Why We Get Climate Change Wrong with Bjorn Lomborg (Lessons from Hoover Boot Camp) | Ch 2

[Music] why is this the case well i would argue to a very large extent is because we miss having the conversation about what does adaptation do what does the fact that we get rich or do so i'm going to show you a graph here this is from the best data that we have from the international disaster database from the 1920s until today if we look at all the deaths that have been caused by global warming remember sorry by by weather-related deaths remember that the world has probably increased about fourfold over this period what do you think this will look like how many people used to die in the old times and how many people died today if you think into the sort of standard terminology of global warming is bringing us all to you know the portals of hell kind of thing you'd imagine that this would be going up you'd be incredibly wrong actually what we've seen is that we have gone from a world where about half a million people died on average every year because of weather-related disasters to now about 20 000 people despite the fact that we've quadrupled global population the individual risk of dying from related factors has dropped 99 percent this has very little to do with global warming it's actually possible that global warming has made it worse all over but it's everything to do with the fact that we're much more resilient because we're much richer and that's not just the us that's everywhere so this is one thing that we miss the resilience the other thing that we miss is the fact that we adapt to many of these things let me show you one of the one one of these you know it's one of the very very well cited papers on on flooding because they you look at what is the impact if we don't and if we do adapt and it's actually also one of the things that popped up in many books when they look at what happens if we don't adapt so let me look at what over the over the century how many people will get flooded right now we estimate about 3 million people are being flooded every year that has a cost on average about 14 billion dollars or about 0.016 percent of gdp what happens as global warming keeps increasing and so we get a sea level rise not mostly because of uh arctic or antarctic melting but simply because of water like everything else expands when temperatures rises we are going to see a sea level rise what happens if we assume that we do nothing so let's look at the worst case warming that is the worst case that we can imagine the highest population that is the most people that will get affected and the lowest gdp growth so that is the least adaptive world if we take all of these worst case scenarios and then look at what will happen if we don't adapt we will see a lot of people starting getting flooded every year this is not very surprising we're going to see um you know sea level rise two and a half feet or about 70 80 centimeters of sea level rise by the end of the century if all of our dikes if everything of all infrastructure are kept at the same pace as where it is right now we're not increasing any of our dikes obviously we're going to see a lot more people being flooded by 2100 this study shows and this is very similar it is an average a lot of different models and a lot of different uh assumptions behind this so it gives very much the same thing as everybody else shows we'll end up seeing about 329 million people flood it every year it'll have a huge impact it'll cost 17 trillion dollars in costs so that's almost 5 percent of gdp in this fairly low gdp world that's obviously oh and i just gave away the point right but the that's obviously a terrible terrible outcome but it's also a phenomenally unrealistic outcome it's in a world where we assume everybody's just going to sit back and say wow the water keeps rising if i keep standing here i'm going to drown right in 100 years that's not how it works right what actually happens is that even moderately wealthy societies build higher dikes for instance and so if you have adaptation and they show actually that almost every country almost everywhere will have complete adaptation we'll actually see fewer people being flooded we will see about a 37 billion dollar cost so an increase but that mostly because we got richer uh it's actually lower percentage of gdp and there will be an extra dike cost of about 40 billion a year the point is the first number the 329 million people the 17 trillion dollars in cost those are the numbers you read about in the papers because they get generate clicks and they are true in that very academic sense that if we did nothing that would be what happens but of course we don't live in that world where we do nothing we actually live in a world where people are reasonably smart and so they will actually get to a point where this is a better world even though we have much higher sea levels so almost three feet of sea level rise will actually have much fewer people being flooded will have almost the same amount of damage overall in this very very poor world and the ritual world will actually have a lower impact overall the simple point here is we're talking about very very small fractions we're talking about 0.01 percent of gdp this is not what's going to matter dramatically by the end of the century and this is in general true and that's why i think it's incredibly important to recognize and this is data or the other one was obviously model if you look at the global cost of climate change so all weather related damages we only have good data from about 1990 so if you look at that that's actually been declining not increasing if you thought and certainly that's the impression we get from all the media you think that things are getting worse and worse actually the data seems to indicate that's exactly wrong we're seeing lower costs from global weather disasters not increasing costs there's a lot of ways you can massage those numbers and there's a lot of ways we and we can get back to that in the in in the q a but it fundamentally shows us we're being misled in this conversation so that's one part of it i want to sort of get you to understand that things are not this end of the world kind of thing it's a problem yes but the other part is then you know it's still a problem why the hell don't we just fix it and one obvious way of fixing is stop using all that fossil fuel well the problem with getting rid of fossil fuels is it's a lot harder than what most people believe this is how much energy we got this is from the international energy agency this is the last number number we have from 2017 so in 2017 we got 0.27 of all our energy from solar and we got about 0.67 from wind and all the rest came from other energy we have this understanding this sense that oh my god solar and wind is taking over the world no it's not actually if you look at and let me show you this i i uh you know i think this is a very telling graph but if you look at what has happened since 1800 and what's going to likely happen up till 2100 with renewables we used to be an almost entirely renewably focused world we used 94 percent of our energy came from renewables back in 1800 the next 170 years we spent getting rid of of renewables right we were trying to get off renewables and actually the last 50 years we have pretty much had a stable uh uh uh 13 14 of renewables for the last half century almost all of this remember is wood this is mostly wood in developing countries that burns terribly inside and pollutes and kills a lot of people today we're still at about 14 by if you look at some of the predictions this is the ia so the international energy agency they have one uh prediction if we totally do everything we promised in paris agreement and then they have a more realistic outcome we'll see slight increases uh up until 2040. the u.n climate panel has five official scenarios of what the world is going to look like until 2100 and obviously there's huge amount of uncertainty this this but if you just take a look at them what you see is even by 2100 we're unlikely to be more than 45 and this is the very greenest scenario uh most of the or all the four others will be down in the 20s so what you really have is a situation if you just zoom in on this as a world where it's very likely by mid-century that we will have less renewable energy in percentage than we had in 1950 that's very very counter to what most people think it's certainly very counter to the idea that we get constantly that they're winning and they're taking over the world right now the point here is we've spent the last two centuries getting rid of fossils sorry getting rid of renewables and we're not likely to get back and certainly not in any way as most people like to say oh we're you know we're going to go to 100 in 2030. uh no that's just not going to happen that's fantasy or as al gore's climate advisor uh uh jim hansen the guy who actually started the global warming war back in in 1988 says it's like believing in the tooth fairy or the um easter bunny sorry those are very idiomatic uh american references so the third thing to realize so it is a problem it's not the end of the world we are not just going to get rid of fossil fuels because it'd be nice to do that it's actually very unlikely we're going to do that so we got to recognize that the current set of policies that we've looked at are not really working so you know in rio in 1992 we promised uh to cut carbon emissions for the rich world we didn't do that in kyoto we did the same thing we pretty much didn't do that now we promised in paris and everybody's saying oh paris is going to solve the whole problem no it's not it'll have a tiny impact and again let me just walk you through this and i'm going to use the un's own climate model now they have some big super computer models that run for like days i can't afford to run of those as also be totally useless because they have these very small models that are very easy to run that you can actually go online running the epa has supported them and and the european environment agencies supported them and they've been using all the climate models uh since 1990 uh it's called magic and it's one of the most used models so if you just take and so i'm going to show you over here is our emissions and over here i'm going to show you the temperature so if you look at these are our missions historically we know those right so what do we expect will happen if we don't do anything well there are lots of different businesses usual scenarios i'm using the one that unep so the u.n environmental protection agency uses a lot of people have about the same business as usual scenario so if you run the world with this so you just simply input these are the co2 and remember these all co2 equivalents so they also include all the other greenhouse gases and actually it matters a little bit but not very much how exactly you do that if you run this through the model you get this temperature graph so basically you can see all right the temperature that we're going to see by the end of the century is going to be almost 4 degrees temperature rise or about 7 degrees fahrenheit temperature rise from pre-industrial times so now we have our baseline what did we actually promise in uh in the paris agreement well this is the triangle we promised if everyone does everything they promised also all the conditional promises also of course if the u.s was actually going to do what they promised which you know clearly right now they're not going to uh if everybody do this again this is not me saying it it's actually the ones that organized the uh paris agreement sorry the paris uh meeting the unf triple c so the framework can convention for climate they made that estimate it sums up to about 56 gigatons of co2 so that's just simply the area of that little square i'm just going to put up 56 up there because it's going to be important to compare on later if you just run that so just run with that reduction what will be the impact well you can just run it through the model and here you see this is the difference it's really hard to see the difference right because it's only 0.04 degrees now in some way that may be a little unreasonable remember uh this is actually hard to achieve and i'll show you just in a bit that we're not actually living up to it but you know if you imagined maybe you'd imagine well surely we'll continue to do what we promised in paris for the rest of the century that's actually a huge commitment but let's just see what would happen if we extended this for the rest of the century remember nobody's actually promised that the u.s was very specific so obama was very specific they were promising one thing for 2025 and nothing else and most other countries have only promised these very very specific up to 2030. but if we extended the paris promise that would be 540 gigatons of co2 cuts what would that result in well we can run this in our model and we actually end up with a 0.18 degree temperature reduction that's something but not very much so remember the dramatically increased paris agreement would deliver very very little now this is what most media told you that paris had achieved this is what the climate action tracker was suggesting would be the outcome of paris it's a little weird right that this is what the nation's actually promised and remember the little uh 56 up there was the absolute maximum of what they promised but still all the media told us that we'd actually promised about three thousand gigatons of co2 cuts this is to put it charitably as an exaggeration right if you run this you actually get a much much lower temperature graph and that's what comes out with that was also what you saw widely reported that we've actually promised to cut about 1.1 degrees we're still somewhat away from the 2 degree target but we're doing pretty well and then of course this is what you need to get to 2 degrees and and that's of course not even what people are talking about anymore but the two degree target will require us to cut six thousand giga tons my point here is simply to show you when that gives you this uh temperature uh graph my point here is simply to show to you that we have promised incredibly little and everybody says yay we solved this problem and if you extend it dramatically it's still very very little if you extend it enormously like the 3000 gigatons you can sort of make it sound like something but then it's also a little unclear whether it's just you know wishful thinking and it's nowhere near what nations actually claiming they promised namely the two degrees to put it very bluntly what we see here is that the actual paris promises is less than one percent of what nations are saying they're going to do it's a little bit like somebody going on a diet and you know eating a salad and saying yay success right well no that's not actually how that works um so the reality here is we have done very very little even if we do the maximum of paris but of course the truth is we're doing nothing of the sort of paris so this is one new paper from from nature that basically said all major nations are not living up to their paris agreement so there's another new paper out uh just uh three months ago i believe uh that showed that of all the 150 nations have actually signed up to uh the paris agreement only 17 are living up to them and most of them are like samoa and algeria and other countries that basically didn't promise anything so it's not very hard to live up to that so the problem here is not only are we not going to succeed but we're not even living up to the things that we have promised that are not going to get us very far at the same time they have huge costs so paris will probably cost sorry i should just show you you know this this is again is the international agent uh energy agency that shows what are the cost of of of subsidies to renewables they're huge yeah so we're probably this this is when off onshore offshore bioenergy uh solar and others this is for the world uh so right now we're spending about 150 billion dollars a year and we're likely to keep increasing that that's a good example of how you know everybody will tell you oh solar and wind and everybody else is very close to being competitive well they're clearly not because if they were we would actually have to subsidize them less and less we're not we're subsidizing more and more just to give you a sense of proportion uh over the next 22 years until 20 2040 we're likely to be subsidizing these at the tune of almost 6 trillion the point here is again that for very little impact so we're likely to see solar and wind to go to pops four percent of total energy by 2040 we will have to spend a huge amount of money and so that's why cutting carbon emissions is generally seen as very expensive for a wide variety of reasons but fundamentally because if you have to cut carbon emissions you basically have to tell the uh the economy to do something with more expensive inputs and that typically reduces your gdp growth slightly one way of showing this and this obviously is just a correlation but this is built into all the models if you look at gdp growth versus co2 growth there's a very strong correlation and that's the simple point of saying if you want to cut emissions you probably also end up cutting your growth rate not to the point where you can't grow but you will grow slightly less than what you would otherwise have done and that's why if you look at what are the cost of paris again i did some of the first estimates of this using stanford energy modeling forum which is typically considered the gold standard they they incorporate all the major models i also use the asian modeling exercise because that's the one that's done for china and a few others so basically looking at the cost in terms of what is the cost and gdp growth reduction so basically because you make energy slightly more expensive you get slightly lower growth rates and that has a compounding impact that eventually turns out to be real costs if you look at those costs and remember there's not been done any official modeling of what is the cost of parrots which is also a little weird given that this is the costliest uh treaty ever signed in human history uh uh it's probably about uh four times costlier than the versailles treaty uh where germany had to pay uh uh uh war reparations to the the other combatants uh and that's per year uh so if you look at the total cost here we estimate that for the u.s if the u.s was actually going to do the obama promises and in the most effective way the cost would be and that would be through carbon tax that would be 154 billion a year for the eu would be about 300 billion for china and remember china is very very hard to predict some models show it has almost no cost some models show it has a huge cost and that's mostly because we have very very little sense of what is the baseline of china this is the average of all the models but there's no good reasons for believing that that's a very accurate estimate for mexico we have very good estimates it's about 80 billion and we don't have estimates for the rest of the world this is about 85 of the world so i've just simply assumed that the rest of the world has the similar cost uh per ton of co2 that adds up to almost a trillion dollars a year by 2030. now we also have good evidence that shows if you don't do this in the most effective way which no climate policy has ever been done we have lots of evidence that show that climate policies are typically about pretty badly implemented and that means they're about twice as expensive if they're twice as expensive not surprisingly the cost just simply doubles so it's between one and two trillion dollars a year the cost of paris is one to two trillion dollars a year you will get very little from it so how much will it actually do well we know it cuts uh 7.5 gigatons of co2 per year uh it'll cost one to two trillion dollars we also know what is the value of cutting a ton of co2 that's what the social cost of carbon is this is the latest estimate from the obama administration again i probably think that that's too high but let's just go with it it's a it's about 50 the total cost is somewhere between 123 to 246 dollars per ton uh so that means every dollar spent will do about 20 to 40 cents of climate benefit that is it'll avoid further damages down the line of 20 to 40 cents that's a bad deal for the world and that's the real problem not only are we promising things in the back of arguments that the world is coming to an end but we're also doing it really really badly that's why i think we should start having a conversation about how can we do this better [Music] you

Channel: PolicyEd

Views: 68,339

Rating: 4.5454545 out of 5

Keywords: Global Warming, Climate Change, Climate, Environment, Hoover Institution, Hoover National Policy, Climate Policies, Environmentalism, Bjorn Lomborg

Id: RZqBfPsVlsU

Length: 22min 45sec (1365 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 12 2020