and of course nobody did any such thing because
00:58:03.820 everybody was focused on putting up the new and the next solar panel park, because that looks
00:58:09.400 great on TV, whereas funding eggheads really doesn't. But the reality is, if Greta started 0.97
00:58:15.560 asking and if everybody started asking for the thing that really will fix this problem, just like
00:58:20.500 we fixed most problems in the past, more innovation, we could do wonders. And we'd also make the world
00:58:26.820 a better place in all kinds of other ways. Imagine if everyone, especially in the poor world, had
00:58:31.560 much more access to cheap green energy. That'd be an amazing place.
00:58:36.100 Bjorn, before we go to our last question, because we could talk for hours, but we're
00:58:39.260 rapidly running out of time and you're a busy guy. You say Greta wants to shut down society,
00:58:45.140 yet you have a lot of respect for her. Why is that?
00:58:48.460 Well, I think so. When you talk to teenagers, a lot of them are terrified by climate change.
00:58:55.260 And I think Greta has taken that to a logical conclusion. Look, you're telling us the world
00:59:00.220 is going to end, but you're not doing anything. What? What the hell? And that makes good sense.
00:59:04.740 If you're telling us the world is going to come to an end, you should be doing everything to avoid
00:59:08.860 this. And I think she's calling out the hypocrisy in much policy. Of course, it's the argument that
00:59:15.440 the world is coming to an end that's wrong. And hence, the conclusion is not we should do everything,
00:59:20.200 but we should do stuff smarter. So I think she is much more honest in this conversation
00:59:26.600 than many others. But her fundamental analysis is still wrong. But I understand why that is the
00:59:33.300 case, because she's simply saying, look, this is what I'm being told by almost everyone. The world
00:59:38.480 is ending. So we've got to throw everything at it. Look, that's the right analysis, but based on the
00:59:45.240 wrong facts. If you actually read the UN Climate Panel problem, and then let's solve that problem
00:59:51.520 by spending less resources than the original problem will actually cost.
00:59:56.120 Again, don't cut off your arm in order to cure a wrist ache.
01:00:02.160 Bjorn, it has been an absolutely brilliant interview.
01:00:05.180 Like Konstantin said, I could happily sit here and talk to you for hours,
01:00:08.100 but it has to come to an end.
01:00:09.400 And the question we always ask at the end is,
01:00:12.100 what's the one thing we're not talking about, but we really should be?
01:00:15.740 So I would love to talk to you about lots of things.
01:00:18.620 But actually, I just want to briefly mention,
01:00:20.680 This is not actually my day job. I run a think tank called the Copenhagen Consensus where we
01:00:27.280 look at the world's big problems and how we can smartly fix them. And what we never talk about
01:00:34.500 are all these other issues we briefly mentioned in the interview, right? The fact that people die
01:00:39.760 from easily curable infectious diseases, that we don't have good education, that we have terrible
01:00:44.380 health that we have all these other problems. Remember, about 300,000 women die in childbirth
01:00:50.600 every year, and 2.1 million kids die in their first month of life. And we know how to fix all
01:00:58.900 of these problems, and often very, very cheaply. So my day job is actually trying to point out all
01:01:05.020 these other great things that we can do at very low cost that could help humanity enormously.
01:01:11.720 And as you might have surmised, nobody cares a little bit in the third world, right? 0.96
01:01:17.460 But this is not sexy when you can, you know, sort of run to the next hurricane that just hit the U.S. and say global warming.
01:01:24.760 That it is a problem, but somehow we have lost track of what really matters and what are the important things.
01:01:32.600 You know, if you look at what is the most environmentally damaging problem, what kills most people, not global warming.
01:01:39.820 The World Health Organization estimate about 150,000 people die from global warming every
01:01:44.500 year, and I would dispute that, but we could get into that.
01:01:47.700 No, it's the 7 million people who die from indoor and outdoor air pollution.
01:01:52.240 Now, outdoor air pollution, most people know that's basically a problem of low development.
01:01:57.160 You need to put scrubbers on your coal-fired power plants.
01:02:00.560 Boring, but would help a lot of people.
01:02:03.120 Indoor air pollution is the fact that about 3 billion people every year, so almost half
01:02:07.640 this world's population are so poor, they cook and keep warm with dirty fuels like dung, cardboard,
01:02:14.840 and wood. That's a terrible way to heat and cook. And what that means is most of these people,
01:02:21.960 so 3 billion people, live indoors where it's about 10 times more polluted than it is outdoor
01:02:27.980 in Beijing. We don't hear about that because it's not sexy. So again, the thing we don't talk about
01:02:34.080 are all these other problems that we could do so much about at very low cost so you know for instance
01:02:39.960 we could do something about maternal and child deaths one pound would save so many people that
01:02:48.120 you would do about 87 pounds of social good for every pound spent that's a phenomenal payback
01:02:55.600 compared to you know for instance the climate change if we do it really smartly you can get
01:02:59.920 11 pounds back on your pound. That's still pretty good. But much of our climate policy,
01:03:05.460 you pay a pound, for instance, in Paris, and you get 11 pence back, which is a really terrible
01:03:11.820 outcome. So my job and the thing we don't talk about is how we prioritize the entire world,
01:03:17.220 not just the thing that gets to the top of the news. Bjorn, thank you so much for that. The king
01:03:22.540 of all things unsexy. We're going to ask you a couple of questions for our local supporters in
01:03:27.560 the second but for now guys thank you so much for watching we'll see you very soon with another
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