Climate Alarmists Are Getting This All Wrong - Dr Bjorn Lomborg

1. 0:00 – 0:37

   Intro

   1. BLBjorn Lomborg0:00

      Climate change will affect the poorest the most. That's absolutely true. (laughs) But what you have to remember is everything bad affects poor people the most. So they're most affected by infectious diseases or bad environments. The main point is there's something slightly odd about the whole idea of us saying, "You know what? I see you. I really care about you. I wanna help you. I'm not gonna drive to work tomorrow. And that will actually mean that I won't emit CO2, which will mean in a 100 years, your descendants will be much warmer, but slightly less much warm." That just seems almost careless.

   2. CWChris Williamson0:35

      (wind blows) Five years ago, Greta Thunberg

2. 0:37 – 6:14

   Greta Thunberg’s Deleted Predictions

   1. CWChris Williamson0:37

      tweeted, "Climate change will wipe out all of humanity in five years." Now she's deleted it. What's going on?

   2. BLBjorn Lomborg0:44

      Well, so Greta Thunberg is doing what I think most n- rational people should really be doing. She's listening to what the media is telling us, and they're telling us climate change is not just a problem, it's not just dangerous, it's actually likely to wipe us all out. And, and so, you know, she's scared, like many, many other people. Uh, but of course, it isn't actually a problem that's gonna end humanity. Climate change is a problem, not the end of the world. If it's a problem, it's something that we should fix along with all the other problems in the world. If it's the end of the world, of course, that's the only thing we should be focused on. So I understand why there's such a focus on making us believe this is really the end of the world. There's a new survey of the, uh, all the rich countries in the world, the OCD. It said 60% of all people now believe that it's likely global warming will lead to the end of mankind. That's terrifying because that's not what the UN Climate Panel is telling us. So problem, yes, not the end of the world. And that's what, you know, Greta, uh, she, she tweeted this. It was, it was a bad tweet in the first place, because it didn't actually reflect what the author said. And it just, it felt right, I'm sure, at the time, but of course you can't actually get away with saying that and then, you know, realizing five years later, we're still here.

   3. CWChris Williamson2:00

      For the people who haven't been, uh, fully red-pilled on the X-risk definition and why climate change doesn't meet that criteria, what's the 30,000-foot view of that?

   4. BLBjorn Lomborg2:13

      I'm a little worried I never remember whether it's the blue or the red pill. What, what is the, (laughs) what is that?

   5. CWChris Williamson2:19

      The red pill is seeing, uh, why, why is, (laughs) why is climate change not a genuine existential risk?

   6. BLBjorn Lomborg2:25

      So fundamentally, if you see temperatures rise or if you saw them drop for that matter, our societies will be ill-prepared. So, you know, uh, look at, uh, you live in Austin, right?

   7. CWChris Williamson2:38

      Yeah.

   8. BLBjorn Lomborg2:38

      Uh, and compare that to, you know, sort of Boston, they're both well-adapted to where they are. But if it got very much warmer or very much colder, both would be ill-adapted. That's the main point, that if you change the temperature of the world, it'll be a problem for all humans, and of course, it'll also be a problem for all other living things. So there's a real problem here. But the idea that somehow a few degrees of temperature would then suddenly eradicate everything is just simply way outside of what anyone, the UN Climate Panel, anyone else, is really telling us. There's a problem here, so the cost that, you know, you will have to have more air conditioning cost. Of course you'll have less, uh, heating costs most places, and, you know, many of those places, it'll sort of weigh out to each other. But some places, one will outweigh the other dramatically. So it will be local problems. It will have some problems globally. There's a lot of researchers, including a guy called, uh, uh, William Nordhaus, he's an economic professor at the University of Yale in, uh, in New Haven, I believe. Uh, uh, and he is the only climate economist to get the Nobel Prize in Climate Economics. And he estimates that if we do nothing about climate for the rest of this century, the impact will feel a little bit like we're 4% less well-off than we otherwise would be. Now, that's a problem, remember, 4% is not the end of the world, and also, if you think about it, the UN estimate that by the end of the century, the average person in the world will be about 450% as rich as he or she is today. So we'll be much, much richer, but because of global warming, we'll be slightly less much richer. So instead of being 450% as rich, we'll only be 434% as rich. Yes, that's a problem. No, (laughs) it's not the end of the world.

   9. CWChris Williamson4:27

      Why use the metric of richness? Why is it that that's the, uh, outcome that's being optimized for here when it comes to climate?

   10. BLBjorn Lomborg4:36

       Oh, look, look, and, and this is a common m- misunderstanding that somehow economists and especially, you know, sort of welfare economists only care about money. Uh, you know, that's not (laughs) what this is about. It's just a convenient way of measuring a lot of different things. So it'll be, you know, uh, uh, losses of wetlands. It'll be, uh, that some people will die, some people won't die. It'll be a lot of other things. So we do this routinely in many different ways, uh, for instance, when we decide whether to put up a, a, a traffic circle, or I believe a roundabout in, in, in America, uh, or, you know, if we put up, uh, highway protection in the, uh, in the median, or lots of other things. Do we hand out vaccines or make expensive, uh, uh, operating procedures, uh, operations? Sorry. We decide on that from a societal point of view on saying how much more good does it do? And that will typically be in saved lives or if we're talking about nature and, and preserved nature, compared to how many resources we spend. Economists tend to translate all of that into money because it's a convenient measure. But it's just one measure. Uh, it's a fairly important one because that is what very often correlates very, very well with pretty much anything else. We know that, you know, if you're, if you have higher incomes, you also might, are likely to survive more, you're likely to have more spare time, you're likely to be better educated. You have lots and lots of other attributes that are similar in the sense of desirable... Oh, you also have better environment typically. So the, the point here is it's just one measure in many of getting a sense of what is the size of this.

   11. CWChris Williamson6:13

       When

3. 6:14 – 10:39

   Why Climate Change is NOT an Existential Risk

   1. CWChris Williamson6:14

      it comes to existential risk, the proper definition of existential risk, permanent unrecoverable collapse, right, of human civilization, um, it- it really does, it's been a, a pet irritant of mine ever since I started reading Nick Bostrom and Toby Ord, that people see climate change as an actual existential risk. When I say existential risk, permanent unrecoverable collapse. We are all paper clips, we are all gray goo, or we are basically permanently locked into being in the Stone Age and we can't get back out of it again. Almost all of the things that people focus their attention on, stuff like climate change, uh, nuclear war, even nuclear war, every nuke goes off, not an existential risk. Now, unaligned super intelligent AGI, big existential risk. Nano technology, big existential risk. Engineered pandemics, big existential risk. I am blown away by the fact that of all of the myriad of different X risks that we could be focused on, climate change is the one that's galvanized the most public attention and Toby's book, The Precipice, which is great, says it's got a one in 1,000, or no sorry, one in 10,000 chance over the next 100 years of being the end of human civilization, whereas I think AGI is one in 10, engineered pandemics are one in 10, natural pandemics are one in 30. Basically, it seems like all of the attention is focused on something which doesn't require it or deserve it. Why?

   2. BLBjorn Lomborg7:43

      Welcome to the media age, right? This is, this is fundamentally because climate change has all the great pictures. It also has some other things that are very desirable, like for instance, you get to sell a lot of stuff, uh, so last year we spent about 1.1 trillion dollars on climate policy. Uh, a lot of people are making money off of this, so obviously they're pushing this, uh, when we had the big climate meeting in Denmark, uh, uh, in 2009 when we were gonna save the world as they always have to do in, in those meetings. Uh, uh, Vestas, our big, uh, uh, uh, wind turbine pro- producer, I believe still the world's biggest, uh, uh, wind turbine producer, they had plastic everywhere in Copenhagen would say, "Get a great agreement." Which, you know, I'm, I'm sure they're nice guys and they actually want that, but also it was a basic way of saying, "And make us lots and lots of money." So, so there's a lot of reasons why, uh, with climate you can basically turn every weather story into a climate catastrophe, a potential climate catastrophe. It's great for, uh, for visuals. It's very, very hard to do that with gray goo or with artificial intelligence, or even if you think about it, uh, back in 2019 virtually nobody took a pandemic seriously. We knew it was gonna happen. I mean, we're very lucky that COVID-

   3. CWChris Williamson9:05

      Bill Gates warned us. Bill Gates warned us in what, 2014? That favorite- favorite video of his.

   4. BLBjorn Lomborg9:09

      Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and look, (laughs) we saw it in 1918, right? So it's not like it- it's a surprise and, you know, it's-

   5. CWChris Williamson9:15

      Unprecedented.

   6. BLBjorn Lomborg9:17

      Yeah. Uh, we've seen this many times and, and of course asteroids is an obvious, uh, uh, point. We know that they can basically kill everything in, in the universe. So, so I think one of the points that I try to do, and I guess that's also why you like me on, on the show, is I try to tell, tell people, "This is not about what looks best on TV, or in this case, most scary on TV. It's about where we can actually do the most, good for every dollar spent." Now, there's another thing, and that's where economists tend to get really annoying, as well as of course to say some things we can fix fairly cheaply. Some things are incredibly hard to do something about. And, and so again, I would tend to say let's focus on the places where we can make a huge impact at low cost first before we try, and that's unfortunately what climate is, we try to make a small impact in a long time from now at an incredibly high cost, which is not very effective.

   7. CWChris Williamson10:17

      Yeah, so what you're trying to do is front load some of the gains that you can get because it's easy, we have probably the technology at the moment to be able to do it. There are some problems that you could foresee if you project out where technology's going that we may be more able to do it at a better price point in the future. So okay, you- you've been doing this research, you've got this new

4. 10:39 – 19:49

   Bjorn’s Cost-Effective Ways to Improve the World

   1. CWChris Williamson10:39

      big chunk of research that you've spent an awfully long time doing, which is looking at (laughs) the most cost-effective ways to make the world a better place. What did that involve? What have you discovered? What was surprising?

   2. BLBjorn Lomborg10:53

      So back in 2016, the world set targets for the world that they called the Sustainable Development Goals. You may have heard of them. Uh, the US has signed up, Britain has signed up, every country in the world has signed up.

   3. CWChris Williamson11:07

      Was, that was that thing where there was 100 and- 180 of them or something.

   4. BLBjorn Lomborg11:10

      169 targets or goals. Uh, so we basically promised everything to everyone, everywhere, all the time. Uh, and you know, the guys who did this in New York, these were all UN ambassadors, undoubtedly felt really cool about being able to say, "I promise this. Oh, and I also promise this, and I promise that." You know, we basically just promised around promise to you, promise to you, you know. Uh, but, but you know, that's not how the world works, and so not surprisingly, we're actually failing on pretty much all of the promises. Now, they're all nice promises, you know, so they're stop poverty, stop hunger, stop climate change, uh, stop corruption, stop war, stop, you know, anything you don't like, and do everything you do like. Make, make sure everybody has good jobs, and, and there's also some really odd ones in there, you know, we should recycle more and we should eat more organics and we should have more, uh, parks accessible for, for handicapped people. And you know, it, it's not that these are not all good, although I would argue that some of them are perhaps slightly different levels of, of, of, uh, of attention. But what we tried to do back then was to basically tell them...... please, some of these goals, some of these targets, some of these promises are incredibly effective. You can spend a few dollars and do an amazing amount of good. Some of them are gonna be incredibly expensive and really hard to do like, you know, stop war, for instance. So maybe you should start focusing on the stuff that's really doable and effective first. A- and, no, they didn't listen. I, I met with a lot of them, and they loved this idea, and they said, "You know, this is all great," but the reality was, y- you know, when you meet with Brazil's ambassador, I'm not pulling up Brazil for any good reason, right? But, uh, you know, he would say, "But fundamentally, I'm here to tell what Brazil's five points are," and, and we'd meet with Norwegian ambassador, and he wanted Norway's four points in there, and that's how we ended up with 169, uh, targets. So we try to look across all these different areas and say, "Where can you do good?" One of the things that everybody talks about is climate, obviously, but the problem is, you can spend trillions of dollars, and literally trillions of dollars, and make no impact today. That's just how the climate system works. Make a tiny change in 50 or 100 years. Now, that's not nothing, you know, if we had infinite resources, we should also do that. But it's funny that people worry so very little about the fact that many people live terrible lives right now. You know, so about half the world's population live in low, and lower-middle-income countries, so less than $11 a day, and these guys could use a lot of things that, in the rich world, we take for granted. So, you know, they die from easily curable infectious diseases, they don't have enough food, they have terrible education, there are all these problems there. So what we try to basically say is, shouldn't we take a look across all these different areas that we're promising and say, "If we can't do it all, what should we do first?" So that was a very, very long way of saying this is why we've been doing this, so what we've tried to do is, with lots of economists, say, "Where can you spend a dollar, or, or a yen, or a, a rupee, or whatever your currency is, and make the biggest bang?" And it turns out that some things are incredibly effective, some things are not. Let me just tell you one. So we found 12 great things, and obviously, you know, uh, we're, we've, uh, set a cutoff point, this is sort of what's called benefit-cost analysis. We look at what are all the costs, not just the, uh, the economic cost, but also social and environmental cost, and likewise, we look at what are all the benefits, so not just economic, but also social and e- e- environmental, and then we try to say we're looking for the really good ones, the one that deliver at least $15 of good for every dollar you spend. This is not investment advice, so you, you can't actually make your money back, right? You're doing good with your dollar. But what we found, for instance, was education. So it's clearly a huge problem, so, uh, around the world, we have spent the last, what, 50 years getting people educated, getting them out of illiteracy, and that's great. We got most kids in school today, but unfortunately, there's a, what, what the academics call a learning crisis. Nobody's learning anything, or very, very many don't learn anything. So they can technically read, but they can't understand the sentence. So w- let me just give you one example. Uh, so w- we ask people around the world, not we, I don't do this, a lot of really smart people do this, I'm, I'm just aggregating all this stuff, uh, but they ask, uh, you know, 10-year-olds to read this sentence. "VJ has a red hat, a blue shirt and yellow shoes. What color is the hat?" This is not super complicated, right? I mean, the right answer is red, uh, but unfortunately, 80% of all kids in the developing world, in po- low and lower-middle-income countries can't answer this question. So they've learnt technically to spell their way through this, these sentences, but they don't, they can't string the words together, and that's a terrible outcome because that means they're committed to poverty. Even if we sort of get everything else right, they still can't be very productive, and so what we've tried to estimate is what would it take to make schools better? And there's a lot of knowledge about what doesn't and what does work, so one of the things is, uh, you want to make better schools. How do you do that? Well, you give teachers better pay. Uh, a lot of people will argue that. Uh, they did that in, for instance, Indonesia. Indonesia doubled teacher pay, uh, back in the, uh, around 2010, uh, and, uh, because they did it in different r- uh, districts and different times, we can actually estimate the impact on this, on kids', uh, learning outcomes. Turns out there was no learning outcome, uh, the famous paper is called Double for Nothing, uh, so, you know, fundamentally, we spent twice as much money, it made the teachers much happier, not surprisingly, but it didn't have any measurable impact on the learning of kids. There's a lot of other studies that show what doesn't work, but here is the stuff that does work. The real problem in schools is that you put all the 12-year-olds together in one group, all the 13-year-olds in another group, and so on, but these guys are vastly different in their outcomes. Some are really smart and know a lot of stuff and are incredibly bored, and some have no clue what's going on, and everywhere in between, right? What is the teacher gonna do if you have, like, 30 or 60 kids in your class? You're t- sort of teaching to some middle ground, and most kids are either incredibly bored or totally lost. Instead, what you should do is teach at the right level. You should teach at their level. One way you can do that is by giving each of these kids a tablet. We're not actually gonna give them a tablet because that's really expensive, they get to sit in front of a tablet one hour a day, and then some other kids are gonna be using it for the other hours of the day. If you do that, then you have software that very quickly realize, you know, they'll know that, oh, it's Chris, he's back, uh, and they'll know pretty much your level, and then they will start teach you right from there. It turns out that that tablet one hour a day can teach you so much that by the end of the year...... you will have learned three times as much as what you normally would have done. You've learned three years of school in one year of schooling. And, you know, the cost is about $30 per kid, so that's for, uh, you know, you need s- solar panels to recharge their, uh, them. You need, uh, you know, some lockers for the tablets because otherwise they're gonna get stolen and all that kinda stuff. But fundamentally, this is super cheap and could do an amazing amount of good. So there are some other, uh, solutions in there. We try to estimate what's the total cost of doing this for 90%, so there's almost half a billion kids in the low and lower middle income countries. Each year, they need to get this education that's better. It's gonna cost almost $10 billion. But you know what the benefit is? And we, again, calculate that in dollars, but the real benefit is that they will learn more, they'll go out and be productive when they're old- old enough, and they will help both build m- more wealth for themselves and for their societies. But the benefit of those $10 billion is $600 billion. We can make the world $600 billion richer. That's 60 back on each dollar. How amazing is that? That's the kinda points that we're trying to make. So I'm sorry I just, you know, talked for way too long, but I- I think in some ways, this is the s- central point. This is not sexy, but it's incredibly useful, and those are the kinds of things that we should be focused

5. 19:49 – 24:36

   Is Bjorn’s Work Close to Effective Altruism?

   1. BLBjorn Lomborg19:49

      on.

   2. CWChris Williamson19:50

      How close do you see this work that you're doing to the effective altruism movement?

   3. BLBjorn Lomborg19:56

      So effective altruism, I love the, uh, those guys and- and they're a lot of fun to be with. Uh, it's very much the same spirit, so they are also very focused on saying what works and what doesn't. Uh, there's two things I think that sort of differentiate us. Uh, I think the main thing is that they tend to say the future is just as important as- as the present. Uh, this is one of the reasons why they worry about existential risk, they worry about the fact that what about, you know, us- uh, us sort of running ou- uh, uh, running out of track in a million years or something. I think that's intellectually interesting, but it's just not how people react. Certainly m- not most people in the poorer part of the world, but even in the rich part of the world. If you really thought the future was just as important as the present, all you would do is eat porridge every day and s- save all the rest to your descendants. We don't, right? You know, the- the honest answer is we actually spend most of the money on ourselves, on our immediate surroundings, then we spend some money on our descendants. We typically spend it through, uh, investment and infrastructure and in learning so that we're basically saying here is a little bit more of wealth, here's a lot more of information. Now go fend for yourself. That's pretty much how we actually do it, and that makes for a very different sorta setup because the altruists, uh, the effective altruists, although they, you know, they will say they care a lot about people right now, they're sort of... The- the way they think end up focusing a lot on the future. Likewise, they also like to, uh, focus on- on- on animals, for instance, where... A- and again, I think they make some fascinating stories. I- I'm a vegetarian because I don't wanna kill animals, so I- I love the fact that they focus on animals, but again, I tend to see it, as a professional economist, as- as a way of saying it's about how much people value these m- uh, these animals, not about the animals in and of themselves, uh, and- and that's a very different sort of approach. Uh, so again, you know, I tend to probably say it's a little more important to- to save humans.

   4. CWChris Williamson22:07

      I see the, um, similarities with regards to what is the best way to get a return on the money that we put in. That was what sort of aligned it for me. And I also... That's something that I hadn't considered. William MacAskill's been on the show. I- I find him very compelling, I think he's a- a really lovely dude. Big fan of Toby Ord, big fan of Nick Bostrom and everybody coming out of that world. But you are right. Um, in a perfect, hermetically sealed sandbox, you might be able to say, "Well look, we've got, you know, 14.5 trillion future human lives that will spread across the galaxy if we make these steps and get us there." But you need to account for human irrationality. You need to account for human biases like hyperbolic discounting and- and, you know, self-serving bias and stuff like that. So you need to go, okay, I understand that that would be optimal, but I need to factor in the fact that all of the people around us are gonna spend most of their money on themselves. They're not going to leave everything to future generations. They are going to inherently be selfish even if they try to be selfless. So yeah, I think-

   5. BLBjorn Lomborg23:09

      And- and- and I would, uh, if I could just... I- I would actually tend to go, uh, uh, uh, one step further because you're absolutely right. That's- that's how people act, but I think that also tells us about what is our actual preferences about this. Uh, so people will say, well, you know, if you ask them, "Do you care about the future?" Nobody's gonna be, you know, annoying and say, "No." (laughs) You know, "Fuck them," or whatever. You're just gonna say, um, uh, "I- I really want us to focus on the future," but then when you vote, when you spend your money, you're very clearly saying, "Well, I care somewhat for the future, but I actually care a lot for right now and for the next year." And that kinda thing. And I think we need to reflect that. And- and the- the- the second part is also it makes for slightly more boring stories, uh, because it's fun to talk about, you know, us going out and co- colonizing, uh, the universe and all that stuff. And it's slightly more boring talking about how do we make better education in developing countries for sixth graders. But this is what's actually gonna fix a lot of the problems, and of course, also what is gonna get us to the stars quicker, if you will, (laughs) because, you know, we're... Uh, I- I think there's something slightly wrong about us thinking about going to the stars while a lot of people are still starving, uh, and- and, you know, more fundamentally, you know, if we actually get the whole world together, there's also much greater chance that people are gonna be saying we should also fix global warming, we should also fix lots of other things, because now we're so rich that we can actually afford to care about the future.

   6. CWChris Williamson24:35

      So education

6. 24:36 – 30:00

   The Longest Levers for a Better Future

   1. CWChris Williamson24:36

      is one of the longest levers that you found.

   2. BLBjorn Lomborg24:39

      Yes.

   3. CWChris Williamson24:39

      What is another one? You got... You managed to spend 10 billion and get 600 back. Not bad. What is another very long lever that you discovered?

   4. BLBjorn Lomborg24:47

      So there, there's... So there's 12 all in all. Another one is maternal and newborn health, uh, one of those things that I didn't know anything about really. Uh, so every year, 300,000 moms die in, uh, uh, uh, uh, close to childbirth, from childbirth, and about 2.3 million kids die each year in the first 28 days of their life here in, on, on the planet, and most of these deaths are absolutely avoidable. So, you know, a lot of women, uh, used to die in rich countries. Uh, it was actually such that, uh, you know, upper, uh, class women died more, uh, because they went to hospitals, you know, in the 1800s and of course, the doctor, fresh from operating on somebody else, came and helped her, uh, delivering the baby-

   5. CWChris Williamson25:34

      The full gem theory, it's not a good time. Yeah.

   6. BLBjorn Lomborg25:36

      Bad, bad idea. Bad idea. Uh, so, so, uh, but, but, you know, we fundamentally fixed this in the rich world. But, you know, every two minutes, a mom die, nine, nine kids die, and we could do something about this. So the simple... And these are really, you know, sort of almost strikingly simple things, is something the World Health Organization called BEMONC. All right. This is one of the reasons why, uh, these, these sorts of solutions don't work, right? (laughs) They're not... That's not fun, uh, but it's basic obstetric, uh, and emergency, uh, maternal and newborn healthcare. See, I just screwed it up. Something along those lines. Anyway, so it's a, you know, it's a simple list of things that we should do, so it's, for instance, make sure that you have clean operating environment. Yeah, you're sort of like, "Soap and disinfectant? Yeah, that's probably a good idea." But if you think about it, you know, uh, about a third of all these areas, uh, in, in the, uh, in low and low middle income countries, they don't have, uh, uh, uh, uh, clean water. They don't have clean sanitation. They often lack, uh, uh, uh, disinfectants. Um, about a third of all the kids that die, die from asphyxia, so they basically don't get to breathe. Uh, and I, again, I didn't know this, but if you, if you take even just, you know, European kids or rich, uh, country kids, about 80% that come out of mom, they just start breathing right away. Uh, about 15% of them need, you know, that shove in the, in the back end to get them going. "Aah," okay, and then they start gasping, right? But the last 5% actually need a mask, and then you pump air into their, uh, lungs, and then they start breathing, and they survive. This little bag, it costs, what, $60 or something, and it can save 25 kids over a period of two or three years. Wh- w- w- why don't we have this? And, and there's... Part of the solution is, or part of the reason is, that this is not a high priority thing. You know, if you talk to politicians everywhere, you know, politicians typically being old, often also men, uh, they'll want, you know, cancer hospitals or stuff that they and their wives and s- others die from. Uh, and, and, and maternal health is just far down the line. Uh, it's also, you know, this little bag, that's not fun if you're, if you've ever seen... Uh, if you haven't, you should. Uh, the machine that says ping, do you remember that one from-

   7. CWChris Williamson27:57

      No.

   8. BLBjorn Lomborg27:57

      ... uh, the, uh, Monty Python?

   9. CWChris Williamson27:59

      No.

   10. BLBjorn Lomborg27:59

       It's a Monty Python sketch where they're giving birth to... Uh, they're helping a woman give birth and, but the doctors and the administrators only really focused on all the expensive machines they have, and especially this one machine that says ping. Uh, and that's really, you know, there's a... There's something mi- Oh, the woman. (laughs) Yes. You know, so, so it, you know, doctors love... And I, I totally get that, right? They love, you know, the exciting stuff, and this mask thing is, is just not one of them. So what we're trying to say is you should invest in these cheap, simple things. It turns out that the total cost is about $4.9 billion. Two billion of that is women's time, so that's actually not money that we need to come up with but it's, of course, still a cost because we need to get women into facilities to give birth instead of giving it back home, because then they have that emergency option o- opportunities, uh, in the hospitals. But... So for about $5 billion a year, we could make benefits that would basically save 1.4 million lives. It'd save 166,000 women each year and it'd save 1.2 million kids. How amazing is that? You know, and the cost is so... Uh, or the benefit is so great that each dollar will deliver $87 of social good. So, you know, those are the kinds of thing... They're slightly boring, they're not things we... You, you usually knew about, but they're just incredibly effective. They're not climate change, but they are something, in some sense, much, much better because they actually work right now, they'll help a huge chunk, uh, chunk of, of, uh, people either getting better off as an education or just simply surviving, and they'll make life much better at very, very low cost.

   11. CWChris Williamson29:45

       Let me do a little recap here to make sure that I've got my brain in order. So (clears throat) the first person that I learned about why climate change is such a powerful existential risk from is Mike Solana that writes Pirate Wise, the Substack,

7. 30:00 – 37:36

   Why Climate Change Policy is Counterproductive

   1. CWChris Williamson30:00

      and what he said was that, um... He was talking about demographic collapse, and he was saying that there's no smoke in the sky, there's no plumes, there's no hurricane, there's no forest fires, nothing galvanizes people to get after it. What it seems like that you're saying here is there are lots of very boring, very unsexy, very kind of behind the scenes, no press release solutions that we can spend money on, which will do the thing that ostensibly a lot of climate activism is trying to do. Presumably, the reason that people are doing climate activism is because they want to save human lives. People proselytize about the fact that they want to save human lives, specifically in the most poverty-stricken regions, "You don't care about poor people," so on and so forth.... but my time with Alex Epstein taught me that a lot of the green policies that are being enacted hurt people from provi- poverty significantly more than they do developed countries. So when you're doing this climate approach, when people are obsessed in climate as the highest, uh, the, uh, longest lever point in order to affect people from poverty, they are applying a salve to everything which actually needs a slightly more targeted response. They are spending money in a way which doesn't benefit and cause positive changes in the now. It is an investment which takes a very long time to pay off, which may be better facilitated by technology advances in the future. There are more targeted solutions that we can do to people that are in these poverty-stricken areas, but because of the cultural hold that climate alarmism and activism and Green New Deal and 169 different targets has taken hold of, it's very difficult to pull any one person out of this because you have a, a like a, a cohesive group where if one person decided to retract, you'd say, "Oh, you don't care about the climate. You don't care about poor people." And you go, "Well, actually, no, I'm doing a thing that cares more about poor people. It's more effective for poor people than what you're doing," but it doesn't seem that way, which means that they would then get lambasted, which is a disincentive for them to go and then do it. And all of this together gets rolled into how do we spend money to achieve the goal? And presumably the goal is human wellbeing, human flourishing, eh, uh, uh, an acceptable standard of living for as many people on planet Earth. Something like that, right?

   2. BLBjorn Lomborg32:18

      Yeah.

   3. CWChris Williamson32:18

      Whilst factoring in-

   4. BLBjorn Lomborg32:19

      So, so I, I would say the go- the goal is a better world, and, and that could be a lot of different things. It could be that you're better off materially. It could be that you don't die, and it could be that you have a better environment, and we try to, you know, balance all of those. Uh, it turns out that it's very much hard... You know, uh, w- when you ask people, and this is not very surprising, uh, they care a lot more about not dying than they care about, you know, uh, having, uh, having more wetlands. And so much of the effective stuff that we have is either getting people out of poverty or, uh, getting them out of death.

   5. CWChris Williamson32:53

      So in this regard, climate-

   6. BLBjorn Lomborg32:54

      But, you know, I, I loved your summary, and, and, and-

   7. CWChris Williamson32:56

      Uh, am I far off? Was I, was I wrong with what you said?

   8. BLBjorn Lomborg32:58

      No, no, no. I think that's, that's great. And, and one more thing. You know, when people say, and this is absolutely true, climate change will affect the poorest the most. That's absolutely true. But what you have to remember is everything bad affects poor people most. You know, so they're most affected by, uh, infectious diseases or bad environments or, uh, you know, uh, any kind of hurricane where there's-

   9. CWChris Williamson33:21

      Or expensive-

   10. BLBjorn Lomborg33:22

       ... cost for climate change.

   11. CWChris Williamson33:22

       ... and in re- uh, unreliable energy access.

   12. BLBjorn Lomborg33:25

       Absolutely. And, and so, eh, eh, you know, the, the main point is there's something slightly odd about the whole idea of us saying, "You know what? I see you." You're, uh, you talk to, uh, uh, some p- person and they're really poor and you say, "I really care about you. I wanna help you. I'm not gonna drive to work tomorrow. And, oh, and, uh, sorry, and that will actually mean that I won't emit CO2, which will mean in 100 years your descendants will be much warmer, but slightly less much warm." That's just, that just seems almost careless, uh, you know, about these people. The real point is that you... why wouldn't we want to help them now? And by making them better off, of course you will also make them more resilient to climate and to all these other things that they're challenged with. So again, it's an efficiency conversation of saying, "Do you wanna do a lot of good or do you just wanna feel good?" And, you know, I, I hope that a lot of people actually wanna do good. But yes, you're absolutely right. It's really, really hard to have this conversation, and, and, and I think it's also important to just take a little bit of a step away from, from climate change. It's not just climate change, you know. It's also a lot of other things. You know, people care about, uh, plastic straws in the ocean and stuff. And I, I, you know, I, I think that's great, but again, you know, let's get a sense of proportion here. There's, uh, one, uh, uh, one other solution. There is 1.4 million people that die from tuberculosis every year. Last year, tuberculosis was again the world's leading infectious disease killer. You know, COVID disrupted that in 2020 and 2021. Uh, but you know, this has been a huge killer. It's killed a billion people over the last 200 years. Uh, every fourth person that you n- well, we didn't know, but in the 1800s that died, died from tuberculosis. And yet we fixed in the rich world and then we sort of think, "Oh, it's fixed everywhere." No, it's not. And again, because we've fixed it, we know very, very well how to fix this. This is about making sure that there's enough medication, that people keep taking it. Uh, you have to take it four or six months, so it's actually somewhat complicated. Most of us forget to take our pills after two weeks when we get better, eh? Uh, uh, and then you need to overcome some of the stigma and you need to make sure that people actually get, uh, uh, uh, found, the, the people who are sick. We, uh, there's about 11 million people who are sick every year, but we only, uh, I- identify about 6 million of them, and that's what keeps the infection going because there's a lot of people who don't get, uh, diagnosed and hence either die, uh, or just pass on the, uh, uh, tuberculosis. This again would cost in the order of $5 billion a year, but the benefits in terms of saving... So over the long run we'd save about a million people, uh, in the, uh, in the short run because you actually need to ramp it up, we'd save about 600,000 people. (laughs) You know, that's still pretty damn good. And imagine we could do that for every dollar spent would do $46 worth of good. So, you know, the point that we're trying to keep saying is that there's these amazing things that we... really make a huge difference and that would also make people more concerned about all other things. You know, when once you get out of poverty, you'll actually start caring about climate change. Uh, and, and of course as you point out also, uh, reliable energy is incredibly important. It's one of the things that mean that we are not...... affected by, you know, incredible heat waves or incredible cold waves because we can cool and heat our homes, and, and not surprisingly, most people, for instance, in sub-Saharan Africa want that as well, not primarily because of global warming, but simply because it's really uncomfortable if it's very, very warm or very, very cold, and it's always been that way. Now, we've made it a little more uncomfortably warm and a little less uncomfortably cold in Africa. Overall, it's still a big problem, and they would want most of the, uh, uh, the heating and cooling anyway. The point here is, if you get well off or if you at least get out of poverty, you're much more likely to actually have a good life and, you know, be able to afford the stuff that'll make it possible for you and your kids to start learning and, and, and doing

8. 37:36 – 43:14

   Which is Worse: Cold or Heat?

   1. BLBjorn Lomborg37:36

      better.

   2. CWChris Williamson37:37

      I saw a tweet from you that said, "Cold kills much more than heat. Each year, heat kills half a million people, but cold kills 4.5 million people." How does that work?

   3. BLBjorn Lomborg37:48

      Mm. (laughs)

   4. CWChris Williamson37:49

      How's, how's the nine times more deaths from cold than there is from heat?

   5. BLBjorn Lomborg37:53

      So this, this is very well-established. This is from a, uh, the w- the world's first estimate of a truly global estimate. We have very bad data from many places in the world. We have lots of great data for, for rich countries, but we only have mediocre data for a lot of, of, of, uh, poor places in the world. Uh, this was from The Lancet magazine. Uh, and so what we know is that if you look at cross-temperatures, if it's very cold, people die more. If it's very warm, people die more. And so what they're basically looking at is they say, "Where do you die the least?" And it turns out that there's an optimal temperature almost everywhere on the planet that shifts 0. So in England, it's, what, eight degrees? And in India, it's perhaps, why, I don't know, uh, 20-something degrees Centigrade. And I'm, I'm totally lost in Fahrenheit, but cold in England and warm in, in, in India. And the point is most of the time, we spend time below the optimal temperature that is colder than the optimal temperature. That's why most people actually die from cold. Especially in the cold week, uh, uh, uh, months of the year, people, especially old people, will, uh, uh, stay inside if they're, if they're not really wealthy and, and typically old people suffer more in this way. They can't afford to keep their home quite as heated as they'd like. And so what happens is when it's cold, your body constricts, uh, the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, uh, um, uh, the blood vessels, uh, to keep your inner core, uh, heated, but that drives up your blood pressure. So we know, uh, uh, everyone has higher blood pressure in, in wintertime, and that means you have much higher chance of getting, uh, a stroke or, uh, uh, a blood clot or many other complications that sometimes lead to your death. And because this happens for literally almost everyone on the planet, this has, makes for a lot of deaths. Uh, you know, it's not, it's, it's like smoking deaths. It's not something that you're... (inhales sharply) you, you take a smoke, and then you die, but it's something of a statistical correlation. This is what all the people who've looked at heat and cold deaths say. When it gets really hot, you die, or, or you have a higher risk of dying, and when it gets cold, you have a higher risk of, uh, of dying. Unfortunately, most of humanity spends way more time being a little too cold. So the amazing thing is, if you look at India, because they've done studies for India as well, uh, India, you know, you'd imagine a lot of people die from heat, but actually, uh, again about seven times more people die from cold. And this is because it's very easy to die and very easy to see when you die from heat because you die right after. You die, you know, within the, the next 24 hours. That's why heat waves are great TV. But cold waves, you don't die the next day. You die over the next 30 days because you've constricted your blood, uh, vessels. You've increased your risk of a heart attack, and then maybe 15 days down the line, you get this heart attack. But, you know, it doesn't show up on CNN. The problem here is, again, that we're, we're guided by what we see on TV rather than what the evidence actually tell us. Now, this doesn't mean global warming's not a problem because global warming will mean we'll have more heat waves, and we'll have fewer cold waves. In the short term, it actually turns out that that's good for mankind overall because we'll see more heat waves. That'll mean more dead. But we'll see fewer cold waves, and because many more people die from cold, that'll actually be a net, uh, benefit for mankind. Uh, over the long run, of course, eventually, we'll run out of cold deaths, and so it may turn out to be a problem. The other part is it's much, much easier to avoid, uh, heat death than it is cold death because heat death, you really just need access f- to air conditioning for, like, you know, 48 hours or so. Uh, we know you can open up the malls and that kind of thing. There's a lot of ways that you can make sure people get more cooling. For avoiding cold deaths, you need heating on for months on end, especially for poor people. A- and that's one of the reasons why, uh, uh, not having access to enough energy is actually really, really harmful. Uh, there's a wonderful study in the US that looked at what happened when you had fracking, the fracking revolution. Uh, fracking revolution meant that gas prices dropped to about half as much. That matters because the vast amount of people in the US use gas for heating. Uh, and so they estimated what that mean that gas became cheaper. Well, especially poor people kept their homes better heated, and that, of course, means they die less. The net effect this, uh, study estimate is that every year, 11,000 people didn't die in the US from cold deaths.You save 11,000 deaths from cheaper gas. And so there's something weird about the way that we worry about, oh my goodness, you know, the, the, uh, uh, uh, the heat dome and 800 people died. That's absolutely something we should be, uh, concerned about, but we should have sort of a sense of proportion that, you know, uh, fracking probably saved 11,000 people every year, every year, uh, about, uh, uh, so, so about 20,000 people die from heat in the US, but 170,000 people die from coal. Why are we only talking about the heat deaths and not the cold deaths?

9. 43:14 – 50:29

   The Financial Mess of the Green Movement

   1. BLBjorn Lomborg43:15

   2. CWChris Williamson43:15

      You've run a couple of numbers previously to do with education, to do with tuberculosis, et cetera, et cetera, what is the return on money when it gets spent on climate and green movement stuff?

   3. BLBjorn Lomborg43:27

      So, it depends on how you spend it. Uh, if you... Uh, so the best analyzed, uh, data is for the EU. Uh, they had a 2020, uh, climate policy, uh, and that has been sort of looked back at and we've analyzed in a lot of different ways. And the simple answer, and this is wrong in the sense that there- there's so much uncertainty that it's only an order of magnitude estimate, is that every dollar spent avoided about three cents of climate damage. Now, it could actually have been 30 cents back on the dollar if we'd been really, really lucky. It could also have been even less, uh, but it was not a good deal, right? Y- y- instead of spending a dollar and doing three cents of good, mostly in poor countries and a long time from now, you could just have given away the dollar and done, you know, 97 cents, uh, more good. Most climate policies are very close to one or below one, uh, so they do very poorly. Uh, uh, and, and, and that's basically because politicians love to put a lot of restrictions on, you know, "No, no, no, you can't solve climate change with nuclear power, for instance," which would be somewhat cheaper, or switch from coal to gas, which would often be a net, net positive for people. That's something that people would actually want to do, uh, as the US did in the 2010s. Uh, instead they say, "No, no, you have to put up solar panels or wind turbines," which are often fairly expensive. So, uh, the estimate is that most climate policies is somewhere between 10 cents back on the dollar and maybe even a dollar, maybe a dollar and a half. So, you can do pretty good policy, but typically you don't. There is one policy that's incredibly good. So we actually did a whole project just for climate, uh, together with 50 of the world's top climate economists and three Nobel laureates to look at where can you spend a dollar and do the most good just for climate? So not talking about, well, you could do something about tuberculosis or something else. Just for climate. It turned out that the best long-term policy was investment in green energy R&D. And this is not very surprising really, because imagine if you could come up with innovations that would make green energy cheaper than fossil fuels. Not the cheaper that we're saying right now that, you know, still needs, uh, hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies from, you know, uh, the Inflation Reduction Act or something, and, and the reason why China and India and everywhere e- else is only, you know, taking up a little bit of this. But actually cheaper, which of course would mean that people would just jump on it. You wouldn't need any big summits. People would just do it themselves because it was cheaper. If we had those kinds of breakthroughs, uh, this could be fourth generation nuclear. Uh, again, there's a lot of reasons why fourth generation might actually fail us at the end, but imagine if fourth generation was just vastly cheaper than anything else. China, India, Africa, everybody would just buy it, and, you know, tons of it, and the world would decarbonize. It wouldn't be the complete solution because there's lots of other ways that we need to decarbonize apart from electricity, but it would be a big part of it. So the point is, this is the solution that we've always used. Uh, if you think back, there's, there's a, a good story back in the 1850s. Uh, the world was basically running out of whales. We were hunting whales almost to extinction because whales happen to have this wonderful whale blubber that burns really, really brightly. So, you know, most rich people in Western Europe and North America would keep their homes lit with this wonderful new whale blubber. It was much cleaner, much nicer, burnt much brighter. I mean, the solution to saving the whales wasn't to tell, tell everyone, "I'm sorry, could you go back to the dirty old stuff that doesn't burn as well?" You know, you, you couldn't convince people to do that. What you did convince them with was that we found oil. And so, you know, we found oil first in Pennsylvania and then everybody else everywhere else, and you could basically make the same clean-burning oil product, but without having to go out in the middle of the ocean and, and kill whales and just get a little bit of blubber, which was incredibly more inefficient. So fundamentally, innovation saved the whales. Instead of telling people, "No, you have to do without," we came up with an innovation that was better. We've done that in many other ways. You know, back in the 1970s when everybody worried about, uh, there not be enough food to p- for people, the solution was not to tell everyone, "I'm sorry, could everyone just eat a little less and then we'll send it down to the poor people?" The solution was the Green Revolution. The, you know, uh, the guy who actually got the Nobel Prize for this in, in, in 1970, Norman Borlaug, he was the leader of finding ways to make seeds more effective. Uh, and so he basically made these new yield, higher-yield seeds. They would, you know, deliver two or three times as much rice or wheat or corn per acre or per hectare. And so you could basically give this to poor people and they could make more food themselves. This is what saved, for instance, India, uh, and many other countries. This is why India has gone from, you know, basically a basket case in the '70s to now being the world's leading rice exporter.... because we innovated them. So it's not, again, about saying, "Oh, you know, be a little more hungry and then we'll save the world." No, it's about technology, and that's how we're gonna save global warming. That's kinda how we're gonna fix global warming, by innovation. If we can come up with technologies that are cheaper and less carbon-intensive... We've already done one, you know, uh, fracking, which basically made a very cheap gas, which has meant that the US has switched over from coal to gas. Gas emits about half as much. That's a great climate solution. It's not the final climate solution because gas is still emitting CO2, and so we need to go further. But, you know, surely that's one of the first things we should do to get sure that Europe, that Africa, that India, and that China starts fracking so that they can also switch away from coal and start using gas instead, and become much cleaner and emit much less. So again, the point here is simply to say, there are smart ways to do this and there are dumb ways, and unfortunately, we seem to be insistent on saying, "No, we're gonna do the dumb stuff which will be incredibly costly and actually not work."

   4. CWChris Williamson49:51

      It's strange to think that the, the biggest point of contribution that you can make, as opposed to trying to wag your finger or get a Swedish girl to wag her finger and say, "You should change. This is something that you should do," is just offer up a solution that people are naturally going to want to do because the incentives end up being aligned. What you're trying to do is-

   5. BLBjorn Lomborg50:12

      (laughs)

   6. CWChris Williamson50:12

      ... force people through shame or guilt or, or sad imagery, uh, to do something that they fundamentally don't want to do. And you know, incentives will as incentives do, basically. Like people are gonna end up aligning themselves with what it is that they want. Uh, you were talking there about the

10. 50:29 – 1:00:12

    Are Climate Alarmists Really Helping the Polar Bears?

    1. CWChris Williamson50:29

       whales. I also saw a tweet from you that said, "The polar bear population is increasing. Polar bears were intensely hunted, but in 1976, the world banned much hunting. The polar bear population recovered and now (laughs) is at its highest in six decades."

    2. BLBjorn Lomborg50:44

       Yeah. And, and, you know, again, this is just simply a, a question of saying... This is not saying that overall climate change might actually be a problem in the long run for polar bears. I, I think the science is much less clear than what they want to tell us, uh, but there is undoubtedly a problem. But that we are so focused on making climate change the only problem, and so we're somehow thinking, "No, no, no, I wanna help save polar bears, so I'm gonna, you know, not drive my car tomorrow," which is just like the weirdest kind of connection that, you know, in a hundred years maybe I'll, uh, uh, I, I and everybody else in the US will save a quarter of a polar bear. What, whereas, you know, if you actually cared about polar bears, we should stop shooting them. You know, the, the amazing thing is that every year... So there's about, you know, uh, 26,000 polar bears in the world right now, um, uh, and every year, we shoot 700 polar bears. If you're worried about polar bears, stop shooting polar bears. It's, you know, it's not rocket science. A- and so, ag- again, I simply try to point out what works and what doesn't. I actually forgot to say, just on the, uh, research and development for green energy, we also did a cost-benefit analysis on that. And of course, it's very, very uncertain because who... you know, you're basically making arguments about what's gonna happen in the far future. But what we estimated was, with world's best minds, was that every dollar spent will do $11 of s- of, of social good. So essentially, by investing $1 on green energy R&D, you will help push forward the date when green energy will be so s- cheap that everybody will switch over, which will then reduce climate damages in the long run about $11. That's a great investment. It's not as great as some of these other things I'm arguing for, but it's still a great one. It's by far the best one we can do in climate.

    3. CWChris Williamson52:38

       Also, there are, again, as we've said before, you need to account for the fact that we have this desire to be seen as altruistic and empathetic and so on and so forth. You need to account for the biases everybody's got at the moment. And one of them is, we should be focusing on climate. So perhaps it's still within the realm of climate, but it's the highest leverage point of doing that, um, might be a nice halfway house to get people to think a little bit more, um, nuanced about this kind of a problem.

    4. BLBjorn Lomborg53:10

       Yeah. No, and, and look, (laughs) I, I, I really appreciate those thoughts. Uh, we've tried for a very long time to get people to think about stuff that's, you know, fundamentally boring but incredibly good, uh, and we've tried all of these different things. So what we're trying right now is simply to say, "We made all these promises. We're gonna fail on pretty much all of the promises. If we can't do it all, shouldn't we do the smarter stuff first?" So we're simply saying 12 amazing things. Uh, just to give you a sense of proportion, uh, if you add up all of these, it'll cost about $35 billion. There's another 6 billion in social costs that, you know, the moms waiting, that kind of thing. Uh, but we need $35 billion. $35 billion is basically couch money, right? You know, for the world. This is almost nothing. You know, we spend, what, three times as much on cosmetics globally every year. So yes, we could probably afford $35 billion a year. The benefit would be that we would avoid 4.2 million deaths each and every year. We'd save 4.2 million lives, and we'd make the poor, poor half of the world $1.1 trillion better off every year. That's almost $1 per person per day in the poor half of the world.

    5. CWChris Williamson54:30

       Are you not just screaming at the walls in your office every day with these figures in your hands and with-

    6. BLBjorn Lomborg54:37

       (laughs)

    7. CWChris Williamson54:37

       ... you know, these campaigns that everybody else is putting out? You must just be losing your... You must wanna throw yourself off the roof. Like why-

    8. BLBjorn Lomborg54:44

       (laughs)

    9. CWChris Williamson54:44

       ... why, why-

    10. BLBjorn Lomborg54:45

        Well, I clearly haven't. (laughs) You know, I-

    11. CWChris Williamson54:47

        Yeah. Well, yeah. Uh, well-

    12. BLBjorn Lomborg54:48

        I-

    13. CWChris Williamson54:48

        ... you know, praise to your sanity for, for sticking up with it.

    14. BLBjorn Lomborg54:52

        I, I, I think, uh, y- yes. We, we have a saying at the, uh, in my think tank, the Copenhagen Consensus, that, you know, we, we would love for everyone to be incredibly rational, uh, but, you know, we'd love to, for everyone to do the right thing, but actually we'll settle for just people doing it slightly less wrong. Uh, and, and you know, there's a lot of reasons why we don't get it right. And, and you know, a lot of it is just simply we're egotistical creatures, right? I mean, fundamentally, most of ... So David Hume, um, back from 1700s, uh, you know, he would describe how we, he would sit and, uh, w- reading the paper and read about a big earthquake in China that killed, you know, hundreds of thousands of people, and then he'd cut his thumb on the, on the paper, and he'd, you know, he'd be a lot more focused then. And he's no different from the rest of us. C- c- of course that's how we, you know, we act. We just care a lot more about, you know, I just cut my thumb. But it doesn't mean we're uncaring people. It just means we're, you know, sort of limited caring people. And so I just wanna get our attention to at least saying, all right, look, you're gonna spend most of the money on yourself and you're gonna spend some of it on really s- silly stuff, and that's fine. That's how the world is. But when we're not, when we're actually saying, "I wanna do this because I wanna do good in the world," and that's, as you pointed out, sometimes when people set- talk about climate change and many other things, when they talk about plastic straws and everything else. When we really wanna do good in the world, then let's really (laughs) do good in the world and not just, uh, end up feeling good about ourselves. And if I can push people a little bit to the smarter solutions, uh, you know, I would love us to do all $35 billion, but I'll settle for, you know, uh, Elon Musk saying, "I'm gonna do that one thing," or whatever it takes. Uh, so, you know, I'm, we're, we're throwing out these 12 amazing things and hoping some of it will stick.

    15. CWChris Williamson56:43

        How dumb of a policy is net zero?

    16. BLBjorn Lomborg56:47

        Uh, it's an impossible policy. Well, I, uh, look, in the long run, we'll probably get to net zero. I, I, I struggle to believe that we won't be net zero in a couple of centuries. Uh, but, um, but, uh, for 2050 or, you know, some of these states that are talking about it even before, it's just absolutely bonkers, uh, but for two reasons. One of 'em is we don't have the technology for at least half of it. And even if we had, it would be fantastically expensive, which of course, is why, you know, most people talk about it, but d- most people don't actually want to do it. There was a, uh, a wonderful story in Politico just today, uh, about Germany where they say, uh, uh, that most Germans would love to do all their climate, uh, goals, but they're somewhat skeptical about paying for all of that. And, you know, that's, that's sort of the basic dilemma of most of these things that you talk about this stuff, but then if you actually realize how much it's gonna cost, you can see that there's gonna be nobody saying yes to this. There's one study, uh, of how much it would cost, uh, it was from Nature, uh, uh, how much it would cost, uh, for the average American to reduce his or her, or the, the, uh, the US carbon emissions by 80%, and the cost would be ... so, you know, pretty far from net zero, uh, by 2050, would be more than $5,000 per person per year. So, you know, if you're a family of four, that's $20,000 for you every year.

    17. CWChris Williamson58:16

        Wow.

    18. BLBjorn Lomborg58:16

        Uh, and if you wanna go all the way, or they couldn't actually get the model to do it all the way, it would cost more than twice as much. So fundamentally, this is just not going to happen in any realistic sense. Uh, uh, McKinsey did a study for what it's gonna cost to go net zero. They estimated like many others have done. Uh, if we do it really smartly, which we won't do, uh, but even if we did, it would cost, you know, in the order of five to $6 trillion a year. It would cost India about 9% of its GDP every year. Remember, the total budget intake in India is about 12%, so they'd have to spend almost their entire budget on net zero. Of course they're not gonna do that. You know, so we've, we've just gotta get to grips with the fact that we're talking about these policies that are absolutely fanciful. And even if we did, just remember, if everyone in the rich world went net zero today and stayed that way for the rest of the century, it would reduce temperatures by about half a degree centigrade or one degree Fahrenheit. Uh, so yes, it would be noticeable, but it wouldn't have fixed most of the problem. That's of course because the vast majority of emissions are gonna come from China, India and Africa, who are all places that want to get much richer. So again, we have no sense of proportion here. Uh, net zero is both impossible and it's probably also a ... net zero by 2050 or something is an incredibly ineffective way to help the world. It's a good idea to say we want to fix climate, but I think there's something wrong in saying we wanna fix climate to the extent that we're just gonna leave off a lot of the money that could have helped save a lot of other stuff. And it's also wrong to tell people we're gonna go down a road that will eventually make every one of you yellow vest protesters because it's just gonna be so expensive.

    19. CWChris Williamson1:00:11

        So there's

11. 1:00:12 – 1:08:03

    Bjorn’s Strategy to Engage Sceptics

    1. CWChris Williamson1:00:12

       a limited amount of time, resources, money, energy, focus that can be spent on looking after the world.

    2. BLBjorn Lomborg1:00:23

       Yeah.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:00:23

       There are trade-offs between going green, stopping poverty, health, pollution, women's education, child mortality, et cetera, et cetera. At the moment, the most widespread of these, whether it go to public campaigns, political campaigns, government talks, Davos conferences, the ability to click that button to offset your carbon when you fly in a plane, the ability to round up and donate money to Greenpeace or whoever it might be, all of these different vectors could be find- pointing at places that were longer levers, ones that would give you a better multiplier on all of these. Given that we have-... what seems to be, um, a culture of altruism, right? That's like one positive, white-pilled way of looking at what's happening, you know, people want to make an impact. The problem is that the less sexy risks are the ones that galvanize them more poorly. What is a way that you foresee of trying to get people to buy into your 12 points?

    4. BLBjorn Lomborg1:01:28

       So I think there's one thing and, and we've talked about that, uh, uh, in several different ways. You need to get people off the ledge. If climate change is the end of the world, of course that's the only thing you should worry about. You know, uh, AOC said it very beautifully when, when, when she was talking about there's only 12 years left. It's, you know, it's been a sort of recurrent phrase, uh, at least since 1972 when the UN first told us we just had 10 years left. Uh, but, you know, the, the, "We only have 12 years left," she said, "and you're worried about how we're gonna pay for it? That makes perfect sense. If the world was really ending, this is the only thing you should be focused on." So, it makes sense if you believe you're at the, on the, uh, on the, uh, on the edge. And so we need to first pull people back, and that's what I've been trying to do. You know, you, you mentioned the, uh, the polar bears, the, uh, the fact that, you know, a lot more people die from cold than heat. Uh, I have another graph that I love, uh, which is basically how many people died from climate-related disasters. Uh, uh, so we have pretty good data at least for the last 100 years. Uh, and in the 1920s, on average every year people died from climate-related disasters or cold, uh, uh, uh, cold than heat and, and, uh, drought, storms, floods and, and, uh, extreme temperatures. Uh, about half a million people died each year, uh, 100 years ago. Now, most people would certainly, when you look at the presentation, think that that had increased since then. It's actually dramatically decreased, such that in the last decade, in the 2010s, it was 18,000. Last year, it was 11,000 people globally. And, and mind you, we've quadrupled in size, so actually the individual at risk has gone down even more. We have seen a decline of about 98% in, in, in, in total deaths from climate-related disasters. This has nothing to do with climate. This has everything to do with the fact that when you're richer, you're more technologically advanced, you don't die as much. You're more resilient. We've just simply become much better at dealing with whatever nature throws at you, which is one of the reasons why we should make sure that the rest of the world also gets out of poverty so they can get the same benefits that we're having. But the reality here is once you pull people back from that ledge, you can then start talking about now, all right, so what do you wanna do? Do you wanna, you know, not drive your car tomorrow and help a hapless guy in 100 years in a tiny, tiny amount? Or do you wanna do something really, really effective right now? And once you point that out, once you've taken away the end- end of the world, I think it's a lot easier to get people to start realizing, oh wait, there's some really, really good stuff here. But what I'm trying to do with this particular thing, and that's because I, you know, this is what I've been saying for 20 years and failed, um, so what I'm trying right now is, is basically to say, look, whatever else you- is you're doing, I'm simply saying why don't we spend $35 billion, couch change, you know, spend on all the other stuff that you want, but let's just spend this tiny, tiny, tiny amount and make the world immensely, much better. How about that? And I think even a lot of people, you know, even the AOCs of the world would also say, "Sure, I'd love to do that, and then go- let me go back and worry about climate change." And that's fine. That's sort of another way to, you know, I would probably still disagree with her, but, you know, fundamentally I want to get everybody on board with this boat. We've made all these promises we're not actually gonna deliver. Why don't we at least do the really smart stuff that's incredibly cheap first?

    5. CWChris Williamson1:05:00

       Where should people go if they want to support these efforts and, and try and make some sort of an impact themselves?

    6. BLBjorn Lomborg1:05:07

       So there's a number of different ways. Uh, first of all, I'm an academic, so I'm not, you know, we're, we're not looking for money to do this. We're not the right guys to go out and actually fix, uh, tuberculosis. Then it's, uh, you know, STOP TB or it's, uh, uh, uh, Red Cross or many, many of these other organizations. It's also very much about getting your politicians to think about this. It's also just about getting that conversation going, so I, you know, I'm, I'm really hoping that when people watch this, uh, they'll s- they'll simply start having these conversations with their, uh, with their kids or their peers or, you know, their grandparents (laughs) uh, around the tables and say, "Why aren't we focused on these things?" Uh, I'm coming out with a book next month, uh, it's also available on our website, uh, but it's, you know, I'm still working on it. Uh, we're publishing this in 35 papers around the world, so you can go to our website. It's called copenhagenconsensus.com/halftime. Uh, and that's basically because we're at halftime, but nowhere near halfway, right? So we're basically saying let's do the smart stuff now. Uh, you can also follow me on Twitter, uh, and, uh, and obviously I'm hoping to help give that sort of input that will make you better at pushing all the other people to become slightly more aware that this is how we should be spending our money. Because at the end of the day, this is not gonna happen unless also, you know, everybody... You know, I, I want ... It's not, you know, I live in the same country as Greta Thunberg. I think she's a, you know, I think she's a great girl. I- I really have a lot of respect for her because, you know, she's heard the message loud and clear, the world is ending, and it seems like nobody's doing enough. So I understand why she's doing what she's doing, but I would love her to then say, "Why aren't we doing the real stuff first?" Right? So if we could take away some of the fear, I think a lot of people like Greta Thunberg could actually start say- saying, "I wanna do the real stuff." And then of course we could actually get our politicians to do a little, you know, a little less of the dumb stuff and a little more of the smart stuff.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:07:05

       Bjorn, I really appreciate you. I, I like the fact that you are, um, very measured with the way that you put this stuff across. I think that you need to be delicate when sort of broaching this topic with people, because you'll just trigger a response that's going to get them to dig their heels in and ignore what you're saying. I think it's definitely the right demeanor and the right sort of rhetoric to go about this stuff with. Uh, very much looking forward to the book coming out, and yeah, I, I really hope that this has opened a lot of people's eyes. Uh, every time that I speak to someone that's got a, a measured response when it comes to how we should be dealing with current problems facing the world, uh, it does give me a glimmer of hope. So, uh, congratulations for-

    8. BLBjorn Lomborg1:07:39

       Great.

    9. CWChris Williamson1:07:40

       ... for doing that. Dude, I, I really appreciate you. Thank you for your time today.

    10. BLBjorn Lomborg1:07:42

        Thank you, Chris.

    11. CWChris Williamson1:07:43

        What's happening, people? Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks. And don't forget to subscribe. Peace.

Episode duration: 1:08:03