Keeping Your Cool on the Climate Debate 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 we'll be hearing more about that i'm sure to the great issues of the day he's the author of a number of books including his 2001 bestseller the skeptical environmentalist bjorn lomborg's latest book published just last year false alarm how climate change panic costs us trillions hurts the poor and fails to fix the planet today the biden administration has promised to place climate at the very center of all its deliberations bjorn lomborg will tell us how the administration is doing bjorn welcome back peter it's great to be back you're in sweden i am yes so virtually virtu yes and i'm in i'm in california so we are i think that's pretty much we're on opposite sides of the planet right now or at least yeah well all right one third or so yeah two quotations here's this is from the biden plan which is a campaign document that laid out joe biden's climate agenda and it's best i can tell the administration now that he's in office they're they're sticking to this quite closely quote from coastal towns to rural farms to urban centers climate change poses an existential threat close quote bjorn lomborg writing recently in the new york post quote biden's climate alarmism is almost entirely wrong close quote bjorn will come to the details in just a moment but opening explanation here climate doesn't pose an existential threat no look climate change is a real problem and it is something we should fix but we also need to get get a sense of proportion here and if you tell people this could be the end of the world for you and your loved ones and everybody else on the planet which is essentially what the existential threat means you are telling people they should spend everything and the kitchen sink on fixing this problem and not really bother about anything else before we've gotten this problem fixed on the other hand if you look at the gold standard you might say of climate science which is the u.n climate panel and the many many climate economists who have spent three decades or more trying to estimate what's the total problem of global warming they said in their 2014 report that the impact of global warming by the 2070s about 50 years from now half a century from now would be equivalent to each one of us losing somewhere between 0.2 and 2 of our income remember by then the u.n estimate that each one of us will be much richer on the medium uh impact probably about 350 as rich as we are today so instead of being 350 as rich in 50 years we will only be 336 as rich now that's a problem because we could have been even richer but it's certainly not the end of the world and that's why we need to have this conversation if we think it's the end of the world we'll spend everything if we realize it's one problem among many we will start prioritizing just like we do with all other problems yes we should spend smartly we should not spend the whole pot on this problem listen i want to come you being you i want to hear what we should be doing but first a couple of segments if we if i could in which i just want to present the biden plan and hear your critique of the biden plan but i promise i reserve a poor a large portion of this conversation to to to the lomborg plan but we'll come to that second if you don't mind so first the premises of the biden plan again again a couple of quotations this one again i take directly from the biden plan a campaign document top climate experts have all concluded that human activities are estimated to have caused an approximate 1 degree centigrade rise in the earth's global temperature to date that's already happened quotation number two president biden's special presidential envoy for climate john kerry quote the scientists told us three years ago that we had 12 years to avert the worst consequences of climate crisis we are now three years gone so we have nine years left close quote the premise here is that there exists a clearly defined irrefutable scientific consensus which extends not just to how bad the problem is not just to what has already happened but to the amount of time left to fix it this is clear it's well known by anyone with a mind open to the science true or false well i'd like to explain a little more than just uh so you know fundamentally binding is right we we expect about a one degree uh temperature rise since the industrial revolution and it is likely that much of that is because of global warming so absolutely uh global warming is real and it's man-made and it's causing quite a big part probably not all of it but a large part of the one degree uh centigrade rise all right that bit of the premise correct yes all right but then we come to uh and and i saw this on on on cbs when uh uh when john kerry made that statement and remember it's the very same statement as aoc said back in 2018 when it first came out we heard that we only have 12 years left and we got to do everything if we're going to fix this and so we really can't be bothered about anything else that's the one that john kerry then three years later so now we only have uh nine years that's an incredible misrepresentation of what the un has actually done so back in uh actually a little before 2018 the un was asked to produce a report that would tell us how do we get to the 1.5 degrees centigrade which is 2.7 degrees fahrenheit uh it sounds better in celsius so let's just go and go along with that 1.5 degrees centigrade how do you get to that and what they've told us was that's going to be incredibly hard that's almost impossible so if you want i just want how do we get how do we lower the temperature by one point so when you say i see all right so what they're expecting is if we don't do anything we'll way overshoot we'll get up to about seven degrees fahrenheit or almost four degrees uh celsius but if we're going to really cut a lot not just in the u.s not just in the rich world but across the world we can possibly just keep it to 1.5 degrees that's basically the the idea over how much time 1.5 degrees if it's 1.5 degrees uh so so there's a lot of conversation about can you just jump over a little bit and then get down below it's it's hard to know uh but let's say we try to keep it below 1.5 degrees for all time so we really have a very very small margin uh to deal with because we're already about one uh a little bit more than one degree so what they say is if you're going to do that it will require immense effort it will be almost impossible so what they said was you have to do an enormous amount by 2030. that was how the 12-year time schedule came up and that's how carrie is talking about the nine-year time schedule so he's right in that very technical sense if you want to do something that's almost impossible you have to do pretty much everything even vastly vastly expensive stuff but remember that's true for everything everything you know if you want to build a bridge to china or to europe it's going to be fantastically expensive and engineers of course can tell you how to do that but they will probably also sort of in the psa but it's not a very good idea it's fantastically expensive or at least climate economists will do the same thing and they've done that for the 1.5 degree uh target and it's fantastically expensive and will not achieve anything like the benefits compared to the cost that we're going to enter into so that's why kerry is simply saying if we want to do this almost impossible thing we have to do everything now but the real question the democratic question is do we want to do everything possible to get below 1.5 degrees because remember 1.5 degrees climate change is not the only challenge facing humanity as i think everybody has realized with covet so we've got to ask ourselves how much do we want to spend on climate compared to all the other problems then we're back to the conversation we just had before if you think this is the end of the world yeah you're going to spend everything on climate if you realize it's one of many problems you're going to apportion a part of your budget to climate you're going to apportion it a lot of other things just to recap the un did not say we have 12 years until we all die in a giant ball of fire and they've actually been out saying that very explicitly afterwards because they they feel very very misunderstood on that point okay the un said if you want to do something that's nearly impossible and probably unwise in the first place then we probably have 12 years in which to do it yeah but let's talk that's what they really said okay second premise that i want to address here again a few quotations from the biden plan the trump administration allowed america to fall behind in the clean energy race for the future the trump administration abdicated leadership president trump recklessly threw away hard-won progress president trump reversed america's progress on climate change all those quotations come from the biden plan against that i did the best i could as a layman of limited intellectual scope i did the best i could to try to figure out what actually happened during the four years of trump and as best i can work it out greenhouse gas emissions in the united states fell by about nine percent now a lot of that is because of the economic slowdown during the pandemic but even if you remove that it looks as though because of the increase in natural gas during trump pre-pandemic greenhouse gas emissions were beginning were slightly down as best i can tell so what's the what's the premise that everything everything trump did was a catastrophe we're behind because of him and yet as best i can tell that's just not so how do you evaluate that premise so i think we need to recognize that climate and doing something about climate is immensely long-term impacts so virtually nothing that biden will do the next four years will have a significant measurable impact on on certainly on temperatures but probably even on emissions and likewise anything trump did was not really going to matter much in those four years while he was uh when he was president remember the fall that you talked about and that is real there has been a decline in in emissions uh certainly in the last decade for the u.s it's actually been the biggest decline of any nation in the world you're also very big so that's part of the reason right but that's because you got fracking and remember fracking was not at all intended to cut carbon emissions it was intended to make you know energy cheap in the u.s but a side effect was that gas became a lot cheaper than coal because gas emits about half as much co2 as coal a lot of coal-fired power stations went out of business a lot switched to gas powered production and that's why we've seen a dramatic decline it happened both on obama's watch and on trump's watch and it's really not the benefit of it's not the you know they can't claim credit for for this either of them so what we've seen is uh trump certainly gave up on climate and just said we're not really going to care all that much and i think he was clearly wrong in saying it's not really a problem it is a problem but i think we also need to recognize it is about how we long-term tackle this problem not about what happened every any one year all right by the way may i ask a question which i admit is tendentious uh how has the united states done over the last decade by comparison with the european union those are two that are roughly comparable in size and wealth in degree of technological advancement and so forth who's done best in greenhouse gas emissions so again that's a hard question oh no it's not well your battles has reduced more okay but that's also because you emit a lot more per person so the europeans have reduced more in percent and you've reduced more in absolute terms i think if you were to try to be reasonable probably the europeans have done slightly better but it's been much much more costly uh but part of that of course is because we don't have fracking we don't have access to usually switch from coal to gas and part of it is because we insist as europeans and i'm also being a little facetiously we insist on saying if it's going to be good it has to hurt uh so we don't like those cheap or even okay all right so by the divided administration let's go through if we may three or four of the main initiatives a couple of which they've already taken and then again i want to get back to the lomborg plan but here's the biden plan here's what the administration has done and intends to do i'll name a few of these and you just give me a relatively brief evaluation on his first day in office president biden rejoined the paris climate agreement and revoked the federal permit for the keystone oil pipeline paris agreement legally binding treaty on climate change signed by almost 200 nations trump got us out and now biden has put us back in what do you make of that unfortunately first is not legally binding that's one of the reasons why biden can do it and not actually send it to the senate for confirmation where it would obviously fail uh but secondly oh i see i see okay all right right international law once we go in we'll stick to it we can't help ourselves sorry go ahead okay yes fair enough but uh and and the second part is certainly on the current promises paris will not do very much paris will get us about one percent of the way to the 1.5 degrees target that we talked about so if everyone does everything it will reduce temperatures in 2100 by about 0.8 degree fahrenheit uh so really you won't be able to notice that the fact that the us joined or not joined won't make much of a difference now it could be a way that we can actually try to address this problem in the future but for now it's mostly a symbolic act and unfortunately the same thing is also true for keystone xl uh even obama's own uh estimate showed that uh they pointed out look it's not like the canadian's not going to be selling 883 000 barrels of oil every year anyway they'll just get it out in another way so the real question is do you want to get it out safely but also more cheaply so people will probably buy more of it or do you want to make it harder but also less safe that's really the question it's a very small bit player in the global emissions but it's again a very powerful signal and of course that's the problem with much climate policy it's not so much about how much good it does it's about how much good it makes us feel or in other words politics yes all right by the way the keystone pipeline just to be clear about this for listeners uh pipeline to take get oil from canada down to the interior of the united states crossing most of the united states to the southern united states to refineries and distribution centers in oklahoma louisiana and so forth all right the green new deal or some revised version thereof president biden has said that he intends to spend the numbers here are staggering he intends to spend some 500 billion dollars a year or more than 10 percent of the entire federal budget on climate this includes money big money to retrofit commercial buildings across the country expand the railroad system apparently on the idea that it's better for the climate if people take trains instead of drive their own cars create new jobs in green industries and expand subsidies on all kinds of so-called sustainable energy including windmills solar panels and so on and so on spending bjorn huge spending more than 10 percent of the entire federal budget bjorn well there's a couple things to note on it first of all uh we there's a lot of things that we still don't know how he's going to spend the whole uh 500 billion dollars but certainly some of these things we know are not very good investments so the retrofitting the weatherization of homes we actually have the world's biggest study uh done in the us for about 40 000 homes showed that the cost was about twice as high as the benefits that you reaped so spending hundreds of billions dollars which we know that biden's talking about over the next four years on a policy that will only give you 50 cents or less back on the dollar is a bad deal likewise he wants to increase dramatically the funding or the subsidies for electric cars again electric cars being this icon of us doing something about global warming now remember electric cars are actually good for the environment they emit less co2 on average even if they charge from a coal-fired power plant but not very much because you still have to build them much of their batteries are incredibly energy intensive typically done in china with lots of coal pipe firepower so the reality is that these cars will typically over their lifetime cut maybe 10 tons of co2 now to most people that doesn't mean anything but actually on the standard marketplaces for co2 emission in the u.s you could cut a similar amount for 60 dollars right now so spending seven thousand five hundred dollars to get that amount of subsidizing even ten years is a really bad idea again it's not to say that the intention is not good but it's a very very poor incentive it's one of the worst ways to try to cut carbon emissions uh you mentioned subsidies to wind and solar typically the the reality is that we can get more wind and solar but only if we keep paying for it at least for a considerable amount of time and so doing that is probably very ineffective as well it certainly typically doesn't lead to very effective cuts of co2 so there are lots of poor ways to spend that money and at the same time you mentioned uh you know uh that he's going to spend 500 a billion dollars a year just remember last year alone the u.s debt the public debt in the u.s rose by 4.5 trillion dollars going out and saying hey let's spend another two trillion dollars on climate over the next four years is probably not the obvious implication of just having become four and a half trillion dollars poor right again it is a way of saying maybe spending lots of money is not the right way to try to fix climate change along with everything else one final aspect of the biden new deal and then we come to the lomborg deal the biden plan excuse me i'm quoting again from the biden plan president biden will quote lead an effort to get every major country to ramp up the ambition of their domestic climate targets close quote the idea here is that the western world which the biden plan admits this is in writing accounts for only a little more than a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions that means the rest of the world especially china india latin america account for the rest and president biden is going to get them to ramp up their ambitions what do you make of that well peter in some way it it emphasizes the whole idea of how we think about climate namely and you say you don't quite know how to what to make of it it's all about promises that's the ambition part of it right it's about let's make sure that we make grander promises uh next time all the global leaders are going to meet is in uh the end of this year in glasgow and england sorry in the united kingdom uh because it's not like scotland yes in scotland uh and and there they're gonna make these fantastic promises so they're gonna say we'll cut a lot more than what you thought but of course the reality is it's not about how much you wish you'd cut is how much you actually cut and there's two very important parts of this as most people and most states who've made promises have not met those promises you know canada famously uh promised for the kyoto deal they were gonna you know uh cut i believe it was eight percent they ended up 25 above uh bill clinton back in 1992 promised uh to to get the u.s back uh to 1992 levels in 2000 uh he totally shot that and when when confronted with it he said well it's because the economy has been going so well and and you can understand how policymakers are saying sure we'll try and do something in a long time and then we'll see if it happens we'll see if it actually works out because actually cutting is very expensive and also very uncomfortable as we've seen with the covet crisis we've actually seen dramatic reductions during coven but i think we've also seen that most people don't want that and they certainly don't want more of that so it's very hard to imagine that you're going to be able to get countries to say yeah we'd like to reduce more if that means we'll have less economic ability less economic growth less of everything that's just not attractive to most voters would you would you i'll say it because you try very hard and successfully to stay out of politics but perhaps you could just nod or pull your earlobe if you think i'm right the idea that president biden can persuade china or india to surrender one iota of economic growth if china and india believe that their economic growth depends on burning coal is preposterous pull your elobe if you agree well i'll probably do it around here i i think there's some truth to that uh obviously if we talk to the chinese if we talk to the indians and what has happened over the last 20 years is certainly in international circles it's become almost untenable not to say that you want to cut carbon emissions uh so i think there is some pull in each of these uh uh uh sovereignties uh and and also let's not forget the rest of southeast asia and africa which is going to be an enormous player uh towards the second half of the century all of these know that the west is telling them cut your carbon emissions i totally agree with you they're not going to cut most of it if it brings some economic benefit that's obvious in china because the deal with the chinese regime is we could get your economic growth if you then accept not to having political influence and of course if you don't get them economic growth it's going to be a much harder deal uh to come through with in india it's perhaps even more clear because honestly there's still what 300 million people who are an extreme party and modi and the rest of the indian elite wants to pull them out and right now the best opportunity is coal so again there has to be an understanding that this is not mostly about talking this is not mostly about you know cajoling people and nations into making grand promises in in glasgow it is about making sure that it is economically viable and preferably economically beneficial to switch to low carbon or zero carbon emissions this brings us to the lomborg plan this is you bjorn in the new york post just a couple of weeks ago quote the last 30 years of climate policy have delivered high costs and rising not shrinking rising emissions the only reliable ways to cut emissions have been recessions and the covid 19 lockdowns both of which are unpalatable unpalatable as a mild word for it expecting nations to stop using cheap energy won't succeed you've already explained all of that here's what i'd like you to explain next your last sentence here we need innovation innovation what how what do you we already have windmills and electric vehicles and biden wants to spend more give us more windmills and more electric vehicles that's innovation bjorn what's wrong with that not really no that's multiplying the stuff that we still that we already know doesn't work without these subsidies so innovation is really the way that we as human beings and as civilization has fixed most problems remember it's a very hard sell to go and tell people i'm sorry could you do with less could you turn off your lights could you have less lights could you drive less could you fly less and and we've tried it here under the pandemic and of course most people don't want that most people are looking very very much forward to going back to being able to travel and to eat and to enjoy in in many different ways if if you look at los angeles uh back in the 1950s terribly polluted place mostly because of cars it has a very specific uh sort of geographical location that traps all the pollution from cars makes it a terrible place to live if there's lots of pollution uh so one obvious way and i would say sort of the standard environmental way would be to tell everyone in los angeles in 1950s i'm sorry could you stop driving could you walk or bike instead and of course they would have gotten absolutely no uptake on that but what did work out was innovation so a guy innovated and i'm making this a little too simple right but a guy innovated the catalytic converter in 1974. so it cost a couple hundred bucks you put it on the tailpipe and it takes away most of that emission so fundamentally an innovation yes it was not costless but it was fairly cheap and you mandated every car got this and it basically solved much of the problem people drive much more in los angeles there are many more people now there's still other problems and certainly traffic jams is one of them but this basically fixed a very large part of the pollution problem in los angeles with innovation so instead of telling people do with less which is never going to work we should find a way to do with more but emitting less that was what the catalytic converter did for the los angeles problem and and honestly for much air pollution around the world we need the same approach to finding green and eventually zero carbon emitting energy technologies so let me just yeah well if i may let me set up um i think i know where you're going with this if not just back the question aside so fracking was technical innovation it within the oil and gas industry the idea that i as i understand it there are two or three first of all there's a legal overhang you have to understand sub uh subsurface mineral they're all kinds of complicated aspects of the american legal and financial structure that went into fracking but the technical aspect was they figured out how to drill here and then go horizontally a long way away that's new and then they also figured out how to put a kind of substance much made mostly of water into this pipe then put it under enormous and sudden pressure and cause microscopic fractures throughout the structure into which gas leaks that you can then pump out okay that turns out to be really remarkable and as you say it's led to a decrease in greenhouse gas emissions in this country for which the government cannot take credit because it wasn't directed by the government or mandated by the government it was a bunch of largely guys largely in texas after the old good old texas oil and energy what do we do next to get that stuff out of the ground it was those guys all right i think you approved that kind of innovation but i don't believe that's quite what you have in mind you want government to play a role here in funding in mandating what so fracking isn't good enough because it just happened by accident you want somehow or other this is the problem bjorn you don't want the free market left alone and yet innovation is always a surprise in some ways it's always accidental what do you want us to do to cause the kinds of innovations the kinds of accidents to find the surprises that you say we need do you see what i'm after there all right go ahead so first first of all uh the fracking revolution really was an impressive innovation and as you say it was incredibly good for u.s emissions uh because you switch from coal to gas one of the things that we should use this for is also make sure that china gets it because china uses lots of uh coal and very little uh gas if we could get fracking going in china we could dramatically reduce the planet's biggest emitter and we could do so in a way that would actually be advantageous for china so that's absolutely right the second part is it's not as simple i i know that there's there's different sort of versions of of of the fracking story uh so the breakthrough institute has actually gone back and interviewed a lot of the participants in the fracking adventure uh and for instance uh mitchell who is one of the later on billionaire oilmen who is credited for much of the uh of the breakthrough of fracking has very clearly confirmed that a very large part of what made this possible was that he got a lot of funding uh from garpa so mitchell has very clearly said he managed to do this because he got a a substantial amount of funding from the federal government to do this so the idea here is to say it was unprofitable to just go around and say you know i have a hunch that this might work and of course it didn't actually work for 10 years or more if you don't have any money most companies are just going to shut you down now mitchell was a very persistent man but he also had the opportunity to keep trying because the government actually gave him funds remember the point of giving people who are very tenacious and have this great idea that very likely will fail remember we haven't heard about the hundreds of mitchells yes of course tried other stuff and that didn't succeed the point is giving them a little funding to actually see their grand ideas through often is very very low cost so the idea here is to say there's a reason why a perfect market economy typically under invests in innovation this has been known widely for at least 20 or 30 years in economics it's because most of the breakthroughs that you manage to get will only help humanity and will only really be big best sellers once your patent has run out so you will do this amazing breakthrough then somebody else will do an amazing breakthrough then somebody else will do an amazing breakthrough and we'll all be much richer in 30 years but of course the guys who did the first breakthroughs have now had their patents run out that's why you invest a lot less than what is actually worth for humanity we recognize this in health uh research where we invest lots of money and a lot of people who some of who will eventually go on to be nobel laureates who produce all these breakthroughs in health understanding that eventually makes it possible for private businesses like the big big pharmaceuticals to make breakthroughs that can actually make money we don't spend trillions on these guys but we do spend billions on them and it's well spent billions because it enables breakthroughs 20 30 40 50 years down the line it's the same kind of argument that i'm making for energy i'm not saying that we should go in and sponsor a cylinder that was a terrible idea because we were basically sponsoring the solar panels no doesn't work so instead of trying to do stuff we already know doesn't work which is what all the subsidies that biden is talking about to wind and solar which is just basically turning up more of the stuff that still needs subsidies it's about getting the next and the next generations of this it's about subsidizing all the slightly crazy ideas many of which are not going to work so let me just give you one example so craig venter the guy who cracked the human genome back in 2000 he has this idea that he will essentially use gene modified algae and grow them on the ocean surfaces far away from land where they'll soak up sunlight and co2 and produce oil now we know it can be done we also know that it's hugely inefficient right now but he's saying maybe he can innovate a way to make that incredibly cheap if he could do that we could keep our whole world as it is we could keep running on oil but that oil would just have been produced out there on the ocean surface so it would be co2 neutral the amazing thing is if we have lots of people doing these ideas we only have to give each one of them a little bit of support not a whole lot not cylindrical support but get your idea to the stage where you can actually see whether it works or not those ideas are the ones that we should be supporting and most of them are going to fail but we just need a few of them to come through and those are the ones that will power the 21st century price tag what should the united states be spending joe biden says 500 billion dollars a year on this that and the other almost all of which you disapprove of what should we what should we be spending so we we suggest it uh somewhere between 0.1 and 0.2 of gdp so you should be spent and all nations should be spending this uh so you should be spending what 20 30 billion dollars a year uh so you should be spending a little part of the pot uh that uh that president biden has set aside for all these climate events and that would be the main reason why we would actually find a solution that could make it possible for everyone to switch just think for a second if biden helped innovate by spending this money generating really smart ideas that it then eventually turn out one of them to be incredibly beneficial for humankind everyone would switch not just rich well-meaning americans but the chinese the indians africans everybody else and that's why biden should be spending this so america should be spending but denmark and sweden and everybody else should also be spending the same proportion of their gdp it would be fairly small not totally unsubstantial but much much smaller than most most nations are now spending on their climate commitments and it would have a much greater chance of actually fixing the problem in the long run bjorn i have to say conservative that i am if you had said to me two years ago we should be spending we should add 20 or 30 billion in outlays to the federal budget on basic research i think i would have resisted you but now what you're saying is we can save 500 billion we can save 450 billion or 470 billion a year and i think bjorn you deserve the nobel prize i want you to know i've swung around behind your argument thank you thanks to joe biden could we i'd like to take you now that i've got you and you're not in california you won't be here until this lockdown ends let me take you through a couple of what i think of in terms of as almost special topics things in the news and i'd like to hear the way you think about them the correct way to think about the lomborg way to think about them texas all right texas last month there's a polar vortex i didn't know polar vortexes existed until i read about them they're swinging down to texas it inflicted record low temperatures on texas temperatures so low that windmills froze and it turns out that although texas has been run by republicans for 25 years 20 or more than 20 percent of the texas power supply they had put into windmills windmills freeze grid essentially crashes hundreds of thousands of people are deprived of electricity for days here's what john kerry says about that your instinct is to say this is the new ice age but it's not it is coming from global warming which threatens all the normal weather weather patterns close quote so of course the first question is what happened in texas something of which we're going to see a lot more because of climate change and then the second question is if we'd been following the lomborg plan and innovating how would what what's the correct way to think about texas and what we could do to prevent such a catastrophe in the future yeah so the first part is is a ploy that's very often heard namely every weird thing is because of global warming in the interview that kerry actually made he was asked is this global weirding and he was like yeah that's exactly what it is and of course that that sort of gives it away this is not science anymore we're just going to call everything we don't like climate change look all models not just most models all climate models show not surprisingly as temperatures rises as co2 rises we're going to see fewer and fewer cold nights fewer and fewer and cold days you just can't make this argument into generally we're also going to see more cold no that's not what climate change means it's not what we're expecting there's a tiny bit of sliver of an argument of the polar vortex it's very very unclear if it has any uh reality but certainly overall we're going to see less cold not more coal it's you know this is not rocket science and i think it somehow gives away the point of saying you can't make everything you don't like into climate change that's not how that works at least if you want to keep being scientific the second part namely what should texas do i i'm not going to pretend to be an expert in texas but my understanding of this is we have to be very careful not to just blame one thing as you well know wind turbines gave out but so did gas turbines even coal fire power plants there was uh one blip in the nuclear power plant as well i think the better argument and and this is again in some sense the way that the climate conversations become so polarized everybody jumps just jumps in there and say see frozen uh uh wind turbines or no no no see the coal fire power plants also have problems we're missing the bigger picture i think which is if you take a step back what the problem in texas really tells us is as a society we are very very dependent on power 24 7. if we're going to follow much of the climate alarmism and climate recommendations we're going to put many many more things on the electric power you're going to have our cars being charged from electric power we're going to have most of our space heating from electric power we're going to try to electrify almost everything so we're going to be even more dependent in the future what that means is we really got to make sure it's 24 7 power and one of the problems with going solar and wind is that is the opposite of very sure that you have power 24 7. obviously there's no solar power at night obviously there's no wind power when the wind is not blowing and so the reality and this is one of the reasons why it's so hard to go very far with solar and wind is what are you gonna do on on nights when the wind is not blowing you have zero power you just can't remember people will then sort of facility say oh it's batteries right now the us have batteries enough to store 14 seconds of u.s power so and and we need it to store not just for hours but for days and possibly even seasons that's just way outside of our ability right now again we should research better batteries because that's going to make everything cheaper and make your cell phone better but we should likewise also find ways to find base load power and that's very much about nuclear and hopefully fusion maybe and also uh the craig venter you know argument if we could get oil from the sea that could also be one way i want to come to nuclear in just a moment but first you this is something you touched on earlier electric vehicles because they're in the news everywhere i mean as you know as you well know i live in northern california and a neighbor just down just two or three houses away from where i am now was in charge for a while of the google what is it called wayfarer anyway their electric vehicle driverless all of this okay it's in the news here but now it's in the news everywhere a couple of quotations here's holman jenkins in the wall street journal quote the biden administration will be piling a lot of chips as if to say poker chips on electric cars the most popular and least useful way of fighting climate change no matter how you fiddle the data personal evs are a single digit factor and belong low on any sane list of priorities close quote that's holman jenkins in the wall street journal now here's mary berra the ceo of general motors announcing that gm will soon produce mostly electric vehicles at gm we believe that after one of the most difficult years in recent history this moment will prove to be an inflection point the moment when our world's reliance on gas and diesel-powered vehicles will begin transitioning to an all-electric future and gm intends to lead that change not only to help accelerate the rollout of more electric vehicles but to help ensure an equitable and inclusive transition to a net zero carbon future to advance a safer world for all on the one hand electric vehicles low on any same list of priorities on the other electric vehicles about to lead us into a more equitable and inclusive and safer world bjorn well first of all uh it's absolutely true that they will have fairly little impact certainly over the next 10 20 30 years uh they will eventually take over a significant part of personal mobility and that's great and there's lots of benefits to an electric car but only once they've gotten cheaper and that of course goes to gm's point she's basically saying yes i'd love to sell a lot of cars onto biden especially if he's going to give me thousand five hundred dollars for every car i sell and even more maybe we get to replace the entire automotive uh infrastructure in in the country that's a lot of cars to sell right obviously all right look there's there's clearly a lot of private incentive if there's all this subsidy money out there but we have to be realistic most uh most surveys show that the vast majority of cars sold in 2030 will still be not electric now some of them will be hybrid because that's actually a very competitive way and we've seen that already the prius as we used to love uh you know what five ten years ago is actually a really good idea because it's cheap and it actually lowers your cost it's something where you can both go go a little ways and be very very energy efficient or you can go a long way and you can just gas it up at any gas station so there's a good argument for going hybrid it's much much harder to imagine that we're most of us going to go uh all uh uh all electric for a variety of reasons partly because it actually min it it reduces your mobility because you will have to think about what am i going to do when i reach the end of the battery it's also very hard for the what 40 who don't live in single detached houses it's a very very rich world phenomena and very rich people in rich world who are thinking about oh i have a house and i can just recharge it in my garage what do all the people who live in apartments or in in cities uh do that's much much harder and then finally of course it's very costly right now electric cars are typically much more costly that's why you need the subsidy and and so it's extra sort of grating when you hear that this is going to help the world's poor or just the poor in the u.s the reality of course is that most green subsidies go to the rich but by far the biggest amount of subsidies from electric cars go to the very richest in the u.s because they're the only ones who could you know could consider buying an incredibly expensive tesla and then get a lot of subsidy from both the american state and from the californian state and also get the chance to drive in the carpool lane and everything yes yes exactly right no that you're touching a raw nerve because when i'm on the 101 in the crowded lane and i see all these hedge fund people whipping past in their teslas the last people on the planet who need subsidies are the people who are whipping past all right you get that can i just very very briefly mention that people love to emphasize norway uh because in norway they're actually uh of new cars more than half are now electric and people are saying see they're leading the way the reality is that norway is giving so much subsidies both in direct subsidies and that they don't tax these cars and that they get you know both carpool lanes they get cheaper parking they get cheaper uh ferry which is a big thing in norway so if you add all of that up it turns out that a car that costs thirty thousand dollars you possibly get around twenty six thousand dollars in subsidies so sure it makes sense for anyone who could possibly want an electric car to buy an electric car in norway but obviously most people who are not norwegian possibly even the norwegians can't afford this in the long run and also almost all of the people in norway who buy an electric car already have a gasoline car you know for when they actually need to go somewhere they actually need to drive away but then they can do the shopping and field verches and the electric car got it does that feel good for a dane to to just put a little touch them a little bit yes we're annoyed that they got all these all right of course there's another thing right let's just think about norway the reason why they can afford all this is because they get rich in oil on the oil the north sea oil um nuclear power this is from the state of the planet a study published by columbia university and as you know i'm such an expert that i just tripped across this thing online quote the u.s has 95 nuclear reactors in operation but only one new reactor has been started up in the last 20 years over 100 new nuclear reactors are being planned in other countries and 300 more are proposed with china india and russia leading the way close quote okay if the united states i put this to you if the united states has indeed surrendered the lead in the race for clean energy as the biden plan argues it has done so above all in nuclear energy is that is that not i mean if the chinese are going to be building as i read someplace else there's some thought that the chinese will build a hundred nuclear plants over the next decade or so and you know what by the time they get to plant 15 or 16 they'll be pretty good at it they will have they will have discovered you you do something repeatedly and you play some intellectual effort behind it you'll make breakthroughs there will be innovation right yes that's certainly what we used to think we didn't actually see that happening uh with uh nuclear power so nuclear power is a very funny uh or a very special uh sort of instance because what happened in the 60s 70s and 80s were that nuclear power while you built more and more of them they all were very very specialized they all got tailored to that particular place and they got more and more expensive which is one of the main reasons i actually think we stopped using uh nuclear in in the west what we have to recognize is that although these numbers sound impressive remember everything is very very large in in china so 100 nuclear power plants are not actually all that much and by most estimates nuclear power is not going to be a dramatic uh player in the future of of of energy so far but you're absolutely right to say nuclear power is something we should be investigating because it gives us base load power so it gives us the stuff that texas was missing right and it has the possibility of doing so very very cheaply it is not cheap right now uh one of the arguments is that it was actually deliberately made so extra safe that it ended up being incredibly expensive but obviously it's not an argument to say well let's make it a little less uh safe uh to make it cheap but that's never going to happen but what a lot of people are arguing is the we're right now in the third generation nuclear power plant a lot of people like bill gates and many others are investigating fourth generation nuclear power which promises to be a lot safer possibly inherently safe and much much cheaper let me go through because again just googling around on this it turns out that there are several dozen funded private ventures as best i can tell they're privately funded the bill gates foundation is funding one or two i guess in what i have in my head is of course every american has seen i suppose people around the world have seen this every american has seen old footage of nuclear explosions test explosions everybody's conscious of hiroshima we have that in our minds when we think hear the word nuclear chernobyl in this country three mile island nobody died at three mile island uh but still it scared people the the accident in japan all right it turns out so goes the argument which i test by placing it before you that these new technologies apparently there is some prospect that they will really be different there's an atrium reactor this is apparently what bill gates is investing in that will use sodium as a coolant instead of water it won't have to be under pressure the way water is under pressure apparently keeping the water under pressure adds enormous complexity and expense to building a plan don't need to do that anymore there's a small modular light water reactor i don't under i can say these words but this is why i'm putting it to you because i don't know the field at all but that would occupy the space of only one percent of a conventional reactor and while we're talking about small reactors there are also designs now for micro reactors that would fit in the back of an 18-wheeler and of course i'm thinking to myself texas could have used a few of those 18 wheelers just a few weeks ago so i'm a layman but doesn't that look like a place where some of your 20 or 30 billion a year ought to go if we can crack the nuclear problem and make it genuinely safe we already know it can be tremendously inexpensive i guess isn't that in some way the technological grail for that we ought to be seeking or am i becoming too excited about one technology yes i think i think that's the that's the real problem because if you remember back in time we've had you know george bush loved uh hydrogen cars biden obviously loves solar and wind there's always this favorite technology and and and the reality is of course we don't know which place the breakthrough is going to come but absolutely we should be spending money on nuclear uh let me just on the nuclear bit although we've had chernobyl and we've had fukushima and we've had three mile island and many other uh uh smaller problems actually very very few people have died from nuclear power so in in the biggest survey of of all the deaths that we've had from different energy forms nuclear is one of the least deadly of course remember coal is by far the most deadly because it literally kills hundreds of thousand possibly even a million people a year by air pollution so this is not rocket science nuclear power is very safe now we should make it even safer and if we can make it so safe that it physically can't make uh you know a big problem that would be wonderful but the primary problem with with nuclear is not safety although there is a perception problem in some ways the primary problem is cost so most of the new nuclear power plants that we built in the west are so expensive and coming so high over cost that they are vastly more expensive than fossil fuels and vastly more expensive than most subsidized green energy that's not sustainable and that's why we need to find ways to technologically engineer that and that's actually what gates and these other guys are saying let's find ways that we can make this much cheaper i have great hopes for this but i wouldn't place all my eggs so one question it's my understanding at a very fuzzy level that some large component of the expense arises from the regulatory overhang which in turn arises from it's more than a perception problem i mean chernobyl was a horrifying event this people are responding to something real but if you can make them smaller if you can make them safer that is to say the technology itself isn't isn't even now all that expensive it's the amount that we pay to keep ourselves from being terrified by it that makes it too expensive in some proportion is there something to that or am i mistaken well there's some something to that just remember the the eu did a a survey over chernobyl and they estimate it together with the international uh atomic energy agency and several other institute world health organization that the total number of dead across all of the world from chernobyl were less than two hundred so i think i think it's it's worthwhile to be waiting i know you'll have this this enormous sense of of devastation yes it was a problem but remember there are lots and lots of people killed from uh air pollution from friends and coal fired however you uh but but but again back to your question yes it is partly that we have regulated this very very harshly and i as i mentioned i don't think we're going to get away from that but if you could and and you alluded to that if you could build the same power plant over and over you can build it very safely and cheaply whereas what we're doing right now is we build a new kind of power plant every time very safely but incredibly expensively so if we could get to those 18 wheel trucks uh or you know some sort of modular design and we could just churn out lots of them they could be incredibly safe and fairly cheap we still don't know whether they can be incredibly cheap and i think that's where where a lot of the innovation comes in if you can make this in a modular way that is you know inherently safe very cheap you could get everyone to use it and we'd be done we wouldn't have to talk about climate change anymore because we just have this incredibly cheap power source that everyone would use everywhere all right bjorn a couple of final questions climate change is real i'm summarizing bjorn to bjorn but doesn't pose an existential crisis and nearly all the spending that joe biden proposes nearly all of that 500 billion dollars a year will be wasted at least it may have its political purposes if you're joe biden you may say i need to pay off this interest group and that interest group but from the point of view of actually affecting the climate it's wasted joe biden probably knows that and if joe biden doesn't know that he has highly intelligent well-read people throughout his administration who do how is it the that bjorn lomborg sitting in sweden of all places is the one void why don't why doesn't every intelligent person every intelligent well-read person who feels strongly about climate change and there are a lot of people who fit just that description in the byte administration why don't they see things the way you see things so i think there's a number of different reasons part of it is that if you really believe we only have nine years left we've got to amp it up to 11 we got to do everything we possibly can and if we can get our hands on 500 billion dollars we're going to spend it and yes it might not do as much good as we could have done elsewhere but this is the overarching problem so let's try and get going i think a lot of people and certainly a lot of people i debate really have that urgency you know the meteor is hurtling towards earth and we just got to do something even if it is you know sending bruce willis up there so the the idea here in some way is you're just trying to do something at least to get this done i think there's also an other and more sinister part of this if you spend 500 billion dollars you make a lot of people rich so obviously a lot of people are championing this i i often find it very hilarious how you know when when you went to the paris uh summit uh you know there were there were ads everywhere from from all the wind turbine companies and solar panel companies saying make a strong statement for climate what they were uh obviously also saying was get us lots of contracts and you know if you're uh ceo of that company of course you should be pushing for that and then there's also this understanding you know even john kerry said that and you mentioned that the at the beginning of our program here he recognizes even if the u.s totally stops emitting it's not really going to matter because most of this is about the rest of the world there's a sense in which if we do everything in the u.s we can show everyone else that they should also do it it's of course fallacious because remember the germans thought the same way and what they basically now have is an incredibly expensive program the in a given as they call it which costs consumers at least 30 billion euros every year in higher cost for their energy and they have basically not succeeded in reducing their emissions because wow surprised when the wind is not blowing you have to fire up your coal-fired power plant there's a lot of other things wrong with germany but the fundamental point is if you try to show people here's how to do it and then do it really really expensively and really really badly you're not a you know picture of admiration for everyone else everybody says oh let's not do like germany and people will do the same thing for the u.s but i think for most people when you start off this immense project of saving the planet you just got to do everything you can and everybody will love the us when we put up more solar panels and unfortunately i'm the guy who says well no and you know it's i'm a party poop in that way but we need someone to say it in order for us to get to the policies that will actually work they're not going to be as flashy but they'll be much more useful bjorn is this a correct conclusion from all that you've said there is one gift the united states could give the world that would matter just one innovation is that correct yes if you take one thing away let's make sure that the us helps the world innovate that technology or the few technologies that will power the rest of the 21st century cheaply and with very little or no co2 that's what you can do and of course i would like because i don't think it's just about the us we should ask all nations to do that because it's going to be all of humanity's benefit if we innovate that even if it ends up being a chinese or a nigerian innovation will all benefit from that innovation that will help us become carbon neutral and have access to cheap energy but by all means you know it fires people up a little bit more if you just say america should fix this well you know i'm just thinking here's what we've given the world on the last quarter century facebook twitter google maybe nuclear energy for the whole world would not be such a bad it might actually be a step up maybe all right um last question bjorn here's the title again of your most recent book that which you published just last year false alarm false alarm how climate change panic costs us trillions hurts the poor and fails to fix the planet since you published that book the european union has suffered the shock of brexit the british exit the entire planet has suffered a pandemic and here in the united states trump is out and biden is in are you hopeful since you published that book have we become more or less susceptible to climate panic i think we've become more susceptible because you know when trump was then the problem was really that the u.s was not caring enough about climate change because he didn't care at all now the problem is probably that you care too much or at least that you care in a way that's incredibly ineffective and you're likely to lead much of the world down that path certainly the european union is willing uh the uk is willing uh and a lot of rich countries are willing to play in on this idea that we're all going to make grand promises and kumbaya at the end of this year and then you know we'll figure out later what to do but one other thing happened as you also mentioned we had a grand pandemic and what that did was it reduced global emissions somewhere between four and six percent the u.n tells us we need to cut this emission every year by seven point six percent if we're going to live up to our paris agreements so just to give you a sense of proportion that means last year we should have had a bigger nastier pandemic or at least the economic effects of that you know locked down would have reduced emissions even more around the world but this year we need two of those big shutdowns because we need 7.6 and then 7.6 above in 2022 we need three shutdowns like we had in 2020 and by 2030 we need 11 of those i think what you can see where i'm heading this simply emphasizes that the current way that people are just sort of casually suggesting that we can dramatically reduce our carbon emissions by investing in some electric cars is is simply misguided and unfortunately it'll actually lead us to just spend lots of money in actually not having found the solution this is again los angeles in the 1950s don't go around and tell everyone to bike instead spend the money on innovation bjorn lomborg of the copenhagen consensus center and the hoover institution thank you thank you for uncommon knowledge the hoover institution and fox nation i'm peter robinson [Music] you

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 848,508

Keywords: Uncommon Knowledge, Peter Robinson, Bjorn Lomborg, Climate Change, Climate Science, Climate, Clean Energy, Biden's Climate Plan

Id: 0Te5al2APrQ

Length: 65min 56sec (3956 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 10 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/FederickSly1927]

I love this guy.
I've done lot of research on global warming and as a skeptic I think mankind has a certain impact on global warming (not sure but probably ranging from 10% to 50%) and we must do something to preserve the balance of nature. We have all the time we need to optimize our life style and industrial processes + nuclear energy and some renewables will be helpful and economically competitive. Don't forget to plant as many trees as you can (not just for the climate).

[u/LackmustestTester]

Danish political scientist Björn Lomborg gave a critical lecture on climate change at the prestigious Duke University in North Carolina. A professor emeritus tried to get the university's leadership to cancel the lecture in an open letter. He failed.

Lomborg was not disinvited and gave his speech. His comment on the attempted defamation

Source - video included

[u/kokoisperfection]

Watch this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwMPFDqyfrA&ab_channel=potholer54