Climate Change Debate: Bjørn Lomborg and Andrew Revkin

00:00:00.000 | people all around the world,

00:00:01.440 | their lives are basically dependent on fossil fuels.

00:00:03.940 | And so the idea that we're gonna get people off

00:00:06.740 | by making it so expensive

00:00:08.400 | that it becomes impossible for them to live good lives

00:00:11.840 | is almost morally reprehensible.

00:00:13.900 | - People who have the most basic science literacy,

00:00:16.540 | like who know the most about greenhouse effect,

00:00:18.940 | they're at both ends of the spectrum of views on climate,

00:00:22.220 | dismissives and alarmed.

00:00:23.720 | - What is likely the worst effect of climate change?

00:00:29.800 | - The following is a conversation with Bjorn Lomborg

00:00:32.520 | and Andrew Refkin on the topic of climate change.

00:00:36.400 | It is framed as a debate,

00:00:38.280 | but with the goal of having a nuanced conversation,

00:00:41.380 | talking with each other, not at each other.

00:00:44.680 | I hope to continue having debates like these,

00:00:47.040 | including on controversial topics.

00:00:49.640 | I believe in the power of conversation

00:00:51.840 | to bring people together,

00:00:53.640 | not to convince one side or the other,

00:00:56.400 | but to enlighten both with the insights

00:00:58.640 | and wisdom that each hold.

00:01:00.180 | Bjorn Lomborg is the president

00:01:02.940 | of Copenhagen Consensus Think Tank

00:01:05.300 | and author of "False Alarm," "Cool It,"

00:01:09.040 | and "Skeptical Environmentalist."

00:01:12.120 | Please check out his work at lomborg.com

00:01:14.600 | that includes his books, articles, and other writing.

00:01:18.640 | Andrew Refkin is one of the most respected journalists

00:01:21.960 | in the world on the topic of climate.

00:01:24.360 | He's been writing about global environmental change

00:01:26.820 | and risk for more than 30 years,

00:01:29.560 | 20 of it at the New York Times.

00:01:32.280 | Please check out his work in the Linktree

00:01:35.520 | that includes his books, articles, and other writing.

00:01:39.480 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.

00:01:41.480 | To support it, please check out our sponsors

00:01:43.680 | in the description.

00:01:45.000 | And now, dear friends,

00:01:46.520 | here's Bjorn Lomborg and Andrew Refkin.

00:01:50.260 | There's a spectrum of belief on the topic of climate change,

00:01:54.680 | and the landscape of that spectrum

00:01:56.700 | has probably changed over several decades.

00:01:59.580 | On one extreme, there's a belief

00:02:00.940 | that climate change is a hoax,

00:02:02.960 | it's not human-caused.

00:02:05.540 | To pile on top of that,

00:02:06.500 | there's a belief that institutions,

00:02:07.940 | scientific, political, the media,

00:02:10.340 | are corrupt and are kind of constructing this fabrication.

00:02:14.980 | That's one extreme.

00:02:15.820 | And then the other extreme,

00:02:17.860 | there's a level of alarmism

00:02:22.140 | about the catastrophic impacts of climate change

00:02:25.220 | that lead to the extinction of human civilization.

00:02:29.820 | So not just economic costs, hardship, suffering,

00:02:33.700 | but literally the destruction of the human species

00:02:37.380 | in the short term.

00:02:38.300 | Okay, so that's the spectrum.

00:02:39.820 | And I would love to find the center,

00:02:43.220 | and my sense is,

00:02:44.420 | and the reason I wanted to talk to the two of you,

00:02:46.780 | aside from the humility with which you approach this topic,

00:02:52.220 | is I feel like you're close to the center

00:02:54.480 | and are on different sides of that center,

00:02:57.860 | if it's possible to define the center.

00:02:59.620 | Like there is a political center

00:03:01.500 | for center left and center right.

00:03:03.700 | Of course, it's very difficult to define,

00:03:05.380 | but can you help me define what the extremes are again,

00:03:08.140 | as they have changed over the years,

00:03:09.540 | what they are today,

00:03:10.620 | and where's the center?

00:03:12.120 | - Oh boy.

00:03:13.060 | Well, in a way, on this issue,

00:03:14.780 | I think there is no center,

00:03:15.940 | except in this, if you're looking on social media

00:03:18.980 | or if you're looking on TV,

00:03:21.340 | there are people who are trying to fabricate the idea

00:03:23.060 | there's a single question.

00:03:24.500 | And that's the first mistake.

00:03:27.460 | We are developing a new relationship with the climate system

00:03:31.460 | and we're rethinking our energy systems.

00:03:35.380 | And those are very disconnected in so many ways,

00:03:39.380 | they connect around climate change.

00:03:40.940 | But the first way to me to overcome this idea

00:03:44.060 | of there is this polarized universe around this issue

00:03:48.340 | is to step back and say,

00:03:50.420 | well, what is this actually?

00:03:51.740 | And when you do, you realize it's kind of

00:03:53.860 | an uncomfortable collision between old energy norms

00:03:56.940 | and a growing awareness of how the planet works.

00:04:01.100 | That if you keep adding gases that are invisible,

00:04:03.460 | it's the bubbles in beer.

00:04:05.140 | If you keep adding that to the atmosphere,

00:04:06.680 | because it accumulates, that will change everything,

00:04:09.020 | is changing everything for thousands of years,

00:04:10.780 | it's already happening.

00:04:11.820 | - What do you mean by bubbles in beer?

00:04:13.340 | - CO2, carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas.

00:04:16.620 | - Why beer?

00:04:17.880 | - Well, 'cause I like beer.

00:04:19.140 | - It's also in Coca-Cola,

00:04:20.460 | we were talking about Cola before.

00:04:22.220 | And so it's innocuous.

00:04:24.500 | We grew up with this idea is CO2,

00:04:27.060 | unless you're trapped in a room suffocating,

00:04:29.600 | is an innocuous gas.

00:04:31.860 | It's plant food, it's beer bubbles.

00:04:34.940 | And the idea we can swiftly transition to a world

00:04:39.580 | where that gas is a pollutant, regulated,

00:04:43.600 | tamped down from the top is fantastical.

00:04:48.260 | Having looked at this for 35 years,

00:04:50.740 | I brought along one of my tokens.

00:04:52.860 | This is my 1988 cover story on global warming.

00:04:56.620 | - The Greenhouse Effect, this cover, 1988.

00:05:00.380 | - Jim Hansen, the famous American climate scientist,

00:05:03.060 | really he stimulated this article

00:05:05.500 | by doing this dramatic testimony

00:05:08.280 | in a Senate committee that summer,

00:05:10.100 | in May, actually, spring, late spring.

00:05:12.060 | It was a hot day and it got headlines

00:05:14.960 | and this was the result.

00:05:16.420 | But it's complicated.

00:05:17.700 | Look what we were selling on the back cover.

00:05:19.980 | - What you see is when you get tobacco--

00:05:21.900 | - Cigarettes.

00:05:22.740 | - Tobacco, yeah.

00:05:24.420 | - You know, looking back at my own career

00:05:26.300 | on the climate question,

00:05:27.660 | it's no longer a belief fight over

00:05:29.720 | is global warming real or not.

00:05:30.940 | You say, well, what kind of energy future do you want?

00:05:32.860 | That's a very different question than stop global warming.

00:05:36.460 | And when you look at climate, actually,

00:05:40.900 | I had this learning journey on my reporting

00:05:43.060 | where I started out with this

00:05:45.980 | as the definition of the problem.

00:05:47.680 | The '70s and '80s, pollution was changing things

00:05:52.220 | that were making things bad.

00:05:53.600 | - So really focusing in on the greenhouse effect

00:05:55.740 | and the pollution.

00:05:56.580 | - But what I missed, the big thing that I missed

00:05:58.620 | of the first 15 years of my reporting

00:06:00.740 | from 1988 through about 2007,

00:06:04.140 | when I was, that period I was at the New York Times

00:06:09.100 | in the middle there,

00:06:10.580 | was that we're building vulnerability

00:06:11.980 | to climate hazards at the same time.

00:06:13.860 | So climate is changing,

00:06:15.780 | but we're changing too.

00:06:17.460 | And where we are here in Austin, Texas is a great example.

00:06:21.580 | Flash Flood Alley, named in the 1920s, west of here.

00:06:26.500 | Everyone forgot about flash floods.

00:06:28.140 | Built these huge developments along these river basins

00:06:32.220 | that in one side starts saying,

00:06:33.580 | global warming, global warming,

00:06:35.180 | and the other side is not recognizing

00:06:38.100 | that we built willfully, greedily,

00:06:43.540 | vulnerability in places of utter hazard.

00:06:45.860 | Same things played out in Pakistan

00:06:47.860 | and in Fort Myers, Florida.

00:06:49.280 | And you start to understand

00:06:51.500 | that we're creating a landscape of risk

00:06:53.500 | as climate is changing,

00:06:56.240 | then it feels, oh my God, that's more complex, right?

00:06:59.380 | But it also gives you more action points.

00:07:01.100 | It's like, okay, well, we know how to design better.

00:07:03.780 | We know that today's coasts won't be tomorrow's coasts.

00:07:07.900 | Work with that.

00:07:08.740 | And then let's chart an energy future at the same time.

00:07:11.700 | So the story became so different.

00:07:12.940 | It didn't become like a story you could package

00:07:16.900 | into a magazine article or the like.

00:07:20.240 | And it just led me to a whole different way

00:07:21.780 | of even my journalism changed over time.

00:07:24.460 | So I don't fight the belief disbelief fight anymore.

00:07:27.800 | I think it's actually kind of a waste.

00:07:30.780 | It's a good way to start the discussion

00:07:32.860 | 'cause that's where we're at.

00:07:34.320 | But this isn't about, to me, going forward from where we're at

00:07:38.180 | isn't about tipping that balance

00:07:41.740 | back toward the center so much as finding opportunities

00:07:44.820 | to just do something about this stuff.

00:07:46.900 | - What do you think, Bjorn?

00:07:47.820 | Do you agree that it's multiple questions in one big question?

00:07:51.460 | Do you think it's possible to define the center?

00:07:53.020 | Where is the center?

00:07:54.700 | - I think it's wonderful to hear Andy

00:07:56.580 | sort of unconstruct the whole conversation

00:07:59.420 | and say we should be worried about different things.

00:08:01.740 | And I think that's exactly,

00:08:03.020 | or we should be worried about things in a different way

00:08:05.300 | that makes it much more useful.

00:08:08.360 | And I think that's exactly the right way to think about it.

00:08:11.220 | On the other hand,

00:08:12.060 | that was also where you kind of ended,

00:08:13.840 | we are stuck in a place where this very much

00:08:16.560 | is the conversation right now.

00:08:18.260 | And so I think in one sense,

00:08:21.500 | certainly the people who used to say,

00:08:23.580 | "Oh, this is not happening."

00:08:24.820 | They're very, very small and diminishing crowd

00:08:27.540 | and certainly not right.

00:08:28.800 | But on the other hand, I think to an increasing extent,

00:08:34.700 | we've gotten into a world where a lot of people

00:08:37.340 | really think this is the end of times.

00:08:40.740 | If you, so the OECD did a new survey of all OECD countries

00:08:45.380 | and it's shocking.

00:08:46.460 | So it shows that 60% of all people in the OECD,

00:08:50.260 | so the rich world,

00:08:51.780 | believes that global warming will likely

00:08:53.780 | or very likely lead to the extinction of mankind.

00:08:57.780 | And that's scary in a very, very clear way

00:09:02.300 | because look, if this really is true,

00:09:04.500 | if global warming is this meteor hurtling towards earth

00:09:08.380 | and we're gonna be destroyed in 12 years

00:09:10.980 | or whatever the number is today,

00:09:14.380 | then clearly we should care about nothing else.

00:09:16.560 | We should just be focusing on making sure

00:09:19.020 | that that asteroid gets,

00:09:20.820 | we should send up Bruce Willis and get this done with.

00:09:24.180 | But that's not the way it is.

00:09:26.300 | This is not actually what the UN climate panel tells us

00:09:29.200 | or anything else.

00:09:30.180 | So I think it's not so much about arcing against the people

00:09:34.100 | who are saying it's a hoax.

00:09:35.540 | That's not really where I am.

00:09:36.880 | I don't think that's where Andy or really

00:09:38.460 | where the conversation is.

00:09:40.020 | But it is a question of sort of pulling people back

00:09:42.780 | from this end of the world conversation

00:09:45.180 | because it really skews our way

00:09:47.380 | that we think about problems.

00:09:48.820 | Also, if you really think this is the end of time

00:09:51.380 | and you only have 12 years,

00:09:53.140 | nothing that can only work in 13 years can be considered.

00:09:57.860 | And the reality of most of what we're talking about

00:10:00.660 | in climate and certainly our vulnerability,

00:10:02.540 | certainly our energy system

00:10:04.300 | is gonna be half to a full century.

00:10:06.540 | And so when you talk to people and say,

00:10:08.740 | well, but we're gonna, you know,

00:10:10.060 | we're really gonna go a lot more renewable

00:10:11.980 | in the next half century.

00:10:13.020 | They look at you and like, but that's what,

00:10:15.220 | 38 years too late.

00:10:17.220 | And I get that.

00:10:18.180 | But so I think in your question,

00:10:21.300 | what I'm trying to do and I would imagine

00:10:23.020 | that's true for you as well,

00:10:24.460 | is to try to pull people away from this precipice

00:10:27.500 | and this end of the world and then open it up.

00:10:30.540 | And I think Andy did that really well by saying,

00:10:33.100 | look, there are so many different sub conversations

00:10:36.180 | and we need to have all of them

00:10:38.020 | and we need to be respectful of,

00:10:40.380 | some of these are right in the sort of standard media

00:10:43.700 | kind of way, but some of them are very, very wrong.

00:10:46.320 | And it actually means that we end up doing much less good,

00:10:49.880 | both on climate, but also on all the other problems

00:10:52.620 | the world faces.

00:10:53.460 | - Oh yeah, and it just empowers people too.

00:10:55.580 | Those who believe this then just sit back,

00:10:58.740 | even in Adam McKay's movie, the "Don't Look Up" movie,

00:11:01.820 | there was that sort of nihilist crowd

00:11:03.460 | for those who've seen it, who just say,

00:11:05.180 | you know, fuck this, and a lot of people have that,

00:11:09.020 | when something's too big,

00:11:10.220 | and it just paralyzes you,

00:11:14.580 | as opposed to giving you these action points.

00:11:16.900 | And the other thing is, I hate it when economists

00:11:20.540 | are right about stuff like the--

00:11:22.140 | (laughing)

00:11:24.380 | - It happens all that often, though.

00:11:25.420 | - No, no, there are these phrases,

00:11:27.260 | like I never knew the words path dependency

00:11:30.220 | until probably 10 years ago in my reporting.

00:11:32.740 | And it basically says you're in a system,

00:11:35.420 | the things around you, how we pass laws,

00:11:37.980 | the brokenness of the Senate, you know.

00:11:39.940 | We don't have a climate crisis in America,

00:11:43.980 | we have a decision crisis,

00:11:45.900 | as it comes to how the government works or doesn't work.

00:11:48.660 | But those big features of our landscape,

00:11:51.460 | it's path dependency.

00:11:54.500 | When you screw in a light bulb,

00:11:56.820 | even if it's an LED light bulb,

00:11:58.140 | it's going into a 113, 120-year-old fixture,

00:12:02.360 | because, and actually that fixture is almost designed,

00:12:05.220 | if you look at 19th century gas fixtures,

00:12:07.660 | they had this screw in thing.

00:12:09.140 | So we're on these long path dependencies

00:12:11.380 | when it comes to energy and stuff like that,

00:12:12.680 | that you don't just magically transition a car fleet.

00:12:16.540 | A car built today will last 40 years,

00:12:18.540 | it'll end up in Mexico, sold as a used car,

00:12:20.660 | et cetera, et cetera.

00:12:21.820 | And so there is no quick fix,

00:12:26.260 | even if we're true that things are coming to an end

00:12:30.780 | in 13 years or 12 years or eight years.

00:12:32.360 | - So most people don't believe

00:12:34.280 | that climate change is a hoax,

00:12:35.720 | so they believe that there is an increase,

00:12:39.240 | there's a global warming of a few degrees

00:12:41.360 | in the next century,

00:12:43.000 | and then maybe debate about

00:12:44.200 | what the number of the degrees is.

00:12:46.740 | And do most people believe that it's human caused

00:12:50.680 | at this time in this history

00:12:54.140 | of discussion of climate change?

00:12:55.320 | So is that the center still?

00:12:57.240 | Is there still debate on this?

00:12:59.640 | - Yale University, the climate communication group

00:13:02.380 | there for like 13 years has done this Six Americas study

00:13:06.920 | where they've charted pretty carefully

00:13:09.700 | in ways that I really find useful what people believe.

00:13:13.920 | And we could talk about the word belief

00:13:15.300 | in the context of science too,

00:13:16.380 | but and they've identified kind of six kinds of us.

00:13:19.440 | There's from dismissive to alarmed

00:13:22.480 | and with lots of bubbles in between.

00:13:24.200 | I think some of those bubbles in between

00:13:25.700 | are mostly disengaged people

00:13:27.780 | don't really deal with the issue.

00:13:29.480 | And they've shown a drift for sure.

00:13:32.660 | There's much more majority now at the alarmed

00:13:36.420 | or engaged bubbles than just the dismissive bubble.

00:13:40.760 | There's a durable like with vaccination

00:13:42.540 | and lots of other issues.

00:13:43.720 | There's a durable never anything belief group,

00:13:47.980 | but on the reality that humans are contributing

00:13:51.260 | to climate change, most Americans when you ask them,

00:13:55.020 | and it also depends on how you write your survey.

00:13:57.820 | Think there's a component.

00:13:59.500 | - I mean, when you ask around, I mean,

00:14:01.780 | and this is, if you hear the story

00:14:03.880 | from the media of 20 years,

00:14:05.060 | of course that's what you will believe.

00:14:06.760 | And it also happens to be true.

00:14:09.220 | That is what the science, I think,

00:14:11.060 | it's perhaps worth saying,

00:14:12.420 | and it's a little depressing that you always have to say,

00:14:15.020 | but I think it's worth saying that

00:14:16.560 | I think we both really do accept

00:14:19.420 | the climate panel science

00:14:21.420 | and there's absolutely global warming.

00:14:23.740 | It is an issue and it's probably just worthwhile

00:14:26.780 | to get it out of the way.

00:14:27.620 | - It's an issue and it's caused by humans.

00:14:30.500 | - It's caused by humans, yeah.

00:14:32.020 | But vulnerability, the losses that are driven

00:14:36.160 | by climate-related events still predominantly

00:14:39.340 | are caused by humans, but on the ground.

00:14:42.260 | It's where we build stuff, where we settle.

00:14:45.500 | Pakistan, in 1960, I just looked these data up,

00:14:50.500 | there were 40 million people in Pakistan.

00:14:52.740 | Today there are 225 million

00:14:54.940 | and a big chunk of them are still rural.

00:14:56.820 | They live in the floodplain of the amazing Indus River,

00:14:59.680 | which comes down from the Himalayas.

00:15:01.820 | Extraordinary 5,000 year history of agriculture there.

00:15:05.900 | But when you put 200 million people in harm's way,

00:15:09.860 | and this doesn't say anything about

00:15:11.220 | the bigger questions about,

00:15:13.020 | oh, shame on Pakistan for having more people.

00:15:15.620 | It just says the reality is the losses that we see

00:15:19.220 | in the news are, and the science finds this,

00:15:22.980 | even though there's a new weather attribution group,

00:15:25.940 | it's WXRisk on Twitter.

00:15:28.900 | This does pretty good work on how much of what just happened

00:15:33.280 | was some tweak in the storm from global warming,

00:15:36.060 | from CO2 changing weather.

00:15:38.240 | But, and the media glom onto that,

00:15:42.420 | as I did in the '80s, '90s, 2000s.

00:15:47.000 | But the reports also have a section on, by the way,

00:15:50.440 | the vulnerability that was built in this region

00:15:52.200 | was a big driver of loss.

00:15:55.560 | So discriminating between loss,

00:15:58.000 | change in what's happening on the ground,

00:16:02.820 | and change in the climate system,

00:16:05.160 | is never solely about CO2.

00:16:07.440 | In fact, Lawrence Bauer, B-O-U-W-E-R,

00:16:14.840 | I first wrote on his work in 2010 in the New York Times,

00:16:17.280 | and basically, in 2010, there was no sign in the data

00:16:20.760 | of climate change driving disasters.

00:16:23.380 | Climate change is up here, disasters are on the ground,

00:16:27.080 | they depend on how many people are in the way,

00:16:29.160 | how much stuff you built in the way.

00:16:31.080 | And so far, we've done so much of that,

00:16:32.880 | so fast in the 20th century, particularly,

00:16:35.920 | that it completely dominates, it makes it hard,

00:16:38.120 | impossible to discriminate how much of that disaster

00:16:42.600 | was from the change in weather from global warming.

00:16:47.600 | - So a function of greenhouse gases to human suffering

00:16:53.120 | is unclear.

00:16:57.880 | - And that's very much in our control, theoretically.

00:17:00.520 | - Right, the point, I think, is exactly right,

00:17:03.560 | that if you look at the Hurricane Ian

00:17:06.440 | that went through Florida, you have a situation

00:17:08.960 | where Florida went from, what, 600,000 houses

00:17:12.200 | in 1940 to 17 million houses,

00:17:17.200 | sorry, 10 million houses, so 17 times more,

00:17:21.580 | over, what, a period of 80 years?

00:17:24.240 | Of course you're gonna have, what?

00:17:25.920 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:17:26.760 | - You're gonna have lots more damage,

00:17:28.640 | and many of these houses now have been built

00:17:30.520 | on places where you probably shouldn't be building.

00:17:33.480 | And so I think a lot of scientists are very focused

00:17:37.200 | on saying, can we measure whether global warming

00:17:40.280 | had an impact, which is an interesting science question.

00:17:43.320 | I think it's very implausible that eventually

00:17:46.960 | we won't be able to say it has an impact.

00:17:48.960 | But the real question, it seems to me,

00:17:51.040 | is if we actually wanna make sure that people

00:17:53.360 | are less harmed in the future,

00:17:54.900 | what are the levers that we can control?

00:17:58.280 | And it turns out that the CO2 lever,

00:18:01.040 | doing something about climate, is an incredibly

00:18:03.720 | difficult and slightly inefficient way

00:18:06.240 | of trying to help these people in the future,

00:18:08.280 | whereas, of course, zoning, making sure that you have

00:18:11.180 | better housing rules, what is it, regulations,

00:18:16.180 | that you maybe don't have people building

00:18:19.100 | in the flash flood, what was it called?

00:18:21.000 | - Flash flood alley.

00:18:21.840 | - Flash flood alley.

00:18:23.280 | It's just simple stuff, and because we're so focused

00:18:27.000 | on this one issue, it almost feels sacrilegious

00:18:32.000 | to talk about these other things that are much more

00:18:35.180 | in our power and that we can do something about

00:18:37.360 | much quicker and that would help a lot more people.

00:18:39.680 | So I think this is gonna be a large part

00:18:42.480 | of the whole conversation.

00:18:44.400 | Yes, climate is a problem, but it's not the only problem.

00:18:47.080 | And there are many other things where we can actually

00:18:49.240 | have a much, much bigger impact at much lower cost.

00:18:52.100 | Maybe we should also remember those.

00:18:53.760 | - Can you still man the case of Greta,

00:18:58.680 | who's a representative of alarmism,

00:19:04.160 | that we need that kind of level of alarmism

00:19:08.200 | for people to pay attention and to think

00:19:10.360 | about climate change?

00:19:11.840 | So you said the singular view is not the correct way

00:19:16.840 | to look at climate change, just the emissions.

00:19:21.440 | But for us to have a discussion, shouldn't there be

00:19:25.920 | somebody who's really raising the concern?

00:19:30.760 | Can you still man the case for alarmism, essentially,

00:19:33.720 | or is there a better term than alarmism?

00:19:36.620 | Communication of like, holy shit,

00:19:42.500 | we should be thinking about this.

00:19:44.760 | - So I totally understand why Greta Thunberg

00:19:48.440 | is doing what she's doing.

00:19:49.640 | I have great respect for her because I look at a lot

00:19:53.560 | of kids growing up and they're basically being told,

00:19:56.680 | you're not gonna reach adulthood, or at least not,

00:19:58.880 | you're not gonna get very far into adulthood.

00:20:01.720 | And that, of course, this is the meteor hurtling

00:20:05.120 | towards Earth, and then this is the only thing

00:20:07.320 | we should be focusing on.

00:20:08.720 | I understand why she's making that argument.

00:20:10.920 | I think it's, at the end of the day, it's incorrect,

00:20:14.340 | and I'm sure we'll get around to talking about that.

00:20:16.680 | And one of the things is, of course,

00:20:18.600 | that her whole generation, I can understand

00:20:22.200 | why they're saying, if we're gonna be dead in 12 years,

00:20:25.040 | why would I wanna study?

00:20:26.560 | Why would I really care about anything?

00:20:28.640 | So I totally want to sort of pull Greta and many others

00:20:32.280 | out of this end of the world fear,

00:20:35.080 | but I totally get why she's doing it.

00:20:37.160 | I think she's done a service in the sense

00:20:39.080 | that she's gotten more people to talk about climate,

00:20:41.760 | and that's good because we need to have this discussion.

00:20:44.960 | I think it's unfortunate, and this is just what happens

00:20:48.460 | in almost all policy discussions, that they end up being

00:20:51.800 | sort of discussions from the extreme groups,

00:20:54.780 | because it's just more fun on media

00:20:57.120 | to have sort of the total deniers

00:20:59.680 | and the people who say, we're gonna die tomorrow,

00:21:02.540 | and it sort of becomes that discussion.

00:21:04.320 | It's more sort of a mud wrestling fight.

00:21:06.920 | - So would you think the mud wrestling fight is not useful

00:21:09.600 | or is useful for communication,

00:21:11.680 | for effective science communication,

00:21:14.200 | on one of the platforms that you're a fan of,

00:21:16.360 | which is Twitter?

00:21:17.720 | - Yeah, I wrote a piece recently in my Sustain What column

00:21:21.740 | saying, if you go on there for the entertainment value

00:21:25.680 | of seeing those knockdown fights, I guess that's useful,

00:21:30.120 | if that's what you're looking for.

00:21:31.880 | The thing I found Twitter invaluable for,

00:21:34.200 | but it's a practice.

00:21:37.260 | It's just like the workouts you do,

00:21:39.300 | or it's how do I put this tool to use today,

00:21:44.140 | thinking about energy action in poor communities?

00:21:49.140 | How do I put this tool today, learning about

00:21:51.880 | what really happened with Ian the hurricane,

00:21:54.640 | who was most at risk, and how would you build forward better?

00:21:59.520 | I hate build back.

00:22:00.560 | Or you can go there and just watch it

00:22:03.440 | as an entertainment value.

00:22:04.600 | That's not gonna get the world anywhere.

00:22:07.040 | - You don't think entertainment,

00:22:10.120 | I wouldn't call it entertainment,

00:22:11.800 | but giving voice to the extremes

00:22:14.480 | isn't a productive way forward.

00:22:16.680 | It seems to, to push back against the main narrative,

00:22:20.600 | it seems to work pretty well in the American system.

00:22:22.880 | We think politics is totally broken,

00:22:25.880 | but maybe that works, that oscillation back and forth.

00:22:29.200 | You need a Greta, and you need somebody

00:22:31.640 | that pushes back against the Greta to get everybody's,

00:22:34.720 | just to get everybody's attention.

00:22:38.080 | The fun of battle over time creates progress.

00:22:43.080 | - Well, and this gets to the, you know,

00:22:46.100 | people who focus on communication science,

00:22:48.160 | I'm not a scientist, I write about this stuff.

00:22:51.360 | If you're gonna try to prod someone with a warning,

00:22:55.120 | like, this is three years apart.

00:22:57.760 | Nuclear winter.

00:22:59.000 | - Nuclear winter, we'll talk about that.

00:23:00.600 | - Global warming, well, yeah, we'll talk about it.

00:23:02.320 | But look at that, you know, this is three years apart

00:23:04.160 | in the covers of a magazine.

00:23:05.560 | But then you have to say to what end,

00:23:08.920 | if you're not directing people to a basket of things to do.

00:23:13.200 | And if you want political change,

00:23:15.400 | then it would be to support a politician.

00:23:18.000 | If you want energy access, it would be to look

00:23:20.920 | at this $370 billion the American government

00:23:25.920 | just put into play on climate and say,

00:23:27.760 | well, how can my community benefit from that?

00:23:30.140 | And I've been told over and over again

00:23:31.720 | by people in government, Jigar Shah,

00:23:34.360 | who heads this giant loan program, the energy department,

00:23:37.640 | he says, what I need now is like 19,500 people

00:23:40.620 | who are worried about climate change.

00:23:42.520 | Maybe because Greta got them worried.

00:23:45.060 | But here's the thing you could do,

00:23:46.960 | you can connect your local government right now

00:23:48.800 | with these multimillion dollar loans

00:23:50.600 | so you can have electric buses instead of diesel buses.

00:23:53.800 | And that's an action pathway.

00:23:55.280 | So without, so you know, alarm for the sake

00:23:59.060 | of getting attention or clicks,

00:24:02.720 | to me is not any more valuable than watching an action movie.

00:24:07.720 | - And again, I think also it very easily ends up

00:24:10.680 | sort of skewing our conversation

00:24:12.400 | about what are the actual solutions.

00:24:15.280 | You know, because yes, it's great to get rid

00:24:17.880 | of the diesel bus, but probably not for the reason

00:24:20.520 | people think, it's because diesel buses

00:24:22.360 | are really polluting in the air pollution sense.

00:24:26.400 | - Right, right, right.

00:24:27.240 | - And that is why you should get rid of them.

00:24:29.960 | And again, if you really wanted to help people,

00:24:32.520 | for instance, with hurricanes,

00:24:34.400 | you should have better rules and zoning in Florida,

00:24:38.520 | which is a very different outcome.

00:24:40.280 | So the mud wrestling fight also gets our attention

00:24:44.680 | diverted towards solutions that seem easy, fun,

00:24:50.240 | you know, sort of the electric car is a great example

00:24:52.680 | of this, the electric car has somehow become

00:24:54.560 | almost the sign that I care and I'm really gonna do

00:24:58.320 | something about climate.

00:24:59.960 | Of course, electric cars are great

00:25:01.960 | and they're probably part of the solution

00:25:04.000 | and they will actually cut carbon emissions somewhat,

00:25:06.840 | but they're an incredibly ineffective way

00:25:09.560 | of cutting carbon emissions right now.

00:25:11.700 | They're fairly expensive, you have to subsidize them a lot

00:25:14.760 | and they still emit quite a bit of CO2,

00:25:17.000 | both because the batteries get produced

00:25:18.960 | and because they usually run off power

00:25:21.320 | that's not-- - Strong words

00:25:22.600 | from your in-law, okay, let's go there,

00:25:24.560 | let's go electric cars, okay, educate us

00:25:27.560 | on the pros and cons of electric cars

00:25:30.360 | in this complex picture of climate change.

00:25:33.520 | What do you think of the efforts of Tesla and Elon Musk

00:25:36.560 | on pushing forward the electric car revolution?

00:25:40.760 | - So look, electric cars are great.

00:25:43.040 | I don't own a car, but you know, I've been driving--

00:25:47.160 | - There you go, socially signaling.

00:25:48.960 | (laughing)

00:25:49.800 | - Yeah, but yeah, I've--

00:25:51.560 | - We're in Texas, it's okay. - Well, I flew in here,

00:25:52.960 | so it's not like I'm in any way a virtuous guy on that path,

00:25:57.600 | but look, they're great cars and eventually,

00:26:01.880 | electric cars will take over a significant part

00:26:04.680 | of our driving and that's good

00:26:07.560 | because they're more effective,

00:26:10.080 | they're probably also gonna be cheaper.

00:26:12.320 | There's a lot of good opportunities with them,

00:26:15.000 | but it's because they've become reified

00:26:16.960 | as this thing that you do to fix climate

00:26:19.880 | and right now, they're not really all that great for climate.

00:26:24.320 | You need a lot of extra material into the batteries,

00:26:28.720 | which is very polluting and it's also,

00:26:31.320 | it emits a lot of CO2.

00:26:32.880 | A lot of electric cars are bought as second cars in the US.

00:26:37.120 | So we used to think that they were driven

00:26:38.840 | almost as much as a regular car.

00:26:41.440 | It turns out that they're more likely driven

00:26:43.800 | less than half as much as regular cars.

00:26:47.080 | So, 89% of all Americans who have an electric car

00:26:50.440 | also have a real car that they use for the long trips

00:26:53.920 | and then they use the electric car for short trips.

00:26:56.200 | - 89%? - 89, yeah.

00:26:58.000 | So the point here is that it's one of these things

00:27:02.480 | that become more sort of a virtue signaling thing.

00:27:05.200 | And again, look, once electric cars are sufficiently cheap

00:27:09.000 | that people will want to buy them, that's great

00:27:11.160 | and they will do some good for the environment.

00:27:14.520 | But in reality, what we should be focusing on

00:27:16.720 | is instead of getting people electric cars

00:27:20.000 | in rich countries, where because we're subsidizing

00:27:22.800 | typically in many countries,

00:27:25.280 | you actually get a sort of sliding scale.

00:27:28.200 | You get more subsidy, the more expensive it is.

00:27:30.880 | We sort of subsidize this to very rich people

00:27:33.120 | to buy very large Teslas to drive around in.

00:27:37.600 | Whereas what we should be focusing on

00:27:39.400 | is perhaps getting electric motorcycles

00:27:42.440 | in third world developing cities,

00:27:44.840 | where they would do a lot more good.

00:27:46.960 | They can actually go as far as you need.

00:27:49.040 | There's no worry about running out of them.

00:27:51.760 | And they would obviously, they're much, much more polluting

00:27:55.040 | just air pollution wise, and they're much cheaper

00:27:58.080 | and they use very little battery.

00:27:59.480 | So it's about getting our senses right.

00:28:01.480 | But the electric car is not a conversation about

00:28:06.080 | is it technically really good

00:28:08.080 | or is it a somewhat good insight?

00:28:10.720 | It's more like it's a virtual signal.

00:28:12.440 | So just, I work with economists.

00:28:15.120 | I'm actually not an economist,

00:28:16.480 | but I like to say I claim I kind of am.

00:28:19.040 | But the fundamental point is we would say,

00:28:21.840 | well, how much does it cost to cut a ton of CO2?

00:28:25.960 | And the answer is for most electric cars,

00:28:28.400 | we're paying in the order of 1000, 2000,

00:28:31.960 | Norway, they pay up to what $5,000 or thereabouts,

00:28:37.400 | huge amount for one ton of CO2.

00:28:40.080 | You can right now cut a ton of CO2 for about,

00:28:42.720 | what is it, $14 on the Reggie or something.

00:28:45.880 | You can do this.

00:28:46.720 | - That's a regional greenhouse gas.

00:28:48.960 | - So you can basically cut it really, really cheaply.

00:28:51.400 | Why would we not want to cut dozens and dozens of tons

00:28:54.920 | of CO2 for the same price instead of just cutting one ton?

00:28:58.560 | And the simple answer is we only do that

00:29:00.480 | because we're so focused on electric.

00:29:02.000 | - If I may interrupt, typically European come here

00:29:04.680 | in Texas, tell me I can't have my Ford F-150.

00:29:08.040 | - Well, now you can have your F-150 Lightning.

00:29:10.920 | - Yes, that's true.

00:29:12.320 | I'm just joking.

00:29:14.560 | But what do you think about electric cars?

00:29:16.480 | If you could just link on that moment

00:29:17.920 | and this particular element of helping reduce emissions.

00:29:22.920 | - Well, you talked about the middle in the beginning.

00:29:26.720 | And I loved moving to the hybrid.

00:29:29.440 | The Prius was fantastic.

00:29:30.800 | It did everything our other sedan did.

00:29:33.120 | But it was 60 miles per gallon performance.

00:29:36.640 | And you don't have range anxiety

00:29:39.280 | because it has a regular engine too.

00:29:42.240 | We still have a Prius.

00:29:43.600 | We also inherited my dad,

00:29:45.480 | dear dad's year 2000 Toyota Sienna,

00:29:48.800 | which is an old 100,000 mile minivan.

00:29:53.240 | And we use it all the time to do the stuff

00:29:55.080 | we can't do in the Prius.

00:29:57.640 | - Like what?

00:29:58.640 | - Taking stuff to the dump.

00:30:00.000 | - Oh, you mean in terms of the size of the vehicle?

00:30:02.560 | - Yeah, size and just convenience factor for a bigger vehicle.

00:30:06.520 | I would love a fully electrified transportation world.

00:30:12.400 | It's kind of exciting.

00:30:13.640 | I think what Elon did with Tesla,

00:30:16.160 | I remember way, way back in the day

00:30:18.000 | when the first models were coming out.

00:30:19.400 | They were very slick Ferrari style cars.

00:30:22.800 | And I thought, this is cool.

00:30:24.280 | And there's a history of privileged markets

00:30:27.160 | testing new technologies.

00:30:29.120 | And I'm all for that.

00:30:31.240 | And I think it's done a huge service

00:30:33.040 | prodding so much more R and D.

00:30:36.440 | And once GM and Ford started to realize,

00:30:39.200 | oh my God, this is a real phenomenon,

00:30:42.280 | getting them in the game.

00:30:43.840 | There was that documentary, "Who Killed the Electric Car?"

00:30:47.920 | which seemed to imply that there were fights

00:30:52.360 | to keep this tamp down.

00:30:54.120 | And it's fundamentally cleaner, fundamentally better.

00:30:57.080 | But then you have to manage these bigger questions.

00:31:01.000 | If we're gonna do a build out here,

00:31:03.000 | how do you make it fair?

00:31:05.240 | As you were saying, who actually uses transformed cars?

00:31:08.640 | And Jagir Shah, that guy at the energy department

00:31:10.880 | I mentioned who has all this money to give out,

00:31:13.440 | he wants to give loans to, if you had an Uber fleet,

00:31:18.440 | those Uber drivers, they're the ones who need electric cars.

00:31:23.460 | As his work, and there was a recent story in Grist also,

00:31:28.600 | said that most of the sales of Teslas

00:31:30.640 | are the high end of the market.

00:31:31.840 | They're 60, $80,000 vehicles.

00:31:33.820 | Like the Hummer, the electric Hummer,

00:31:37.600 | there was a data point on that, astonishing data point,

00:31:41.800 | the battery in that Hummer weighs more than,

00:31:44.780 | I'd have to look it up, it weighs more than a car.

00:31:49.040 | Yeah, I think it might have been a Prius.

00:31:51.120 | And think of the material costs there.

00:31:53.040 | Think of where that battery, the cobalt and the lithium,

00:31:55.720 | where does this stuff come from to build this stuff out?

00:31:59.480 | I'm all for it, but we have to be honest and clear about

00:32:03.000 | that's a new resource rush, like the oil rush

00:32:05.960 | back in the early 20th century.

00:32:08.040 | And those impacts have to be figured out too.

00:32:10.480 | And if they're all big Hummers for rich people,

00:32:14.660 | there's so many contrary arguments to that

00:32:16.560 | that I think we have to figure out a way, we,

00:32:19.680 | I don't like the word we, I use it too much, we all do.

00:32:23.080 | - We all do.

00:32:23.920 | - You usually refer when you say we, we humans.

00:32:26.480 | - We society, we government, yeah.

00:32:28.800 | There has to be some thought and attention put

00:32:31.560 | to where you put these incentives so that you get

00:32:33.800 | the best use of this technology for the carbon benefit,

00:32:38.000 | for the conventional sooty pollution benefit,

00:32:41.040 | for the transportation benefit.

00:32:42.800 | - Can I step back and ask a sort of big question?

00:32:45.600 | We mentioned economics, journalism.

00:32:48.360 | How does an economist and a climate scientist

00:32:53.280 | and a journalist that writes about climate

00:32:57.040 | see the world differently?

00:32:58.400 | What are the strengths and potential blind spots

00:33:00.560 | of each discipline?

00:33:02.080 | I mean, that's just sort of, just so people may be aware.

00:33:06.320 | I think you'll be able to fall into the economics camp a bit.

00:33:10.200 | There's climate scientists,

00:33:12.280 | and there's climate scientists adjacent people,

00:33:15.080 | like who hang, some of my best friends are climate scientists

00:33:17.640 | kind of, which is I think where you fall in

00:33:19.920 | because you're a journalist, you've been writing it,

00:33:22.120 | so you're not completely in the trenches of doing the work

00:33:28.120 | you're just step into the trenches every once in a while.

00:33:31.720 | So can you speak to that maybe beyond like,

00:33:33.920 | what does the world look like to an economist?

00:33:37.880 | Let's try to empathize with these beings that--

00:33:41.520 | - Unfortunately has fallen into the disreputable economics.

00:33:46.520 | So I think the main point that I've been trying

00:33:50.880 | for a long time, and I think that's also a little bit

00:33:52.800 | what Andy has been talking about, for a very long time,

00:33:56.180 | the whole conversation was about

00:33:57.440 | what does the science tell us?

00:33:59.320 | Is global warming real?

00:34:01.080 | And to me, it's much more, what can we actually do?

00:34:05.720 | What are the policies that we can take

00:34:08.520 | and how effective are they gonna be?

00:34:10.400 | So the conversation we just had about electric cars

00:34:12.680 | is a good example of how an economist think about,

00:34:15.920 | look, this is not a question about

00:34:18.880 | whether you feel morally virtuous

00:34:20.720 | or whether you can sort of display

00:34:22.640 | how much you care about the environment.

00:34:24.600 | This is about how much you actually ended up

00:34:27.460 | affecting the world.

00:34:28.820 | And the honest answer is that electric cars right now

00:34:32.540 | in the next decade or so will have a fairly small impact.

00:34:36.300 | And unfortunately right now at a very high cost

00:34:38.340 | because we're basically subsidizing these things

00:34:40.700 | at five or $10,000 around the world per car.

00:34:44.940 | That's just not, it's not really sustainable,

00:34:47.300 | but it's certainly not a very great way

00:34:48.980 | to cut carbon emissions.

00:34:50.460 | So I would be the kind of guy and economists

00:34:53.220 | would be the types of people who would say,

00:34:55.620 | is there a smarter way where you for less money

00:34:59.160 | can for instance, cut more CO2?

00:35:01.200 | And the obvious answer is yes.

00:35:03.980 | That's what we've seen for instance, with fracking.

00:35:07.140 | The fact that the US went from a lot of coal

00:35:10.380 | to a lot of gas because gas became incredibly cheap

00:35:13.360 | because gas emits about half as much as coal does

00:35:16.780 | when you use it for power,

00:35:20.060 | that basically cut more carbon emissions

00:35:22.340 | than pretty much any other single thing.

00:35:24.780 | And we should get the rest of the world in some sense

00:35:27.940 | to frack because it's really cheap.

00:35:30.540 | There are some problems and absolutely

00:35:32.300 | we can also have that conversation.

00:35:34.180 | No technology is problem-free,

00:35:36.860 | but fundamentally it's an incredibly cheap way

00:35:39.780 | to get people to cut a lot of CO2.

00:35:42.460 | It's not the final solution

00:35:43.860 | because it's still a fossil fuel,

00:35:45.180 | but it's a much better fossil fuel, if you will.

00:35:47.980 | And it's much more realistic to do that.

00:35:50.340 | So that's one part of the thing.

00:35:52.160 | The other one is when we talked about, for instance,

00:35:54.900 | how do we help people in Florida who gets hit by a hurricane

00:35:58.520 | or how do we help people that get damaged in flash floods,

00:36:02.900 | the people who are in heat waves.

00:36:05.740 | And the simple answer is there's a lot of very, very cheap

00:36:10.300 | and effective things that we could do first.

00:36:12.420 | So most climate people will tend to sort of say,

00:36:15.380 | we gotta get rid of all carbon emissions,

00:36:18.780 | we gotta change the engine that sort of powers the world

00:36:23.660 | and has powered us for the last 200 years.

00:36:26.080 | And that's all good and well,

00:36:27.200 | but it's really, really hard to do

00:36:28.480 | and it's probably not gonna do very much.

00:36:30.440 | And even if you succeed it, it would only help

00:36:33.280 | future victims of future hurricane Ians in Florida

00:36:36.280 | a tiny, tiny bit at best.

00:36:38.320 | So instead, let's try to focus on not getting people

00:36:41.420 | to build right on the waterfront

00:36:43.640 | where you're incredibly vulnerable

00:36:45.240 | and where you're very likely to get hit,

00:36:47.160 | where we subsidize people with federal insurance again,

00:36:51.560 | which is just actually losing money.

00:36:53.540 | So we're much more about saying,

00:36:55.840 | it's not a science question,

00:36:57.240 | I just take the science for granted.

00:36:58.840 | Yes, there is a problem with climate change,

00:37:00.700 | but it's much more about saying,

00:37:02.040 | how can we make smart decisions?

00:37:03.520 | - Can I ask you about blind spots?

00:37:06.080 | When you reduce stuff to numbers, the cost and benefits,

00:37:09.800 | is there stuff you might miss

00:37:11.880 | that are important to the flourishing of the human species?

00:37:16.900 | - So everyone will have to say,

00:37:18.920 | of course there must be blind spots.

00:37:21.240 | - But I don't know what they are.

00:37:23.120 | - Yeah, I'm sure Andy would probably be better

00:37:26.400 | at telling me what they are.

00:37:28.560 | So we try to incorporate all of it,

00:37:30.480 | but obviously we're not successful.

00:37:32.600 | You can't incorporate everything,

00:37:34.240 | for instance, in a cost benefit analysis.

00:37:36.320 | But the point is in some way,

00:37:38.180 | I would worry a lot about this

00:37:41.440 | if we were sort of close to perfection,

00:37:44.400 | human race, we're doing almost everything right,

00:37:47.080 | but we're not quite right,

00:37:48.260 | then we need to get the last digits right.

00:37:50.340 | But I think it's much more of the,

00:37:51.980 | and the point that I tried to make before,

00:37:54.800 | that we're all focused on going to an electric car

00:37:58.820 | or something else rather than fracking,

00:38:01.700 | we're all focused on cutting carbon emissions

00:38:04.300 | instead of reducing vulnerability.

00:38:06.620 | So we're similarly getting in orders of magnitude wrong.

00:38:10.380 | And while I'm sure I have blind spots,

00:38:13.380 | I think they're probably not big enough

00:38:15.040 | to overturn that point.

00:38:16.600 | - Andy, wise, Bjorn, economists

00:38:18.760 | are all wrong about everything.

00:38:21.260 | - Well, models, we could spend a whole day on models.

00:38:25.780 | There are economic models,

00:38:26.840 | there's this thing called optimization models.

00:38:29.340 | There were two big ones used to assess the US plan,

00:38:33.660 | this new big IRA, inflation reduction package.

00:38:38.420 | And they're fine, they're a starting point

00:38:41.260 | for understanding what's possible.

00:38:43.980 | But as this gets to the journalism part or the public part,

00:38:47.860 | you have to look at the caveats.

00:38:49.260 | You have to look at what model,

00:38:51.420 | economists expressly exclude things that are not modelable.

00:38:56.220 | And if you look in the fine print on the repeat project,

00:38:59.540 | the Princeton version of the assessment

00:39:01.940 | of the recent giant legislation,

00:39:04.040 | the fine print is the front page for me

00:39:09.280 | as a deep diving journalist,

00:39:11.140 | because it says we didn't include any sources of friction,

00:39:16.140 | meaning resistance to putting new transmission lines

00:39:20.220 | through your community,

00:39:21.540 | or people who don't want mining in America

00:39:26.540 | because we've exported all of our mining.

00:39:29.420 | We mine our cobalt in Congo,

00:39:32.820 | and trying to get a new mine in Nevada

00:39:35.300 | was a fraught fight that took more than 10 years for lithium.

00:39:41.240 | So if you're excluding those elements from your model,

00:39:46.240 | which on the surface makes this $370 billion package

00:39:51.440 | have an emissions reduction trajectory

00:39:53.500 | that's really pretty good,

00:39:54.800 | and you're not saying in your first line,

00:39:58.080 | by the way, these are the things we're not considering.

00:40:00.920 | That's the job of a journalist.

00:40:02.320 | - You could probably summarize all of human history

00:40:04.360 | with that one word, friction.

00:40:06.680 | - Yeah, yeah, well, inertia,

00:40:08.760 | friction implies there's a force

00:40:10.320 | that's already being resisted,

00:40:11.920 | but there's also inertia, which is a huge part of our,

00:40:15.420 | we have a status quo bias.

00:40:18.740 | The scientists that I,

00:40:21.800 | in grappling with the climate problem as a journalist,

00:40:25.360 | I paid too much attention to climate scientists.

00:40:28.440 | That's why all my articles focused on climate change,

00:40:31.740 | and it was 2006.

00:40:33.360 | I remember now pretty clearly,

00:40:35.380 | I was asked by the Week in Review section

00:40:38.040 | of the New York Times to write a sort of a weekend

00:40:40.400 | thumb sucker, we call them, on--

00:40:42.840 | - Thumb sucker?

00:40:43.680 | - You know, you sit and suck your thumb

00:40:45.360 | and think about something.

00:40:46.600 | Why is everybody so pissed off about climate change?

00:40:48.520 | It was after Al Gore's movie,

00:40:49.760 | the Al Gore movie came out, "Inconvenient Truth,"

00:40:51.720 | Hurricane Katrina, it was big.

00:40:53.600 | Senator Inhofe in the Senate from Oklahoma

00:40:56.200 | wasn't yet throwing snowballs, but it was close to that.

00:40:59.040 | And so I looked into what was going on.

00:41:02.000 | Why is this so heated?

00:41:03.400 | In 2006, the story's called "Yelling Fire on a Hot Planet."

00:41:08.120 | And that was the first time,

00:41:10.000 | this is after 18 years of writing about global warming,

00:41:13.320 | that was the first time I interviewed a social scientist,

00:41:15.660 | not a climate scientist.

00:41:16.840 | Her name was Helen Ingram, she was at UC Irvine.

00:41:20.560 | And she laid out for me the factors

00:41:23.500 | that determine why people vote,

00:41:26.240 | what they vote for, what they think about politically.

00:41:29.100 | And they were the antithesis of the climate problem.

00:41:32.000 | She used the words, she said,

00:41:33.240 | "People go in the voting booth thinking about things

00:41:36.960 | "that are soon, salient, and certain."

00:41:41.040 | And climate change is complex, has long timescales.

00:41:44.560 | And that really jogged me.

00:41:46.680 | And then between 2006, 2010,

00:41:49.320 | I started interviewing other social scientists.

00:41:52.620 | And this was by far the scariest science of all.

00:41:56.780 | It's the climate in our heads, or inconvenient minds,

00:42:01.280 | and in how that translates into political norms and stuff,

00:42:04.560 | really became the monster, not the climate system.

00:42:07.760 | - Is there social dynamics to the scientists themselves?

00:42:10.800 | Because I've gotten to witness

00:42:14.240 | a kind of flocking behavior with scientists.

00:42:18.120 | So it's almost like a flock of birds.

00:42:19.820 | Within the flock, there's a lot of disagreement,

00:42:23.200 | and fun debates, and everybody trying

00:42:25.520 | to prove each other wrong.

00:42:26.760 | But they're all kind of headed in the same direction.

00:42:29.240 | And you don't want to be the bird

00:42:30.740 | that kind of leaves that flock.

00:42:32.940 | So there's an idea that science is a mechanism

00:42:36.760 | will get us towards the truth.

00:42:38.480 | But it'll definitely get us somewhere.

00:42:41.360 | But it could be not the truth in the short term.

00:42:45.040 | In the long term, a bigger flock will come along,

00:42:48.080 | and it'll get us to the truth.

00:42:49.240 | But there's a sense that, I don't know

00:42:51.320 | if there's a mechanism within science

00:42:52.880 | to snap out of it if you're down the wrong track.

00:42:57.200 | Usually you get it right, but sometimes you don't.

00:43:01.080 | And when you don't, it's very costly.

00:43:03.100 | - And there's so many factors that line up

00:43:05.300 | to perpetuate that flocking behavior.

00:43:09.340 | One is media attention comes in.

00:43:12.860 | The other is funding comes in.

00:43:14.940 | National Science Foundation or whatever,

00:43:17.720 | European foundations pour a huge amount of money

00:43:19.820 | into things related to climate.

00:43:22.340 | And then your narrative in your head

00:43:25.140 | is shaped by that aspect of the climate problem

00:43:29.060 | that's in the spotlight.

00:43:30.580 | I started using this hashtag a few years back,

00:43:34.440 | narrative capture, be wary of narrative capture,

00:43:38.500 | where you're on a train and everyone's getting on the train.

00:43:42.980 | And this is in the media too, not just science.

00:43:44.820 | And it becomes self-sustaining.

00:43:47.940 | And contrary indications are ignored or downplayed.

00:43:52.700 | No one does replication science

00:43:54.540 | because your career doesn't advance

00:43:56.700 | through replicating someone else's work.

00:43:58.900 | So those contrary indications are not necessarily

00:44:03.580 | really dug in on.

00:44:05.020 | And this is way beyond climate.

00:44:07.420 | This is many fields.

00:44:08.700 | As you said, you might've seen this in AI.

00:44:10.500 | And it's really hard to find.

00:44:14.140 | It's another form of path dependency,

00:44:16.300 | the term I used before.

00:44:18.860 | But breaking narrative capture to me,

00:44:21.340 | for me, has come mostly from stepping back

00:44:27.660 | and reminding myself of the basic principles of journalism.

00:44:30.900 | Journalism's basic principles are useful for anybody.

00:44:35.020 | Confronting a big, enormous, dynamic, complex thing

00:44:38.340 | is who, what, where, when, why.

00:44:40.780 | Just be really rigorous about not assuming

00:44:44.420 | because there's a fire in Boulder County

00:44:47.560 | or a flood in Fort Myers that climate,

00:44:50.660 | which is in your head because you're part

00:44:52.500 | of the climate team at the New York Times or whatever,

00:44:54.980 | is the foreground part of this problem.

00:44:59.100 | - What's the psychological challenge of that

00:45:02.940 | if you incorporate the fact that if you try to step back

00:45:07.460 | and have nuance, you might get attacked

00:45:09.520 | by the others in the flock?

00:45:12.260 | - Oh, I was.

00:45:13.460 | Well, you've certainly been--

00:45:14.660 | - So both of you get attacked continuously

00:45:18.820 | from different sides.

00:45:20.220 | So let me just ask about that.

00:45:21.820 | How does that feel and how do you continue thinking clearly

00:45:26.260 | and continuously try to have humility and step back

00:45:31.580 | and not get defensive in that as a communicator?

00:45:36.380 | - I mean, there are other things happening

00:45:38.700 | at the same time, right?

00:45:39.540 | I'm now 35 years into, almost 40 years

00:45:42.900 | into my journalism career.

00:45:44.060 | So I have some independence.

00:45:45.240 | I'm free from the obligations of,

00:45:47.800 | you know, I don't really need my next paycheck.

00:45:50.680 | I live in Maine now in a house I love.

00:45:52.860 | I own it outright.

00:45:53.780 | It's a great privilege and honor

00:45:55.500 | and as a result of a lot of hard work.

00:45:59.260 | And so I'm freer to think freely.

00:46:03.060 | And I know my colleagues in newsrooms,

00:46:04.940 | when I was at the New York Times, in the newsroom,

00:46:08.140 | you become captive to a narrative,

00:46:10.980 | just as you do out in the world.

00:46:13.380 | The New York Times had a narrative about Saddam Hussein.

00:46:18.900 | Drove us into that war.

00:46:21.800 | The Times sucked right into that and helped perpetuate it.

00:46:26.480 | I think we're in a bit of a narrative, we, the media,

00:46:30.680 | my friends at the Times and others are on a train ride

00:46:33.800 | on climate change, depicting it in a certain way

00:46:37.000 | that really, I saw problems

00:46:39.600 | with how they handled the Joe Manchin issue in America.

00:46:42.760 | The West Virginia Senator, they really kind of piled on

00:46:46.720 | and zoomed in on his investments,

00:46:49.700 | which is really important to do,

00:46:50.960 | but they never pulled back and said,

00:46:52.760 | by the way, he's a rare species.

00:46:55.360 | He's a Democrat in West Virginia,

00:46:57.640 | and which is otherwise occupied by a Republican.

00:47:00.880 | There'd be no talk of a climate deal

00:47:02.480 | or any of that stuff without him.

00:47:04.540 | And, but when you, once you're starting

00:47:06.280 | to kind of frame a story in a certain way,

00:47:07.800 | you carry it along and as you said,

00:47:10.260 | sometimes it breaks and a new norm arrives,

00:47:12.760 | but the climate train is still kind of rushing forward

00:47:17.260 | and missing the opportunity to cut it into its pieces

00:47:22.260 | and say, well, what's really wrong with Florida?

00:47:25.560 | And it's for me, when you ask you about how I handle

00:47:28.120 | the slings and arrows and stuff,

00:47:30.680 | it's partially 'cause I'm past worrying about it too much.

00:47:34.620 | I mean, it was pretty intense.

00:47:37.720 | 2009 Rush Limbaugh suggested I kill myself

00:47:41.440 | on his radio show.

00:47:42.280 | It's a really great time.

00:47:43.120 | - What was that about?

00:47:44.240 | - I had, actually, this was a meeting in Washington in 2009

00:47:49.240 | on population at the Wilson Center.

00:47:52.520 | I couldn't be there, so actually this is pre-COVID,

00:47:54.400 | but I was Zooming in or something like Skyping in,

00:47:57.740 | and I was talking about in a playful way.

00:48:00.960 | I said, well, if you really wanna worry about carbon,

00:48:04.240 | this was during the debate over a carbon tax model

00:48:08.360 | for a bill in America.

00:48:10.840 | We should probably have a carbon tax for kids

00:48:13.920 | because a bigger family in America

00:48:15.520 | is a big source of more emissions.

00:48:18.120 | It was kind of a playful thought bubble.

00:48:20.160 | Some right-wing blogger blogged about it.

00:48:22.240 | It got into Rush's pile of things to talk about,

00:48:26.400 | and the clip is really fun.

00:48:28.880 | - Oh, so meaning, so if humans are bad for the environment,

00:48:33.880 | I can imagine Rush.

00:48:38.880 | - He was very explicit. - That's how you know

00:48:40.640 | you've made it.

00:48:41.560 | - He said, Mr. Revkin of the New York,

00:48:43.480 | Andrew Revkin of the New York Times,

00:48:44.720 | if you really think that people are the worst thing

00:48:46.360 | that ever happened to this planet,

00:48:48.160 | why don't you just kill yourself

00:48:49.440 | and save the planet by dying?

00:48:51.560 | - So that was tough for you.

00:48:53.360 | - It was tough for my family.

00:48:55.080 | To me, it did generate some interesting calls

00:48:57.240 | and stuff in my voicemail.

00:48:58.920 | But on the left, I was also undercut.

00:49:03.840 | Roger Pilkey, Jr., a prominent researcher

00:49:06.800 | of climate risk and climate policy,

00:49:09.600 | UC Boulder, was actively, his career track

00:49:14.160 | was derailed purposefully by people

00:49:17.600 | who just thought his message was too off the path.

00:49:21.880 | You've been dealing with this for a very long time.

00:49:26.920 | - Oh, God, yeah, yeah.

00:49:27.760 | - What do you--

00:49:28.600 | - So I just wanna get back to, so the science,

00:49:31.400 | I don't think the science get it so much wrong

00:49:34.620 | as it just becomes accepted to make certain assumptions,

00:49:38.480 | as you just said, we assume no friction.

00:49:40.740 | So there's a way that you kind of model the world

00:49:43.900 | that ends up being also a convenient message in many ways.

00:49:47.920 | And I think the main convenient message in climate,

00:49:51.340 | and it's not surprising if you think about it,

00:49:54.280 | the main convenient message is that the best way

00:49:57.520 | to do something about all the things that we call climate

00:50:00.280 | is to cut CO2.

00:50:02.220 | And that turns out to only sometimes be true

00:50:05.000 | and with a lot of caveats.

00:50:07.280 | But that's sort of the message--

00:50:08.120 | - And it takes a long time.

00:50:09.440 | - Yes, yes, it's really, really difficult to do

00:50:12.140 | in any meaningful sort of timeframe.

00:50:15.040 | And if you challenge that, yes, you're outside the flock

00:50:19.760 | and you get attacked.

00:50:20.720 | I've always, so somebody told me once, I think it's true,

00:50:24.960 | they say at the Harvard Law School,

00:50:27.760 | if you have a good case, pound the case.

00:50:30.120 | If you have a bad case, pound the table.

00:50:32.780 | And so I've always felt that when people go after me,

00:50:35.940 | they're kind of pounding the table.

00:50:37.220 | They're literally screaming, I don't have a good case.

00:50:40.320 | I'm really annoyed with what you're saying.

00:50:42.260 | And so to me, that actually means it's much more important

00:50:46.060 | to make this argument.

00:50:47.640 | Sure, I mean, I would love everyone just saying,

00:50:50.860 | oh, that's a really good point, I'm gonna use that.

00:50:53.160 | But we're stuck in a situation,

00:50:56.020 | certainly in a conversation where a lot of people

00:50:59.260 | invest a lot of time and energy on saying,

00:51:02.620 | we should cut carbon emissions.

00:51:04.040 | This is the way to help humankind.

00:51:06.420 | And just be clear, I think we should cut carbon emissions

00:51:09.260 | as well, but we should also just be realistic

00:51:11.660 | about what we can achieve with that

00:51:13.020 | and what are all the other things that we could also do.

00:51:16.940 | And it turns out that a lot of these other things

00:51:18.740 | are much cheaper, much more effective,

00:51:20.340 | will help much more, much quicker.

00:51:22.660 | And so getting that point out is just incredibly important

00:51:26.860 | for us to get it right.

00:51:28.280 | So in some sense, to make sure that we don't do another

00:51:32.580 | Iraq and we don't do another, lots of stupid decisions.

00:51:37.580 | This is one of the things mankind is very good at.

00:51:40.580 | And I guess I see my role, and I think that's probably also

00:51:45.540 | how you see yourself is trying to get everyone

00:51:48.440 | to do it slightly less wrong.

00:51:50.420 | - So let me ask you about a deep psychological effect

00:51:54.940 | for you.

00:51:55.980 | There's also a drug of martyrdom.

00:51:58.640 | So whenever you stand against the flock,

00:52:01.000 | there's, you wrote a couple of really good books

00:52:07.420 | on the topic, the most recent, "False Alarm."

00:52:11.760 | "I stand as the holder of truth,

00:52:14.920 | "that everybody who is alarmist is wrong.

00:52:18.060 | "And here's just simple, calm way to express

00:52:20.800 | "the facts of the matter."

00:52:22.960 | And that's very compelling to a very large number of people.

00:52:26.500 | They wanna make a martyr out of you.

00:52:28.300 | Is that, are you worried about your own mind

00:52:31.920 | being corrupted by that, by enjoying standing

00:52:37.620 | against the crowd?

00:52:39.080 | - No, no, no.

00:52:40.700 | There's very little, I guess I can see what you're saying

00:52:45.020 | sort of in a literary way or something.

00:52:47.140 | - Yeah, it's a bit poetic here.

00:52:48.840 | - Yeah, there's very little comfort or sort of usefulness

00:52:53.180 | in annoying a lot of people.

00:52:55.700 | Whenever I go to a party, for instance,

00:53:00.100 | I know that there's a good chance people

00:53:01.980 | are gonna be annoyed with me.

00:53:03.360 | And I would love that not to be the case.

00:53:06.120 | But what I try to do is, so I try to be very polite

00:53:10.380 | and sort of not push people's buttons

00:53:13.220 | unless they sort of actively say,

00:53:15.100 | "So you're saying all kind of stupid stuff

00:53:18.060 | "on the climate, right?"

00:53:19.660 | And then try to engage with them and say,

00:53:21.300 | "Well, what is it you're thinking about?"

00:53:23.100 | And hopefully, during that party,

00:53:24.820 | and then it ends up being a really bad party for me.

00:53:26.560 | But anyway, so I'll end up possibly convincing one person

00:53:31.220 | that I'm not totally stupid.

00:53:32.960 | But no, I'm not playing the martyr

00:53:35.200 | and I'm not enjoying that.

00:53:36.560 | - It's so interesting.

00:53:39.160 | I mean, the martyr complex

00:53:42.820 | is all around the climate question.

00:53:44.480 | Michael Mann, at the far end of the spectrum of activism

00:53:48.120 | from where Bjorn is, was a climate scientist,

00:53:50.760 | is a climate scientist who was actively attacked

00:53:53.680 | by Inhofe and West Virginia politicians

00:53:58.120 | and really abused in many ways.

00:54:00.600 | He had come up with a very prominent model

00:54:03.000 | of looking at long-term records of climate change

00:54:06.440 | and got this hockey stick for temperature.

00:54:08.940 | And he definitely sits there in a certain kind of spotlight

00:54:14.040 | because of that.

00:54:15.920 | So it's not unique at any particular vantage point

00:54:19.560 | in the spectrum of sort of prominent people on the debate.

00:54:24.000 | - Andrew, you co-wrote the book,

00:54:25.360 | "The Human Planet, Earth at the Dawn of the Anthropocene,"

00:54:30.360 | which is the new age when humans are actually

00:54:33.760 | having an impact on the environment.

00:54:35.580 | Let me ask the question of,

00:54:37.000 | what do you find most beautiful and fascinating

00:54:39.120 | about our planet Earth?

00:54:41.560 | - It'd be cheap to say everything,

00:54:43.280 | but just walking here this morning under the bridge

00:54:46.360 | over the Colorado River, seeing the birds,

00:54:48.680 | knowing there's bat colonies,

00:54:50.040 | massive bat colonies around here

00:54:51.480 | that I got to visit a few years ago.

00:54:53.520 | I experienced one of those bat explosions.

00:54:57.780 | It's mind-blowing.

00:54:59.220 | I've been really lucky as a journalist

00:55:03.360 | to have gone to the North Pole,

00:55:05.040 | the camp on the sea ice with Russian help.

00:55:08.840 | This is a camp that was set up for tourists

00:55:10.520 | coming from Europe every year.

00:55:12.360 | There were scientists on the sea ice

00:55:14.280 | floating on the 14,000-foot-deep Arctic Ocean,

00:55:18.000 | and I was with them for several days.

00:55:19.320 | I wrote a book about that, too, along with my reporting.

00:55:22.440 | Been in the depths of the Amazon rainforest.

00:55:25.360 | When I was very young, I was a crew on a sailboat

00:55:28.720 | that sailed 2/3 of the way around the world.

00:55:31.200 | I was halfway across the Indian Ocean,

00:55:33.160 | again, in 14,000-foot-deep water.

00:55:36.440 | There was no wind, and we were,

00:55:39.160 | this was way before I was a journalist,

00:55:40.760 | 22, 23 years old, and we went swimming,

00:55:43.640 | and swimming in 14,000-foot-deep water,

00:55:46.020 | 500 miles from land, the Western Indian Ocean,

00:55:49.800 | halfway between Somalia and the Maldives.

00:55:53.920 | It's like so mind-boggling, chillingly fantastical thing,

00:55:59.720 | with a mask on, looking at your shadow

00:56:02.120 | going to the vanishing point below you,

00:56:04.320 | looking over at the boat, which is a 60-foot boat,

00:56:06.760 | but it just looks like a toy, and then getting back on

00:56:09.800 | and being beholden to the elements,

00:56:11.440 | the sailboat heading toward Djibouti.

00:56:13.760 | - The immensity and the power of the elements.

00:56:15.080 | - Oh my God, and then the human qualities are unbelievable.

00:56:20.080 | The Anthropocene, I played a bit of a role as a journalist

00:56:25.480 | in waking people up to the idea that this era

00:56:29.040 | called the Holocene, the last 11,000 years,

00:56:31.560 | since the last Ice Age, had ended.

00:56:35.380 | I wrote my 1992 book on global warming,

00:56:39.480 | thinking about all that we're just talking about,

00:56:41.120 | thinking about the wonders of the planet,

00:56:43.160 | thinking about the impact of humans so far

00:56:45.640 | in our explosive growth in the 20th century.

00:56:49.880 | I wrote that perhaps earth scientists of the future

00:56:53.120 | will name this post-Holocene era

00:56:57.200 | for its formative element for us,

00:57:00.160 | because we're kind of in charge in certain ways,

00:57:05.480 | you know, which is hubristic at the same time.

00:57:08.040 | It's like, you know, the variability of the climate system

00:57:11.640 | is still profound with or without global warming.

00:57:13.920 | - So this immense, powerful, beautiful organism

00:57:16.840 | that is earth, all the different sub-organisms

00:57:19.840 | that are on it, do you see humans

00:57:21.680 | as a kind of parasite on this earth?

00:57:23.640 | - No, no. - Or do you see it

00:57:24.880 | as something that helps the flourishing

00:57:29.440 | of the entire organism?

00:57:31.200 | - That can. - Can.

00:57:32.900 | Intelligence. - That hasn't yet.

00:57:35.120 | - Hasn't yet?

00:57:36.800 | I mean, aren't we on a,

00:57:39.240 | so the ability of the collective intelligence

00:57:41.520 | of the human species to develop

00:57:43.520 | all these kinds of technologies,

00:57:45.640 | and to be able to have Twitter to introspect onto itself.

00:57:50.200 | (Luke laughs)

00:57:51.040 | - We should get Twitter to the animals.

00:57:51.880 | - Oh, I think we're doing a, it's always--

00:57:54.960 | - In a way, we are. - It's catch-up.

00:57:56.320 | We're always in catch-up mode, you know.

00:57:58.880 | - Right. - I was at the Vatican

00:58:01.080 | for a big meeting in 2014 on sustainable humanity,

00:58:04.520 | sustainable nature, our responsibility.

00:58:07.000 | And it was a week of presentations by Martin Rees,

00:58:11.400 | who's this famed British scientist, physicist who--

00:58:14.880 | - Been on his podcast.

00:58:16.360 | - Yeah, great. - Yeah.

00:58:17.600 | - Well, he's fixated on existential risk, right?

00:58:21.440 | - Yes, he is. - So it was a week

00:58:22.660 | of this stuff, and the meeting was kicked off by,

00:58:27.400 | I wrote about it, Cardinal Maradiaga,

00:58:31.120 | who is, I think, from El Salvador.

00:58:32.440 | He's one of the Pope's kind of posse.

00:58:34.040 | He gave one of the initial speeches, and he said,

00:58:36.360 | "Nowadays, mankind looks like a technical giant

00:58:41.360 | "and an ethical child," meaning our technological wizardry

00:58:46.480 | is unbelievable, but it's way out in front of our ability

00:58:49.440 | to step back and kind of like consider

00:58:52.680 | in the full dimensions we need to, is it helping everybody?

00:58:55.320 | Is it, what are the consequences of CRISPR,

00:58:59.440 | you know, genetics, technology?

00:59:01.160 | And there's no single answer to that,

00:59:03.480 | if I'm in the African Union.

00:59:06.360 | I'm just using this as an example.

00:59:08.480 | CRISPR has emerged so fast.

00:59:09.960 | It can do so much by changing the nature of nature,

00:59:13.320 | in a kind of a programming way, you know, building genes,

00:59:18.280 | not just transferring them from one organism to another.

00:59:21.520 | We've only just begun to taste the fruits of that,

00:59:24.160 | literally, and it can wipe out a mosquito species.

00:59:29.160 | We know how to do that now.

00:59:30.300 | You can like literally take out the dengue-causing mosquito.

00:59:35.300 | The scientists have done the work, and you think,

00:59:37.840 | "Okay, cool, well, that's great."

00:59:39.980 | Now, there's this big fight over whether that should happen.

00:59:43.820 | African Union, and I'm with their view, says,

00:59:47.940 | "Hey, if we can take out a mosquito species

00:59:50.520 | "that's causing horrific, chronic loss through dengue,"

00:59:55.520 | which I had once in Indonesia, it's not fun,

00:59:58.260 | and we should do it, you know?

01:00:01.340 | And Europe-- - What's the other side

01:00:02.980 | of the argument? - The European Union,

01:00:04.860 | they're saying, using their,

01:00:08.100 | capital P, precautionary principle,

01:00:11.620 | says, "No, we can't meddle with nature."

01:00:14.020 | And this is just like we were talking with climate.

01:00:15.940 | You know, there's the real-time question

01:00:17.600 | and the long-term question, and there's the people

01:00:21.260 | who are just facing the need to get through the day

01:00:23.460 | and be healthy and survive and have enough food,

01:00:26.440 | which is not integrated sufficiently at all

01:00:29.060 | into the climate, stop climate change debate,

01:00:32.440 | and those who are trying to cut CO2,

01:00:35.400 | which will have a benefit in the future

01:00:38.300 | by limiting the fat-tail outcomes of this journey we're on.

01:00:43.300 | So when I think about the Anthropocene,

01:00:45.600 | I think about this planet.

01:00:47.480 | I love that we're here right now.

01:00:50.640 | I love that our species has these capacities.

01:00:53.980 | I would love for there to be

01:00:55.480 | a little bit more reflection in where things come from

01:00:59.000 | and where they might go, whether you're a student, a kid.

01:01:02.420 | What's your role?

01:01:05.340 | The wonderful thing about the complexity of it

01:01:07.620 | is everyone can play a role.

01:01:09.760 | If you're an artist or a designer or an architect

01:01:14.620 | or an economist or a podcaster,

01:01:17.860 | whatever you do, just tweak a little bit

01:01:20.120 | toward examining these questions,

01:01:23.140 | stepping back from the simplistic label-throwing

01:01:26.940 | toward what actually is the problem in front of me,

01:01:30.940 | whether it's in Pakistan or in Boston or wherever,

01:01:35.940 | you know, Florida.

01:01:37.900 | - Bjorn, what do you find beautiful

01:01:39.400 | about this collective intelligence machine we have?

01:01:41.760 | From an economics perspective,

01:01:43.180 | it's kind of fascinating that we're able to,

01:01:46.900 | there is a machine to it that we've built up

01:01:50.380 | that's able to represent interests and desires and value

01:01:54.980 | and hopes and dreams in sort of monetary ways

01:01:59.640 | that we can trade with each other,

01:02:02.500 | we can make agreements with each other,

01:02:04.220 | we can represent our goals

01:02:05.580 | and build companies that actually help and so on.

01:02:09.500 | Do you just step back every once in a while

01:02:11.140 | and marvel at the fact that a few billion of us

01:02:13.660 | are able to somehow not create complete chaos

01:02:17.820 | and actually collaborate and have collaborative disagreements

01:02:22.020 | that ultimately, or so far, have led to progress?

01:02:26.540 | - Yeah, I think fundamentally the point,

01:02:29.580 | apart from the fact that we should just be joyful

01:02:32.940 | of the fact that humans live here,

01:02:35.700 | I think it's incredibly important to remember

01:02:38.340 | how much progress we've had.

01:02:41.420 | Most people just don't stop to think about those stats.

01:02:44.180 | You know, I get that in the normal bustle of day,

01:02:47.620 | but just, you know, in 1900,

01:02:50.020 | the average person on the planet lived to be 32 years.

01:02:54.420 | 32 years, that was our average life expectancy.

01:02:57.740 | Today, it's about 74.

01:03:00.140 | So we've literally got two lifetimes on this planet,

01:03:04.140 | each one of us.

01:03:05.340 | And, you know, every year you live in the rich world,

01:03:09.020 | you get to live three months longer,

01:03:12.140 | and the poor world is about four months longer

01:03:14.420 | because of medical advances,

01:03:16.380 | because we get better at dealing both with cancer

01:03:18.460 | and especially right now with heart disease.

01:03:22.420 | These are amazing achievements.

01:03:24.060 | Of course, it's a very, very small part of it.

01:03:26.140 | We're much better fed, we're much better educated.

01:03:28.660 | We've gone from a world where virtually everyone,

01:03:31.260 | or, you know, 90% were illiterate,

01:03:34.700 | to a world where more than 90% illiterate.

01:03:36.940 | This is an astounding opportunity.

01:03:39.140 | And 200 years ago, 95%, 94% of the world

01:03:45.700 | were extremely poor, that is less than a dollar a day.

01:03:49.100 | Today, for the first time in 2015, it was down below 10%.

01:03:54.100 | And again, these are kind of boring statistics,

01:03:57.180 | but they're also astounding testaments

01:04:00.300 | of how well humanity has done.

01:04:02.440 | So just on the point of,

01:04:04.700 | we've kind of just been focused

01:04:06.820 | on making our own world better.

01:04:09.060 | And in many ways, you know,

01:04:10.100 | so we've hunted a lot of big animals,

01:04:12.740 | either to extinction or down to much,

01:04:15.380 | much smaller populations,

01:04:16.780 | as much smaller populations of fish in the ocean.

01:04:19.380 | So there's a lot of things

01:04:21.300 | that sort of bear the brunt of our success.

01:04:24.460 | It's not because we're evil in that sense,

01:04:26.300 | it's just because we didn't care all that much about them.

01:04:29.620 | I think it is important as one funnel of that,

01:04:33.100 | I'm not gonna make a big deal out of it,

01:04:35.340 | but the fact that we're putting out more CO2

01:04:37.180 | in the atmosphere, because CO2,

01:04:39.140 | as you also mentioned before, it's actually plant food.

01:04:42.580 | You know, if you're a greenhouse grower,

01:04:46.220 | you know if you put in CO2 in your greenhouse,

01:04:48.580 | you actually get bigger and plumper tomatoes.

01:04:51.460 | And that's essentially what we're doing in the world.

01:04:53.580 | This has overall bad consequences,

01:04:55.380 | and that's why we should be doing something about it.

01:04:58.380 | But one of the good side effects

01:05:00.580 | is actually that the world is getting greener.

01:05:03.460 | So we get much more green stuff.

01:05:05.340 | Now, I don't know,

01:05:06.300 | and this is where I sort of show my economist roots,

01:05:10.380 | because if you just measure all living stuff in tons,

01:05:15.380 | so in weight, there's actually more living stuff

01:05:20.780 | than there were 100 years ago.

01:05:22.740 | Because elephants and all these other big fish and stuff

01:05:27.460 | are actually really, really small fraction of the world.

01:05:30.140 | So just the fact that we have,

01:05:33.100 | yes, so we have an enormous amount of live stuff,

01:05:35.220 | but that doesn't even measure it.

01:05:37.220 | It's mostly just wood, you know, wooden green stuff

01:05:40.660 | that has dramatically increased in the world.

01:05:43.500 | Now, we're still not there from what it was in 1500.

01:05:46.620 | So we've still cut down the world a lot,

01:05:49.420 | but we're actually making a much greener world.

01:05:51.660 | Again, not because we really cared or thought about it,

01:05:54.740 | but just sort of a side effect of what we're doing.

01:05:57.060 | I think the crucial bit to remember is,

01:06:00.180 | when you're poor and you worry about

01:06:02.820 | what's gonna happen the next day,

01:06:05.140 | this is just not your main issue.

01:06:08.140 | Am I killing too many large animals in the world?

01:06:12.740 | But when you're rich and you can actually sit in a podcast

01:06:16.300 | in a convenient place in Austin,

01:06:18.660 | you can also start thinking about this.

01:06:20.300 | So one of the crucial bits, I think,

01:06:22.780 | if we want to get the rest of the world

01:06:24.980 | to care about the environment, care about climate,

01:06:27.820 | care about all these other issues,

01:06:29.860 | we really need to get them out of poverty first.

01:06:32.700 | And it's a simple point that we often forget.

01:06:35.020 | - And get them connected to all these gifts.

01:06:37.500 | - Yes.

01:06:38.540 | - I have these memories of,

01:06:40.740 | I was reporting on the next big earthquake

01:06:43.500 | that's gonna devastate Istanbul in 2009.

01:06:47.420 | I was in a slum, immigrant, poor neighborhood,

01:06:53.540 | and walking around with an engineer

01:06:56.900 | pointing out to the buildings that were gonna fall down.

01:06:58.980 | This is all known.

01:06:59.860 | There was an earthquake in 1999, and the next one's coming.

01:07:03.060 | One of my advantages in covering climate

01:07:04.820 | is I've covered other kinds of disasters too,

01:07:06.380 | so it keeps my context,

01:07:07.860 | me in touch with other things we can do.

01:07:11.100 | So I'm walking around and interviewing everybody.

01:07:12.900 | Went to this school that's being retrofit.

01:07:14.820 | They actually were getting ahead of it there.

01:07:16.460 | The World Bank provided some funding

01:07:17.860 | to put in iron bars in the brick building.

01:07:20.660 | And I met these kids, and they came,

01:07:25.260 | when you're a journalist with a camera and stuff and a pad,

01:07:28.140 | you get swarmed by kids, mostly in developing countries.

01:07:31.940 | And so these kids are running up to me,

01:07:33.780 | and they weren't going like, "Are you American?"

01:07:36.260 | Or just, they were saying, "Facebook, Facebook."

01:07:38.860 | And I went, "That's interesting."

01:07:41.820 | And they led me to their little town,

01:07:44.740 | a little community center that had a bank of eight or 10

01:07:47.460 | pretty flimsy computers.

01:07:49.780 | And they were all there playing Farm,

01:07:52.620 | it was a game that was hot at that time on Facebook.

01:07:54.500 | - Farm? - Farm.

01:07:55.420 | - Farmville? - Farmville, yeah.

01:07:57.060 | And my son back in the Hudson Valley,

01:08:00.300 | I remember him playing it, and I thought,

01:08:02.460 | "Wow, that is so fricking cool that these kids."

01:08:06.580 | And actually, I became Facebook friends

01:08:08.220 | with a couple of them afterwards, we traded our,

01:08:11.140 | and I thought back to my youth when we had pen pals.

01:08:15.140 | I would write a letter to a kid in West Cameroon,

01:08:18.460 | and he would write back.

01:08:20.140 | And it took weeks, and it was a crinkly letter,

01:08:23.580 | and I never met him.

01:08:25.540 | And now you can kind of connect with people,

01:08:27.140 | and that all, through my blogging,

01:08:30.860 | at the New York Times, I was doing my regular reporting,

01:08:32.980 | but I launched a blog in 2007 called Dot Earth,

01:08:36.100 | which was all about what you were just describing,

01:08:39.280 | the newosphere, the connected world.

01:08:41.700 | That's a term from these two earliest,

01:08:44.940 | a Russian guy in early,

01:08:46.140 | Vernadsky and a French theologian and scientist,

01:08:51.280 | which is so interesting, Teilhard de Chardin.

01:08:55.580 | They had this idea in the early 20th century

01:08:58.140 | that we're creating a planet of the mind,

01:09:00.840 | that human intelligence can foster a better Earth.

01:09:06.740 | And I just became smitten with that,

01:09:09.980 | especially meeting kids in Istanbul slums

01:09:12.500 | who were on Facebook, looking at connectedness,

01:09:14.540 | what can you do with these tools,

01:09:16.240 | which is what drives me with my work now.

01:09:18.500 | But then there are these counter-currents

01:09:24.100 | that if the connectedness can cut back,

01:09:27.700 | it allowed Al-Qaeda to recruit,

01:09:30.580 | use decapitation videos to recruit

01:09:32.740 | distributed, disaffected young people into extremism.

01:09:38.620 | And there's lots of, these systems are not,

01:09:42.160 | they're just like every other tool, right?

01:09:43.780 | They're just for good or ill.

01:09:46.180 | And the efficiency thing, the economics of the world,

01:09:50.820 | which I also wrote about a little bit,

01:09:53.340 | late 20th century, it was so cool

01:09:55.200 | that everything became so efficient,

01:09:58.320 | that our supply chains are just in time manufacturing,

01:10:02.780 | getting the stuff from where the sources of the material are

01:10:07.740 | to the car factory and to get the car to the floor

01:10:10.220 | just in time for someone to buy it.

01:10:11.900 | And everyone got totally sucked in by that, including me.

01:10:14.820 | It's great, super efficient, cheaper.

01:10:17.600 | And then COVID hit

01:10:18.980 | and the whole supply chain concept crumbled.

01:10:22.460 | And one of the big lessons there, hopefully,

01:10:24.900 | and this is relevant to sustainability generally,

01:10:28.100 | is efficiency matters, but resilience matters too.

01:10:32.460 | And resilience is inefficient.

01:10:34.420 | You need redundancy or a variety of options, right?

01:10:39.420 | Which is not what corporate companies think about,

01:10:42.900 | which is not what, if you're only focused

01:10:45.060 | on a bottom line, short-term timeline,

01:10:48.380 | those disruptions are not what you're thinking about.

01:10:51.540 | You're still thinking about,

01:10:52.380 | can we get that widget here just in time

01:10:53.540 | for this thing to happen and then on we go.

01:10:56.100 | So it's kind of, I love the noosphere,

01:10:58.960 | this noosphere idea, the connectedness is fantastic.

01:11:02.900 | Oh, another thing, like in the early '90s,

01:11:06.020 | when I wrote my first book on global warming,

01:11:08.660 | it was for an exhibition at the Museum of Natural History.

01:11:12.140 | The Environmental Defense Fund was involved.

01:11:13.980 | They were like a partner,

01:11:15.580 | one of these longstanding environmental groups.

01:11:18.100 | And they're very old-fashioned.

01:11:19.140 | It's mostly lawyers, really,

01:11:20.300 | just using the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act

01:11:22.340 | to litigate against pollution.

01:11:24.200 | And now, EDF is vastly bigger.

01:11:28.580 | And they're actually, this coming year,

01:11:29.940 | they're launching a satellite.

01:11:31.540 | An environmental group is launching methane sat.

01:11:35.500 | And it's providing a view, an independent view

01:11:37.740 | of where there's this gas.

01:11:40.220 | You know, it's the same thing,

01:11:41.140 | natural gas is basically methane.

01:11:42.700 | So if you have a leak, whether it's in Siberia or in Oklahoma

01:11:47.580 | you can cross-reference, you can ground,

01:11:49.860 | you can identify the hotspot,

01:11:52.220 | you can know where the problem is to fix in so many ways.

01:11:56.580 | And that's just one example.

01:11:57.500 | I'm like, if someone had told me in 1993

01:11:59.820 | that EDF was gonna launch a methane satellite,

01:12:01.860 | I would have laughed out loud.

01:12:02.980 | So technology plays a huge role

01:12:05.380 | if it's kind of employed

01:12:08.460 | with the bigger vision and leadership.

01:12:11.220 | - So Bjorn, you wrote, one of the books you wrote,

01:12:13.980 | the most recent one called "False Alarm,

01:12:16.260 | "How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions,

01:12:19.860 | "Hurts the Poor and Fails to Fix the Planet."

01:12:23.940 | Good title by the way, very intense,

01:12:25.540 | makes me wanna read it.

01:12:26.980 | "What is likely the worst effect of climate change?"

01:12:31.100 | - First let me just, my editor actually hated the subtitle

01:12:34.700 | because it gives away the whole book.

01:12:36.820 | Basically, it tells you what the book tries to make.

01:12:39.500 | I think that's exactly what it should be.

01:12:41.980 | It's about getting this conversation out

01:12:44.220 | in the public sphere.

01:12:46.220 | So the worst thing that climate change can do

01:12:50.220 | is like the worst thing that anything can do

01:12:52.940 | is that it wipes out everything and we all die.

01:12:55.700 | So it's not like,

01:12:57.980 | if you're just looking for worst case outcomes,

01:13:00.540 | anything can get to the worst case outcome.

01:13:04.940 | Imagine if we, what's the worst thing

01:13:07.820 | that could happen from HIV?

01:13:10.180 | It breaks down one or more African states

01:13:14.700 | because we don't fix it.

01:13:16.340 | And then you get sort of biological warfare and terrorism,

01:13:20.260 | throw that in the mix,

01:13:21.500 | and then you get someone who makes a virus

01:13:23.220 | and kills the whole world.

01:13:24.700 | You can make worst case scenarios for everything.

01:13:27.580 | - Well, let's just call it, I get the point.

01:13:29.380 | And I'm sorry for the interruption.

01:13:31.100 | And I appreciate worst case analysis

01:13:33.260 | 'cause I am fundamentally a computer scientist

01:13:35.620 | and that was the thing that defined the discipline

01:13:38.420 | of the measure, the quality of the algorithm,

01:13:40.980 | you measure what is its worst case performance.

01:13:44.340 | That's the big O notation.

01:13:45.540 | That's how you discuss algorithms.

01:13:46.940 | What is the worst possible thing

01:13:49.820 | in terms of performance this thing can do?

01:13:52.600 | But for climate change, let's even go crazy.

01:13:57.340 | What is exactly the worst case scenario for climate change?

01:14:01.200 | Because I have to be honest and say,

01:14:04.420 | I haven't really paid deep attention.

01:14:08.020 | I just have a lot of colleagues

01:14:10.060 | who think about climate and so on.

01:14:13.120 | And there's a kind of in the alarmism,

01:14:15.420 | there was a sense why this is a very serious problem.

01:14:19.680 | And then the sentence would never finish.

01:14:22.740 | What exactly is the problem?

01:14:24.140 | Well, the extinction of the human species, okay.

01:14:27.260 | With a virus, I understand how that can possibly happen.

01:14:30.700 | What is the mechanism by which the human species

01:14:33.580 | becomes extinct because of climate change?

01:14:36.380 | - I'm not sure I would want to be able to argue that

01:14:38.580 | because it really requires you to have

01:14:40.100 | sort of very, very extreme parameter choices

01:14:43.120 | all down the line.

01:14:44.680 | And so it's more, it's this kind of idea

01:14:46.820 | that we hit some of these unexpected outcomes.

01:14:50.600 | So for instance, the Western Arctic ice sheet

01:14:53.600 | melts really, really quickly.

01:14:55.620 | It doesn't look like that can happen really, really quickly.

01:14:58.080 | But let's just say that this could happen

01:15:00.240 | within a hundred years or something.

01:15:02.120 | So we basically get what, seven meters,

01:15:05.120 | what is that, 20 feet of sea level rise.

01:15:08.940 | That will be a real challenge to a lot of places

01:15:11.320 | around the world.

01:15:12.200 | This would have significant costs.

01:15:14.720 | It's likely, and there's actually been a study

01:15:17.480 | that's tried to estimate, could we deal with that?

01:15:19.880 | And the short answer is yes, if you're fairly well off.

01:15:24.880 | If you're Holland, you can definitely deal with it.

01:15:27.280 | It's also likely that most developing countries

01:15:30.120 | are gonna be much closer to Holland

01:15:32.160 | towards the end of the century

01:15:33.400 | because they'll be much richer.

01:15:34.880 | So they can probably handle it,

01:15:36.360 | but it will be a real challenge.

01:15:37.680 | - May I ask a dumb question?

01:15:39.140 | What happens when the sea level rises exactly?

01:15:43.140 | What is the painful aspect of that?

01:15:45.820 | - It is that all of your current infrastructure

01:15:48.780 | in a lot of coastal cities around the world

01:15:51.380 | that are literally built on,

01:15:53.240 | Jakarta is a good example,

01:15:54.700 | that are literally built on the,

01:15:56.540 | inches above the sea level.

01:16:00.420 | If you then get a sea level rise,

01:16:02.420 | they'll rise say, what would 20 feet,

01:16:05.300 | that would be like a third or a fourth of a foot every year.

01:16:08.780 | - Yeah, I see no evidence that that's even.

01:16:11.960 | - But hold on a second, we're not talking about evidence.

01:16:14.220 | We're talking about worst case analysis and algorithm.

01:16:16.780 | - And so basically you would see your infrastructure,

01:16:20.200 | all your stuff very quickly being very, very challenged.

01:16:24.460 | And you basically have to put up huge sea walls

01:16:27.660 | or migrate out of that area.

01:16:29.620 | - Very quickly.

01:16:30.820 | - Well, very quickly as in 50 years or something.

01:16:33.380 | - Right, so like, is that as a human species,

01:16:38.380 | we're not able to respond to that kind of threat?

01:16:42.220 | - Of course we are.

01:16:43.060 | And look, again, the point here is,

01:16:45.420 | then there's a lot of other arguments.

01:16:47.540 | And I should just put the disclaimer,

01:16:50.380 | this is not what I think is correct,

01:16:52.120 | but you're asking me what's the worst case outcome

01:16:55.460 | that you have.

01:16:56.600 | So most of global warming is really about

01:17:00.140 | that we're used to one way of doing things.

01:17:03.280 | So, we live in Jakarta because it's right next to the sea.

01:17:07.700 | We're used to the sea being at this level.

01:17:10.160 | We grow our crops because we're used to,

01:17:13.900 | you grow corn here, you grow wheat here

01:17:16.300 | because we're used to that's where the precipitation

01:17:18.900 | and the temperature is the right for this kind of crop.

01:17:22.420 | If this changes, and this is the same thing with houses,

01:17:26.800 | if it gets colder, if it gets warmer,

01:17:28.900 | it's suddenly uncomfortable

01:17:30.000 | because you've built your house wrong.

01:17:32.140 | So our infrastructure will be wrong if the world changes.

01:17:35.780 | And that's what climate change does.

01:17:36.940 | - At a large scale.

01:17:38.180 | - Yes, and so this is a problem in most of these senses.

01:17:42.100 | But if you then sort of take it to the extreme and say,

01:17:45.140 | well, imagine that you're gonna get a huge sea level rise.

01:17:48.100 | Imagine that you're gonna get a very different

01:17:50.380 | sort of precipitation, for instance,

01:17:52.180 | what is it, the rain season,

01:17:55.100 | monsoon in the Indian subcontinent changes dramatically.

01:18:01.700 | That could affect a lot of agriculture

01:18:03.900 | and make it really hard to imagine

01:18:05.800 | that you could feed India well.

01:18:07.860 | There are these kinds of things where you can imagine

01:18:11.100 | and then that this would be very difficult to deal with.

01:18:14.820 | And then if you add all of it up,

01:18:16.780 | you could possibly get sort of a system collapse

01:18:19.240 | because you just have too many problems in one.

01:18:21.580 | - Is it possible to model those kinds of things?

01:18:23.420 | So what I understand is the sea level rise itself

01:18:29.720 | isn't the destructive thing.

01:18:32.200 | It's the fact that it creates migration patterns

01:18:35.360 | and human tension, battle over resources.

01:18:38.440 | And so you start to get these human things, human conflict.

01:18:43.440 | So the big negative impact won't be necessarily

01:18:46.960 | from the fact that you have to move your house.

01:18:48.920 | It's the fact that once you move your house,

01:18:51.220 | that means something else down the line.

01:18:53.160 | And this is secondary tertiary effects

01:18:55.400 | that can have potentially to wars, military conflict,

01:18:59.240 | can have destabilized entire economies,

01:19:02.360 | all that kind of stuff because of the migration pattern.

01:19:04.680 | Is it possible to model those kinds of things?

01:19:07.040 | - So there are people who looked at this

01:19:08.800 | and surprisingly again, most people will move

01:19:12.320 | within their country for a lot of different reasons,

01:19:14.640 | but mainly language and political structure.

01:19:17.960 | You have your money, you have your relationships there.

01:19:20.640 | So it's not like we're gonna see these big moves

01:19:23.600 | from the Southern Mexico and Central America

01:19:28.720 | up to the US or from Africa up to the EU.

01:19:32.000 | That's not predominantly because of climate.

01:19:33.800 | That's because there's a lot of welfare opportunity.

01:19:38.520 | You can make your life much, much better

01:19:40.640 | and you can become much more productive

01:19:42.040 | if you move into a richer country.

01:19:45.280 | So yes, there are these issues.

01:19:47.500 | Again, you're asking me for sort of what is it

01:19:50.320 | that could really sort of break down the world?

01:19:52.560 | I think the fundamental point is to recognize

01:19:55.720 | that it's not like we haven't dealt

01:19:57.720 | with huge challenges in the past

01:20:00.480 | and we've dealt with them really well.

01:20:02.240 | So just one fun thing, I encourage everyone

01:20:05.320 | to just look that up on Wikipedia, the rising of Chicago.

01:20:09.680 | So in the 1850s, Chicago was a terribly dirty place

01:20:14.680 | and they didn't have good sewers.

01:20:18.320 | And so they decided, and we can't really make up all,

01:20:21.900 | they decided to raise Chicago one to two feet.

01:20:26.400 | And so they simply took one block at a time.

01:20:28.760 | They put like 50,000 jacks underneath a building

01:20:31.440 | and they would just raise the building

01:20:32.640 | and then they'd go on to the next building.

01:20:34.240 | They raised all of Chicago one to two feet.

01:20:37.360 | This is almost 200 years ago.

01:20:39.640 | Of course, we will be able to deal with these things.

01:20:42.200 | I'm not saying it'll be fun or that it'll be cheap.

01:20:45.520 | Of course, we would rather not have to deal with this,

01:20:48.160 | but we're a very inventive species.

01:20:50.200 | And so it's very unlikely that we'll not be able to--

01:20:53.020 | - What about COVID pandemic just said, hold my beer.

01:20:57.200 | The response of human civilization to the COVID pandemic

01:21:03.740 | seems to have not, they didn't find the car jacks.

01:21:07.200 | (laughing)

01:21:08.020 | - Oh, yeah.

01:21:08.860 | - It seems to have not been as effective

01:21:10.900 | as I would have hoped for as a human that believes

01:21:15.900 | in the basic competence of leadership

01:21:19.740 | and all that kind of stuff.

01:21:20.920 | It seems that given the COVID pandemic,

01:21:24.000 | luckily did not turn out to be a pandemic

01:21:27.020 | that would eradicate most of the human species,

01:21:30.460 | which is something you always have to consider

01:21:32.620 | and worry about, that I would have hoped

01:21:35.460 | we would have less economic impact

01:21:37.280 | and we would respond more effectively

01:21:39.620 | and in terms of policy, in terms of socially, medically,

01:21:44.620 | all that kind of stuff.

01:21:45.600 | So if the COVID pandemic brought the world to its knees,

01:21:49.900 | then what does a sea level rise?

01:21:53.440 | - I think there's a different kind of thing

01:21:55.240 | that happened in the COVID.

01:21:57.300 | So politicians, a lot of politicians,

01:21:59.760 | I think made certainly suboptimal decisions,

01:22:04.000 | but I also find the fact that we actually managed

01:22:06.480 | to get a vaccine in a year.

01:22:09.160 | We should not be sort of unaware of the fact that,

01:22:12.480 | yes, we did a lot of stupid stuff

01:22:14.000 | and a lot of people were really, really annoyed,

01:22:15.920 | but fundamentally we fixed this.

01:22:18.440 | We could have done it better and prettier.

01:22:20.520 | I mean, I rode through the COVID pandemic

01:22:24.120 | in Southern Sweden.

01:22:25.320 | Yes, we can have that whole conversation.

01:22:30.020 | It was certainly much easier to live there

01:22:32.840 | than many other places, but the fundamental point was,

01:22:36.440 | we actually fixed it.

01:22:37.480 | So yes, we'll do, and we'll do that with climate.

01:22:40.080 | We'll make a lot of bad decisions

01:22:41.960 | and we'll waste a lot of money,

01:22:43.580 | like we do with all other problems,

01:22:45.400 | but are we gonna fix this?

01:22:47.400 | - Yeah.

01:22:48.520 | - Can you add onto that uncomfortable discussion

01:22:51.560 | of what's the worst thing that could possibly happen?

01:22:54.040 | - I'm not worried about the sea level rise component,

01:22:56.840 | certainly not nearly as much as the heat

01:22:59.200 | and disruption of agriculture patterns and water supplies.

01:23:03.000 | And a lot of it relates to, again,

01:23:05.420 | path dependency and history.

01:23:07.980 | Farmers are the heroes of humanity all through history

01:23:11.440 | 'cause they're incredibly adaptable

01:23:13.120 | if you give them access to resources.

01:23:18.220 | In some cases, it's just crop insurance,

01:23:20.780 | which is really, basically still impossible

01:23:23.240 | to get in big chunks of Africa

01:23:24.960 | to get you through those hard spots.

01:23:26.560 | But the heat issue is the one that's most,

01:23:29.400 | the most basic element related to global warming

01:23:32.960 | from CO2 buildup is hotter heat waves.

01:23:37.960 | There's still some lack of evidence

01:23:40.280 | of the intensification, but the duration,

01:23:44.360 | and that's what really matters for heat,

01:23:47.480 | is how many days seems to be very powerfully linked

01:23:51.000 | to global warming.

01:23:52.560 | And so how many people die as a result of that is important.

01:23:55.800 | - So we're talking about, maybe you can also educate me,

01:24:00.080 | what's the average projection for the next 100 years

01:24:03.840 | as the temperature rises at two degrees Celsius?

01:24:07.000 | - Well, yeah, although this gets us

01:24:09.760 | into the modeling realm.

01:24:11.280 | You're assuming, you have to assume

01:24:13.920 | different emissions possibilities.

01:24:16.800 | You have to assume we still don't know the basic physics,

01:24:20.640 | like how many clouds form in a warming climate

01:24:24.080 | and how that relates to limiting warming.

01:24:26.840 | There are aspects of the fundamental warming question

01:24:29.240 | that are still deeply uncertain.

01:24:30.840 | - But the debate is like two, three, or four Celsius.

01:24:33.840 | - It's in that range.

01:24:34.680 | - But the thing is, all of those are bad for,

01:24:38.800 | this is an educational question.

01:24:40.920 | - Sure.

01:24:41.760 | - It doesn't seem like that much from a weather perspective,

01:24:46.440 | if you just turn up the AC and so on

01:24:48.440 | in your own personal home.

01:24:50.640 | But it is, from a global perspective,

01:24:52.760 | a huge impact on agriculture.

01:24:55.040 | - Well, yeah, and getting back to sea level and glaciers,

01:24:58.480 | the melting point of ice is a number.

01:25:02.040 | - Yeah.

01:25:02.880 | - And so if you pass that number,

01:25:04.120 | things start to change.

01:25:06.040 | What became known about Antarctica and Greenland more

01:25:08.760 | is that its ocean temperature,

01:25:10.880 | the seawater in and around and under these ice sheets,

01:25:15.200 | 'cause it kind of gets under parts of Antarctica,

01:25:18.120 | is what's driving the dynamics

01:25:20.920 | that could lead to more abrupt change,

01:25:23.280 | more than air temperature.

01:25:25.440 | Glaciers, these big ice sheets live or die

01:25:27.400 | based on how much snow falls

01:25:29.680 | and how much ice leaves every year.

01:25:32.200 | And I was up on the Greenland ice sheet in 2004

01:25:36.160 | and written about it forever since then.

01:25:40.440 | It's the same amount of water that's in the Gulf of Mexico

01:25:43.000 | as if God or some great force came down

01:25:45.280 | and flash flows the Gulf of Mexico

01:25:48.000 | and plunked it up on land.

01:25:49.320 | That's the ice sheet.

01:25:50.280 | It's a lot of water.

01:25:51.600 | That's 23 feet of sea level rise.

01:25:54.760 | But you were not gonna melt it all.

01:25:56.720 | And the pace at which that erosion begins

01:26:02.560 | and becomes sort of a runaway train

01:26:05.800 | is still not well understood.

01:26:09.160 | That change from like a manageable level of sea level rise

01:26:14.160 | from these ice sheets

01:26:16.040 | to something that becomes truly unstoppable

01:26:18.240 | or that has these discontinuities

01:26:19.640 | where you get a lot more all of a sudden,

01:26:22.560 | to me, it's in the realm of what I've taken to calling

01:26:26.200 | known unknowables.

01:26:27.320 | Like don't count on another IPCC report

01:26:30.760 | magically including science that says,

01:26:33.040 | aha, now we know it's gonna be five feet by 2100.

01:26:37.560 | Because learning,

01:26:38.840 | there's a lot of negative learning in science.

01:26:40.920 | This may be true in your body of science too.

01:26:43.320 | There's a guy named Jeremy Bassis, B-A-S-S-I-S,

01:26:47.480 | who wrote a paper about this West Antarctic,

01:26:51.280 | the idea that you could get this sudden cliff breakdown

01:26:55.560 | of these ice shelves around Antarctica

01:26:58.920 | leading to rapid sea level rise.

01:27:01.200 | He did more modeling in physics

01:27:02.880 | and it turns out that you end up with,

01:27:05.120 | it's a much more progressive and self-limiting phenomenon.

01:27:08.080 | But those papers don't get any attention in the media

01:27:11.000 | because-- - They're not scary.

01:27:12.440 | - They're not scary and they're sort of after the fact.

01:27:15.440 | Just this past year,

01:27:16.280 | there's been this cycle around collapse,

01:27:18.680 | the word collapse and Antarctic ice.

01:27:22.720 | It started actually several years ago

01:27:27.000 | with the idea that the West Antarctic ice sheet

01:27:29.480 | is particularly vulnerable.

01:27:31.080 | And some paper, everyone, the science community,

01:27:33.400 | like the birds we were talking about,

01:27:34.600 | flocks to it and some high profile papers are written.

01:27:39.080 | And then a deeper inquiry reveals,

01:27:41.480 | you know, it's more complicated than that.

01:27:43.120 | And we, the journalists, the media,

01:27:45.800 | pundits don't pay attention to that stuff.

01:27:49.400 | And actually, which is why I started to develop

01:27:54.040 | kind of a dictionary, I call it watchwords,

01:27:56.480 | like words to, if you're out there,

01:27:58.520 | you're just a public person,

01:28:02.400 | you wanna know what's really going on.

01:28:04.280 | You hear these words like collapse in the context of ice,

01:28:08.520 | what do you do with that?

01:28:09.840 | And so I've created conversations around these words.

01:28:12.560 | Geologists and ice scientists use the word collapse.

01:28:15.680 | They're talking about a centuries long process.

01:28:18.040 | They're not talking about the World Trade Center.

01:28:20.880 | And scientists would do well to be more careful

01:28:24.880 | with words like that.

01:28:26.040 | Unless your focus is what we were saying earlier,

01:28:29.440 | your idea that alarming people will spur them to act,

01:28:33.240 | then you use that word carelessly.

01:28:35.640 | - Can I just follow up on the other point

01:28:38.240 | that you said, you know, two, three, four degrees,

01:28:40.440 | you know, that doesn't sound like much,

01:28:42.040 | I can just crank up the air conditioning.

01:28:44.400 | I think that sort of touches on a really,

01:28:46.440 | really important point that for most rich people,

01:28:49.960 | much of climate change is not really gonna be

01:28:53.000 | all that impactful, it still will have an impact.

01:28:55.720 | But fundamentally, if you're well off,

01:28:58.200 | you can mitigate a lot of these impacts.

01:29:00.600 | - And there's a young scientist at Carnegie Mellon,

01:29:02.760 | Destiny Nock, she just was the lead author on a study,

01:29:06.680 | what poor and prosperous households do in a heat wave

01:29:12.080 | when they have access to air conditioning.

01:29:14.280 | In a poor household, you wait, they found through science,

01:29:18.720 | they delay turning on the air conditioner

01:29:21.800 | four to seven degrees more of heating

01:29:23.640 | before they start to use the air conditioner.

01:29:25.440 | And that can create adverse outcomes.

01:29:27.360 | If you have an asthmatic in the house, an old person,

01:29:29.920 | you're endangering their lives.

01:29:32.000 | And that's just a little tiny, microscopic,

01:29:34.960 | fractal example of this powerful, real phenomenon

01:29:39.800 | that there's a divide in vulnerability,

01:29:42.080 | and it's not just based on where you live.

01:29:44.760 | This is families in like Pittsburgh.

01:29:47.360 | We're not talking about Botswana.

01:29:48.840 | And so that divide in capacity to deal

01:29:52.320 | with environmental stress is something

01:29:55.840 | you can really work on.

01:29:57.080 | And it gets hidden in all this talk of climate crisis.

01:30:00.520 | - And that's one of the important parts is both to say,

01:30:04.600 | look, if seven billion people, sorry,

01:30:07.960 | eight billion people will now have all experienced this,

01:30:11.680 | even though for each one of them, it's manageable,

01:30:14.120 | it's still a big problem because it's eight billion people

01:30:17.320 | living through this.

01:30:18.160 | - And how's the air conditioning eight billion people?

01:30:19.440 | - Yes, and then it's the point of getting to realize

01:30:24.400 | it's very, very much about how do you help the world's poor?

01:30:27.920 | And that's very much about making it more affordable,

01:30:30.920 | basically getting them out of poverty.

01:30:33.480 | And remember, getting out of poverty doesn't just mean

01:30:35.760 | that they can now afford to air condition themselves,

01:30:37.920 | but they get better education,

01:30:40.360 | they get better opportunities,

01:30:42.040 | they get better lives in so many other ways.

01:30:44.920 | And then at the end of it,

01:30:47.440 | it's not just about making sure that we focus

01:30:50.040 | on this one problem, but it's recognizing

01:30:52.520 | that these families have lots of different issues

01:30:56.220 | that they would like us to focus on,

01:30:58.320 | climate and heat waves just being one of them.

01:31:01.720 | So it's sort of taking progressive steps back

01:31:04.280 | and realizing, all right, okay, this is a problem,

01:31:07.400 | not the end of the world.

01:31:08.240 | - And one tiny little last example,

01:31:09.920 | you mentioned Jakarta at the beginning.

01:31:12.240 | It's really valuable to look around the world

01:31:13.840 | at places that are sort of leading indicator places,

01:31:16.600 | whether it's sea level rise or heat, and you could do that.

01:31:20.200 | Jakarta is sinking like a foot a year,

01:31:23.720 | literally a foot a year, it's some insane number,

01:31:26.920 | from withdrawing groundwater, from gas withdrawal,

01:31:30.480 | from, it's a delta, it's sediment, it's built on sediment.

01:31:33.540 | I wrote a piece ages ago, the New York Times

01:31:35.840 | is calling it Delta Blues, you know, musicians.

01:31:38.520 | And in Jakarta, so what are they doing?

01:31:40.740 | They're moving, they're moving the capital to another area.

01:31:45.820 | So that says to me, there's a lot of plasticity too.

01:31:49.240 | It's a city that's going through this,

01:31:51.640 | that rate of sea level, of their relationship

01:31:54.400 | with the sea level through sinking is way faster

01:31:57.520 | than what's happening with global warming.

01:31:59.160 | So look there, look to those kinds of places

01:32:00.960 | and you can start to build.

01:32:02.560 | - Tokyo had the same thing in the 1930s.

01:32:05.520 | They were also withdrawing lots of water way too fast.

01:32:09.160 | And so, you know, one of the obvious things is

01:32:11.080 | maybe you should stop withdrawing water so fast.

01:32:13.880 | - Yeah, and again, we seem to almost be intent

01:32:16.740 | on finding the most politically correct way

01:32:19.500 | to fix a problem or, you know, the most,

01:32:22.220 | the thing that sort of gets the most clicks

01:32:24.520 | instead of the thing that actually works the best.

01:32:27.500 | So a lot of these things are really, you know,

01:32:29.660 | not rocket science solutions.

01:32:31.140 | - Well, we'll get there.

01:32:32.260 | Let me add one more on top of the pile

01:32:34.780 | of the worst case analysis.

01:32:36.220 | So what people talk about, which is hurricanes

01:32:38.300 | and earthquakes, is there a connection

01:32:42.020 | that's well understood between climate change

01:32:44.860 | and the increased frequency and intensity

01:32:51.020 | of hurricanes and earthquakes?

01:32:52.740 | - I've dug in on both a lot.

01:32:54.780 | The earthquake connection to climate change,

01:32:56.460 | I'm not worried about compared to just the earthquake risk

01:32:58.860 | that we live with in many parts of the world already.

01:33:01.340 | The Himalayas, even with that earthquake in 2015

01:33:04.980 | in Kathmandu, that whole range is overdue

01:33:09.980 | for major earthquakes.

01:33:11.480 | And what has happened in the last 50 years

01:33:14.100 | since they last had big earthquakes?

01:33:15.940 | Huge development, big cities,

01:33:17.920 | a lot of informal construction,

01:33:19.820 | like the stuff I wrote about in Istanbul,

01:33:22.060 | where the family builds another layer and another,

01:33:24.700 | they put a floor on, every time someone gets married

01:33:26.540 | and has kids, you put another floor in the house.

01:33:28.420 | And unfortunately, that's, you know,

01:33:30.420 | what was the term, this Turkish engineer,

01:33:36.340 | rubble in waiting.

01:33:38.460 | - Rubble in waiting.

01:33:39.300 | - It's rubble in waiting.

01:33:40.140 | And we're looking at it, you know, videotaping it,

01:33:42.280 | and there are people playing there.

01:33:44.240 | So I don't worry about the earthquake connection

01:33:45.640 | to climate change.

01:33:46.940 | The hurricanes I've written about for decades.

01:33:49.500 | And the most illuminating body of science

01:33:53.740 | that I've dug in on, literally, related to hurricanes

01:33:58.560 | is this field that's emerged,

01:34:00.080 | it gets a tiny bit of money compared to climate modeling.

01:34:02.760 | It's called paleotempestology.

01:34:05.520 | It's like paleontology, you know?

01:34:07.440 | They look for evidence of past hurricanes

01:34:10.120 | along coasts that we care about.

01:34:12.200 | And they dig down into the lagoons behind,

01:34:16.840 | like the barrier beaches along Florida,

01:34:19.360 | or the Carolinas, or in Puerto Rico.

01:34:21.280 | And what you have is a history book of past hurricanes.

01:34:24.720 | So there's mud, mud, mud, mud, mud, mud, mud,

01:34:27.040 | you know, accumulating over centuries.

01:34:28.940 | And then there's a layer of sand and seashells.

01:34:32.620 | And what that indicates is that there was a great storm

01:34:34.980 | that came across the beach, pushed a lot of sediment

01:34:38.240 | into the mud.

01:34:39.280 | And then there's mud, mud, mud, mud, mud, mud, mud.

01:34:41.360 | And when you look at that work,

01:34:43.200 | I first wrote about this in 2001 in the Times,

01:34:45.520 | a long story, and then I kept track

01:34:48.300 | of these intrepid scientists putting these core tubes down.

01:34:53.300 | It shows you that we're in a landscape

01:34:55.880 | where big, bad hurricanes are not, they're the norm.

01:35:00.880 | But something that's rare and big

01:35:03.960 | is something that's extreme.

01:35:05.960 | When you think about the word extreme, right,

01:35:07.280 | it means it's at the end of the spectrum of what's possible.

01:35:10.560 | They're rare, rare in human timescales.

01:35:13.840 | Hurricane Michael, four years ago, devastated.

01:35:17.720 | Category 5 came ashore in the panhandle of Florida,

01:35:21.760 | leveled that much-photographed town, Mexico Beach.

01:35:24.580 | And people, actually, the Tallahassee National Weather

01:35:29.560 | Service said, "Unprecedented hurricane."

01:35:33.140 | And the damage was unprecedented

01:35:35.560 | because there hadn't been a community there before.

01:35:38.240 | But the hurricane was not unprecedented at all.

01:35:40.320 | If you look at the history, and this is published research,

01:35:42.680 | it's just that no one bothers to,

01:35:44.800 | we have this blind spot for the longer timescale

01:35:49.240 | you need to examine if you're thinking

01:35:50.440 | about big, bad things that are rare.

01:35:52.440 | And hurricanes are still rare.

01:35:54.760 | I was recently covering Fort Myers, the awful devastation.

01:35:59.760 | There's a young climate scientist

01:36:01.660 | at Florida Gulf Coast University, Jo Muller,

01:36:06.340 | who's done that paleotempestology work there,

01:36:08.500 | right in Fort Myers.

01:36:09.420 | She lives there, and she was away in London

01:36:11.620 | at a meeting of reinsurance companies

01:36:13.420 | that reinsure all the world's big, bad risks

01:36:15.740 | when this was happening.

01:36:17.460 | But she has done the work that shows,

01:36:19.460 | it's a thousand-year record of past hurricanes,

01:36:21.420 | and it's super sobering when you consider

01:36:24.740 | how fast people have moved into Florida

01:36:28.460 | and built vulnerably in an area that hurricanes will hammer.

01:36:33.460 | That's part of the fundamental dynamics

01:36:35.700 | of the Gulf of Mexico, and the storms come off of Africa.

01:36:39.100 | It's a place where they will come.

01:36:40.900 | Now, the question of global warming impact is subtle.

01:36:44.420 | There are aspects of hurricanes that haven't changed.

01:36:47.500 | There's aspects like rainfall that seem pretty powerfully

01:36:51.580 | linked to global warming.

01:36:53.420 | A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture,

01:36:55.460 | so when you have a big disturbance,

01:36:57.620 | the heat engine of a hurricane comes through it,

01:36:59.620 | you get more rain.

01:37:00.520 | There's rapid intensification,

01:37:03.580 | how quickly these storms jump from category one

01:37:08.580 | to five or four before they hit is a new area of science.

01:37:13.780 | So I think it's still early days in knowing,

01:37:16.780 | because no one was looking for that.

01:37:19.060 | There were no data back 300 years ago

01:37:21.820 | when these big, bad previous hurricanes came

01:37:24.500 | to know whether they were rapidly intensified or not.

01:37:27.020 | So as a journalist, I try to keep track

01:37:30.780 | of what we don't know, not to be too constrained,

01:37:33.600 | and think about new science as being robust,

01:37:37.340 | unless it's considering and actually actively stating

01:37:42.740 | we don't really know what's going on with earlier hurricanes.

01:37:46.820 | And all of that is swamped, ultimately, literally,

01:37:49.960 | by the vulnerability, building vulnerability in these areas.

01:37:54.180 | You know, if there's a marginal change in a storm,

01:37:56.860 | and you've quadrupled or sextupled how much stuff

01:38:01.780 | and how many people are in the way,

01:38:03.800 | and if some of those people are poor and vulnerable,

01:38:06.380 | or elderly and can't swim,

01:38:08.980 | you're creating a landscape of destruction.

01:38:11.300 | - So a lot of the human suffering that has to do with storms

01:38:15.920 | is about where and how you build,

01:38:19.860 | versus the frequency and the intensity of storms.

01:38:22.420 | - Still, you didn't quite answer the question.

01:38:26.540 | You know, when I'm having a beer with people at a bar,

01:38:29.980 | and they say, "Hey, why are you having a beer?

01:38:32.140 | "We're all going to die," because of climate change,

01:38:34.620 | usually what they bring up,

01:38:36.020 | and I'm just trying to add some levity here.

01:38:38.460 | - No, this is good.

01:38:39.940 | - Usually what they bring up is the hurricanes,

01:38:43.380 | and the most recent hurricane, saying like,

01:38:46.700 | they're getting crazy, hurricanes all the time,

01:38:49.700 | they're getting more intense, more frequent, and so on.

01:38:53.460 | I'm sure there's incredible science going on

01:38:57.860 | trying to look at this.

01:38:59.020 | Is there evidence, and is it possible to have evidence

01:39:04.300 | that there's a connection between

01:39:07.660 | what we can call global warming

01:39:10.060 | and the increased frequency and intensity of storms?

01:39:12.940 | - No. - Okay, no, thank you.

01:39:15.080 | - Well, you added intensity.

01:39:18.420 | You know, let me just get into this a tiny bit more.

01:39:22.180 | I mean, hurricanes, I grew up with them in Rhode Island

01:39:25.220 | in my youth, and there was a very active period

01:39:28.060 | of hurricanes in New England in the '50s and '60s, '70s,

01:39:32.900 | and then in the North Atlantic, generally,

01:39:35.420 | it was very, very active in '50 when I was a kid,

01:39:39.340 | and the dynamics of them forming off of Africa

01:39:42.980 | and coming here, circling up the coast, was just prime time.

01:39:47.180 | Then there was like what Kerry Emanuel,

01:39:49.220 | who's the most experienced hurricane climate scientist

01:39:53.100 | around at MIT, he's in this story, he's in my 1988 article.

01:39:58.100 | He and colleagues have found, and others,

01:40:04.220 | that there's what they call a hurricane drought

01:40:07.660 | from like the '70s through about 1994 in the Atlantic,

01:40:11.480 | specifically the Atlantic Basin,

01:40:13.540 | and there's been a lot of questions about that.

01:40:15.640 | People thought it was ocean circulation,

01:40:17.460 | something about the currents.

01:40:18.900 | There's these multi-decadal variabilities in the oceans.

01:40:22.820 | And then now it looks robustly,

01:40:27.220 | I can't find a climate scientist who disagrees,

01:40:30.340 | that the thing that caused the drought was pollution, smog,

01:40:34.960 | and significantly in Europe.

01:40:38.340 | And you say, well, how does smog in Europe relate

01:40:40.380 | to hurricanes crossing the Atlantic

01:40:42.820 | and getting to the United States?

01:40:45.380 | It's because of the smog was changing the behavior

01:40:49.700 | of the Sahara Desert, which is just south of Europe.

01:40:52.300 | And the Sahara Desert kills hurricanes.

01:40:56.840 | Sand and dust coming off the Sahara,

01:40:58.500 | you can see this every year.

01:40:59.820 | When that's active, it stifles these big storms.

01:41:03.380 | At the point, right in their nursery, they all form,

01:41:06.020 | there's this area for hurricanes off of West Africa

01:41:09.020 | that's like the nursery zone.

01:41:10.620 | And so if you're stifling those hurricanes

01:41:12.160 | because of pollution in Europe

01:41:15.280 | before the Clean Air Act's cleanups,

01:41:18.880 | and then that goes away,

01:41:21.740 | none of that has anything to do with global warming.

01:41:23.900 | It's another kind of forcing in the climate system,

01:41:25.860 | a local one that created a regional dynamic

01:41:28.700 | that created a quiet period

01:41:30.720 | when all these friends in the bar,

01:41:32.420 | maybe they were born in the '90s or whatever,

01:41:37.380 | they grew up in an area of like,

01:41:40.860 | hurricanes weren't a big deal.

01:41:42.320 | And now we have an end to that drought

01:41:45.200 | because we cleaned up the air pollution,

01:41:47.020 | the sooty kind of air pollution, sulfury.

01:41:49.960 | And anyone who says global warming, global warming,

01:41:53.300 | without saying, well, that's in there too,

01:41:55.320 | is kind of missing that.

01:41:57.440 | And when you look globally,

01:41:58.920 | still, I think it was 90 or so hurricanes a year,

01:42:03.400 | cyclones, hurricanes, typhoons globally.

01:42:05.720 | That hasn't changed.

01:42:06.560 | The number of these tropical storms

01:42:09.000 | that reach that ferocity has not changed.

01:42:12.360 | It's just a fundamental dynamic of,

01:42:14.600 | and by the way, on the long time scale,

01:42:16.480 | the models still indicate as you warm the planet,

01:42:21.480 | and remember the Arctic warms quicker,

01:42:23.800 | this is something people probably understand,

01:42:26.280 | you're actually evening out the imbalance

01:42:29.320 | between the heat at the equator

01:42:31.640 | and the cold in the northern part of the hemisphere,

01:42:35.260 | and that calms the whole system down.

01:42:36.860 | So there could be fewer hurricanes later in the century

01:42:40.040 | because of global warming.

01:42:41.500 | And for me, that's a lot of information,

01:42:44.760 | but if I'm in a bar, I start with what do you care about?

01:42:49.240 | You care about safety, you care about security,

01:42:51.500 | you care about having everybody safe, not just you.

01:42:55.000 | You get in your car and you can evacuate.

01:42:56.800 | What about the old person or the poor family

01:43:00.720 | who can't do that, they're not gonna leave their house?

01:43:02.980 | What are we doing to limit vulnerability now?

01:43:05.780 | That, I circle back to that over and over again.

01:43:08.560 | I have a pocket card, I have this graphic card

01:43:12.000 | I created about risk,

01:43:13.880 | and what we really care about is climate risk.

01:43:17.080 | Who's at risk, what's driving the risk,

01:43:19.640 | how do you reduce that?

01:43:20.480 | It's a card, you can almost pull it out in a bar,

01:43:21.960 | I should print them.

01:43:22.800 | - You should do that.

01:43:23.640 | - It's like risk is the hazard.

01:43:25.440 | - Climate bar, Pat.

01:43:26.440 | - Risk is the hazard, the hazard is a storm,

01:43:34.160 | times exposure, how many people, how much stuff,

01:43:37.980 | factoring in vulnerability or resilience.

01:43:43.740 | And climate change is changing the hazard for some things,

01:43:48.580 | not for tornadoes, not for everything.

01:43:50.820 | Exposure is this expanding bullseye,

01:43:54.620 | this is another hashtag, expanding bullseye.

01:43:57.540 | Get out there and look for that and you'll see,

01:43:59.620 | I'm pushing these two geographers who do this

01:44:03.140 | for every hazard, wildfire, earthquake, flood,

01:44:07.940 | coastal storm, and we're building an expanding bullseye

01:44:11.620 | in an area and nature's throwing darts.

01:44:14.020 | Some of the darts are getting bigger

01:44:15.100 | because of global warming, some of the darts we don't know.

01:44:17.780 | What do you do?

01:44:18.620 | Like, what do you do?

01:44:19.560 | Well, you get out of the way, right?

01:44:21.300 | You don't wanna be on the dartboard.

01:44:23.020 | And that, it just simplifies the whole formula.

01:44:25.780 | To me, it's kind of a transformational potential

01:44:32.740 | to go into a bar.

01:44:33.660 | Maybe I should print these things.

01:44:35.180 | - 100%.

01:44:36.020 | And I should go drinking with you more often.

01:44:37.740 | - There should be coasters in bars.

01:44:39.340 | - 'Cause that was fascinating about smog.

01:44:41.460 | I mean, it's nice to be reminded about how complicated

01:44:44.620 | and fascinating the weather system is.

01:44:46.420 | - Let me try to answer the questions slightly quicker

01:44:50.500 | before your friends have drunk too much.

01:44:53.860 | - Never enough.

01:44:54.700 | - Or not enough.

01:44:56.620 | So if you look at the amount of,

01:45:01.580 | the number of hurricanes, as Andy rightly pointed out,

01:45:05.300 | it doesn't look like it's changing.

01:45:08.500 | So we see more because we have now much better

01:45:11.980 | detection systems with satellites.

01:45:14.080 | But if you look since 1980,

01:45:17.780 | when we have good satellite coverage,

01:45:19.700 | for instance, last year was the year

01:45:22.420 | that had the lowest number of hurricanes in the world.

01:45:25.960 | And you're sort of like, that's odd

01:45:28.820 | because it's probably the year where I heard

01:45:31.020 | the most about hurricanes.

01:45:32.460 | And what that tells you is that just because you hear

01:45:34.500 | a lot about hurricanes doesn't actually mean

01:45:36.620 | that there is a lot of hurricanes.

01:45:37.820 | You can't just go that way.

01:45:39.380 | If you remember in the 1990s and 2000s,

01:45:44.100 | there was an enormous amount of talk about how violence,

01:45:47.260 | how crime was getting worse in the US,

01:45:49.600 | while all the objective indicators

01:45:51.300 | showed that it was going down.

01:45:52.900 | But there's sufficient amount of violence

01:45:55.820 | that you can fill every radio and TV show with a new crime.

01:46:00.580 | And so if you get more and more TV shows

01:46:03.180 | that talk about crime, actually most people end up

01:46:05.900 | thinking that there's more crime

01:46:07.340 | while the real number is going down.

01:46:09.860 | So the reality here is yes, climate change

01:46:14.320 | will probably affect hurricanes in the sense

01:46:17.260 | that they'll be the same number or slightly fewer

01:46:20.300 | as Andy was mentioning,

01:46:21.740 | but they will likely be somewhat stronger.

01:46:25.140 | This seems to be the best outcome.

01:46:27.900 | We're not sure, but this seems to be the outcome.

01:46:30.180 | And it's important to remember,

01:46:32.060 | stronger is worse than fewer is better.

01:46:35.680 | So overall, climate will make the world a little bit worse.

01:46:40.680 | So that's the sort of bottom line,

01:46:43.420 | but, and that's the real issue here,

01:46:45.940 | all the other things,

01:46:46.900 | the fact that people are much more vulnerable,

01:46:49.140 | is just vastly outweigh this,

01:46:51.660 | which is why if you look at the impact of hurricanes

01:46:55.820 | and impact of pretty much everything,

01:46:57.780 | it is typically going down.

01:47:00.060 | If you look, for instance, in percent of GDP,

01:47:02.340 | you have to look at percent of GDP,

01:47:03.860 | because if you have twice as many houses,

01:47:05.680 | obviously, the same kind of impact will have twice

01:47:08.540 | the impact or if they're worth twice as much.

01:47:12.020 | If you do that in percent of GDP,

01:47:13.580 | and even the UN says that's how you should measure it,

01:47:16.180 | it's going down.

01:47:17.260 | Why is that?

01:47:18.140 | It's because we're becoming more resilient.

01:47:20.580 | Just simply, if you look at what happens

01:47:23.420 | when hurricanes come in,

01:47:24.620 | we have much better prediction in the long run.

01:47:27.060 | That means you now know, two or three days out,

01:47:30.340 | that there's a big hurricane that's likely to come here.

01:47:32.860 | What does that mean?

01:47:33.740 | All the things that can be moved.

01:47:36.020 | So, typically all buses, all trucks,

01:47:38.900 | everything that's not bolted down will leave this area.

01:47:42.140 | And so you will get less damage from that.

01:47:44.620 | You will have more people knowing,

01:47:46.220 | oh, this is gonna be a big one.

01:47:47.660 | They moved to their relative somewhere else.

01:47:49.760 | So you'll have fewer people being vulnerable.

01:47:52.060 | There's a lot-

01:47:52.900 | - If people are responsive and aware.

01:47:53.940 | - Yeah, there's a lot of way you can do this.

01:47:56.260 | So the outcome,

01:47:57.540 | and this is important for the whole conversation,

01:47:59.660 | the outcome is that we're actually becoming less vulnerable

01:48:03.580 | and that damages are becoming smaller, not bigger.

01:48:07.820 | But had there not been global warming,

01:48:10.800 | it would probably have gone down even faster.

01:48:13.480 | So we would have become even better off quicker

01:48:16.860 | had there been no global warming.

01:48:18.380 | But this is a crucial difference

01:48:20.540 | and this is what I find really hard to communicate.

01:48:23.040 | Climate change is not this,

01:48:24.740 | oh my God, everything is going off the charts

01:48:27.900 | and we're all gonna be doomed kind of thing.

01:48:29.900 | Climate change is a thing that means

01:48:32.820 | we're gonna get better slightly slower.

01:48:36.460 | And that's a very, very different kind of attitude.

01:48:39.660 | It's one of the many problems

01:48:41.180 | rather than this is the end of all of us.

01:48:43.780 | - And by the way,

01:48:44.620 | if you look at what's happening in the world,

01:48:47.580 | the data also show that in rich places and poor places,

01:48:50.980 | we still are moving into zones of hazard

01:48:53.540 | faster than climate is changing.

01:48:55.620 | Beth Tellman, who's at Columbia and she moved to Arizona,

01:48:59.700 | she and colleagues at this outfit called Cloud to Street

01:49:03.340 | did an amazing study showing,

01:49:05.300 | this is a year or so ago I wrote about,

01:49:06.740 | showing again, we're moving into zones of hazard,

01:49:09.700 | which it applies to me,

01:49:11.120 | just what Bjorn was saying that

01:49:14.020 | people wouldn't be doing that

01:49:16.340 | if they thought that was gonna lead to devastation.

01:49:19.980 | And this is today, we're doing this now.

01:49:22.200 | And it's flood zones, wildfire zones.

01:49:25.100 | So that means there's these things to do.

01:49:28.600 | There's so much plasticity in the human behavior

01:49:32.140 | and how we build and where we build.

01:49:34.340 | You can make a big, big change in the outcomes.

01:49:37.620 | - I mean, one of the things to remember is,

01:49:39.540 | people move to where hurricanes hit

01:49:41.620 | because when they're not there,

01:49:42.940 | it's a really beautiful place to be.

01:49:44.820 | - Yeah, yeah.

01:49:45.780 | - So in many ways, we make the trade-offs and say,

01:49:49.620 | look, I'm happy to have an ocean view

01:49:53.200 | and then maybe a hurricane's gonna hit.

01:49:55.240 | And of course it becomes a lot easier

01:49:56.800 | than when the federal government

01:49:58.000 | is actually subsidizing your risk by saying,

01:50:00.440 | we'll ensure you're really cheaply.

01:50:02.600 | And that's one of the things that we should stop doing.

01:50:05.720 | We should actually tell people,

01:50:06.880 | look, if you wanna live where hurricanes hit,

01:50:09.300 | maybe you should be more careful.

01:50:11.160 | - Yeah, by the way, what I was saying about past storms,

01:50:14.200 | the paleo tempestology, past fires, it's the same thing.

01:50:17.800 | We've suppressed fire in the United States for 100 years

01:50:21.640 | through much of the West,

01:50:23.080 | through wanting to save the forests,

01:50:26.440 | the whole Smokey the Bear thing.

01:50:28.160 | Don't start.

01:50:29.000 | When these are landscapes that evolved to burn,

01:50:32.500 | and what happened in the last 100 years?

01:50:34.280 | A lot of people love the West.

01:50:35.680 | We love these environments.

01:50:37.400 | We love to live with the trees.

01:50:39.080 | The Boulder County area, the explosive development

01:50:41.740 | in zones of implicit hazard leads to big, bad outcomes

01:50:45.680 | when conditions align

01:50:46.920 | and climate change is worsening some of those conditions.

01:50:49.760 | And sometimes it's really counterintuitive.

01:50:52.080 | A wet season builds more grass.

01:50:54.980 | A dry season comes along, parches the grass.

01:50:57.760 | Then comes a human ignition.

01:50:59.440 | It's almost always human ignitions.

01:51:01.720 | And then you have this disaster

01:51:02.960 | where a thousand homes burn in Boulder County.

01:51:05.280 | And it's like, there's so many elements there

01:51:07.800 | that can be worked on that give me confidence

01:51:12.400 | that we can change these outcomes.

01:51:16.080 | Natural disasters are not natural.

01:51:17.720 | Disasters are designed, really, as some people say.

01:51:21.040 | - Can I take a quick aside and ask about terminology

01:51:25.000 | of climate change and global warming?

01:51:26.840 | 'Cause we use it interchangeably.

01:51:29.760 | It is an aside, but it's one that's worthy of taking.

01:51:33.320 | Do those carry different meanings?

01:51:36.040 | And has that meaning changed over the years?

01:51:38.760 | Between those two terms, are they really equivalent?

01:51:43.120 | - Well, some people say there was this industry

01:51:45.480 | or propagandistic shift from,

01:51:48.400 | let's see, which came first?

01:51:51.720 | Oh, no, they're going to climate change now.

01:51:53.800 | It's a new thing, which is, it's ridiculous.

01:51:56.880 | The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988

01:52:01.040 | wasn't the Intergovernmental Panel on Global Warming.

01:52:03.960 | It was on climate change.

01:52:06.000 | So these terms have been there.

01:52:07.980 | They've been sort of evolving.

01:52:09.120 | When I wrote this cover story, it was the greenhouse effect.

01:52:11.800 | - So, and that's fallen out of favor.

01:52:13.520 | Greenhouse effect is not often talked about.

01:52:15.360 | - Well, it's really, that's the physical effect

01:52:18.200 | that's holding in the heat.

01:52:19.440 | - But see-- - It's not a good--

01:52:21.240 | - There's terms that mean stuff,

01:52:22.920 | and there's terms that are actually used in public discourse

01:52:26.580 | to designate what your,

01:52:28.480 | a whole umbrella of opinions you have.

01:52:32.440 | And I guess as somebody, me,

01:52:34.400 | who doesn't pay attention to this carefully,

01:52:38.440 | you have to use terms carefully.

01:52:40.600 | - Sure. - Because people will,

01:52:44.040 | a noob that rolls into the topic will often use terms

01:52:47.720 | to mean exactly what they mean, like literally.

01:52:50.280 | But they actually have political implications,

01:52:52.400 | all that kind of stuff.

01:52:53.240 | So I guess I'm asking, is there like,

01:52:55.480 | are you signaling something by using global warming

01:53:00.880 | versus climate change?

01:53:02.160 | Or people have calmed down in terms of the use of these?

01:53:04.840 | - No, no, but the Guardian newspapers made it worse.

01:53:08.560 | Now they have their style book.

01:53:09.880 | You know, every newspaper has a,

01:53:11.920 | they prescribe, they don't want their reporters

01:53:14.480 | to use any of those terms anymore.

01:53:16.320 | They call it climate crisis, climate emergency.

01:53:18.760 | - Oh no. - Oh yeah.

01:53:20.000 | - Global heating. - It's literally

01:53:21.200 | in their rule book.

01:53:22.240 | - Global heating, that sounds more intense.

01:53:24.120 | - Global heating. - And that was the point.

01:53:25.680 | - Well, I wrote about the global heating thing

01:53:28.560 | more than a decade ago.

01:53:29.720 | That's been around.

01:53:30.560 | But you know, so they're doing the,

01:53:33.200 | what was the movie where the,

01:53:35.320 | the comedy, the rock and roll comedy,

01:53:36.880 | where he sets his-- - To 11, yeah, yeah.

01:53:39.280 | - His amplifier goes to 11.

01:53:40.640 | You know, the idea that you turned up

01:53:42.400 | the rhetorical volume and that's gonna change people

01:53:44.720 | is ridiculous. - I mean, so for me,

01:53:47.080 | I mean, I use global warming and climate change

01:53:51.040 | interchangeably, and I think it's fair.

01:53:53.480 | There's some technical ways that you can differentiate them.

01:53:57.080 | But the reality is that global warming

01:53:59.520 | is probably a better way to describe a lot of it

01:54:02.080 | because this is really what is the main driver

01:54:04.760 | of what we worry about.

01:54:06.280 | Climate change seems a little diffuse,

01:54:08.280 | but you know, it's convenient to,

01:54:10.080 | when you talk about climate all the time,

01:54:11.800 | that you can call both of them.

01:54:13.160 | But I think the climate crisis and the climate catastrophe

01:54:16.520 | is really sort of, this is the amping up of a catastrophe.

01:54:21.120 | And again, as we've talked about before,

01:54:23.320 | if it really were true, we should tell people.

01:54:26.400 | But if it's not true, and I think there's a lot of reasons

01:54:28.600 | why this is not a climate catastrophe, this is a problem,

01:54:32.600 | we're actually doing everyone a disservice

01:54:34.720 | because we end up making people so worried

01:54:37.280 | that they say, "We gotta fix this in 12 years,"

01:54:39.160 | or whatever the number is.

01:54:40.640 | And also that it makes it almost impossible

01:54:43.160 | to have a conversation of,

01:54:45.440 | well, maybe we should be focusing on vulnerability first.

01:54:48.640 | And a lot of people, and I think a lot of well-meaning

01:54:52.280 | and well-intentioned people feel that it's almost

01:54:55.600 | sacrilegious to say it's about vulnerability

01:55:00.320 | because you're taking away the guilt of climate change.

01:55:03.960 | You're taking away our focus

01:55:05.200 | on dealing with climate change,

01:55:07.400 | whereas I think we would say,

01:55:09.080 | "No, it's about stuff that actually works

01:55:11.880 | "and doing that first."

01:55:13.640 | - Well, and by making it about carbon dioxide,

01:55:17.240 | you're implicitly making it about fossil fuels,

01:55:20.680 | which implicitly gives you another great narrative,

01:55:23.560 | good guy, bad guy.

01:55:24.600 | It's these big companies.

01:55:27.240 | - Where's the source of alarmism?

01:55:30.040 | So is it the IPCC,

01:55:32.920 | the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change?

01:55:35.960 | There's a chain here.

01:55:37.720 | Is there somebody to blame along the chain,

01:55:39.880 | or is this some kind of weird complex system

01:55:42.080 | where everybody encourages each other?

01:55:44.560 | Can you point to one place?

01:55:45.880 | Is it the media?

01:55:46.920 | Is it the scientists?

01:55:48.040 | - I think the UN Climate Panel

01:55:49.360 | is fundamentally a really good climate research group.

01:55:54.040 | You can have some quibbles with the way

01:55:56.240 | that they sort of summarize it

01:55:57.880 | in politically coordinated documents and stuff.

01:56:00.720 | But fundamentally, I think they do a good job

01:56:03.120 | of putting together all the research.

01:56:05.880 | This also means it's incredibly boring to read,

01:56:08.200 | which is why virtually nobody does.

01:56:10.760 | I'm sure you have,

01:56:11.640 | but I'm pretty sure a lot of climate journalists

01:56:14.480 | have never sort of looked past

01:56:16.760 | at least the summary for policy makers.

01:56:19.320 | - So the UN Climate Panel, they do predictions as well?

01:56:23.000 | - No, well, they pull together all the stuff

01:56:26.400 | that people have published in the period literature

01:56:30.040 | and then try to summarize it and basically tell you,

01:56:32.600 | so what's up and down with climate change.

01:56:35.160 | They do that in four large volumes

01:56:37.880 | every four to five to six, seven years or something.

01:56:40.960 | And yes, I think it's the gold-plated version

01:56:45.840 | of what we know.

01:56:47.360 | There tends to be a lot of,

01:56:49.120 | well, this is what they say.

01:56:52.680 | Actually, they say so many different places

01:56:55.040 | with so many different people

01:56:56.600 | that it's not quite clear exactly what they're saying often.

01:56:59.360 | You can sort of find contradictions between one volume

01:57:03.120 | with one set of authors and another.

01:57:05.280 | But yeah, I think this is fundamentally the right way

01:57:09.800 | that we know about climate,

01:57:12.680 | but then it gets translated into,

01:57:15.480 | how do you know about this?

01:57:17.000 | When most people don't read these 4,000 pages,

01:57:19.720 | you read a news story in a newspaper

01:57:23.080 | and that news story will be very heavily slanted towards,

01:57:27.800 | if you say, so sea levels could rise

01:57:30.600 | somewhere between one and three foot, what do you hear?

01:57:34.120 | Yeah, you obviously hear the three foot.

01:57:35.840 | Three foot is just more fun, more scary,

01:57:38.360 | more interesting than one foot.

01:57:40.880 | And it's that way with all of these.

01:57:43.080 | So what's the prediction for temperature rises?

01:57:47.000 | It's somewhere from not very scary to pretty damn scary.

01:57:50.840 | And again, you hear the pretty damn scary all the time.

01:57:53.880 | And then there's obviously always researchers

01:57:57.400 | who are saying, well, but actually,

01:57:58.880 | it could be a little more scary than that.

01:58:00.960 | And then there are likewise researchers who say,

01:58:02.920 | well, it's probably not gonna be as scary as that.

01:58:05.840 | And most of the journalists will interview-

01:58:09.520 | Do you really put the blame fundamentally

01:58:11.680 | on the journalists?

01:58:13.200 | I put it on the media setup.

01:58:15.760 | Look, media is simply trying to get clicks

01:58:18.360 | or sell newspapers.

01:58:19.640 | And if you were just gonna say, this is not a big issue,

01:58:23.820 | it just doesn't sell anything.

01:58:25.360 | But I think you're probably much better able to address this.

01:58:28.160 | Well, no, folks can Google for my name, Revkin,

01:58:32.280 | and the words front page thought in the newsroom

01:58:37.280 | every afternoon.

01:58:38.840 | Now we have a 24/7 news cycle, so it's different.

01:58:41.680 | But back in the day, the New York Times,

01:58:44.440 | when it was a flourishing print institution,

01:58:46.880 | every afternoon there was a front page meeting.

01:58:49.280 | And the big pooh-bah editors would go in there.

01:58:51.320 | And the desk editors come in with their pitches for the day.

01:58:54.640 | And my friend, Corrie Dean, who was the science editor

01:58:57.240 | for a chunk of my time,

01:58:58.400 | I remember having a conversation with her

01:59:01.240 | about some new study of, I think it was Greenland,

01:59:04.320 | the ice sheet, and I laid it out for her.

01:59:07.000 | And she said, "Where's the front page thought in that?"

01:59:09.700 | So we're all set up to look for the, that.

01:59:15.040 | - The scary bit.

01:59:15.880 | - And the news environment has gotten so much worse

01:59:19.280 | than 10 or 20 years ago.

01:59:21.960 | At least you had filters and limited number of outlets,

01:59:26.400 | and there was some sense you could track what's good or bad.

01:59:29.560 | There's lots of problems with that system too.

01:59:31.520 | But now you have an information buffet.

01:59:34.000 | So if you wanna be alarmed, or you wanna be,

01:59:36.560 | can stay in the tribe of those who think

01:59:39.840 | this is utter bull, you can find your flow.

01:59:43.400 | And that has led, but getting back

01:59:46.640 | to this specific question, the 2018 IPCC report,

01:59:50.600 | which was a special report commissioned

01:59:52.600 | to learn about the difference between 1.5 degrees

01:59:55.760 | of warming and two, which sounds so weird

01:59:58.480 | and technocratic and complicated.

02:00:00.760 | That's the one that generated the whole meme

02:00:03.080 | about eight years left.

02:00:04.680 | - 12 years. - Till doomsday.

02:00:06.360 | - 2030. - And that's the one.

02:00:07.200 | - Can you explain the meme?

02:00:08.120 | - This was the idea that there's a point we're gonna,

02:00:11.480 | if we don't cut emissions in half by whatever it was,

02:00:15.080 | 2050, we're doomed. - 2030, yeah.

02:00:17.040 | - That emerged from that specific report.

02:00:19.280 | And it wasn't something that was in the report.

02:00:21.080 | It was in the spin around the report.

02:00:22.920 | And that's what captivated Greta appropriately

02:00:25.400 | as a young person going, you know,

02:00:27.600 | and with her unique vantage point and stuff.

02:00:30.360 | And that report, I still need to dig in

02:00:33.040 | and write something deeper about what happened

02:00:35.920 | with that particular dynamics,

02:00:37.400 | created this recent burst of we're doomed rhetoric

02:00:41.400 | that I think you're focusing on.

02:00:44.320 | And it's all in the external interpretations,

02:00:48.000 | which journalism laps up

02:00:50.760 | because we're looking for the front page thought.

02:00:53.160 | But it's not just the journalists, it's the whole system,

02:00:56.120 | NGOs, environmental groups.

02:00:58.040 | If you're, and developing country,

02:01:00.840 | well-meaning leaders in developing countries,

02:01:03.560 | because of the structure of this treaty

02:01:05.640 | that goes back to 1992,

02:01:07.280 | that's the Paris Agreement is part of,

02:01:09.480 | they're now really looking for a way

02:01:14.880 | to portray this as a CO2 problem.

02:01:17.920 | Not a vulnerability.

02:01:19.720 | Well, there's a vulnerability aspect,

02:01:21.160 | but like in Pakistan, their climate minister,

02:01:25.520 | which they didn't even have a climate minister

02:01:26.960 | five years ago,

02:01:27.800 | is blaming everything that happened in Pakistan

02:01:30.720 | on carbon dioxide warming the climate,

02:01:32.600 | creating this, when a lot of what was going on

02:01:34.840 | was also on the ground.

02:01:36.400 | And you can blame colonialism, Pakistan's history,

02:01:38.920 | all kinds of things.

02:01:40.360 | But under the treaty, you want it to be about CO2

02:01:43.560 | because that puts the onus on rich countries.

02:01:46.200 | You're not paying us.

02:01:47.680 | Where's our money?

02:01:48.840 | And they're right.

02:01:50.320 | In the context of what everyone agreed to,

02:01:52.680 | there was supposed to be $100 billion a year

02:01:55.320 | from rich countries to poor countries starting in 2020.

02:01:57.600 | It didn't happen.

02:01:58.440 | It's like basically some money is flowing,

02:02:01.840 | but it's not really made up money.

02:02:03.400 | Yeah, and so that whole dynamic,

02:02:06.080 | they latch onto the climate science,

02:02:07.840 | and they, so they're there,

02:02:10.520 | and they're very handy, quotable people.

02:02:12.920 | And you have a justice angle.

02:02:14.040 | You have bad guys and good guys,

02:02:16.240 | which fits all of these narrative threads

02:02:18.000 | that come together into this information storm

02:02:21.080 | we're still living with.

02:02:22.040 | And then of course, it's not Pakistan's fault either.

02:02:25.080 | I mean, it also actually, almost all leaders now say,

02:02:28.520 | it's because of climate, because then it's not,

02:02:30.760 | you know, we didn't do anything wrong.

02:02:32.760 | In Germany, for instance, when we had that flood last year,

02:02:36.360 | it's not impossible that climate had a part in that,

02:02:40.560 | but it's very, very clear that the main reason

02:02:42.680 | why so many people died in Germany and Belgium

02:02:45.280 | was because the alarm systems didn't work.

02:02:48.240 | And this was plainly the local leaders in Germany.

02:02:52.120 | Now, if I'm stuck here and basically have caused

02:02:54.640 | the death of 200 people, would I rather say,

02:02:57.920 | yeah, that's on me, or would I say climate?

02:03:00.560 | Or, you know, so it's just such an easy scapegoat.

02:03:03.520 | I don't wanna place it all on the journalists,

02:03:05.760 | I think, because there's a lot of,

02:03:08.200 | if I were to think about, what did you call it,

02:03:10.040 | front page thought, there's a lot of really

02:03:15.040 | narratives that result in destruction of the human species,

02:03:20.040 | so nuclear war, pandemics, all that kind of stuff.

02:03:24.880 | It seems that climate is a sticky one.

02:03:27.040 | So the fact that it's sticky means there's other interests

02:03:30.000 | at play, like you guys are talking about,

02:03:31.960 | in terms of politics, all that kind of stuff.

02:03:33.720 | So it's not just the journalists.

02:03:35.480 | I feel like journalists will try anything

02:03:37.360 | for the front page, but it won't stick

02:03:40.480 | unless there's bigger interests at play

02:03:43.360 | for which these narratives are useful.

02:03:45.720 | So journalists will just throw stuff out there

02:03:47.480 | and see if it gets clicks, and it's like a first spark,

02:03:52.480 | maybe, it's maybe a tiny catalyst of the initial steps,

02:03:57.800 | but it has to be picked up by the politicians,

02:04:00.400 | by interest groups, and all that kind of stuff.

02:04:03.200 | Let me ask you, Bjorn, about the first part of the subtitle.

02:04:08.160 | How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions.

02:04:12.320 | How does Climate Change Panic Cost Us Trillions?

02:04:14.840 | - So we're basically deciding to make policies

02:04:17.320 | that'll have fairly little impact, even in 50 or 100 years,

02:04:21.400 | that literally cost trillions of dollars.

02:04:24.040 | So, you know, I'll give you two examples.

02:04:26.520 | So the European Union is trying to go to net zero.

02:04:31.320 | So our attempt to go halfway there by 2030

02:04:35.080 | will cost about a trillion dollars a year,

02:04:38.520 | and yet the net impact will be almost unmeasurable

02:04:41.280 | by the end of the century.

02:04:42.720 | Why is that?

02:04:43.800 | That's because the EU and the rich countries

02:04:46.160 | is a fairly small part of the emissions

02:04:48.280 | that are gonna come out in the 21st century.

02:04:50.120 | Now, we used to be a big part of it,

02:04:51.920 | as that's mainly because nobody else, you know,

02:04:53.720 | it was just the US and Europe and a few others

02:04:56.400 | that put out CO2 in the 20th century.

02:04:59.200 | So we used to be big, but in the 21st century,

02:05:02.560 | we'll be a small bit player.

02:05:04.480 | And so we're basically spending a lot of money,

02:05:07.040 | and remember, a trillion dollars is a lot of money

02:05:09.720 | that could have been spent on a lot of things

02:05:11.680 | that could have made humanity better

02:05:14.520 | on something that will only make us tiny bit better.

02:05:18.120 | Now, it will do some good, but, you know,

02:05:21.000 | the reasonable estimates is if you do

02:05:22.760 | a cost-benefit analysis, and again, you know,

02:05:24.960 | technically it's really, really complicated,

02:05:27.720 | but the basic idea is very, very simple.

02:05:29.880 | You just simply say, what are all the costs on one side

02:05:33.680 | and what are all the benefits?

02:05:35.200 | So the costs are mainly that we have to live

02:05:37.560 | with more expensive energy, you have to forego

02:05:40.520 | some opportunities, you have to have, you know,

02:05:42.720 | more complicated services, that kind of thing.

02:05:45.400 | The benefit is that you cut carbon emissions

02:05:47.440 | and that eventually means that you'll have

02:05:48.960 | less climate damage, you'll have lower temperature rises

02:05:51.960 | and so on.

02:05:53.120 | If you try to weigh up all of those,

02:05:55.640 | it's reasonable to assume that the EU policies

02:05:59.840 | will deliver for every dollar you spend,

02:06:02.640 | it'll deliver less than a dollar,

02:06:04.200 | probably about 30 cents back on the dollar,

02:06:06.800 | which is a really bad way to spend dollars

02:06:08.840 | because there's lots of other things out in the world

02:06:11.440 | where you could do, you know, multiple, you know,

02:06:13.360 | so for instance, if you think about tuberculosis

02:06:15.400 | or education of small kids or nutrition for small kids

02:06:19.400 | and those kinds of things, every dollar you spend

02:06:21.560 | will do like 30 to $100 worth of good.

02:06:24.160 | So there are much, much better places

02:06:26.040 | where you could spend this money.

02:06:27.440 | Likewise, the US is thinking of going net zero by 2050.

02:06:32.160 | It's not actually gonna happen, but it's sort of a thing

02:06:35.120 | that everybody talks about.

02:06:36.200 | Biden is talking a lot about it.

02:06:38.160 | If you look at the models that indicate

02:06:40.320 | how much will that cost, it's not implausible

02:06:44.240 | that this will cost somewhere between two and $4 trillion

02:06:47.880 | per year by mid century.

02:06:49.920 | And remember, if the US went carbon neutral today,

02:06:54.480 | by the end of the century, that would reduce temperatures

02:06:57.840 | by about 0.3 degree Fahrenheit.

02:07:00.440 | So you would just be able to measure it.

02:07:03.000 | It probably wouldn't in real life, but you know,

02:07:05.160 | you'd just be able to measure it.

02:07:07.000 | Again, this is not saying that there's not some good

02:07:09.600 | coming out of it, but you're basically spending

02:07:11.520 | an enormous amount of money on fairly small benefits.

02:07:14.720 | So that's my main point.

02:07:16.520 | - Yeah, this reminds me of what we were saying earlier

02:07:18.840 | about the things that models don't integrate

02:07:22.240 | and the things that cost benefit leave out

02:07:24.160 | because you really can't go there.

02:07:26.600 | One of the issues facing the world right now

02:07:28.120 | is the reality that we're reminded of,

02:07:30.720 | that energy availability is a geopolitical destabilizer.

02:07:34.800 | If you have uneven access to energy

02:07:39.200 | and you have Vladimir Putin coming into office

02:07:41.280 | or something else happening that disrupts that system,

02:07:44.640 | you're vastly increasing poverty.

02:07:47.720 | This is playing out across the world.

02:07:49.720 | Fertilizer prices, fertilizer comes from gas, natural gas.

02:07:54.080 | If you can envision a world later in the century

02:07:59.940 | where we're no longer beholden on this material

02:08:01.680 | in the ground, at least fossil fuels,

02:08:04.400 | you know, cobalt and lithium for batteries,

02:08:06.560 | that's pretty cool, you know,

02:08:08.700 | 'cause you're taking away geopolitical instability.

02:08:11.640 | And you don't, but that's not factored in, right?

02:08:15.040 | That's like way outside of what you'd factor in.

02:08:17.020 | But it does feel like to me, you know,

02:08:18.880 | if I was gonna make the case for,

02:08:20.660 | you can choose your trillions,

02:08:23.320 | whatever that investing big isn't for these marginal things.

02:08:28.320 | It's for looking at the big picture,

02:08:30.840 | a world of abundant energy that doesn't come

02:08:33.560 | from a black rock or a gooey liquid

02:08:36.800 | that when you burn it creates--

02:08:38.280 | - But isn't that what the proposals are?

02:08:40.440 | Is investing in different kinds of energy,

02:08:43.640 | renewable energy, so what--

02:08:45.200 | - But I don't think most people are making that case.

02:08:47.320 | - What's in the trillion in the T costs?

02:08:51.080 | What's incorporated, what are the big costs there?

02:08:53.320 | - So the big cost is that you have

02:08:55.720 | slightly lower productivity gains.

02:08:58.240 | So basically again, you know,

02:08:59.600 | and this is sort of the opposite

02:09:00.960 | of what we just talked about by climate change.

02:09:03.020 | We're gonna get richer and richer in the world.

02:09:05.360 | This is all models, also the UN,

02:09:07.360 | this is really the only way that you can get

02:09:09.160 | big climate changes because everybody gets a lot richer.

02:09:11.940 | So also the developing world gets a lot richer.

02:09:14.180 | So we're likely to get richer.

02:09:16.320 | But one of the things that drive wealth production

02:09:19.520 | is the fact that we have ample

02:09:21.420 | and cheap and available energy.

02:09:23.840 | If you make that slightly harder,

02:09:25.820 | which is what you do with climate legislation,

02:09:28.260 | because you're basically telling people

02:09:29.920 | you have to use a source of energy

02:09:31.820 | that you'd rather not have used,

02:09:34.080 | because if people wanted to do it,

02:09:35.920 | we'd already have solved the problem.

02:09:37.360 | So you're basically telling them

02:09:38.360 | you've got to use this wind turbine

02:09:40.160 | instead of this natural gas plant,

02:09:42.740 | or you know, that kind of thing.

02:09:44.680 | It's not that you suddenly become poor or anything,

02:09:47.780 | it simply makes production slightly harder.

02:09:50.360 | What do you do when the wind is not blowing kind of thing?

02:09:53.000 | And of course we have lots of ways

02:09:54.440 | to somewhat mitigate that,

02:09:56.120 | but it's a little more costly,

02:09:57.580 | a little more complicated, a little less convenient.

02:10:00.080 | And that means you grow a little less.

02:10:02.480 | That's the main problem with these policies,

02:10:05.720 | that it simply makes you somewhat less well-off.

02:10:08.360 | - So energy becomes more inefficient.

02:10:10.640 | - Yes.

02:10:11.480 | - So let me challenge you here.

02:10:14.140 | Try to steel man some critics.

02:10:17.640 | So you have critics.

02:10:19.600 | I would love you to take it seriously

02:10:25.160 | and sort of consider this criticism

02:10:27.200 | and try to steel man their case.

02:10:29.820 | There's a bunch, I could mention this list of criticisms

02:10:34.820 | from Bob Ward in London School of Economics.

02:10:39.080 | I don't know if you're familiar with him.

02:10:40.600 | But just on this point,

02:10:42.200 | in terms of one of the big costs being an energy,

02:10:45.080 | he criticizes your recent book in saying,

02:10:50.240 | "You consider the 143 billion in annual support

02:10:53.760 | "for renewable energy,

02:10:54.860 | "but ignore the 300 billion in fossil fuel subsidies."

02:10:59.640 | So a lot of the criticism has to do with,

02:11:03.820 | well, you're cherry-picking the models,

02:11:06.220 | which the models are always cherry-picking anyway.

02:11:09.580 | But you wanna take those seriously.

02:11:12.740 | So he claims that you ignore,

02:11:16.620 | you're not fully modeling the costs, the trade-off here.

02:11:21.620 | How expensive is the renewable energy

02:11:26.100 | and how expensive is the fossil fuel?

02:11:28.180 | Can you steel man his case?

02:11:29.600 | - Sure.

02:11:30.440 | So two things.

02:11:31.780 | The first, the quote,

02:11:34.180 | it's absolutely true that the world spends

02:11:36.580 | a large chunk of money on fossil fuels,

02:11:40.260 | and that's just stupid, and we should stop doing it.

02:11:42.980 | We should also recognize that this is not rich countries.

02:11:45.780 | This is not the countries

02:11:46.980 | where we're talking about climate change.

02:11:48.620 | This is poor countries.

02:11:49.580 | This is Saudi Arabia.

02:11:51.420 | No, that's actually not a terribly poor country.

02:11:54.180 | It's China, it's Indonesia, it's Russia.

02:11:58.300 | It's places where you're basically paying off

02:12:01.100 | your population, just like that you subsidize bread,

02:12:03.820 | you make sure that they don't rebel

02:12:05.340 | by making cheap fuels available.

02:12:08.220 | That's dumb, but it's not like they don't know

02:12:11.260 | what they're doing.

02:12:12.080 | They're mostly doing this for things

02:12:13.300 | that have nothing to do with climate.

02:12:15.020 | So I totally agree we should get rid of it.

02:12:17.300 | It's hard to do.

02:12:18.260 | Indonesia's actually somewhat managed to get rid of it,

02:12:22.020 | because remember, if you spend a lot of money

02:12:23.780 | on fossil fuel subsidies,

02:12:25.140 | you're basically subsidizing the rich,

02:12:26.980 | because poor people don't have a car.

02:12:29.220 | It's the rich people who can now buy very cheap gasoline.

02:12:33.300 | That's unjust as well.

02:12:35.860 | So it's dumb in so many different ways.

02:12:38.100 | I would never argue that you shouldn't do it.

02:12:40.180 | I've plenty of times said we should stop that,

02:12:43.380 | but we should also recognize these are mostly regimes

02:12:46.300 | that are not going to be taken over

02:12:48.260 | either by my argument or Bob Ward's or anyone else's.

02:12:51.180 | They're doing this for totally different reasons.

02:12:53.580 | Now, on the model side, there is virtually no model

02:12:58.580 | that don't show, economic model,

02:13:00.540 | that don't show this has a cost.

02:13:02.260 | And that's the fundamental point is that the,

02:13:05.940 | this is sort of a basic point from economics.

02:13:08.680 | The system is already working most effectively,

02:13:11.260 | because if it wasn't,

02:13:12.660 | you could actually make money changing over.

02:13:15.100 | So if you want to have a change outside

02:13:17.860 | of what the system is already doing,

02:13:19.580 | it's because you're saying you have to do something

02:13:21.620 | that you'd rather not want to do,

02:13:23.340 | namely use an energy source that is less convenient

02:13:25.780 | or less cost-effective and so on.

02:13:28.460 | And that will incur a cost.

02:13:30.560 | Now there's huge discussion about just exactly

02:13:33.260 | how much cost is that.

02:13:34.540 | So there's definitely a cost.

02:13:36.240 | Is the cost going to be one or 5 trillion?

02:13:38.780 | That's absolutely a discussion about

02:13:40.740 | where do you take your models from?

02:13:42.060 | I try to do, and again, this is not possible everywhere.

02:13:45.540 | I try to actually take the average

02:13:47.900 | of all of the economic models.

02:13:49.820 | So there's a group called

02:13:51.460 | the Stanford Energy Modeling Forum,

02:13:53.000 | which tries to pull together all these different groups

02:13:56.220 | that do the modeling.

02:13:57.140 | So some models, a lot of this cost actually comes down to

02:14:00.620 | the fact that we don't quite know how much more

02:14:04.500 | fossil fuels you're going to need in the future.

02:14:06.740 | And so if you're projections are

02:14:09.000 | you're not going to use that much,

02:14:10.520 | the cost of reducing it is going to be very small.

02:14:12.820 | If you think you're going to use a ton of extra fossil fuels

02:14:16.500 | and you have to reduce that,

02:14:17.700 | the cost is going to be bigger.

02:14:19.220 | So I think-

02:14:20.060 | - That's just one of the variables.

02:14:21.740 | - Oh yeah, yeah.

02:14:22.580 | - And there's many, many, many more.

02:14:24.700 | - I think the point here is to say

02:14:26.780 | that if you take the average of all the best modelists

02:14:30.540 | that sort of aggregate it,

02:14:31.620 | for instance, at the Stanford Energy Modeling Forum,

02:14:34.160 | you're pretty secure ground.

02:14:36.460 | So again, I would argue that Bob Ward,

02:14:41.500 | yes, I've had a lot of run-ins with Bob Ward,

02:14:44.920 | and he has a very different set of views on things,

02:14:49.840 | but I just don't think he's right in saying

02:14:52.260 | that I'm cherry picking.

02:14:53.340 | - Well, yes.

02:14:54.180 | And I mean, he also has similar criticism

02:14:56.420 | about the estimate of the EU cost of climate action

02:14:59.860 | based on the NOP 2013 model.

02:15:04.300 | But ultimately these criticisms have to do is like,

02:15:06.740 | what are the sources for the different models?

02:15:09.620 | - And just very briefly,

02:15:10.780 | I mean, I'm laying it out very transparently

02:15:12.980 | where I get these models,

02:15:14.340 | where I get these estimates from in the book.

02:15:16.380 | I've really tried to document this.

02:15:18.180 | And yes, I mean, look,

02:15:19.740 | there's nobody who sort of has all the information

02:15:22.980 | and gets everything right in all of these areas.

02:15:26.220 | I think most of Bob Ward's argument

02:15:29.780 | is not a good faith effort

02:15:34.260 | to sort of improve on these estimates.

02:15:38.580 | He's right in saying some of these estimates,

02:15:40.900 | we only have a few estimates.

02:15:42.880 | And yeah, I'd like to have more of them.

02:15:45.700 | One thing I should mention is

02:15:47.660 | that there is very little interest in general

02:15:50.060 | and there's very little funding

02:15:51.620 | in finding out how much do our climate policies cost?

02:15:55.380 | Because that's just inconvenient to everyone

02:15:58.180 | in the whole game.

02:15:59.540 | Who wants to know that, for instance,

02:16:02.440 | would you want to fund something that says

02:16:06.340 | that the Inflation Reduction Act

02:16:08.020 | is not gonna be very effective?

02:16:09.640 | Of course you don't want to do that, right?

02:16:11.740 | So again, it's a little bit the flock of birds

02:16:15.500 | will look at something else.

02:16:17.540 | And what I think is that given that we're paying for it,

02:16:20.940 | and this is public money,

02:16:22.980 | we're deciding we're gonna spend money here

02:16:24.740 | rather than there,

02:16:25.720 | let's at least look at what are the best estimates out there.

02:16:28.800 | I would love to have more estimates.

02:16:31.180 | More estimates is always better.

02:16:32.420 | - And just a quick comment on the good faith part.

02:16:35.780 | Me as a consumer looking for truth,

02:16:38.060 | it's hard to find who's good faith and not.

02:16:40.460 | So it's not only are you looking for

02:16:42.460 | sort of accurate information,

02:16:46.380 | you're also trying to infer

02:16:48.300 | about the communicator of that information.

02:16:50.940 | And it's very difficult.

02:16:52.280 | - You put me on the podcast.

02:16:55.820 | Of course I'm gonna say I'm a trustworthy guy.

02:16:58.700 | - Well, I mean, and we believe we're trustworthy too,

02:17:02.980 | but I've been reading for various reasons,

02:17:07.980 | but mostly because I've been traveling to Ukraine

02:17:10.260 | and thinking just about the people suffering through war.

02:17:15.580 | I've been reading a lot about World War II

02:17:17.260 | and Stalin and Hitler.

02:17:19.220 | And from the perspective of Hitler,

02:17:21.800 | he really believed he's doing good for the world.

02:17:28.460 | And he was communicating from his perspective in good faith.

02:17:33.320 | He started to believe, I think, early on,

02:17:36.260 | his own propaganda.

02:17:37.340 | So even your understanding and perception

02:17:40.620 | of the world completely shifted.

02:17:41.780 | So it's very, very, very difficult

02:17:44.780 | to understand who to trust.

02:17:46.520 | And just because it's a consensus in a particular community

02:17:52.540 | doesn't necessarily mean it's a source of trust.

02:17:54.820 | So it's, I mean, basically,

02:17:57.960 | I don't know how to operate in this world

02:18:01.220 | except to have a humility

02:18:02.620 | and constantly questioning your assumptions.

02:18:05.780 | But not so much that you're completely out in the ocean,

02:18:08.900 | not knowing what is true and not.

02:18:10.840 | So it's this weird, weird world.

02:18:13.140 | Because I ultimately, bigger than climate,

02:18:16.540 | my hope is to have institutions that can be trusted.

02:18:22.420 | And that's been very much under attack

02:18:25.140 | as part of the climate debate,

02:18:28.620 | as part of the COVID debate,

02:18:31.200 | as part of all these discussions.

02:18:33.180 | And science, to me, is one of the sources of truth.

02:18:37.740 | And the fact that that's under question now

02:18:39.760 | is something that hurts me on many levels.

02:18:43.020 | Deeply.

02:18:44.100 | - You said something earlier,

02:18:45.260 | I took a note down here and I can't find it,

02:18:47.580 | about cooperation.

02:18:48.620 | It was like collaborative cooperation or something like that?

02:18:51.340 | - Sure.

02:18:52.460 | - To me, there was a point, like in 2013,

02:18:56.200 | after just dealing with everything

02:18:58.460 | you've been grappling with,

02:18:59.820 | if you know you don't know how this is gonna work out,

02:19:05.380 | what do you work on?

02:19:06.380 | And one morning I made a list of words

02:19:10.180 | that kind of summarized basically system properties

02:19:13.860 | that give you confidence in a system, trust.

02:19:17.020 | And transparency is one, just as you were saying earlier.

02:19:21.740 | Connectivity is another, so everyone's connected.

02:19:28.380 | So on the subsidy issue, for example,

02:19:31.400 | there are young entrepreneurs in Nairobi

02:19:35.500 | who are selling ingeniously using

02:19:38.260 | Nairobi's digital currency, propane,

02:19:41.460 | the fuel that's in our backyard barbecue grills,

02:19:44.720 | which comes out of gas wells, but it's a separate fuel,

02:19:47.520 | in little increments that poor people

02:19:50.040 | can use instead of charcoal.

02:19:51.560 | And LPG subsidies are helping them

02:19:56.700 | get people off of charcoal, which is a horrific trade

02:20:01.120 | from the source through the warlords in Somalia

02:20:05.020 | and elsewhere who are getting the money

02:20:07.420 | to the pollution in houses.

02:20:09.580 | So being sure when we're having these big debates

02:20:14.140 | about who the World Bank is gonna give loans to,

02:20:17.500 | and drawing a simple line, no more fossil fuel subsidies,

02:20:20.860 | hurts a really good, valuable,

02:20:24.440 | small-scale but scalable way to have people

02:20:29.880 | not die from cooking smoke in their houses

02:20:31.760 | and take down forests.

02:20:34.220 | But that only is considered if they're in the conversation.

02:20:37.020 | So connectivity, full connectivity, digital access,

02:20:40.080 | so those entrepreneurs are in the mix of people,

02:20:42.900 | when they're thinking about subsidies,

02:20:44.180 | you're not just thinking about Big Bad Exxon,

02:20:45.660 | you're thinking about this little company

02:20:47.820 | in Nairobi, Pago LPG, I think is the name,

02:20:51.260 | and India, the same thing.

02:20:52.500 | So you can list those properties of systems.

02:20:55.340 | And the IPCC wasn't originally transparent

02:20:59.100 | when I started writing about it in 1988 and 1990,

02:21:03.820 | and now it's way more transparent.

02:21:05.340 | They have more public review.

02:21:06.780 | So it's even better than it was.

02:21:09.540 | It's like a really good example of a science process

02:21:12.300 | of assessing the science,

02:21:14.020 | providing periodic output to the world,

02:21:16.800 | and iteratively improving the model going forward

02:21:20.140 | because of critique, because of scrutiny,

02:21:23.680 | and finding better ways for that to interface with people

02:21:26.620 | so they have information they can use from that big thing.

02:21:28.860 | And the media are not doing a good job

02:21:32.700 | because of this front-page thotism.

02:21:35.360 | But we can all, I work partially in academia, Columbia,

02:21:40.460 | on an initiative partially in communication innovation.

02:21:43.460 | Like how can we have an open landscape

02:21:45.980 | of access to information that matters?

02:21:47.460 | How can you, what can you do

02:21:48.940 | to foster better conversations

02:21:51.180 | so that words like collapse

02:21:52.380 | aren't just thrown around like emblems?

02:21:54.660 | And so system properties give you confidence, I think.

02:21:58.380 | And then you don't have to be flailing around

02:22:01.120 | for Bjorn or Tom Friedman or Catherine Hayhoe.

02:22:06.120 | You can always, right now, find your character to follow.

02:22:11.620 | But I think what would be better

02:22:13.620 | is if you actually develop some skills

02:22:15.420 | to just have a basic ability to know how to cut to the chase.

02:22:19.420 | - Can I just follow up on that?

02:22:21.660 | Because one of the things that I try to do,

02:22:23.700 | and so my day job is actually something else I work with,

02:22:26.900 | I think called the Copenhagen Consensus,

02:22:29.700 | where we work with more than 300

02:22:31.440 | of the world's top economists,

02:22:32.520 | and we've worked with seven Nobel laureates in economics.

02:22:35.280 | And the point there is really to talk about

02:22:38.240 | where can you spend a dollar

02:22:40.160 | and do the most good for the world?

02:22:42.720 | That's basically the thing that we try to do.

02:22:46.240 | And as you rightly point out,

02:22:48.480 | look, there are lots of different estimates

02:22:50.440 | of what can you do, for instance, on climate?

02:22:52.400 | What can you do on tuberculosis?

02:22:54.560 | What can you do for vulnerability

02:22:56.900 | in all kinds of different ways?

02:22:58.960 | And if these were all sort of,

02:23:00.920 | well, you can spend a dollar here and do 2.36,

02:23:04.640 | but you can spend a dollar here and do 2.34 over here,

02:23:08.560 | I would worry a lot.

02:23:09.520 | But that's not how the world works,

02:23:11.280 | because we're terribly inefficient.

02:23:13.840 | So there are literally lots and lots

02:23:16.520 | of amazing things you can do out there.

02:23:18.640 | - There's a lot of low-hanging fruit.

02:23:20.080 | - And there's a lot of not terribly great things

02:23:23.000 | that you can do.

02:23:24.020 | And unfortunately, one of the things

02:23:25.800 | I try to sort of battle is that,

02:23:28.360 | we get a lot of things right.

02:23:29.480 | That's why the world is a lot better

02:23:31.160 | than what it used to be.

02:23:32.720 | But the things that are sort of left over

02:23:35.320 | are often the boring things

02:23:37.760 | that happen to be incredibly effective

02:23:39.480 | and the exciting things that are often

02:23:41.320 | not that terribly effective.

02:23:43.640 | And so I think one way to look at this

02:23:46.560 | is basically to have people do cost-benefit

02:23:49.160 | across a wide range of areas.

02:23:50.680 | And we try to get a lot of different economists to do this,

02:23:53.160 | and they come up with different numbers

02:23:54.760 | and different models and different results.

02:23:56.800 | But if you sort of consistently get that some things

02:23:59.680 | give you in tens or maybe even hundreds of dollars

02:24:02.720 | back per dollar,

02:24:04.120 | remember this is not actually you getting rich,

02:24:06.000 | it's the world getting rich.

02:24:07.200 | It's that the world gets better worth $100

02:24:10.960 | for every dollar you spend.

02:24:12.560 | And over here, you can spend a dollar

02:24:14.240 | and do somewhere between 30 cents

02:24:15.920 | and maybe a couple of dollars.

02:24:17.800 | You should probably be focused

02:24:19.040 | on the other opportunity first.

02:24:20.800 | And that's really the point that I try to make with climate.

02:24:23.520 | There are some smart things we can do,

02:24:25.040 | and I hope we get to talk about them in climate.

02:24:28.560 | But there's also a lot of sort of the standard approaches

02:24:31.280 | to fixing climate turns out to be very likely

02:24:35.080 | below $1 back in dollar,

02:24:36.880 | and certainly not terribly high.

02:24:38.880 | Even if you're very optimistic, it'll be like two or three.

02:24:41.640 | Whereas many other things

02:24:43.600 | are just fantastically better investment.

02:24:46.400 | - Like the thing I've been advocating,

02:24:48.320 | a modest proposal to eat the children of the poor in England.

02:24:53.400 | Was that in Jonathan Swift's modest proposal

02:24:56.960 | from a few centuries ago?

02:24:58.680 | So it's not just cost benefit,

02:25:02.560 | it's also in the context of what is moral

02:25:05.440 | and the full complexity of it.

02:25:08.480 | - You just hit on something really important.

02:25:10.160 | Having been on this beat for so long,

02:25:11.520 | and again, on the disaster beat as well, earthquakes.

02:25:14.440 | I can't tell you how many disaster science experts

02:25:18.100 | keep telling me, like everyone says,

02:25:20.160 | preparedness, invest for preparedness.

02:25:22.520 | A strict cost benefit analysis will always tell you

02:25:24.800 | a dollar invested in resilience

02:25:27.860 | before a community gets hit by whatever is worth 10.

02:25:32.000 | You'll always have to spend 10 after.

02:25:33.720 | And so it's fine to do the cost benefit stuff,

02:25:36.100 | but it's just the baseline.

02:25:38.120 | Then you have to look at the social science,

02:25:40.200 | which shows, or history,

02:25:42.100 | which shows you how few times we do it.

02:25:44.860 | It's like, we just don't do it.

02:25:46.320 | Therefore, you can bang that drum.

02:25:49.240 | Your work is valuable, but it's really constrained.

02:25:52.260 | Because show me in the world where that does happen,

02:25:56.820 | and then how you turn that success,

02:25:59.560 | which is basically something not happening,

02:26:02.200 | into a story.

02:26:03.040 | - So, just very briefly, we try to,

02:26:06.000 | so we do this for a lot of countries.

02:26:07.840 | So we did it for Haiti, for instance,

02:26:10.320 | funded by the Canadian Development Ministry,

02:26:13.920 | because they're basically saying,

02:26:15.320 | we've spent a billion dollars in Haiti since the earthquake,

02:26:17.860 | and we really can't tell the difference.

02:26:19.840 | So they want it to find,

02:26:21.280 | I mean, they actually say that, right?

02:26:22.740 | And so they said, we want to find out

02:26:24.660 | what are the really smart things you can do in Haiti.

02:26:27.440 | And so we, together with lots of people in Haiti,

02:26:31.420 | and all the business community, and the political community,

02:26:34.320 | and the religious community, and labor community,

02:26:36.820 | and everybody else, what are the smart things to do?

02:26:39.500 | And then we had economists evaluate it.

02:26:41.540 | And there are a lot of these things that everybody wanted

02:26:43.740 | that were not all that smart.

02:26:45.420 | There's actually a lot of smart things.

02:26:47.460 | And yes, the politicians didn't pick most of them.

02:26:50.300 | So our sense is, we try to give people,

02:26:53.740 | you're thinking about these 70 things,

02:26:56.180 | you should actually just think about these 20 things.

02:26:59.040 | And then we consider ourselves incredibly lucky

02:27:01.420 | if they actually do one of them.

02:27:02.980 | - So you wrote the book,

02:27:04.060 | "How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place."

02:27:08.140 | So can we just list some of the things?

02:27:11.460 | If you got $75 billion, how do you spend them?

02:27:16.180 | - All right, so there's some incredibly good

02:27:18.600 | and very, very well-documented things

02:27:20.500 | that you could spend money on.

02:27:21.820 | So we have two big infectious diseases

02:27:24.980 | that almost nobody think about,

02:27:27.100 | because we only think about COVID.

02:27:30.020 | But tuberculosis used to be

02:27:32.180 | the world's biggest infectious disease killer.

02:27:34.820 | It still kills about 1.5 million people every year.

02:27:38.460 | The reason why we don't really worry about it

02:27:41.580 | is because we fixed it 100 years ago.

02:27:44.600 | We know how to fix it.

02:27:46.220 | It's just basically getting medication to people.

02:27:49.280 | It's also about getting them to take it

02:27:50.920 | while when they're sort of been cured,

02:27:53.080 | because you need to take it for four to six months,

02:27:55.280 | and that's actually hard to do.

02:27:56.780 | So you also need to incentivize that in some kind of way.

02:27:59.560 | It turns out it's incredibly cheap

02:28:01.820 | to basically save almost all of the 1.5 million people.

02:28:05.460 | These are people that die in the prime of their lives.

02:28:08.680 | They're typically parents,

02:28:09.680 | so it also have a lot of knock-on effects.

02:28:12.080 | And basically we find for a couple billion dollars,

02:28:14.920 | you could save the vast number of these.

02:28:16.820 | Not all of them,

02:28:17.660 | but you could save the vast number of them.

02:28:19.000 | It would also improve outcomes in all kinds of other ways.

02:28:22.220 | Likewise with malaria, another,

02:28:24.460 | it has somewhat better PR.

02:28:27.540 | - It's funny to think of malaria as PR,

02:28:30.380 | and tuberculosis not.

02:28:31.500 | They need to improve their PR department.

02:28:33.300 | (laughing)

02:28:34.340 | Those mosquitoes are the good PR.

02:28:36.700 | - By far the biggest infectious disease

02:28:39.740 | that got good PR, if you will, was HIV.

02:28:44.700 | And I'm not trying to compare it and say,

02:28:46.460 | oh, it's worse or better to have HIV

02:28:49.080 | than tuberculosis or anything.

02:28:51.280 | But I'm simply saying we are underfunding

02:28:53.240 | because it doesn't really get the public attention.

02:28:57.680 | We just, you know, we don't really care.

02:28:58.520 | - But spending money on that has,

02:29:00.800 | in terms of benefit, a much bigger impact than other.

02:29:02.880 | - So every dollar you spend on TB

02:29:05.900 | will probably do about $43 worth of good.

02:29:08.980 | So it'll do an amazing amount of good,

02:29:10.680 | basically because it'll save lives,

02:29:12.280 | it'll make sure parents stay with their kids

02:29:14.680 | and be more productive in their communities,

02:29:17.200 | and it'll have a lot of knock-on effects.

02:29:19.520 | And it's incredibly cheap to do.

02:29:21.960 | Same thing with malaria.

02:29:23.600 | It's mostly mosquito nets that we need to get out.

02:29:26.240 | - And you're saying, just to contrast with climate change,

02:29:29.040 | the dollar you spend on, no, not climate change,

02:29:32.120 | but decreasing emissions does not have,

02:29:35.400 | does not come close to the $43 benefit?

02:29:38.040 | - No, nobody would ever argue that.

02:29:40.440 | So very, very enthusiastic climate advocates

02:29:44.480 | would probably say it'll do $2 or $3

02:29:47.040 | worth of good for every dollar.

02:29:48.280 | So, you know, it's still worthwhile to do.

02:29:50.200 | That's what they would say.

02:29:51.460 | I would argue, and I think a lot of the evidence

02:29:53.800 | seems to side that way,

02:29:55.240 | that a lot of the things that we're doing

02:29:56.920 | deliver actually less than a dollar back.

02:29:59.760 | But it's certainly not nearly the same kind of place.

02:30:03.160 | But there's many, many other things.

02:30:05.040 | And, you know, just if you'll allow me to.

02:30:07.440 | - Yes, please, I love this.

02:30:08.880 | - But yeah, there are lots of other things,

02:30:11.160 | for instance, e-procurement.

02:30:13.720 | So, you know, it's incredibly boring.

02:30:16.480 | So most developing countries,

02:30:18.560 | well, actually most governments,

02:30:20.000 | spend most of their money on procurement,

02:30:21.880 | is typically incredibly corrupt.

02:30:24.320 | So we did this project for Bangladesh where-

02:30:27.280 | - Can you explain procurement?

02:30:28.360 | - Yes, so that's governments buying stuff.

02:30:31.880 | So a large part of the government revenue

02:30:34.920 | is spent on buying anything from, you know,

02:30:37.280 | post-it notes to roads.

02:30:39.320 | And obviously, you know, roads are much,

02:30:41.240 | much more expensive.

02:30:42.440 | It's mostly infrastructure stuff.

02:30:44.600 | Hugely corrupt.

02:30:46.080 | For instance, in Bangladesh,

02:30:47.540 | it would already have been decided among the ruling elite

02:30:51.240 | in that local area, who's gonna get this.

02:30:54.020 | So they'll have this bidding competition

02:30:56.200 | where you have to hand in an envelope,

02:30:58.080 | a sealed envelope with your bid on it.

02:31:00.520 | But you put a goon outside the office.

02:31:03.760 | So you literally physically can't get in

02:31:06.120 | with your bid.

02:31:08.440 | Now, what we found, and this is, you know,

02:31:11.080 | I'm not claiming any sort of ownership to this.

02:31:14.260 | A lot of smart people have done this way before.

02:31:16.440 | We're just simply proving that it's a good idea.

02:31:18.840 | It turns out that if you put this on eBay, essentially,

02:31:22.500 | so if you do an e-procurement system

02:31:24.800 | where bidders can come in,

02:31:26.840 | suddenly it becomes harder to put up the goon.

02:31:29.480 | You can still do it, but it's harder to do it.

02:31:32.080 | It also means you get bids from all over Bangladesh.

02:31:35.480 | And in general, you'll get bids from all over.

02:31:38.760 | Actually, it turns out you get better quality,

02:31:41.000 | but most important is you get it much cheaper.

02:31:44.240 | So basically, you can simply save money.

02:31:46.580 | So we did a scaled experiment in Bangladesh

02:31:49.360 | where we had about 4% go to be e-procurement,

02:31:53.240 | and you could compare what it would have cost

02:31:55.440 | and then what it did cost.

02:31:57.120 | And the average reduction was, as I remember, it's 7%.

02:32:01.160 | And the finance minister loved it, you know,

02:32:03.560 | because that basically gives him a lot more money,

02:32:06.160 | or you can buy more stuff at the same cost.

02:32:08.720 | - No, it is just corruption.

02:32:10.600 | - So it's basically you get rid of some corruption.

02:32:13.560 | There'll still be corruption, but less corruption.

02:32:16.000 | Ukraine has actually been big on this.

02:32:18.160 | - Yeah, I've talked to them.

02:32:19.160 | I talked to the digital transformation minister.

02:32:21.660 | It's kind of incredible.

02:32:22.760 | I mean, this is before the war, but still working.

02:32:26.220 | It's like the entirety of the government is in an app.

02:32:30.800 | And that, one of the big effects

02:32:33.800 | is the reduction of corruption.

02:32:36.160 | And not like from, as politicians say,

02:32:39.480 | to say we've reduced,

02:32:40.640 | we've taken these actions to reduce corruption.

02:32:42.400 | No, literally, it's just much more difficult to be corrupt.

02:32:45.840 | - Yeah.

02:32:46.840 | - The incentives aren't quite there,

02:32:48.280 | and there's friction for corruption.

02:32:51.240 | - Yeah. - Oh, yeah, yeah.

02:32:52.080 | So basically, you can spend a little bit of money,

02:32:55.560 | and you can make a huge benefit.

02:32:57.140 | There's still about 70 countries

02:32:58.520 | that haven't gone e-procurement.

02:32:59.960 | So obviously, they should do that.

02:33:02.040 | Food for small kids, another thing.

02:33:04.160 | So basically, it's morally wrong that people are starving,

02:33:09.120 | but it also turns out that it's a really, really dumb thing

02:33:13.240 | not to get kids good food.

02:33:15.080 | Because if you get them good food,

02:33:17.000 | their brains develop more,

02:33:18.560 | so that when they get into school, they learn more.

02:33:21.400 | And so when they come out in adult lives,

02:33:23.760 | they're much more productive.

02:33:25.200 | So we can actually make every kid,

02:33:28.720 | especially in developing countries,

02:33:30.280 | much more productive by making sure they get good food.

02:33:33.200 | So getting good food is not cost-free.

02:33:35.400 | So it probably costs about $100,

02:33:37.960 | both in you need some directed advertisement,

02:33:41.800 | you need to make sure

02:33:42.640 | that you actually get some of the food out there,

02:33:44.900 | that you help the families,

02:33:46.020 | and you also make sure you don't just give it to everyone,

02:33:48.180 | because then it becomes a lot more expensive.

02:33:50.400 | If you do that right, it costs about $100 per kid, but-

02:33:54.040 | - Per kid, or what do you do?

02:33:56.040 | - For two years, so it's for their first two years of life.

02:33:59.040 | And if you do that, you then get a benefit

02:34:03.720 | in that they become smarter and go longer to school,

02:34:06.480 | and they actually learn more

02:34:07.640 | and become more productive of $4,500.

02:34:11.260 | Remember, this is far into the future.

02:34:13.680 | So this is discounted, the benefit is actually much higher.

02:34:16.960 | And this is one of the things

02:34:18.040 | that we also have a conversation about in climate change,

02:34:20.760 | because all, and when you talk about climate change,

02:34:23.520 | cost and benefits, all the costs are now,

02:34:25.520 | and all the benefits are in the future,

02:34:27.160 | but it's just like that in education.

02:34:29.080 | You know, all the costs are now,

02:34:30.760 | all the benefits are far into the future.

02:34:33.200 | And if you try to do that right,

02:34:34.720 | and that's a whole other conversation we could have,

02:34:38.120 | then it turns out that for every dollar spent,

02:34:40.640 | you do $45 worth of good.

02:34:42.720 | Again, remember, about a third of all kids

02:34:46.420 | that go to school right now

02:34:47.920 | just don't learn pretty much anything.

02:34:50.380 | And if we could make them more productive

02:34:53.700 | in the school system, we have another proposal

02:34:55.740 | on how to do that in the school system.

02:34:57.860 | But, you know, by just simply making sure

02:34:59.720 | that they're smarter when they get into school.

02:35:02.800 | We've been focusing so much

02:35:04.040 | on making the education system better,

02:35:06.320 | which is really hard,

02:35:07.580 | but it's actually really easy to make the kids smarter.

02:35:10.840 | - Then when you say the education system

02:35:12.560 | is not working well,

02:35:13.800 | we're talking about not the American education system,

02:35:16.680 | we're talking about globally.

02:35:17.680 | - Yes, we're talking about globally.

02:35:19.080 | You know, so about a third of the teachers

02:35:21.160 | in developing countries have a hard time passing the tests

02:35:24.620 | of the things they have to teach their students, right?

02:35:27.220 | And, you know, all these students have lots of other issues.

02:35:30.300 | You know, they need to do farm work,

02:35:33.300 | they're constantly considering,

02:35:37.180 | should I just go out and start working instead?

02:35:39.480 | You know, there's constant disruption.

02:35:42.300 | There's a lot of teachers that don't show up.

02:35:43.900 | In India, you know, you have this absurd situation

02:35:47.380 | where all the teachers are basically paid

02:35:50.440 | and hired for eternity, for the rest of their lives.

02:35:53.420 | And so not surprisingly, a lot of them decide not to show up.

02:35:56.380 | So now they've hired assistant teachers

02:36:00.220 | that basically have taken over.

02:36:01.580 | So they're paying, you know,

02:36:02.660 | for I think it's 7 million teachers that,

02:36:05.820 | I'm not saying they're all not working,

02:36:08.300 | but a lot of them are not working as much as they should.

02:36:10.900 | And we've now hired another 7 million teachers

02:36:13.700 | that will eventually, you know, stop working as well.

02:36:16.660 | They're working much better right now

02:36:18.260 | because they're not on permanent contracts,

02:36:21.600 | but eventually they'll get on permanent contracts

02:36:23.520 | and then you have the same problem again.

02:36:24.800 | There's lots of these issues.

02:36:26.480 | And, you know, it's just simply about saying,

02:36:28.320 | we can't fix all problems,

02:36:29.920 | but there are some problems that are incredibly easy to solve

02:36:32.800 | and there are some that are incredibly hard to solve.

02:36:35.200 | Why don't we start with solving the easy and effective ones?

02:36:38.640 | And this of course bears on that whole conversation

02:36:40.960 | on climate change, because in some ways, you know,

02:36:43.400 | that's also Andy's point of saying,

02:36:45.240 | look, if you want to save people

02:36:47.180 | from the impacts of hurricanes,

02:36:48.780 | let's fix this simple, easy things about vulnerability first

02:36:52.660 | whereas we have somehow latched onto this,

02:36:55.120 | let's fix the hardest thing to do,

02:36:57.580 | which is to get everyone to stop using fossil fuels,

02:37:00.500 | which is basically what's driven

02:37:02.500 | the last 200 years of development.

02:37:05.060 | That's gonna be, that's a tall order,

02:37:07.100 | no matter how you look at it.

02:37:08.940 | - There's some really cool elements

02:37:10.580 | that you guys just brought up.

02:37:12.740 | When you mentioned that word moral before,

02:37:14.300 | I wasn't, I latched onto it because it relates

02:37:17.320 | to these timescales that really are immeasurable.

02:37:21.640 | If you know it's gonna take decades

02:37:23.320 | to confirm the benefit of some investment now,

02:37:27.960 | that implies you're doing the investment

02:37:30.020 | with some moral imperative,

02:37:33.000 | not because you can do a spreadsheet

02:37:36.800 | and come up with a number.

02:37:38.580 | And that process, letting go of the need

02:37:43.540 | for kind of a mechanistic cost-benefit approach

02:37:46.760 | and thinking about kids' education in poor countries

02:37:49.280 | or several things we talk about,

02:37:51.880 | seems to be really important

02:37:52.920 | and it's very hard for all of us to do.

02:37:55.040 | Philanthropists suck at it.

02:37:57.080 | I worked at National Geographic Society for a year

02:37:59.120 | building some new programs

02:38:00.320 | when they got a big infusion of money.

02:38:02.420 | They have a whole department that's called M&E,

02:38:04.800 | it's measurement and evaluation,

02:38:06.440 | which is if you don't prove it, it goes away.

02:38:10.220 | I mentioned Spotify earlier,

02:38:11.720 | Spotify killing a climate podcast

02:38:13.740 | because that podcast didn't measure out for their impact,

02:38:18.740 | what they wanna do.

02:38:20.260 | And if we're always making the judgments

02:38:22.920 | based on strict cost-benefit,

02:38:24.380 | we're gonna miss larger realities.

02:38:28.020 | Another thing is, a really exciting example

02:38:30.820 | of what you're talking about

02:38:32.300 | in terms of in Ukraine with the trust

02:38:34.700 | and lack of less corruption and stuff was in India.

02:38:39.420 | For all of his issues, Modi recognized

02:38:44.340 | that middle-class people in India cook on LPG, propane,

02:38:48.060 | or on piped gas, natural gas if they're in cities.

02:38:51.260 | Much cleaner, much healthier in so many ways.

02:38:55.460 | And actually, compared to chopping down trees

02:38:58.100 | and cooking on wood, it's actually better for the climate,

02:39:00.820 | even though it's a fossil fuel.

02:39:02.740 | So he and others, there was an American scientist,

02:39:06.060 | Kirk Smith, who worked this all out.

02:39:07.860 | If you find a way, they were getting a subsidy.

02:39:12.220 | They had that energy subsidy.

02:39:13.740 | You were talking about many poor countries

02:39:15.900 | subsidize energy just to stay in office,

02:39:18.700 | to make something cheap that everyone wants.

02:39:21.520 | But they wanted to shift the subsidy

02:39:22.900 | away from the middle class to the poor people

02:39:25.740 | who are cooking on firewood and dying young from pneumonia.

02:39:29.460 | And the critical factor was India's digital currency.

02:39:35.020 | India went to a digital economy.

02:39:37.660 | Very poor families there now.

02:39:38.980 | If you have a phone, basically that's your bank.

02:39:42.180 | And you could make the case to the public

02:39:44.700 | that we're gonna be starting to shift your LPG,

02:39:48.900 | your propane subsidy to poor people.

02:39:51.660 | But we know they're poor.

02:39:53.020 | We know they're not just gonna be using it

02:39:55.700 | behind their restaurant, which was,

02:39:58.100 | when it was a general subsidy, people were hoarding the LPG.

02:40:02.700 | And the system has worked.

02:40:04.480 | They've shifted a lot of capacity

02:40:07.420 | to cook on a clean blue flame that turns off and on

02:40:11.100 | in homes that previously,

02:40:12.460 | where the woman would spend hours collecting firewood,

02:40:15.380 | smoky fire, cooking, clean the pots,

02:40:17.660 | and start all over again.

02:40:19.580 | But it's all built on trust, built on the digital economy,

02:40:22.460 | and the same thing in Nairobi.

02:40:24.180 | So that excites me every day, with all the doomism.

02:40:28.140 | I just hope people can literally take a breath,

02:40:33.260 | look for these examples that show the potential

02:40:37.040 | when you have a trustworthy system,

02:40:39.520 | when you have a clear path to making lives better.

02:40:42.600 | And then knowing that kid having electric light

02:40:47.240 | as opposed to a kerosene lamp.

02:40:49.280 | We don't know how much that's gonna improve his homework

02:40:52.760 | and lead to a better outcome.

02:40:54.320 | But we know from history that sometimes it does.

02:40:56.920 | Ban Ki-moon, former Secretary General,

02:40:58.600 | told the most powerful story I ever heard from a UN.

02:41:01.840 | Secretary General, it was like 2012

02:41:04.060 | when they were rolling out

02:41:05.900 | this Sustainable Energy for All initiative,

02:41:08.080 | which is not just climate,

02:41:09.380 | it was just getting people energy

02:41:10.940 | they need to survive and thrive.

02:41:14.180 | He was growing up in post-war Korea.

02:41:16.600 | Everyone was poor, everything was broken, destroyed.

02:41:20.580 | Sadly, like so many parts of Ukraine.

02:41:24.540 | And he would do his homework by kerosene lamp.

02:41:27.960 | He said when he was studying for his finals,

02:41:30.740 | his mom would give him a candle

02:41:32.340 | 'cause it was a brighter flame,

02:41:35.340 | better grades maybe.

02:41:37.740 | And he became Secretary General.

02:41:39.340 | - That's a hell of a story.

02:41:42.180 | So which,

02:41:45.860 | for climate change, which policies work, which don't?

02:41:52.040 | Which are, when we look at this formula of $1 in,

02:41:57.540 | $45 out, for climate change,

02:42:01.100 | what dollar in, what policies for dollar in

02:42:05.220 | and dollar out are good and which are not?

02:42:08.260 | - So we actually did a whole project back in 2009

02:42:13.060 | when the whole world circus was coming to Copenhagen

02:42:17.180 | and we were gonna save the world there.

02:42:19.620 | We brought together about 50 climate economists

02:42:22.500 | and three Nobel laureates to look at

02:42:24.180 | where can you spend a dollar

02:42:25.180 | and do the most good for climate?

02:42:26.980 | And what they found was a lot of these things

02:42:29.140 | as we've been talking about before,

02:42:30.820 | that basically investing in the current sort of technology

02:42:34.740 | that we're trying very hard is at best

02:42:38.140 | a pretty dicey outcome.

02:42:41.100 | Much of it is probably less than a dollar back in the dollar.

02:42:44.220 | There's some investments on adaptation, for instance,

02:42:48.900 | that's pretty good, but it's sort of two, $3

02:42:51.420 | back in the dollar.

02:42:52.380 | - Oh, what is adaptation?

02:42:53.680 | - The obvious thing is that you build a dike

02:42:55.660 | for a sea level rise or that you make people,

02:42:59.100 | you get some apps that people know

02:43:01.140 | that there's a hurricane coming or that,

02:43:04.100 | so you can adapt--

02:43:04.940 | - Adapting infrastructure, right?

02:43:05.940 | - Yes.

02:43:06.780 | - The physical and the digital infrastructure.

02:43:08.980 | - The point is that people are really good

02:43:10.580 | at doing this already

02:43:12.180 | because they have a strong incentive to do it.

02:43:13.940 | So the extra thing that governments can do outside

02:43:16.820 | is somewhat good, but it's not amazing or anything.

02:43:19.620 | What we found by far the best investment in the long run

02:43:24.820 | was on investment in energy innovation.

02:43:27.980 | So, and I think this also sort of corresponds

02:43:30.980 | with what we would think in general.

02:43:33.780 | If we could innovate, so for instance, Bill Gates

02:43:36.300 | is arguing we should have fourth generation nuclear,

02:43:38.700 | so the next, more advanced than what we currently have

02:43:42.700 | in third generation nuclear,

02:43:44.340 | which would be industrial scale process.

02:43:47.380 | You'd just be building these modular nuclear power plants.

02:43:51.900 | They would be, instead of being this artwork

02:43:54.500 | that we design once for every different plant,

02:43:57.300 | which is one of the reasons why they're so expensive,

02:43:59.420 | they would just be mass produced and you'd have one,

02:44:02.220 | they all be recognized in one go, so it'd be much cheaper.

02:44:06.820 | They would also be passively safe.

02:44:08.580 | So if all the power goes, they'll shut down

02:44:12.620 | rather than go boom.

02:44:14.540 | So that's another very good thing.

02:44:16.620 | And then they'll also be very hard to transform

02:44:19.700 | into nuclear weapons.

02:44:21.980 | So you can actually imagine them being out

02:44:23.860 | in a lot of different places where we'd perhaps

02:44:25.580 | be a little worried about having plutonium lying around.

02:44:28.660 | Now, this is all still being worked out,

02:44:30.940 | but imagine if that actually comes out.

02:44:33.060 | And again, remember the other three generations,

02:44:36.020 | we were also told that it'll be incredibly safe

02:44:38.260 | and it'll be incredibly cheap,

02:44:39.780 | and it didn't turn out that way.

02:44:40.980 | So let's wait, but it could be.

02:44:43.980 | And so the argument is invest in these ideas,

02:44:47.860 | for instance, fourth generation nuclear,

02:44:49.740 | and if fourth generation nuclear becomes cheaper

02:44:52.100 | than fossil fuels, we're done.

02:44:54.620 | Everyone will just switch, not just rich,

02:44:56.980 | well-meaning Americans or Europeans,

02:44:59.500 | but also the Chinese, the Indians, everybody in Africa,

02:45:02.380 | the rest of the Indian subcontinent.

02:45:05.100 | That's how you fix these issues, right?

02:45:07.500 | So the idea here is to say,

02:45:09.540 | instead of thinking that we can sort of push people

02:45:13.380 | to do stuff they really don't want to do,

02:45:16.540 | which is basically saying, let's use more of the,

02:45:20.700 | the solar and wind that you would otherwise

02:45:22.340 | have invested in, force people to buy an electric car

02:45:25.420 | by giving huge subsidies, because otherwise

02:45:27.460 | they're clearly not all that interested in buying it

02:45:30.540 | and so on, then get the innovation such that

02:45:34.060 | they become cheaper than fossil fuels

02:45:36.260 | and everyone will switch.

02:45:38.020 | This is how we've solved problems in the past,

02:45:39.780 | if you think, and Los Angeles in the 1950s

02:45:42.980 | was hugely polluted place, mostly because of cars.

02:45:46.420 | The sort of standard climate approach today

02:45:49.220 | would be to tell everyone in Los Angeles,

02:45:51.140 | I'm sorry, could you just walk instead?

02:45:53.700 | And of course, that just doesn't work,

02:45:55.420 | that doesn't pay off, you never get,

02:45:57.180 | you know, politicians voted in office,

02:45:59.660 | or at least staying in office,

02:46:01.540 | if you make that kind of policy.

02:46:03.060 | What did solve the problem was the innovation

02:46:05.860 | of the catalytic converter.

02:46:07.380 | You basically get those little gizmo

02:46:09.300 | and it cost a couple hundred dollars,

02:46:10.780 | you put it on your tailpipe, and then you can drive around

02:46:13.700 | and basically almost not pollute.

02:46:15.900 | And that's how you fix the air pollution in Los Angeles.

02:46:19.220 | Basically, we've solved all problems in humanity,

02:46:22.580 | all big, difficult problems with innovation.

02:46:25.820 | We haven't solved it by telling everyone,

02:46:27.740 | I'm sorry, could you be a little less comfortable

02:46:30.220 | and a little more cold and a little poorer,

02:46:33.140 | and believing that that can go on for decades.

02:46:36.580 | And while it possibly works in some pockets of the US,

02:46:41.380 | and I think actually in large parts of Europe, at least,

02:46:44.620 | it used to, the war in Ukraine is definitely

02:46:48.660 | sort of changing that whole perspective.

02:46:50.380 | But yeah, there's a willingness to say,

02:46:52.140 | we're gonna suffer a little bit,

02:46:53.820 | then we'll fix this problem.

02:46:55.220 | But the point is, we're gonna be willing to suffer a little

02:46:58.020 | and so fix a tiny bit of the climate problem,

02:47:02.140 | instead of actually focusing on innovation.

02:47:04.700 | So what we found was, if you spend a dollar on innovation,

02:47:07.940 | you will probably avoid about $11 of climate damage

02:47:11.380 | in the long run, which is a great investment.

02:47:14.300 | And the terrible thing is, we have not been doing this.

02:47:17.940 | So because everybody's focused on saying,

02:47:20.520 | we need this solution within the next 12 years,

02:47:23.420 | it means you're not thinking about the innovation.

02:47:25.980 | We're actually spending less money,

02:47:27.300 | not more money on innovation globally.

02:47:30.700 | - So everyone is focusing on reducing carbon emission

02:47:33.660 | versus innovating on alternate energy.

02:47:36.460 | - You're basically focusing on putting

02:47:38.180 | the existing solar panels or wind turbines,

02:47:40.500 | which are either just about inefficient or inefficient,

02:47:44.180 | instead of making the next generation,

02:47:46.340 | or it's more likely the 10th generation after that,

02:47:50.880 | that comes with lots of battery backup power,

02:47:54.060 | or fourth generation nuclear,

02:47:57.040 | or Craig Venter has this great idea.

02:47:59.300 | Craig Venter, the guy who cracked the human genome

02:48:01.180 | back in 2000, he has this idea of growing algae

02:48:04.420 | out on the ocean surface.

02:48:05.700 | These algae, they'd be genetically modified

02:48:07.900 | and they would basically soak up sunlight and CO2

02:48:11.420 | and produce oil.

02:48:12.740 | Then we could basically just grow our own Saudi Arabia

02:48:15.300 | out on the ocean surface and we'd harvest it,

02:48:17.620 | we'd keep our entire fossil fuel economy,

02:48:19.940 | but it'd now be net zero,

02:48:21.540 | because we just soaked up the CO2 out there.

02:48:24.100 | - $1 invested in the portfolio of different ideas.

02:48:28.380 | - Gives $11 back.

02:48:29.900 | - I first wrote about that in the New York Times.

02:48:31.980 | It was one of my actual page one stories.

02:48:33.980 | In 2006, it was declining R&D in energy

02:48:40.180 | at a time of global warming.

02:48:41.980 | And the baseline is so low for this

02:48:46.100 | that it's a super bargain.

02:48:47.940 | We were, during the energy crisis,

02:48:52.820 | the first energy crisis in the '70s,

02:48:55.420 | before the current one,

02:48:56.620 | our annual spending in the United States

02:49:00.780 | and constant dollars on R&D,

02:49:03.380 | research and development for energy,

02:49:05.740 | was about $5 billion.

02:49:07.020 | And then it's just dribbled away since then.

02:49:11.100 | And recently now, there's a big burst of new money

02:49:13.580 | coming through these new bills that got passed.

02:49:16.260 | But what I was told over and over again

02:49:17.580 | by people in that arena is you can't just have

02:49:21.660 | these little bubbles of investment.

02:49:24.300 | You don't get young people away from thinking

02:49:27.340 | about Wall Street for jobs

02:49:28.500 | towards thinking about energy innovation

02:49:30.820 | if there isn't a future there.

02:49:33.220 | And a lot of the, in the United States and Europe,

02:49:35.660 | the presumption was the wage of that future

02:49:37.420 | was taxing carbon.

02:49:41.040 | You make that so punitive that you're basically

02:49:45.040 | evening the landscape for cleaner stuff

02:49:48.080 | that's more expensive.

02:49:49.400 | That has failed completely.

02:49:51.760 | There are little examples in Europe where it's working.

02:49:54.480 | And what's happened now is, well, in the United States,

02:49:57.080 | this big chunk of money is designed to take us

02:50:01.280 | over a finish line that was started with

02:50:04.680 | not just innovation, but with the production efficiency too.

02:50:07.760 | This is one thing I got wrong, I think,

02:50:09.440 | a little bit in my reporting.

02:50:10.440 | I was so fixated on the innovation part,

02:50:12.920 | just because I love science too,

02:50:15.280 | I saw this untapped possibility,

02:50:18.440 | that others were saying, no, no, production efficiency,

02:50:21.040 | the more people are producing batteries,

02:50:23.100 | the cheaper they'll get.

02:50:24.140 | This is Elon Musk's path and many others.

02:50:28.960 | And it really is both.

02:50:29.880 | So when you were talking about purchasing power

02:50:31.620 | for governments, for example, that can stimulate production,

02:50:36.400 | capacity for batteries, or whatever the good thing is,

02:50:39.400 | and take you down faster.

02:50:41.400 | And it's all about getting that margin

02:50:43.680 | of the new thing out competing the old.

02:50:46.000 | And it's not just innovation.

02:50:48.520 | It has so many parts of the pipeline

02:50:50.260 | that need to be nurtured.

02:50:51.880 | So, and the other thing is relative cost.

02:50:55.880 | The United States, when I was writing about this in 2006,

02:50:58.780 | our budget for DARPA,

02:51:02.120 | the Advanced Research Project Agency

02:51:04.080 | for the Defense Department,

02:51:06.800 | just for science was 80 billion a year.

02:51:10.080 | For health, for medical frontier research on cancer

02:51:13.440 | and stuff, 40 billion.

02:51:14.800 | Energy was two or three.

02:51:16.080 | So we weren't taking this remotely seriously.

02:51:19.600 | So now that if we get that up,

02:51:21.940 | to me there's like this level,

02:51:23.780 | you know we're taking something seriously

02:51:25.900 | when it's like in the tens of billions for R&D.

02:51:28.560 | It's not that R&D will solve the problem,

02:51:30.640 | but it's a proxy for what we really care about.

02:51:33.480 | We care a shitload about defense.

02:51:35.680 | What's the defense budget in the United States now?

02:51:37.360 | Like 800 billion?

02:51:38.800 | It's some insane number.

02:51:40.080 | - Who's counting when you're having fun?

02:51:41.640 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:51:42.480 | And so innovation is not just like for the better,

02:51:45.880 | you know, camera, the better solar panel,

02:51:49.540 | the better battery.

02:51:50.920 | Social innovation actually matters hugely.

02:51:53.040 | Like the guy in Nairobi I mentioned

02:51:55.560 | with a company doing micropayment gas

02:51:58.560 | to get people off charcoal.

02:52:00.440 | We need that as much as this.

02:52:03.560 | And I actually, I interviewed Bill Gates.

02:52:06.240 | We had spent an hour with him in Seattle in 2016

02:52:09.640 | when he was rolling out his breakthrough energy thing.

02:52:14.080 | I got to spend, it was 45 minutes,

02:52:15.960 | me and Bill Gates, which was pretty fun.

02:52:17.760 | But I brought this up.

02:52:19.000 | I said, you know, 'cause he's all about

02:52:20.760 | the new nuclear thing that will solve the world's problems.

02:52:23.520 | And I, yes, yes, yes, but we also--

02:52:25.120 | - He brought up nuclear, sorry to interrupt.

02:52:26.320 | - Oh, he did, oh sure, yeah.

02:52:27.560 | - So he's interested in one of the--

02:52:29.400 | - Oh, he's investing heavily in nuclear,

02:52:31.240 | but he invests in everything.

02:52:32.560 | You know, he's got a big portfolio.

02:52:34.320 | But I brought up a guy I met in India

02:52:37.840 | who runs a little outfit called Selco

02:52:41.400 | that they do really interesting, cool village to village.

02:52:44.640 | They're like an energy analyst

02:52:47.560 | who'll come to your house here in the States

02:52:48.840 | and tell you how to weatherize your house,

02:52:50.840 | but they do it at the village scale.

02:52:52.880 | And in a village that has, where they're milling wheat,

02:52:57.000 | he'll put in a solar-powered wheat mill.

02:53:00.080 | And, you know, that's not gonna solve the world's problems,

02:53:02.840 | but it gives them a way to control their energy.

02:53:05.720 | They don't have to buy something to grind their wheat.

02:53:08.040 | And that needs just as much attention

02:53:10.640 | as the things I really like too, the cool technologies.

02:53:14.320 | And I thought I cornered Bill Gates.

02:53:16.560 | I was like, 'cause he really does focus on these big wins,

02:53:20.760 | the big, you know, like nuclear

02:53:22.800 | that will make net zero completely doable.

02:53:25.680 | And I said, well, you know, what about nuclear,

02:53:28.320 | like New York City, where I was still living at the time,

02:53:30.760 | or near, and I said, it's got a million buildings.

02:53:34.200 | New York City has one million buildings.

02:53:37.000 | And in 2013, the Bloomberg government analyzed,

02:53:40.240 | they said, looking ahead to 2050,

02:53:43.280 | 75% of the buildings in New York City

02:53:45.640 | that will exist in 2050 already exist.

02:53:48.720 | Think about these brave new futures, right?

02:53:51.460 | Like we're just gonna like come in,

02:53:53.480 | have these shiny, cool passive house cities.

02:53:56.380 | And so I put this to Bill and I said,

02:53:58.200 | so how do you do that?

02:54:00.520 | How do you retrofit all those boilers,

02:54:03.600 | many of which were coal-fired like 20 years ago,

02:54:07.040 | to get a zero-energy New York City?

02:54:08.600 | And I kind of thought I had him.

02:54:11.240 | And then he immediately, he kind of sat back and went,

02:54:13.880 | well, but if you have unlimited clean power

02:54:17.100 | coming into that city, it doesn't really matter.

02:54:20.080 | - It's a pretty good Bill Gates impression.

02:54:21.400 | - It was a good answer.

02:54:22.920 | I mean, it was a good answer.

02:54:24.320 | He said, oh yeah, it's a leaky bucket,

02:54:25.920 | but pour in zero-carbon energy, then it doesn't matter.

02:54:29.920 | But I still think we have to figure out the other part too.

02:54:32.240 | The that end, how do you innovate at the household level,

02:54:35.320 | at the village level?

02:54:36.580 | It's much more of a distributed problem, we used to think.

02:54:40.260 | The one big change I've had in my own thinking too

02:54:42.680 | is from top down to distributed.

02:54:47.680 | Everything about the climate problem

02:54:50.500 | through the first three decades of my reporting

02:54:53.540 | was that the IPCC will come out a new report,

02:54:57.380 | the framework convention, the treaty will get us on board,

02:55:02.240 | we'll all behave better.

02:55:03.520 | It has this top down parent to child architecture.

02:55:07.960 | And everything I've learned has gone the other way.

02:55:13.000 | It's distributed capacity for improved lives.

02:55:17.880 | Kids getting through school,

02:55:19.720 | women not having to spend three hours collecting firewood.

02:55:23.080 | And if it means propane for that household

02:55:24.940 | in that context, that's a good thing.

02:55:26.460 | So stop with all your yammering

02:55:27.880 | about any oil, fossil fuel subsidies.

02:55:30.140 | And what's an America look like

02:55:33.380 | that has some climate safe energy future?

02:55:37.980 | Find your part in that.

02:55:39.780 | Don't get disempowered by the scale of it.

02:55:41.860 | There's like a thousand things to do

02:55:43.340 | when you start to cut it into pieces.

02:55:45.420 | So it's very different, it's not a top down thing.

02:55:48.440 | No one's gonna magically come in and--

02:55:49.940 | - And that's where I think,

02:55:52.080 | so I agree that everyone should try to play their part

02:55:55.880 | and do whatever they can.

02:55:59.480 | But I also think just the sheer incentives,

02:56:03.040 | what we saw happening with shale gas is a great example.

02:56:08.040 | When shale gas becomes so cheap

02:56:10.040 | that you just stop using coal,

02:56:12.480 | then you don't really have to convince

02:56:14.760 | lots and lots of people, coal is really bad.

02:56:17.600 | - And it wasn't labeled a climate.

02:56:18.640 | - No, it wasn't a climate thing, it was an energy thing.

02:56:20.640 | - It was totally.

02:56:21.480 | And the point is just the power of an innovation

02:56:25.760 | is that you almost don't see it anymore, it just happens.

02:56:30.400 | And I think that's really the only way

02:56:32.720 | we're gonna fix these big problems.

02:56:35.000 | If you think about the nutrition problem

02:56:38.160 | back in the 60s, 70s,

02:56:40.160 | we worried a lot about India and other places.

02:56:42.440 | A solution is not worrying,

02:56:44.640 | or the solution was not us eating a little bit less

02:56:47.200 | and sending it down to India, wherever.

02:56:49.360 | The solution was the green revolution, right?

02:56:51.240 | It was the fact that some scientists made ways

02:56:53.880 | to make every seed produce three times as much,

02:56:56.440 | so you could grow three times as much food on an acre.

02:56:59.040 | And that's what basically made it possible for India

02:57:02.120 | to go from a basket case

02:57:03.880 | to the world's leading rice exporter.

02:57:07.040 | And that's how you do these things,

02:57:10.320 | you solve these big problems through innovation.

02:57:13.320 | And again, I'm not saying that,

02:57:15.160 | we're actually arguing our carbon tax

02:57:17.320 | is a smart thing to do.

02:57:18.960 | That's what any economist would tell you to do.

02:57:21.520 | But it also turns out that it's partly,

02:57:24.280 | it's not gonna solve most of the problem,

02:57:26.240 | and it's incredibly politically hard to do.

02:57:29.600 | So it may also just be the wrong sort of tree to bark up.

02:57:33.080 | If you can do it, please do.

02:57:36.200 | But this is not the main thing that's gonna solve climate.

02:57:38.920 | The main thing is that we get these innovations

02:57:41.520 | that basically make green energy so cheap,

02:57:44.080 | everyone will just want.

02:57:46.200 | - We mentioned nuclear quite a few times.

02:57:48.640 | You know, there was for a long time,

02:57:50.940 | it seems to have shifted recently,

02:57:52.400 | maybe you can clarify and educate me on this,

02:57:54.760 | but for the longest time people thought that nuclear

02:57:58.080 | is almost unclean energy,

02:58:02.680 | or dangerous energy, or all that kind of stuff.

02:58:05.560 | When did that shift?

02:58:07.280 | What was the source of that alarmism?

02:58:11.240 | Maybe is that a case study of how alarmism

02:58:15.080 | can turn into a productive, constructive policy?

02:58:20.080 | - (laughs) Productive from whose standpoint?

02:58:22.960 | - Is it not?

02:58:25.440 | Is it not like nuclear--

02:58:27.000 | - No, I was trying to, do you mean productive

02:58:28.560 | in terms of yay, we banned it, or productive for those--

02:58:30.680 | - Oh, I see, I see what you mean, yes.

02:58:32.200 | I meant productive for human civilization.

02:58:34.680 | - No, the alarmism over nuclear power

02:58:36.960 | dominated any alarmism over global warming, absolutely.

02:58:41.960 | - Really?

02:58:43.320 | - Oh yeah, just in the United States,

02:58:46.160 | Three Mile Island, then you had Chernobyl there,

02:58:48.560 | and the traditional environmental movement

02:58:52.360 | still won't go there.

02:58:54.560 | They still, the big groups, NRDC, EDF,

02:58:59.080 | that whole alphabet soup of the big greens,

02:59:02.080 | are reluctant to put forward the nuclear option

02:59:06.080 | because they know a lot of their aging donors

02:59:08.400 | basically grew up in the thinking about nuclear

02:59:11.840 | as the problem, not the solution.

02:59:14.200 | I lived for the last 30 years, I moved to Maine recently,

02:59:17.220 | but I lived in the Hudson Valley,

02:59:19.520 | 10 miles from the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant,

02:59:21.880 | which was built in the '60s, '70s, and had some problems.

02:59:26.760 | None of them were to the point of a meltdown

02:59:30.560 | or the threat of it,

02:59:31.840 | even the theoretical possibility of one.

02:59:35.400 | I've been in, I was in it twice as a reporter,

02:59:38.320 | looking down in the cooling pool.

02:59:39.720 | I can send you a fun video of bubbles

02:59:41.880 | in the cooling pool with the rods.

02:59:43.400 | And progressively they demonstrated how to handle waste.

02:59:47.560 | In the United States now, the waste is,

02:59:49.520 | because we haven't figured out

02:59:50.440 | how to move it across state lines,

02:59:52.140 | it's glassified, it's put into kind of containers

02:59:57.280 | that sit there at the plant.

02:59:59.480 | We just simply don't have a long-term solution.

03:00:04.640 | The Nevada politicians were successful in saying,

03:00:09.640 | not here, not Yucca Mountain.

03:00:12.040 | But my wife, who I've been married to,

03:00:16.800 | well, I met 30 years ago, and she lives with me,

03:00:19.400 | she's an environmental educator.

03:00:21.520 | She was very happy when Cuomo shut it down,

03:00:25.080 | said we're gonna shut it down three or four years ago,

03:00:27.680 | which just happened a year, it actually is shut down now.

03:00:30.520 | It's being mothballed, and I was like, that sucks.

03:00:33.080 | We need-- - But she's happy.

03:00:34.600 | - Yeah, and we still love each other.

03:00:36.360 | - And she's an environmentalist, so that just speaks to,

03:00:40.240 | a lot of environmentalists still see nuclear as bad.

03:00:43.800 | - Oh, totally, oh yeah.

03:00:45.200 | You know, and you bring in

03:00:46.400 | the weapons proliferation issues.

03:00:50.420 | But it's a safety thing, it's a generational thing.

03:00:53.240 | I think young people are different, I hope.

03:00:56.260 | These small modular reactor designs,

03:00:59.680 | several of which, there's a couple of PhDs

03:01:03.120 | from MIT who did transatomic power.

03:01:07.360 | They're both in their early 30s.

03:01:09.640 | We need so much more of them.

03:01:11.540 | And just briefly, the one thing I say about nuclear is,

03:01:14.480 | with so many of these things, like subsidies,

03:01:17.240 | don't talk to me about yes/no nuclear.

03:01:20.400 | Talk to me about what do you wanna do

03:01:21.880 | with existing nuclear power plants,

03:01:24.320 | and what do you wanna do about the possibility of new ones?

03:01:28.000 | Let's parse this out in chunks

03:01:29.680 | that we can have constructive conversations about.

03:01:32.400 | The idea of no nuclear drives me crazy,

03:01:35.160 | just like no fossil fuel subsidies is silly

03:01:38.400 | in the world we inhabit that has these pockets

03:01:40.440 | of no energy.

03:01:41.760 | So that's just my sustain what mantras.

03:01:46.760 | Start with some, divide and conquer.

03:01:50.600 | To conquer the dispute over by saying,

03:01:53.200 | let's at least get real.

03:01:54.860 | This power plant has been in the Hudson Valley for 30 years.

03:01:57.760 | It was the baseload, it was baseload.

03:02:00.160 | Baseload is a real thing.

03:02:02.360 | And guess what has filled the gap

03:02:05.040 | since that power plant has turned off?

03:02:07.240 | Natural gas, natural gas.

03:02:09.200 | But, and you don't hear that from the environmental community

03:02:13.460 | that was so eager to turn off the Indian Point.

03:02:17.120 | - I think both the point of saying,

03:02:19.200 | the people are saying, it's the end of the world,

03:02:21.080 | but no, I don't want a nuclear power plant.

03:02:23.560 | It just doesn't make sense.

03:02:24.920 | And Andy's absolutely right to talk about,

03:02:28.640 | so existing nuclear power plants,

03:02:30.760 | we already paid for them.

03:02:32.640 | We already have them.

03:02:34.120 | We already committed to decommissioning them eventually

03:02:37.760 | while they're running.

03:02:39.080 | They're pretty much the cheapest power

03:02:41.120 | you can possibly have on the planet

03:02:42.980 | because it costs almost nothing to run them day to day.

03:02:46.480 | So, it's basically cheap or almost free CO2 baseload power.

03:02:51.480 | There's just nothing there that doesn't,

03:02:54.960 | you should embrace.

03:02:56.960 | Now, new nuclear power plants turn out

03:03:00.360 | to be very expensive currently.

03:03:02.620 | So, the one they built in Finland,

03:03:04.800 | some in the UK and France and several other places

03:03:08.880 | turn out to be incredibly expensive.

03:03:10.940 | So, they're much more expensive

03:03:12.440 | than the costliest renewables you can imagine.

03:03:16.600 | So, they're actually not a solution right now.

03:03:19.680 | And that's why we need the innovation.

03:03:21.800 | That's why we need the potentially

03:03:23.560 | fourth generation nuclear power.

03:03:25.140 | It's just simply, it's a bad deal.

03:03:27.440 | And that's why nuclear's never gonna win

03:03:30.320 | on its third generation.

03:03:31.600 | Now, it may never get there, who knows?

03:03:35.520 | But it's certainly a possibility

03:03:38.800 | and we should be looking into it.

03:03:40.160 | - And there are wonky realities that need to be dealt with.

03:03:45.160 | The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the United States,

03:03:48.100 | their approval process is still locked and designed

03:03:51.760 | on this 50 year old model of big, giant power plants.

03:03:55.260 | There's an intense discussion right now

03:03:57.140 | about evolving a new regulatory scheme

03:04:01.620 | for small modular ones because of all these

03:04:03.980 | implicit advantages they offer.

03:04:06.260 | And that, so, along with the innovation,

03:04:09.100 | you need to have this get out of the way

03:04:12.300 | or you're never gonna have the investment.

03:04:14.100 | So, it really is an all of the above thing.

03:04:17.060 | Looking at these as systems problems,

03:04:19.220 | systems solutions is really important.

03:04:21.460 | - Let me ask you about Alex Epstein.

03:04:25.020 | So, he wrote, I'm not sure if you're familiar who he is,

03:04:29.680 | but he wrote a couple of books.

03:04:31.580 | It's just interesting to ask a question about fossil fuels

03:04:34.040 | because we're talking about reality.

03:04:36.000 | And he's somebody that doesn't just talk about

03:04:37.960 | the reality of fossil fuels, but he wrote a book,

03:04:41.360 | "A Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and Fossil Future"

03:04:45.100 | where he makes the case that, as his subtitle says,

03:04:49.360 | "Global human flourishing requires oil, coal,

03:04:52.980 | "and natural gas," or more oil, coal, and natural gas,

03:04:57.980 | not less.

03:04:58.960 | What do you think about the argument he makes?

03:05:02.140 | So, he pushes, we've had this kind of,

03:05:05.460 | speaking of the center, of this balanced discussion

03:05:08.620 | of the reality of fossil fuels, but also investing a lot

03:05:11.860 | into renewable energy and then having the $1 to $11 return.

03:05:16.860 | He says, I'm not sure exactly how to frame it,

03:05:22.100 | but investing and maintaining investment of fossil fuels

03:05:27.100 | also has a positive return because of how efficient

03:05:30.940 | the energy is.

03:05:32.120 | - I read the first book.

03:05:33.620 | Yeah, I haven't read, I've got his second one.

03:05:35.380 | I've been planning to have him on my webcast,

03:05:37.620 | my tiny webcast.

03:05:38.500 | - What's the name of the webcast?

03:05:41.220 | - Sustain What?

03:05:42.100 | Everything I do is sustain what?

03:05:43.900 | 'Cause it's like, don't talk to me about sustainability.

03:05:46.620 | Sustain what?

03:05:47.580 | For whom?

03:05:48.420 | How?

03:05:49.240 | Then we're talking, you know?

03:05:50.540 | Interrogatory approach to things.

03:05:53.140 | So, I think the valuable part of what he has done

03:05:57.660 | is to remind people, particularly in the West or North

03:06:02.140 | or whatever, the developed world,

03:06:04.460 | that everything we take for granted,

03:06:07.820 | low fertilizer, from low fertilizer prices

03:06:10.940 | to air conditioning to everything else,

03:06:13.300 | exists because we had this bounty

03:06:15.500 | that we dug out of the ground or pumped out of the ground.

03:06:18.900 | It's a boon, it's been an amazing boon to society, period.

03:06:22.100 | So, start there.

03:06:23.460 | Which means, going forward, what we're talking about

03:06:26.300 | is a substitution.

03:06:28.060 | Or, having your fossil fuels and eating it too,

03:06:31.540 | meaning getting rid of the carbon dioxide.

03:06:33.220 | If you focus on the carbon dioxide,

03:06:34.980 | which is the thing warming the planet,

03:06:37.600 | not the burning of the fuels,

03:06:40.340 | then that's another way forward

03:06:41.860 | that could sustain fossil fuels.

03:06:44.020 | As far as I can tell from at least the first book,

03:06:46.220 | he makes the moral case that fossil fuels

03:06:48.620 | are essentially a good overall.

03:06:52.740 | I don't think he adequately accounts for the need

03:06:55.660 | to stop global warming.

03:06:58.060 | You know, I think that we have to slow,

03:07:01.100 | slowing global warming is a fundamental need

03:07:03.660 | in this century we're in.

03:07:06.340 | And that's just not factored into his math.

03:07:08.400 | - Well, I think that's where,

03:07:10.160 | I've had a few sort of offline conversations with him.

03:07:13.200 | I think he said, 'cause I mentioned I'm talking to the two,

03:07:16.040 | he said that he, that's probably where he disagrees

03:07:19.600 | about sort of the level of threat that global warming causes.

03:07:24.600 | - Well, Steve Koonin is another one.

03:07:27.340 | He's a brilliant guy.

03:07:29.200 | He lived right close to me in the Hudson Valley.

03:07:31.800 | He was in the Obama administration energy department.

03:07:34.320 | It's K-O-O-N-I-N.

03:07:35.840 | He wrote a bestseller that came out recently

03:07:37.400 | on skepticism about climate.

03:07:40.260 | And there are other smart people who somehow feel

03:07:46.720 | we can literally adapt our way forward

03:07:49.800 | without any constraint on the gases changing the climate.

03:07:53.960 | And I, you know, I've spent enough time on this.

03:07:57.200 | I think I'm a pretty level-headed reporter

03:07:59.140 | when it comes to this issue.

03:08:00.440 | And I think having some sense that we can adapt our way

03:08:04.820 | into the world we're building

03:08:06.640 | through relentless climate change with no new normal,

03:08:09.840 | remember, more gas accumulating in the air every year.

03:08:14.080 | These are not static moments.

03:08:17.360 | That that's a good thing to do is,

03:08:20.520 | doesn't strike me as smart.

03:08:25.360 | - I'll probably say that I think it's more sort of a,

03:08:29.240 | at least the thing that I take away from Alex

03:08:31.680 | is the fact, as you point out,

03:08:35.380 | that we need to recognize that fossil fuels

03:08:37.900 | is basically the backbone of our society today.

03:08:40.960 | We get 80% of our energy from fossil fuels today.

03:08:44.340 | - Still, as we did 50 years ago, 40 years ago.

03:08:46.540 | - Yeah, yeah, and people have no sense of this, right?

03:08:49.060 | So they have the idea,

03:08:50.620 | because you see so many wind turbines and solar panels

03:08:53.580 | and everybody's talking about it,

03:08:55.020 | that this is huge, big things.

03:08:57.020 | But the reality is, remember,

03:08:58.380 | only about a fifth of all energy use is electricity.

03:09:01.800 | The rest is in processes and heating,

03:09:04.040 | industrial processes and so on.

03:09:06.320 | So actually, solar and wind right now

03:09:09.680 | produces 1% of energy from wind and 0.8% from solar.

03:09:14.680 | This is not a huge thing.

03:09:16.800 | It's a fairly tiny bit.

03:09:18.400 | - And growing explosively, but from this--

03:09:20.520 | - Yes, it's absolutely growing.

03:09:21.920 | But actually, it's growing slower

03:09:23.960 | than what nuclear was growing in the '70s and '80s,

03:09:26.640 | which I thought was a fun point,

03:09:28.320 | not by a little amount, by like two or three times.

03:09:31.200 | So we're still talking about something

03:09:34.040 | which is somewhat boutique, at least.

03:09:37.240 | And when you then look out into the future,

03:09:40.200 | and I think this is the interesting part of it,

03:09:42.980 | when you look out into the future,

03:09:44.520 | if you look at the Biden administration's own estimate

03:09:47.320 | of what will happen by 2050,

03:09:49.160 | we will be at, if all countries do all the stuff

03:09:54.480 | that they promised and everything,

03:09:56.080 | we will be at 70% fossil fuels by 2050, globally.

03:10:01.080 | This is just, yes, it's a better world.

03:10:04.640 | I think it's good that we're now down to 70

03:10:07.160 | instead of 80, but it is still a world

03:10:11.000 | that's fundamentally dependent on fossil fuels

03:10:14.040 | for almost everything that we really like about the world.

03:10:17.440 | And forgetting that, and I think we are doing that

03:10:20.900 | in the sense, as you also mentioned,

03:10:22.480 | that people say, "No fossil fuels,"

03:10:24.120 | and we're, in all development organizations,

03:10:26.680 | we're now telling the poor countries,

03:10:28.800 | you can't get any funding for anything

03:10:31.200 | that has to do with fossil fuels.

03:10:33.360 | We have literally reduced our investment

03:10:37.280 | in oil and gas by more than half since 2014.

03:10:42.280 | And much of this is because of climate concerns.

03:10:46.680 | This has real world consequences.

03:10:48.460 | This is why energy prices have gone up.

03:10:51.600 | It's not the only reason.

03:10:52.920 | COVID also, certainly the war in Ukraine,

03:10:55.360 | but this is an underlying systemic reason

03:10:58.480 | why fossil fuel costs will go up dramatically.

03:11:01.400 | Now, a lot of greens will sort of tend to say,

03:11:03.920 | "Well, that's great because we want fossil fuels

03:11:06.800 | "to be expensive.

03:11:07.700 | "We want people to be forced over to renewables."

03:11:10.720 | But that's very easy to say if you're rich.

03:11:14.080 | You know, it's the kind of thing that New Yorkers will say,

03:11:16.320 | you know, when you go to rich,

03:11:18.400 | well-meaning green New Yorkers and say,

03:11:20.820 | "Yes, gasoline should cost $20 a gallon."

03:11:24.080 | Well, you don't have a car.

03:11:26.160 | You just ride the Metro.

03:11:27.720 | It's very easy for you to say that,

03:11:29.140 | but lots of people, both in the rich world,

03:11:31.480 | but in poor parts of the US,

03:11:33.840 | but all around the world,

03:11:35.260 | their lives are basically dependent on fossil fuels.

03:11:37.760 | And so the idea that we're gonna get people off

03:11:40.560 | by making it so expensive

03:11:42.220 | that it becomes impossible for them to live good lives

03:11:45.640 | is almost morally reprehensible.

03:11:47.680 | And I think Alex has the right point there.

03:11:50.720 | We need to get people to realize

03:11:53.340 | we're not gonna get off fossil fuels anytime soon.

03:11:55.980 | So we need reasonably affordable fossil fuels

03:11:59.300 | for most of the world.

03:12:00.620 | And that's, of course, why we need to focus so much more

03:12:03.300 | on the innovation so that we can get to the point

03:12:05.900 | where we no longer need fossil fuels as soon as possible.

03:12:09.220 | But to say to everyone,

03:12:10.520 | "Look, we're gonna make fossil fuels expensive

03:12:12.760 | "way before we have the solution," is just terrible.

03:12:15.420 | - And so much is on the rich countries of the world.

03:12:19.480 | - Yeah.

03:12:20.320 | - I did a conversation recently with Johan Rockström,

03:12:24.180 | who's a famed sustainability scientist in Stockholm.

03:12:29.180 | Actually, Potsdam now.

03:12:31.680 | - Right.

03:12:32.520 | - And he's come up with the idea of planetary boundaries.

03:12:35.220 | There's lots of things he has said that I,

03:12:37.860 | as a journalist, I'm still looking into about that.

03:12:39.980 | - Planetary boundaries?

03:12:40.940 | - Yeah, that there are limits to what Earth can absorb

03:12:43.260 | in human, our use of water, phosphorus,

03:12:46.340 | or carbon dioxide loading in the atmosphere.

03:12:48.740 | There are these tipping, there are these boundaries.

03:12:51.180 | If we cross them, we're in a hot zone, a danger zone.

03:12:54.380 | He's an interesting thinker.

03:12:55.820 | But on this point, last year at the Glasgow Climate Talks,

03:13:00.820 | he gave a very important talk about the equity thing here.

03:13:05.740 | He basically laid out a landscape saying

03:13:11.000 | the rich nations of the world need to greatly ramp up

03:13:14.160 | their reduction of emissions

03:13:15.620 | or what they're gonna pay poor countries to do.

03:13:18.880 | To allow poor countries,

03:13:20.720 | some of which have fossil resources, like in Africa,

03:13:25.040 | to have the carbon space,

03:13:26.920 | to own whatever space or time is left

03:13:30.360 | to be able to develop their fossil fuels

03:13:34.060 | as a fundamental right.

03:13:36.480 | Because also, they're starting from this little baseline.

03:13:39.320 | Ghana hasn't contributed squat

03:13:41.880 | to the global warming problem in terms of emissions.

03:13:44.320 | Ghana has natural gas.

03:13:46.000 | And right now, this month,

03:13:48.560 | environmental groups are outside the World Bank,

03:13:52.640 | today, actually tonight,

03:13:54.860 | saying this was on their list of dirty projects.

03:13:57.640 | World Bank should stop financing

03:13:59.000 | Ghana's right to get gas out of the ground.

03:14:01.440 | To develop its economy, get its people less poor,

03:14:04.440 | make them more productive, innovative parts of humanity.

03:14:07.560 | To me, that's really reprehensible.

03:14:10.260 | One of the other projects on their list,

03:14:12.320 | as a World Bank kind of gotcha,

03:14:14.280 | like how dare they give money,

03:14:16.480 | was for a fertilizer factory in Bangladesh

03:14:19.840 | that is designed to get three times as much fertilizer

03:14:23.480 | from the same amount of natural gas

03:14:25.060 | as the old plants that are now dormant.

03:14:27.000 | This is in a time when we're facing high energy prices,

03:14:32.600 | high gas prices, high food prices,

03:14:34.960 | when food insecurity is spreading rapidly.

03:14:37.600 | When a country like Bangladesh has millions of rice farmers

03:14:40.000 | who need urea tablets to put in their rice fields.

03:14:44.320 | And to say that shouldn't,

03:14:46.320 | how dare they finance that

03:14:47.680 | because there's a fossil fuel involved is immoral.

03:14:50.720 | So yes on that point from Alex.

03:14:52.720 | - So this is 2022 poll.

03:14:56.960 | Polls.

03:14:59.020 | Just this is a bunch of different ways

03:15:01.720 | to look at the same basic effect.

03:15:04.440 | In the United States,

03:15:05.880 | Democrats, younger Americans identify

03:15:09.460 | dealing with climate change as a top priority.

03:15:12.000 | US adults,

03:15:14.240 | 42% say,

03:15:15.920 | 42% say that dealing with climate change

03:15:19.160 | should be a top priority.

03:15:21.160 | 11% of Republicans,

03:15:23.440 | 65% of Democrats.

03:15:25.840 | And we could see this effect throughout.

03:15:28.940 | 46% of Americans say human activity

03:15:34.660 | contributes a great deal to climate change.

03:15:37.180 | By the way, this is a little bit different

03:15:39.560 | than what we're discussing.

03:15:41.040 | I was just looking through different polls.

03:15:44.040 | In the public there seems to still be uncertainty

03:15:48.480 | about how much humans contribute to climate change.

03:15:52.840 | More than the scientific--

03:15:55.320 | - It would only be 24% that disagree

03:15:57.480 | with the UN Climate Panel.

03:15:59.400 | Three quarters would agree.

03:16:00.920 | - Are you uncomfortable about the 29?

03:16:02.840 | - 29 is actually, it's exactly right.

03:16:06.160 | I mean, the UN doesn't say it's all.

03:16:08.560 | Well, they say that could be the border case.

03:16:11.260 | - But anyway, this is interesting,

03:16:12.740 | but to me, across all these polls,

03:16:14.740 | if you look Republican versus Democrat,

03:16:18.440 | Republican,

03:16:19.520 | say that 17% say it's a great deal.

03:16:24.560 | Democrats say 71% say it's a great deal.

03:16:28.040 | And you just see this complete division.

03:16:30.500 | I think you probably,

03:16:34.120 | with COVID pandemic,

03:16:35.540 | you can ask a lot of questions like this.

03:16:39.680 | Do masks work?

03:16:41.160 | Are they an effective method

03:16:43.040 | to slow transmission of a pandemic?

03:16:45.320 | You'll probably have the same kind of polls

03:16:47.880 | about Republicans and Democrats.

03:16:50.120 | And while the effectiveness of masks,

03:16:54.700 | to me, is a scientific question.

03:16:56.400 | So there's different truths here, apparently.

03:17:00.520 | One is a scientific truth.

03:17:03.700 | One is a truth held by the scientific community,

03:17:07.360 | which seems to be also different

03:17:08.640 | than the scientific truth sometimes.

03:17:11.000 | And the other is the public perception

03:17:13.000 | that's polluted or affected by political affiliation.

03:17:18.000 | And then there's whatever is the narrative

03:17:23.040 | that's communicated by the media.

03:17:25.960 | They will also have a question,

03:17:27.480 | answer to the question of whether masks work or not.

03:17:30.120 | And they will also have an answer to the question

03:17:32.080 | about all these climate-related things.

03:17:34.180 | So that's a long way of asking the question

03:17:38.120 | of how is politics mixed into all of this?

03:17:43.120 | On the communication front,

03:17:45.000 | on the figuring out what the right policy is front,

03:17:48.380 | on the friction of humanity

03:17:50.660 | in the face of the right policies.

03:17:53.580 | - Well, I've written a ton on this.

03:17:55.580 | After I had that conversion about the social science in 2006,

03:17:59.740 | I began digging in a lot more on how people hold beliefs

03:18:03.180 | and what they do as opposed to what they think

03:18:06.980 | and questions about polling.

03:18:10.260 | And there's two things that come to me

03:18:12.040 | that make me not worry about the basic literacy,

03:18:15.020 | like is climate change X percent of whatever?

03:18:19.260 | I don't really care about that.

03:18:21.300 | And I'll explain why.

03:18:22.560 | For one thing, more science literacy,

03:18:27.260 | more basic literacy, like what is a greenhouse gas,

03:18:30.940 | all that stuff.

03:18:32.380 | Dan Kahane, K-A-H-A-N at Yale.

03:18:35.540 | He's actually at Yale Law School.

03:18:37.900 | The last decade, he did all this work

03:18:40.060 | on what he calls cultural cognition,

03:18:41.960 | which is, and he did studies that showed

03:18:47.080 | how what you believe emerges based on culture,

03:18:53.140 | based on your background, your red, blue,

03:18:56.220 | your where you are in the country.

03:18:58.340 | And one of the really disturbing findings was

03:19:01.180 | that the people who have the most basic science literacy,

03:19:04.940 | like who know the most about greenhouse effect or whatever,

03:19:09.080 | they're at both ends of the spectrum of views on climate,

03:19:13.260 | dismissives and alarmed.

03:19:15.260 | Steve Koonin, as I mentioned, is a good example.

03:19:17.140 | He's a brilliant physicist.

03:19:19.300 | And he knows all the science

03:19:20.980 | and he's completely at the end of skepticism.

03:19:24.860 | Will Happer, who was close to being Trump's science advisor,

03:19:29.460 | was even more out there.

03:19:31.100 | And they're both on the Jason Committee

03:19:34.460 | that advises the government on big strategic things.

03:19:37.060 | And people who are really alarmed about it

03:19:40.780 | also have the same belief.

03:19:41.980 | So as a journalist, I was thinking,

03:19:43.380 | do I just spend my time writing more explanatory stories

03:19:47.020 | that explain the science better?

03:19:48.680 | No.

03:19:51.020 | Do I dig in on this work to understand

03:19:53.120 | what brings people together?

03:19:54.520 | And then these same surveys, the same science shows you,

03:19:58.200 | if you don't make it about climate, among other things,

03:20:01.120 | this becomes, you don't have to worry about this anymore.

03:20:04.060 | If you Google for no red-blue divide climate revkin,

03:20:09.060 | you'll find a piece I did with some really good graphs.

03:20:11.860 | Essentially, it shows that in America,

03:20:15.140 | this is the Yale group again,

03:20:16.380 | their climate communication group.

03:20:19.200 | There's no red-blue divide on energy innovation, none.

03:20:23.180 | We need more climate energy, clean energy innovation.

03:20:26.060 | There wasn't even a divide country by state by state

03:20:29.820 | on whether CO2 should be regulated as a pollutant.

03:20:33.620 | But it's all like, what are the questions you ask?

03:20:37.220 | If you ask about innovation,

03:20:40.220 | if you ask about more incentives for renewable power.

03:20:44.400 | Oklahoma, Iowa, I did a piece when I was at ProPublica

03:20:50.180 | showing that the 17 states that were fighting Obama

03:20:54.420 | in court over his clean power plan,

03:20:59.020 | were actually, the majority of them

03:21:00.940 | were actually meeting the targets

03:21:02.340 | that the clean power plan had

03:21:04.720 | because they're expanding wind power already.

03:21:07.900 | Not because of the climate,

03:21:09.100 | because it makes money sense and energy sense.

03:21:12.140 | - So you don't think there's a political divide in this?

03:21:14.100 | - There is on climate, if you call it climate.

03:21:16.580 | If you say it's a climate,

03:21:18.060 | do you believe in the climate crisis?

03:21:19.580 | You're not asking,

03:21:21.420 | what kind of energy future do you want in your town?

03:21:24.820 | And so if you ask that question,

03:21:27.420 | the polarization goes away.

03:21:28.860 | - I guess what I'm asking,

03:21:30.900 | is there polarization on policy?

03:21:33.260 | - No, well there, again,

03:21:35.960 | the bipartisan infrastructure law

03:21:39.920 | that was passed last November, that was bipartisan.

03:21:43.060 | All of Congress said yes.

03:21:44.340 | And that's a trillion dollars,

03:21:45.840 | several hundred billion of which

03:21:48.060 | are for cleaner energy and resilience.

03:21:50.100 | - Yeah, but that's--

03:21:51.940 | - And that, but it's not a climate bill.

03:21:55.180 | And it wasn't a tax.

03:21:56.940 | It's incentives.

03:22:00.180 | - So the word climate and similar words

03:22:02.780 | are just used as part of the signaling, like masks.

03:22:06.660 | It's not-- - Absolutely.

03:22:09.140 | Dan Cahan's work, the guy at Yale,

03:22:11.460 | he really demonstrated powerfully

03:22:13.460 | abortion, gun rights, climate.

03:22:16.700 | And a more part level nuclear power

03:22:19.740 | has enduring camps that for and against--

03:22:22.620 | - What are the camps for?

03:22:24.460 | - Some of it's cultural cognition.

03:22:28.260 | It's how you grew up, it's what you fear.

03:22:30.860 | There's no common human frame for--

03:22:32.540 | - Is it 'cause of like folks,

03:22:34.020 | like certain individuals like Al Gore?

03:22:36.340 | - Ah.

03:22:38.260 | - Like he would make a film,

03:22:39.940 | he cares about this thing, he's a Democrat.

03:22:42.780 | - Therefore I hate this thing.

03:22:44.100 | - Therefore I don't like this thing, yeah.

03:22:45.380 | - Oh sure, yeah.

03:22:46.860 | When people get attached to an issue,

03:22:48.220 | if that's what pops into your head

03:22:50.820 | when you hear climate then.

03:22:52.300 | And it got politicized, it became emblematic.

03:22:56.240 | And the whole vaccine thing.

03:23:00.380 | - I mean, I'm not American,

03:23:01.740 | so I should stay a little bit out of this,

03:23:03.540 | but I think it seems to me that a lot of the thing

03:23:07.620 | that people believe and talk about

03:23:10.020 | is really about what they worry that that will lead to

03:23:13.460 | in terms of policy down the line.

03:23:15.700 | So a little bit like, do masks work?

03:23:18.280 | I'm sort of imagining, I don't know whether this is true,

03:23:21.940 | but I think part of it is, if I say masks work,

03:23:25.060 | they're gonna force me to wear it for the next year.

03:23:27.840 | So it doesn't work because then I don't have to wear it,

03:23:30.400 | kind of thing.

03:23:31.240 | That it's really, you're looking much further down the line.

03:23:34.740 | And certainly on climate, it seems to me

03:23:37.160 | that a lot of the people who say it's not real,

03:23:40.340 | it's not because they don't know it's,

03:23:42.500 | of course it's real,

03:23:43.580 | but it's that they don't want you to then come

03:23:45.780 | and regulate it really heavily.

03:23:48.060 | So it's-

03:23:48.900 | - Because they don't like top-down government.

03:23:50.220 | - Yeah, and also because they don't want another tax.

03:23:53.220 | And there's lots of other,

03:23:55.420 | so it's really, it's not a science,

03:23:57.700 | it's not a straight science question.

03:23:59.900 | It really is a question of what do you want to do?

03:24:03.100 | And that's where I think, Andy,

03:24:04.620 | you're much, much more right in saying

03:24:06.600 | we should have that discussion.

03:24:08.800 | So what do you wanna do?

03:24:10.440 | Because that will be a much easier conversation to say,

03:24:13.840 | do you wanna do really smart, cheap stuff?

03:24:15.820 | Or do you wanna do pretty dumb, expensive stuff?

03:24:18.740 | When you put it that way, you can get most people on board.

03:24:21.300 | Of course, it's not as simple as that, I know.

03:24:23.460 | - And it gets back to what you said earlier,

03:24:25.060 | that again, you talked about collaborative cooperation

03:24:27.700 | or whatever.

03:24:28.540 | There's a guy at Columbia, Peter Coleman,

03:24:31.460 | who runs this thing called

03:24:32.300 | the Difficult Conversations Laboratory.

03:24:34.300 | (laughing)

03:24:35.620 | Yeah.

03:24:36.460 | - Yeah, that's awesome.

03:24:37.280 | - And when I first heard about it, I was like,

03:24:38.120 | oh man, we need that.

03:24:40.340 | And his background's in psychology and conflict resolution,

03:24:45.340 | mostly at the global scale related to atrocities

03:24:48.900 | that countries are trying to get over.

03:24:50.260 | And there's a science to how to hold a better conversation.

03:24:54.500 | As you, either through experience or whatever, know,

03:24:58.340 | if you hold a debate,

03:25:00.540 | like I wouldn't wanna be in a debate with Bjorn.

03:25:02.900 | We could find lots of things we disagree on.

03:25:05.180 | But that takes it back to the win-lose model, right?

03:25:08.860 | That's not how you make progress.

03:25:11.420 | And what Peter, what I learned, absorbed from him,

03:25:15.420 | Peter Coleman, 'cause I was thinking,

03:25:18.740 | we need room for agreement.

03:25:19.820 | I need to build a room for agreement.

03:25:21.060 | My blog and at the Times and then the stuff I do now,

03:25:24.820 | it's like, how can we talk and come to agreement?

03:25:27.420 | He says, no, no, you don't want agreement.

03:25:29.140 | You want cooperation.

03:25:30.180 | That allows you to hold onto your beliefs.

03:25:34.060 | But to, we can disbelieve,

03:25:37.800 | we can disagree on all these things,

03:25:39.060 | but let's cooperate on that one thing.

03:25:41.140 | And that's a really valuable distinction

03:25:44.560 | that's needed so much in this arena,

03:25:46.620 | because as I said earlier,

03:25:49.200 | you can parse it right down to the whole menu

03:25:52.140 | of things Joe Manchin wanted, transmission lines.

03:25:56.000 | Now we're gonna have big fights over transmission lines.

03:25:57.940 | We've got billions of dollars to spend

03:25:59.460 | expanding America's grid.

03:26:01.560 | And every community in America is gonna say, not here.

03:26:04.220 | So how do you foster a federal local dialogue

03:26:08.920 | that allows that to happen

03:26:10.360 | if you wanna have any hope of a better grid?

03:26:12.940 | So that's like, those insights come from behavioral sciences

03:26:18.220 | that I think are completely undervalued in this area.

03:26:23.220 | - Pilka loves to quote, I think it's Lippert, but--

03:26:26.840 | - Oh, Walter Lippman.

03:26:28.000 | - Lippman, yes, that democracy is not about

03:26:31.160 | everybody agreeing, but it's about different people

03:26:33.800 | disagreeing, but doing the same thing.

03:26:36.520 | - Doing one thing together.

03:26:37.800 | - Yes, I mean, agreeing that we're gonna do this thing.

03:26:40.260 | So you can disagree, but still do a thing,

03:26:42.840 | possibly for very different reasons.

03:26:45.640 | - Yeah, and there's an amazing video clip

03:26:48.340 | that shows this so powerfully.

03:26:51.560 | 2015 was the buildup to the Paris talks

03:26:54.360 | that led to the Paris agreement, you know this.

03:26:57.840 | And a really talented journalist at CNN at the time,

03:27:00.920 | John Sutter, who's from Oklahoma originally,

03:27:03.720 | he saw another Yale study that was a county by county study

03:27:08.720 | of American attitudes on global warming,

03:27:12.040 | like right down to the county level.

03:27:13.440 | And there's this little glowing data point

03:27:17.760 | in Woodward County, Oklahoma.

03:27:20.500 | Woodward County, Oklahoma was ground zero

03:27:22.440 | for climate skepticism, climate denial,

03:27:24.400 | whatever you wanna call it.

03:27:25.920 | And he thought, oh, I'm gonna go there.

03:27:27.080 | And he went there just to meet people on the street,

03:27:30.520 | talk to them about energy and weather.

03:27:33.240 | And he did these little interviews.

03:27:35.080 | And there's this one with this guy

03:27:36.480 | who's like a middle-aged oil company employee,

03:27:39.540 | like a administrator, Thai kind of guy.

03:27:43.380 | And he starts out the interview,

03:27:46.080 | and the guy is saying, well, you know,

03:27:47.880 | God controls the environment.

03:27:49.780 | And if you're watching this, you're just going,

03:27:51.880 | okay, this is gonna be interesting.

03:27:54.000 | And the backstory, by the way, is the guy,

03:27:55.640 | he paid for the local playground

03:27:59.480 | to have dinosaurs and people,

03:28:01.400 | like toy dinosaurs and people on the playground,

03:28:04.440 | 'cause he believes in creation,

03:28:06.280 | 6,000-year creation. - 6,000, yeah.

03:28:07.960 | - So that's the guy, right?

03:28:09.980 | And then he gets to energy, and the guy says,

03:28:11.880 | you know, the same guy who believes

03:28:14.240 | God controls the environment says,

03:28:16.820 | you know, we have half of our roof covered

03:28:18.100 | with solar panels, and we wanna get off the grid entirely.

03:28:21.640 | And when I show this, I show this to audiences,

03:28:24.240 | and I say, just pause and think about that for a second.

03:28:27.640 | If you went, why do you think that's happening?

03:28:30.320 | And it's 'cause he's independent.

03:28:31.600 | He wants to have his own source of power.

03:28:33.040 | He's libertarian.

03:28:33.880 | He doesn't want the government telling him what to do.

03:28:35.520 | He would never vote for Hillary, I guarantee you.

03:28:37.480 | This is 2015.

03:28:39.480 | But he wanted to get off the grid entirely

03:28:40.880 | to be his own, to be himself.

03:28:44.300 | And so then I say, okay, so if you were going

03:28:47.000 | around the country with your climate crisis placard,

03:28:49.840 | and you go to Woodward County,

03:28:51.880 | do you think that would be a productive way

03:28:54.360 | to go to that place and make your case?

03:28:57.120 | And the answer is pretty obvious, no.

03:29:00.240 | If you go in there and you listen,

03:29:02.080 | like listening is such an important property

03:29:04.360 | that we all forget, including journalists,

03:29:06.440 | you're much more apt to find a path to cooperation.

03:29:11.560 | You could talk to him about, I guarantee,

03:29:13.840 | if I went there today, maybe I should go

03:29:15.840 | to talk about this new bill, $370 billion.

03:29:18.320 | How do we make that work at the local level?

03:29:21.880 | How do we answer that guy at the energy department,

03:29:23.960 | Jigar Shah, so how do we put this to work

03:29:26.680 | to get our buses off, to get electrified,

03:29:29.760 | or transition our street lamps and stuff?

03:29:33.040 | You could have a good chat with him.

03:29:34.560 | If you go in there and say, I'm here to debate you

03:29:36.960 | to death on global warming, forget about it.

03:29:39.580 | - Actually, let me ask you a question,

03:29:42.560 | given your roots as a journalist.

03:29:45.140 | So yeah, talking to a guy you disagree with,

03:29:49.480 | that's one thing.

03:29:51.080 | What about talking to people that might be,

03:29:56.200 | society might consider bad, unethical, even evil?

03:30:01.200 | What's the role of a journalist in that context?

03:30:05.040 | So climate change is a large number of people

03:30:09.080 | that believe one thing, a large number of people

03:30:11.200 | that believe another thing.

03:30:13.200 | It turns out, even with people that society deems as evil,

03:30:16.320 | there's a large number of people that support them.

03:30:19.360 | What's your role as a journalist to talk to them?

03:30:24.600 | - Well, I have talked to really bad people.

03:30:27.600 | When I wrote about the murder of Chico Mendes,

03:30:29.960 | a Brazilian Amazon rainforest activist in 1989,

03:30:34.360 | I interviewed the killers.

03:30:36.260 | One was in jail, several of them were just ranchers

03:30:41.280 | who, you know, they had their point of view.

03:30:45.080 | They were there in the Amazon rainforest to,

03:30:47.980 | the word in Brazil and Portuguese is limpar,

03:30:51.880 | to clean the land.

03:30:53.240 | You know, they're the bandarantes, the pioneers of Brazil.

03:30:56.360 | They go into these frontiers and tame them

03:30:58.680 | like we had in our West, you know?

03:31:01.120 | And they would bring that up too.

03:31:03.160 | They would say to me, well, you did this, you know?

03:31:06.240 | They didn't say you murdered your Native Americans

03:31:08.540 | and stuff, but they could easily have said that too,

03:31:10.160 | and you deforested all your landscapes.

03:31:12.720 | So who are you to come down here to?

03:31:14.480 | But if I didn't talk to them,

03:31:16.920 | that would be not a way to do journalism.

03:31:20.840 | But when you talk to them, did you empathize with them

03:31:23.920 | or did you push back?

03:31:26.200 | That's the ultimate question.

03:31:28.120 | Like if you want to understand,

03:31:29.880 | like if you talk to Hitler in 1941,

03:31:35.240 | you empathize with him or do you push back?

03:31:39.080 | Because most journalists would push

03:31:41.720 | because they're trying to signal to fellow journalists

03:31:45.640 | and to people back home that this,

03:31:48.600 | me, the journalist is on the right side.

03:31:50.800 | But if you actually want to understand the person,

03:31:54.800 | you should empathize.

03:31:56.080 | If you want to be the kind of person

03:31:59.400 | that actually understands in the full arc of history,

03:32:04.400 | you need to empathize.

03:32:07.120 | I find that journalists, a lot of times,

03:32:10.280 | perhaps they're protecting their job,

03:32:12.380 | their reputation, their sanity,

03:32:14.680 | are not willing to empathize.

03:32:16.600 | - Yeah, I think this happened with Joe Manchin.

03:32:18.440 | I'm not doing any kind of equation here

03:32:20.360 | related to Hitler and Joe Manchin.

03:32:22.080 | Or Trump, I mean Trump.

03:32:23.440 | I interviewed the guy, Will Hepper, I mentioned,

03:32:25.480 | who was a physicist at Princeton

03:32:27.400 | who thinks carbon dioxide is the greatest thing

03:32:29.840 | in the world and we should have more of it in the atmosphere.

03:32:32.680 | I profoundly disagree on that point.

03:32:35.680 | But I interviewed him for an hour

03:32:37.680 | and it was so interesting

03:32:40.700 | because he was trying to kind of rope-a-dope me

03:32:43.360 | into making it about CO2 and climate

03:32:47.880 | 'cause he's a super smart physicist.

03:32:51.520 | And I kind of said, "Let's talk about some other things."

03:32:55.700 | And we started talking about education

03:32:57.040 | and science education.

03:32:57.960 | He went on for like 20 minutes

03:32:59.720 | about the vital importance of better science education

03:33:03.660 | for Americans.

03:33:04.720 | He drew on people he knew from Europe, Hungary.

03:33:08.520 | Bunch of Nobel Prize winners came from some town in Hungary,

03:33:11.640 | at least a couple.

03:33:12.980 | And he said that he learned their teachers.

03:33:15.140 | At any rate, he went at a long exposition on that.

03:33:18.320 | He then defended climate science.

03:33:20.820 | He said, "We need more climate science."

03:33:22.220 | He says, "I love this stuff.

03:33:23.180 | "I love the ocean buoys."

03:33:24.960 | There are now thousands of them in the oceans

03:33:26.560 | charting clear pictures of ocean circulation and satellites.

03:33:30.940 | And he said something really important

03:33:32.320 | that many people discount,

03:33:33.680 | which is we need sustained investment

03:33:36.000 | in monitoring this planet.

03:33:37.440 | We neglect our systems

03:33:41.240 | that just tell us what's happening in the world.

03:33:44.440 | And that's happened over and over again.

03:33:47.120 | So if I had left it,

03:33:48.520 | if I had gone into the terrain of the fight over CO2,

03:33:53.520 | some journalist friends might say,

03:33:55.760 | "Oh, that was a good mashup, you know, matchup."

03:33:59.840 | But I found these really profound and important things

03:34:02.680 | that I wanted the world to know about

03:34:05.200 | in the context of whether Trump

03:34:06.440 | was gonna have him as a science advisor.

03:34:08.960 | And so if I hadn't gone there,

03:34:11.640 | and a lot of people, if you look back,

03:34:13.480 | I got hammered for doing that, even from friends.

03:34:18.000 | And then later, John Holdren,

03:34:21.560 | who had been Obama's science advisor for eight years,

03:34:24.340 | he said, "I would rather have Will Happer

03:34:29.080 | "as Trump's science advisor than no science advisor."

03:34:32.840 | In other words, there's a landscape

03:34:34.280 | of things that are important.

03:34:35.200 | He recognized that Happer's really smart about defense

03:34:37.740 | and all kinds of things too.

03:34:39.040 | So it's like you do have to sort of screw up your,

03:34:42.400 | ideally, you screw up your courage,

03:34:44.680 | but then not necessarily get into the,

03:34:47.760 | it's like with the guy in Oklahoma.

03:34:49.520 | If you go in looking for the differences, you'll find them.

03:34:53.640 | You can amplify them.

03:34:54.840 | You can leave with this paralyzed sense

03:34:59.240 | of nothing having happened that was useful.

03:35:02.720 | Or you can find these nuggets.

03:35:04.720 | Everyone is a human being.

03:35:06.940 | I can't play the mind game

03:35:08.760 | of what I would have asked to Hitler.

03:35:11.360 | But-- - I play that mind game

03:35:14.480 | all the time, but that's for another conversation.

03:35:16.720 | - Yeah, yeah. - I had many in my family

03:35:19.680 | that have suffered under him.

03:35:22.880 | Nevertheless, he is a human being.

03:35:25.260 | - Yeah. - And people sometimes

03:35:28.320 | caricature Hitler saying like,

03:35:31.040 | that's when you mentioned Hitler,

03:35:32.280 | the conversation devolves. - Oh, right,

03:35:34.080 | you've got a certain point.

03:35:35.240 | - But I don't agree.

03:35:37.000 | I think sort of these extremes

03:35:38.560 | are useful thought experiments to understand.

03:35:40.760 | Because if you're not willing to take your ideals

03:35:43.160 | to that extreme, then maybe your ideals

03:35:47.480 | need some rethinking from a journalist's perspective,

03:35:51.000 | all that kind of stuff.

03:35:52.400 | - A number of years ago, my wife and I

03:35:53.720 | were with our veterinarian who was German born,

03:35:56.920 | Dr. Bach, B-A-C-H.

03:35:59.360 | We were talking about the dog and stuff,

03:36:00.560 | and then we were talking about Trump.

03:36:02.800 | And he just mentioned in passing,

03:36:03.960 | he said, "My mother voted for Hitler."

03:36:05.860 | Wow, that hit me like a brick.

03:36:09.040 | - Yeah.

03:36:09.880 | - Because it was so, at the very least,

03:36:13.400 | understanding how pathways that lead to

03:36:17.000 | people doing things like he did in "Ordered"

03:36:21.480 | is essential, and the only way to understand that

03:36:23.980 | is to dig in and ask questions and get uncomfortable.

03:36:28.980 | It still makes my hair prickle

03:36:30.120 | when I think back to him saying,

03:36:32.040 | yeah, my mom voted for Hitler.

03:36:33.800 | - That somehow makes it super real.

03:36:35.240 | Like, oh, yeah. - Yeah, wow.

03:36:37.080 | - Yeah, there's elections, there's real people

03:36:39.600 | living their lives.

03:36:40.880 | - Exactly, struggling with a broken economy

03:36:43.240 | and all kinds of things.

03:36:44.800 | - Having their own little personal resentments

03:36:48.120 | and all that kind of stuff.

03:36:49.840 | Let me ask you about presidents, American presidents.

03:36:52.480 | Who had a positive or negative impact

03:36:58.640 | on climate change efforts in your view?

03:37:01.280 | Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden,

03:37:03.800 | or maybe you could say that they don't have much of an impact.

03:37:06.120 | So, like, they, in public discourse,

03:37:09.200 | presidents have a kind of, maybe, disproportional,

03:37:14.200 | like, we imagine they have a huge amount of impact.

03:37:18.080 | How much impact do they actually have on climate policy?

03:37:23.020 | I don't know if you have comments on this.

03:37:25.760 | - Well, there is a background decarbonization rate

03:37:29.040 | that's happened for 150 years.

03:37:30.920 | You know, we move from wood to charcoal

03:37:34.640 | to coal to oil and gas is cleaner,

03:37:38.480 | it's more hydrogen, less carbon.

03:37:40.360 | And I asked recently, I asked some really smart scientists

03:37:44.680 | who study these long trajectories of energy.

03:37:47.760 | When you look at those curves,

03:37:48.840 | is there anything in that curve that says,

03:37:50.520 | oh, climate treaty, 1992?

03:37:53.000 | Oh, Paris?

03:37:55.800 | And it's really hard.

03:37:58.040 | Or China, I mean, when China came in

03:38:00.160 | with its huge growth in emissions,

03:38:03.400 | that created a bit of a recarbonization blip,

03:38:07.160 | but that was this huge growth in their economy.

03:38:08.920 | They pulled a bunch of people out of poverty.

03:38:11.520 | So, yeah, no, presidents don't really change anything.

03:38:15.040 | On timescales that we would measure,

03:38:17.440 | as meaning where you could parse it out,

03:38:19.640 | I think that's not to say that Obama's

03:38:23.560 | and the current focus on the stimulus that's happening,

03:38:27.960 | which includes a lot more money for research,

03:38:29.840 | et cetera, and innovation.

03:38:32.400 | I do think that will be beneficial in a very, very long run.

03:38:35.760 | But I have to say, when Obama stood up

03:38:38.680 | and took credit for reductions

03:38:42.920 | from moving from coal to gas because of fracking,

03:38:46.020 | that was actually Cheney who set that in motion.

03:38:49.760 | - I was thinking, I would say Bush,

03:38:51.840 | not because I like him or anything,

03:38:53.200 | but he's the guy who inadvertently started fracking.

03:38:57.400 | - It goes further back than that.

03:38:58.520 | It was a federal investment in fracking

03:39:00.000 | in the '60s and '70s,

03:39:01.040 | and then this one guy in Texas, right here in Texas,

03:39:03.920 | George Mischel, who cobbled together technology,

03:39:08.360 | and that led to this real dramatic change from gas to coal

03:39:13.360 | that mostly played out in the Obama years,

03:39:16.160 | but that really was stimulated

03:39:17.440 | by Cheney's early energy task force,

03:39:20.720 | 2001, when they were getting into office.

03:39:23.560 | And also, Bush did something interesting

03:39:25.640 | in the whole wonky climate treaty process.

03:39:30.840 | It was under Bush that they started to focus on sectors.

03:39:34.020 | Oh, and also on big emitters.

03:39:37.960 | This isn't about 200 countries.

03:39:40.400 | It's about basically eight or 10 countries.

03:39:43.320 | Let's get them into a room,

03:39:44.660 | and let's have these little subrooms

03:39:47.040 | on electrification, on mining, on whatever,

03:39:52.040 | and by parsing it out,

03:39:54.120 | and Obama picked up the same model.

03:39:55.760 | They had different names for it

03:39:56.960 | because presidents always name something different

03:39:58.920 | than the last president.

03:40:00.480 | One was the major economies forum,

03:40:02.160 | and then it was the major emitters, something or other,

03:40:05.820 | and that getting away from the treaty dots and dashes

03:40:09.480 | toward just sectoral, big sectors that matter,

03:40:13.960 | gas, electrification, makes a difference.

03:40:17.760 | But again, you couldn't ever measure.

03:40:20.100 | It's always the lag time would be a problem.

03:40:22.960 | - And also, I think one very under-reported fact,

03:40:27.840 | so the UNEP, the Environment Program,

03:40:30.400 | they come out with what they call a gap report every year

03:40:34.920 | where they estimate how much is the world doing

03:40:37.360 | compared to what should it or has it promised to do.

03:40:40.320 | - Emissions.

03:40:41.440 | - Yeah, and in 2019, so just before COVID hit,

03:40:45.960 | they actually did a survey of the 2010s,

03:40:49.240 | so the last big sort of report on how well are we doing,

03:40:52.800 | and their takeaway quote,

03:40:54.320 | and I'm not gonna get this right,

03:40:55.720 | but it's pretty much what they said was,

03:40:57.800 | "If you take the world as if we hadn't cared

03:41:01.560 | "about climate change since 2005,

03:41:04.900 | "we can't tell the difference between that world

03:41:09.000 | "and the world that we're actually living in."

03:41:11.680 | So despite the fact that we've had 10 years

03:41:14.120 | of immense focus on climate, and everybody talks about it,

03:41:18.760 | and the Paris Agreement,

03:41:19.920 | which is perhaps the biggest global sort of agreement

03:41:22.920 | on what we're gonna be doing, you can't actually tell,

03:41:25.960 | and that I think is incredibly important

03:41:29.480 | because what it tells you is all that we're doing

03:41:31.960 | is not even on the margin, it's sort of smaller than that,

03:41:35.240 | and I'm not sure what that is,

03:41:36.720 | but we're basically dealing in,

03:41:39.160 | for instance, the UK loves to point out

03:41:41.120 | that they have dramatically reduced their carbon emissions,

03:41:43.600 | and they have, they've really dramatically

03:41:46.040 | lowered their emissions,

03:41:47.400 | but mostly because they've de-industrialized.

03:41:50.100 | They basically said, "Look, we're just gonna be bankers

03:41:52.600 | "for all of you guys,

03:41:53.440 | "and then everybody else is gonna produce our stuff,"

03:41:56.360 | which of course is great for Britain,

03:41:58.200 | or I don't know if it's great for Britain,

03:41:59.800 | but we can't all do that,

03:42:02.320 | and so most of what we're trying to do right now

03:42:05.600 | is sort of this virtue signaling, it makes us feel good,

03:42:10.040 | it's sort of, yeah, on the margin,

03:42:11.840 | or in the very tiny margin, but what we basically,

03:42:14.680 | and that was, Andy, your point with China,

03:42:17.520 | and the reason why we can't tell the difference,

03:42:19.260 | of course, is because China basically

03:42:21.080 | became the workshop for everyone,

03:42:22.920 | and so not only did they lift

03:42:25.440 | more than half a million people out of poverty,

03:42:27.480 | sorry, half a billion, yes,

03:42:29.360 | half a billion people out of poverty,

03:42:31.200 | but they also basically took over

03:42:34.200 | most production in the world,

03:42:36.120 | and so of course, many rich countries could decarbonize,

03:42:40.720 | or at least reduce their carbon emissions

03:42:42.600 | and feel very virtuous about it,

03:42:44.200 | but fundamentally, we haven't solved

03:42:45.920 | how does the world do this,

03:42:48.000 | and that's why I think we're also left with this sense

03:42:50.600 | of not only are we being told

03:42:52.200 | this is an unmitigated catastrophe,

03:42:54.920 | and that's why this is the only thing

03:42:56.360 | we should be focusing on, but also somehow,

03:42:58.480 | and we can all fix it, and I don't think we have any sense

03:43:02.040 | of how hard this is actually gonna be,

03:43:04.200 | and that's, of course, why I would go back and say,

03:43:06.240 | look, the only way you're gonna fix this

03:43:07.920 | is through innovation, because if you have something

03:43:09.920 | that's cheaper than fossil fuels, you've fixed it.

03:43:12.280 | If you have something that's harder and costlier

03:43:16.040 | and more inconvenient, no, you're just not gonna make it.

03:43:19.720 | - And getting more time by cutting vulnerability.

03:43:23.400 | - Yes.

03:43:24.220 | - The pockets of vulnerability on the planet are huge,

03:43:26.240 | and they're identifiable, and you know what to do.

03:43:28.280 | - What are the biggest pockets of vulnerability?

03:43:30.600 | - Well, they're like-- - Infrastructure of cities?

03:43:32.600 | - No, it's where people are living

03:43:33.960 | and what their capacities are.

03:43:36.120 | - So moving people, how do you decrease

03:43:38.800 | the vulnerability in the world?

03:43:40.240 | What are the big-- - Affordable housing.

03:43:42.080 | One reason so many people moved out of San Francisco

03:43:45.120 | and adjacent cities into the countryside

03:43:47.560 | and then had their houses burned down

03:43:50.000 | is because they can't afford to live in the city anymore.

03:43:52.960 | So affordable housing in cities can limit exposure to,

03:43:57.200 | in that case, wildfire.

03:43:58.720 | Durban, South Africa, that terrible, devastating flood

03:44:01.700 | they had this year, past year, who was washed away?

03:44:05.480 | Poor people who don't have any place to live,

03:44:07.480 | so they settle in a floodplain along a stream bed

03:44:11.840 | that's livable when it's not raining buckets.

03:44:15.360 | And those are vulnerabilities that are there

03:44:17.840 | because of dislocation, housing.

03:44:21.080 | Tacloban, this typhoon that hit the Philippines terribly,

03:44:24.800 | ahead of the Paris talks, or was it the previous one?

03:44:27.000 | - No, it was in 2013, I believe.

03:44:29.520 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah, thousands died.

03:44:31.880 | Most of the stories that were written

03:44:34.320 | were framed around climate change

03:44:35.760 | because the Pope made a deal about it.

03:44:37.480 | It was just before the climate talks of that year.

03:44:41.320 | And what happened, partially why there were so many losses,

03:44:45.400 | was Tacloban City had quadrupled in population

03:44:49.760 | in the last 30 years,

03:44:50.680 | and most of the people coming into the city

03:44:52.320 | were poor, looking for work,

03:44:53.600 | and settling in marginal places

03:44:55.720 | where a storm surge killed them.

03:44:58.160 | So those are things we,

03:44:59.840 | whatever the we is in the different places,

03:45:03.940 | really can work on, and that gives more flex for sure,

03:45:07.040 | and thinking about having this long trajectory

03:45:09.800 | that seems so immovable and so hard,

03:45:11.520 | the decarbonization part, there's no excuse.

03:45:15.000 | I wrote a piece, I guess a year ago.

03:45:18.200 | I said there's a vulnerability emergency

03:45:20.060 | hiding behind this climate emergency label.

03:45:24.760 | That's really what needs work.

03:45:27.480 | - And also on the Tacloban,

03:45:28.920 | I mean, the hurricane that hit in 2013,

03:45:32.240 | there was almost a similar hurricane

03:45:34.160 | in the early part of the 1900s

03:45:37.640 | that hit pretty much the same strength,

03:45:40.800 | and it eradicated half the city.

03:45:42.480 | It killed half the city.

03:45:44.440 | And so what's happened since then

03:45:45.800 | is people just got much, much richer

03:45:48.720 | from early 1900 to 2013.

03:45:52.000 | We've just moved a lot of people out of poverty.

03:45:54.360 | Now it's a lot bigger.

03:45:55.200 | - And Bangladesh.

03:45:56.920 | Bangladesh is even a bigger example of that.

03:45:58.560 | In the 1970s, they had horrible cyclones,

03:46:01.280 | one of which was the Beatles,

03:46:02.720 | George Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh,

03:46:04.920 | great album that I still have somewhere.

03:46:08.120 | - What's the album? - Hundreds of thousands.

03:46:10.200 | He did a concert, a fundraising concert,

03:46:12.200 | the Concert for Bangladesh

03:46:13.400 | after this terrible cyclone tragedy hit Bangladesh,

03:46:16.680 | and I think there were several hundred thousand

03:46:18.560 | who were killed, and a couple like that around that time.

03:46:22.320 | Bangladesh has been hit by comparable storms recently,

03:46:25.520 | and it's terrible, every death is terrible,

03:46:27.440 | but it's like 123 deaths.

03:46:29.200 | And it's not just 'cause of wealth,

03:46:31.600 | it's 'cause people know what to do.

03:46:33.520 | It's because there's cell phones.

03:46:35.080 | It's because they have elevated platforms

03:46:37.400 | in many communities in the floodplains there

03:46:40.600 | that you know to get to.

03:46:41.920 | So they went from hundreds of thousands of deaths

03:46:44.720 | in a cyclone to 123.

03:46:47.400 | - When we were working with Bangladesh,

03:46:49.320 | it's no longer the problem of people dying,

03:46:52.200 | it's the fact that their cattle dies.

03:46:53.920 | So they want cattle places where you could herd your cattle.

03:46:57.560 | This is their capital, and it's not to make fun of it,

03:47:00.240 | but it's an amazing progress

03:47:01.800 | that you've stopped worrying about your parents dying

03:47:04.720 | and you worry about your cows dying.

03:47:06.240 | - And when I was talking about social innovation,

03:47:08.000 | the other hour, there's a model emerging in Bangladesh

03:47:10.760 | for farmers to move from raising chickens, poultry, to ducks.

03:47:14.640 | And it's working.

03:47:17.280 | And ducks actually fetch a higher price at the market.

03:47:19.920 | And guess what?

03:47:20.760 | When you get flooded-- - They survive.

03:47:22.960 | - You can still have your income and your future.

03:47:25.440 | - Let me ask you to give advice.

03:47:30.600 | Put on your sage, wise hat, and give advice to young people

03:47:35.520 | that are looking into this world

03:47:38.880 | and see how they can do the most good.

03:47:40.560 | We talked about what is the $1

03:47:44.040 | that can do the most positive improvement

03:47:47.280 | to lead to $40, $45, and so on.

03:47:51.640 | What advice would you give to young people

03:47:53.600 | in high school and college

03:47:56.120 | how to have a positive impact on the world?

03:47:58.880 | How to have a career they can be proud of?

03:48:01.240 | Maybe ask Bjorn first.

03:48:02.440 | And how to have a life they can be proud of?

03:48:06.120 | - So I think, and this really pretty well reflects

03:48:09.040 | the whole conversation we've had,

03:48:10.720 | we've gotta sort of take the catastrophism

03:48:14.400 | out of the climate conversation.

03:48:17.840 | And this really matters because a lot of kids

03:48:21.080 | literally think that the world is gonna end pretty soon.

03:48:24.280 | And that obviously makes any other kind of plan

03:48:27.960 | meaningless.

03:48:29.920 | So first of all, look, you're not gonna die.

03:48:32.720 | That poster that people, a lot of kids have,

03:48:36.960 | you're gonna die from old age,

03:48:38.280 | but I'm gonna die from climate.

03:48:39.480 | No, you're not.

03:48:40.760 | You're gonna die from old age

03:48:42.120 | and you're gonna die much older, very likely.

03:48:45.120 | So the reality is the world has improved dramatically

03:48:49.800 | and it's very likely to improve even more.

03:48:52.040 | So the baseline is good.

03:48:54.560 | This is just the facts.

03:48:56.480 | Then there's still lots and lots of problems.

03:49:00.440 | And what you should do as a young person is

03:49:02.760 | stop being paralyzed by fear

03:49:06.120 | and then realize what you can do

03:49:08.240 | is basically help humanity become even smarter.

03:49:12.280 | There's a lot of different places you can do.

03:49:14.400 | I mean, the obvious thing

03:49:15.520 | when you're talking about climate is

03:49:17.280 | what if you could become the guy

03:49:19.080 | that develops fourth generation nuclear?

03:49:21.920 | It's very likely it's something that

03:49:23.800 | neither of us know anything about right now,

03:49:26.080 | but develop the energy source

03:49:28.320 | that'll basically power the rest of humanity.

03:49:30.360 | How cool would that be?

03:49:32.080 | That's one of the many things you could do.

03:49:34.200 | But again, also remember there are lots and lots

03:49:36.920 | of other things that need solutions.

03:49:39.360 | So what about you become the guy that makes the,

03:49:42.680 | or the girl that makes the social innovation

03:49:46.120 | in Tanzania or in Kenya, sorry, in Kenya?

03:49:50.160 | Or what about if you become the person who finds a way

03:49:53.920 | that is a much cheaper, more effective way

03:49:56.640 | to tackle tuberculosis right now,

03:49:58.520 | it needs four to six months of medication.

03:50:00.840 | That one of the big problems is

03:50:02.400 | once you pop the pills and you're fresh,

03:50:04.800 | it's really hard to get people to do it

03:50:06.320 | for the other five and a half months, right?

03:50:08.280 | And you need that,

03:50:09.760 | otherwise you actually have a big risk

03:50:11.800 | of getting a multi-drug resistant tuberculosis,

03:50:15.920 | which is a real scourge on the earth.

03:50:18.200 | So, what if you develop that?

03:50:20.760 | So the truth is, not only can your life be much better

03:50:24.720 | when you sort of ditch that doomerism,

03:50:28.240 | but it also becomes much more possible

03:50:30.160 | for you to be a positive part of making sure

03:50:33.040 | that you do that progress.

03:50:34.280 | Why has the world improved so much?

03:50:36.440 | Because our parents and great grandparents,

03:50:39.560 | they made all this work.

03:50:41.240 | This was all their innovations and a lot of hard work.

03:50:44.560 | And I'm incredibly grateful that they've done it.

03:50:47.240 | But now it's kind of time to pay back.

03:50:49.280 | So, you got to do this for our grandkids.

03:50:53.360 | You got to make those innovations,

03:50:55.200 | make those policy opportunities

03:50:57.800 | that'll make the world an even better place.

03:51:00.960 | - Totally.

03:51:01.800 | And to me, there's never been a better time

03:51:06.040 | to be effective as a young person

03:51:08.440 | 'cause the internet, connectedness.

03:51:11.640 | You can brainstorm with someone in another country

03:51:15.160 | just as easily as you can brainstorm

03:51:16.480 | with someone down the block when we were kids.

03:51:19.240 | As I said earlier, my pen pal was letters taking weeks.

03:51:24.000 | And so the key properties, ideally,

03:51:29.640 | that young people would do well to cultivate are,

03:51:34.640 | well, certainly adaptability because change is changing.

03:51:39.800 | Not just, you know, the rate of change is changing.

03:51:42.520 | These layers of change are all piling up on each other.

03:51:46.280 | Having an ability to understand

03:51:49.520 | the information environment is a fundamental need now

03:51:53.240 | that wasn't a need when we were growing up.

03:51:55.400 | We read a few newspapers.

03:51:56.760 | My dad would turn on the nightly news

03:51:58.920 | and Walter Cronkite would say, "That's the way it is."

03:52:01.880 | I'd say, "That's the way it is."

03:52:03.840 | And that's so not the way the media environment is now.

03:52:07.600 | So courses in media literacy should be kind of

03:52:10.120 | fundamental parts of curriculum from like kindergarten on

03:52:14.240 | or parents can do the same thing.

03:52:16.320 | There's a woman at URI, University of Rhode Island,

03:52:18.480 | Renee Hobbs, who teaches a course in propaganda literacy.

03:52:21.380 | And she said, you know, the history of the word is not bad.

03:52:26.140 | Propaganda could be good.

03:52:27.280 | It's pro, it's for the church.

03:52:30.440 | She did a wonderful chat with me.

03:52:32.560 | She laid this out.

03:52:34.120 | But understanding when it is propaganda,

03:52:37.040 | like the tobacco, you know,

03:52:38.760 | there is hopefully a difference between that and that,

03:52:42.760 | but cigarette ads and journalistically acquired information.

03:52:47.760 | So key to everything Bjorn was talking about too

03:52:51.320 | is just understanding how to not be sucked

03:52:54.040 | into this information environment

03:52:55.520 | and spit out as a paralyzed, doomist entity.

03:53:00.280 | Because once you have an ability to step back,

03:53:03.540 | then you can use Twitter or whatever you're on

03:53:07.360 | to find people who might have a skillset you don't have

03:53:10.120 | that is something you need to do to incorporate,

03:53:14.200 | to harness, to do the thing you want to do in the world.

03:53:17.680 | Finding your way to make the world better.

03:53:19.680 | And it can have nothing to do with climate,

03:53:21.760 | but if it makes a few more people's lives better,

03:53:24.120 | then overall you're leading toward better capacity

03:53:26.480 | for all this stuff.

03:53:27.480 | So that, and then the climate problem,

03:53:29.120 | the prismatic giant nature of it

03:53:31.160 | is what makes it so daunting,

03:53:35.240 | but it's also what gives everybody an opportunity.

03:53:37.880 | Like there's something for artists, scientists, poets,

03:53:41.000 | everybody needs to get in the game.

03:53:43.800 | I just spent some time with Kim Stanley Robinson

03:53:46.320 | who wrote that book, "Ministry of the Future,"

03:53:47.800 | which is this sprawling novel about a worst case outcome

03:53:52.200 | where everyone in India is dying.

03:53:53.840 | So fiction can help experiment,

03:54:00.680 | different kinds of fiction, different kinds of arts

03:54:02.680 | can help us sort of experiment

03:54:04.480 | with what the future might look like in different ways.

03:54:06.240 | And just get started.

03:54:08.040 | And the other thing, unfortunately, that's needed,

03:54:10.480 | I think I first said this in 2008

03:54:13.960 | when someone asked me something about climate.

03:54:15.720 | I said, "Weirdly, you have to sort of have a sense

03:54:19.360 | "of urgency, but a sense of patience at the same time."

03:54:22.560 | Like, just roll those words around in your mind.

03:54:24.480 | Like, what does that mean?

03:54:25.600 | Urgent and patient, how could that possibly be?

03:54:27.960 | But actually it really is the reality.

03:54:32.440 | There is an urgency with this building gas

03:54:34.600 | that's cumulative, that doesn't go away like smoke

03:54:37.000 | when it rains.

03:54:39.160 | And every year that happens, it's adding to risk.

03:54:42.960 | And you can kind of wake up completely freaked out urgent,

03:54:46.340 | but when you realize energy transitions take time,

03:54:49.200 | then you have to sort of find patience

03:54:50.800 | or whatever your word is for that.

03:54:53.360 | - Yeah, I think you have to oscillate back and forth

03:54:55.320 | throughout the day, having a sense of urgency

03:54:57.880 | when you're trying to actually be productive and patient

03:55:02.040 | so you can have a calm head about you

03:55:03.760 | in terms of putting everything into perspective.

03:55:06.520 | And like you said, with information, that is interesting,

03:55:10.380 | especially in the scientific community.

03:55:11.800 | I think you've spoken about this before.

03:55:13.800 | That there is some responsibility,

03:55:16.600 | or at least an opportunity for scientists

03:55:19.280 | to not just do science, but to understand the dynamics

03:55:22.180 | of the different mediums in which information is exchanged.

03:55:25.720 | So it could be Twitter for a few years,

03:55:28.020 | then it could be TikTok, then it could be,

03:55:31.280 | I'm a huge believer in the power of YouTube

03:55:33.520 | over the next several years, perhaps decades.

03:55:39.000 | I mean, it's a very interesting medium for education

03:55:42.360 | and communication and for debate and that's grassroots.

03:55:46.640 | That's from like the bottom up,

03:55:48.720 | that every scientist is able to communicate their work.

03:55:52.440 | And I personally believe have the responsibility

03:55:55.040 | to communicate their work.

03:55:56.360 | If anything, the internet made me realize

03:56:00.400 | that science is not just about doing the science,

03:56:04.720 | it's about communicating it.

03:56:06.160 | Like this is not some kind of virtue signaling on my part.

03:56:11.440 | - No, no, no.

03:56:12.280 | - No, like I feel like if the tree falls in the forest

03:56:15.760 | and nobody's around to hear it, it really didn't fall.

03:56:19.440 | Like that's not, there should be a culture of,

03:56:22.600 | well, at MIT, there's a place called the Media Lab.

03:56:27.920 | - Yes, sir.

03:56:28.760 | - Where they really emphasize,

03:56:31.160 | like you always be able to demo something,

03:56:35.040 | to show off your work.

03:56:35.960 | They really emphasize showing off their work.

03:56:37.760 | And I think that was in some part criticized

03:56:41.040 | in the bigger MIT culture that,

03:56:42.800 | that's like being focusing too much on the PR

03:56:47.360 | versus doing the science.

03:56:49.000 | But I really disagree with that.

03:56:50.560 | Of course, there's a balance to strike.

03:56:52.560 | You don't want to be all smoke and mirrors,

03:56:54.280 | but there really is a lot of value to communication

03:56:57.800 | and not just sort of some broad,

03:57:01.800 | you almost don't want to teach a course on communication

03:57:04.400 | because by the time you teach the course, it's already too late.

03:57:06.720 | It's always being on top of how, what is the language?

03:57:11.720 | What is the culture and the etiquette?

03:57:13.880 | What is the technology of communication that is effective?

03:57:17.640 | - Yeah.

03:57:18.480 | - I actually had a big conversation about that

03:57:20.680 | in my university because I think,

03:57:22.920 | and this is perhaps especially true for social sciences,

03:57:26.160 | but I think it's probably true for everyone,

03:57:28.440 | just simply communicating what it is that you've done

03:57:30.880 | in research makes it possible for you

03:57:32.880 | to sort of get an outsider's perspective and see,

03:57:35.240 | did I just go into an incredibly deep hole

03:57:39.040 | that just three other people really care about in the world?

03:57:42.120 | Or is this actually something that matters to the world?

03:57:44.720 | And being able to explain what it is that you've done

03:57:47.640 | to everyone else makes,

03:57:49.760 | my sort of sense is if you can't say it

03:57:52.440 | in a couple of minutes, it's probably,

03:57:54.640 | it's not necessarily true,

03:57:56.360 | but it's probably because it wasn't all that important.

03:57:59.000 | - There was a hashtag generated maybe seven years ago

03:58:03.280 | by a Caltech PhD candidate woman,

03:58:06.800 | and it was fantastic.

03:58:09.400 | The hashtag was #iamascientistbecause,

03:58:13.000 | and she posted it with a picture of herself

03:58:14.800 | with her answer, you know?

03:58:16.900 | And that, when I talk to scientists,

03:58:19.040 | or basically anybody about communicating,

03:58:21.580 | I say don't start with I am a phytologist,

03:58:26.580 | and I use a spectrophotometer to do X.

03:58:30.740 | Start with I am a scientist because

03:58:34.020 | the world is endlessly interesting,

03:58:36.020 | and I just found these salamanders,

03:58:39.340 | which are gonna vanish if we don't stop this fungus

03:58:42.660 | from coming to the United States, utterly interesting.

03:58:45.300 | And then you've got people hooked.

03:58:47.620 | But it's the motivation part,

03:58:49.020 | 'cause everyone grew up as a kid,

03:58:50.700 | and a kid is basically like a scientist.

03:58:52.260 | Wow, what the hell is this?

03:58:53.300 | How does this work?

03:58:54.540 | So you can connect with people that way.

03:58:56.820 | But this other issue you broached is really important,

03:58:59.460 | and what I love about MIT particularly,

03:59:01.980 | I spent a lot of time there over the decades,

03:59:04.020 | not just talking to the hurricane guy,

03:59:06.540 | Amy Smith, who has the development lab

03:59:08.340 | in the basement there somewhere.

03:59:09.540 | - Most of MIT looks like it's the basement,

03:59:11.620 | but yes, it's part of the charm.

03:59:14.620 | - But it's a usability function

03:59:16.500 | is part of a lot of that goes on there.

03:59:18.780 | It's engineering and science.

03:59:20.320 | And it reminds me, in 1997,

03:59:23.740 | these two very different scientists,

03:59:25.780 | Dan Kamin at Berkeley and Michael Dove at Yale,

03:59:28.660 | wrote a manifesto, and it was

03:59:32.460 | the virtues of mundane science.

03:59:35.120 | That's what they called it.

03:59:36.180 | It was a prod to the scientific community to,

03:59:38.460 | actually, it's about useful, utility.

03:59:41.020 | 'Cause the whole arena is set up to advance your career

03:59:44.540 | through revealing new knowledge

03:59:47.540 | that will get you tenure someday.

03:59:49.180 | And actually doing useful science is disincentivized.

03:59:53.980 | Having a conversation,

03:59:54.820 | and especially if it involves more than one discipline.

03:59:58.740 | 'Cause as a young scientist,

04:00:00.200 | there were some postdocs at Columbia

04:00:04.020 | wrote this other manifesto paper saying,

04:00:06.340 | "Here are the things universities need to do

04:00:09.260 | "to foster the collaborative capacity we need

04:00:11.660 | "to have sustainable development."

04:00:14.220 | And it was like four or five things

04:00:15.560 | that universities don't do.

04:00:17.840 | Give you time to become fluent.

04:00:19.960 | And for a physicist to talk to an anthropologist

04:00:24.960 | and understand how anthropology works with sociology

04:00:28.120 | takes time.

04:00:28.960 | And then building a relationship with a community

04:00:30.620 | that has a problem that you wanna fix takes time.

04:00:34.000 | And so you do these quick turnaround papers

04:00:37.400 | that get you toward your little micro career goal,

04:00:40.400 | but they're not actually getting you

04:00:41.920 | what you want in the world.

04:00:43.680 | Those are really hard problems going forward.

04:00:45.480 | But starting with that idea of usability,

04:00:47.560 | what can I do with my skill sets?

04:00:49.640 | You know, a lot of great physicists I know

04:00:51.120 | are dug in on string theory and stuff.

04:00:53.600 | And someone has to dig in on that too.

04:00:55.720 | But I'd like to have them pull a little bit

04:00:57.280 | of their brain power away to think about

04:00:59.640 | some of the practical things Bjorn thinks about too.

04:01:02.440 | - So the two of you have been thinking

04:01:06.240 | about some of the biggest questions,

04:01:08.640 | which is life here on Earth.

04:01:11.360 | The history of life here,

04:01:12.520 | the future of life here on Earth.

04:01:14.960 | Of Earth itself.

04:01:17.200 | And how to allocate our resources

04:01:21.040 | to alleviate suffering in the world.

04:01:23.240 | So let me ask the big question.

04:01:24.920 | What do you think is the why of it all?

04:01:27.920 | What's the meaning of it?

04:01:29.280 | What's the meaning of our life here on Earth?

04:01:31.520 | (laughing)

04:01:33.840 | - You waited 'til the last moment to ask us that question.

04:01:37.840 | - Yes, in case there's,

04:01:41.320 | yeah, in case I can trick you into finding an answer.

04:01:44.880 | - Well, so I mean, again, I'm just gonna take a stab

04:01:49.400 | in this because I think in some ways

04:01:52.040 | it's the same thing that you were talking about before.

04:01:55.600 | It's not about getting everybody sort of in the same track

04:01:58.520 | and all agree on something.

04:02:00.440 | But it's about getting a lot of people

04:02:02.240 | with very different goals and targets

04:02:05.320 | and ways of thinking about the world

04:02:07.520 | to go in the same direction.

04:02:09.480 | So for me, the goal of life, certainly my goal,

04:02:14.480 | but I think for most people,

04:02:16.640 | is to make the world a better place.

04:02:18.600 | It sounds incredibly pedestrian

04:02:21.080 | because it's become so overused,

04:02:22.760 | but that really and literally is the point.

04:02:25.020 | Your point of your life is to,

04:02:28.680 | when one of your friends is sad,

04:02:31.120 | to make sure that they sort of get out of that

04:02:33.040 | and find out why they're sad

04:02:35.080 | and maybe move them a little bit in the right direction.

04:02:38.040 | And all the things that we've talked about,

04:02:40.680 | stop people from dying from tuberculosis

04:02:43.120 | and live longer lives and fix climate change,

04:02:46.120 | but fix it in such a way

04:02:48.480 | that we actually use resources smartest

04:02:50.840 | because there are lots of problems.

04:02:52.080 | So let's make sure we deal with them adequately.

04:02:55.960 | This is very unsexy in some sense,

04:02:59.640 | but I think it's also very basic and really what matters.

04:03:03.400 | - Well, biologically evolution has demanded

04:03:08.400 | that life is about finding sources of energy

04:03:12.800 | and perpetuating yourself, right?

04:03:14.800 | So that's the baseline.

04:03:15.960 | And that's led us into a bit of a bollocks

04:03:19.560 | because we have this easy energy

04:03:22.480 | that's come from the ground so far,

04:03:24.280 | but our brilliance has given this larger awareness

04:03:30.840 | of everything about the planet is transitory.

04:03:35.320 | And so how do you work with that productively

04:03:39.160 | is really an important question.

04:03:41.080 | I could just sort of try to be as rich as possible

04:03:44.400 | and use as much energy as possible and have other people.

04:03:49.240 | I mean, Alex Epstein, I think, again,

04:03:50.680 | this is one of the constraints on my support

04:03:52.480 | for what he says is he's just talking about growth

04:03:56.160 | and progress in that sense,

04:03:58.480 | but there are consequences

04:04:00.320 | and there are long-term trajectories here

04:04:02.080 | that have to be taken into account too.

04:04:04.440 | So what do you wake up to do?

04:04:07.040 | To me, it's finding your part of this.

04:04:10.300 | And as Bjorn said,

04:04:12.360 | finding a way to pursue and expand betterment.

04:04:16.560 | When I taught, I was at Pace University for six years,

04:04:19.540 | and one of the courses I launched there

04:04:22.040 | was called "Blogging a Better Planet."

04:04:23.920 | And it was for grad students mostly in communication.

04:04:27.440 | It wasn't an environment, it wasn't like better planet,

04:04:29.880 | like save the climate.

04:04:31.880 | But my task for the students was to blog

04:04:33.880 | about something they're passionate about, first of all,

04:04:36.000 | 'cause you can't do this,

04:04:36.880 | just like you can't do your conversations

04:04:38.640 | if you don't wake up in the morning

04:04:39.680 | wanting to do what you're doing, right?

04:04:41.600 | You're doing this.

04:04:42.720 | I used to call myself a selfish blogger

04:04:44.480 | because I was learning every day.

04:04:45.720 | I still am.

04:04:46.880 | I love this.

04:04:47.720 | My wife laughs, she thinks I work too much,

04:04:51.480 | but I'm always asking those questions, like sustain what?

04:04:54.960 | So my charge to the students was harness a passion,

04:04:59.200 | build a blog, either alone or with others,

04:05:02.800 | that notches the world a little bit

04:05:05.400 | towards some better outcome.

04:05:07.200 | And so there was a musician who did a thing on music,

04:05:10.200 | musicians who use their art for their work

04:05:12.760 | for making the world better.

04:05:14.400 | Some of it was like music therapy,

04:05:16.680 | bands contributing money, whatever.

04:05:18.560 | Another one did, her blog was on comfort food

04:05:22.020 | all around the world.

04:05:22.920 | And I thought it was my favorite.

04:05:24.040 | It was a video.

04:05:25.200 | See, I think it should be viral, actually.

04:05:27.880 | It was like looking at the world,

04:05:30.040 | every different cultures.

04:05:32.000 | She was in Queens, so every culture,

04:05:34.120 | every cuisine is there in Queens, 200 countries, right?

04:05:38.160 | But she would go and talk to people's moms

04:05:39.520 | and have them cook the food of that country

04:05:41.360 | that's their comfort food.

04:05:42.480 | I mean, I just love this 'cause we all need to eat

04:05:45.200 | and you're getting this expanded sense of what comfort is

04:05:49.120 | by thinking about what other cultures choose.

04:05:52.120 | And that felt like a great course

04:05:54.320 | 'cause it was not directive.

04:05:55.840 | It was just, it gave them this potential to go forward.

04:05:59.320 | I'd love to think they've all gone on to become a superstar,

04:06:02.200 | whatever it is, I don't know.

04:06:03.600 | That's the giving, that's the letting go part.

04:06:06.360 | Even if one did something special,

04:06:08.680 | then that makes me feel job done.

04:06:10.440 | And after I'd been writing about climate for 30 years,

04:06:15.560 | 2016-ish, I did a lot of writing about what did I learn,

04:06:20.560 | unlearn and stuff.

04:06:22.240 | And I had had a stroke in 2011, which was interesting.

04:06:26.200 | It was the first time I really thought about my brain.

04:06:29.140 | You don't think about your brain on a day-to-day basis,

04:06:32.880 | but this is my brain telling me,

04:06:34.760 | ding, ding, ding, ding, some weird shit's happening.

04:06:38.000 | And when I was thinking about climate

04:06:40.000 | or confronting climate change,

04:06:40.920 | it felt like some of the things I learned

04:06:42.480 | about my own existence, I'm gonna die,

04:06:45.760 | but you don't really absorb that.

04:06:48.000 | - Is that the first time you kind of faced your mortality?

04:06:49.680 | - That was like my first, like,

04:06:51.160 | yeah, this is really the shit,

04:06:53.400 | or at least deep disability, if not death,

04:06:55.520 | and that ability is transitory.

04:06:59.800 | And I thought about the climate problem.

04:07:01.840 | We're not gonna solve the global warming problem,

04:07:03.760 | at least not in our lifetimes.

04:07:05.480 | But you work on making those trajectories sustainable,

04:07:10.480 | the end of life particularly.

04:07:13.080 | You work on making sure other people don't get strokes

04:07:16.440 | if they can avoid it.

04:07:17.280 | In my case, I wrote about it.

04:07:18.840 | I was blogging about my stroke while I was having it.

04:07:21.800 | I was tweeting about it.

04:07:22.640 | There's a funny tweet that's kind of mistyped

04:07:25.440 | because things weren't working.

04:07:27.480 | - Wow, Co-PP?

04:07:28.960 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right, right.

04:07:31.480 | So that's like share your knowledge, share your learning.

04:07:34.400 | And everyone can do this now, like on whatever platform.

04:07:37.640 | And then there's also this like giving up part,

04:07:41.640 | but not in a depressing,

04:07:43.320 | well, maybe you could call it depressing.

04:07:45.760 | I started to Zoom in years ago

04:07:47.920 | on the idea of the serenity prayer, the sobriety thing.

04:07:50.920 | It's like know what you can change, know what you can't.

04:07:54.120 | - Grant me the serenity to accept the things

04:07:56.480 | that cannot change, the courage to change the things

04:07:59.160 | that can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

04:08:02.520 | - Yeah, see, those three properties

04:08:04.560 | are really important right now.

04:08:06.560 | Some aspects of this, we know absolutely

04:08:08.840 | what we can work on, cutting vulnerability.

04:08:11.560 | Energy transitions take time.

04:08:13.560 | Science can help us discriminate the difference.

04:08:17.680 | And that's an iterative changing landscape going forward.

04:08:21.320 | But at the same time, science,

04:08:26.440 | like I personally on climate modeling,

04:08:28.760 | or like narrowing how hot it's gonna get,

04:08:31.720 | or more clarity on when an ice sheet is gonna collapse.

04:08:36.040 | I think those are what I call known unknowables.

04:08:38.080 | So being able to, I've seen enough evidence

04:08:41.400 | that those are deeply complex problems

04:08:44.240 | that we're not gonna get there quickly.

04:08:45.640 | So then that gives you a landscape to act on.

04:08:47.960 | And that, whether you bring God into the mix is irrelevant.

04:08:51.920 | It's really know what you can change, know what you can't,

04:08:55.160 | and that gives you the quality to work on them.

04:08:58.480 | And serenity is comfort with that this is transitory,

04:09:03.200 | that the human journey, like anyone's individual journey,

04:09:08.200 | will have some end.

04:09:11.520 | That doesn't mean it has to be near.

04:09:13.680 | This Anthropocene that I've been writing about

04:09:15.440 | for decades can still be a good Anthropocene,

04:09:20.440 | or at least a less bad one in terms of how we get through it.

04:09:23.760 | - And you're also a musician, so in context,

04:09:27.160 | one of my favorite songs of yours, an album,

04:09:30.960 | "A Very Fine Line," I should mention that

04:09:34.160 | with the stroke coming close to death,

04:09:37.280 | the lyrics here are quite brilliant, I have to say.

04:09:39.680 | - Oh yeah.

04:09:40.520 | - It's a very fine line between winning and losing,

04:09:43.920 | a very fine line between living and dying,

04:09:46.320 | a very fine line, by the way, people should listen to this.

04:09:48.880 | I can't play this because YouTube will give me trouble.

04:09:52.400 | A very fine line between loving and leaving.

04:09:55.540 | Most of your life you spend walking a very fine line,

04:09:58.880 | and the rest of the lyrics are just quite brilliant.

04:10:01.920 | It is a fine line.

04:10:03.520 | - Yeah.

04:10:04.360 | - I'm glad you walked it with me today, gentlemen.

04:10:06.840 | You're brilliant, kind, beautiful human beings.

04:10:10.800 | Thank you so much for having this quote-unquote debate

04:10:13.560 | that was much more about just exploring ideas together.

04:10:16.840 | Bjorn, thank you so much.

04:10:18.720 | And Andy, thank you so much for talking today.

04:10:21.400 | - You know, these kinds of extended conversations

04:10:25.360 | are the more of it the better,

04:10:27.040 | and finding ways to spread that capacity

04:10:31.480 | just to get people out of this win-lose thing

04:10:33.640 | is really important, so thanks for what you're doing.

04:10:35.360 | - Yeah.

04:10:36.600 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

04:10:38.160 | with Bjorn Lomborg and Andrew Refkin.

04:10:40.840 | To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors

04:10:43.360 | in the description.

04:10:44.840 | And now, let me leave you with some words

04:10:46.960 | from Henry David Thoreau.

04:10:49.280 | "Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads."

04:10:54.280 | Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

04:10:57.200 | (upbeat music)

04:10:59.800 | (upbeat music)

04:11:02.400 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Climate Change Debate: Bjørn Lomborg and Andrew Revkin | Lex Fridman Podcast #339

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