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Episode 1536 Scott Adams: Bjorn Lomborg Interview

42 min read

Episode 1536 Scott Adams: Bjorn Lomborg Interview

Date: 2021-10-20 | Duration: 41:26

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Transcript

[0:05]

all right i’m here with author bjorn lomborg whose uh latest book we’ll be talking about and it’s called false alarm and i just just read it in the last 24 hours and loved it and we’re going to ask you lots of questions tons of things to talk about we’re going to hit them all but first i want to start with for the audience who’s not familiar with one or both of us what qualities we bring to this discussion and why they should listen to it people know me as a cartoonist you might not know i have a degree in economics i’ve got an mba and lots of business experience and lots of experience analyzing complicated things mostly in the financial level um so that’s that’s what i’m bringing to the conversation sort of an economic bias and that’s exactly what led me to you because most of what i know on this topic i learn from you i don’t think you know that but i’m telling you that wow thank you so so bjorn do the same thing tell us which of your specific uh experiences and or talents relevant to climate change as a topic

[1:09]

relevant to climate change as a topic well i think i you know i i used to be a statistics professor teach my uh my students statistics uh and one of the things i kept telling was you think you know a lot about the world and much of what you know is wrong uh and i love to point out all kinds of other stuff you know stuff you just think is right but actually is not when you look at the data so i kept hitting people and say you’ve got to look at the data uh and that was really what got me interested in this whole conversation i’m an old green piece i used to be member i was now in a rubber boat or anything but yeah i was really worried about lots of things uh and uh i was paying member in greenpeace and then i read an interview with julian simon saying much of what you think about the environment is wrong so i took my students i was like that can’t be true so i took my students we went through all this data we’re sure he was going to prove him wrong but have fun of the process turns out that a lot of stuff he said was right and that’s really why i wrote my first book and why i’m still you know doing this so i bring a numbers uh point i keep saying look it doesn’t

[2:11]

uh point i keep saying look it doesn’t matter about your intentions and stuff simply matters about the data and that’s what i’m hoping we’ll also talk about here today right i watched you i think for the first time years ago on a bill maher episode where you triggered him into cognitive dissonance i want to see if you remember this because i use this example all the time and the way it was triggered was the world thinks that there are two views on climate change you’re either an alarmist a real believer or you don’t believe any of it it’s just like none of it exists now you don’t fall into either of those camps and neither do i and when you’re talking to bill maher you basically said and correct me if i if i mischaracterize you basically said yeah the co2 is going to warm the climate we have to worry about that but maybe not as much as you think and maybe we should handle it differently because of the numbers bill maher listened to that and then said some version of so why do you deny climate change and i just sat there thinking that is literally the opposite of what you so clearly just laid down in detail and he couldn’t hear

[3:12]

laid down in detail and he couldn’t hear it it because he was he was stuck the prison of two ideas is and i i remember that very clearly because i was very uh proud that you actually wrote me uh right after that i love you know dilbert so i obviously knew who you were uh and and actually my recollection of this was i was doing a satellite interview with bill maher and he was you know he was sort of going along and understanding this yes global warming is a problem it’s not the end of the world we need to be smart about how we invest but then afterwards and you actually told me this because obviously you know the satellite cut out and he was sitting and talking uh with um uh uh oh what’s the guy’s name uh salman rushdie and many others uh around the table and they were all agreeing that i was an uh denier afterwards you know so so while they were talking to me they were like yeah yeah we get what you’re saying oh he’s just an idiot afterwards and i think that’s a very sort of stereotypical way of of dealing with this you it’s much much easier to say that anyone you disagree with on

[4:13]

that anyone you disagree with on specific points they’re just idiots in general but of course the point is this is a problem just like all others and we need to be smart about it and we aren’t right now now in my opinion you are right on the verge of being completely vindicated in everything you’ve said for years we’re not quite there but i feel like we’re like you’re just going to push him over the edge any minute let me go through some uh specific things now i like to start with the illusions the things that people think are true that turn out not to uh what’s the biggest risk to polar bears climate change or it’s the fact that we shoot them i’m always so surprised you know people worry about the fact that we possibly make the world worse for polar bears it’s actually not clear because they also survived without any ice uh you know five to eight thousand years ago uh and the north pole but you know there’s probably an argument there maybe one or two polar bears out of 25 000 polar bears are threatened every year

[5:13]

polar bears are threatened every year from climate change we shoot 500 polar bears each year if you worry about polar bears maybe we should stop shooting 500 first so so i like to start with this one because it’s all the rest of your argument has this quality which is how about just stop shooting the bears there’s probably an easier way stop shooting bears let’s do a few more do more people die from heat or cold so vastly more people die from cold uh there’s a big study in a lancet that actually for the first time estimated this for the entire world turns out that about 600 000 people die from heat 4.5 million people die from coal we need to know and we don’t hear that yeah and the reason we don’t catch the cold deaths is because they’re they’re not exciting they’re not tied to like a specific you know heat you think that day they take longer you know it’s poor people so we just don’t but it’s mostly the fact that if you have a heat wave people

[6:14]

fact that if you have a heat wave people die like flies and that day or the day after but if you die from cold you typically die over the next month and so there’s no obvious thing there yeah in in england uh in 2015 there were so many people dying that people couldn’t get out their loved ones when they died the bodies in months because there’s just backlogged never a story because that’s not that doesn’t fit the narrative again heat deaths is a problem but cold deaths is a much bigger problem right you and i both accept that the scientists are right at least in the sense that humans are creating co2 and this is causing some warming the the extent of that we’ll talk about later but uh is the world getting more green or is it turning to dust that’s a funny one because we’ve actually been studying this for about 30 years turns out that the world is dramatically becoming more green why because for an obvious reason right and obviously co2 is a fertilizer now there’s other

[7:15]

co2 is a fertilizer now there’s other things that are bad about co2 but it also fertilize you know that if you’re you know if you’re a commercial grower for instance tomatoes you put in lots of co2 in your greenhouse so you grow bigger tomatoes we can see that on a global level we’ve actually so they measure this by the number of leaves on on on on on trees and stuff imagine the fact that we actually know how many leaves are or at least have an estimate turns out that they’re over the last 30 years we’ve gotten about three continents of australia or three sizes of the continental us more leaves on the planet it’s just become much much greener this doesn’t you know take away the fact that there are also other problems but this is an amazing and astounding fact that you don’t know i don’t i don’t think he mentions the in the book but indoor farming is obviously going to be huge in the future as we get the economics to work there and we’re going to have to pump in co2 to the plants because they won’t have enough if they’re indoors very probably so that’s it one use for that um all right here’s another one

[8:17]

that um all right here’s another one um are the islands that are close to sea level are they getting closer to being sunken because everybody said sea levels rising so sea levels are rising and so the natural inclination would be to say of course micronesia or uh uh you know tuvalu or these other beautiful islands that are just like a couple feet above uh sea level will drown turns out no they won’t because and a lot of people have actually been studying this yes as sea levels rise they’re going to be more threatened but they’re also built from coral reefs so whenever there’s uh you know a storm that comes in they break off old dead coral and actually accrete the islands so what’s happened over the last 30 to 60 years when they’ve done these studies almost all of them have grown some of them also because of man-made increases but all of them have grown firm natural sources not decreased so yes there is a problem but it’s not you know the the

[9:18]

problem but it’s not you know the the story back in the what 90s where they predict the maldives would be gone by now they’re not and actually they’ve just you know increased with a new big airport because they actually crete at the same time we need to hear the whole story again one of the things that i had never heard before until i saw your book was that i didn’t realize that a lot of the places we already live are under sea level and we just we just build dikes and deal with it basically yes and we could do more of that so yes there’s there’s probably about 110 million people that live in places that are already under uh under the mean sea level uh and so if you do a map you’ll think oh my god there’s 110 million people who have to get you know scuba gear on every time they need to go outside uh and new york times actually did a story exactly of that when you do these maps you think wow you know southern vietnam for instance is almost completely flooded they saw that for 2050. so they thought oh that’s because

[10:19]

  1. so they thought oh that’s because of global warming but it’s already flooded today in that sense flooded of course they’ve actually put up dikes there’s one little province there that produces one percent of the entire world’s rice and they’re of course dyke and all and they’re pretty well well-off and they know how to deal with that if you look at it in in holland of course uh you know what 40 of the country is already flooded but it’s not likewise look at central london flooded already but they know how to deal with this the point is we’re a pretty smart species yeah the uh the the thing i always say is the uh i refer to the adams law of slow-moving disasters you know if humans can see it coming for a long time we’re really good at fixing it you know we didn’t run out of fuel we didn’t run out of food you know i just mentioned one more one more thing there’s actually a study that’s looked at how much land has have we lost because of sea level rise and how much

[11:19]

because of sea level rise and how much land have we gained despite sea level rise turns out that we’ve gained more than we’ve lost most of this is you know the the stuff you see from uh from the uh united arab emirates where they built this uh this whole island that looks like the world and a palm tree and all that stuff but of course you do this all the different places much of new york has been actually built out while it’s still uh you know vulnerable to sea level rise because it’s incredibly valuable land we know how to do these things and we do it continuously all right let’s just do another one uh everybody knows that everything’s worse now right every the the whole world is falling apart uh the our health is worse we’re dying to covet uh we’re all getting poorer inflation’s going to kill us basically everything’s worse isn’t it it seems that way when you look at news and that’s of course bad news sales much better than good news actually over the last 25 years we have lifted about a billion people out of poverty something you’ve never heard about every day on the front page of

[12:22]

about every day on the front page of every newspaper we could have said in the last 24 hours we’ve lifted 137 000 people out of poverty how come you never hear this and the point is on pretty much all accounts we’re better off we live much longer in 1900 we live to be about 30 years on average we’ve got two lifetimes now you live to about 70 or 80 uh around the world we’re much better we have much higher incomes we’re also much better educated it used to be like 80 percent couldn’t read now 80 or more can read in the world and on and on oh sure there’s some good news but what about all these climate change hurricanes that are going to be wiping people out and all that so so you you hear a lot about this but actually if you look at the data we have very very patchy data of most of the world for any length of time we have the best data for the us and we actually have good data since 1900 for landfalling hurricanes for the us and despite the sense that you would imagine that that has increased it has

[13:22]

imagine that that has increased it has not it’s actually slightly but insignificantly decreased that’s also true for strong hurricanes now again the global warming science tell us that we will probably see fewer but stronger hurricanes because of global warming fewer is obviously good stronger is bad turns out that stronger is worse than fewer is better so there is a problem but it’s not nearly the problem that you think it is if you look globally on all the uh on all the weather disasters that the world has had it turns out that in percent of gdp and you have to do that in percent of gdp because basically if you have twice the number of houses you will also get twice the amount of damage if you’re doing percent of gdp it’s gone down from about 0.3 to 0.2 percent of global gdp there’s two things to take away from that one is it’s declining not increasing but the other one is also that’s a very very small number all of the climate catastrophes you possibly hear about in total cost you

[14:23]

possibly hear about in total cost you 0.2 0.2 now now wow all right so uh um what about the let’s say if the if the us went to zero emissions let’s say we discovered a magic thing that we didn’t share with the rest of the world it was only in america and we could push the button and suddenly america only went to zero emissions problem solved right well it would have a very very tiny effect on climate if you put it into the standard urine climate panel model if you stayed at syrup for the rest of the century from today the net impact would be to reduce temperatures by the end of the century by 0.3 degrees fahrenheit so it would have a tiny impact not very much and it goes to give you a sense of proportion of what this kind of you know obviously if you have that in innovation you should do it but if it was costly which it probably is you should consider is this actually worth the while and the the point that you made that i think

[15:24]

think if you could make one point that captures everything there there’s one statement that you make clearly in the book which is that prosperity saves lives and poverty kills people all the time every way like once once you understand that dynamic then you say how much do you want to your economy to to save x number of people because crippling the economy will probably kill more than you save by by that so so i i look to that as you know everything seems to fit under that umbrella in some way now how about uh wars i mean this oh i’m hearing in the media that climate change is causing wars because all the heat i guess i don’t know or the dislocation or the battle of resources i guess so so the argument is people get more angry when it’s warm and there’s some evidence for for that but actually the only long-term studies we have show so 500 a thousand years show that cold is much more dangerous for wars now

[16:24]

cold is much more dangerous for wars now this is only mostly from europe and china and remember both of these are temperate zones so we’re not sure whether we we can sort of extrapolate this to the entire world but fundamentally it makes sense if it’s warm you have lots of uh you know uh uh sorry food uh you know your stuff grows well if it’s cold you’re hungry and annoyed until you go you know raiding on on your partners again we don’t know this for sure but we certainly hear the wrong message when we’re being told that uh you know increasing temperatures is what will lead to more war no for now at least the certainty is that cold leads to war you know i kind of suspect that whatever caused wars in the old days doesn’t have to be the same thing that’s you know i mean today it’s probably persuasion right and that’s that’s an important point right that we used to go to war because what we produced was mostly from the land we don’t do that anymore so in the

[17:26]

land we don’t do that anymore so in the times of old it made sense to make war because you could actually get a vast majority of you know your stuff but imagine if denmark came in and you know scooped up silicon valley way we got you know google and all the other stuff but all you guys would probably just leave or you wouldn’t certainly wouldn’t you know work for us we would it would be almost worthless i’m not saying we’re going to and i’m not saying we’d be successful but the but the basic point of course is it’s no longer a good idea to try to scoop up land because that’s not really what’s valuable so yeah that’s a that’s a wonderful uh sort of corollary of development well you’re almost talking me out of my desire to conquer greenland but but not quite not quite no no all right um let’s see uh suppose suppose uh there was a developing country and they wanted to have enough energy to develop well and they wanted to be green so they say we’re just going to go nuts on solar power now including developments that will happen you know there’ll be better storage and

[18:27]

there’ll be better storage and everything so not not your grandfather’s solar but good solar solid high-tech uh how how well will they develop their country with that as their source it’s hard to answer that with certainty but it’s very clear that what really drives a society and development is that you have access to a lot of energy that it’s cheap and that it’s reliable and the problem with the so yeah i i i didn’t want to interrupt you but well i did it anyway i guess is it not true that there’s a perfect correlation between energy and gdp yes yes so the more energy yes the more energy you have the richer you are or if you want to be rich you have to have access to a lot of energy now obviously green campaigners will still say well but solar energy is also great but the problem is it’s not great if you can’t have it all the time in principle we can have these conversations oh you can store it as hydrogen or you can store it in these

[19:29]

hydrogen or you can store it in these tesla battery packs and stuff but the reality is we have very very little knowledge of how to store this in any sort of industrial size right now the world has storage enough for all of its electricity for about 19 seconds so no we’re not you know we’re not anywhere near to being able to deal with the fact that not only is there nights but there is also you know uh days with dark or you know overcast and stuff like that uh what we’re essentially seeing in europe right now we’ve just had doldrums and in the wind for for a couple months and we’re all screwed that that’s a you know that doesn’t bode well you know there’s a thing coming that i just realized that’s going to be interesting one of the biggest promoters of course of you know solar and storing it would be elon musk because he makes electric cars and such but he’s also in space so you know where that’s going to go and it’s not going to be solar panels in order for him to call him new cars he’s got to go nuclear there’s no option

[20:31]

he’s got to go nuclear there’s no option and everybody agrees on that who knows knows the field so elon musk the electric car solar guy is probably going to be one of the biggest um um nuclear energy guys ever we just haven’t heard of it yet in fact i heard that some of the ex uh engineers from his space company built are building a modular uh a nuclear thing to power a thousand homes portable yeah so a lot of that and and bill gates is investing in this as well and and you know i’m very sort of technology agnostic i don’t know whether uh fourth generation as they call fourth generation nuclear is going to be the thing that you know uh just really rocks uh because remember we also heard about the other three generations that that was going to be too cheap to meter and you know we’d just be uh inundated in in cheap and available power but there’s certainly an argument to be made that there’s a lot of potential innovations out there imagine if you could make these modular safe nuclear power

[21:33]

these modular safe nuclear power stations ever yeah and they were incredibly cheap everyone would just buy them and we’d be done we wouldn’t be talking about global warming anymore but my understanding is that the the problems of the past both economic and storage of waste are basically solved meaning that we know how to solve them so if you build modular devices you would make them all the same and then you get the economies of scale of making them but in the past we did one-off designs where you really didn’t know how long it would take or whether it would work that model doesn’t make any sense so we wouldn’t do that and and and look there’s a lot of opportunity there i totally buy the prospect i just want to see it actually happen uh you know because there’s a there there’s a lot of vapor aware and and these kinds of arguments uh but but but i think it underscores the fundamental point that i also try to make in the book it is to say look you’re never going to solve global warming by telling everyone i’m sorry could you eat a little less and have a little less meat and drive a little less and don’t fly and you know

[22:35]

little less and don’t fly and you know sit and freeze a little more in the winter and and sweat a little more in the summer and then we’ll all sort of get by kind of thing and then realize you have to do more and more of that every year that’s just not going to work the way we’ve solved all problems in the world is not by telling people to do with less but coming up with innovations that make you do more uh back in the 1970s we worried about you know food running out you mentioned that earlier and the solution was not i remember my mom telling you you’ve got to finish your your plate because otherwise what about all those you know uh poor people in africa i never quite understood that connection but but you know the idea of saying we should eat a less and then we’ll send it down to to africa of course that’s not actually going to solve the problem what did solve it was the green revolution we innovated uh basically varieties that produce a lot more food for every acre if you do that you’re done everybody just grows it and everybody gets happy of course there’s more to the story than that but the fundamental point is if you have innovations everyone wants if you don’t

[23:37]

innovations everyone wants if you don’t have it it’s just going to be incredibly hard one of your uh ideas in the book that i think would make a lot of people nervous if they don’t have the right kind of experience to evaluate the idea which is to uh i’ll use the word massively increase uh r d spending for the new energy sources etc now everybody understands you have to you know invest to get new new stuff but but i don’t think people understand how dependable that is meaning that i don’t know too many areas where we’ve put massive resources into it and we didn’t produce something you know every time there’s a war it seems like we produce a whole bunch of new stuff and let’s just point out we neither of us are advocating that right um but but but how do you how do you convince people that the things that they can kind of touch and smell like oh i’ll recycle or whatever the hell they’re doing in their private life that seems real to them how do you convince them

[24:37]

real to them how do you convince them that x dollars put into research and development can reliably turn into a solution when you can’t even describe what the solution would look like what what could you give somebody so you’re you’re definitely right it’s much easier and that’s why politicians are doing this to say see we built this big wind turbine park you’ve done something yes it cost a lot of money it’s pretty much a waste of money and won’t cut very much but it feels like and you can you know you can go and cut a cord if you fund eggheads it feels like you’re not really doing anything but remember there’s a great example of what happened with fracking fracking was essentially an idea for a long time that in principle there was a lot of gas in the underground in some places that you couldn’t get to but it’d be really cool if we could uh and so some uh some guys including mitchell in in texas and many others thought it’d be fun to see if we can do this but they couldn’t afford it and they didn’t know exactly how to do it the doe went in and basically helped them giving them funding so that they

[25:39]

them giving them funding so that they could find out how to do this they would never have done this by themselves because you know they need it about at the end it turned out to be what 10 billion dollars of thereabouts that was put in to finding out how to do fracking now remember this could have gone wrong it might may have been that we could never have done fracking you know some problems are unsolvable just turns out that way so i’m just showing you one of the good examples namely we spent so or the us spent 10 billion dollars in this 20 years lots of different experiments lots of things that didn’t work eventually they i’m sorry cracked it and then of course we got the fracking revolution everybody got much cheaper gas and oil eventually it probably delivers what about 150 billion dollars in benefits to the us every year and it made the us the number one biggest cutter of co2 because again you don’t cut by telling people i’m sorry could you turn down your lights you do so by saying here’s a cheaper fuel instead of burning coal burn gas so

[26:41]

fuel instead of burning coal burn gas so so let me let me break this down for the people who you know don’t study economics and stuff like that so that’s a 10 bill 10 billion dollar investment by the government produced i’m going to multiply the the yearly benefit and say a trillion dollars yeah plus but we didn’t know that that would work yeah however the way you get a guarantee is that you don’t invest in one thing it’s like that that’s how the stock market works if you pick one stock you’re an idiot you might get lucky you might get lucky right i just need to go on my stock yeah you’re not investing if you picked one stock you have to pick you know a broad group and then one of them works and it pays for the pace of the ones that didn’t but we are doing that the the doe is is doing a lot of stuff and they’re putting money into it so i wish i could handle my alerts before i did this and also you know there’s lots and lots of ideas out there so as you mentioned fourth generation nuclear we should certainly be investing in that there’s already gates but we can help to push this a lot for instance gates are doing

[27:43]

this a lot for instance gates are doing this is doing this in china because the u.s won’t regulatorily allow in in the us and so on but there are also lots of other ideas you know fusion is one of those exciting ideas that everybody you know worries about will never come around but if we could that would sort of fix everything for the rest of eternity uh the craig venter the guy who cracked the human genome he has this idea of growing oil on the ocean surface so take a a genetically modified algae that basically soaks up sunlight and co2 and produces oil now you can make this work but you can’t make it work profitably but imagine if we could and we should fundament trying to make this work you’d harvest all the oil you’d ship it in we would basically have co2 or free oil because we just produced it out on the ocean surface so we could keep our entire infrastructure but we wouldn’t be producing any co2 there are lots of these ideas and there’s lots of crazy people out there who say i have this brilliant idea the point is it’s incredibly cheap to fund

[28:46]

point is it’s incredibly cheap to fund not crazy but near crazy ideas and we really just need one or a few of these to come through and that’s what’s going to power the rest of the 21st century the other thing you talked about was the air scrubbers that literally suck the co2 out of the air now those are too expensive by far at the moment but uh do you know if the expense is in the air blowing that they’re just moving the air is that where the expense is so my understanding is it’s incredibly energy intensive and you also need to store it which is very very energy intensive because you have to pump it down at very very high pressure or turn it into product because they’re all yes now they’re turning into jet fuel but that’s also not quite accurate yes yes so so the idea there is uh uh remember it’s always gonna cost money it’s very very unlikely that’ll turn into a great product uh and and in that sense it’s really just about saying imagine right now it cost a couple hundred dollars so that would be trillions of dollars if we’re gonna cut all the uh the world’s uh emissions but imagine if it only cost

[29:47]

uh emissions but imagine if it only cost what one dollar or five dollars sure would still be about you know about a couple hundred billion dollars that we’d have to pay every year but given that we’re already paying that for our current climate policies you know yes we’d be bickering but probably you know you could imagine the eu and the us just saying huh we’re just going to pay for it it and yes it would be a little expensive but then we’d be done there are so many ways we could potentially solve this but the only way we’re gonna manage to do it is if it’s sufficiently cheap that most voters are gonna say yeah i’m gonna i’m willing to pay for this the problem is right now it is so phenomenally expensive to actually solve this that you have to scare the pants off people in order to get them to say yes to this and i think we would have a better conversation if we don’t actually scare people but tell them this is a problem not the end of the world and show them great solutions you know i i’m going to give you a little push back on this scaring people problem because i’ve thought that this might be a productive fear

[30:47]

might be a productive fear meaning we’re not afraid of nothing i mean we’re afraid of a real thing we’re more afraid than we need to be but maybe that’s the only way anything gets done it’s certainly a valid conversation uh and i hear this from a lot of green uh guys and actually if you talk to all kinds of other people so you know if you talk to teachers they’ll tell you oh the schools is not working and we’ll turn out a terrible new generation to give us more money or you know doctors will say the same thing about health care it’s not uncommon to do this but i think there is a difference between sort of exaggerating a little bit for effect and where we are now with climate change which is basically scaring especially young people and if you talk to people you know young people you can actually feel this palpable fear why would i care about the future because i’m not going to become an adult you know the world is going to end before that and that’s just that’s not just wrong that’s false on an entirely different level so there’s a slight exaggeration and there’s this massive exaggeration that’s actually terribly

[31:48]

exaggeration that’s actually terribly counterproductive and of course also hurting everyone immoral i mean it’s literally moral and can i just very briefly the stuff that i actually do this is sort of my my my side my sideways job what do you call it you know not my main job um because my main job is actually working with a think tank where we look at what are the most important places where we can spend money and do good in the world it’s called the copenhagen consensus so this is about nutrition to small kids or tuberculosis or malaria and all these other boring big problems you know stuff you rarely hear about because it’s not sexy if you over worry about climate change it also means you end up under worrying about all these other things so there’s a real cost i mean i talk to uh you know uh charities that want to do something about a very particular problem and they tell me is there a way we can link this up to climate change because then we can get more money and you’re like that’s not how the world should work right i mean i get why they’re trying to do it

[32:49]

mean i get why they’re trying to do it but that’s actually a well sort of run off the tracks so it seems to me that the people driving climate change are the people with the wrong talent stack you’ve got your artists your politicians and your scientists and one thing that all three of them have in common is they can’t do economics and ultimately like you’re saying everything is a choice of economic choices and they don’t consider economic costs they don’t consider all of the you know the the the second order effects i mean none of that it’s like there’s no analysis happening at all so if we were to do this smarter let’s say a smarter approach to looking at it we talked about the dumb ways uh one of the things you say is to stop ignoring the rebound effect explain to people what the rebound effect is so rebound fundamentally is when you make things cheaper you also use more of it and very often people only think about the first part so for instance i’m i’m vegetarian so i’ve been invested in this whole conversation people say you know

[33:49]

whole conversation people say you know stop eating meat and then you’ll fix a lot of the problem with global warming actually turns out that’s not true you’ll probably fix what four percent but the problem is going vegetarian is also cheaper because you don’t buy those expensive steaks what do you do with that extra money you go on a vacation to you know cancun or something right so you actually end up up making more emissions elsewhere turns out that that negates about half of what you tried to do with going vegetarian you forget that conversation often and we do this in so many different ways what’s happened with lighting for instance because we now have led lights it’s incredibly much both cheaper and more effective to light we’ve just become a much much brighter world turns out that you know in times of old sort of 300 years ago you could only afford a candle you know 20 minutes a day but now you can afford a lot more it turns out that every you know over these last 300 years estimates seems to indicate that everywhere you spend about 0.7 percent of your income on lighting

[34:49]

0.7 percent of your income on lighting so you know we just put up all these christmas lights uh now that we can afford it all right um the the thing that drives me crazy is when the scientists mostly are doing a 50-year economic prediction which no economist believes is even a thing like it’s just a ridiculous concept we don’t know what’s happening next quarter most of the time but 50 years is just a crazy amount because so many things will happen between now and then uh but one of the points things you pointed out was the first thing i saw when i when i saw the the the scare thing about the hit on the gdp will happen 50 years or 80 years i looked at it and i thought well wait a minute all they’re telling us is that it won’t go up as much as we hoped but it will go up this much but not not quite as much literally you wouldn’t notice you could live your whole life and you would be completely unaware that we had missed that two percent man we could have

[35:51]

that two percent man we could have gotten that but we got 400 gain but we could have had 402 and damn it you know why didn’t we try harder and to me that just makes me crazy because it could not be more obvious that we’re not using the right analysis to yeah so so one of the things so in order to predict climate you actually need to make all these predictions also on on economy i i get that it does make sense in some way what do we know what 2100 is going to look like on the other hand it’s probably not unreasonable to say that we’ve seen you know pretty steady growth over the last 200 years it’ll probably continue we kind of know what drives that kind of thing what would happen if you sort of predict that it’ll it’ll grow slightly slower every year simply because we know that it’s harder and harder to invent new stuff what will happen what they find and this is the un’s own estimate by 2100 the average person in the world will be 450 as rich as he or she is

[36:52]

will be 450 as rich as he or she is today an amazing and astounding development and something we should all be very very pleased with if you then look at what’s the total impact of global warming that’s probably about three and a half percent reduction of that so instead of being 450 as rich you will be 434 as rich yes that’s a problem yes it’s not the end of the world and and and again your point is exactly right it’s not that climate change is not real or that it’s not a problem it is those last you know percent from 434 up to 450 but it’s not the end of the world so put it very very bluntly global warming is not the end of the world is something that’s going to destroy or derail it all development it’s something that slightly impede things getting much much better and that’s of course a very different kind of understanding of the problem all right so uh generally speaking i would say that the the people who are not you

[37:54]

the people who are not you when they’re analyzing climate change are just leaving out stuff that’s really big they’re they’re not comparing the right thing the they’re they’re looking too far into the future they’re forgetting that the the rebound effect they’re forgetting opportunity cost which you would describe using different words and and i’m not sure economists have enough of a role in this like that’s not bothering me it feels like the scientists the artists the politicians have taken the lead and they’re all the wrong people like that well they’re part of the people but yeah people love to say follow the science and you know yes we should definitely listen to the natural science but you also need to listen to the social science of the economics of this so you can’t solve this problem without recognizing look there is a problem here that will in absolute terms be significant you know we’re talking many trillions in cost but the policies are also a lot of trillions and could very easily become a

[38:55]

trillions and could very easily become a lot more trillions than the original element that we’re trying to fix you need to realize that both climate change is costly but the climate policies that you’re proposing are costly so we need to find out how do you minimize that actually yeah it’s not like the economies haven’t noticed this they’ve spent last 30 years looking at this so climate economist uh especially a guy named william northhouse he actually got the nobel prize in economics for this in 2018. he’s basically looked at models where he say how much of a problem is climate how much does it cost to do something since we have to pay both you have to find the place where you minimize the total cost of these two things it’s not rocket science if you were to do this yourself you know with your garden or something you would know that you have to do this because you don’t want to end up you know wasting a lot of your income we don’t have that conversation because for politicians it’s obviously so much easier just to say the world is ending but vote for me and i can save you and of course notice how

[39:57]

i can save you and of course notice how they’ve always said but somebody else will have to pay out in the future the problem is the future is now and now people actually have to start paying and people are starting to getting really antsy about the fact that energy prices are going up and all that stuff and so we’re really likely to end up screwing this up badly both by picking really bad solutions but also solutions that are not sustainable that’s why we really have to find a way to do this smarter and so i’m really really happy we can have this conversation and you know get this message out all right so it’s thrilling to be able to talk to you after following you for so long and really you informed my my entire you know understanding of this topic do you have your book with you you can hold up is it nearby i i should have right no i don’t know what is that we’ll hold up a virtual copy afterwards right i just read it on the on the kindle so uh uh yeah and and i’ve i already read it this is is no no all right this is uh this is a bad moment this is you want me to go and get

[40:58]

moment this is you want me to go and get it it it’s called false alarm and it’s it’s available everywhere you can buy books uh and uh thank you so much for this i’ll i’ll post this uh pretty soon probably by the end of today and uh thank you hope to talk to you again soon absolutely let’s do that and let me just say i also enjoyed very much talking to you and of course and you get this all the time but i love dilbert so thank you for that as well thank you take care

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