“I’m F—-ing Terrified” - Economist REFUSED To Have Kids Over Climate Change
Episode Stats
Harmful content
Misogyny
4
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Toxicity
18
sentences flagged
Hate speech
7
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Summary
In this episode of the podcast, I sit down with climate scientist and Nobel Prize winner Bill McKibben to talk all things climate change. We talk about what it's like to grow up in a climate-change-obsessed world, how to deal with it, and why we should all be worried about it.
Transcript
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It's tough when we get older to talk about the mistakes we made earlier.
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Like, you know, being where you are right now and, you know, you've seen a lot.
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What advice would you give to young 16-, 17-, 18-year-old men?
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Well, given the fact that I expect climate change to cause the social system to collapse, I'd say learn how to hunt.
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Um, but you all of a sudden became an optimist.
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You think, so you, you don't think the future looks bright.
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By the way, did you ever end up having kids or no?
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My first wife was, uh, had a disease called endometriosis.
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And if, if you were 25 today, would you have kids today?
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Come on. I can see inside of you there's the sense of humor, lighthearted, fun, positive side, but they got a hold of you.
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No, what's got me a hold of me is facts, okay?
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I've read massively in the climate change literature as well and work with climate scientists, and I can see what they're seeing coming, and I'm fucking terrified.
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and the last thing I want to do is have a child
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away in the next decade. Did you see the recent
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shit and get upset at me. This is a report that
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came out here. I'm just going to read it to you and I
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I just texted you the link if you want to go to
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you have it you i just literally texted it to you department of energy issues report evaluating
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impact of greenhouse gases on u.s climate and invites public comment and one of the things
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they said here is the the severe concern that they had if you read this entire report i'm not
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going to read the entire report to you yeah it was overly exaggerated on how bad climate change
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is going to be for the last few decades and this is coming from the state uh do you agree with this
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report and have you had a chance to look at the total bullshit total bullshit and i can tell you
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why tell me okay this is what economists have said this is william northouse and if i had to have
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anybody blamed for the state of the what i expect to be the state of the planet in the next 10 years
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is william northouse uh his work on climate change is why we've done so little about climate change
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and trivialise the dangers. Now, to give you one example of why he said climate change wasn't
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dangerous, when he first tried to quantify the impact of climate change on the economy,
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this is back in 1991, he said that his prediction was that three degrees of warming by 2100 would
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reduce GDP in 2100 by one quarter of 1% compared to what it would have been if there's absolutely
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no global warming at all. Now, one quarter of 1% means that the impact of three degrees of warming
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would be to reduce the annual rate of economic growth
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GDP is risen 2.1%, 2.2%, so you work in a 0.1%.
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William Nordhaus, the guy who got the Nobel Prize
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would protect you from climate change, okay? So you mistook weather for climate change,
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weather for climate. And that's the basis of all the low predictions you're seeing right now,
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all coming out of economists. And they have literally pretended that you can use data
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about the impact of temperature on GDP across the planet today to predict what's going to happen
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out of global warming over time. And that is completely mistaking what rising temperatures
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mean. And so I think that particular Department of Energy report, I'm sure it's based on the work
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So you don't side with what they're saying here.
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Let me just read it to you to fire you up a little bit.
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It says the report challenges the mainstream view on climate change, arguing that climate risk may be overstated.
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The benefits of emissions cuts may be smaller than advertised.
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And the economic costs of aggressive climate policies deserve greater scrutiny.
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So you're for, you know, you side with the Al Gores of the world.
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Scientists have done a lot of things wrong in the past as well, right?
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Well, mate, you're talking to me through something invented by a scientist.
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You're seeing me through something invented by a scientist.
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If an entrepreneur doesn't have an engineering degree,
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where he can't make something that involves engineering or science.
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and we don't give enough respect to scientists.
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Yeah, those are engineers to me, but they also get things wrong.
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I mean, it's not like to put here and sit there.
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So for you, you're not optimistic about the future.
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Why create Rival, the company that you're building?
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If we're going to die anyways, let's all be negative.
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I think you can't change direction if people believe there's no threat on the road you're on.
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Now, you're saying there's no threat, so there's no need to change our behavior.
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So maybe help me with what you think the right solution is and how much of it is on free market people and how much of it is on the state to fix it.
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A lot of it's actually on economists, period, to making the mistake of not understanding what global warming actually means.
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So I don't blame the state or the private sector so much.
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I blame economists barging into an area where they know nothing about and producing numbers which convince politicians because they're used to taking advice from economists.
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So economists have fooled us to believe global warming
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I'll give you an idea of how different economists are
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There was a survey done of climate economists in 2020.
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if we hit seven degrees of global warming by 2220?
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so two centuries away the average answer those economists gave with gdp to be 25 smaller at
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seven degrees of global warming than it would be if there's no global warming at all now you talk
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to climate scientists and they say that anything more than five degrees of global warming probably
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means humans won't continue to exist on the planet it's existential so a scientist is saying
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anything more than three degrees is catastrophic five degrees is so they're beyond catastrophic
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including existential risks. Economists think that seven degrees of warming are reduced GDP
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by 25%. They're totally different predictions, obviously. It's a damn good idea to find out
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which one's based on realism. Having looked at what the economists have done, they're completely
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based on fantasy. But unfortunately, most people don't know that, so they take economists'
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arguments seriously. I'm sure that's what that Department of Energy document you've got there
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is doing. And I wouldn't trust them as far as I can throw them. Yeah. I'm going to push back a
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little bit and please feel free to do what you do best. So, you know, do your thing. I'm enjoying
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this banter. Don't you think a, a, an element of economists or pro climate change, global warming,
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fear porn, all this stuff that maybe, maybe they believe what they're saying. Don't you think a
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part of it is if all of a sudden that solution didn't exist, they don't have a job. Let me
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unpack. And then, you know, I want to hear from you. I'm in the insurance space. In the insurance
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space, there's such things as actuaries. Okay. And actuaries, you know, most of them, they make
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very good money. They make a few hundred thousand dollars. It's a very, very high paying job.
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And these reinsurance companies were hired on left and right, and they get a job. But recently,
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the last five years, AI can pretty much do 99% of what they do. And the 1% is their opinion
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or their intuition and their gut is, I think this is table D.
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And it's just kind of more, you know, what they think about it.
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It reminds me of the old story, which is this one guy goes and hooks up
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The king is furious, and he hooks up with her in his castle.
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He sends his soldiers to go kill this guy.
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Now, this guy is a psychic, and he predicts the future.
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So when the soldiers come to kill him, he says, look, before you kill me,
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I have one prediction that the king needs to know.
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Of course, this is a fictional story, but I'm just sharing the story with you.
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He goes to the king, and the king says, what's your prediction before I kill you?
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what's that? You're going to die a day after I die. The king says, what did you say? He says,
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you're going to die a day after I die. And the king says, shit, this guy's made some predictions
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in the past before. He puts him in the castle, gives him to his daughter, lives there, well-fed
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everything. And of course the king died before he died, but that was his way of saying, let me
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scare the shit out of everybody to make sure you know me. Don't you think there's a little bit of
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that going on with climate change? No, I don't. You want me to unpack why? Please. Okay. What
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would be the temperature of the planet, do you think, if there was zero carbon dioxide in the
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atmosphere? Tell me. Minus 14 degrees Celsius. And of course, it wouldn't stay at minus 14. It
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would hit minus 100 because the whole planet would be covered in ice and it would then reflect
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solar energy back into outer space. So the fact that the temperature, the average temperature
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so global warming is necessary to have a biosphere that can support life now as we increase the
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amount of carbon dioxide of course we're increasing that temperature and the sort of thinking which
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you all caught up in and this is what economists have done as well is they've said look it's you
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people live at minus seven degrees in the arctic and they live at plus 35 in the tropics that's a
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huge range of temperatures global warming is only going to increase temperature by two or three
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degrees. What's that in terms of across the space of the planet? I'm doing a cartoon right now. You
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might actually want to take a look at the cartoon because I'm trying to get across why this is
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completely wrong thinking because we're talking about temperature across space and we know this
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huge range. We think, you know, what's a few degrees across space? It doesn't mean anything
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at all. But if you look at where we came from as a species, we evolved about 300,000 years ago
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and about 12,000 years ago, we started to develop civilization. The reason we started developing
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civilization about 12,000 to 15,000 years ago was because the planet goes through cycles that are
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called Milankovitch cycles after the person who first discovered them. And they're pulses in the
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average temperature of the planet caused by changes in the orbit of the planet around the sun,
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the inclination, and so on. So roughly every 100,000 years, we've got a cold period and a
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hot period. The cold period lasts about 80,000 years, which is an ice age. The warm period lasts
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about 10,000 to 20,000 years, and that's what we're in right now, which we call the Holocene.
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So if we go back just 20,000 years, we find the temperature of the planet was about seven
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degrees colder than it is now. So the average temperature of the planet during the ice age
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was about plus seven degrees Celsius. So going from plus seven degrees to plus 14 degrees
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is what enabled us to build our agricultural systems. Now, if we hadn't built industrial
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civilization, we would have gone back down again into the next ice age. So at the moment,
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temperatures are falling. The natural temperature of the planet is declining. And if that kept up,
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we'd go back and lose another six degrees, six or seven degrees cooler. We'd go back to an ice
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age and that would destroy our civilizations. So tiny variations across time, like six degrees,
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not tiny, but six degrees is the difference between an ice age when Chicago is beneath a
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kilometre of ice, and today we're, you know, Chicago's an industrial powerhouse. That's how
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sensitive temperature is through time. It's far more sensitive to time than it is to space. But
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what economists have done is said, oh, it's not particularly sensitive across space, so why should
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it be sensitive across time? They're completely ignorant of the dynamics that give us the change
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in temperature over time, and that's why it's so dangerous to trivialise what we're going through.
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Yeah, I think for me, I sit there and I watch human behavior on what we do.
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And again, this is my opinion on what I think happens is, you know, I'm in Florida.
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So right now by 2030, you know, they're wanting us to lift.
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They're wanting us to lift the edge to the intercoastal two feet higher, right?
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It kind of validates to your point where why are they doing that in Florida?
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because the climate and all this other stuff, but people are still, actuaries and underwriters
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are still underwriting homes on water, and they're still getting the insurance, and the
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insurance companies are not going to give insurance if they didn't feel in the next decade,
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two, three decades, something's going to happen.
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There's just not a good business plan for them to be able to do it.
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Some of the insurance companies in America have left the state of California, and they've
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And their reasoning for leaving is like, I think Geico left.
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Somebody can fact check this to see one of those farmers left.
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And a part of it is the fires that happens there.
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So insurance companies won't stay somewhere if they can't make the money.
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I think on the climate change side, I do agree.
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I think they went from global warming and they said, well, it's probably not the good name.
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Kind of like how we used to be pro-death to pro-choice.
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Pro-choice is probably a better word than pro-death back in the days campaign-wise, politically.
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But I also watched what BlackRock did, what that ESG concept was that kind of went away from it.
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Who knows? It may make a comeback. It may make a comeback.
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But my bigger concern is that a lot of a 20-year-old Steve Keen went to a university with the aspirations of being a tennis player.
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He read Das Kapital and then read Communist Manifesto.
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Instead, he could have competed against Jimmy Connors.
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You may have played against some of these guys.
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But I worry, respectfully, I worry that there's millions of 18, 20-year-old youngs,
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next Steve Keens, that may have people around them that have maybe a little bit of the framing
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like you that are negative about the future and that may scare the crap out of them to not want
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to pursue it because they're thinking the end of the world is around the corner i think that is a
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bigger damage than the risk of climate change and i think by tenfold it's a bigger damage you you're
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probably going to disagree with it of course i am i know you are you have to you don't have a choice
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but to disagree with it because what is the alternative wrong okay the alternative see we
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don't realize how fragile life on this planet is. And there's arrogance to believe we can do
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anything we like to the planet and we won't come back and bite us. Now, that arrogance is going to
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kill us. And so it's arrogance and not understanding the actual dynamics of the system that is
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commonplace for humans that I think is the greatest danger we face. Don't you think it's
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also the mutual arrogance of knowing for a fact you're right? Maybe you're wrong.
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Okay, so I'm looking at the models they've built.
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Yes, I am, and I think, in fact, the mistakes they've made are to underestimate the dangers they face.
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For example, I'll give you one of my favorite examples there.
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Have you heard what's called wet bulb catastrophe?
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I asked one of the leading scientists in this area, has anybody done work on the wet bulb
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temperature that will kill non-humans? Because one thing which makes humans almost unique in
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the animal kingdom is we have sweat glands all over our body, which means we can radiate heat
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from our bodies much more effectively than any other animal except horses. And I thought that
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somebody would have said, well, in that case, we know wet bulb temperature that would kill
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a human. It used to be thought to be 35 degrees for six hours. We now know it's probably 31
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degrees. Experimental results recently have shown that it's more likely 31 degrees wet bulb will
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kill the vast majority of people. So it's much closer in that sense than we think. But I said,
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what about if we have a wet bulb catastrophe which kills livestock? Has anybody done studies
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about that? He said, no, we haven't. So because animals normally sweat through their tongues,
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They can't get rid of heat as easily as we can.
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And it's quite possible a wet valve catastrophe could hit at a lower temperature for animals and wipe out our animal stock.
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Now, that's the sort of thing where I thought scientists would have done the right work.
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They haven't yet because this is happening so quickly in terms of scientific procedures.
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Most of the programs, computer programs that simulate what's going to happen with the climate are written in Fortran
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because that's what the first meteorological systems
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and functional programming and things like that.
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that are not being considered by the climate scientists,
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even though they've got the technology to do it.
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So we're potentially underestimating the dangers we face, not overestimating.
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shop this summer um fair enough i don't think i'm going to change your mind i think you are
00:21:35.400
you're not going to change yeah i think i think you know so you know our brand is called future
00:21:39.520
looks bright okay if you go is it i didn't know that that's what makes it so funny or if you go
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to uh if you go to flb.com or if you go to vtmerch.com can you go to the future bright
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Would it be future looks dark? Future looks grim. I wonder walking in the streets and seeing
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somebody, kids wearing future looks grim, what they would say about it. I think we're close to
00:22:13.740
a golden future. This is what pisses me off because it's so dangerous. In the last quarter
00:22:18.480
of a millennium, so 250 years, pretty much since the beginning of America as a country.
00:22:26.900
That's when the Industrial Revolution began. We've learned so much about the universe in
00:22:30.600
that period of time. And if we can continue learning and continue expanding, we could
00:22:35.600
go to a Star Trek future. And that's what I'd like to see. But at the same time, we're
00:22:40.520
damaging the biosphere at the same point. Now, we are probably 20 or 30 years from being
00:22:46.000
able to take production off planet. I mean, therefore, we could produce the goods and
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services we all consume now and far richer in outer space. We'd dump the waste into the sun.
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We could have that golden future. And that's what I'd like to see us get to. But we can't get there
00:23:01.800
if we recklessly go at it at such a stage that we end up destroying the productive capacity of the
00:23:06.480
planet before we get to that point. So you must be a massive fan of Elon Musk.
00:23:10.620
Yes and no. He was a total bloody fool when he got involved with Trump. I think it was
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totally destructive. He should have stuck with engineering. So I was supporting Musk because
00:23:20.680
I really want to see a human outpost on Mars or anywhere off planet because my feeling is
00:23:26.280
we're not going to stop the damage we're doing on the planet. We are going to destroy the capacity
00:23:30.860
for this planet to support human civilization, if not human life. So in that situation, a bit
00:23:36.440
like the Middle Ages, the only way to hang on to the knowledge is to have a monastery somewhere
00:23:40.200
that keeps all the knowledge and while there's chaos around everywhere else, at least the
00:23:43.960
knowledge is preserved and then we can go forward in the future. That's what I saw about
00:23:48.100
Musk and the potential for getting a human outpost on Mars. Now, he's wasted so much
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bloody time with his right-wing politics and with his meddling in elections around the
00:23:58.300
planet, including getting Trump elected. I hope he regrets that now, that I don't think
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he's going to get there, but the Chinese might beat him. But I do want to see a human outpost
1.00
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on mars to give us some chance of hanging on to the knowledge we've built in the last quarter
00:24:10.600
millennium and not destroying it by destroying the biosphere and not being aware we're doing
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