Joe Rogan Experience #1896 - Bjorn Lomborg

[Music] by night it's like coffee all right so see I brought my uh oh you're a mountain you guys died oh boy I like I like a man who prepares for his podcast all right we rolling we're up did you get that part yeah this dude perfect that is like the anti-environmentalist beverage of choice no I'm kidding so I aluminum is actually good right because aluminum does get Recycled recycling it does get recycled but yeah we were so heartbroken reading this article recently about Plastics about how it was like five percent right single-use Plastics get

recycled yeah yeah like all that all every time you throw your bottle in the right bin you feel like you're a good person yep I'm like mostly person I put it in the blue bin yeah I'm a good person yes the the right way to probably handle that that's a whole different Conversation is just simply to burn it and reuse the energy right um how would you do that though and not pollute the air we do that all all over the world especially in Europe uh you just put some uh you know a scrub on

the Smoke Stack that's all you do like that's that simple yeah it really it doesn't have any well come on some of us have some emissions sure I mean nothing is zero right is it like very hard or is it like a million cars like no no I think it's Probably less than a car so I I it's not something I've looked a million cars sounds gross but that's our city yes the emissions from from uh waste uh uh burning very very low uh so I remember people worried a lot about dioxins and that kind

of stuff uh turns out we can you know get rid of virtually all of it is the trade-off um you have some emissions from the burning of the Plastics but you're getting rid of the Plastics which is a Real is it a net gain for the environment because the Plastics are a real real problem particularly in the ocean and in landfills and just it's a real issue so the the real issue here is once you decide to say you have to switch it into all these different bins yeah you have everyone said I was just

at a conference in Stanford and you could just see everyone and I did the same thing you're sort of like oh my God what am I going and you feel like you Did the wrong thing no matter what you do and you probably did and most of it as you just said won't get recycled why because back in you know five ten years ago we just took all of this and sent it to China yeah and had them re recycle it and this is why there's so much plastic in the oceans it's not because anybody

you know just throw it out is because we shipped it away to feel good about ourselves but we didn't want to pay and then of course when you get this Barge with all this crap plastic you either say should we uh you know recycle it and spend a lot of money or maybe just come you know happen to lose it on the ocean that's where most of this plastic actually comes from so the idea really is to just dump it out yeah so if you burn it instead it's no prob you just throw everything in

one bucket you recycle the energy and it's very very cheap for everyone nobody has to sit and stand there and worry and you'll Actually do what you just pointed out 95 gets done anyway you so if we just do that it will have a net gain on the environment we'll remove Plastics like particularly from the ocean yeah uh who's that young gentleman that we've had on the podcast that developed that machine to extract the plastic from the ocean yeah tip of your tongue son very very I mean he was I believe he was 19 years

old When he came up with the idea and implemented it you know had like a few different models boy on slot thank you sorry boy my memory [ __ ] in the morning um but he figured out how to extract some of it and then they took that plastic and then converted into things you could buy like sunglasses and things on those lines and all of this is nice and and look we should definitely try to clean up the ocean but again I tend to think that we try to make it too hard You know

if you actually want this to work for a population of 8 billion you need to have simple municipal waste uh Recycling and that's very often just that you recycle glass you recycle paper you burn most of the other stuff and then you recycle some of the really valuable stuff doesn't that cost a lot of money to do in places that are like strapped for resources like one of the things that you always see when you see a video footage of countries overseas That are impoverished is you see a lot of trash oh yeah because they

don't have the money to process it no no right and and that's why the first thing you want is just simply good trash uh collection so you get rid of it now so we did a big project in DACA or for Bangladesh and one of the things we focused on was also just simply getting trash off the off the streets because it's unsightly it actually leads to more crime it leads to uh more destitution it probably also Transmit disease and it's fairly cheap to get rid of it's this is not rocket science so there's a

lot of ways that you can do that but instead we come in and say no no you need to recycle you need to have three different baskets and all that kind of stuff no you just need to get rid of it that's how you also get rid of the Plastics in the ocean you know again and I think we'll have that conversation a lot of times uh a lot of these oh we should do the absolute best Feels like it's a really good solution but very often it ends up meaning that you do stuff that

will then only be implemented five percent and the other stuff is crap hmm um there should be a real public understanding of the dangers of these Plastics and microplastics getting into your body too it's it's just so weird that we've developed this entire Society based on this petrochemical plot product that ultimately gets into your body and has negative effects so the the microplastics are possibly an issue it's not quite clear yet whether they are but that's a concern and that's certainly something we should look at but also remember pretty much everything else that you have

with plastics is incredibly useful right and packages which actually reduces loss of pretty Much anything you can think of dramatically and of course through covet we realize it's a really good thing to have one use plastic stuff yeah so so again most things in the real world are both a problem and a benefit and we need to find out how do we make it more of a benefit and less of a problem but we need to stop having this comes oh you can't have anything of this you know this bad thing that's not how we

organize our society so that's not how We think and that's certainly not how we make good choices that makes sense but if we know that there are alternatives to plastic and we know that there's so many different problems with plastic it being non-biodegradable unless it's like there's some isn't there some plastic that they can make with like plant fiber that's biodegradable then then there's the phthalate thing you know I'm sure you're probably aware of this Dr Shanna Swann do you know do You know this whole thing about what's happening to when women are pregnant and

their bodies uh have levels of phthalates above a certain level it uh has an effect on the reproductive cycle of the child and they can do studies in in mammals and they show that when the female is pregnant and she encounters these chemicals from Plastics it [ __ ] with the the the gender of the child like where um their taints shrink which is weird but in mammals apparently That's a representation of like whether or not it's a male or it's like best one of the best distinctions ways distinguishing whether it's a male or female

is the size of the taint when it's a baby because the male chain is 50 to 100 larger than the female taint she's hilarious she's like she's got a like really funny thing on her of Instagram about uh because it also causes a decline in sperm production and so her way of approaching it that's Funny is she has the jizz quiz and she does this she's like this adorable like petite lady who is a brilliant doctor but she's she's kind of being funny and at the same time like sounding the warning shot like hey this

is [ __ ] with human beings reproductive cycles and since the invention of petrochemical plastics that we use in basically everything from that point to today there's a very clear drop in fertility rates a very clear drop in male sperm Count a very clear drop in penis and testicle size and with females there's higher uh rates of miscarriages and she believes through her research that this is connected and that these chemicals that we're getting from these Plastics are literally affecting the development cycle of human babies yeah and and look I've I've done some work on

this so in the thing you have to worry about so we should definitely be concerned about that sounds like a giant issue and we we Should certainly be looking at it uh the best data as I understand this is uh the fact that that sperm counts have gone down dramatically over the last uh 30 to 40 years uh but haven't looked at the taints well does it no I have big time taint study sorry uh and what it turns out of course is uh that uh you tell people that they have to abstain for a

week or four days or a week I can't remember and that's potentially possible that people would do in the 50s it's Very unlikely it happens today and we know so you think more people jerk off now and that's why that's an interesting perspective I bet you're right hold on a second now I'm on team I'm on team Bjorn the point is not that we shouldn't be concerned about issues and that we should be investigating things but you also got to remember our civilization is actually really really good at making sure that we are Concerned about

all the different things and how do we know because we live much longer the this is one of the things I think uh you know almost everyone forgets in 1900 the average life expectancy on planet Earth was 32 years last year it was 74 years right but you know why it was 32 years right it was it was infant mortality about three quarters but what's happening is still that it goes up so this is a fantastic statistic you're going to be surprised About this so even in rich countries it goes up for every year you

live it goes up three more months so for every four years you actually become uh you get one more year in life expectancy you could be young Jamie forever kind of you're you're gonna run out of Runway eventually but but the point here is that we're actually really good at doing these things and yes we should still be concerned one of the reasons why we're good at it is because We're good at being concerned but we should not be so scared that we end up thinking oh my God you know all these things are going

I don't think people are necessarily scared but they should I think they should be concerned and I think we should recognize when things are detrimental to human health you know like the Plastics thing like to just to dismiss that and go well everything's better than it was before and you live longer right but it might like literally Be affecting the way human beings develop in a negative way and who knows what I mean right now they're looking at sexual side effects what kind of cognitive improve or cognitive impairment side effects does it have what kind

of I mean who the [ __ ] knows yeah and and we had a very good example of that with uh lead yeah to gasoline and that was a terrible idea please explain the story behind that because it's really bananas so the fundamental Thing is it makes your gasoline run a little better uh so you added this lead uh to all cars uh it stops your car from knocking yeah yeah those old engines like and they didn't do it quite as much I love the sound effects those little you ever see those old shitty cars

man they're [ __ ] those like guns were going off yeah and and and you know and it just had that huge side effect that actually makes us all dumber yeah the Whole population giant populations of cities lost many percentage points of Ip it's sort of like a three to five IQ that's nuts five percent just so your car could run smoother and and and this again you know it shows because we all remember I don't know uh thaldamide yeah the the idea that you were politomized sorry yeah I I just read these words I

don't actually never heard baby before yeah yeah it's terrible yes and and the point is there are these terrible Stories and they're sign markers to tell us we should be careful but again I also just want to come back to realizing that when you look at the whole picture we're actually doing amazingly much better remember at the same time so we lost these five IQ points what we see now in IQ development is that kids are getting smarter and smarter probably because you get better food you get better childhoods you get better education you get

more stimulated They're all these kinds of things so we've actually gone up what 30 IQ points or something over the last 100 years so at the same time as it's a little controversial because you try to standardize a hundred but fundamentally what you've seen is a dramatic increase in IQ and yes uh lead was a stupid idea we've taken it out and it's mostly cleared up and now you see dramatic increase in IQ what's that attributed to so there's a lot of controversy we don't Quite know I mean as I mentioned I we think it's

because you know kids are no longer starving uh they're no longer they get good uh good nutrition they get much more stimulated one of the important things is that kids get stimulated when they're young uh that they actually get to play around and learn stuff uh you know video games is probably also one of the things uh that actually you know increase your eye brain coordination you shouldn't tell People that then they're just gonna play video games I mean increasing my brain coordination I think that's actually been proven though hasn't it yeah that it has

a similar effect on the brain as uh traditional games of of intellect like chess yeah so so it's nuts well it again you know so I guess the point that I try to make and I'm sure we'll get to that when we start talking about global warming and all the other problems is that we need to recognize that we have Real problems in this world but it's not that the world is sort of you know the wheels are coming off right which is very often the conversation station that I think a lot of people feel

like they're in when you ask you know kids and young people for instance on climate change they're terrified yeah that's a that's an unfortunate thing because a lot of these young kids that are gluing themselves to paintings they don't have a real perspective they're like 18 19 Years old and they really think like they're saving the world because their brains aren't fully formed and they've been like devouring propaganda like it's cheesecake that's the problem yes it's like you know I had on Randall Carlson and Graham Hancock yesterday and the podcast will be released on Thursday

and it's this amazing podcast talking about moments in the Earth's history where the Earth experienced asteroid impacts Comet impacts and that there's a period Around 12 000 something years ago where we for sure got hit by these big impacts of either exploding in the sky above Earth or hitting the ground and there's plenty of like physical evidence of this and it's called the younger driest impact Theory but they were talking about the rapid change in the climate how the the sea levels Rose the ice caps melted all because we got pummeled by asteroids like this

[ __ ] has gone on forever That's just natural stuff from getting hit by space if you look at like the cycles of the like if you go back a million years in Earth and look at all the highs and lows like oh this thing's never been stable without us even existing it's never been stable so I guess the question is how much of an effect are we having on these wild Cycles what can you really blame it on and what can we do if anything to turn it around yeah so it those are the

Reasonable questions right yes and a long one uh so no no no a little carried away I get excited about this one because it seems kind of cultish it is so so look if you look around and if you look back in time absolutely there's been huge changes as as you pointed out you know uh sea levels from from uh an ice age to today has gone up what 400 feet uh so yeah without us even doing [ __ ] with nothing from you know our our impact uh with all that said so that's Sort

of the background and that's important to know we don't live in thousands of millions of years we live right now right and we kind of care about what's going to happen the next hundred and next 200 years to a large extent also because we built all of our cities so you know Austin is built in a pretty warm climate I'm assuming uh you know coming from Southern Sweden I think it's uh it's a lot warmer here than it is where yeah a lot warmer yeah yeah so You know cities are built to the temperature that

they used to have right for the last 100 years so if temperatures change even if it's just somewhat it'll be inconvenient it'll actually be a problem and that I think is really why we're talking about global warming it's a problem that we are causing so we are actually changing the temperature not by these enormous amounts that you're talking about they're not the asteroids of the world But there's you know an issue that we should be careful about and that we should pay attention to and that we should talk about so how do we fix it

in the best possible way well let's before you get to that how do we know how much of an impact our society is having on the overall effect like if there is a warming of the globe how do we know how much of an impact our point is there a real science that points out the Amount of carbon and the emissions that we release has x amount of effect which will equal this amount of temperature rise is that solidified so I'm a social scientist right so I basically just read about your 115 I'm one of

those guys yes sorry should I leave now um so so I basically just take for granted what the U.N climate panel guys telling us I think they have you know I've spoken to a lot of my I've read a lot of their work I think they're really Trying hard to show that what they typically say is between half and all of the change that we've seen over the last hundred years is because of us uh and I they've sort of trend it towards all uh is because of us it feels like that's possibly a little

bit too much but yeah most of it is certainly because of us most of the changing climates so most of the change that is about two degrees Fahrenheit that we've seen and change over the last hundred and and 50 years And that's all because of carbon that's because of the methane from cattle production it's basically because we use fossil fuels and then we also choose yes coal oil gas and then a little bit of farts from cows yeah and so um that has not necessarily been a good thing for the Earth no not when you

just look at the impact on climate because as I said if you built your cities and if you built your life around one temperature if it Changes a little bit that's a problem if the oceans boil just move in a little well but it's not the oceans are going to boil that's when we get into the girl who throws the soup she has a whole video on YouTube the girl threw the soup on the van Gogh she's making some really good points she's making sure maybe I should leave no any so so really the the

point here is this is a problem but it's not the end of the world and I think that's really where we need to get back To and realizing this is not what is going to change our entire future it's going to have a negative impact but remember also at the same time fossil fuels have basically made it possible for us to have the Industrial Revolution and become incredibly safe in so many different ways I mean how did you get here this morning I flew you flew it doesn't matter I drove I was hoping I'm good

for the environment there you go yes yes and and doing my part I feel Virtuous you I I bet you do uh but yeah most people actually get around you food is produced by uh by uh by fertilizer which is very often from gas natural gas uh our transportation our electricity pretty much everything is mostly focused around uh fossil fuels it's pretty nuts to bank everything on this one thing like it's it's a very bizarre how Society has moved like completely in that direction how many things that we need fossil fuels to create like Containers

and tires and this and that and clothing and sneakers and eyeglass there's so much [ __ ] that we use fossil fuels for it makes you wonder like I wonder what would have happened if we never took that path as a culture if we only used fossil fuels for fuel and we never figured out how to turn it into stuff yeah we would have been a lot poorer yeah we've never had computers well we would you know think about you know what what it looked like in around 1800 in England that that would probably be

where we'd be about right yeah the the point is of course and you're making that argument really well uh fossil fuels is just an incredible Boon to civilization and then they also have this problem yeah and and so that's where we need to find a way to slowly and eventually find ways to produce all of that stuff you just talked about without the negative impacts of fossil fuels and that's going to be hard and That's not you know an easy trip what about nuclear nuclear absolutely could be part of the solution so people are incredibly

frightened about nuclear but remember if you look at what it acts actually takes to produce energy nuclear is one of the safest things possible now all technologies have risk right if you put up solar panels you'll have some people falling down from the roofs putting them up I'm not kidding this is right and then sure A Hazard an Occupational hazard but solar panels are some of the safest things together with nuclear uh you know they uh so so Chernobyl which was by all kinds of ways a terrible accident I'm glad you said that I thought

you were approached your Noble for a minute I'm going to say no no I'm not uh so so Chernobyl uh you know probably killed uh in the order of a hundred to two hundred people uh which is not nothing but remember this is the biggest catastrophe We've ever had with nuclear power uh regularly Coal fire power kills you know millions of people uh so yeah millions millions across millions of people die from coal power so this is basically because especially in developing world you don't put smoke you don't put scrubbers on your Smoke Stack so

it just makes it incredibly polluted if you've ever been to New Delhi in the in the in the fall uh it just it I I'm assuming it's a little bit but worse than it was Uh to be back in London 1950s you know you almost can't see your way for it for it and you can just feel it in your throat and everything apparently you inhale all that like uh fires like fireplace fires well you know like where you have in the heart a lot of people think that's good that's terrible it's terrible yes burning

wood like that is one of the worst things for the air absolutely so what people don't get everybody did it it would be horrible if If and we're going to have a lot more of that in Europe this winter because yeah Russian issue but uh but you know what people don't get is most of the world's poor so about three billion people on this planet they cook and keep warm with really dirty fuels like dung cardboard wood whatever they can get their hands on and that means the average in indoor air pollution in these homes

is higher and worse than it is in the outdoor Beijing wow we have no it's the World Health Organization estimated it's equivalent for each person to smoke two packs of cigarettes every day this is three so they're cooking indoor with fires is that what they're doing yeah wow and you keep warm with these because yeah cold at night and we don't we don't have any sense of of these impacts so clearly so let me just tell you a fun story in in Denmark the environmental uh agency they were trying to find out how much uh

in indoor air pollution do you Get if you're right next to a major Street and so they were measuring you know they rented this apartment that was empty and put up measurements in there and every once in a while they couldn't understand they just got these incredible spikes in there and they were like this this shouldn't be coming from from outside right turns out it was when the neighbor lit candles wow that tells you how dangerous it people think it's really nice to have The you know uh fire and and the and the stove or

or these candles on but actually incredibly polluting oh wow well some people go nutty with the candles that's got to be horrible like if someone has their whole like RH fear special Jew which is out right now on YouTube you're just gonna bring that up let's go to that go to a clip of it my friend Ari shaffir was polluting the environment not only does he not care about the environment but he snuck in Pollution I'm sure he did this [ __ ] on purpose it's available right now on YouTube behind Ari best special he's

ever done look at all those candles he's killing the air he's forcing people to breathe toxic fumes yep while he's doing his jokes the son of a [ __ ] they look real though no they're real they had a they um had a life of eight hours of lit when they were normal but then when they turned the air conditioning on the air was Blowing down on the candles so they were burning through this so this lady had to get like extra candles overnight it was a giant Affair like 9 000 candles overnight yeah and

mind you they just pumped up the air pollution as well right but anyway it's available right now on YouTube he's got over 2 million views 2.2 so he's uh he's polluting the environment by doing that so people that do fireplaces you think oh it's going to be So romantic sit by the fireplace you're polluting the environment if everybody did it would be horrible air quality you're polluting your own indoor uh environment so I mean in that sense I'm like all right you know it's a little bit like skydiving the man if you're fine if you

take it if you're camping and you have a little campfire going on maybe it's a little bad for the environment but how good is it for you that's where people draw that line like No one's out here no one is out here in the middle of nowhere exactly and we're staying alive with with actual fire warming up but when you go then to India they burn all their fields right next to uh the problem is poverty yeah yes and what gets us out of poverty quicker and that's petrochemical products fossil fuels it's it's basically energy

oh yeah that's the capitalist versus the Marxist can I show you argument about this story I'm no no no I'm a graph guy so if too Okay I have a wood cover it looks cool now on your MacBook yeah so this is you see how rich people are out the X uh the the horizontal axis and then you see how much energy you have up on the uh on the y-axis and what you basically see is the Richer you are the more energy you use or the other way around well of course yeah this is

not rocket science right climate change people to fly around in private chats are the biggest Hypocrites yes like you're selling that you're Going to the world economic Forum on a [ __ ] chat with three people in it yes get out of here man he loser are you conspiratorial about this push towards a climate change I mean what or or towards a a climate change crisis mentality where you know there was a famous project Veritas video with a guy who worked for CNN and they caught him on undercover camera and they were talking about using

climate change to get people excited I assumed he was Talking about four ratings which makes sense if you're a producer and you work in Hollywood you know if the Kardashians are fighting with their boyfriend get in there let's go that's that's money right that's what you do and if that's happening oh my God the climate like everyone freaks out the climate they're glowing their their hands to picassos oh Jesus the climate if that's going to get you ratings your job is to get ratings your job is not to educate the American People you can barely

figure out life yourself right you're 34 years old you got a half a million dollars in student loans can't believe you work for CNN what are you supposed to do you're supposed to [ __ ] [ __ ] put the climate change in everybody's face because that's how you're going to sell tickets that's what they're doing so climate has that wonderful opportunity that it can actually fundamentally get us to talk about every time something out there Happens it can be news and it can be somebody's fault uh so right every time there's a flood every

time there's a storm every time there's art attacks heart attacks or climate change I'm sure they'll come have you seen that I'm sure yeah no that's real oh God yeah there's articles written yeah about uh the climate change may be causing all these sudden deaths and heart attacks and and look again there is something to this so the idea that when you have very high Temperatures you actually have more heart attacks and you have more people dying so yes uh uh uh deaths are are bad you also have uh more people dying if they're not

taking care of their body and no one talks about that climate change causes heart attacks a second look at the data hmm how good is the evidence implicating climate change climate change as a cause of heart attacks not vary let's take a critical look at some of this research so a slew Of recent studies suggested that climate change increasing the number of heart attacks worldwide the hypothesis suffers from many critical deficiencies the most important being that rates of heart disease and thus heart attacks in the industrialized world have plummeted as our ability to prevent and

treat coronary artery disease has improved Studies have reported a Slowdown in this trend have studies that have reported slow down this trend have also detected Rises in the prevalence of obesity metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes what we're just saying all well-known risk factors for heart disease so it's not that climate change is causing the heart disease it's that people are doing things that they shouldn't be doing with their body in terms of like letting their body get obese or not taking action and going to the gym and altering their diet then they need encouragement

and it should be if you really wanted Like lower costs for health care worldwide especially Nationwide a national program encouraging people instead of just putting like a black Square on your Instagram on Tuesday how about encouraging people through one entire month to do a hundred sit-ups and 100 push-ups and go up you know walk 10 000 steps every day just encouraging people and everybody have to [ __ ] be accountable online if everybody did that people would be much better weight they Would shed weight all sorts of medical problems would go away if they're capable

of doing this of course if they're not if they already have a health problem that's it's obviously not their fault but there's so many people that can improve their life and there's no encouragement to do it all they talk about is like the fear of what happens if this comes for you the fear the climate is going to make you have a stroke the climate is going to make you Stay indoors the oceans are going to boil it's like Jesus Christ tell me what I can do to make life better right now yeah and so

you're absolutely right we can do a lot of house with that said though it's not that there is nothing to this point uh so can can I just show uh the same uh well I'd imagine if it gets hotter people are going to have heart attacks yeah so it makes sense yes but that's because they're not very resilient well but right you know it's Especially old people right so no it's not unreasonable to say that this is going to be an issue and and you know there is a lot of people out there telling us

oh my God they're going to be more uh heat deaths because of global warming yeah it's scary it is scary but you also have to then uh if if I can show a B3 you also have to see so what this shows this is new Lancet study from uh 2020 what each year Rising temps save 166 000 lives yeah this is kind of Surprising right you know so told me that the first time I'm sorry to interrupt you okay but uh Randall Carlson said uh he goes climate change where it gets warmer it's not necessarily

good but climate change where it gets colder is bad that's bad yeah he said Everybody's scared about global warming you should really scared about global cooling it's not dismissing global warming say like understand like when temperatures drop you can't grow Food kids like it gets bad and then we're really [ __ ] so if I can just show you this one up here so if you look there's an enormous amount of coal deaths in the world so there's about four and a half million people die from cold evidence in the U.S how is that possible

170 000 people die from cold every year what why because every winter you actually have to keep your home heated well for six months especially up in the north right In order to not have you know uh artery clog you have heart attacks that kind of thing what happens when it gets colder and you get cold the body restricts its uh at blood flow out to the uh to the surface and you get higher blood pressure and that's a very well-known uh risk factor for for getting heart attacks so you actually have a lot of

people that die because they don't get enough heat especially older people I never would imagine that many people Freeze to death and and this is of course the point you know do you remember the heat dome last year the heat Dome the the thing that killed a lot of people up in uh in uh up in Washington and British Columbia oh that's right yeah there's a huge Heat Wave it killed what 700 people yeah huge issue and you know know got covers for for of all papers and and uh cnns and all that for for

a week and that is a real problem that's certainly something That we're going to see more of from climate change but you never hear about this fact that 170 000 people die from cold every year in the U.S I've never heard that before and this is this is not you know some quack signs this is the Lancet this is the global burden of disease yeah what's the number 170 000. uh so you wasn't that what the Lancet just said what was the paper put the paper up again so we can take a look at it

so that's the global burden of Disease if you go to uh uh GB I just typed in cold deaths in the US per year and it said since 1979 only like 19 000 people have died from code related yes that's that's because if you ask and there's another there's another uh organization that just keeps track of how many people died from cold if you actually and got in the newspaper that's of course very very few most of these are statistical deaths so these are deaths that happens because whenever the Temperature is lower there's a slightly

higher risk of dying and that slightly higher risk is the cold death oh so is this like a died with covid or died from covet thing are these people that are already dying and then it gets really cold and they die no no this is they would not have had this problem had they not been experiencing this cold so every year you see uh sorry if you if you take over the year you see this trend uh so from December sorry from January it's High and then the death rate is low and then it gets

high again this is basically because cult is dangerous and heat not nearly as much so right but how are they attributing those deaths directly to cold if like what is the statistic that you looked up and where's what's the source of that so key points so this is from what is this from government dot climate so this is the EPA between 79 and 2016 the death rate As a direct result of exposure to cold underlying cause of death so that's freezing to death yeah right okay um generally range from 1 to 2.5 deaths per million

people with year-to-year fluctuations overall total of more than 19 000 Americans have died from cold related causes since 1979 according to death certificates so what are they putting on the death certificate of These people that are dying that you're counting with the 166 000. so oh sorry that's the 170 for the U.S or yeah what whatever the Lansing study said to 166. the Lancet study is a global study and that was an increase in the number oh I'm sorry so United States 170 000. that's the global burden of disease so they are an international study

out of the University of Washington that tries to estimate all the deaths and where do they come from uh so you know people die From all kinds of things but what was the proximate cost of this was it too hot was it too cold right was it that you were in an accident all these kinds of different things and a lot of you know uh uh this is the kind of thing where you say obesity costs causes a lot of of you know deaths I can't remember what that is you know like a million dollars

but it's not on the death certificate it's not on the death certificate because it's a it's a Statistical correlation that you died because or you died right after uh the uh the uh cold or the heat snap is there potential to manipulate that in one way or another because look again if someone has a political bias to push one thing or another so yes there is a there's a way so for instance uh uh curiously everybody that dies from from heat die after one or two days so that's why it's such good news you know

uh sorry sorry Such good news casting right when when it happens you can show the bodies right there uh when you have cold deaths it typically happens uh after 15 to 30 days so you need to have cold for a long time because then you're starting to work that up and your you know your body restricts your your temperature that's what causes it so you really need to lag these a lot of times you don't do that analysis and so you only find the heat dust but not the cold deaths huh so There's a wonderful

study that actually showed uh back in the uh uh early 2000s or late 2000s when uh when fracking uh came on board uh they found that you know gas prices went down so about half of all Americans uh Heat their homes with gas and so what happened was you actually could show that because people could now afford to heat their homes better especially if they were poor that actually every year saves about 11 000 people from dying from heat uh sorry From cold death isn't that amazing it is amazing so these cold deaths were talking

about people who because of being in freezing cold temperatures they have a variety of different detrimental health problems like is it just because they're it's typically not that they're older folks yes they're it's almost entirely older people okay this is not because they're sitting and shivering and you know you can sort of see the uh the ice it's just A bit more fragile it's just when it's cold at night it's just that their homes are not all that well heated and you know until you have to keep the heat on at night and they can't

quite afford it and so they keep it like one or two or three degrees lower than they probably want it to no one thinks that kills people no no and the reason why it kills people is because this is a lot of millions of people and each one of them are put into this little risk factor and The overall point that I try to make with that graph uh and with the Lancet study was just that you know you hear all this thing about more heat deaths and that's absolutely true because of global warming but

you never hear the fact that it's temperatures rise you're of course also going to see fewer cold deaths and actually right now it turns out that we're seeing many fewer coal deaths than we're seeing increasing heat dust what's more preventable the the Heat dust or the cold deaths in terms of like um medical intervention so it's actually not MediCal intervention it's just you know air conditioning like fluid IVs they do that a lot to people that get severely dehydrated but again remember these are not people that are that are you know have been freezing water

for 10 minutes or something or right these are these are people that are just a little too cold Or a little too warm and the simple way to deal with that is air conditioning that's why as temperatures have risen in the U.S we've seen declining levels of heat death because you guys can afford air conditioning and that's of course what we need to make sure that the rest of the world can afford so it's actually easier to deal with heat because we know how to do that whereas cold requires you to have cheap energy for

the whole heating season and that's much much cost Much costly and and harder especially for poorer people so when people talk about our impact um on on the world with oil and how we're ruining the the future of our planet and so the hysteria of these young people what do you think is the thing to tell them to try to give them a more balanced perspective of what's actually happening like if you you think it's a problem you think what people are doing is a problem But it's not as big of a problem that's what

that's what kind of has to be balanced out because it's either everything or it's nothing yeah that's the that's the narrative that we hear today either global warming is not an issue at all oh you silly goose why are you worried about that or it's oh my God we're all gonna die yeah those are the only two options you have and I want to get people to understand that global warming is a problem but it's actually Mostly a problem in the sense that the world is getting better and better but because of global warming it

gets slightly slower much better that's a hard one to tell can I just show you one slightly slower much better so it gets better and better but slightly slower let me show you two graphs so if I can show you from a 22 so it's impeding our progress yes it's impeding our progress slightly slightly so what kind of a percentage are we talking about let me Just first if I can just show you uh a22 so this one shows the deaths over the last century of all the things that you think of as climate right

floods drought storms wildfires and extreme temperatures they don't do a particularly good job on extreme temperatures but let's just leave it at that this is the best data that we have for the world and what it basically shows is the complete opposite of what these guys that are gluing themselves to The Picasso right this is fundamentally a situation of back when you were poor in the 1920s about half a million people died every year you don't want to be amazing to look at right next to that the deaths from Donuts it would be the total

opposite direction oh yeah yeah look look weird getting richer means that you can allow yourself to go you know die from lots and lots of donors yeah but it's a decision well it's a lot of poor people As well yeah I mean that that food's cheap and it's filling you know but if you looked at Food related deaths let's see if there's food related deaths how many like how would you just how would you make that distinction of people who would it be people who died from obesity and diabetes like how would you say that

because it's obviously of a lot of other uh they die autoimmune diseases that come from being obese yeah there's not just a few so Like the 500 000 from 20 1920 I bet we hit that every year from obesity oh I'm sure in America like what do you think it is in America like heart disease and that's hard disease is probably a couple of million that's a lot right um but the heart disease ones trying to be attributed to genetics two and a half million debt in total in the U.S so it's probably at one

million or something and how many of that how many of those you could attribute to sedentary lifestyle And obesity and how many was just uh unfortunate genetics you know because that happens as well like what do you think give me a is there does anybody do an accounting on how many people die from obesity every year oh God yeah just very sure that's like the bottom line right like you're you they're attributing it to you on your death certificate they're saying obesity that's that can't be that many right imagine that I don't know I think

the all the other effects like heart attacks Strokes all the things that come from being obese diseases susceptibility diseases but I think your point is well taken right because it tells you that all these protesters are gluing themselves out there and are worried about the end of the world from climate change should be much more worried about they show themselves to Krispy Kreme Krispy Kreme is damn good though especially when it Comes out warm when I look this up it's it's uh it's a contributing factor it I don't know that it's listed as like yeah

that's what I'm getting at it seems like it'd be hard to quantify is it hard to quantify yeah I mean because like if someone's fat and they get cancer like is that what happened hmm you know what what caused it this is an important of disease actually does so they do this for the whole globe they try to you know they would probably parcel it out for For uh uh uh for um obesity as well yeah obviously that was one of the big things that people had a problem with with kova desk was people that

were already terminally ill and got coven they attributed to covet but you know your body is like an ecosystem and if you have like a major insult coming into your body like being obese or a disease or if you live in one of these horrible places that has massive amounts of pollution that's something that must Affect I mean that's a big that is a big impact on longevity right right included cities yes and just being poor bad nutrition bad Health Care all the above stress violence you know all of that um that but that's not

convenient Bjorn that's not good for our little conversation our conversation is I have to glue myself to the van Gogh and throw [ __ ] soup at it can I can I just show you on uh sorry B Jesus B8 Yeah I have a quick question on the other climate one I was just watching the movie about World War one last night that's why I asked us wouldn't war deaths shouldn't they maybe be included or would they be very high in like this first area like 1920 1940. oh so this is comparing like you know

like millions of people died because of war and other things due to the war oh God yes this would be much this would be much bigger and you know centered around 1940. uh But I'm only looking at the climate change floods drought storms and wildfires that's all I was also I didn't what I haven't I don't what giant floods or I'm not saying there weren't I've just never heard of anything no I think what he's talking about with climate related deaths it's mostly people freezing to death well no no so sorry this is exactly the

point I'm just asking Weaver Clarity there was huge floods in China and India in the 1920s 1930s huge famines you know things that we just never heard of well we heard a little bit about it back then uh but then we've forgotten it yeah and then when we hear about these things that will cost a thousand deaths remember let me take a an example I know a lot more about so the world's biggest hurricane death was in Bangladesh in 1970. it was a big hurricane that came in killed somewhere between 300 and 500 000 people

in Bangladesh this was mostly because You know uh they were totally unprepared there was very bad communication it was also East Pakistan back then that was one of the reasons why they broke loose because they felt they weren't really being taken care of today and you know this in many ways defined Bangladesh and so they have taken great care in getting much better uh prevention they have information they have these centers where you can assemble up on high areas where you can actually keep everyone Safe and stuff so now the same kind of hurricanes come

in and they kill sort of tens or hundreds of people instead did you see that community that they established in Florida that survived this last hurricane like flying colors is that a word you you know that expression um if you if you go to um what was the Hurricanes called yeah the last one the big one they just hit Florida Ian if you go to uh Hurricane Ian uh solar community Florida it's uh I believe it's 2 000 homes they're completely off-grid in a sense that they're they have a solar field and it Powers these

homes and they built homes to withstand hurricanes and so this is a bad hurricane so it was a really good test for them and it it nailed them and everything was fine they kept their internet they kept their electricity so look at that isn't that wild look how they did that they have This massive massive field of solar panels so it's called Babcock Ranch and this uh this community was established just to give people a safe place from a natural disaster because a lot of the houses they built before you know the engineering when they

were building these houses in like the 1950s I mean did they really know how to survive a [ __ ] hurricane you know they just built a good house they tried their best but see if you can get some photos of What what the houses look like they look like normal houses but they built these houses with very strong tolerances and they can take like incredible wins and they look like a regular [ __ ] house it's not like they're space houses like they're built like a [ __ ] like a like a wind turbine

or something like that no it's they're normal houses but they're just really robust and these people all made it through yeah which is pretty wild and Joe I think it emphasizes Something we know how to fix many of these problems and if you just disregard the the solar power which of course kept them powered but there's many other ways you could have done that with right with batteries but that's a great way oh absolutely but the main point is you should have better regulation for houses if you want to all most houses to survive yeah

this is very very cheap you know uh uh uh there's a good study for Hurricane Sandy and also for Hurricane Andrew back in 92 had there been better uh regulation so you just had clamps for instance on roofs you know these cost what five dollars or something you could have avoided half of all the damage yeah yeah this is very very simple stuff and so again because we're so worried about one thing namely climate change and saying oh my God we gotta you know go to electric cars and stop using fossil fuels and all this

other stuff no actually you need to have clamps right And and this is this is the kind of conversation that we that we have a very hard time getting around to that just like we talked started started off talking about with plastics a lot of the solutions are not they're not nearly as comforting but they're just much simpler much cheaper much more effective so what is the solution in terms of reducing our carbon footprint without destroying the economy well so I think first of all we need to get rid of the panic because Panic is

just a really really bad way of dealing but it's a really good way to get people to to vote and it's a really good way to get people to donate money to your party yes yes but it also leads to us all you know just screaming good running around screaming a kid because I wanted to show you this that the progress is actually just slightly delayed so if I could just show you show you the uh the B uh uh the B8 this is because of climate change the our Progress is slightly delayed yourself yes

yes so this is malaria death since 1900 until 2060. uh this is obviously prediction for the last uh from 2020. this is the World Health Organization estimating what will happen with global warming you've heard this story right that no I haven't heard that everyone's going to die malaria because of uh global warming there's going to be more places where malaria can survive and That's going to give us all malaria right makes sense and and there is some truth to this so what you see here is that you will actually with climate you will actually have

slightly higher levels of malaria death than if there was no climate change so what we're looking at for folks are just listening there is a really high line in the 1900s and it's at uh it goes from zero to 200. the the line is almost at 200 in the 1900 early 1900s and it drops all the Way down to looks what looks like two in 2060. and it's pretty stable from like 2040 to 2060. and from that point and it's below what it is now by the way but that point above it with climate is

maybe two and a half it's it's on top of the line it's like touching the line so it's a very very small number not that it's good for people to die of malaria and and what this tells you is they're right when they come out and tell you there's going to be more malaria with Global warming but how much but yeah but you're missing the greater picture which is look things are going to be a lot better but slightly slower a lot better and could that be mitigated with malaria medication of course it could of

course so if you actually care about malaria your right answer is not to say we gotta you know change the entire growth engine of the world and stop using fossil fuels no the right answer is to make sure that people get malaria medication that you Get bed nets there's a lot a lot of these simple things remember this does not mean that we shouldn't also try to fix global warming we're you know we're smart species we can walk and chew gum at the same time but we seem to almost entirely just go to the straight

answer whatever the problem is the answer is to cut carbon emissions and that's often not the best or the most effective way to help people first there there are some Real ironies one of the one of The Crazy Ones is coal-fired plants powering Teslas that is one of the wildest trade-offs that we make and that happens day in this country someone is getting into their Tesla thinking they're doing a really good job and the electricity to power that Tesla is from a coal-fired plant it's bananas and a lot of that could be avoided with nuclear

the problem with nuclear is if it funks up You ruin that spot for a long time true that's what scares people that's the initial applications of nuclear like Fukushima they didn't have enough fail safes like there was these were older plants and they think that they can mitigate a lot of those problems with newer plants and there's even designs for newer plants they can actually safely shut down right yeah I mean they they should all be able to safely shut down because I'm sure that's true Fukushima was not well enough to sign because they basically

put them in place where the backup generators could be hit by uh uh uh that one's nuts but even in that one I don't believe very many people died nobody died uh so some people died because you evacuated everybody uh but you know it was really not a big risk but it was a big risk to the ocean right isn't there looking at it very very small bit really yeah I Thought it was spilling over into the ocean there's radioactive water it did but again remember the Pacific Ocean is a very very large enough yeah

and there's a lot of natural radiation in almost everywhere in the world right I mean most people don't get the idea that that your your vast exposure of radiation comes from living in a in a stone house uh so if you have like uh uh uh bricks like a brownstone in New York yeah because uh uh most most Stone has Natural uh uh radiation but it's not a negative right it's not a terrible one by by no means this is not you know don't don't freak out again right but the whole point here is to

recognize that we don't we don't have a good sense of proportion of what's the risks that we're really exposing ourselves to the the main issue with with nuclear and this of course is why we're not getting lots and lots of nuclear is that nuclear is incredibly expensive right now so new Nuclear power plants of the current third generation just cost a lot of money so they're actually more expenses than you know going to solar and wind and that's really why we're not building a lot of them how much more expensive so uh uh so you

know some of the new ones that are being done in in France and and Finland and then you UK have ended up being you know two to four times more expensive than they were planned and so they're easily you know sort of two Three times more expensive but more than they were planned to be yes and so they go way over budget and the total cost of the uh electricity they'll produce uh could easily be two or three times the cheapest uh electricity you can get how much of that is fraud I don't know because

whenever they have construction that goes way over I think about the big dig in Boston yeah do you know about that no the big dig was a thing that was going on when I was a kid And a bunch of people went to jail so we can hear where it's going super slow play and the the digging this tongue because they didn't want the jobs to go away right and uh they did a terrible job it took forever it was I think they called it one of the most corrupt construction projects in the history of

the United States and that's saying something it finished more than 10 years after it was supposed to be finished I got already moved out of Boston but I came back like many many years later I'm like this thing's still around they're still doing this 14.8 billion dollars later The Big Dig finally complete when the Croc clock runs out on 2007 construction The Big Dig the nation's most complex and costliest Highway project will officially come to an end they were doing that when I was living in there in the 1980s they were working on they finished

it in 2007. so what is the like It was super corrupt right didn't a bunch of people go to jail I'm not saying that the people that are making the nuclear power plants are doing the same thing started at 2.6 billion and ended up at 14.8 whoa but I think it it tells a different story certainly for holy [ __ ] that's so much money yeah certainly for nuclear uh what happens is that you want you know one more sale fail safe and then one more Fail-Safe Right the they keep on you know changing the

rules and making the regulations so it's going to be even harder and again that's that's not a bad thing that sounds like a good thing Fail-Safe is not good yes but you also want to have a sense of well how safe are we going to be here compared to all the other stuff that is also risky we constantly make trade-offs right we shouldn't not pay attention to this but I see what you're saying we should give equal Focus to all These other problems that the world has and that that's not what we do we focus

on one thing so you ask me what what should we say to these guys uh you know glue themselves to famous paintings uh and I think first it is to get them to realize this they should work in the coal mine of anyone yes so they they should realize this is not the end of the world and I think that would take away a lot of this oh my God we got to do something Right now right and then we can start talking about okay how do you fix things smartly well you don't fix getting

rid of fossil fuels by telling everyone I'm sorry would you mind being a little poor and a little colder and not be able to drive would that be okay with you that you know we we just don't you don't win elections that way you don't actually get things done the way you fix problems is through Innovation so you know if you think uh back to Los Angeles in the 1950s it was a terribly polluted place mostly because of cars uh you know there's special sort of geography that makes it very possible for all the pollution

just to get stuck in that uh in that dome in Los Angeles and it's cars and so the the current way we think about environment is basically all right the solutions back then would have been to tell everyone in Los Angeles I'm sorry could you walk instead right and no that wouldn't have worked what did Work was the innovation of the catalytic converter so in 1974 this guy comes up with this a little thing you put on it costs a couple hundred uh dollars and basically it takes away all the pollution from the car how

cool is that it's pretty cool but not all the pollution no no no and look but you can drive a lot longer and pollute a lot less which is why Los Angeles is enormously much cleaner it's still not clear here's a take for Innovation Here's an interesting piece of information in polluted cities some cars like particularly uh Jeremy Clarkson was talking about this on um Top Gear some cars like a Porsche Turbo which is a very efficient car and has incredible air filters and the air coming out the exhaust is actually cleaner than the air

going in yeah that's true make sure that's true because I'd be [ __ ] if it's not true but Jerry Clarkson definitely said that and I remember Thinking like wow maybe that is the solution if you can get something to Porsche to everyone no not unfortunately a car that's sucking in the car but everyone should before they die own one of those though but if you could get a car that is somehow or another utilizing that fuel that's in the air that's problematic and if there's some sort of a way to extract that and convert

it maybe through some you know unforeseen technology convert that into energy this Sounds implausible doesn't that yeah it sounds like it's very so we're doing the same thing with carbon that you're trying to suck out the carbon from the atmosphere and it turns out to be very expensive it's all combustion engines require oxygen right would it be possible for a combust combustion engine at least to somehow work carbon neutral by pulling enough carbon out of the atmosphere that the whatever comes out the bag is actually not good okay what He said here it is Jimmy

Clarkson said when you drive this car through a really polluted city Los Angeles Calcutta I don't know what the other part I think he was joking around something like that the gas coming out of the exhaust pipe is less toxic than the air going into the engine and I'm not joking that's true and then this then is like a small efficient easy to use vacuum cleaner okay so he's joking around about that but is that True is it true does it say it's true Jamie what does it say that it's true it doesn't say it's

true or false so that is his quote uh well I have seen concept cars that clean the eye seriously doubt any car existing yeah that's what this is the Porsche 911 oh because there's [ __ ] so he's saying it's [ __ ] I seriously doubt any existing cars especially the Porsche 911 Turbo emits Exhaust that is cleaner than air even air in the most polluted cities here's exactly what Clarkson says so this is uh this is by Auto blog so Autoblog is calling [ __ ] which makes sense doesn't make sense that that but

it was a fun story but if it could be is it is it an engineering issue is it possible that some new invention would be able to do that with the air so I'm essentially an economist I'm I'm sort of a pretend Economist because I'm really a political Scientist but I like to pretend I'm an economist because economists are smart people uh so anyway uh economists would tend to say you can do anything you want if you're willing to pay the money right so you can take people to the Moon we could potentially take all

of Austin to the Moon it would just be fantastically expensive right and it's not clear that you know it'd be really cool either they shouldn't take everybody to the moon no And just the people at Beto signs in their lawn oh there you go so so fundamentally you can do a lot of stuff and you could also do this but it would just be you know incredibly expensive meaning yeah you wouldn't have the resources to do all the other stuff you'll really want to do hence this is a Porsche Turbo this is not a you

know a Hyundai or a Fiat yes it's a very expensive car um so In in terms of what we can do now to slow the stem like that's one of the fear-mongering things that you hear I don't know if it's accurate but they're always saying if we don't do this now with every with every day that passes by if we don't enact legislation the future is doomed this is the thing that people keep harping on yeah how much of that is accurate that's just wrong I mean if you look at the UN climate panel reports

there's nowhere they tell you this the Quote I don't know if you remember this was AOC and many others uh telling us we have just 12 years left oh my God that was that was the argument that they they asked the UN what will it take to stick to 1.5 degrees Centigrade which is sort of an arbitrary Target right and almost impossible probably impossible to do and so the UN said if you want to do this almost impossible you have to do everything before 2030 which was then 12 Years away right that's where the 12-year

time limit come from it's basically saying if you want to do something incredibly stupid and Incredibly expensive you only have 12 years left but that's not what the UN is telling us we should switch and we should cut carbon emissions but they're much much smarter ways to do this so the perhaps the most obvious one is what the US did back from late 2000s which was fracking Yeah this is uh uh uh basically something that was done by uh investment research and development from uh uh uh George W bush uh in the early 2000s where

they spent about 10 billion dollars working with frackers to find out how do you Frack uh gas and then later on oil and what that meant was you ended up this was not at all meant as a climate policy it was meant as a way to get more energy but what it meant was you ended up getting much much cheaper Gas and because you had much cheaper gas you switched out coal for gas this matters because gas is about twice as efficient it emits half as much CO2 per unit of energy so you basically have

this situation where you made a somewhat cleaner source of energy much cheaper and so the U.S actually cut its emissions more over the last decade than any other country has ever done but is there a detrimental effect on the environment because of fracking that it Has to balance that out there is how much of an impact is that so there's thank you for asking so there's a there's a study that tries to look at what all the damages and all the benefits from fracking is and so they find the total damage from fracking as in

the order of 25 billion dollars mostly from air pollution uh yes interesting so does that negate the air pollution that it saves no no so this is local air pollution and this is mostly From you know the increased amount of uh emissions especially of methane but also just because you have lots of construction going on where you do the uh the fracking and because fracking is a very rapid turnover you need a lot of Wells so there's a total cost environmental cost about 25 billion dollars that's not nothing absolutely per year but the benefit of

fracking to the US is estimated by the uh one of the Federal Reserve right but if I can push Back against that the the risk can I just say please sir sorry so it's a 180 billion dollars in increased growth for the us so you get 187 a billion dollars but you also have environmental problems of 25 billion dollars well shouldn't we be doing everything possible to mitigate the amount of environmental problems and when you're talking about just straight money how much money is it worth to pollute the rivers and pollute the streams and pollute

the air I would say That's not a benefit at all that benefit in terms of like the negative impact of pollution and then trying to clean up that pollution is catastrophic it's very difficult and sometimes impossible when you're talking about polluting ancient waterways that scares the [ __ ] out of people including me especially people that like to go outside and do outdoor activities and go camping and hiking and [ __ ] they get terrified by the idea of fracking destroying the rivers and that Has happened before right sure and and look again most of

the impact was air pollution but there's also some water pollution and that that is definitely a an issue again we have to remember that running the current of of uh energy system that we have in the U.S causes lots of pollution and it causes lots of benefits and we make those trade-offs all the time right we can contain it to the areas that it's already at that would be more efficient than spreading It out to our rivers and we have done that right remember air pollution uh uh certainly in the U.S has come to come

down about 90 over the last 30 years uh so because of you know the clean uh Clean Air Act and many others we've actually dramatically reduced air pollution and we know how to do that you can absolutely regulate a a fracking better and you can decide that you want to have less air pollution but it is a trade-off in the sense of saying how Much more opportunity will you have and then you also actually cut carbon emissions which is what the US has done more than any other country versus how much uh do you want

for instance less air pollution but for the people that live around those areas where they're fracking that's not a good no relationship although a lot of these guys this is one of the reasons why fracking is taken off in the U.S and not ever anywhere else because in the U.S You own your own mineral rights right so the guys who own the land are the ones who typically get most of the or not most of the benefit but a substantial benefit of the fracking that's not true in Europe which is why everybody then gets annoyed

about the air pollution but if you get air pollution but you also get like two hundred thousand dollars many people will say hmm I like that now they probably like to have less air pollution doesn't RuPaul have like some Crazy Ranch where they extract natural resources I remember people reading about that going wait what there you go with the Mountain Dew get excited first Mountain Dew to the day it is um are cigars bad for the environment oh they're certainly bad for you no what about George Burns you lived forever do you think they're bad

for you I'm pretty sure we know that you think they're worse for you than Mountain Dew I'm sorry I'm hoping on Mountain Dew talking to me about cigars yes cigars are natural tobacco leaves you don't even inhale you just puff on it okay I I don't think you possibly we should have a little warning sticker there don't take medical advice from this man yeah for sure hold up non-coveted content RuPaul was just on NPR fresh air and shared that he and his partner owned 60 000 acres in Wyoming and they lease mineral rights and sell

water to oil Companies okay uh Terry Gross did not follow up with one question about the fact that RuPaul is fracking oh so it is fracking we found that RuPaul is that true Rue's partner is true Australian Rancher George LeBar owned seven Parcels of land in Wyoming totaling some 66 000 Acres labar's company labar Ranch leases that land to at least three oil companies uh and a Darko EP onshore Chesapeake operating in Anne Schultz Oil Company using Frac tracker we looked at just 10 000 of those acres and found more than 35 active oil and

gas Wells and then they also say all oil and gas drilling is bad all oil and gas drilling is bad you hear me Bjorn this is a fact it's on Gizmodo you son of a [ __ ] all oil and gas drilling is bad but these three companies are no mom and pop shops Chesapeake Energy was a pioneer of the drilling method early in the nation's Fracking boom it was the second most active drilling company in the nation closely followed by Anadarko and Ann Schultz owner Philippe Frederick and Schultz made billions from fossil fuel extraction

that earned him the 41st spot on the Forbes 400. wow interesting well RuPaul is fabulous go get it get that money um if it's your land do you have the right to uh pollute the rivers and streams That's the question because these all have you trickle-down effects like that water is connected to other waterways and and we should have better regulation we have gotten a lot better regulation but I was simply trying to get you a sense of you know when you do anything in the world it has negative impacts and positive impact I get

you're a glass half full guy no I'm a glass that you need to no I'm not I'm not I can't carry on that metaphor okay you don't have to I put you down the dark Road the um the idea behind it is there's a trade-off with everything you do I mean this was Thomas Soule said that right there's no Solutions there's trade-offs yeah and and what what again you know we talked about what should we say to these guys that are gluing themselves on on paintings and not only should you not be you know scared

witless you should think of this as a problem but then you also need to find out what actually works Remember remember Germany has spent half you know Germany is for many people sort of these amazing green Wonder land yeah uh but no they've gone from 84 fossil fuels to now 77 fossil fuels and they spent half a trillion dollars trying to achieve that that's not how you do these things that's not how you really you know show yourself to the world and say is that amazing political posturing thing where they put policies in place because

those policies are what the People have been sort of at least programmed by fear-mongering to expect and want from their politicians it's partly that I mean obviously it's good politics because a lot of people get reelected saying right I'm Gonna Save Your World and elect me and then I'm gonna put up some more solar panels but the problem is it's incredibly expensive way of achieving almost nothing and that's why you know if you look at what fracking has done you know fracking is Sort of a dirty word you work for big fracking this son of

a [ __ ] but I simply point out that fracking more than anything else has cut carbon emissions dramatically because you've given an alternative to Coal which not only emits a lot of CO2 but also kills a lot of people through uh air pollution and you can now do a lot less imagine if we could make China Frac India Frack Europe would be good to frac as well because we could actually get all of these Countries to switch away from coal towards gas now this is not the whole solution but it has the beauty of

being cheaper so that you don't actually have to go to all these Summits where everybody promises stuff and then don't do it but you would actually have people do what's in their own private interest that's an uncomfortable trade-off to me this idea of uh exploiting the environment that way because that's what it is it's like if you're going to agree To pollute a certain amount of the water a certain amount of the land is there any solution to extract that pollution and is that even feasible or possible of course I mean look if it is

that yeah I mean because if it's not I don't think that should even be considered I understand that our emissions are an important issue but there are missions are where they are now for a trade-off like that where you decide you're going to do something that's going to Definitely pollute rivers and streams and to decide the way that you're going to do that because it's going to reduce the effect on the environment in terms of the emissions there's got to be a better way yes so look I I think we need to go busy and

I I would love to look at the study again uh so the vast majority is air pollution that's simply just that you have elevated levels where you you know near the uh near the fracking this is from C this is pollution from Fracking yeah air pollution so uh the the water it's it's localized and it's mostly the people who are also getting the benefits that's why you know many people would accept this this sort of trade-off uh absolutely we should not have you know you're sort of switching over to this other place where we say

but what if it you know uh dramatically damaged Rivers Downstream and you know a cultural place and all that stuff that's much more regulatable that's the kind of Thing where you just simply say you can't do this we had a lot of this impact in the early part of fracking where just everybody did it was sort of you know Wild West for everything but you can regulate a lot of this and that's why I think it's a fairly small part of it but again how can you regulate unseen water pollution so if you are the

the method that they utilize in fracking is they drill holes and then they force liquids into these holes And these liquids are filled with chemicals and somehow another is a process they use that to extract it yeah so how are they doing that and how could you possibly regulate that if you're not even seeing where it's going so the way you regulated it was to get rid of of the most dangerous parts of those chemicals as I understand it there's very little dangerous now the chemicals that you put in and then also have the Overflow

so you know you actually get The waste water out and that you keep that or you treat that before you release it back is that possible to do if they're pumping it into the Earth no no you pump it out again yeah yeah so it's it's not you're you're not leaving it down there the pollution that's also why it gets back into the environment the pollution typically came the water pollution that you're thinking of I think mostly came from from yes from people taking this uh this Wastewater When it comes back up again and then

just letting it you know seep in putting it in places where it wasn't quite where you know if it rained a lot it would just overflow or that kind of thing and yeah this this is something that we know very well how to do if you have yes there are always people who will cheat and stuff that's why you need some sort of uh follow-up as well and you probably also want to have bigger companies doing this because they you know they follow Standard procedure but this is fairly simple to manage if you will that's

what the EPA does in a lot of difference did you ever see the documentary Gasland yep what did you think about that documentary so my my two cents in that was that it uh yeah it's a good thing to point out that there's a that there's a real issue here when you com uh contrast it with what most of the actual operators said where the problems I think it was somewhat misleading and it Was certainly you know alarmist uh but again yeah I think it's good that we get this to get these stories out there

but we need to keep a sense of perspective what about the people whose water was on fire oh God and it was a great it was a great uh picture yeah and and very clearly there were some things some of the things that needed to get regulated and they now have they have they fixed it it's all done all better well it's certainly a lot better that this is what Uh the environmental defense fund and many others are saying as well do you know what the chemicals were that were really dangerous that they were using

that they stopped using no I mean I kind of know I've read it but I can't remember but so there's no damage whatsoever to the waterways that are under the ground if they're pumping all this toxic chemicals in there no because they're pumping way further down than where aquifiers typically are okay and They pump them into places that have held hydrocarbons that's why they're there for you know millions of years so so they can extract basically everything they put down there yeah okay well that's better um but this idea that we should accept some amount

of water pollution River pollution scares the [ __ ] out of me because that's like one of the few amazing things about this country is that there are still unspoiled natural Habitats and to S [ __ ] those up yeah in the name of the economy yeah I think and I get that point I I think you're sort of imagining that we're we're gonna frack and then you know uh Yellowstone Goes Down And Flames kind of thing no I'm saying even for local areas imagine if you're a person who like your family's always gone down

to this River it's near your house and it's a source of recreation for everybody now you can't go in there because it's polluted Yeah I I so again I don't know this well enough but it's not my understanding that we're anywhere near that situation it would be something that you could measure elevated levels of some uh constituents that would be it see if you can Google what the there was one river that I think that they were talking about in that documentary that that got polluted directly because of fracking and the chemicals released from fracking

and that it was really damaging You know that scares the [ __ ] out of people when they start talking about extracting oil and you're like where salmon spawn and stuff like that you know that I mean we got to be really careful about doing stuff like that just to boost the economy that seems like a short-sighted thing that's going to cost us more money in the long run if ultimately does lead to be not just more money but like you're gonna have these unfixable areas of pollution yeah I I Think I think this is

way exaggerated what uh you know the the point that I try to make was when you do these estimates and that's that's why I think economics actually have a good you know sort of contribution they tell you that when you look at all the disbenefits from fracking those are significant that's 25 billion dollars that means that there will be some people who will be more exposed to air pollution which will lead to some diseases and and That's the net worth of witches yeah in the order of 25 billion dollars it's a lot of other things

and also some of these waterways things so that's people that are working on the fracking minds and then working in the it could also be just people who are there who live there well that sucks if you're there absolutely you don't Frack yeah and and you know but but but I think if you look at any other thing so if you look at the fact that we have uh you Know roads in the U.S they killed 40 000 people every year you mean car accidents yeah yeah it's and and you know there's there's a very

simple way to avoid that it's setting the speed limit at three miles an hour good call and and you know we make that trade-off and we say look you can have a sensible conversation should be 55 or 75 and that's a real conversation about how much faster do I get home versus how many more people die right but we none of us would be willing To say it's going to be three miles an hour right and I think that's the conversation that we need to have yeah that's a that's kind of a different conversation my

Delaware's rivers and streams are the most polluted in the US and new report says and is this directly because of fracking that's why I I was trying to figure out so I just found another article that kind of contradicts that specifically and said it's uh uh particular right here So it's been cleaned up and it's now today like the one of the top water quality success stories oh okay one was the other article written this is from new jersey.gov and the other one is also this year it's a report from another like PBS it's a

news station wrote this and this is also from this year so which one is saying this is where you gotta go so can I just say and yeah you get this a lot I I don't know this particular thing but what is what we know is that All pollution levels have been going down in the U.S so it could actually both be true that everything is getting cleaner but Delaware's rivers are getting less more clean do you see what I mean they they're getting cleaner slower cleaner slower so even though it's one of the most

polluted it's one of the most polluted in comparison to all the other very very clean rivers and again you know this is not untrue and and certainly we want our environment to Be cleaner rather than tertia there's no doubt about that but it's just that we can't have this idea of saying we we won't accept any damage anywhere because then we end up and this of course is what happens to uh in in many areas we end up sending all our pollution to China and India and elsewhere and feel all virtuous about it we do

how do we do that so you know there's a good chance no you have a Tesla right so that that's possibly produced here but most electric Cars their batteries are produced in China uh so you know all the pollution went in over in China and then we drive around and feel virtues about them the cons you mean involved in the construction yes and of course that's true for everything else you know mostly I don't know how much of the stuff in here but probably a lot of it is from China and just like everyone else

it's not you there's anything wrong with right but That's that's just how uh We've we've put up our world so we actually can feel very virtuous about ourselves and make everything cleaner but then just have uh the air pollution all the other uh pollution impacts somewhere else now when you look at the overall landscape of proposed improvements and uh and the impact it'll have in the environment what stands out to you like what do you think is things that people are talking about in terms of uh helping the Environment and reducing our carbon footprint like

what what makes sense so I'll tell you one thing that doesn't then one thing that does right sure so if you look at a lot of these things oh I'm not going to do this or I'm not going to do that I'm actually a vegetarian how dare you yes sorry about that I knew it more more works for big fracking and he's a vegetarian this [ __ ] guy but people people will tell you that you know going Vegetarian is a great thing for the planet uh but actually it's a fairly small impact overall uh

so you know they'll tell you that it'll reduce your carbon footprint by 50 what they don't tell you it's your food impact yeah food footprint which is a very small part of your total impact so we're talking about four percent or thereabouts and then remember also being vegetarian is cheaper so that actually means you have more money and you're going to spend That on you know a trip to Mexico or something so it actually turns out that when you take into account that people also going to spend the rest of their money on something else

it probably reduces your emissions by two percent when people talk about emissions and vegetarianism do they take into account the difference in monocrop agriculture versus regenerative agriculture like you can buy food um we had Will Harris from White Oak Pastures and who has this very sophisticated regenerative farm that he converted his family's industrialized Farm over a period of 20 years years Amazing Story really interesting guy but doing so has basically he they take out more carbon than they put out into the environment everything is natural they don't use any pesticides or herbicides everything is done

the way like nature intended they've essentially recreated nature in a controlled environment in Terms of like utilizing the manure and the chicken [ __ ] and the chickens roam around and the pigs root around and all these animals live as if they're supposed to live like like in normally in the wild and because of that his water that runs off into the river is so noticeably different than the water of his next door neighbor it's stunning his next door neighbor runs a traditional industrialized farm and when you see their property line when the water runs

Off his is clear and that it hits where the neighbor's property is and it turns brown like instantly there's a literal divide line in the river it's crazy to see so that's something you have to take into account when you think about vegetarianism like how are you getting your vegetables are you getting it from a place like White Oaks pastures that raises everything in a regenerative way so it's natural there's no pesticides or herbicides no poison at all is getting Leaked into the water supply or are you buying your vegetables at you know regular supermarket

and they're you know oh it's corn great corn is good for you but meanwhile you're contributing to this [ __ ] crazy Eco Devastation on this River you don't even think you are so so the the numbers I showed you were the ones that are based on how we actually produce and that's by far mostly uh what that other guy does Yeah by far mostly doing it industrial so so You have to be a little careful though uh so a lot of farms that say you know for instance they're organic and they're they don't use

pesticides and they don't use uh artificial fertilize and all that stuff uh they basically get a lot of their fertilizer from other Farms that are not because otherwise you can't make it run around uh a a curious thing that I think most people don't recognize say that again so there's not enough natural fertilizer in the world to keep eight Billion people fed there's actually only enough natural fertilizer to keep four billion people fed but isn't that under current farming models well you it's just simply a question of nitrogen there's just not enough nitrogen in the

world to make it run around that's why you have to have the other uh four billion people or half of every person fed with uh with uh that basically comes from uh from uh natural gas and so when people say oh I have this very very nice Environmental Farm it often means that they're actually importing basically feces from other Farms that have been grown with uh artificial fertilizers don't necessarily think he does that look I don't know but yeah it's not that big of a farm in terms of like the amount of humans do you

remember what he said like the amount of humans he could feed with his farm it's not enormous no and the and the point is we just can't make this happen For everyone which is one of the things I uh when people go buy organic and all that stuff it's great you know it because it makes field people feel really virtuous uh but the point is we just couldn't do it all of us right but for the humans that do it they are having a smaller impact which is it is doing something to make them feel

better it's certainly really something to make food from the White Oaks pastors if that's your sole source of food for your Family yes you 100 are contributing less to the carbon footprint in comparison to buying stuff from that farm that's leaking into the river no not the well it depends on whether you're talking about the carbon footprint not the carbon footprint they they typically about as much uh uh Organic Farms again I don't know this particular Farm uh how is that possible though if they're because they're much less effective and so they use a lot

more land to produce The same amount of food and so what is the carbon footprint coming from machines that they use well it both comes from the uh from the methane that leaks from the land from the uh from the inputs that go into the individual uh animals it depends also a lot on what kind of animals it is and what kind of uh grains or whatever it is that you're producing but the point is that overall when you do these life cycle analyzes you get that they have about the same in Perk per per

pound of of food really even in regenerative Farm well again I don't know this I think the way he was describing it like he was very proud of the fact that it's essentially below carbon neutral that it's actually contributing it's a taking out carbon from the the way they grow their food to the way they utilize the manure and the way they feed the animals and that's that's impressive because you can't and again I don't know How you do that because you can't you can you can certainly keep set some land aside and make sure

you generate rate more and more carbon in that storage area for for a while but you can't keep it keep doing that look at this as a result White Oak pastures has a carbon footprint 111 percent lower than conventional beef White Oak pastures sequestered 919 tons of CO2 in the soil with the help of plants and compost that's like switching 31 679 Incandescent light bulbs to LED and so it shows uh White Oak pastures versus other proteins like how they're grown in other places so you see conventional beef which is like a huge amount of

carbon plus 33 White Oak pastures it gets to them their beef is negative 3.5 yeah so the only way that you can sequester CO2 and land is by not having it be productive you need to have it you know you need to basically have it uh build Up carbon dioxide in the in the uh sorry carbon but he's talking about like compost and manure extracting that yeah but you can't use it because if you use it then you emit it again we store more carbon in the soil than our cows emit during their lives and

so pounds of CO2 for every pound of white oak pastures be produced like this seems to contradict what you're saying and and look I I don't know how this works uh uh I'm I'm talking about how regular Organic Farms Work and there's been lots of studies done on that and and and the thing I'm a little worried about here is that it it doesn't seem reasonable to me that you can actually keep this up you can certainly do it for for a few few short years where you build up your carbon uh storage in your

in your land but eventually you have to either use it a productive layer keep it fenced off I don't understand what you're saying why would you have to do that if he's Rotating the crops and rotating where the animals go and moving them around and well you know so if if you if you plant a forest so that's the typical sort of way you think about this right you you put up a forest you put up small saplings they grow bigger and bigger they store a lot of carbon they both store it in the in

the crown but also in the root material but eventually they've grown full and then they can't store anymore and then you just have to keep It there if you cut them down then obviously you now release all the CO2 again and what they're doing as I understand is that they're basically building it up in their ground so they're having you know more roots in there more stuff in there but if you don't release it uh if you don't use it if you don't grow on it you you have to sorry you have to keep not

growing on it in order to keep it stored away well they're growing it's pastures So they have grass growing there that's that's like the main thing that these cows are eating they're all white yes they're all grass-fed no I get them yes so that's how they're doing okay yeah no that makes sense sorry I I was thinking about intensive uh uh Farm yep no that makes sense yeah so his method I think the the only knock on it would be if you want to have a Jack In The Box on every corner and you want

cheap beef to feed people everywhere you probably can't do It that way and and if you want to feed everyone but his argument was that we really shouldn't be eating that way anyway but that's also that's also a fair point yeah but yeah so the the main the main point comes back to saying we can't do this for everyone and that was that was the main point I was trying to make that we we have this idea of saying we can all go organic no you know a few people can go organic and feel very

comfortable About it but there's just not enough nitrogen for everyone to do this and and so that was the answer that I want to say you know don't think that these are these sort of cheap simple things where you where you virtue a signal is how you're really going to switch the way you're going to switch the way we're actually going to fix climate change is by focusing on technology so you mentioned one of them nuclear you know if we could imagine that we could Actually get fourth generation nuclear in some way to be incredibly

cheap and safe that could solve a very large part of it imagine if you come up with a technology that's cheaper than coal and gas and all that everyone is going to switch not just because they're rich well-meaning Americans but also the Chinese the Indians the Africans everybody else so that will basically generate a lot of cheap energy that's both good for Economic growth and we'll cut carbon emissions dramatically now remember this is not the only thing you need because you can't just run well you possibly can run most of the world on electricity but

we don't right now right now only about 20 percent as electricity the rest of energy is industrial processes heating transport all these other things that are much much harder to to switch out so obviously also steel and Co sorry steel and cement and so on so there's a lot of Issues that still remain but the technology Point Still Remains if we can come up with this technology that's cheaper than fossil fuels and does not emit CO2 which we're done now if we don't do this and if we give in to uh climate fear which is

what a lot of people are using it seems if you want to be cynical it seems like a political Ploy why would they want to do that what do you think the motivation is of not having a balanced nuanced Perspective and expressing a balanced nuanced perspective to people or you could explain things the way you're you're explaining them there's an economic impact to this there's a trade-off to that here's why it's better for actually better for the atmosphere overall if we do it this way and the solution seems to be in technology and it's not

into halting all use of fossil fuels immediate which would be devastating to the economy and Ultimately when the economy goes it's devastating to almost all aspects of our civilization that's that's the very unfortunate reality of life right so what what have you ever had a debate with someone about this oh God yes climate fanatic oh yeah I've lots of those depends how do those go so my my sense is that these guys are really well intentioned so they you know they really want to do good uh it's it's not sort of an evil a ploy

or anything but they seem To believe that you know just by wishing we can somehow make it come true and and I think a lot of the conversation that you know so when you're starting to see what what is it going to cost to go Net Zero for instance a lot of people are talking about we should go Nets here you know buy it and President Biden is talking about that uh this will be fantastically costly and that's what all these studies show so McKinsey shows it's going to cost nearly six trillion Dollars every year

for the world uh that's two-thirds of the total Global Tax intake so you know basically imagine that two-thirds of everything the US government spends now would have to go to Net Zero well I think you said something that's very important too you said the world and I think it's very unreasonable to assume that the rest of the world would take on this economic burden the way we're willing to take it on for the environment and that in fact There are countries that are not interested at all in releasing less carbon they're interested in economically be

becoming more and more powerful and spreading their wings and and just lifting their populations and so also becoming more military you know more powerful entirely yeah yeah look China is not uh just a good guy uh Nation by any means but you under I can understand them and I can understand why you know India and Africa wants to be a Little bit like China remember China has basically lifted what almost a billion people out of poverty that's an amazing achievement and you know if you lived in China or you lived in India you would want

to do the same sure so then at what cost yes and and so the the reality is even if just the US tried to go Net Zero uh uh there's a new study in in nature magazine that estimated that the cost per person I actually have that graph so we can we can show that as well uh so The cost per person would be phenomenal um well it'd be nice if I could find it but oh there it is uh so it's uh uh number 28 and a so the the cost of reducing emissions to

80 this is per person per year in the US by 11 000 bucks well that's that's almost entire Net Zero and the the the modelers say they're not sure whether this is true but it's certainly a big number but even if you just went 80 Towards the uh the Biden uh promise it would cost more than five thousand dollars per person per year just get Bill Gates to pay for it I don't get it what's the problem I've got a lot of money philanthropically uh inclined half a year Mackenzie Bezos she's got a lot of

cheddar she's put in towards good use but the fundamental point is people are just not going to be willing to pay that amount of money well they might be I Mean they might assume that the government could foot the bill for this if they can come up with so much money to send arms to Ukraine and to invade other countries and do a lot of shady [ __ ] that we don't appreciate them doing we would think that they could Fork out 11 000 per person and per year per year and crank that up what

is that what is that all told with 300 and how many do we have now so this is uh 12 of uh of U.S GDP Jesus Yep that's a chunk yes um so that's not feasible not not currently but we can work towards something like that that that's why we need to get get realistic and say we're not going to do this by telling everyone you have to pay up right now how much we can do is to do this Innovation we should be spending lots lots more into Innovation because Innovation is incredibly cheap so

Craig Venter do you remember him it was a guy who cracked The human genome back in 2000 um he's sort of a you know crazy smart guy uh and he has this idea that he wants to grow algae specific special uh algae on the ocean surface that basically soak up sunlight and CO2 and produce oil imagine that we could grow our own you know Saudi arabias out on the ocean surface and then we just simply Harvest those we'd process them make oil we could keep our entire fossil fuel Economy going right now but it would

be CO2 neutral because they just soaked out the CO2 out in the ocean would that have a detrimental effect on the ocean look I'm sure that you know just like we've talked about before nothing you do would have no impact uh yes everything is trade-offs but we could potentially solve a very large part of the global warming problem at you know fairly low cost we can't do it right now because right now it costs a fortune and you Know can't really be scaled very well but the point is give this guy some money and try

to investigate it because researchers are incredibly cheap this is how we've solved all problems if you think you know do you remember those Live Aid concerts and all that stuff sure and even before then we worried a lot about you know Africa and it was especially India and Southeast Asia not being able to feed their own populations and sort of the standard way that we Think about global warming now is to tell everyone you know could you not eat so much and then we'll send it down to you know the poor Indians and the poor

Africans and and of course that didn't work what did work was the Green Revolution we basically evolved these if we innovated these new seeds that produce two or three times as much per acre and that's what basically grew the world's population sorry the world's food production dramatically India is Now one of the world's uh it is actually the world's leading rice exporter it's gone from a basket case to being able to feed its own population but aren't there a lot of problems with that too or the the Indian farmers are getting [ __ ] over

and they get connected to these seeds that they don't own and they can't reuse and they owe a giant amount of money to the company so they provide them with the seeds there's certainly some bankrupt and there's a ton of Suicides from these Indian Farmers so that's a pretty big trade-off so well it actually turns out that there's less so there's uh there's uh if pre uh who's one of these uh uh institutions that look into uh farmers and and farming policy they did an estimate and found that they're fewer people die from uh from

suicides but it but there's because there's a lot of farmers in India there's a lot of farmer suicides uh but but yes there are absolutely problems in India as well uh but you know fundamentally being in enthrall to big uh Acro business because you have to buy more of the seats or you have to pay more is probably a lot better than you know dying uh from uh from not having enough food but they're the only two solutions no no isn't there a solution where they have a more Equitable sort of a relationship with the

people that provide them seeds and that they can both benefit from it seems like they're Getting exploited right so again my my understanding of this is that you can if you if you want to you can buy the uh public seeds and so India and many other countries uh provide public seeds that don't have any copyright and that you can grow or you can buy the private property seeds that grow more per acre and so it's you know it's basically a trade-off just like when you go to a store and you know decide between a

Slightly less good product which is cheaper and or a more expensive product it sounds like a creepy trade-off though if the stuff that doesn't work as well is the stuff that you could get from the state and people are economically poor and disenfranchised and you know they have to take on loans to get the other seeds and they get indebted but they don't have to get those seats right they can get the public seeds but they won't be able to make it like well they can't Make as much no right no no the point probably

barely getting by as it is though don't you think so the problem is I think we're seeing the outcome here uh from the people who basically said all right I'm gonna you know get a loan possibly from a loan shark and then invest this in order to get a higher payoff if it works out if it's beautiful if it was great weather it works out really well if it didn't I'm screwed and then I commit suicide I'm making a story Here right but but the but the idea here still that that you know it's it's

possibly not the right way to think about this if we're just concerned about well you know the people who took chances shouldn't have been so uh exposed and uh if if they if they made the wrong choices um well I think what we're really concerned with is predatory relationships between very poor farmers and giant multinational corporations That don't give a [ __ ] about those people that's what scares us is that you know there's a dehumanizing aspect to this sort of method of producing agriculture yeah so the the real issue here is though that most

of the uh of the big uh agricultural producers basically produce for rich countries because those are the ones who can pay so what we're stuck with and very often don't have very good uh is that we need much more research into getting uh yield Enhancement in you know the things that you grow in many of the poor countries in the world that also better are suited for their agriculture this is a lot of what for instance research goes into and where we should be spending a lot more money so I I totally agree that we

can do it even better but I just think we need to step back and also realize we have managed to make the world and India and Africa a lot better off which is why a lot fewer people are starving again You're a glass half full guy I'm I'm a a guide where it says we used to have what seven million kids dying each year of malnutrition now it's less than three that still means there's almost three million kids that die each year from malnutrition that's terrible but it's a much better world than seven yes and

um that's a weird conversation to have with people because all people want to think about generally is the negative aspects of any story they always want to do that And this is a big story that affects the whole world I was going to ask you why in the middle of all that um I didn't want to forget what percentage of the CO2 emission the greenhouse gases does the United States dues in relationship to the rest of the world like what does the rest of the world produce so it's about 12 percent we produce 12 percent

yeah so if we cut back to Net Zero you're still dealing with an 88 problem yes and we would just To give you a sense of proportion if you actually take out the U.S emissions from the U.N climate model it turns out that by the end of the century you will have 0.3 degree Fahrenheit lower temperatures so you'll have this temperature increase instead of this temperature increase so the temperature will continue to increase yes but slightly less do they really have an objective understanding of how much of this is a natural cycle and how much

of this is being caused by Human beings do they have like can they like quantify it so we started out talking a little bit about what what do they think yeah it is and again my understanding is that they're saying it's a very large part it's a predominant part that's caused by global warming but it's also obvious that we have less good understanding of these long-term Cycles so there is some of that concern but you know fundamentally I think you can sort of step back and Say global warming is real it is made by man

it is a problem that we're making it's not the end of the world and and we need to deal with it but deal with it smartly right so instead of us you know gluing ourselves to pictures and saying we got to stop everything right now right we gotta look at how do we get Innovation going so that we get you know better for instance nuclear or better of this Craig vendor guy ideas or these many many other ideas that are out there We should be funding all of those so I I I helped assemble uh

together with a uh uh I believe it was 49 of the world's top climate economists and and three Nobel laureates to look at how do you best and smartest invest in green energy so better uh deal with climate change from what they found was the long-term uh best strategy was invest in green energy research and development if that's the long term because there could be some Innovation that would be Groundbreaking basically if you get Innovation and you find a breakthrough you will have fixed the problem if you don't get that innovation we just won't fix

the problem we'll do a little bit of it at very very high cost and we'll end up a little bit like we talked about with Germany right you'll you'll end up spending half a trillion dollars and cut a tiny bit of your emissions to sort of shift The Narrative and get people to stop being terrified Of a future with the climate increasing the way it is on a steady rate like what what can you say to people that would get them to like is there like a real simple way of breaking this down that gives

people an understanding of their perspective like how much this has been exaggerated how how what what the danger actually is like one of the big ones is Miami I'm 10 years Miami's going to be underwater yes but meanwhile Banks kills keep financing people building these Giant skyscrapers next to the water like what's going on is Miami going underwater no I mean and and the simple reason is because we know around the world that when sea levels rise it is very very cheap and simple to avoid most of those problems and Holland obviously is the great

example right Holland has while sea levels have been rising they've actually gotten much larger because they know how to do this and they're very very safe remember 40 of The countries underwater if you go to ship hole which is the 14th largest airport in the world Amsterdam airport they proudly say on their website that we're the only major airport in the world that was previously a site of a major naval battle uh yeah but you don't feel it they're fine there and so how would they do that with Miami the total cost over the last

50 years for Holland is about 10 billion dollars the total cost of protecting Holland this is not nothing but you know for a rich country over 50 years that's almost nothing it's not that bad so what about Miami though how would they protect Miami so I I don't know specifically how you do this for Miami the point is Miami is incredibly valuable obviously you find a as I understand it there is actually some problems with uh that is built on Coral and yeah yes it'll be harder to do I'm not saying this is going to

be easy but This is you didn't say it was going to be easy well in general we know how to do these things uh and and so I don't know how specifically you're going to do this for Miami but I do know that we've done this almost everywhere on the planet remember if you go uh so New York Times took me down to the uh Waterfront Cafe in New York when I published my first climate book and that this is now what five streets away from the Waterfront right because New York has Actually grown we've

seen the same thing happen everywhere on the planet so even Bangladesh which you know is a very poor country has actually increased that land surface while sea levels have risen because we know how to do this has anybody done that like with a model for Miami because again what you're saying I I had heard was that the problem is the ground is porous yeah and that whenever there's like any sort of a water event in Miami the streets are flooded and That they're worried that as the ocean level rises this would be insurmountable like I

don't know if that's as simple a problem as what they're dealing with in Holland or in a lot of other places where they make dams and sea walls what they do with New Orleans yes and and I I don't so I should possibly have been less quick Miami I don't know everywhere else we have yeah so there are good Global models look at this uh if I can actually Show you a graph of a global model on so it's uh number 23 on a on the a file so this is a model for the world

that looks at how many people are are getting flooded okay and what it shows you is that in uh in 2000 about 3 million people got flooded every year and so you can see over there in 2000 3 million people get flooded and has a cost of 0.05 percent of GDP now if you assume that there's going to be no adaptation this is pretty much where all the Catastrophic stories come from you end up in this situation where you know 187 million people will be flooded this number has been both on the cover of Wall

Street sorry Washington Post and in New York Times and there's a New York Times op-ed lots and lots of this is at 2100 year 2100 2100 if you know sea levels rise we do nothing about it then obviously this is going to be terrible so it's going to cost five percent of global GDP The world we live in will actually adapt and that's where you know so that's why I said in this General thing it's not going to happen for Miami but I don't know whether the model has actually modeled particularly Miami right it's modeled

the world this seems like a real problem though like if if there's not real adaptation ideas that are on the books that like seem like they could be implemented 80 years will go by pretty quickly if 187 Million people are flooded if there's no adaptation then you have to also think about population increase you have to think about uh the increase in the amount of CO2 we release the there's a lot of other things you have to factor in along with no adaptation but the but the point is we will not be in this world

are you sure yes and the authors themselves say this is absolutely inconceivable worst case everybody will actually adapt you will put up Hyacy uh see dikes and and much of this is not going to be these you know amazingly big structures that are going to feel overwhelming it's just simply water management and so the realistic outcome is that by the end of the century about 15 000 people will be flooded and the cost of GDP will be both for protection and from flood costs will be almost 10 times lower in percent of GDP so this

adaptation that uh you show on this chart where's this chart from so This is from one of the most quoted story stories this is one of the few articles that actually both look at both adaptation and no adaptation okay so it's from Hinkle 20 2014 I think it's uh yeah it's I I don't have internet so I can't actually shoot right now so no adaptation it drops down below the rate where it's at currently sorry excuse me with adaptation the the amount of people flooded drops below and much much below rate I mean from three

million to Virtually nobody to fifteen thousand and that is but that's that's globally that's globally what that tells you is that this is an issue that we fix we know how to fix and Holland is a great example of that if you're rich you fix it if you're poor you have a real problem this of course is why so many people died in China and India when there were floods back in the 1920s as we were talking about before when you're poor Life sucks in so many different ways it also sucks from climate and that's

of course one of the reasons why I think when people are saying this they're right to say that climate is going to harm the world's poor the most and then they sort of jump to this unwarranted conclusion so we need to do something about client no it's because it sucks to be poor we should do something about not being poor you know the uh there's a big hurricane that hits Tacloban in 2013 uh Philippine a Filipino uh City and it happened right when there was a a a global warming meeting one of the big cop

meetings um and everybody out poured and said oh this is because of global warning of course there was actually exactly similar hurricane a hundred years before I have 190 something uh uh that that happened that followed the exact same path and killed half the City's population back then it was much Much worse this time it'll only uh killed about two percent of the of the City's population but the people the people got killed and the people who got harmed were still you know essentially living under corrugated roofs our job is to make sure that they

don't live under corrugated roofs that they actually live in good buildings that they have those clamps that we talked about but they have all these other opportunities so that they can live well of course we Should also in the long run find a way to actually make sure we fix climate change but it's wrong to say because these poor people are going to be focused with more climate change we should do something about climate change no these poor people are going to be focused with all kinds of bad things from malnutrition and bad education and

from diseases because they're poor if we want to help them we should lift them out of poverty that's a solution you Don't ever hear before uh you very hear very little of when it comes to dealing with the situation in terms of the amount of impact on deaths and and the amazing thing is of course this is what made our lives great of course most of the rest of the world want the exact same thing and we should let them have it so the real challenge here is how do we find a way that means

the vast amount so the 6.5 billion people who are not rich can actually get A great living by the end of the century and we can also fix climate change and that's only going to happen if we find the technological breakthroughs not by telling everyone I'm sorry could you do with less not only is that not going to win any elections in the long run but it's also just not going to be possible to convince China India Africa to do that now what about the impact on climate change and natural storms hurricanes and the like

like how much Are they increasing how much is the severity of them increasing because that's a big point of confusion for people I've heard I've heard multiple people say that those storms are worse than ever and more frequent than ever and then I've heard people say no they're actually less frequent than ever but stronger I've even heard people say no no they're more frequent and less strong so I don't know what's going on no so if the the biggest point on this I Think is they're certainly much stronger on TV right I mean you hear

much much more about them because your cells right they're such great stories yeah they absolutely they sell but if you actually look at the data we cannot tell right now so that's that's the conclusion from the uh from the government agencies of the us as well we can't still tell that there's a fingerprint from climate change on hurricanes we can't so no we can't why can't we because there's such A natural variability that you can't see oh this increase or this decrease is because of global warming is there if you increase Trend currently well so

in the 1960s sorry in the 1970s and 80s there was a lull in hurricanes that hit the U.S that was also when satellite coverage started so much of what you see now is if you start from the 1970s or 1980s there is an increase for the U.S uh but that's probably uh uh spurious because if you go back in the 1950s and 1960s there was actually just as many hurricanes so what you do and this is by far the best estimate so I actually have that I brought that with me uh if you take a

look at uh slide four on a in the a file uh there we see if you look at the number of hurricanes that have hit the U.S because remember we don't know about this hurricanes that we couldn't see uh back when we didn't have satellites right now we see them because we have Satellites but that's obviously the wrong way to counter to count so if you just look at the Hurricanes that landfall on the U.S you get this graph and so this is 19 1900 to 2022. yeah so 2022 is obviously not done but it's

probably done and it looks incredibly similar it's actually slightly decreasing this is not significant slightly decreasing from 2008. so sorry no from 2000 from another from 19 if you try to put in the best line as you can See that's the dotted Red Line you actually have a slightly decreasing lines oh I see that's easy overall the average yeah the overall average used to be uh you know more like two hurricanes per season pass down to 1.6 or something sorry what the hell was going on in 1980 looks like 86. yeah yeah I was going

to pull up it uh this is a contradicting chart though okay it specifies though North Atlantic which this does not okay so North Atlantic is Where the predominant amount of hurricanes exist in the United States is that correct or South Atlantic it's South Atlantic so North Atlantic would have less of them because the water's cold Northern Hemisphere I believe is not just it's not North compared to the United States it's North First South hemisphere oh okay okay why Atlantic hurricanes are getting stronger faster than other storms yeah hurricane Ian 264 since 1980 compared to the

globe According to this chart percentage of tropical Cyclone activity with major intensity so major intensity indicates that the sustained wind speeds reach a category three level or higher so it seems like there's more of them yes and notice what that happens it starts in 1980. and that's why you know when you when you do these numbers it's very easy to get this number this result if you start in 1980 when they were much lower if I can just show you the other graph Again because I showed you for all of the Hurricanes but we also

have uh if you take the next slide uh for uh that's just a strong hurricane so that's exactly the same as what you just showed uh category three and and uh uh and uh higher and what you see here again is that there are fewer hurricanes not not more hurricanes hitting the us today than they used to be back in in the early part of it I'm just saying there's only one per year or yes that doesn't Feel like that's right though this is one major hurricane land falling each year yeah is that usually what

we get and so if you go all the way back to 2006 which is that year we were talking about it looks like there was four so that so from the 80 so when you're looking at that maybe 2005 that was uh Hurricane Katrina and all these others okay so when you're looking at that other chart that shows the increase from 1980 see with the 1980 it's just all those years it's just one and then it gets up to four in 2006. and that's a rough year so all that factors into the average and that

kicks the average up to 264 percent but a lot of it is from 2006. and a lot of it is because you just you know go from a period when there was a relative lull to appear it when it's back up on these parts what is it differentiating as major or not major because then we get To like we almost got through all the names I thought a couple years ago so yes sorry uh so major is category three but these all landfalling remember a lot of hurricanes are not land falling so the reason why

we run out of names is because the there we are able to see a lot more of them so they actually estimate this is a re-analysis uh by Noah and all those guys um so they actually found that we now name about four storms more than we Would have named in the early 2000s every year because we're just become better at you know notice oh there's a hurricane and then it dropped uh dropped off right don't hit not only because they don't hit but typically they're just one or two days uh what's the percentage of

them that actually hit the the the problem is like when they get strong enough on the ocean that they can carry over onto the land and devastate the land so the reason why I'm looking At landfall is because in the early part of last century you would have it's very likely that someone would have noticed a landfalling hurricane anywhere in the U.S but if it's out in the middle of nowhere there's a very good chance nobody would have noticed actually you can see in the in the data that when uh the uh the uh Panama

Canal opened suddenly uh you know ships started going a different route so there is a big part of the Atlantic that they no longer Traversed and so we never so you know the number of hurricanes dropped in those areas because you know you need it to have sort of a ship to be out there and noticing that's why it's a very very bad way to look at this if you just look at how many hurricanes do we know about because we just know about a lot more now so that's from satellite radar and that was

what year they started implementing satellite this is about 1980 1980 okay so that's when okay so so It's not clear but basically what you're saying your point was to basically say what people will are worried about is that there's going to be a lot more hurricanes yes well actually so the best evidence seems to indicate that was one of the points that you said that there will probably be fewer hurricanes but they will be stronger and overall stronger is worse than fewer is better which means that overall they'll be Slightly more damage right so global

warming is bad that's you know one of the many things that you know will actually be worse with global warming but it's not terribly bad it's somewhat worse and of course at the same time we're getting much better at dealing with this impact what you're actually seeing if you look at the total cost for instance on on uh on on Hurricane impacts and all kinds of climate impacts it's actually going down not up in Percent in percent of GDP why because we now know we have much better prediction we know how to you know deal

with these things for instance get a lot of a lot of stuff that can be moved we get it out of Harm's Way so every time there's a hurricane you know all all trucks will go to other states that kind of thing so there's a lot of things that don't get damaged we can also build better as you talked about with houses and so on so we have a lot of ways to reduce us but what Is happening is it'll reduce slightly less fast because of global forming again not the end of the world but

a problem so the fear-mongering would have you terrified about a future that's impossible to fix and that we're doomed and you're you're simply saying it is a problem but is not our biggest problem it's it's it's a problem in the sense that it slows down progress right and if I can just you know because people talk a lot about uh uh the fact that we won't Have enough food either uh I have I have another slide um on in the B file and uh God I need glasses and number six 19 sorry I was just

Googling this uh 2020 it says 11 hurricanes made it to land here a total of 11 named storms made landfill United States breaking the previous record of 9 and 1960 11 name storms or six of these were storms destroyed the United States that's hurricane intensity they were talking About category three and above that was that that was just this one though right his chart which was this is it all hurricanes this is Major hurricanes Phoenix so category one what's the worst is category one the worst or four no this is the worst right what's the

worst yeah this has four hurricanes hit us and four and then when I Google it says there's at least six if not eleven yeah that's I mean this this is period literature uh I have noted and the the Updates are for the guy this is 2020 Jamie yeah I just was trying to pick one year yeah yeah um uh and these and the one that this was saying they're intensifying this is that like since 1950 only uh nine category four hurricanes have made hit the mainland but six of those were in the last five years

whoa that seems like a problem that's a big problem Ah it's just doesn't that seem like a big problem me we're seeing that I would see why people would freak out okay and this is so we we can't sit here and do period research and uh in real time uh I'm I'm sure but you do need contradicting oh no no statements absolutely but I am saying that so I'm I'm happy to say that we should uh so there's very little uh four and five hurricanes that's why they uh the major and that was also why

the other graph uh Uh showed the change in uh in um in three three four and fall back to that again please for a second look at that man Andrew was even more powerful than Ian in 92. that was a 165 mile an hour what's the [ __ ] strongest one that we've ever had is that all of them that we've had during the last uh so that's the last 50 years yeah I think of you when I was like 92 I think so Ian was the strongest Or Andrew excuse me was the strongest that

was 165. Katrina's not even on this list no wow why isn't Katrina on the list I don't know that was a big one wasn't it yeah wasn't it hurricane three category three it could just been big and long and just lasted for a long time right the devastation was big because of where it hit yes wow also if if you look at the major hurricanes uh uh we had the biggest Drought ever so there were 11 years where there were no major hurricane that hit the U.S recently uh I don't know if you noticed that

was when nobody talked about hurricanes and then of course the Hurricanes came back and then we said oh see global warming again this is how we're not being well served with this kind of conversation what is your book called false alarm false alarm yeah because no I don't have one yet here thank you very Much um I don't I wouldn't say false alarm I would say there's a lot of other [ __ ] to be worried about as well yes that is a problem that's the other book I brought you prioritizing development yes ah see

so this is this is basically this is what my day job really is uh because as as you also know uh and as we talked a little bit about so look there's a lot of problems in the world and for most people so rich people who are you know Well ensconced in their lives and they you know they don't have to worry about their kids dying from uh infectious diseases or or not having enough food all that kind of stuff they clearly can worry about what the temperature is going to be in 100 years but

for most of the planet's population so know the 6.5 billion people here they actually worry about their kids might die tonight they might not have enough food they have terrible education there are all kinds Of other terrible things you know almost a billion people are extremely poor so in terms of the overall impact on human health and life elevating the economy is the most important step that people can take it's certainly a very important part of it and again when we sorry if I could just show you the the one of malnutrition the uh the

slight uh from the B stack number six sorry so what I just want to show you Was that malnutrition has come down dramatically and again what you see here so this is the number of death uh uh from uh so from kits that are less than five years old and again this is very similar to the other chart but a little bit of a difference the difference between with climate change and without climate change without climate change is only slightly lower but the overall trend is much much much lower than it was in 1990. and

this is because we're Getting better at you know making agriculture uh this is what we talked about before they're much better in India they're much better everywhere and the overall net benefit is positive we're we're moving towards a world that's going to be much better so these guys that are protesting think it's the end of the world no it's not it's a world that's going to be much better but they're right in saying that climate is one problem and we should definitely Think about how we fix that but we should also remember a large part

of this is how do we fix all the other problems there are still people you know there's one of the things that you just blow my mind mind we all worried about covet but remember the world's biggest infectious disease killer over the last 200 years has been tuberculosis probably killed about a billion people in total it still kills one and a half million people every year And we know how to fix it we we figured that out a hundred years ago that's why no no one in the rich World died from this but it you

know apart from covet is the world's leading infectious disease killer and we do nothing against it we could at very low cost fix most of this problem and so one of the things I try to push is to say look for very little money we could actually so we're talking about three billion dollars a year thereabouts we could actually save Almost everyone from tuberculosis but why don't we make that one of the things we want to do yeah it's interesting that's not a sexy headline that gets people riled up and scared because they're not worried

about tuberculosis over here and we're not worried about our kids getting tuberculosis right so in some sense it's because it's you know it's over there it's a lot of people in India and in Africa and so on uh but but in some way it doesn't quite make it Okay right I see what you're saying so what you're trying to promote is a balanced message and you're trying to counter the this the climate change fear-mongering by saying it is one of our issues but it is surmountable at least in some aspects of it oh it's look

the world will be much better off by the end of the century but because of global warming will be slightly less much better off so what do you think if you contemplated the Motivations for this fear-mongering and this distorted perception of of this one very particular issue you know when you look at all the issues that we face that you've outlined why why that one why that why does that one get the most heat so as you just mentioned it's partly because it's our kids rather than someone else's kids who are going to get influenced

by this we also just love having something to worry about I think that's to a very large extent and then Of course we have a lot of uh media that has an interest in pushing a catastrophic agenda about anything you know so anything is catastrophic anything is something that you know we should worry intensely about is it just the media or is it also political Ploy oh of course it's also politicians for a very long time this was you know the the gift that kept on giving for politicians because they basically got to say the

world is ending But I can save you right I can't do that voice but you know what I thought I wanted to yeah so so you know fundamentally matching being able to say I can save you and will promise to do some stuff that will only happen long into the future or long after I've stopped being uh you know president or whatever it is right now of course this is catching up with us because now we actually have to start paying for all of this and this is where it you know the Wheels come off

because most people are just not willing most people are willing to pay something to do good for the environment they're certainly not willing to pay you know five thousand dollars per person per year uh that's just not going to happen most people mostly sure a few you know a few very very wealthy the hardcore lefties will go we got to take the billionaires they can fix it all yeah and that's just Elon that's just not true right I mean they Would run out of money really quickly yeah unfortunately I mean the US budget is what

uh a thousand what is it two three thousand billion the federal budget a thousand billion dollars and and what uh Elon has two 300 million you know he would run out in two weeks he's running out of it two months Twitter but yeah the point the point is these billionaires sure that you know I'm all for that they should do more and I think some of them are doing uh excellent work And some of them are probably not but this is not how you solve this problem this is about making sure that you actually responsibly

can do it with the budgets that you have or with realistic tax increases and you know increasing your tax five or ten percent of GDP is just not realistic do you have a fear that the fear-mongering and the way uh concern I should say about the fear-mongering and the way it's betrayed in the media is going to cause people to Vote for things and to vote for people that are going to implement things that will ultimately be more destructive than they are beneficial oh absolutely I mean partly if we're suggesting we should do policies because

we're worried that this is the end of the world coming up that are enormously ineffective of which is what most of the world has done then we're going to waste a lot of money but likewise on the other side so you could say this is sort of Democrats here in The U.S right but likewise there's a lot of Republicans that are saying oh no problem whatsoever you know just keep fracking do it whatever and and you know because you get sick and tired of having to pay those extra taxes from the Democrats you might very

well end up electing Republicans as well they'll just not do anything to solve the problem and so I I really think this polarization this it's the end of the world is not happening at all is very Unhelpful both in the terms that scares people witness but it also makes it very hard to make these sensible middle of the road kind of arguments which is we're not going to solve this by huge taxation we're not going to solve this by making lots of people pay for ineffective policies what we are going to solve this with is

innovation so we should be spending a lot more in Innovation but the beauty of of it is right now globally the world spends About just under 20 billion dollars per year on Innovation into green energy that's in percentage much less than we've done over the last 30 years because politicians want to go out and open new solar panel Parks or wind turbine Parks because that looks like something not you know fun Eggheads is that part of the problem is the perception oh I'm sure it is and what we should do is we should fi-fully increase

that to about a hundred billion dollars President Obama and everybody else promised that back in Paris uh and I'm happy to say we had a very very tiny small role in that we should be spending lots more on research and development and green energy because that's how we're going to fix this problem but we'll only get to that if we actually get people to sort of calm down and realize problem not the end of the world and don't tank the economy why are you trying to fix the problem because then You'll limit the amount of

available Solutions because the resources and resources and and one other really depressing things that we're seeing now if if you've noticed you know uh growth rates are coming down the U.S used to grow what per capita three percent per year yeah your your your uh your kids would be much richer than you uh but in many countries both in the US and Europe we're seeing much much slower growth one of the reasons this by no means the only Reason but one of the reasons is that we have somehow realized oh we should be sorry for

all the things we're doing we should be doing uh more to you know counter global warming and one of the ways you can do that is by having little or no growth but the problem with that of course is that also impacts everything else it makes it much more of a distributional issue you know if the cake is no longer growing everybody starts bickering about who gets what uh Slice of the uh of the cake and it makes everything harder to deal with and of course at the same time we have the entire developing world

that still just wants to get out of poverty and we're not really giving them a chance either we're for instance pretty much limiting them we've been telling Africa for instance for the longest time sorry you can't have gas you can't have coal you should just go straight to solar and wind which of course can't really power An economy or at least not right now and this while Europe is then you know starting to grind up more coal because we're cold and because they're born in Ukraine whoo this is a very complex issue and the problem

is that in sound bites on the news you don't get to dive into all of the aspects of these complex issues knowing what you're knowing and like how frustrating is this for you to try to spread this message because I'm sure you Get labeled like immediate you're a climate change denier or you're you're you're a shill you're a bad person what you know how frustrating is this for you when you're trying to get this message out and you're writing these books and you're you're giving these speeches I mean fundamentally if it would be wonderful if

everybody just said hey that's that sounds smart let's do that but you know that's not how the real world works I Think it's it's great to have the opportunity to actually push what kind of solutions work so what we're trying to do we work with lots of the world's top economists I work with seven noble Lords in class in economics uh trying to say where can you spend money and do the most good so on climate we should be investing green energy r d that's the way you fix this problem and then we should realize

there are lots of other problems most of which you haven't Heard of uh you know so for instance the frustrating thing and and the thing that really drives most of global productivity is education education almost everywhere sucks but especially in the developing world you know a lot of teachers just don't know the stuff that they're actually supposed to be teaching the uh the kids how do you get kids to be better educated it turns out that there are some very very simple ways that we know work incredibly well So it's called teaching according to level

uh so the the basic idea you know if you think about a sixth grade or something where I don't know is that 12 year olds uh yeah sixth grade is 12 11 11 year old so say you have all these six year uh sorry all these 12 year olds in the same grade especially in the developing country but even here they have very varying levels some of them are just hanging on and don't quite Know what's going on some of them are far ahead of what the teacher is teaching right so the problem is when

you're in that kind of grade where we put all the 12 year olds in the one in one grade you're actually having a very hard time teaching all of these kids effectively what we've shown with and this is not me we lots of really smart people have shown this as in experiments if you instead make sure that each of these kids are taught at their right Level at the level that they are they can learn a lot more now you could do that in one of two ways you could actually Shuffle these guys around so

you know the some 11 year olds are going to be together with some 13 year olds and maybe one nine year old and one 15 year old and so on so they all have the same level that has some social problems but they're doing it for instance in India you could also do it by every one hour every day you sit them down with a Tablet and this tablet then finds out what is your level so it's teaching it in either your language or your mathematics for instance and they it very quickly adapts and find

out what is your level and then teach you exactly at your level the beauty is you can you actually teach these kids three years of schooling in one real year at very low extra cost we're talking about twenty dollars per per student per year so if you do this with a tablet you Can basically have a situation where you can educate these kids much better and teach them much more isn't that amazing that's assuming they engage with the material right so this is more difficult to get them to engage with tablets than it is to

get them to engage with a teacher no actually it turns off uh out it often as the opposite they they want to have more than just that one hour uh it's probably true if you did this a whole day it's one hour a day it's Partly because so other students can also use the tablet so it becomes cheaper it's also partly because we don't want to upset the teachers because if the teachers don't like this idea if they are worried that computers are going to take over their jobs they don't want to play along and

it's also because it they would eventually get bored but no if you sit in a in a classroom where you're you know 40 50 60 kids the teacher is teaching you something that You don't either you don't quite understand or you're way ahead of this that's incredibly boring this tablet is actually challenging right on the level and the beauty of this is that this is research that has actually been done in randomized controlled trial studies right so you've done with some kids you gave them the tablets some kids you didn't give them tablets and then

you see how much they differ and this matters because they not only learn more But then they'll go out when they become adults and become much more productive in their societies so again one of the things that we try to do so in that you know that big book uh I I showed you advertising development that we did that with uh with 50 teams of of economists and several Noble alerts and trying to find out you know of all the different things in the world what could we do but that's a very long book you

can't get most politicians who read it so we Actually did also a one pager so I brought that one I'm hoping we can put that up so this this basically is the whole um this is the whole outline of all the stuff that we those one pager is smartest targets for for the world and what is this so you should look at this this this out here on this one side it has all the different things you can do for the world so this this has come about with a lot Of complicated stuff and basically

there's a is there a graph that we can see online of this yes there oh sorry yes there is because I can barely read this yes this is a very good point social environmental benefits for every people to find it how can we direct people to it so we'll put up the link on uh if that's okay yeah a lot of graphs buddy yes sorry about that so basically what it shows is all The different things you can do for the world and then the line shows uh the the length of the line shows how

much bang for your book okay and so if it's a long line it's a great idea okay sorry yes so here it goes uh so what's the best bang for your buck so trade trade restrictions reduce World Trade restrictions if we actually got much more free trade that would make everyone incredibly much richer sorry there's uh in in my slides there Is a better version that you can show online uh on the the last slide on the on lombok a so 51. um kind of better yeah because it it's at least not as as long

right it fits this format okay so basically you know if you sp if you if you uh spend money and basically in order to get free trade you need to pay off the world's Rich Farmers uh but you will get an enormous amount Of growth in uh in in the economy Freer Regional Asia Pacific trade so it's trade seems to be the biggest one that's one of the biggest ones yes and then universal access to contraception yeah so that's basically the idea if you get more contraception it means two things it partly means that women

give fewer birth and that means they die less it also means that each kid that then gets born will get more attention from their from their parents because they'll be Slightly fewer kids and they will have more uh uh Capital available to them uh that means they become more productive and that means the economy will grow more this is what's typically called the uh the uh um well I don't think we should go that's okay I don't think we should go over this no no forever but the idea is that there's a lot of things

in the world that have a great bang for the book and climate is one of them but it's Just one of them right right and if you think this is the end of the world you think that's the only thing we should be discussing I mean I've heard some people say you know if we only have till 2030 you know we've got to do everything for climate and then you know they'll still be poor people in 2030 we we can help and I just think it's so you know um short-sized patronized patronizing right yes because

clearly we both want to fix climate change and fix all these other Problems in the world and we can do that but only if we spend money smartly so we let's spend the money smartly on climate in research and development but let's also spend money on you know getting tablets and into the educational system making sure we deal with uh tuberculosis malaria malnutrition there's lots of other things where we for very little money can make an enormous amount of benefit well I think that's the most important part of your message is it's Not just this

idea that climate change has kind of being overblown it's a very terrifying Prospect but there's a lot of issues to deal with that's great I really appreciate that now I think that we need more of that more of a balanced nuanced perspective on all of our issues I'm glad you brought up education as well and all those other than contraception and poverty and yeah there's a lot going on there that we need to think about as well yeah and if We start doing that it can also be a real lift for for a lot of

these people who are terrified remember if you ask people in the in the rich world do you think the world's civilization is going to come to an end 60 percent now are saying they think it's likely or very likely that humanity is going to end that's that's petrifying and that's just not what's going to happen and they think this is because of climate change they think it's because Of climate change right so we can actually both liberate ourselves and realize yeah problem not the end of the world and then also start talking about all these

other issues and make sure that we actually leave this planet not just a little bit better but a lot better I love your message thank you Bjorn that was really great thank you um I really appreciate it uh even though you're working for big fracking and you're sure Stop saying that yes I'm kidding okay yes so false alarm is your book how climate change Panic costs us trillions hurts the poor and fails to fix the planet how do I pronounce your last name correctly Lombard Bjorn lombborg and then the other one is this is all

the other things you were concentrating on of all the different ways that we can prioritize spending that'll benefit the whole world and that's prioritizing development a cost-benefit analysis of The United States sustainable United Nations excuse me United Nations sustainable development goals and uh if you're inclined this is a very detail-oriented book yes this is this will fill people's time thank you Bjorn I really appreciate you being on here and uh it was a lot of fun I enjoyed it all right um people want to get a hold of you on uh do you have a

website social media yes yes longboard.com and uh Twitter is Bjorn longboard and uh M b uh-o-r-g is the pronunciation for the spelling yes thanks sir appreciate it thank you bye everybody [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music]