Bjorn Lomborg | Don't waste trillions on BAD Climate Policy

and I should stress the Bjorn has never been is or will be a so called climate denier he firmly believes in the climate science and recognizes humans impact on our environment and he has even a time supported a carbon price he is insured a highly qualified original thinker with a flair for evidence-based public policy has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals on environmental climate and development issues he believes that governments would be better off spending resources tackling diseases such as AIDS or malaria or problems such as malnutrition or pollution rather than very expensive and highly dubiously effective climate mitigation strategies a serious thinker environmentalists him Flannery told the ABCs Tony Jones that Bjorn Lomborg message was of quote deep concern ladies and gentlemen please welcome Bjorn Lomborg thank you thank you very much what I would love to talk to you about is really how do we think smarter about climate but also and I'll get back to that towards the end what are all the other challenges that we need to remember because well Glo boring is one problem but it's not the only one and we need to start having that conversation about where can we actually spend our resources and help the world the most but most of the talk I'll simply talk about climate change so look global Waring it's real it's man-made let's just get that out of the way this is a real issue but the problem is it's often vastly exaggerated so let me just give you a few of those conversations that we often hear we hear that this is going to be the end of civilization so this is the un secretary-general Gutierrez who basically told us we're all gonna die because of global warming the world is facing a grave climate emergency every week brings new climate related devastation floods droughts heat waves notice the punctuation wildfires super storms and then he says we're in a battle for our lives climate change is the biggest threat to the global economy almost all of these statements are wrong they're certainly dramatically misleading and I'll show you a few of those it's not that he's Rami look he is a politician but it's much more that we are purposely scaring our kids and we're making a lot of bad and very costly decisions based on the scare so it matters whether we're getting it right or not yes global warming is real these kinds of claims are mostly wrong so for instance when people tell you there's more and more droughts let's just remember that is not what we see globally when you look at the global drought from 1902 till today or the latest numbers that we have it's actually been slightly declining the area that has been in drought not increasing now again this does not mean that there's no problem but it does mean when you point out some places that are getting more drought and then saying see global warming you're ignoring even more places that are out of drought now that doesn't help the people who are in drought but certainly you can't make the argument that sequel boring is making more drought if there's actually less drought in the world that's of course why the u.s. climate change science program under Obama told us that droughts have for the most part become shorter less frequent and cover a smaller portion of the US over the last century this is not at all what we hear right likewise the UN climate panel the so-called IPCC tells us there's low confidence in a global scale observed trend in drought we just don't know so when people tell you drought is getting worse and it's because of global that's just not correct it's not the same thing as saying that there's not getting more drought some places but there's also getting less other places and globally we can't actually say that we can see any impact from humans now in the future the UN climate panel tells us that there's medium confidence that droughts will intensify in some seasons and areas overall low confidence elsewhere so what they're basically telling us is with very high emissions we will probably see some more droughts and we'll get back to that because of course we're going to talk about bush fires as well but the basic point here is to say unlike what you hear it's not the end of the world actually we cannot even tell if global warming right now is reducing or increasing drought but what we can say is probably in the long run if we don't do anything we will see more droughts so there's a sliver of a basis but of course when good or arrows come on say it's drought everywhere we're not actually being well informed same thing about floods so if you look at floods and again I gotta apologize I mostly use American data because we've much better data for the US but if you look at what the UN climate panel says about flood there continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and or frequency of floods on a global scale over the instrumental record noted very long and very complicated and and don't ever read the whole UN report it's like this all the way through but the main point is look there is no there they don't even know the sign of trend they don't know if it's getting worse or less bad but certainly that's not what you hear from the average news conference what you do here is whenever there's a drought a flood sorry see global warming when there's not a flood you don't hear about it so again we're not being very well informed so if you look for instance at the cost of u.s. flooding since 1903 which is the first data that we have you would imagine that floods are getting worse and worse than that we're seeing more and more damage actually if you take it in percent of GDP and of course you have to do that because if there's twice as much in the country the same kind of drought the flood will cost twice as much damage now there's twice as many houses are there twice as expensive so if you take it in percent of GDP you see a very different outcome you see actually a dramatic decline in the cost and we believe that that's probably also true elsewhere we certainly also know this for Australia we have much shorter data for that but fundamentally what you see here is yes there will continue to be floods but there's actually less damage not more damage and this is something that we see globally and across the world in many different ways and I'll show you a few more of these but again flooding yes we do expect that in the long run there might be more flooding we have not seen it now and actually the damage impact is lower not higher if you look at hurricanes which are obviously is one of the things that a lot of people have been talking about with global warming if you remember Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth actually had hurricane coming out of the smokestack that was a picture very very a very powerful picture but also not very correct the UN climate panel again tells us globally there's low confidence and attribution of changes in tropical cyclone activity which is what they curl our canes to human influence again if you look at the landfalling hurricanes for the US which is what we have by far the best describe we have very very good records back to 1900 because it's very hard to ignore a hurricane that actually arrives to land whereas of course hurricanes out in the sea that never touched land we're much more likely to discover today because we have satellites we have lots of ships compared to earlier time so there's a severe underreporting of the past but we don't believe that that's the case for landfalling hurricanes and unlike I think what most people think we've actually seen a declining number of landfalling hurricanes in the US over that period and that's also true for major hurricanes so the category 3 or more again here at the point and again I should just emphasize this is not a significant but the point is it's not increasing again you hear one story but the facts are actually very different this again does not mean that we don't expect that there will be stronger hurricanes towards the end of the century because of global warming we think there'll be fewer but stronger hurricanes overall that will be more of a problem but it is not what we've seen up till now again when you look at Wi-Fi as it's called globally or what you call bushfire it's not such that bushfire is getting worse and worse around the world actually we know very well that most of history that is since 1870 we've seen declining levels of fire activity around the world why is that it's because we have more agriculture we have better fire practices and fundamentally we stopped using fire right remember a hundred notes don't remember a hundred years ago but you know a hundred years ago we had you know the home was pretty much defined by the place where we had the fire we had fire in our kitchens we had fire in our living rooms because that was how we kept warm we have taken away fire from our everyday lives put it into power stations or into our cars but in little sparks we've taken it away and that's why there's a lot less fire in the landscape so actually what we see is a declining level not an increasing level of wildfire around the world we certainly know this over the instrumental record there's no sorry over the satellite record we have lots of studies this is just one from NASA that shows that the amount of area burnt in the world has declined dramatically not increased over the satellite area but certainly when we talk about wildfire in Australia it has been one hell of a bushfire season so clearly there's been the sense surely this must be tremendously different and I was actually quite surprised that nobody seems to have done the numbers so I tried to look at what do we know about bushfire in in Australia what we do actually have good data for Australia back from 1900 so as you can see all the all the references that are out here but I'm just going to show you the data so again if we look at the historical data about eleven percent or so of Australia Bert every year from 1900 to 1950 since then it's declined significantly so by late nineteen 1990s it was down below eight percent and what has happened since and we know very well because we have good satellite data and that's why you know these are decayed 'el estimates and now they get a lot more jumpy because obviously every year is going to be different this is the satellite record over Australia again nobody disputes this so basically we've gone from about 8% in the satellite area era just before the millennium down to today is less than 6% so we've seen a declining level certainly over the last 120 years not something that most people hear but you would imagine this season was very different right if you were to put it somewhere I bet that most people would say this season must be up here again or something right no there has been a lot of fire in New South Wales there's been a lot of fire in Victoria that's important because that's where a lot of the value of Australia's so clearly this has been very damaging it's also incidentally where a lot of cameras are so a lot of people have had a chance to see this but the global warming argument is that if temperatures rise we're gonna see more fire and I'll show you that in just a second that is true but it assumes that pretty much all areas except for tropical savanna will increase in burn area but that's not what we've seen if we take the amount of burnt area and I'm using the Guardian so they abused and as for all of Australia they don't have the estimate of prescribed burns so had I've increased the the guardian's number with the of prescribed burns that are typically taking place and then also of course the season is not done but we do know from satellite measures how much of this part of the season that has already happened is a part of the total season so I've increased that number again this is what we would likely see the full season being right it's a little less than 4% again this does not mean that the current bush fires were not terrible they were terrible there was a tragedy in so many ways but this is not alarming in the sense that oh my god this is this is simply an indication of yes it was terrible where they happen and we should try and make a good argument of how we get rid of bush fires especially where people live one way of doing that of course is prescribed burns and many other things and other way is to say people probably shouldn't be living out where there's a lot of bush fire so again there are many ways you can do that but you need to recognize that this season has not in any way been exceptional let me show you the last bit so this is one study but you know a very respected study of what is going to happen with bush fire over this century so back until 2100 this is the simulation so this is the climate model indicating that we're gonna see increasing burn over the century this is because of gold warming this is the problem that we're talking back here today so right now we're about 5.3 percent over here and this model estimate that by the end of the century because of global warming that we didn't tackle very well we will be at 6% that's a real issue that's a zero point seven percent increase every year on average that is an issue that's something we should confront and something we should talk about but we should also get a set to proportion first of all notice how this climate model and many others don't see any real impact before the 2000 32,000 40s so that's only where you can really tell this is actually what's global warming so when people come out and tell you global warming right now that's just not right first of all it didn't burn nearly as much it didn't burn all the places should it just burn in Victoria and New South Wales absolutely it burned a lot but that is not what the models would tell us it would tell us it should have burned everywhere except tropical savanna so again we need to get a sense of proportion the other point of course is to say what would climate policies have done how much could we have changed this if for instance say Australia had gone carbon neutral imagine if you guys had actually cut down all your fossil fuel emissions not and not a car anywhere not a power plant anywhere not any very much food a lot of what we were doing here today would be impossible but imagine if you'd actually done it if you done this that no other country on earth has managed to do imagine you've done it already in 2012 when the first carbon tax was proposed imagine you were the country that had led the world cut all carbon emissions in 2012 you'd cut it also in 2013 2014 up to 2020 2021 2022 all the way to 2100 a lot of years lots of Africa it would have a huge cost but you'd really have done something for the climate what would have been the impact on the area burn I actually tried to do this but I can't because you can't see it I can't make the graph I can't make this thin enough so you could actually see it but let me just tell you right now we expect that we'll get 6% by the end of the century if Australia had gone carbon neutral in 2012 and every year since the biggest achievement of any nation ever anywhere instead of 6% you would have reached by 2100 5.99 7% congratulations you have just spent an enormous amount of resources to achieve absolutely nothing that's not the way I think to honor the people who perished and who have had terrible tragedies from the bush fires this year we are not likely to honor them well by saying we want to help them by making incredibly expensive policies that will have absolutely no impact next year absolutely no impact in the decade absolutely no impact by 2050 oh and absolutely no impact in 100 years that seems like almost the opposite of trying to honor them so I would argue if we want to have this conversation we need to know this we need to have the facts and we need to have this conversation look global Waring's real but many of the things you hear are dramatically exaggerated so why is it we get it so wrong on global warming I would argue to very large success it's because we missed adaptation so look how many people die every year from global warming with good data for this I'm gonna show you how many people die every year over the last 100 years if you look at and if you listen to the media debate you'd imagine that this graph would be going like this right more and more people at I actually you'd be phenomenally wrong this is what has happened with climate deaths so floods droughts storms wildfire and extreme temperatures since the 1920s have dropped from about half a million people every year to now around 18,000 people over the last hundred years we have seen a civilization that has gone from half a million people die every year to 18,000 every year that's a reduction of 96% remember at the same time we've quadrupled global population so what actually happen is per person we've reduced risks by 99% this is almost nothing or nothing to do with climate this is everything to do with the fact that we've become much richer much better able to climate and other problems but this also shows that this is not the end of the world with when Gutierrez is telling us oh no we're all gonna die no that's actually not what the data tells us fewer and fewer people are gonna die this does not mean that if we tackle global warming maybe even fewer people would die that's a good point we can still do good with climate but this is not an existential crisis that we're battling our way out of let me show you another graph this is an obvious argument of saying as temperatures rise sea levels again rise a sea levels rise more people are going to get flooded that sounds pretty simple and that's certainly what a lot of people say let's just look at the facts right now or actually in 2000 these are models because we don't actually have good evidence for this for for globally there's very very hard to get the right numbers so these are based on nine different models they're all international periods so these are the best numbers that we have we estimate that about 3.4 million people get flooded every year it has a cost of 11 billion I should just say all these numbers are US dollars we also have a cost of about 13 billion dollars of di't cost and that means the total cost of global flooding is zero point zero five percent of GDP that's a problem remember that means it's also a very small part of global economy what will happen in a world where we have worst-case warming the highest population and the highest GDP growth in that worst-case world of warming if we don't do anything what will happen well not surprisingly as temperatures rise and the sea level rise we're gonna see more and more people being drowned almost right we'll have a hundred and eighty seven million people flooded this number was brandished in Washington Post and Wall Street Journal and pretty much all papers around the world as oh my god a hundred and eighty seven million people are gonna die of course they're not actually gonna die they'll need to move but still yeah you'll be very very silly to be standing there for 80 years and watch you the waves lap up over your feet and say whoo if I don't move in 80 years I'm gonna but if we have this no adaptation 187 million people are gonna get flooded this will cost us 55 trillion dollars every year that's a huge cost we'll be paying 24 trillion billion dollars and die costs that means the total cost because we'll be much richer by 2100 is 5.3 percent of GDP that's a huge cost but what is the one thing that's really really unrealistic it is that ever more rich countries decide to say so sea levels are rising yep but we're not gonna change our dikes we're not gonna do anything about that no no no I know it's all flood and I know you all hate it but there you are we're not going to do anything about it we're not going to adapt of course we're gonna adapt I mean Holland did this a hundred years ago right we know how to adapt to sea level rise we know how to do that almost everywhere if we assume that all nations are instead going to do what it's economically efficient adaptation here's what's happening oh I'm sorry you can't see it but basically we're gonna get to almost nothing so as much richer countries by 2100 are going to see sea levels we will have 15,000 people being flooded every year not a hundred and eighty seven million people I'll give you one guess as to which one of these made the headlines it was 187 and this happens all the time this is a model that has been replicated many many times it always gives to the 187 million and it's been brandished at least since 2011 you always hear the hundred and eighty seven million you never hear that the realistic outcome there's 15,000 now there will be higher costs absolutely mostly because we actually have a lot more stuff to get damaged there will be much higher dike costs because we actually have to keep increasing we have to repair them much more but notice the total cost of GDP will go down not up we today spend zero point zero five percent of our GDP in 2100 with worst case warming we're actually going to be spending less not more how's that possible it is because when you're richer you're much better able to deal with problems not all kinds of problems but also flooding that's the simple point and we keep forgetting this this is of course why if you ask what's the total global cost of climate damages we only have good numbers since 1990 it's not that they're going up it's that they're going down it used to be that costs we are about 0.26 percent of GDP now it's down to 0.18 percent of GDP I don't think any of us feel that this is what we hear in the newspapers today again or this year again climate costs went down that's not what we hear but that's what the facts tell us again we need to understand that we're being told one part of the equation oh my god it cost this many billions yes it did but we were all so much richer and actually in total we saw less damage not more why is it then that we don't just say why maybe be honest right maybe gold boring it's not that big of a problem but still it yeah that's a sizable issue why don't we just get rid of fossil fuels well remember that we don't burn fossil fuels - anyway Al Gore right we do it because it basically powers everything we like about civilization so look at this this is the history of renewables and in a very quick version right in 1800 we got 94 percent of all energy from renewables the next hundred and 70 years we spent getting rid of renewables because they're they're hard to use and they're certainly very very diffuse we basically tried to get to the Industrial Revolution the last 50 years we've stayed pretty much at 13 to 14 percent of renewables almost all of this is poor world using dung and cardboard and wood inside their homes which kills them immensely we're still today at 14% if you look at the projections I'll first show you the International Energy Agency if we do everything we promised in Paris we will now get it up to about 20% more realistically we'll probably get to about 16 and a half 17% and if we look at the UN scenarios that go all the way up to 2100 they find even in the most optimistic scenario the greenest the most sustainable scenario we will still only get 45 percent of our energy from renewables by the end of the century so just notice this from 1950 to 2050 it's likely that we had a higher proportion of energy from renewables in 1950 that will get even by 2050 and certainly it is true that most of what Europe being told that will go renewable by 2030 or 2050 it's just simply wishful thinking Jim Hansen the guy who's who started the whole global warming worrying in 1988 when he testified in front of Al Gore's Congress he's also algos climate adviser he put it very memorably I say I think when he said that people who believe that we're likely to be able to swiftly go to renewables either in China US and Europe or anywhere in the world are doing a little bit like believing in the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny just not gonna happen and that's important to recognize why because it is very very costly and that's of course why we are likely to see that not only will climate cost but climate policy will also cost that's why we need to start talking about so what should we actually do well this is from the UN climate panel report and this has been updated by Nordhaus who who is the only economists in the world - gotten the Nobel Prize in climate economics these are all the studies out here is the temperature increase so Sarah - for up to 10 degrees and here is the impact on the global economy so basically these all studies the bigger circles are better studies if you will new a study typically and this is what north house estimate the best regression through here so this is what he expects so a four degree temperature rise will cost about 3 percent of GDP loss this is a problem by no means the end of the world he also actually adds 25 percent because it's unlikely that we have estimated all as all negative impacts so this is actually what I'm going to be showing you when we do the cost-benefit analysis for climate policies so he has already looked at this we know what the cost is this is why when good or Eris come out and say this could be the most dangerous thing for the global economy know by the end of the century we're likely to see three three and a half percent damages that's certainly something we'd like to avoid but we've got to ask how much will climate policies cost so this is Nordhaus again the world's only climate economist who got the Nobel Prize this is his model but there's lots of other models that essentially show about the same so if we don't do anything we'll likely by the end of the century to see 4.1 degree temperature rise how much will that cost well his policy shows that it's about a hundred and forty trillion dollars this is actually the average of the cost of the next five centuries so the 140 trillion dollars if we get to 3.75 degrees it'll cost a little less if we get to three degrees two point five degrees actually he finds that we can't get to two degrees it's just physically impossible but that hasn't stopped the the the politicians from promising but let's just get to the very lowest that he believes he you can get to point 15 degrees obviously the lowest damage impact which is just forty trillion dollars so this is the picture that we're typically being presented with not new nearly as clearly but but but certainly if we don't do anything lots of cost if we do something much lower cost this would seem to indicate we should just go for lowest or I mean clearly this is better than this it's not really rocket science right let's get the lowest cost because this is obviously preferable but it forgets that there's also a cost to the policy so let me just show you the climate policy cost now I'm first going to show you what's the cost of the no policy oh nothing right there's obviously no policy cost if we don't do anything if we do a little bit if we go for the 3.75 and remember this is assuming that all nations slightly incompetently that's what we've seen in the past try to do the best policies to get to 3.75 then the cost is about I can't really see that I know that that's 2025 trillion dollars right three degrees so it's about a hundred trillion dollars two point five degrees it's a little more than two hundred and fifty trillion dollars and if you go for the lowest one it cost three hundred and fifty trillion dollars the point is you have to pay both you both have to pay the cost from climate we have to do that but you also have to pay the cost for the climate policy so you have to add the two so here all right the cost that I just showed you these are the climate costs but then we have to add the climate policy cost on the first one we add zero in the next one we add the twenty on the third one we add the hundred and then we add more and more what is the best climate policy here yes it's this one right the 3.75 this is what you got the Nobel Prize for it maybe you don't have to do more than this and then you get a Nobel Prize right there's a little bit more stuff behind us right but the fundamental point here is this is not rocket science why is it we can't have this as our conversation on what should we be doing the fundamental point here is to say you both have to pay the cost of actual policies and you have to pay the cost of climate you have to pay both let's make sure we leave the world with the least cost that turns out to be three point seventy five degrees that is a lot less ambitious than what most climate activists will tell you they will say we should go for this but that's because they only think about the climate cost what we need to get into the conversation is what is the realistic climate policy cost as well so if I'll just show you this in a different way this is the total welfare of the world over the next five centuries only economists do that right but you know if you want to buy the the 21st 22nd 23rd 24th and 25th century you have to pay about four thousand five hundred trillion dollars so any takers but anyway so this is this is just assembly for to make this very clear most of this is going to go to welfare if we don't do anything up here no policy we'll have a climate and climate policy loss of 3% this is the 3% that didn't go for human welfare part of it was well all of it sorry was from climate loss we had more hurricanes we had worse weather in many ways it cost us about three percent of our GDP that's a big problem but still we had 97 percent left over it if we do the smart policy that's this one we can actually achieve 2.6 percent of climate and climate policy laws that means we have ninety 7.4 percent left over for humanity and as you can see down here we have more and more loss here and less and less welfare this I think is the most important point if we do climate right we can actually add Sarah point four percent of global welfare to humanity over the next my deck centuries I want to be part of that movement that make sure we leave an extra 0.4% to humanity that's great but if we do this badly we can easily end up costing humanity 5% or more the reality here is we can do a little good and we can do a lot of bad let's make sure we're not the guys who ended up doing a lot of bad but did a little good that's what we need to do and that's what he basically tells us in Nordhaus how do you do that so fundamentally the policies that we've tried to do so far don't work for a lot of different reasons so yeah the Paris agreement done almost nothing it's very costly notice the UNF triple C so the guys who actually organized the Paris agreement they say that the total impact of the Paris agreement is to cut 60 3.5 Giga tons of co2 by 2030 for most people this means absolutely nothing but if you translate it into temperature it's the equivalent of reducing temperature by the end of the century by 0.02 9 degrees centigrade so instead of seeing 4.1 degrees we're gonna see an amazing reduction down to four point zero seven one degrees congratulations world so when people tell you the Paris agreement is this magnificent creature that will safeguard all of humanity no it's not it'll do a trainee trivial bit by the end of the century and the cost will be somewhere between one and two trillion dollars a year we estimate that every dollar spent on climate on the Paris agreement will avoid about 11 cents of climate damage that's a poor way of spending resources spending a dollar and only doing 11 cents of good if we do Paris for the rest of the century it will reduce temperatures by the end of the century by 0.17 degrees and it will cost us somewhere between 60 and 120 trillion dollars in cost also we're not doing anything the UN ap the environmental program from the US actually and very surprisingly called the 2010s a decade lost they told us that the emissions that they have seen over the 2010s look almost exactly the level of emissions projected for 2020 under the business-as-usual or no policy scenario so basically we can't tell the difference between the scenario where nobody did anything and reality that should make us pause a little bit so we have tried for three decades to make climate policy and we've managed to do virtually nothing if i will just show you very quickly up here these are some of the policies that we can do the EU 2020 policy is one of the best studied policies that's what Europe has promised to do by 2020 the total cost there's about 400 billion dollars a year u.s. billion dollars it'll have virtually no impact we estimate the total benefit will be about three cents back on every dollar the Paris agreement as I just mentioned will deliver eleven dollars back on the dollar the smart global carbon tax and that was what Tom mentioned before a smart global carbon tax can actually do good now it's gonna be very hard to implement but it can actually reduce temperatures a little bit as we saw it can get us back to about three point seventy five degrees and it can actually do some good it can give us back that zero-point-four percentage point of global GDP but it will also cost us a lot so let's absolutely make sure we do this but let's make clear this is not what's going to solve global warming however what will solve global warming is innovation we've actually done studies that show if you focus on innovation you can get much much more for less money why is that because if we could innovate down new green energy to be cheaper than fossil fuels it is soft global warming if we could make green energy that was cheaper than fossil fuels everyone would switch not just rich well-meaning Australians or everyone else in the rich world but everyone Chinese Indians every else would switch so if we invest a lot more in innovation that would both be much cheaper than the current approach and it would be much more effective this is the way that we can actually fix climate change I have a whole other bit on what are the smart things for the world but I think I'm over time a marina so I should probably just stop here so fundamentally look global Waring is real but you're often being sold it's a lot worse and we actually don't have good data for that and you're being told that the way to fix for instance bushfires and many other things is by cutting carbon emissions it'll actually probably be one of the least effective ways to help the future if we want to do smart absolutely let's have a carbon tax by far invest in green energy R&D because we know that that is the way that we can actually solve global warming but also let's just remember the best outcome we can get for global warming is that we managed to make humanity's 0.4 percent richer over the next five centuries that's good but if we don't get it right we can end up making five or even more percent less well off that's terrible so we really have to be careful and we are not right now on climate change and I think that's why we need to have this conversation I'm really happy you're here so I'm looking very much forward to having this conversation with you thank you okay we'll take some questions very thank you we'll take some questions very soon but look I just want to talk about that graph that was astonishing about the bush fires in Australia since the early 1900's because the overwhelming conventional wisdom in the media has been that the scope and the intensity of these bush fires were started in Queensland in September we relatively early ripping through Victorian New South Wales in December in January these and of course we had the smoky towns and especially Sydney and in Melbourne these were unprecedented and it's not a view you'll just hear at the Guardian and the ABC in the city Morning Herald but also the Financial Review why they wrong well so they're not wrong in that they're unprecedented certainly for New South Wales as I understand it's never burnt more in recorded history and in Victoria it's a long time ago since it burnt this much so they're unprecedented in some ways they're certainly dangerous because they've happened where a lot of people live so they're different but again if you want to paint paint this as a climate issue you have to accept that the climate models tell us that almost all vegetation shapes not the tropical savanna up in the north and I've also done the same numbers and the show the same thing if you sorry but fundamentally it has burned a lot less in many other places this doesn't matter so much for humans because it's mostly not burnt where nobody's there so nobody really cares whether it burns or not but it matters if you're gonna paint this as global warming and of course the real point here is to say even if you did a lot of climate policy you'd have almost no impact and you're not alone here sea ice is bringing out Johan Norberg the distinguished Swedish intellectual later this year and he's makes the point that among other things that we had just as many extreme weather events in the past but more people died from those extreme weather events than they do today and if you look at these fires terrible as they are 40 50 people it's still a significant drop-off from the bush fires ten years ago in Victoria Ash Wednesday 1983 but look the Prime Minister's feeling the heat no pun intended this is what Phil curry says in the Financial Review the Prime Minister no longer talks about climate change being one of many factors including droughts which are contributing to the severity and duration of the fire season Mr Morrison now claims clearly the fires are a product of climate change and no longer claims droughts to be an unrelated factor curry goes on to say in mapping a path driven by technology and market forces towards clean and reliable energy or line morrison said we cannot continue to rely on sweating old coal-fired power plants and stations and that the slightly cleaner gas must be the transition fuel until really clean sources of energy are reliable enough your Lomborg well so there's a number of things going on here again we're all being told that this is the line that you have to toe you have to say more fires are because of global warming and if you don't say that you're gonna get criticized endlessly I totally understand why you'd want to say as a politician all right okay and we're actually doing something about it but the fundamental fact remains that we cannot see the impact from global warming on fires now actually a very influential review that was just published like three months ago across all fire knowledge says in Australia we won't be able to tell that there is an impact from global warming before the 2030 so 2040s we're not there yet and so that's not what the science tell us also even if you do cut you'll have virtually no impact I think I I would imagine that it's a good idea to do some of the things that the Prime Minister says because remember the impact of cutting carbon emissions is not just uncut ingush fire in Australia it has a lot of other beneficial impacts that's why we should try to aim for 3.75 degrees but it is not the arguments that he was making certainly not the argument that we're making to the Australian people telling look if we cut carbon emissions we're all gonna be fine and there's gonna be no bushfire that's just simply wrong to make that argument in and quite frankly dangerous and we should stress that one of the reasons why he won the 2019 election was that he carried Queensland and one of the reasons why carried Queensland was on this very issue of coal now your central argument has long been that why spend so much tax dollars on fighting global warming when there are more pressing problems around the old that we should be focused on many climate scientists say that the worst effects of climate change are likely to be in Asia and Africa especially among the poorer people how would you respond to that well that's absolutely true look global warming harms the poor the most actually most problems harm the poor the most so clearly global warming will harm the poor the most for for a number of different reasons but also typically because poor live where it's already pretty down hot so if it gets worse hotter it will actually be an extra stressor but again the question is how do you actually help people who are suffering from many different things but mostly from poverty do you help them by cutting carbon emissions so do you help them by getting them out of poverty and the simple answer is you help them so much more getting out of poverty so I don't know if you guys remember there was a hurricane back in 2000 2013 and high on in the Philippines it happened just when there is a big UN climate meeting so a lot of people said see we got to do something for these poor people in the Philippines we got to stop using our card cutter cut tanto carbon emission there's something phenomenally absurd about saying I'm gonna help those poor people in the Philippines I'm gonna not drive my car tomorrow that's really gonna help them no it's not if you want to help them these people live under corrugated roofs and terrible conditions if you help them get out of poverty not only would have immense benefits for their health and their poverty and their kids education too many of the things but they'd also become much more resilient and much more able to handle the Hurricanes that have always traveled over that path now they may be slightly stronger in a hundred years but if they're also 20 or 30 or 40 times richer they will be much more thankful that you actually helped them escape but your critics would respond and say that global warming will hurt the broader effort to to produce sustainable development you had a piece in The New York Times a few years ago and it was titled cheap fossil fuels for the poor this was in The New York Times sponse ran a letter from a climate scientist saying quote the path to global development on which providing energy access to all as a critical step is incalculably longer and steeper in a world where climate change goes unchecked the increased frequency of storms floods heat waves and other effects of climate change will fundamentally undermine our efforts to promote sustainable economic growth doesn't that contradict your argument what certainly does that's why he wrote it so so there's there's a number of things here we have to remember one is that that a lot of people will sort of assume that the alternative is that we actually managed to do everything you know all the most well-meaning people say I just showed you that for the last 30 years for the last three decades people have claimed this is the biggest problem in the world we should do everything ad and we have not seen any change the UN can't tell the difference between what we promised sorry a world where we didn't do anything and the current world so we're not actually fixing global warming I'm suggesting something that would actually fix global warming but much more smartly because it's much cheaper and much more likely to be effective but the second thing is so a lot of people well-meaning people in the first world will tell us no no you got a transition to solar people we actually did a study for Bangladesh when we were doing when we're advising the Bangladeshi government look this is very poor country and they have lots of lack of energy access so they're thinking about producing putting up a lot more coal-fired power plants if they do that it will cost about half a billion dollars in climate damages that's real those are real costs but it will also generate this is models from from from UC Berkeley it'll generate benefits worth about two hundred and fifty billion dollars it'll actually make every Bangladeshi and about 16 percent richer by 2030 do you think they want that yes they definitely want that and there's something incredibly hypocritical almost colonialist about saying I'm sorry you have to forego this this incredible benefit to avoid this rather small climate problem now how corded that after we've done the study he basically told Sheikh Hasina who's the prime minister of Bangladesh he told you can't build those those power plants she said she did but she basically said what are you gonna do we want to lift our people out of poverty are you gonna tell them that they can't come out of poverty so the fundamental point here is to recognize do we want to make people poor but slightly it less badly off in 2100 or do we want to make them much much better off make their kids much better off have much better opportunities in almost any ways and also fix climate change but smartly I would argue the latter and I think most people seem to be suggesting no we should go down the path of the former yeah Bjorn in late 2015 on the eve of the Paris climate talks I debated a lady named Naomi Klein a climate enthusiast from Canada at the Opera House and her argument was we need to get rid of capitalism to decarbonize the global economy and my point and of course you have the audience in the palm of a hand and I made the point that if you do that you're going to really hurt efforts by developing nations leaders to reduce poverty and grow their economy and the cheapest way of doing that for the foreseeable future is on the back of carbon energy you know I got really booed for that but that's essentially your argument but your critics would come back to you and say Tim Flannery for example he told him Tony Jones from the ABCs Lateline that if we want to divert dollars away from programs to help the poor why why do it on climate change we want to do it say for the military this was Flannery's argument oh and I'm all for that try and convince Trump tube to reduce the military budget absolutely I'd love to see that but it doesn't take away from the fact that military budgets are not normally seen I actually think Americans think that but that's not true it's not normally seen as a way to do good in the world right you don't have an Australian military because you want to help the world you have an Australian military because you want to help Australia just like you have a lot of hospitals in Australia because you want to help Australians you have a lot of spending in Australia for Australians and Americans for Americans and veins for Danes and so on but then we have some money that we spend on trying to do good for the world business development money it's also climate money remember any ton cut here in Australia will not mostly help Australians it'll help everyone else it's mostly a do good effort you're trying to say look we're gonna take some cost here in Australia but we'll deliver some benefits in terms of less climate damage in the in the future for the world so I think Tim plan is very wrong and he knows this because we talk about it doesn't mean he won't say it again but you know fundamentally it is not the correct comparison to say oh you should take the money from military of course yeah if you can't brilliant but the point is we're spending money on trying to help the world with climate with peacekeeping forces with you know a research into obscure tropical diseases and with our development aid these as money that we spend ostensibly to try to make the world a better place I want to ask why don't we spend it where it would do the most good rather than where I kept on you know the the international business climate does appear to be changing the World Bank and others are moving public finance away from coal-fired power although it must be stressed that the china-led Asian infrastructure and investment bank is supporting coal-fired power plants particularly in Southeast Asia big investors meanwhile are highlight are highlighting their exit from coal and the EU is considering a carbon border tax on countries such as Australia if we don't have a pricing mechanism put in place so given all of that does that put you on the backfoot well being right doesn't put it means that there's certainly a big strong argument against being smart we seem to have decided no let's just be idiots and climate and hey I mean if we want to do that that's you know that's our democratic right and this conversation and many others like this is simply about trying to say could we be a little less dumb about this so when you say for instance we've got to stop funding coal-fired power plants sure the best way to do that is to make other technologies cheaper if solar was cheaper than than coal and look for India some places it is and they will be buying more solar but to the extent that that coal is still much cheaper for many places it's really really hard to tell these people to say no I'm sorry you can't have that you got to go with the more expensive and less reliable approach so my point is not to say I'm first of all I don't own shares in any coal companies and I we don't take money from fossil fuel companies but fundamentally the point is we need to get to a world where it is much cheaper to use renewables or a green energy of some sort rather than a world where we tell people you can't use what is cheapest and so this is why we need we come back to saying we need to focus on innovation rather than just what about the inside the European Union's ploy to impose a carbon board attacks on countries that don't conform to their expect to Brussels expectations yeah tie for the Ameri how would a Donald Trump respond to that I mean they're out there unintended consequences I'm not sure I'd be morally pure on punishing countries that don't toe Brussels policy there there is an argument sorry again I I support just like oh sorry I'll go like Nordhaus the Nobel laureate that a climate tak carbon tax can be a smart way to allocate resources away you know fundamentally there's an externality that is not priced in a carbon tax can do that and if you argue this smartly you can actually also use the trade tool to get more buy-in globally however the benefit that you obtain is very small and the risk that you essentially throw the baby out with bathwater is very very high that you end up stalling free trade instead free trade to remember lifts many many more people out of poverty helps the world incredibly much more and the kinds of things that they use proposing while technically and very very well done could potentially be good is likely to you can very easily imagine some French farmers saying didn't they actually put a little more co2 in that and you know basically saying could you raise the tax so they're not gonna compete with us and every way is not because French farm is particularly bad everybody would like to do this so essentially that it's going to be used to do to reduce free trade and hence make the world a lot less rich that would be terrible so I think there's a real risk that'll end up being much worse than its good what about international agreements you mentioned Rio 1992 code oh yeah in 97 which did not include the developing countries Copenhagen in 2009 which completely failed kevin rudd memorably blamed those rats if is from China and then of course 2015 though the Paris climate change Accords Barack Obama the president said there are historic breakthrough Thomas Friedman the Pulitzer prize-winning columnist from the New York Times said they were a big big deal your argument is that Paris has failed why when it was an international agreement that consisted of the developing countries so it's a it's an agreement where basically we asked everyone to come up and say what do you want to promise and then we stable all of those promises get and say yay success and that's you know it's better than nothing but there's two things first of all it doesn't it'll cost a lot mostly because a lot of rich countries are made absurdly expensive a hundred billion dollars a year for the developing country from 2020 onwards for example sorry sorry my estimates is that will end up costing about one to two trillion dollars or not that wasn't this one of the commitments yes sorry yes we've also promised I don't know if you remember we promised all the developing countries to give them a hundred billion dollars a year by 2020 that's now and of course nobody has a hundred billion dollars so we don't quite know how to do that and and that's one of the reasons why the last climate meeting Madrid was pretty much a failure and it's also why the Glasgow meeting that will have my sample this year is likely to be a family a lot of countries obviously not surprisingly if you know if you're if you're a Ghana some other African country to a large extent you've signed up to this because you were hoping to get a big part of the hundred billion dollars so I would sign up to that if somebody promised to give me a significant part of one hundred does anyone do know but anyway but but but the reality of course is when they realize that they're not gonna get it a lot of people are gonna step out so fundamentally Paris is a very ineffective treaty that will cost a lot and deliver very little and remember also most countries are not actually living up to it so Grantham Institute which is a very very climate focused Institute they actually did an analysis of all the 158 countries that have legally signed up to Paris and they found that only 17 countries are so far actually living up to it and remember those 17 are not you know the US and Australian and the EU or something it's like places like Samoa and Algeria and other countries didn't actually promise very much this is not legally binding enforceable verifiable no okay now it's time for Q&A and I first questioned Emily comes from Doug bandow Doug is our CIS scholar in residence for this year 2020 he's a senior fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington which is like a sister think-tank of cis and he's a former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan Doug yeah and these are extraordinarily powerful intellectual arguments that you offer but the political climate obviously looks very different I mean the evidence you presented is many ways politicians don't seem to be doing a lot of the stupids really stupid stuff but they aren't doing the smart stuff that it's very hard to get movement have you found government's agencies interest groups who are interested in these arguments willing to push them forward and if to help promote them are there folks out there who appreciate them and are using them yeah so we have a saying at the coab Megan consensus so we work to basically further good policy in the world and we say it's not about getting it right it's about getting it slightly less right so if you can push the world to do slightly less stupid things that's a success and so on climate I think that's exactly what we have to do right now as you also pointed out the overall and overwhelming trend is to say let's make even more absurd promises even though we're not keeping the ones that we've already made and that seems to be going on for quite a while so no we're not making inroads remember I I basically showed you what the world's only climate economist that's also Nobel Lord has shown and nobody's listening to him because that's also an inconvenient point right so so fundamentally no it's really really hard to get through on this however there's two things we need to remember one is the world is actually doing the four point one degree temperature right to basically do nothing so we're not actually seeing this amazing amount of work yes the EU is cutting carbon emissions and they have actually caught it but remember much of that they've just outsourced to China and elsewhere so the fundamental point here is we're taking a lot of the cost but we're getting none of the benefits the second part is as things get more and more costly so for instance the EU it's expected we have like Australian some of the most expensive electricity prices they expect it to quadruple by 2030 if we keep all our promises now at some point poor drooping very very high electricity prices lead to a breaking point where people say no no I'm not gonna take that that's what we saw with the yellow vest in France right remember that was a 13 cents increase in gasoline prices so at some point unfortunately way too late we will actually get the feedback that oh wait making more and more beautiful promises actually have real-life cost and not small cost I just want to mention one thing I don't know if you if you know New Zealand your neighbor promised to go carbon neutral by 2050 much to their credit they actually asked the New Zealand Institute for Economic Research the leading institution in news to cost that promise and they found and this is the official estimate they found that this would cost every year by 2050 16 percent of New Zealand's GDP 16 percent I think I think this is not reference nearly enough in a Thomas a 6 to 16 percent over the century New Zealand will spend 5 trillion US dollars for this promise in lost GDP and notice the benefit that they will concede confer in the world by the end of the century will be that temperatures will be for one thousandth of a degree lower so the temperature that we expected on January 1st 2100 will now only occur on January 23 2100 I'll get a Christian very soon but falling home from that how do you account for Great Britain success in reducing its emissions dramatically so so a lot of people point out look Britain has done a lot and they've totally caught their coal fire power and and a lot of people believe that that's because of renewables it's actually mostly not it's because they've D industrialised and it's because they've dramatically hiked electricity and other energy prices so demand has dropped dramatically both because of the industrialization and because most people who are not rich can't afford it so you know if you make people sufficiently poor they'll stop using all that great energy and and then you can live up to your your promises but it doesn't make for a good nation rate it doesn't make for a good life next question yeah there's plenty of disagreement out there about the effect of carbon dioxide as you know to increase temperatures by one degree level of carbon dioxide has to increase by a hundred percent from where we are now say 400 to 1600s at four parts per million per year it's going to take three hundred years for the temperature to increased by two degrees and these people are talking about the temperature increasing by whatever was 3.7 but by the end of this century I mean there's there's there's something wrong there yes so sorry again I'm a social scientist so I simply take the UN climate panel reports I use their climate models one of them is the magic model which is the one that I use co-funded by the US EPA and many others so so I can't get into a very long conversation it sounds to me that what you're talking about is only the impact on carbon dioxide and remember there's a three times increase because of water vapor but again I'm not a climate scientist so I simply take what they say forgiving what I'm talking about is given that if they tell us the truth I think they do what are the impact of us both costly as in what will that cost on our human societies and our infrastructure and on our environment and what will policies to reduce that carbon emissions cost us so this is much more sort of what are the economic part of this conversation and I think that's an important part too and that's the one that we've finished this gentleman's question I mean the IPCC models in the nineteen nineties were way out linking the higher temperatures with the higher levels of emissions emissions have gone up but the temperatures haven't gone up as fast the the IPC were in the high end yes and part of it was also because they expected that we weren't gonna fix the ozone hole which actually is a very very powerful greenhouse gas so next question yes I think that leads on from what you're just saying I mean I have to ask what faith can we place in these models went on the strength of them 30 years ago we were told that the Maldives would be underwater by now and the paths and James Hansen who started this scare back in 1988 Al Gore's advisor exactly said that by now parts of New York would be underwater last time I looked it isn't yep I have to say and and the models have predicted much then has been actually observed so far so if they can't predict the existing climate what faith can we place in them to predict a climate but might exist or might not exist 80 years from now yes so there's actually there's a good article published very recently and nature that tried to estimate how well has these models done and what they find is actually they've done a lot better than you'd think i we can quibble about that and I'd like to get into that but I think the real point and it's true that I don't know whether Hansen he certainly said the New York thing I don't think Hansen did the mole dives things but a lot of people have been arguing that the mall dyes will disappear under the waves because sea levels will rise that only shows that you should listen to climate scientists when they talk about what are the model impact in 100 years but you should not listen to them when they tell you so what is the impact on them all dice they clearly have no idea they probably have a visitor or if they have they haven't done their study there is a lot of studies on what happens in Pacific Islands and of course the reality is that most of these very small islands will also grow as you see more storms so actually there's been there's been studies where we have very bad data so it depends on when you have it so typically people have done surveys with the first aerial surveys of these islands so we've looked at Tuvalu and Micronesia and and not all of them but most of the of the islands Mull dives several others so they've looked at how much land was back in whenever the first flights were that yeah so 46 years ago and how much land is there now and the surprising thing is all of these islands have grown in size not decreased why is that well because they're living things right they live on a core of reef as storms come in they break through some of the dead coral and that coral accumulates on the island now there is an important thing so it'll grow on this on the place where the wind grows in but it'll actually sink away because of sea level rise on the other side so the islands move slowly that's also why you eventually will see these atolls they'll end up being a circle because they'll grow out what's so you will get a change but you're actually a more land not less there will be a problem because the guy who lived on the on the disappearing side will have to move you know many hundred meters so that that is a that is a problem but it's not the end of the world so again we need I don't know if you saw Time magazine actually had good or Aris the UN secretary-general on to Levu where he was you know standing an emu knee-high in water and Hebrew and a perfectly good suit for no good reason right he was basically saying look they're all gonna drown but the facts are very different so I think we should give the climate researchers should be part of the input because they give us the parameters but then we need to ask social scientists and people who have actually studied the impacts what will happen when smart people deal with these kinds of impacts that was what I tried to show you before with the sea level rise no with a meter sea level rise which is on the very high end is not going to make a hundred eighty seven million people disappear it's gonna make fifteen thousand people suffer flooding every year that's a very different thing and that comes from acts we'll look around for another question and while we're finding someone I want to skewer on about Australia briefly this is the Financial Review Australia has led the world and taking up wind and rooftop solar panels we have emerged as the world's biggest exporter of LNG liquefied natural gas and of course the transition the gases helped reduce emissions add to this Australia's met our Kyoto targets and we're on track to meet our Paris climate Accords according to the government given all that how do you count for this widespread view you often hear in Australia that Australia is somehow way behind the rest of the world on climate change action I think it's because climate change increasingly has become about making totally unrealistic promises you know so who can make the most ridiculous promise III I've you've probably seen this right but when people start talking about going carbon-neutral you were so like alright then you can't really go further but of course you can you can go carbon- right so there's there's not there's never seemingly an end to what you can promise and the beautiful thing about climate changes you can promise to save the world later right so basically you get to be the politician who will say I want to save the world in 2050 I'm sorry I'm not gonna be here it's not gonna be my problem I'm not gonna be financing this but I'd like you to vote for me and applaud for me and of course that's a very very you know charming impact so in some sense you could argue that the reason why Australia is being the bad boy is because you're the guys who actually say we're only going to promise what we can do whereas a lot of other countries seemingly want to say we're gonna promise what we you know the highest number we can think of okay next question on the slide directly behind you the climate policy that would work the best is innovation does innovation include nuclear power yes so the short short version remember nuclear is not dangerous I mean if you look at cross all the different energy forms by far the most dangerous is coal fire power coal fire kills a lot of people mostly through very very simple air pollution nuclear kills very very few people we pretty much know how to deal with long term damage for the long-term storage of waste the problem with nuclear is it's still very expensive and unfortunately it's getting more and more expensive remember we remember back in the 1960s people were 50s they were talking about how nuclear would be too cheap to meter and that of course would have been a wonderful outcome but unfortunately costs went up and the new power stations that are being built are typically vastly expensive you know so the Hinkley C in the UK has seen you know incredible price rises in a way uncompetitive there's just no way you can concede the curve batch of nuclear power to be anything that anyone would really want however there's a lot of people working on fourth generation nuclear so these are basically the next generation of nuclear that promises to be much more safe and much much cheaper now I would love that to be the case we should definitely invest in research on all of these different areas I think there's a lot of promising opportunities but I do want to point out the other three generations also told us they were going to be incredibly safe and very very cheap and that didn't turn out so you know it could be one of the solutions the beauty of investing in green energy R&D is that you can afford to invest in pretty much everything because research and development is very very cheap we're supporting existing ineffective technology which is what we almost invariably do when we put up more of the same solar panels and more of the same wind turbines as expensive right now we spend about a hundred this year will spend 141 billion dollars globally on Rison on subsidies for inefficient solar and wind that's a bad deal this year also will spend about 16 billion dollars on research on all green energy forms that's that's backwards what we should be spending is about a hundred billion dollars but on green energy research and development because we just need that one technology and maybe it could be you know the next generation nuclear power to imagine if we could make Green a nuclear fourth generation nuclear cost one cent per kilowatt hour not only would we fix global warming for everyone but it also be an amazing achievement to get a lot of cheap power to everyone on the planet it would be an amazing achievement for Humanity but we're not there yet we need to invest in the next question okay well what do you think about do you think you're gonna destroy the coal industry or are they gonna get what John Howard's chief scientist said 30 years ago $3 for carbon capture and storage so fundamentally coal is going to disappear when we have cheaper alternatives and the u.s. is a great example of that actually you could argue that the King revolution that you saw in the u.s. starting in 2009 or 10 dramatically changed the world in a way that real good climate policy should do it made gas much cheaper than coal and it basically out-compete it somewhere between 10 and 20 percentage points of coal that is how you do it make coal uncompetitive because you have a much better technology not because you have a more subsidized technology but I have a much better technology the US has been leading the world in cutting carbon emissions it's actually cut more carbon emissions than any other nation in this is a very important point to bear in mind because President Trump cups a lot of criticism for pulling the United States out of the Paris Accords your point is that US emissions are coming down under his presidency thanks to the shale fracking revolution not because it was because technology again their point here is this is not a partisan conversation this is about being smart and hopefully that's not a you know a Republican or Democrat trait where it should be about us all finding the smart ways forward right so if we could get China fracking we would get a lot of climate benefits very very quickly if we could get similar kind of breakthroughs but not from coal to gas but from gas to none zero carbon emissions we would have fixed like a final question but the data that you have shown us so far I would like to know what makes a climate model reliable and how can you convince fence sitters or people who are so uncertain that climate change is a real issue that the evidence is strong and we need to do something yes so I think there's a number of different steps to this so as we talked about before if you look at the climate models that we've done back from 1970s and 80s if you actually adjust them to the inputs that were you know so the actual emissions they have done pretty well they have not been amazing but they've done pretty well and I certainly think we can use them as a way to sort of guide what we be doing but I think crucially and that's what that's the argument that I've been trying to do tonight that you can't just have this conversation as if climate scientist is the only word on this point partly because they just talk about the climate system but the climate system interfaces with people the interfaces with our economy and that's where the real damage is going to happen so you also gotta look at the the impact on the economy of course you also need to know something about the wall dies so you need a lot of other information so we got to get away from this conversation where we only listen to climate scientists because they will tell you here's a problem the right way to fix it is to cut carbon emissions if we lived in a world where that had no other cost that would be right but we don't live in that well we live in a world where it has real cost to cut carbon and actually the impact for climate change are much lower than you would normally think because we adapt and so you need to look at the real estimates from both sides both the climate system and the economic system that's what William Nordhaus has done that's what he got the Nobel Prize from and again just so you don't think that this is just one crazy guy right I mean he got the Nobel Prize he's probably not totally crazy but a lot of people have been doing this work and a lot of people don't know it they didn't get the Nobel Prize but the fundamental point here is lots of people have done a lot of these models and they all show pretty much the same you should do something but not too much because if you do a little you can actually make the world better if you do a lot which is what a lot of well-meaning people will say if they don't think too hard they will say we should do everything we should cut everything you forget that there will also be real cost to cutting carbon emissions and those costs will be much much bigger and that's why there's a real risk that we can get that 0.4 percent benefit if we do it really smartly but we can very easily end up making the world about 5% worse off but the fundamental plan now what I want you to take away I don't know you want to wrap up is just to remember that no much how badly how well we do this global warming is not going to be the major part of the world that was the point of yeah the ninety ninety seven percent of the world is going to be about happy children getting education getting good health care being able to go on vacations doing all kinds of other stuff that's the welfare that matters this is simply a question about do we do a little good or a lot of bad I personally think we should do a little good [Music] you

Channel: Centre for Independent Studies

Views: 228,020

Rating: 4.7091951 out of 5

Keywords: Centre for Independent Studies, CIS, climate change, dont' waste trillions, Bjorn, Lomborg, Climate, disaster, Lies, Truth, Waste, Skeptical, Environmentalist, global, warming, policy, research, Tom, Switzer, renewable, energy, bad climate policy, global warming conspiracy, climate change lies, wasting money climate change, waste of money, false claims climate change, tackle climate change smartly, climate change conspiracy, global warming lies

Id: otsJno55J0g

Length: 81min 18sec (4878 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 24 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/drcopus]

Is this the anti-EV guy?

Edit: yeah here is his PragerU video 🙄

Here is a good refutation of some of Lomborg's views

[u/Vegan-bandit]

Without watching this video, my general thoughts on him are: I disagree with him on some things and agree on other things. He deserves some of the criticism he gets, but a lot of his good ideas are dismissed out of hand because he apparently doesn't believe in climate change (I don't think that's true anyway).

[u/dtarias]

I think he's largely accurate about climate change (it's real and human-caused, but there are more important causes to address), and the donations of most effective altruists suggest that they agree with him. He embodies a lot of EA ideals, but I'm not sure he's a good poster child for the movement: he's controversial, and I'd rather have us be thought of an pro-malaria nets than anti-fighting climate change. But if someone likes him, they should definitely consider joining the EA movement!

[u/LoveAndPeaceAlways]

I read his book Global Crises, Global Solutions and it argued that when you look purely at the cost per life saved then climate change is not the most effective cause.

[u/MperorM]

Bjørn Lomborg's institute Copenhagen Consensus center produces high quality research on many areas of global poverty and how to effectively alleviate it. I'm always surprised their research is more well known in the ea-movement. That said, I know some of the ea-institutions that work on global poverty know them very well.

Bjørn Lomborg's opinions on climate change is a very healthy viewpoint. It's good to have someone who reminds you to think about cost-effectiveness, even when it comes to climate.

That said, I have two large reservations about his views on climate:

1. It bases largely off economic analyses such as Nordhaus' that use discounting rates I think are too high.

2. Climate change has a fat right tail. We don't really know what will happen after 4 degrees. The models Bjørn Lomborg base his views off, skip over the extreme scenarios too lightly. I think we should place most of our worry on these extreme scenarios.

Unfortunately I don't know Bjørn, so I can't ask him these questions. My guess is he would be sympathetic to this critique, so I wouldn't discount all of his views based on this.

[u/anewhopeforchange]

just watched it. that was awesome!

[u/JohnSmithDogFace]

Is the guy at the start his official ass kisser?

[u/eumemics]

so the reason I'm feeling a bit suspicious of his motives here is that I'm not hearing him say "stop spending trillions on advertisements" even though that industry is clearly and completely wasteful. nor is he saying "stop spending billions on ice cream, cancer research, military and gold." just to name a few industries that are also not bringing much welfare to the world and could be better spent elsewhere.

my second point is that carbon tax (which I'm certainly in favor of) hurts the poor much more than the rich, I wonder what is EA's stance on that.

any thoughts?

[u/paradigmarson]

Anyone genuinely critical of contemporary ideology is not a good poster child. :P Quickly, hide him!