Bjorn Lomborg Declares “False Alarm” on Climate Hysteria

[Music] welcome to uncommon knowledge i'm peter robinson this is another special plague time edition of uncommon knowledge which means i'm seated at home bjorn lomborg is president of the copenhagen consensus center a think tank dedicated to applying economic analysis including cost-benefit analysis to the great issues of the day bjorn is the author of a number of books including his 2001 bestseller the skeptical environmentalist bjorn lumborg's newest book just out false alarm how climate change panic costs us trillions hurts the poor and fails to fix the planet bjorn welcome and you're in you're in sweden thank you i'm in southern sweden right now yes all right welcome from northern california to southern sweden beyond two quotations this is you in your new book false alarm quote in almost every way we can measure almost every way we can measure life on earth is better now than at any time in history we need to take a collective deep breath and understand what climate change is and isn't it is not like a huge asteroid hurtling toward earth it is instead a long-term chronic condition that needs attention and focus but one that we can live with close quote that's the first quotation here's the second swedish school girl greta thundberg tuneberg speaking last september to the u n climate action summit committee get a load of this this is all wrong i shouldn't be up here i should be back in school on the other side of the ocean yet you all come to us young people for hope how dare you you have stolen my dreams my childhood with your empty words and yet i'm one of the lucky ones people are suffering people are dying entire ecosystems are collapsing we are in the beginning of a mass extinction bjorn if you're right and it's a condition that needs attention but that we can live with why would the united nations permit itself to be harangued by a 17 year old schoolgirl such as greta toonberg what is going on well i think there's a couple of answers let me just first talk about the factual issue of this so global warming is a real problem it's man-made and it's something that we should fix but we also need to get a sense of proportion uh these senses this is the end of the world and i i think uh uh uh toonberg displays that very well you know that people really really frighten you can you you can sense that she's really frightened uh washington posted a survey of all uh u.s school kids uh 57 of them are alarmed of cl uh climate change uh there was another study across the world of 28 nations that showed that almost half the world's population now believes that global warming is likely to lead to the extinction of the human race so we're one side half the education half the world's population of the adults in the world so 48 believe that it is likely global warming will lead to the extinction of the human race so clearly we're telling people this is the end of the world and that's also what we see in media and that's certainly what greta tunberg has picked up but i think most people have gotten the memo this is pretty much the end of the world on the other hand we have the u.n climate panel and that's what i'm saying we should actually look at the facts we should look at both the economics and the science about climate change and say how bad is this well they actually tell us that in about 50 years so by the 2070s the impact of global warming is going to be negative that's why it's a problem but it will be equivalent to losing on average somewhere between 0.2 and 2 of your income so just to give you a sense the un also expects will be much richer by 2070 they expect that by 2075 the average person on the planet will be 2.63 times richer than here she is today so what climate change will mean is instead of being 2.63 times richer we will only be 2.56 times richer that's a problem it is not the end of the world and you then ask me why is this happening well i think there's a lot of there's a confluence of different things here first of all media loves terrible stories they've always done right right but climate change just gives you such a large array of terrible stories and i think we'll probably get back to them i'd love to share at least a few of them and try to debunk them uh but you know fundamentally there's lots and lots of opportunities to say we're all going to die and you know and it generates lots of clicks at the same time we also have politicians and that was your question about the un a lot of politicians want to do good in the world i think they're they're generally good people but they also need to get reelected they need to stay relevant and one of the ways they do that is by telling you and this is probably the most powerful phrase they can have the world is going to end but i can save you right vote for me vote and that's what they get to say and they even get to say and the cost will first come in the election cycle after next right so you know it's the perfect opportunity for politicians and for media to tell you this is the end of the world however the problem is of course if we end up believing them we will throw everything at climate change problems and forget the many other problems that we should be focusing on right bjorn i want i want to do just what you said and go on to a couple of examples of stories that you write about that demonstrate the way the press portrays the issue however something you just said how can it be the case i'm not challenging you i'm just asking how can it be the case that 50 years from now as a result of climate change we end up 2.5 times richer instead of 2.7 times richer when climate change how is it that it makes us poorer but only a little bit poorer when climate change feels like you go out into the california sun on an especially hot day in july and the sun is glaring and it's uncomfortably hot and you say to yourself oh my goodness 50 years from now it'll be like this year-round only work how is it that can that climate change is only a kind of minor problem something that retards economic growth instead of causing massive systematic damage and poverty yeah and and again let me just before i try to give you an explanation for that let me just point out this is what the u.n climate panel tells us this is what the world's uh only climate economist uh uh who got the nobel prize uh uh north house many many other economists have uh and and done for you know 30 years so there's a simple reason but it's one that's hard to grasp it's the idea that we'll actually adapt to much of this so you know if you look for instance and and and let me tell you one story of of these you know the the world is going to end uh last year a big story on you know cover of washington post lots of papers around the us and around the world was new study shows because of global warming we're going to see higher sea levels which is absolutely right which will mean 187 million people will have to move right not surprisingly some other media went further and said 187 million people are going to drown uh but of course if you have 80 years warning you're probably not going to drown from this but the main fact is the paper that actually estimated this showed that that is totally totally unlikely because it assumes that all of these people who are now going to get flooded will sit there watch the waves lap up over their knees and then eventually their hips and eventually they'll drown over 80 years and do nothing but if they actually do something and then this very study says it is unreasonable to assume that you will do nothing however if you do reasonable stuff and actually fairly cheap stuff and most of this will simply be to protect yourself better and the obvious thing is a dike but there are many many other ways that you could do that if you do these very simple fairly cheap things instead of 187 million people getting flooded by the end of the century it will be 305 000 people so 600 times less and and remember just to give a sense of proportion every year twice that number move out of the state of california so clearly we can handle 300 000 people moving away around the globe over the next 80 years and this is the difference between saying it's the end of the world 187 million people drowned obviously is a huge issue right 305 000 people who have to move by the end of the century at very low cost is at best a minor inconvenience and this is the reason why when you add up all these costs yes if you go out into the california sun actually you know i come from scandinavia i'll probably actually be like yay but if you know if it's really warm and unpleasant it is like an average day what three four hundred miles down south and it's not like they don't live well they have made their homes they have made their uh set up and their infrastructure such that it is less cumbersome for them to have it warmer that's why people live well both in atlanta and in massachusetts you live well in both of these cities because you have your infrastructure adjusted to the temperature that you have what we the reason why there's a cost is because we've adjusted to what used to be our temperature and it will now deviate that will have a cost but the reason why it's fairly small is because it'll happen over 80 years and we know technologically that we're very well able to handle this so just to give you a sense of proportion for all of the sea level rise around the world it is going to cost us much less for almost all countries except maybe very very small tiny island nations it's going to cost much less than 0.1 percent of gdp to fix it so that's why you get this situation it is a problem not the end of the world you're an in false alarm you write about the work of the american journalist david wallace wells and in some ways this book i take it in any event in some ways i take your book as an answer to his 2017 book the uninhabitable earth and we'll talk i know you and david wallace wells have been in touch and we'll we'll come to that i'd like to come to that but can i just go through two or three of well this is continuing the theme david wallace wells in his 2017 book sketches out sketches out a world that i find easy to imagine it you you can picture this dystopic world and i just like to i'd like you to reset my imagination it's one thing to talk about the facts and of course that's vital but how do you how should we think of how should we picture that's it how do we picture the future all right so here's here's david wallace wells unbreathable air for example quote the fraction of carbon dioxide is growing high-end estimates suggest it will hit a thousand parts per million by 2100 which i will not live to see but it's not that far off at that concentration human cognitive ability declines by 21 close quote how can we get richer if we're all going to be a fifth stupider hmm yeah and and look again the point here is this is first of all uh the thousand requires an almost unimaginable increase in especially coal power uh uh which i think nobody not even uh david wallace wallace would really believe in but the second part is to remember that we routinely fix problems like this so most people live don't live outside so you know a lot of these problems i i i haven't actually looked very much at the at the productivity uh impacts of uh i i know that there's some some of these studies uh i've looked at productivity impacts for instance on agriculture and many other things uh but most people live outside when they're poor but when you get inside when you get rich you move inside you move most of your production most of your office work most of the things that you do inside and that's where you have air condition so you handle the temperature and of course if this really turns into a big problem uh with with uh with a a high pp uh so a high level of uh co2 concentration right we will fix that by filtrating the air but again the the point here is to recognize that there is none of these problems that are unimaginable to handle it is one of those that are very very easy to pre you know sort of envision i think it's a good point that you make uh when you look at most movies they are very very good at telling you this story about the end of the world you know yes we're almost used to seeing these uh this dystopian uh dystopian futures but it's funny if you'd actually think about what it would have looked like for someone to watch a movie of our world a hundred years ago it would be unimaginably amazing right almost everything right better in every peaceful world we'd be living much much longer we have conquered a lot of the diseases that were ravishing the world a hundred years ago we had a much more food much better education all these things so those kinds of movies are very likely phenomenally wrong so actually when you look at what what are the consensus both of economists but also what the u.n climate panel estimate we will likely be in the order of five or ten times richer by the end of the world and importantly not just the rich by the end of the century but by the end of the century right the world's poor uh which let me just give you two more of david david wallace wells here starvation i'm quoting him again the basic rule for staple cereal crops is that every degree of warming yields a decline of 10 percent which means that if the planet is 5 degrees warmer at the end of the century we may have as much as 50 percent more people to feed and 50 percent less grain to give them close quote and bjorn says oh for goodness sake the green revolution we know how to grow you just say don't even worry about it right or not well uh i mean i think we should worry about global warming and i think we should think smartly about this but i mean we're definitely not going to see pretty much anyone start because we will not have unless we do really badly but has nothing to do with climate change and everything to do with how we set our system unless we do really badly we'll have nobody poor remember we've gone from a world where in 1800 about 90 95 percent of all people were extremely poor what we define as extremely poor today that number is less than 10 by 2100 it will be zero it will be effectively zero but but that's not the only thing you also got to remember that uh david wallace wallace and many others like to uh like to make the arguments what happens if you keep planting the same stuff no matter what happens so you know i i used to grow wheat i'm going to grow wheat i'm going to plant it the same day even though it's gotten hotter and hotter over the last 80 years surprisingly my weight fails most farmers aren't that dumb they actually smart people they will start planning other sooner or they'll start planning different stuff they'll start moving you know so we actually have when you take that into account the models show a very different outcome much much lower reductions however you also need to remember co2 is a fertilizer we know that you know gardeners routinely put in lots of co2 into tomato drink greenhouses to make them more plump if you add on the co2 you again get much lower reduction sometimes even increases and then the final point is agriculture is a very very tiny fraction of human output it used to be and in many very very poor countries it's still the vast majority of your economic uh input if you're rich it's one two three percent in 2100 it'll be half a percent and so the reality is even if we have to put in more effort into growing food and of course by 2100 we'll be doing it in big factories with with lots of led lights and all that stuff yes it'll be more expensive even in this worst case scenario but it will mean instead of costing 0.5 percent it'll now cost 0.75 and actually i'm not just picking those numbers out of the air because the biggest study that's also the some summation of the biggest uh roundup study of what will be the impact of global warming on agriculture at worst it'll cost us 0.26 of global gdp because we'll have to put in more effort yes again it's a problem no it's not the end of the world and telling us that that it is when it's not is not only you know it sells more books it actually makes us scared about the wrong things bjorn false alarm back to enough of david wallace wells back to you the book again is false alarm you distinguish between mitigation policies that is policies that are intended to slow or eliminate the introduction of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere mitigation on one hand and the adaptation on the other hand and that's just what you've been talking about right now um joe biden the backers of the green new deal the entire climate lobby in this country i shouldn't call i shouldn't denigrate them by calling them a lobby but people concerned about climate they're all on the side of meditation false alarm i'm quoting you such climate policies often make life worse mitigation policies often make life worse especially for the poor close quote explain that well so fundamentally if you're gonna and look i'm not i didn't invent the distinction between mitigation and adaptation it's a sort of standard way of thinking about it if you do mitigation so basically cutting carbon emissions it means essentially making energy more costly if it didn't if it actually meant you know some people will tell you oh we'll actually get rich doing it well then let's get going but then you don't really need any help you don't need any subsidies you don't need anything else we'll just do it because it's cheaper the reason why it's hard is because it's more expensive look that does not necessarily mean we shouldn't do it because everything you like cost money better school cost more money better health care cost more money it's fine to spend money but we just need to recognize that we're actually spending money we're spending resources that we could have spent on other things so getting people less effective more expensive less reliable energy for instance has real cost just give you one example we know that one of the things that especially hurt the poor is the fact that they spend a very large amount of their money on energy so if you make energy more expensive it simply means that they'll be able to for instance warm their houses in the winter less well that has real consequences because that actually makes more people die from coal remember coal kills many many more people than heat surprisingly to some but this is you know very very well established and we have a study that showed what happened for instance with fracking back in around 2010 it was sort of a natural experiment the price of gas dropped dramatically one of the impacts was that people who heat their homes with gas could suddenly afford to heat their homes better especially the poorest of americans what happened was that saved according to one estimate eleven thousand people from dying every year if you ramp up the cost of gas because you are concerned about climate change that means some of those lives are again now gonna start being lost there are real consequences to making energy more costly we might want to spend that but we should be honest about saying it has real costs bjorn lomborg and false alarm it is perverse you've been very you've been very calm and reasonable so far in this discussion bjorn there are moments in false alarm when you're angry it is perverse to hear rich people piously claim that we should help the world's poor by cutting carbon dioxide to make their future slightly less worse when we have huge opportunities to make their lives much better much more quickly and much more effectively close quote explain that argument well if you look at the world's poor in the poor countries i was just talking about the poor in the rich countries like in the us but if you look at the vast number of billions who have incredibly simple problems like their kids are dying from easily curable infectious diseases they don't have access to enough food or they don't have good education there's something diverse about the idea of a rich well-meaning guy coming down and saying to you know a mom whose baby might die from malaria tonight saying you know what i feel your pain i'm really gonna help you know you know what i'm knocking i'm gonna bite to work tomorrow what i'm gonna cut a ton of co2 from the atmosphere which will help your kids to sentence if the kid actually survives in a hundred years a tiny bit it's not that it it doesn't do anything but it's just that it seems disproportionate to the actual problems and what that person could have done by for instance giving her malaria medication there are some things that are very very simple and we have i think a moral responsibility to do first and unfortunately as we're getting increasingly worried just about climate we're forgetting almost all these other concerns where we could help much better much more efficiently and actually help today's people who are really poor instead of up people 100 years who are going to be much better off how to make things better innovation again i'm going to quote you in false alarm the best way to combat climate change is to invest in green innovation we should explore fusion fission water splitting and more close quote all right now you have to defend yourself against the charge that now you've gone crazy now you're talking about what nuclear energy cold fuse what what on earth are you talking about be serious bjorn hmm no so i am serious but i'll tell you why so fundamentally if you look at most ways we fix problems it is through technology but unfortunately most ways that environmentalists want us to fix problems is through sack and cloth i think is the word you know you do with less uh so uh so you know we'll we'll typically tell people no no don't drive so much don't eat so much meat don't do this don't do that don't do the other it first of all has very little effect uh we've seen that for instance with the coronavirus we've just shut down almost the entire world and yet the impact by the end of the century calculated by one climate economist sorry climate uh climate scientist is going to be 1 500th of a degrees fahrenheit lower temperatures by the end of the century so despite we've almost shut down the world it has almost no impact it gives you a sense of how large the problem is that we're trying to fix but what should you then do well take a look at los angeles back in the 1950s 60s terrible pollution it's the standard sort of environmentalist argument well you gotta you know don't drive stop all those cars right shut down that would have been one way to solve the air pollution problem unfortunately it would probably have been incredibly impossible to do it and would certainly have been fantastically expensive what happened was somebody innovated the catalytic converter in 1974. we've installed kalitik converters in all cars yes it was not cost free but the basic point is now you have much much cleaner you're still lots of problems i'm not defending that you know there's not other things to be done but fundamentally a simple technological change can make a huge difference and it's much much easier to convince everyone to do so on climate change most climate campaigners are basically saying look i know the world got so much better because you have all this access to you know electricity and you can go all places and you can have fossil fertilizer that actually can feed you and all that stuff that's all nice and good but i'm sorry could you you know turn down the light stop driving stop doing all that fun stuff and be less content and of course that's easy to say to really really rich people but to all the world's poor it's essentially telling i'm sorry you just gotta stay in poverty those are very very hard arguments to make and i think fundamentally immoral how about we instead said let's dramatically ramp up our investment in green energy research and development if we could innovate some sort of green energy down below fossil fuels the price of fossil fuels we would have solved global warming and now you just quote a few of the solutions but obviously we should look into battery storage for solar and wind and we should also look at solar and wind but also you know craig ventry the guy who invented uh who cracked the human genome back in 2000 he has this idea make these algae out on the ocean surface that basically take up sunlight and co2 produce oil then we'll harvest them put them in our gasoline driving uh cars and just use it like we normally do but the trick is they've just taken up the co2 so it'll be co2 neutral the point here is there are tons of these different ideas we are not saying that we should do all of them most of them are going to fail but invest in all of them and we just need one of them then they will be cheaper than fossil fuels and not just rich well-meaning americans will do it but the chinese the indians the african everybody else will switch so bjorn from where you sit and i know you sit different places you're sitting you're seated in southern sweden right now but the last time you and i spoke to each other you were right here in palo alto you get here to silicon valley quite often what's your sense of venture investments in green technology are there i have read i i know nothing about this by comparison with what you know but i have read for example that there are new designs of much smaller much much safer much much cleaner nuclear that are at least in principle possible nuclear energy is a possibility for example you just mentioned craig ventner and his notion of developing algae which produce oil i remember reading not too long ago about the idea of taking huge wind turbines really huge ones like north sea oil platforms and towing them out to the middle of the ocean where you where in the first place they don't you don't they don't despoil the landscape but also where you can get make use of the currents down below you can make use of much more violent winds up above so i guess what i'm getting at is it's very easy to talk about all of these things and on the one hand whereas the climate people concerned about climate tend towards the dystopian view of the future you and i could talk each other into a really giddy sense of of joy about this we could talk ourselves into the other kind of high-tech future which is just beyond our grasp what's actually happening if these technologies are plausible somebody should be investing in them right yes so so there's two things to that one is the private venture capital that goes into actual research and development is fairly small so it's estimated about six billion dollars uh per year and then in energy governments around yes in energy okay yes right and in uh in green energy r d uh and in uh for governments it's about 15 billion dollars we are proposing and this is the copenhagen consensus so in 27 the world's top climate economist seven three nobel laureates uh to spend about a hundred billion dollars so dramatic ramp up so we're not talking about just a little adjustment it's a lot more money but at the same time much much cheaper than what we're just spending in subsidies to solar and wind right now the problem with the existing uh sort of venture capital argument is that most of these will only invest if they can see a payoff in the next five years but it's much more likely we're talking about an investment future of say 40 years in academ in economics there's a good argument that there's this perpetual under investment in almost all research and development because most really groundbreaking research and development if you come up with a great idea it's really only going to be marketable in 40 years when of course your patent has run out so in some sense there's very little incentive to invest in these long-term really visionary ideas that's what we need to do however the world is not doing that because we're so focused on spending on green energy that you can see on tv so you know the wind turbine parks and the solar parks that look good like we're doing something let's just remind ourselves right now the world gets just over one percent of its energy from solar and wind despite all the spending that we've done and even by 2040 it'll probably just be less than five percent that comes from solar and wind so we're still talking about a very small bit we need this innovation and we need to spend a lot more to actually get these long-term benefits and that's of course what you know when you're a scared environmentalist you will say but we don't have time we got to do something next year but we've been doing this for for 30 years and gotten almost nobody nowhere we're not actually going to solve this by just simply saying let's go crazy for the next year so bjorn now now here's where here's where the the um the interviewer sitting in northern california the seat of capitalism begins to suspect his interview subject who is seated in southern sweden a socialist state for low these many decades now so who gets to first of all how do you gather this 100 billion dollars that you want to invest and who makes the investment decisions if not venture you see what i'm getting at here the inclination or at least to an american reader you get it if bjorn is saying leave this to the free markets the markets are very good at raising capital allocating capital assessing risk and so forth but that's not what you're saying you're saying no the market isn't big enough it's not going to raise enough capital we need to do more and my question is how how do you raise it and how do you deploy it yes so very briefly you are not going to solve global warming by just having this incremental tinkering so you know venture capitals are going to make a little better wind turbine next year but what we really need is you know 2 300 better i'm not sure that's the right way but a lot better a lot better you need a quantum breakthrough it's what you're about you really need quantum breakthroughs and that is about having government invest in these technologies way before they're ready and i i get the idea of saying but surely governments are not very good at this well actually they're good at making general research progress we know that from national natural science uh uh uh uh sorry uh uh oh what is the nsf national science foundation is that what you're actually yeah right in this country right those people yes so the the ways that we actually give to individual researchers come up with great new ideas that eventually will be turned over to venture capitalists and companies to made it to be made into marketable products one good example of that is actually the fracking revolution which didn't happen because we had lots and lots of capitalists who said yay let's go after this because for a very long time most people said can't be done so this was mostly for at least 10 years you know when mitchell was trying to do this back down in texas this was done with money from the doe from you know subsidies from small studies from a lot of different breakthrough institute has you know assembled this whole sort of story of how that went and it was only once you could start say oh this is a really good idea then all the venture capitals comes in and that's great so we want to spend a little money in a lot of different places with is pretty much is individual researchers and people who have you know almost crazy ideas because it's fine we're going to look at a lot of different ones just like what you talked about yeah so so i can here's the way the world works angela merkel would be willing to listen to you because that's the way europe works you all know each other over there and you all have it you're all very comfortable with government large government action it doesn't work that way over here quite in in anything like the same way really and yet you can't solve this the united states is still overwhelmingly the center of the kind of technological development that you seek so what what as a pr what what's and if you haven't thought it through quite this far that's fair you're you're making a wonderful and important case in false alarm but i'm just wondering have you thought through what kind of mechanism if we could make bjorn lomborg dictator of the united states for 24 hours what mechanism would you set up to get the kind of basic r and d in green technology done that you believe needs to be done how would you do it bjorn well it would be spending in through the national science foundations say let's let's set up uh uh blue ribbon panels that would identify what are the things that we would like to see uh breakthroughs on you know cost efficiency on solar panels uh better safety for nuclear power the fourth generation nuclear power plants and a lot of other things i'm not a technician in any one of these areas i'm sure they would come out with you know say a hundred different things in each one of these different areas and they probably also uh look at a lot of things that will probably be possible or ideal or you know this would be great to look into then you'd simply ask individual researchers not to come up with can you spend you know solyndra like money can you spend half a billion dollars because we don't want to go down that route but can you spend say one million dollars or half a million dollars on advancing our knowledge in this area or the other now i i and just to you know be be frank uh so so uh biden is actually you know in his two trillion dollar climate plan he's actually proposing that the u.s should be spending a hundred billion dollars on research and development every year my plan if if you if you do proportionately to the u.s it's only talking about 30 billion dollars so you're right now 30 billion seven billion yes so you right now spend about seven billion dollars in the u.s you would ramp that up to 30. this is not essential i i think i finally understand now essentially what you would do is use the same the same government university complex that came into being during the cold war after the second world war during the cold war it and in the beginning it was for sure for defense purposes but now we have very well established huge transfers you can have some doubts about whether we should be transferring quite so much money from ordinary american taxpayers to our universities but that's essentially the network it already exists the kind of thing you're talking about already exists the government raises the money panels of one hopes dispassionate scientists rank order the kinds of projects they'd like to see pursued there is some democratic oversight of this because it reports in one way or another to the executive branch of the government and the money goes to universities and researchers get to work you're not in you is that right in other words you're not talking about inventing an entirely new structure we already know in some basic way how to do this yes and the other point is to recognize if we don't do this if we just rely on sort of incremental uh improvement we might get lucky and somebody is going to come up with this process anyhow but we're simply talking about spending a very small amount of money compared to all the other money that we're talking about spending on climate and dramatically increasing our chance to actually fix climate change just remember the us is spending about 50 billion or more per year on subsidizing solar and wind which we know generates almost nothing so you know the the easy deal would be to say stop doing that but start investing a lot more in research and development you'd save money and you'd make a much better chance of actually fixing climate change bjorn you are either a magician or exactly right because you have now got me thinking he makes sense it tens of billions of dollars sounds like a lot but actually it's very modest in this world of huge subsidies and huge alright last few questions bjorn two quotations both from david wallace wells wallace wells in 2017 no matter how well informed you are about climate change you are surely not alarmed enough close quote wallace wells last year for once the climate news might be better than you thought it's certainly better than i thought davis wallace wells is cheering up what's going on well i think he's cheering out because he was incredibly worried so now he's only very worried or more like that so the so the the main point was uh there's a scenario out there that's called rp rcp 8.5 which is also what we talked briefly about at the very beginning so you know the idea that you're just going to have incredible amounts of use of coal throughout the century and everybody's going to you know uh we already know that's simply not increased that that that seems very very unlikely in pretty much all accounts if what what we're now seeing is uh more and more people are getting to terms with oh wait that was not a correct scenario remember all the scare stories that you also hear about the 187 million people we talked about at first comes from that scenario so what it basically means is we've just downgraded the number of you know the scenarios are not quite as bad and actually the development seems like it's going to be more like the rcp-6 which is less bad than the rcp 8.5 but what what what has not happened with david wallis wells is that he's basically saying all right 8.5 was terrible this is only you know moderately terrible but what he forgets is the real big things that make a difference is for instance taking into account adaptation taking into account that we have uh fertilization from co2 and many of these other things that will dramatically reduce the impact and that's why i don't think we're well served by saying i've read a lot of news from washington post or other uh news outlets looks really scary this must be bad i think we'd be better served by actually looking at what do the best economists estimate is the total impact when you add up all these different things from for instance hurricane damage again we talk a lot about it hurricane damage right now cost 0.04 of global gdp by 2100 we estimate the total cost despite hurricanes getting worse will be 0.00 wait a minute hurricanes are going to get worse i thought so so very briefly hurricanes haven't gotten worse yet but models seem to indicate that hurricanes will get fewer but stronger i see stronger out compete fewer because stronger actually goes to the cube so you you will get much more damage but even then damages will go from 0.04 to 0.02 because we will be much better able to deal with it and this is what wall as wells forget and of course also in all this hyperventilating reporting we forget 0.04 or 0.02 is not the end of the world by any means it's obviously terrible for the people who it's happening to and absolutely we should be caring for them but we should stop believing this is the end of the world all right bjorn we have a campaign coming up here in this country we have a choice we haven't heard about that yes and i am very sorry that it's going to be sloppy when it comes to questions of climate change but we're going to have to make a choice here let me for the purposes of the next few moments make you an honorary american and ask you to tell me what you think here's president trump in 2017. no responsible leader can put the workers in the people of their country at this debilitating and tremendous disadvantage the fact that the paris deal hamstrings the united states while empowering some of the world's top polluting countries should dispel any doubt as to the real reason why foreign lobbyists wish to keep our magnificent country tied up and bound down by this agreement it's to give their country an economic edge over the united states that's not going to happen while i'm president i'm sorry so so bjorn he's not going trump's fundamental point here is if you make me choose between dubious climate treaties and agreements and protocols and the american economy i'm going to choose economic growth every single time and he's right about that is he not on your own argument that what we need is economic no he's not saying what you're saying he's not taking the next step and saying we need to invest in innovation but the fundamental point that we need modern growing economies is correct is it not so there's two parts to that point first of all remember that there are many i'm trying very hard to get a man in sweden to endorse donald trump i just want to say yes what happens yes all right let's let's see that experiment unfold uh so partly you need to see growing on economies and we will see that and that's especially true in the in the in the poor part of the world uh again when we talk about this this woman with a baby with uh that's possibly gonna die from uh uh malaria clearly what she need is to be lifted out of poverty and being able to have economic growth will not only give her better health care and better access to food and better education all these things it will also make her more resilient towards climate change so growth and especially for the world's poor is absolutely essential prosperity is one of the ways that you fix climate change this does not mean we should have that we should not have a conversation about saying look we are willing to waste a little or forego a little bit of our growth to have a better environment and one way that you should do that is to recognize global warming is a real problem by spending some resources on actually fixing climate change we will end up better off overall and that's where i think trump is not facing up to this conversation now he's absolutely right for a lot of people because you know uh famously washington post last year uh surveyed people they you know a vast majority of americans even republicans would say global warming is either a serious threat or an existential threat but more than half of them weren't willing to spend 24 a year on global warming which sort of indicates the difference between saying yes in one frame of mind i you know i envision all these right terrible uh dystopian futures on the other hand i envision i actually have to pay my energy bill and i don't want to do that so i think there's a real challenge here and that again underscores when you try to spend thousands of dollars per person per year to fix climate change you're going to fail that's why we need to find a really cheap way bjorn joe biden during the primary campaign he had a plan that called for spending 1.7 trillion dollars on the climate over 10 years and now he's ramped it up just last week as you and i speak here in late july just last week he announced that he would spend two trillion dollars over four years and this is the work of a task force that was chaired by represent representative alexandria ocasio-cortez so two trillion dollars that's 500 billion dollars a year in additional federal spending much of it as far as i can tell and i put this to you if much of it it just looks like political pork spending of jobs programs paying off this interest group the other interest group however there are some teeth in this as well he would outlaw outlaw the use of coal and natural gas to generate electricity within 15 years and then there would be investment so what do you make of the biden plan you've got sort of traditional huge amounts of traditional political pork you've got actual legal teeth beginning to be set into motion and then you do have some of beyond bjorn's sought after yearned for investment what do you make of this well that's exactly right i i actually did a tweet on that first of all it's really really hard to get a cost estimate of what all the different things he wants to spend money on right because they have no idea nobody knows right well but that's i mean and it's not just because you know he's that one politician that's true for pretty much all politicians but a lot of it seemingly will go to build uh or rebuild the interstate highway system which is probably not going to be helpful for the environment but it could be good for other reasons so let me just you know he good for clearly says all right uh well i mean i i think you know when you're driving sorry go ahead few fewer potholes but anyway but uh some of the things that he's proposing we know are bad deals for instance weatherization or uh uh efficiency in houses uh the biggest study from minnesota shows uh of about 40 000 homes shows that you vastly exaggerate how much you're actually going to save so what it turns out is that typically the investment only pays back about half of that in savings so it's just a bad deal don't do that but it's the kind of thing that sounds good but he's also proposing on the other side to spend more on research and development if he does that well that could be a real boon but then there's a lot of stuff in between that i think is probably just not going to work when you talk about uh going uh carbon neutral in the electricity sector in 2035 yeah good luck with that uh that's not what any of the models uh predict certainly there are many other countries who've also said that they want to do this but it's not going to happen because we don't know how to and if you look at the his sort of bigger proposal 2050 the u.s will go net carbon zero we only have one country that has promised to do this that have actually asked an independent assessment of how much is this going to cost us that's new zealand the center left government new zealand asked their own preeminent economic institution to find out how much would that cost them the answer is to go net carbon zero to go net carbons here by 2050. it'll cost them 16 of their gdp so translate it to u.s terms that will cost 5 trillion a year by 2050. that's more than the entire federal budget right now in in today's dollars so just to get a sense of proportion this is not going to happen unless we have much much better technology so i applaud biden for wanting to think about this i worry that he's going to spend a lot of money badly i don't like the fact that trump is only focused on saying we want the economy and so bjorn here's what should happen here's what should happen donald trump should give a full dress environmental speech climate change speech environment speech and he should say simply we know how to address this problem it isn't 500 billion dollars a year it's going to be 30 billion dollars a year or even 50 billion dollars a year one-tenth what joe biden intends to spend and it's going to be on research and development and we are going to use american we will use america's distinctive strengths in the world our technolo our ability to innovate and we will make real progress on the problem and trump will please conservatives such as your friend by saying i'm going to spend one-tenth what biden will spend and he will please my friend bjorn by saying we're going to be serious about this problem at last and that's what he should do have we just not so have we not just established one plank in his campaign you'd be happy with that right i'd love to see that but look again and i know you want to sort of force me to choose between keep pushing and i'm so happy i'm not american so i don't act i can actually opt out of that but i would love either of the candidates to pick up that particular plank this is really about saying let's spend a lot less money but let's spend much smarter and actually do smart stuff actually tackle climate change instead of just you know running around scared and being uh bjorn last question um i know you're very far north you're in sweden but even even there it's getting to be evening the sun is beginning to dip in the sky even in the summer in sweden so here's the last question listen to this quotation from a recent article in uh by journalist john o'sullivan quote a vast international machinery of governments and u.n agencies now exists to promote the strategy of climate mitigation the word you used earlier mitigation which they have successfully transformed into the world's largest secular religion the largest secular religion now here's here's what strikes me about that your book false alarm like all your work and you have been at it for a couple of decades now is relentlessly rational it's also other things it's cheerful it's wonderful to read it's engaging but it is rational and if this if people are willing to listen to the 17 year old greta tunberg bring tears to her eyes and scream and harangue about about a state of affairs that just doesn't exist it's because they're being irrational and that somehow or other this climate change addresses something within people that is not rational that is for want of a better term i don't think it's quite the right term but it may be but john o'sullivan says it's a religious impulse it's some some sense of sin and redemption and the planet is coming after us after all we've done to the planet whatever it is it is not sheerly rational and bjorn will never be able to address climate change in the whole among among in democracies the the the overall democratic impulse unless bjorn himself can somehow or other find a way to address this this sheer impulse what do you make of that well i i think there's a lot of right to this so so fundamentally you know if you get to do something with your life that is about saving the planet that's a lot more fun than getting to say i made sure that the uh you know we ended up spending 30 billion dollars per year on research and development that we still can't see the outcome of instead of 15. i i get that and and this is why it will always be an uphill battle to be more rational but but somehow the fact that everybody or very large number of people are are relatively irrational in this whole space doesn't seem to me to be a good argument for saying all right then let's just throw a throw throw caution to the wind and and just join the the party or or maybe join the party in the opposite way and you know this sort of uh screaming the the opposite sort of things oh this is going to end our economy we're all going to go poorer and and we need to you know stop stop all this un socialism or whatever it is that you'd want to you know make up of of stories i think that most people most of the time are concerned about very very different things which is also why we have the 24 dollars from the washington post uh study you know most people actually you know have to get their kids to school or right now just have to handle them back at home uh you you need to get your uh your job done you need to find out when when is my favorite show on there's lots and lots of other very very uh sort of domestic things you need to take care of and so most people want to hear how do i handle climate change in five minutes it is an easy way in to tell you if you don't do something we're all going to be dead but you know you can do these five easy things and we're all going to survive and that makes you one feel wonderful and honestly you know if people are just willing to settle for that i don't think i have anything else to come with but i think a lot of people are little so really really and to them if you can get more people and you know greta toomberg is a smart girl if she had had the opportunity at her library to also read my book maybe the world would have looked very different so i think fundamentally this is about making sure that people get the information in a readily available way what the u.n climate panel actually tells us yes it is a problem it's not the end of the world let's be smart about it and if we get not 50 because we're not going to be successful enough to to get that but if we get a you know substantial number so let's say 5 or 10 that keeps sort of challenging the end of the world story and say actually that's not the full story is it we will be better at this so we have a saying at the copenhagen consensus we work with a lot of governments around the world especially in developing countries and you know we our our saying is we're all about economic rationality but we don't say we want to get it right we're about making it slightly less wrong if we can make this slightly less wrong i will be very very pleased bjorn lomborg author of false alarm how climate change panic costs us trillions hurts the poor and fails to fix the planet greta that's false alarm by bjorn lomborg go buy a copy bjorn thank you thank you for uncommon knowledge the hoofer institution and fox nation i'm peter robinson you

Channel: Hoover Institution

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Keywords: Uncommon Knowledge, Peter Robinson, Bjorn Lomborg, False Alarm, Climate, Climate Change, Hoover Institution

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Length: 57min 32sec (3452 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 27 2020