now this collapse of the alanes government's Big Dreams the most obvious example is energy Minister Chris bone is plans to transition as supposedly from coal and gas to wind and solar now you wonder how a man can try something so disastrously expensive and physically impossible but this is a man who swears he is driven by the science the science of climate change is now as certain as the science that tobacco causes cancer yeah really because the problem for me Isn't just that Bowen keeps repeating scares that I know aren't science it's that some climate scientists
feeding this scare make me doubt how impartial they really are i s very emotional and political last week three of them all women published an opinion piece in the nature climate science journalist uh journal and complained about male scientists and also complain that studying climate change takes an emotional toll on science they write there is a need for a safe space to share feelings of anxiety grief and burnout among climate scientist grief even one of them Australian has elsewhere written she's felt gutted felt the horror of climate change another Australian climate scientist says she's sometimes
overwhelmed by the terrifying reality and I catch myself unexpectedly weeping a third says I feel so lost some days I feel like I need to scream at the top of my lungs this does not sound like dispassionate science nor in my opinion does this emoting seem justified by any good signs I've seen in three decades of covering this issue it also makes me wonder which scientists Chris bone is listening to when he demands the crime crisis is so great that we must make these impossibly big changes to the way we power the economy and when
he tells us it's working joining me is Economist bjor lomborg he's author and president of the Copenhagen consensus Center former director of the Danish government's environmental assessment Institute his many books include now false alarm how climate change Panic costs us trillions hurts the poor and fails to fix the planet bjor lomborg it's always great to have you on the show I feel privileged to see you again uh we in Australia and our feeling exactly what you describe in that title to be honest the climate change Panic that's costing us billions electricity prices hurting the poor
and none of it fixing the planet how do we get into this mess well fundamentally I think the problem is that there is a real issue with climate change uh so Chris Bowen is technically right there is a challenge here and the science is telling us there is a problem but then everyone goes overboard and telling you all the things that you see on TV all the worrying things from extreme weather and so on is because of global warming but that's not what the data tells us actually what we've seen is declining levels of cost
and percent of GDP over the last 30 years we have seen a dramatic drop in the number of people that die from extreme weather related events and that's fundamentally because we're a really good Society able to tackle most of these issues there is a climate problem but it's nowhere near what we're being told and that of course both make the scientist should just quote it very very scared but it also make us do incredibly poor policies we do need to tackle climate change but right now we're just wasting money and doing almost nothing Well speaking
of wasting money bjor our Chris bone came back the other day from the latest United Nations climate conference the 29th of them where he gave away another 50 million of our money and negotiated that you know 300 billion US a year package I've been uh struck by a graphic you produced in your latest column which is devastating about this climate conference showing the years of every one of those past conferences going back nearly three decades all plotted against Global Greenhouse emissions I see no change at all apart from when business are shut down during the
pandemic briefly what should this graphic tell us well what it fundamentally shows us is that CO2 levels keep going up we keep emitting more CO2 and remember we do do this because fossil fuels which is the main reason we emit CO2 deliver a lot of good for Humanity it basically delivers a lot of Basel load power it delivers opportunity for especially poor countries to get themselves out of poverty now there is a problem again but you're not going to get to solving that problem by telling people oh we promise to be good that's essentially what
they've done for the last uh 29 un climate conferences everyone has promised oh we're going to cut carbon emissions in the future and of course we do no such thing because it is actually very very costly now the rich countries are increasingly and so Australia is increasingly actually reducing their emissions they're reducing their uh consumption for instance of electricity that has real cost we're seeing many of those costs here in Europe but the problem is there's a big whole world out there who's still poor and wants to be rich and they are the ones driving
this we're not going to solve climate by promising to be virtuous or by promising away I I love the fact that you focus on the 50 million uh dollars that Chris bone gave away but of course the $300 billion that we're promising to give in 2035 is going to be1 billion just from Australia each and every year that's a lot of money it's just unbelievable well that's where I got to disagree with you the first 28 conferences were about were promised to be good this last one was give me the cash give me the cash
it's such a cargo cult now but another thing um that you've pointed out in your excellent filling of what actually happened uh Al Chris Bowen uh told us just last week that we are well on track in transitioning to Wi and Soler here he is this statement tells us that we're on track for our emissions reduction Target of 43% and for our 82% renewable energy Target but bjor lomborg you've said that globally at least there is no transition uh that's according to your calculations when you look at all the extra energy added in the year
to June last year 65% of it actually still came from fossil fuels 7% from nuclear power which we've banned here and just 28% from Renewables despite all those massive subsidies why is that why is it so stubbornly the future so stubbornly coal and gas because most countries want cheap and reliable energy so look Australia and other rich countries can afford to be virtuous and say we're going to pay a lot more money uh I don't know if you saw the new data that shows that England sorry the UK is now paying the most for its
electricity both in for industry and for households of any country in the world they've basically gone all r Ral green but it has a huge cost and we need to recognize that but most of the world is not going to play along so China got a lot of renewable but even got more of coal last year uh Indonesia Bangladesh uh uh India got much much more India got more green but three times more coal fundamentally because coal is reliable it is something that you can turn on when you need it whereas of course solar and
wind only plays when Nature wants it and we can't run a society in that this is what all governments around the world and now realizing this is going to be fantastically costly and probably impossible to do I think it's certainly impossible to do without nuclear power uh in in our circumstance we've got a third world worlds and what is it I think third or a quarter of the world's uranium deposits and we ban it for ourselves BJ lomborg always great to see you I'm glad to see the plants are thriving still behind you uh thank
you so much indeed for your time
