Cost-Effective Approaches to Save the Environment, with Bjorn Lomborg

[Music] welcome to uncommon knowledge I'm Peter Robinson Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen consensus center a think-tank dedicated to applying economic analysis including cost-benefit analysis which we'll be talking about quite a lot today to the great issues of the day he is the author of a number of books including his 2001 bestseller The Skeptical environmentalist and his most recent book prioritizing development a cost-benefit analysis of the United Nations sustainable development goals beyond one Borg welcome thank you let's begin with the issue you do all kinds of interesting work and we'll come to some of the other work you do but let's begin with the issue that first brought you to prominence and to what you still devote a lot of time climate change here we have congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez speaking just a couple of weeks ago is that Millennials and people and you know Gen Z and all these folks that come after us are looking up and we're like the world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change and your biggest issue [Applause] your your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it and like this is the war this is our world war two the world will end in ten years and this is the Millennial generations world war two - which Bjorn Lomborg says well it's first of all a wonderful encapsulation of how we really talk about global warming there's this sense the world is gonna come to an end very very soon and so we gotta throw everything in the kitchen sink at this problem now if that was really true if the world was ending in ten years and of course we should throw everything at this problem but that's not what the UN climate panel is telling us actually the UN climate panel tells us global warming is an issue overall and the long run this will be a significant problem for Humanity so a lot of climate economists have spent a long time the Nobel award was just awarded to William Nordhaus the first climate economist ever to get the Nobel Prize and he tells us along with lots of other experts that global warming by the end of the century will cost in the order of two to four percent of global GDP so that means the sort of experience that you will have will be on average that you will be two to four percent less rich by the end of the century than you would otherwise be not less rich than we are now no no less rich than we otherwise would have been and the projections are all for increasing levels so remember we're talking will be three hundred two thousand percent richer in 2100 and then will be two to four percent less right so we might end up being 996 percent less rich actually you have to take it a little more right because it's the percent of that but yes it's a very small percentage of a much much larger number and that of course is why you need to recognize global warming is a problem but it's just simply and by no means the end of the world and now if it's a problem so that's what the UN climate panel very clearly tells us it's a problem if it's a problem there are many many problems in the world and we need to make sure that we fix those problems and way where we spend less resources to fixing them than the negative impact that they have otherwise we're actually throwing away resources and of course resources we could have spent on doing a lot of other good elsewhere and so my real problem with this sort of proposal that she just told us we need to you know spend lots and lots of money remember her her new new green deal Simo seems to indicate that we're going to be spending in the order two point one trillion dollars a year this is the bloomberg a spent and obviously this is a very rough estimate two and A two point one trillion dollars to achieve almost nothing in a hundred years that is typically a bad deal and so my point here is not to say she has her heart in the right place but I want to make sure that we actually do things both for climate now and all the other problems in the world that do the most good and unfortunately that's not it your basic technique here your basic approach is rational an out rational economic analysis cost and benefit we come to that in a moment but I'd like to spend just a moment or two first on you you you took the UN climate panel as an authority okay so what I want to do is elucidate your thinking on climate change just a little bit before we go to cross benefit so on the spectrum of climate change views of climate change over here we have a OC as she's now being called because a lot of people like me have trouble alexandria Ocasio Karthus all right over here the world is ending over here this is I found a quotation by the late Michael Crichton comes from a 2009 book he wrote but it's still the still in my judgment the most forthright skeptical statement you can find this is Michael Crichton we are in the midst of a natural warming trend that began in about 1850 nobody knows how much of the present warming trend might be a natural phenomenon and nobody knows how much of the present warming trend might be man-made the world is ending and we're doing it to ourselves over - nobody really knows anything and where is Bjorn Lomborg in that spectrum well it's always convenient to say I'm sort of in the middle but I would much rather want to say I am where the UN climate panel tells us where we should be look the UN has spent a lot of money in a lot of people's time for what 20 years now looking at what is the ups and downs and in global and you find that body work impressive and generally credited I think generally credible look there's been some issues and and clearly they they don't tell ya they'd they don't do everything equally well they have actually decided not to talk about cost-benefit analysis they did that in their second report and then they basically skipped all of that since then I obviously think that's a big issue but if you look at the Natural Science remember I'm not a natural scientist all right I've talked to a lot of these guys my sense is they tell us pretty much the way it is there is a problem it's it's limited but it's not trivial so it is something we should deal with but it's not the end of the movie just a couple of the usual climate change claims rising sea levels yes you buy that oh yeah absolutely I mean we we have a very very good data sea levels are rising and we're likely to see somewhere between one and three foot of sea level rise by the end of the same at the end of the century all right extreme weather events hurricanes on the Gulf Coast wildfires in California we just had the polar vortex descend from the Arctic to Chicago yeah all attributable to global warming that is a lot more problematic so let me just give you a very short version of this the UN tells us that we don't know about floods we don't know very much about hurricanes and storms so if you look out into the future for instance for hurricanes which is by far the biggest and most damaging impact globally we estimate that they'll probably be slightly fewer hurricanes but they'll probably be stronger so overall you'll probably see somewhat of an increase in the cost of hurricanes it's important again to keep a sense of proportion here right now hurricanes cost the 0.04 percent of GDP by the end of the century this is of whose GDP is that world GDP or discrete America yes and a famous study from 2012 nature magazine which is still the best authority on looking at what happens if you include and exclude global warming they found that by the end of the century because we're gonna be much richer as we talked about just before we are gonna be much more resilient and so we'll actually see less damage that's the simple point of seeing you know when a hurricane hits Florida a lot of stuff gets damaged but it doesn't kill all that many people whereas when a hurricane hits Guatemala a lot of people die and it really impacts their GDP for four years on end so when we get richer they estimate instead of zero points or four percent of GDP as it is today it'll be about 0.01 percent of GDP by the end of the century it'll be somewhat more costly but because we're gonna be much richer it'll actually be a lower percentage okay but yes with global warming because they are estimating that it'll be worse with global warming we actually expect to see a doubling of that amount so we'll see damages of 0.02 percent so two things are true at the same time you will see a decline in actual impacts of hurricanes despite global warming because it will go from 0.04 to Sarah point sir - but it will be bigger than have there been no global warming because they would have been down to zero point so the picture we are not facing a disaster movie no the oceans won't freeze over there was one day after - the day after tomorrow like that still can't figure out how global warming caused the entire world to freeze over but it was a catastrophe and it happened fast and it was frozen what more fun - yeah but so even so to the extent that people are carrying around a mental image as aoc seems to be doing that we are headed into a a Disney ride but an unhappy one instead of a happy one a catastrophe movie if that's just wrong you've got some human kind has always been adjusting to the environment I'm a little colder so I wear a jacket you're a little warmer so you wear a t-shirt so what we have is adjustments that we can make over the course of many many years that's the correct way to think of it yes and a little bit more because you don't let sell a script to Hollywood not in this way no because we are adapted to specific temperature so Atlanta is fine with pretty hot weather and Boston with pretty cold weather but both of these places will be slightly uncomfortable if it either got warmer or colder both places because they built the infrastructure to a particular temperature so it is reasonable to say although we will adapt we will have higher cost when temperatures rise but we need to have a sense of proportion that's what I'm trying the Hurricanes which is by far the worst outcome of extreme weather is a very small part of global GDP of everything we do 0.04 percent globally and the reason why we think it's much much bigger is of course because of the CNN effect that there's always a camera crew there to show you how terrible it is for those people who are involved and it is terrible for them but you just cannot make your decisions on what you see on CNN and say oh that's the entire world there's a lot of stuff that doesn't show up and CNN because it's born God all right let us try not to bore people but this is very strange Bjorn I've never had a man who essentially said I'm here to bore you I'm here to calm you down well because obviously we don't make good decisions if we're scared witless right we're likely to make panicky decisions and indeed that's what we've been doing on global warming for the last 30 years we have been arguing oh my god the world is coming to an end of course remember back we've had a lot of these predictions the first head of the UN's Environmental Protection Agency he came out in 82 and basically said if we don't fit global warming it's gonna be like a nuclear war in 2000 and no it wasn't and we've had lots of those predictions and the point there the reason why they're being made of course is to gather all the good and great and get us moving and do something but the inevitable impact is we feel like we got to do something and then we do something that feels good that looks but doesn't actually have any impact and often is incredibly expensive just as we tape this it would be just a couple of days ago that AOC and Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts rolled out the green New Deal which is a non-binding resolution that calls for a number of quite dramatic items to deal with climate change let me just mention a couple of the main points and hear how you respond here's one the green New Deal it contains a promise to convert quote not making this up quote 100% of the power and the demand in the United States to clean renewable and zero energy sources close quote within ten years good idea as first of all it's not doable and secondly madness even if no could it be phenomenally expensive and again I think because this is clearly motivated by a lot of fear and so going out and say oh it's madness you know I understand where this comes from but I think it's important to real people back and say well if you actually want to do something about global warming let's do proposals that I'll actually work ok so the hands a green new deal first and then we come to the proposals that will actually work because that's you're in lumbergh's job a promise to upgrade quote all existing buildings close quote to meet energy efficiency requirements again I believe that promises to do that within a decade yes and that's even more even possible you know we're talking about 1.3 1.4 trillion dollars per year yeah it's half of the US budget of the statuary budget that's just not gonna happen a promise to expand high-speed rail service so broadly that within a decade most airline travel will be rendered obsolete yeah I can't really see that happening okay but again even if you did that that would actually reduce emissions a lot less because again air travel is a fairly small amount globally it's about three and a half percent it's probably more in the US and I'm not sure what that number is but still yeah it's a fairly small but it's the gilt amount you know it feels wrong to fly and so that's what we're focusing on again I'd like us to focus on the stuff actually work all right so this as to what you believe should reasonably be done you wrote recently of the work of economist William Nordhaus you mentioned a moment ago that he has now received a Nobel Prize the only climate economists ever to receive a Nobel Prize quoting you Bjorn quote his careful work shows that a globally coordinated moderate and rising carbon tax carbon tax could reduce temperatures modestly close quote so that's something that ought to take place the imposition of a globe modest global carbon tax and then ratcheted up gradually yes so I'm gonna complicate this a little further because he's absolutely right almost any economist you ask will say the right way it's a tackle a problem where basically you have a market failure and nobody's paying for an externality then put in a carbon tax if you can do that and remember if you can make it globally coordinated across the century with China India and everybody else then you can actually make this work and you can cut carbon emissions a little bit anyhow well the problem of course is that you you've seen this in the US you know it basically leads to gridlock for ten years yes in many other countries you can't do it if you start doing it as soon as it starts ramping up a little bit you know you get the yellow vests on the street and nobody can do anything in many developing countries have realistic carbon tax would be so expensive that it would be more than the entire intake government intake and of course that won't be possible either so there's a lot of practical problems so it's a neat theoretical point and I think in principle we should try and do it because it probably is effective even if only some countries do it as soon as you don't do stupid stuff like then trying to impose carbon controls at the border which a lot of people misuse to basically break down free trade but the much much better approach to this is to focus on technology and if you'll allow me a sort of diversion if you think back in the 1860s mmm-hmm the world was hunting whales to extinction why because whales has this wonderful oil that burns really brightly and really cleanly lit up most of the US and and the West European homes and our current approach to tackling global warming back then would have been a little bit like could you please turn down that light could you have it a little more dim could you have used the old annoying suiting oil instead and of course you would have had no success what did happen was somebody drill for oil in Pennsylvania and discover oh wait there's a much cheaper even more effective that way that we don't have to go out and hunt whales and we can burn out our homes it's cheaper and it's even brighter let's do that that technological development basically meant we save the whales and we've seen that number of times through human history if you get a technological solution everyone switch if you don't get a technological switch the solution it almost never happens so you know back when when we thought everybody was going to starve to death because we couldn't produce enough food back in the early 1970s early still here at Stanford oh there you go was writing that you know hundreds of millions of people are going to die he was envisioning an us by 2000 which would just have you know 26 million inhabitants about 1/10 of what it actually has another catastrophe movie yeah that argument was not like my mom used to say you know eat your vegetables because you know the poor guys in Africa are starving which of course is nothing like a solution but the real solution was the Green Revolution that we actually found a way for everyone to produce more food and then we avoided this problem so the idea here is again if you can get technology to solve this we know we can reduce emissions dramatically and the US has actually done that you did fracking basically discovering an enormous amount of gas that has cut away a lot of the emissions from coal because gas is cheaper now you didn't do this to try to cut carbon emissions but the ink of the the side effect is that because gasm is about half as much co2 per energy unit you have actually reduced your emissions more than any other country and total amounts yes because you've switched from coal to gas about ten percentage points is unprecedented anywhere in the world it's not because you're particularly environmentally focused but it's because the u.s. found a technology that made gas cheaper than coal so if we could make green energy even cheaper and that of course requires a lot of investment in research and development if we could make green energy cheaper than fossil fuels everyone would switch the Chinese the Indians the u.s. your everyone else not because they were green but because it was cheaper all right I want to come back to that you said a moment ago but first you said a moment ago that congresswoman o kzo o kzo Cortez has her heart in the right place mm-hmm she's speaking Al Gore the climate alarmists speak of a moral imperative and it turns out byung will burn long Bourg I'm Danish does that come naturally to natural to anyone yarn Lumbergh takes moral matters into consideration as well let me quote a recent article you published in Forbes having powered its own development through fossil fuels rich countries now suggest poor countries go without reliable energy sources in the name of the environment but there are 1 billion people in the world still without electricity access it is immoral and rank hypocrisy to leave them in the dark close quote so by defaming in a certain sense the current energy infrastructure and the trajectories of growth toward more electricity in the third world o kzo Cortes Al Gore the others are actually engaging they're not just wrong we can't just say well their hearts are in the right place poor poor dears they're mistaken they're actually saying things and pursuing an agenda which will do poor people harm isn't that your position so arguing that you are going to cut carbon emissions and therefore the poor world also need to stop developing their electricity is absolutely harmful you're right but I think and this may be a difference of us political culture and where I come from what might might my senses that most people actually have really nice people and they want to do good and I think by engaging them in saying look if you were a Oh see yeah you want to do good let me just explain to you why this is a problem for Bangladesh in other countries because they actually want to have more energy let me also explain to you why trying to do this in the US there's a pretty poor use of resources I think it's much more likely I'm not sure she would be convinced but at least a much more likely to pull her a little bit towards thinking about how maybe there are smarter ways to do that rather than saying you're terrible and you're morally wrong and all that but so it is accurate to say that to the extent that her agenda succeeds it's very likely to do actual harm it's not neutral yes it's likely to do all right now the Copenhagen consensus Center does work of all kinds using this fundamental you've which your beautifully demonstrated calm dispassionate rational there's also a certain conversational aspect you want to persuade people and it's cost-benefit analysis so the United Nations that recently your work is has focused on the United Nations the UN has set out a hundred and sixty sustainable development goals or SDGs undernourishment maternal mortality water access and so forth and you note that in 2017 107 146 billion was spent toward those goals which is only a fraction of what would be necessary to get to all 169 to the state where the UN wants them by 2030 a hundred and sixty nine goals that the UN wants us to accomplish by 2030 and Bjorn Lomborg says nobody's spending enough money to do that so the Copenhagen consensus Center engaged in a cost-benefit analysis analysis and discovered what so not surprisingly we we discover it not all goals are equally good the UN as you said I've decided on 169 targets The Economist lampooned that a little bit and call it 169 Commandments and they said there's a reason why Moses came down the mountain with and not a hundred and sixty now you just can't get people to focus a hundred and sixty nine in some sense what the UN did was they promised everything to everyone everywhere all the time which of course makes everyone feel really good but it doesn't help you to decide what should you do first so what we're trying to say is in a real world where you can't do all good things to everyone all the time first let's focus on where you can do the most good what we found was some investments in trying to make the world a better place are just much much more effective so let me give you a few examples free trade is probably the most important single thing for the world and you're smiling you probably like that yes yes I mean fundamentally and I think we've forgotten that and certainly in an era of Trump but also many many other concerns we've forgotten how much free trade can lift people out of poverty so we estimate if we had achieved the Doha round which was the one that we were talking about trying to get through and eventually kind of gave up on have we done that Doha round of of lowering tariffs across the world yes so it's not total free trade but it's freer trade that would on average if you take the World Bank's dynamic models that would on average have made every single person in the developing world about $1,000 richer per person per year in 2030 it would lift a hundred and forty six million people out of poverty it wouldn't fix all problems but it would make most of the world a much better place and of course the simple metaphor isn't you know look at China who 25 years lifted some six hundred and eighty million people out of poverty very much because they integrated them in the global economy so that's one of the things now there are significant costs to that because there's both people who lose out and there's a lot of special interest that you have to pay off but even if you were to do that we find that the benefit cost ratio so the bang for your buck would be in the thousands so you pay a dollar to special interest and you do about a two thousand dollars of social good for the world that's a great investment and we go on with that list there are lots of other things yeah you can a million kids from immunization one of the things in Washington you're talking about right now with the measles epidemic for a million kids we could save their lives every year for about a billion dollars in immunization that was one of the things that Bill Gates said in Davos it's one of those best investments of the 148 billion that was spent toward the 169 goals in 2017 20% was spent toward climate change yes good idea no all right the Copenhagen consensus Center you know even English is proving difficult for me today that's all that's quite a little log jam of consonants there Copenhagen consensus Center got it the Copenhagen consensus Center also has begun doing work for governments you've done work in India you've done work in Bangladesh you've also done work in Haiti we spoke a little bit about this before the cameras started to roll would you briefly explain what you accomplished in Haiti and why you only accomplished what you did it accomplished you know what I mean so I'm sewing someplace with this so so the the issue is when you do this for the world as we've done with the SDGs you basically say this is what should be the priorities for the world and everybody says well that's very interesting but it's not relevant from my country it's probably relevant for Indians or the Indians will say oh for the Chinese or for the South Americans or whatever so it's always somebody else's problem and that's why we want to focus on individual nations and so when we go to Haiti very clearly Haiti has a lot of challenges and they only have a limited amount of money we were actually asked to do this by the Canadians so the Canadian USAID they don't like to be called that so it's the Global Affairs Canada they've spent about a billion dollars in Haiti since the earthquake and they say pretty honestly we can't tell the difference so they wanted to say is there a better way to help Haiti so we went and talked to with everyone in Haiti asked them to come up with what are the best solutions for Haiti so not problems we don't even we know there's lots of problems what are the smart solutions for Haiti they came up with about 800 proposals so we couldn't do analysis and all of them we asked them to sort of rank order and figure what are the very best ones and we ended up with about 70 good proposal for Haiti then we had economists both from Haiti and from abroad do cost-benefit analysis on each one of these 70 proposals and what you basically then get is a menu of choices for Haiti saying this is the best this is the second best this is the third best and so on it basically tells you for every dollar you put in or Gord as it is in in Haiti how much do you do of good and obviously if you can do a lot of good for every dollar you should do that before you proposals where you can only do a little bit so one of the things we found was and everybody in Haiti agrees with us that you should reform the electricity sector Haiti has terribly little electricity if you see there they're on the same island together with the Dominican Republic yes and I saw their their electricity used so you know you see this graph of the x-axis out this way and here's electricity use and it goes up and I couldn't see Haiti and and that was because that was what I thought was the x-axis basically they don't get any electricity yet it cost them 10% of the government revenue to produce virtually no electricity clearly that's a terrible idea we found through a fairly complicated model to actually not have an award by itself that you can show that if you spend a dollar on helping them reform their electricity sector you could do $22 of social good okay no to get I'm yeah I'm going to jump a little bit here you presented them on with an array of wonderful ideas and you got one one idea through which is enriching the flower with vitamins of some capacity so following the physician for children or forever no entire population the beauty of of enriching flower and just like we do with salt here is that everybody ends up taking it now wheat flour not everybody eats at about 40% does but it's only 3 mils so it's very easy to do and you will help avoid about 150 deaths every year and you'll make a quarter of a million people not anemic so you've got one through and it sounds like a splendid one to have gotten through congratulations but what happened to all the others unfortunately Haiti is a very complicated place and there's basically grid and in Haiti about the president is all alone and not listening and that leads to this question in your heart of hearts Haiti is a democracy at least a democracy of sorts the president is popularly elected he all right it's a democracy of a kind do you get impatient with politics do you get impatient with democracy with the world not be better off do you not sometimes in that twilight moment before you fall asleep think to yourself if only and the if only would be if splendid calm dispassionate I can't think of a better word although it's not the right word but technocrats ran the world wouldn't we all be better off aren't you stuck with some terrible in eradicable tension between your approach and democracy hmm no and and I I see where you what you're getting at and obviously I think what we're doing is immensely smart but there's a lot of people out there AOC is one of them she's probably also very smart and a lot of other people and the point of democracy is that we actually have this conversation and make sure that we walk everyone through it and so it's not just you know me or you or a few other people who say yeah that's the right way to go but we actually get everybody on board and so I think what we're trying to do is we give the menu if you will of all the smart choices you can now if you go into a restaurant it's wonderful to know how much you're gonna pay and how much you're gonna get and you'd feel terrible which is the usual menu well you have no idea what you're buying so at least we offer that conversation but you know we would also be the kind of guys who say you know what the spinach is cheap and it's really good for you so you should just eat it but you know if you don't like spinach it'd be really terrible if I was the guy who tell you know that's all you get because it's really cheap and really good so what we do is we help push smart ideas for what we like to say we give tailwind to the good ideas and headword - the bad ones it still means it's a democracy there's gonna be a lot of bad decisions in there but hopefully slightly fewer and that I think is really what the you know the testament of smart technocratic evidence is that you help us do a little better but yeah I'm happy that there's democracy because I think we've found a lot of other places we're having no democracy ends up in a bad way that was I have to grade that answer a-plus I did I didn't think I didn't know I was getting a great card for failing I have my own analysis going on here Bjorn that's good last few questions here you published The Skeptical environmentalist which was your round house attack on climate alarmists in 2001 that means for that for the last 17 years you have been getting attacked by the left and I went on Google just yesterday to check that it's still true and it is still true you're getting walloped from always from the left what keeps you at it again I think it's the same answer look if if nobody stands up for reason and smart arguments we are going to end up in a worse place but again remember what I did with Skeptical environmentalist was not just criticized global warming it was basically criticizing that we get our parties wrong and just to give you a quick sense of this that sort of gets away from this climate madness that everybody is sort of in it's very hard to get a real and straight conversation in global warming look at what we do with air and water pollution air pollution is by far the worst pollutant in the u.s. it kills almost 200,000 people every year it is if you do the EPA cost-benefit analysis it's about 95 percent of benefits from EPA regulation that comes from air pollution yet you spend more money on water pollution which kills virtually zero percent not what drinking water but clean rivers now you know perfect well I would want both I like the fact that I can swim in a river instead of having it catch fire but there's something wrong about the fact that we don't focus on the fact that there's still almost 200,000 Americans die every year because of air pollution why is that not our top priority because it's boring and then we're back to the tongue start of that conversation we focus on the things that are easy to watch on CNN on the news shows but we should be talking a lot more on where can we do the most good so in some sense I totally take that a lot of people criticize me but I think it's important that we have the discussion where can we do the most good both in an environment that's air pollution and on the world and that's on boring things like tuberculosis and contraception free trade and a number of other things this is what I can't quite figure out 17 years of getting whacked around by the left and really you're not a fighter you don't you don't really glory in the fight you want conversations you're and that's because I my sense it was one for scar tissue in your view and then I see none at all when I meet most of these people and and honestly I think that's true both on the right and left most people actually want to do good alright they have clear senses of you know they've and this is possibly mortar in the US and elsewhere you have sort of tricky questions then you know people just go in attack mode and this is the right way and this is the wrong way but it's probably right to you know take a step back and say hey let's just cool off see what we can actually agree on and I think cost-benefit analysis is a useful tool it's not the only thing but it's a useful tool to have smarter conversation to return to a point that you made a moment ago these are the best figures I was able to find if you can if you care to correct them go right ahead but I think they're generally directionally correct since 2005 the United States has reduced its annual greenhouse gas emissions by 760 million metric tons which is as much as all the nations of the European Union put together that is to say and the European Union all those nations have a larger population than we why because as you correctly pointed out free markets lead to technological innovation which produced natural gas which contributes less to green hat per unit of energy produced we've been shifting to natural gas so forth you just laid that out beautifully now I quote I quote Bjorn Lomborg just writing just a couple of weeks ago quote the United States has little or no federal climate policy which is inexcusable quote why is that inexcusable we know what kinds of people you get if you set up climate policy you get people who don't prioritize you get people who become essentially political and produce events that get aired on CNN and make bad choices the United States is doing fine more than fine is you yourself just said so what's inexcusable about that so so you're absolutely right the US has reduced emissions more than the European Union and you've gotten rich off of it unlike the European Union who's burning up money to achieve those carbon cuts wonderful congratulations but also remember this is a little bit of a fluke because you did not do fracking because it was going to cut carbon emissions you might have let me just yeah let me just ahead suggest you an alternative scenario where somebody had discovered an incredibly effective way of getting coal out of the ground so suddenly coal was the mostest option and everyone would know you would have cars running on coal and everything you could easily envision technological development going the other direction so that's why we need to have a conversation about this is still a problem global warming still is a problem and something we need to tackle I am suggesting that the US should be honest that saying we need a carbon sorry we need climate policies but let's have a discussion about how we do it smartly instead of this being left to either people who say we don't need to do anything or the AAA OCS of the world who says we need to throw everything and the kitchen sink your you want lots more resource a research yes in green technologies how do you accomplish that so we've looked a little bit on this so you know the basic government spending and this guess the basic idea is that there's an under investment in all kinds of research and development fundamentally because it's very hard to capture private rights for ideas that are owned again changed the world 20 to 40 years down the line because patents only work for a shorter amount of time and so we know this is true you know both in health research and from suta Cole's many other places but it's this specially Troon energy because we spend very very little in energy and there's potentially huge benefits for mankind so I'm marking we should be spending a lot less in what we're spending right now on our climate promises but spending much more smartly on investing in research and development so that is basically instead of buying a lot of Solyndra switch is a bad idea as we found out invest it in researchers who can then actually come up with the next technology warmer greener more federal money in this country would be more federal not as basic research but why not why not tweak patent law why not just change it why not make it easier to capture those private rights would that work because if you're if you're at Exxon you're going to exist or at least you hope you're going to exist in 20 or 30 years your corporation your shareholders will be around to reap the value right yes but the problem is as I understand it and there's a lot of economists of work but it's more of a theoretical argument of saying if you invent something that then is going to lead to another invention that eventually will lead to the invention of that power the rest of the world for the rest of chambers so it's hard to get that yes so you need a lot of the basic research you should not be spending money on Solyndra building stuff that's stupid but you should be spending money on researchers coming up with smart ideas that will eventually power the world and the point is that's very very cheap nuclear research absolutely should do both okay you know absolutely no allergic reactions that phrase no no no we should definitely do you know fourth generation nuclear they they claim that that will be incredibly cheap and incredibly safe and I'm looking so much forward to that but yeah that was what they told us about the other three generations and I want to you know see that come true first likewise with fusion you know the kind of idea that essentially could power all of humanity but it's apparently always 30 years away so we want to actually invest in those things but we also want to invest in better solar panels better integration better batteries all these kinds of things that potentially and remember when you do this most of this is going to fail but that's exactly the nature of R&D and whatever it was just one of them will come through push back a little bit just a little bit actually even pushing back is just wanted to elucidate your thinking a little bit more on nuclear because it's my understanding that everybody every every energy scientist agrees that the intent the cost benefit the the reward from nuclear energy per per gov per unit of cost is incomparably greater than solar wind anything else you cared India the intensity the yes efficiency of nuclear energy so it's simply incomparable oh if you look at space I mean nuclear yeah it uses very little space on the planet unlike solar wind which needs vast amounts it has it's much more concentrated but in a certain sense what we care about is the cost so the dollars that we're going to put in and because nuclear power plants most of the places if you do if you don't look at France have been considered these arts of work so you do one nuclear power plant and you build it up and you build it up from the ground it becomes incredibly expensive it goes over a budget then you have a very poor kiss what you need is a lot of you know serialization basically okay so the Chinese I don't know whether this is still the plan but a couple of years ago there was some announcement that they intended to plan to build a hundred nuclear plants and your immediate reaction to that is I I haven't actually heard that so that could be a good idea but again I I definitely think it's a great idea for dependence yeah yes but but the fundamental point is what we need to get is the next generation of technology that's both getting much cheaper and much safer so does that we'll have a second the second I don't know the details here but I was talking to a venture capitalist in the energy sector who said that right now there are about two dozen not publicized but about two dozen nuclear startups of one kind or another that are being funded including the Gates Foundation is funding some of them and this is free market the technology has changed dramatically the reactors would be much much smaller we understand what to do with waste and so and your immediate reaction to that is wonderful got it yeah and again it's important to remember there are lots of smart people out there working constantly you know people will come and tell me these soul pals pay for themselves I'm like wonderful yeah we want more solar panels they'll pay for themselves or more windmills or more a nuclear power plant the point and the challenge is not all the stuff that pays for itself the problem is that they'll still be 90 95% of the stuff that doesn't pay for itself unless we find the technological solution that's the challenge okay so your view would be more basic research and a lot of that has to be funded if not all of it by the federal government plus startup culture oh let's Silicon Valley rip absolutely and maybe the day will be more effective the problem the point is we don't know that yet and so it's a prudent investment to spend so we're suggesting you know say 30 billion dollars for the US for research and development annually annually and a hundred billion across the world so that would be a much more effective we actually estimated that every dollar spent will avoid about 11 dollars of climate damage so it's a good deal it's not one of the best things to do in the world but it's a very good idea all right last quotation from Michael Crichton I'm very partial to this again it's the book came out it's a state of fear it's 2009 book but it's such a beautifully written statement let me just try this on you learn to see what you do with it there are many reasons to switch from forth to switch away from fossil fuels and we will do so in the next century without legislation financial incentives carbon conservation programs or the interminable yammering of fear mongers so far as I know nobody had to ban horse transport in the early 20th century close quote the markets the markets are much more important than even then even then well-intentioned even then properly prioritized government action and Bjorn responds so there's definitely a partial truth again markets do a lot of things wonderfully and that's of course why they have provided so many benefits for us but because there's an externality in global warming it's unreasonable to expect that the markets automatically will do this they may with fracking it just may happen to be that the technology which also brings lot of wealth so a lot of people happens to cut carbon emissions but it was not its intent and that's why we can't just rely on luck on this area so we really need to have a conversation about how do we do it either with a carbon tax which is what most economists will tell you or through a directed investment in research and development that will basically make this inevitable so I'm basically saying let's try and invest in better transportation now obviously if I was making this argument in 1900 I'd be too late because Ford was already there but if I've done it in 1850 it probably would have been a good idea because maybe we would get a Ford ten years earlier alright last question listen for just a moment to Han Solo the actor Harrison Ford and this is a video that he recorded for something called the world government summit which will be taking place this winter in the United Arab Emirates which I note produces three and a half million barrels of oil a day Harrison Ford what does living in a four degrees warmer world look like fresh water shortages higher greenhouse gas emissions unprecedented fires worldwide destruction is this the world we want our planet the only home we've got is suffering and Bjorn Lomborg says actually I was about to say what do you say to Harrison Ford forget about Harrison Ford what do you say to all the Millennials who look at this actor whom they've seen in all the star war movies and say wow he's really with it that's really cool well first of all you probably shouldn't take your science advice from any any actor no matter how good he is but I think it's more important if you notice what we saw on those on those clips it was a turtle in oil it was a turtle with plastic around it it was very simple things that we do know are actual issues and we have to a very large extent fix so you know oil oil spills dramatically down because we've done something about it but the the issue here is to recognize yes if we don't do something about climate change the world will be worse than other would be that was what we started out those conversation is two to four percent worse but we have to be careful that we don't do policies that will end up costing five ten fifteen percent of that GDP and only solve a slight part of this problem which is what a lot of people are suggesting so let's make sure we make smart policies and not policies that will actually cost more than the original ailment they were trying to prevent that's really the conversation we need and we can only have that with cost-benefit Bjorn Lomborg president of the Copenhagen consensus Center thank you thank you for uncommon knowledge and the Hoover Institution I'm Peter Robinson [Music] you

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 229,681

Keywords: Climate Change, Environment, Skeptical Environmentalist, Climate Economy, Bjorn Lomborg, Copenhagen Consensus Center, Green New Deal, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, UN Climate Report

Id: 5QyXduteiWE

Length: 48min 44sec (2924 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 04 2019