163. Is Everything Better Than We Think? | Bjorn Lomborg

[0] Welcome to the JPP podcast, Season 4, Episode 18 with Bjorn Lomburg.

[1] This episode was recorded on January 21st, 2021.

[2] Dr. Bjorn Lomborg is a Danish author and president of the think tank Copenhagen Consensus Center.

[3] Bjorn champions a path to solving world problems through the use of economic research to determine where to spend our resources based on the return on investment and severity of the impending issue.

[4] Dr. Lomborg's more notable books include false alarm and how to spend $75 billion to make the world a better place.

[5] Data and Bjorn discussed a variety of topics in the realm of climate change and worldwide problems.

[6] They examined the claims made in Bjorn's latest book, False Alarm.

[7] Throughout the episode, they touched on sustainable development goals, prioritizing world issues, achieving the highest return on investment, the apocalypse lens we apply to many global issues, making the poor richer, innovation, adaptation, selling and market solutions, and much more.

[8] I wanted to mention a few updates.

[9] The major one, we will now be releasing three episodes per week, two to three anyway, probably three, one Q &A and two interview podcasts starting this week, Thursday, and Saturday.

[10] So that's big news.

[11] The other news, if you haven't checked out Dad's Personality Course, it's available at his website, Jordan B. Peterson .com, and it's currently on sale.

[12] And last but not least, you'll be hearing my voice, hopefully less stuffy.

[13] Apparently, this job doesn't care if I'm sick.

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[15] This is to keep our team running, so you get this much content.

[16] You're welcome.

[17] And thank you.

[18] I hope you enjoy the content.

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[34] Hello.

[35] If you have found the ideas I discuss interesting and useful, perhaps you might consider purchasing my recently released book, Beyond Order, 12 more rules for life, available from Penguin Random House, in print, or audio format.

[36] You could use the links we provide below or buy through Amazon or at your local bookstore.

[37] This new book, Beyond Order, provides what I hope is a productive and interesting walk through ideas that are both philosophically and sometimes spiritually meaningful, as well as being immediately implementable and practical.

[38] Beyond order can be read and understood on its own, but also builds on the concepts that I developed in my previous books, 12 rules for life, and before that, maps of meaning.

[39] Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast.

[40] So today I have the privilege of having as a guest Dr. Bjorn Lomburg, who I've spoken with before on my podcast, and who was recently on my daughter's podcast, Michaela Peterson, as well.

[41] And I came across Bjorn's work.

[42] It's got to be six or seven years ago now.

[43] When I was working for a UN panel, the Canadian panel devoted to analyzing economic problems in a hypothetically sustainable manner, it was for the Secretary General's report on sustainable economic development, which was, I think, put out in 2016.

[44] Anyhow, while I was working on that project, I read a lot of books on the various environmental crises that apparently beset us, dozens of books.

[45] And of all the people I read, I think Dr. Lomburg, Dr. Lomberg's work was the most compelling.

[46] And that was partly one of the things I realized when I was working for this UN committee, we were trying to write the narrative.

[47] to restructure the narrative regarding what should be priorities for international consideration over the next 30 to 100 years.

[48] And what I realized while working on that was that there were very few people in the world that were trained to think at that level.

[49] People just don't have the expertise to do that.

[50] We don't have the methodology.

[51] We don't know how to specify the problems.

[52] And we don't know how to specify the solutions.

[53] and we don't know how to rank order the problems in terms of their, let's say, the degree to which they're crucial, and we don't know how to rank order the solutions in terms of their appropriateness.

[54] And the only person that I ran across who had developed a methodology for doing this, which is of crucial importance to develop that methodology, was Bjorn and the think tank, the Copenhagen Consensus Center, which we'll get him to talk about.

[55] and Bjorn maybe you could elaborate let's see there's lots of problems we have lots of problems human beings have lots of problems some of them are familial some of them are civic at the city level say some of them are at the state level some of them are at the national level and a handful are at the international level and there's a good rule of thumb which is that we shouldn't solve family problems at the international level right you should work at the lowest possible level but some problems are international and at least you you could make that case.

[56] And you've been wrestling with this since the mid -1990s.

[57] And you wrote a whole bunch of books, the structure of solutions in the iterated prisoners dilemma, I think was the first one, the skeptical environmentalist, which I think really established your reputation and your notoriety for that matter.

[58] Global crisis, global solutions, cool it, rethink HIV, how to spend $75 billion to make the world a better place, which I really liked.

[59] I thought that was a great book, like truly a great book.

[60] Rajasthan priorities, Bangladesh priorities, Haiti prioritizes, and Andro Pradesh prioritizes.

[61] And your latest book, which we'll talk about a fair bit today, is false alarm, how climate change panic costs us trillions, hurts the poor, and fails to fix the planet.

[62] And so, well, with that introduction, I'm going to let you talk about your work for a bit.

[63] Thank you.

[64] It's great to see you again, Jordan.

[65] So look, what I try to do, and really I have a big organization, well, actually a fairly small organization, but lots and lots of researchers that work hard on all these problems is simply, as you say, we don't have infinite resources.

[66] We can't do everything first.

[67] So it's incredibly important that we have this conversation about saying, if you are to spend an extra dollar or a rupee or whatever your currency is, where can you spend that and do the most good first.

[68] Because as you also point out, there are lots of problems.

[69] And while we tend to think about them in the international arena, of course, most problems actually hit people on a very personal level.

[70] It kills them.

[71] And so one of the things I find slightly ironic as we've just come out of 2020 and everybody has been very, very concerned about COVID.

[72] And rightly so it's a big challenge.

[73] But at the same time, of course, every year about the same number of people die as have died from COVID last year, every year the same number of people die from tuberculosis.

[74] This is a very simple disease.

[75] We've known about it.

[76] It's probably killed about a billion people of the last 200 years.

[77] So it's probably one of the biggest kills of humanity.

[78] And we know how to fix it.

[79] We've fixed it in the rich world, which is why we don't worry about it anymore.

[80] but it's also very cheap to fix in the developing world, but because it never gets any attention, we don't talk very much about it, we don't do very much about it, and that's why 1 .6 million people every year die from tuberculosis.

[81] And so my point simply is to say, let's have a discussion about saying if you were to spend an extra dollar, would you do the most good if you spend it on tuberculosis or on COVID or on climate or on infrastructure or on the many, many other solutions that are out there.

[82] And what we do is we simply work with lots of economists to take a look at what is the cost of a solution and how much good will that deliver, not just in terms of economics.

[83] That is, how much better off will we be or how less worse off will we be?

[84] But also, how much better will we be off socially?

[85] That's typically people not dying, people not being sick, people not having to pay their doctors, not experiencing the loss of a loved one, and also environmentally, that's not so much relevant for tuberculosis, but of course when it comes to deforestation or loss of wetlands and the air pollution, indoor air pollution, and many of the other problems of the world also have an environmental component.

[86] We try to add up all of those.

[87] And so basically say, how much will this cost?

[88] How much good will it do when you incorporate all of these things and turn them into dollars.

[89] And then you can basically say forever dollar you spend, you do this much good of social benefit.

[90] And then we simply ask if there are lots of solutions where you'll spend a dollar and maybe do a dollar and a half of good for the world, that's nice.

[91] But there are some solutions where you can spend a dollar and do hundreds of dollars of good.

[92] Shouldn't we focus on the hundreds of dollars first, the place where you make much, much more good for every resource you spend.

[93] That's really the thinking.

[94] It's not rocket science, but we just don't think about it very often.

[95] It kind of is rocket science because one of the things you want to do when you send a rocket into space is make sure that it doesn't explode.

[96] And what that means is that you have to pay unbelievable attention to the details.

[97] I think it was an O -ring malfunction that brought down the challenger.

[98] So an O -ring was rocket science in that situation and what really struck me when I started to think about international problems was precisely this lack of methodology.

[99] So I'm going to recapitulate the claims you just made so that the listeners and viewers are very clear about, like you make a number of assumptions and all of those assumptions are questionable, but anyone who questions them bears the burden of coming up with a better set of assumptions and justifying them.

[100] And so, you know, you can imagine someone objecting to your rather casual acceptance of the idea that you can put a cost value on all of these problems.

[101] You know, anybody who might object to, who might have some emotional objections even to something like the monetary system and to capitalism, for example, might be appalled at the idea that you could put a dollar value to human life, essentially.

[102] But in the absence of a better solution, well, that's exactly what I mean.

[103] You have to have a better solution.

[104] So your first claim is that we have limited resources.

[105] Okay, so that seems reasonable.

[106] We have limited time.

[107] We have limited energy.

[108] We have limited resources that are at our disposal as individuals and as states.

[109] And so we can't devote an infinite amount of resources to every problem.

[110] So that seems pretty much clear.

[111] If we're going to solve problems, we might as well start with the ones that are the most serious.

[112] So we've got to figure out how to define that.

[113] then we want to concentrate on the serious problems that we can fix and then we want to concentrate on the serious problems that we can fix most effectively so that we have some resources left over to solve other problems okay so let's start with the problem set itself so for example in your book false alarm you talk about climate change and you you're a supporter of the claim that there is going to be climate change of approximately the degree, so to speak, that the International Climate Commission projects, and you also accept the claim that much of that is man -made.

[114] But then you situate climate change as a problem in a host of other problems.

[115] So I'd like to know how you came up with the set of problems to begin with.

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[129] So I'd like to know how you came up with the set of problems to begin with.

[130] So very clearly, it's impossible to enumerate all the problems that we have.

[131] But what we try to do is we've taken our starting point of the UN's different definitions.

[132] So for the SDGs, the last set of goals that the UN has used, the ones that are running from 2016 to 2030, they look at a sustainable development goals.

[133] So they've basically looked across a wide range of areas.

[134] So talking about health, obviously a big issue, poverty, obviously a big issue.

[135] the issue of education, the issue of being able to live securely, that is without violence in many different ways.

[136] And they enumerate a lot of different other things, clearly avoiding loss of biodiversity, avoiding living on an uninhabitable planet like climate change, many of these other things.

[137] Now, I'm not saying that this is a perfect list that's made by a committee, but it's probably one of the best ways that we can say humanity has tried to enumerate all the different challenges that we're that we're facing.

[138] That's the political aspect of this is a consensus.

[139] There's been somewhat of a consensus with regards to the set of problems, even if not with regards to their prioritization.

[140] And so the UN has made itself open to some degree to its constituent members to list whatever problems they see as pressing.

[141] And those would include women's rights and diversity and oceanic management and while virtually every problem that you can think of that might have hit the headlines or being a target of media attention over the last say two or three decades and so again people might quibble with that list but then it's instrumental that they develop a better list and justify it so you start with the u .n list and and that's been derived as a consequence of lobbying pressure and political machination and all those sorts of things.

[142] And hypothetically, that's good enough.

[143] And then the next question is how to address these.

[144] And I was very frustrated when I first encountered that list of goals because I thought, well, there is no possible way that these can all be addressed in the next 30 years with any degree of success.

[145] It's just too complex.

[146] We have to start somewhere.

[147] The problem with that is that as soon as you say that you have to start somewhere, then you take one need above all others and you say that those who lobbied for that particular need take priority.

[148] And you need a justification for that.

[149] That's something other than power struggle or political expediency or, you know, even effective messaging.

[150] It might be nice to have a more hands -off objective method.

[151] Okay, so then you organized a team of economists fundamentally, right?

[152] Why economists and not biologists say?

[153] So you definitely need all the knowledge from biologists, especially when you're talking about things that impact the natural world.

[154] You need to talk to epidemiologists when you're talking about diseases.

[155] You need to talk to doctors also about diseases.

[156] You need to talk to educational experts when you talk about education.

[157] But the crucial bit that's connecting all of them is to talk about what are the resource needs that is basically how much money are we going to have to pay in order to get a solution when you talk about global warming or a solution for education or a solution for tuberculosis or COVID or any other thing.

[158] So what we're talking to is all those economists who do that.

[159] So climate economist or education economist or health economists, these are all guys who interface with all of these specific knowledge, but they also study how much is this going to cost and how effective is this solution going to be.

[160] So it's basically about saying, what can you do about global warming or what can you do about COVID?

[161] Remember, no solution is going to fix all of the problem.

[162] Most solutions will fix part of the problem.

[163] And so what we're saying is, what will a realistically best sort of effort look like?

[164] How much will it solve?

[165] And how much will it solve?

[166] And how how much will it cost?

[167] And then we try to estimate what's the relative value that you provide it to the world.

[168] And as you started off saying, that's a difficult task.

[169] But it is crucial if we want to know that we're not just focused on the topics that have the most cute animals or the people who scream the loudest in the media, but actually know what works.

[170] A postmodern critic of your work might claim that it's inadequably contaminated with the bias brought to it by the discipline that you chose to do this election and by the what would you say by the unexamined political motivations of the participants those being the economists but you don't rely on the judgment of one economist you have a sequence of economists analyze these problems that's correct and then you aggregate across their findings I've believe that's the method.

[171] Yes.

[172] And again, look, it's impossible to imagine that anyone can do this entirely objectively.

[173] So as you're pointing out, clearly economists come with a certain way of looking at the world.

[174] They typically take the starting point of saying there's limited resources, how much will the resources do here, what's the opportunity cost?

[175] So typically, for instance, if you want to vaccinate children and third world countries, it means that their moms will have to take off, typically the whole day, walk with their kid to this place where they're going to get vaccinated.

[176] That has a significant cost for the family.

[177] You need to incorporate that cost.

[178] Economists will tell you not taking that into account is a failure of recognizing that's part of the cost of vaccination.

[179] But of course, it is only one way of looking at it.

[180] I happen to think that it's a fairly convincing way.

[181] And as again, as you point out, at least you have to come up with another way of looking this if you want to criticize and say we should do something else.

[182] Yeah, well, that can't be reiterated too many times, is that it isn't good enough to point out the hypothetical flaws of this approach.

[183] It's only good enough to put forward a viable alternative.

[184] And I haven't seen a viable alternative.

[185] No, right now, the way the world organizes its priority, is very much about who gets to set the agenda, who have the cute examples, the things that we care the most about, the things that are easy to get into the media and so on.

[186] And surely, that's not necessarily the best way to decide how we spend trillions of dollars on global issues.

[187] So what we're simply trying to do is to give the world a sense of how much good can you actually do if you spend money really smartly on climate or if you spend it really smartly on education or if you spend it really smartly on all these other things.

[188] And then we have a good sense of it.

[189] Look, at the end of the day, it's still going to be a political battle.

[190] It's still going to be a discussion about what, you know, captivates people's attention.

[191] There's a reason why we haven't talked about tuberculosis for about 100 years.

[192] But of course, once COVID hits rich people and hits home, we talk a lot more about infectious diseases.

[193] I'm not saying it's wrong.

[194] We should definitely talk about how we deal with COVID, but I think we should perhaps talk more about also how do we deal with tuberculosis, not only because it doesn't affect rich people, but because it affects a lot of people around the world.

[195] So getting that conversation going, getting a sense of the proportion of the problem, getting a sense of what can we do, what's the cost, what is the total in terms of making economies, making people, and making the planet or the environment better off.

[196] What are the benefits there?

[197] What are the costs and getting that balance is crucial.

[198] Okay, now my sense is that you're, tell me if I'm wrong, but my sense is that you're often lumped in by people who have made climate change the center of their ideological universe.

[199] You're often lumped in with climate change.

[200] change deniers of questionable motive.

[201] And this is, the first question might be, do you think it's fair to do that?

[202] And if not, why not?

[203] And if it's not fair, why does it happen?

[204] So there's definitely a lot of people who just approach what I say and many others say, oh, it's just a deny.

[205] He doesn't accept the reality of global warming.

[206] And that's just simply false.

[207] I think what has happened is that the climate conversation has become so politicized that to many people, it's just simply easier to sort of, what do you say, just get rid of that an inconvenient argument by saying, oh, you're a denier and somehow being able to shut down the conversation exclusively by saying, oh, Bjorn is a deny.

[208] I'm not a denier.

[209] I've very clearly been stating ever since my first book, the skeptical environmentalist, as you mentioned, global warming is real.

[210] It's manmade.

[211] It is a problem.

[212] I'm simply accepting what the UN climate panel, the IPC, is telling us about global warming.

[213] What I'm arguing is how much will a potential solution cost and how much good will that solution deliver to humanity?

[214] So the real question here is are we spending lots of resources doing not very much good for climate when we could be spending those resources much better on climate that is doing much more to actually tackle the climate problem and of course also that we could spend those resources and do much much more for the whole world with its many many other problems those are two important questions I think and the reason why they matter so much is because in many ways you know if you're just going to talk very, very rough numbers.

[215] The world spends about $150 billion on all the big problems in the world, you know, from peacekeeping forces to dealing with malaria and tuberculosis, to HIV, to education, to gender equality, to many, many other problems.

[216] But we spend in the order of $400 billion a more per year on climate change.

[217] So if you look at the money that we spend on doing good in the world.

[218] The vast amount of that money goes to climate change.

[219] So if we get it wrong on climate, we're really getting it wrong on how we tackle the world's big problems.

[220] Okay, so I'm going to read something from the UN climate panel that you quote in your book.

[221] For most economic sectors, the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts of other drivers, such as changes in population, age, income technology, relative prices, lifestyle, regulation, governance, and many other aspects of socioeconomic development.

[222] Okay, so that's the IPCC panel itself that penned those words.

[223] Now, you never guessed that, I don't think, by, you wouldn't infer that codicil if you only paid attention to the way that the climate change projections are covered by the media.

[224] And so now we've got a psychological question, and I suppose this is partly a question of the problems of communication.

[225] So when you're trying to solve a problem, you've got two problems.

[226] One is to generate the solution, the practical solution.

[227] That might be analogous to producing a new technology, but then you have the problem of communicating about that technology so that people purchase it.

[228] So you have a production problem and a sales and marketing problem.

[229] And you've got a production problem and a sales and marketing problem.

[230] Now, you'd think that one of the things that you point out in the introduction, for example, is that the cost of climate change interventions often involve an increase in energy prices.

[231] And that increase in energy price falls most heavily on the poor.

[232] And you make a credible case, a strong case, I would say, that much of the climate change intervention, as currently conceptualized, is going to further impoverish the poor.

[233] And this really confuses me, I would say, because I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that most of the motivation, most of the efforts to put climate change at the forefront of modern consideration comes from the left.

[234] You think that's reasonable?

[235] Yeah, that's certainly what's happening.

[236] Okay, then you'd also think that the primary concern of the left would be the absolute or the relative poverty of the most impoverished or relatively impoverished people.

[237] So I can't understand why, since you've continually made the case that climate change policy as presently construed is differentially going to affect the poor, that that doesn't attenuate the left's insistence that climate change is the predominant problem.

[238] And now I have a hypothesis about that, and my hypothesis, I don't think it's particularly original, and it could easily be wrong.

[239] But I think that there's an intrinsic anti -capitalism that is contaminating the discussion about climate change and perhaps even the science and that the fundamental goal is to advance a criticism of free market capitalism by other means and climate change actually produces that outcome that practical outcome and if it happens to negatively affect the poor then that's an okay price to pay even though that's perverse because the whole reason for the criticism of capitalism to begin with, hypothetically, is because of desire to help out either the absolutely impoverished or the relatively impoverished.

[240] So that leaves me with something like resentment as the only other motivation.

[241] Now, you know, I don't think any of that's necessarily right, but I haven't been able to come up with a better hypothesis.

[242] So you face tremendous opposition in your work, and I don't understand why.

[243] What's going on?

[244] Yeah, it's a good question.

[245] I tend to take people on their, on face value of what they, of what they talk about.

[246] I think there's a number of different things that are going on.

[247] So a lot of people, I think, I meet a lot of really well -meaning, very, very concerned people on climate change.

[248] They basically believe that the world is ending unless we do something about global warming.

[249] I mentioned in my book that it, a new survey across the world shows almost half the world's population believe that it's now likely that global warming will lead to the extinction of the human race.

[250] That's a huge and absolutely unwarranted argument.

[251] But if you believe this is the end of the world, everything else moves off the conversation.

[252] If global warming is the end of the world, if it's the sort of asteroid hurtling towards Earth, we should just drop everything else and just send up Bruce Willis and, you know, do something about that asteroid.

[253] So the idea here is to recognize, and I've heard sensible people say, look, there's going to be poor people in 2030.

[254] We'll help them then.

[255] Right now we need to help global warming.

[256] That makes sense if this is the end of the world that we're trying to get rid of.

[257] That's why one of the big points that I try to make in the book is to say that is not what the UN Climate Panel is telling us.

[258] Actually, as you just mentioned, climate change is a problem, but it's a fairly small one compared to most of the other things that we talk about.

[259] We never talk about our pension problems, but those are probably going to be much, much bigger than climate change.

[260] The other part, so just to finish your conversation about the poor, I think that when we were not nearly as scared about global warming, some way you could argue that the reason why we've become so scared is because the media, the selling argument of climate change has just been way too successful.

[261] It's become the self -perpetuating machine that just takes any storm or anything that happens out there and say, see, global warming and make us all believe that the end is nigh.

[262] But before that, I think there was a real challenge in the way, especially the left, was very worried about global warming, but also worried about the world's poor.

[263] And I think it was simply an oversight that we focused so much on global warming and so a little on the world's poor.

[264] And I think if you're going to be very rude about it, you could possibly say it's also a little bit because we care about our own children.

[265] So our own children we worry will grow up in a world where it's global warming and it's going to be terrible for them compared to the world's poor, which are mostly not our kids.

[266] It's someone else's kids, typically in Africa or in Latin America or in Southeast Asia.

[267] So in some sense, this is really, I'm going to pick my kids over all the other unfortunate kids.

[268] I think that was also a big driver.

[269] And I try to argue both of these and get people to realize maybe that's not the right priority for our planet.

[270] Okay, I do think that generally speaking, it's best to take people at face value because to not do so means that you're not extending a hand of trust and it gets you into a terribly complex cognitive situation.

[271] but I would point out that you did question their motives at the end of that answer, you know, saying that perhaps people are more concerned with their own children and willing to sacrifice the world's poor, so to speak, in their prioritization as a consequence of that.

[272] I looked at the potential dark motivation of a kind of lurking anti -capitalism.

[273] Another possibility, perhaps, is that a lot of the problems that you list are do fall into that into the same conceptual category as the world's poor the hypothetical person that you described said well there'll still be poor people in 2030 and we can worry about them and so you might say that you can't make poverty into an apocalyptic catastrophe plausibly and you can't even make tuberculosis into a cataclysmic problem or apocalyptic problem plausibly.

[274] We know how that's going to go.

[275] It's going to stay pretty much the same way that it is, you know, barring mutation.

[276] But with climate change, there's a non -zero possibility of cataclysmic collapse.

[277] The Greenland ice pack melts and slides into the ocean or the Gulf Stream reverses.

[278] or something like that.

[279] And we get a situation where positive feedback loops spiral out of control and everything comes to a, everything culminates in catastrophe.

[280] It might be that we don't know how to deal with a problem that has a non -zero probability of being infinite.

[281] And that is a good, that is a good theoretical conversation.

[282] my take on that is really twofold.

[283] It's partly, I think it's just simply a question of imagination.

[284] Everything when you run it out to 2100 has a non -zero probability of going really, really wrong.

[285] So one very good argument would be to say take HIV -AIDS, which laid bare much of sub -Saharan Africa.

[286] If you imagine we did nothing about HIV -AIDS, you could very easily imagine what, or more states in Africa collapsing over the 21st century.

[287] Throw in some bioterrorism and some geoengineering, sorry, some geo -no, some bioengineering.

[288] And, you know, you can get a catastrophe, you know, that it drives up some terrorists who are going to basically eradicate humanity.

[289] You can come up with almost any kind of scenario that will end the world.

[290] And clearly, we also have many, many other scenarios that we're not particularly worried about, you know, one would be North Korea.

[291] That seems a non -plausible outcome that they could end up ending the world if we don't do something about North Korea.

[292] I'm not sure what that something would be, but the point here is to say that it's very clear we're saying, yeah, we're going to be a little worried about North Korea, but not very much.

[293] Okay, so, so are you, are you criticizing my hypothesis, or are you pointing?

[294] So, like, because I said, I said, that climate change seems to slide pretty easily into an apocalyptic vision.

[295] And one interpretation of your criticism would be, well, that's not valid.

[296] It's not valid to make it apocalyptic like that, because many other things can be made apocalyptic.

[297] But do you think that it's plausible, potentially, that it is easier to do that with climate change?

[298] And I mean, it's not clear why.

[299] maybe it's because it also involves the non -human actors in the world, and people feel additional guilt about that.

[300] So do we have a rule of thumb that's something like, well, when we're discussing practical moves forward, we don't get to extrapolate from the present apocalyptic and say that this problem is so severe that it requires an infinite amount of resources, or it morally obligates us to devote an infinite number of resources to its solution.

[301] We don't get to play that game.

[302] That was exactly my point.

[303] So there's been a wonderful discussion between a Harvard professor who was arguing essentially that point that global warming might be infinitely bad, so we should be spending infinitely resources on it.

[304] And a Yale economics professor, William Nordhaus, who got the Nobel Prize in climate engagement.

[305] And his point was exactly to say, look, there are infinite, infinities everywhere else.

[306] You know, so you might have heard Elon Musk is worrying about the fact that robots will will take over, will possibly take over the world.

[307] There's the possibility that nanotech will lead to gray goo taking over the entire world.

[308] There's potential lurking catastrophes in everything we do.

[309] You can't, and that was Nordhaus's point, you can't just take one and say, I'm going to spend infinity over here, because you should be spending infinity on pretty much everything else.

[310] Of course, that doesn't actually compute.

[311] And so what real people do all the time is we face with things that have a tiny probability of going really, really badly.

[312] We spend more resources on them.

[313] We try to find more ways to tackle them smartly.

[314] But we also recognize there's no way we're going to get rid of all apocalyptic problems.

[315] We simply have to be smart about it.

[316] And in my book, I talk about how we should also be smart about climate change.

[317] If you worry about the apocalyptic prospects of global warming, the only way to fix that is by investigating, not doing, but investigating geoengineering, which is basically a way of being able to, without climate policy, be able to stabilize the planet's climate.

[318] Right.

[319] And I don't have the feeling that geoengineering solutions are going to be an easy sell, even to people who are apocalyptically.

[320] minded.

[321] And maybe it's, maybe it's because they envision geoengineering apocalypses as a consequence.

[322] And they, and they do.

[323] But what you also have to remember is a lot of people will tell you, I believe global warming is the end of the world.

[324] And certainly lots of kids are really, really scared about this.

[325] And I think we should come back to talking about how this is, this is just simply not real.

[326] But I often find it really surprising that if you really, really, really believe this could be the end of the world.

[327] Why is it you're not advocating the only technology that we know right now how to fix global warming with, which is nuclear power?

[328] Why is that you're not just putting up nuclear power everywhere?

[329] Now, I'm actually not arguing for that because economically, new clip power is not very advantageous.

[330] But if you think this is the end of the world, I wonder why it is that you would be arguing, let's do the policies that haven't worked for the last 30 years.

[331] Let's put up solar panels, wind turbines that cover a couple of percent of the world's energy consumption, and that may by 2040 cover maybe even four, maybe even five percent of that energy consumption.

[332] If you really worried about it, you would be using the technologies that would actually work.

[333] And the fact that you don't also kind of belies that even though you talk a lot about these end of the world scenarios, you don't quite believe them because you'd be a lot more focused on solutions.

[334] You also make the point in the introduction that when you ask people by poll how concerned they are about global warming, there's many people, a majority of people, if I remember correctly, who are very concerned about global warming.

[335] But if you ask them how much they would be willing to spend to ameliorate it, I think the average American agreed to spend $24, if I remember correctly from your book.

[336] And so then that does, the problem then is by pointing that out, you belie your other claim, which is that you want to take people at face value.

[337] Now, you've got a real problem in that situation because you can take them at face value with regards to their explicit claims about what they, what they're afraid of, which is global warming.

[338] But then equally explicitly, they tell you they don't want to spend any money on it.

[339] And so then you have to wonder, well, which of those two competing claims do you actually believe?

[340] I would tend to go with the one that actually, it hasn't, saying that you're afraid of global warming has zero cost.

[341] Spending money on it has a cost, obviously.

[342] So the thing is, as soon as you put a cost to it, then you find out that people don't appear to believe it.

[343] They're not concerned.

[344] So the question then is, well, what does saying that they're concerned about by them?

[345] And it might be something like, well, this is, again, not a particularly original thought, but it's moral virtue to advertise that I'm the sort of person who's intelligent enough to conceptualize global concerns and empathic and noble enough to be concerned by them.

[346] And then you say, well, what are you doing about it?

[347] And the answer is, well, I'm not doing anything.

[348] And then you say, well, then I don't buy your claim, but that's pretty rude.

[349] and two people who get together who are both concerned about global warming aren't going to be criticizing each other's lack of diligent attention to the sacrifices.

[350] They can just embrace one another.

[351] And I'm not being entirely cynical about that.

[352] I know why people advertise virtue.

[353] And people are relatively virtuous.

[354] And so it's not such a terrible thing to advertise it.

[355] But it does seem to interfere in this particular situation with practical movement forward.

[356] Now, one of the things you drive home continually is that there are real costs to getting this wrong.

[357] The costs are the money spent and what that money could have been spent on instead.

[358] So maybe you could make a case for everyone who's watching.

[359] What do you see as the proper set of priorities?

[360] Where do we as a species get the most bad?

[361] for the buck with regards to these international problems.

[362] What are the top 10 things we should be concentrating on?

[363] Yeah.

[364] So absolutely, just to give you a sense of the $24 you were just talking about before that people are not willing to spend very much.

[365] I think that's one of the reasons why, for instance, a carbon tax is so hard to do.

[366] Carbon tax is one of the smart solutions for climate change, but it also makes it very explicit that you're spending lots of money.

[367] So instead, what most people support is that we should be subsidizing green energy, that we should be subsidizing electric cars, that we should be doing a lot of other things that make you feel virtuous.

[368] It doesn't feel like it costs all that much, but it actually ends up costing huge amounts of resources.

[369] So while people saying they're not willing to spend very much, their sentiment actually allows politics to end up spending huge amounts of money.

[370] So this really matters.

[371] So, sorry, you ask me what are the things we should be spending our resources.

[372] Yeah, and so that also means what are we sacrificing if we concentrate too much on the moral virtue of driving a Tesla, for example, which is a clear status symbol, very expensive and not obviously related to ameliorating climate change.

[373] What are we sacrificing?

[374] So as long as we are driving this Tesla, because the government, and that's typically almost everywhere in the world, because the government has spent.

[375] five or $10 ,000 on subsidizing us in order to make us afford to drive this Tesla.

[376] That's $10 ,000 that couldn't go to other things either in our own states, our own nations, where we obviously could have spent according to what the political decision -making process would decide on better education and better care for our elderly, on better COVID care right now.

[377] There are lots of other things that are demanding attention.

[378] But what we tried to look at was where could you spend this globally?

[379] And I'm going to talk about a few things because I'm sure we can get back to more of them.

[380] So one of the things that we talked about was free trade.

[381] So free trade, we know is one of the reasons why almost everyone has gotten rich.

[382] The basic point is that instead of me trying to do everything, I specialize.

[383] I do one thing and then I have a baker bread, bake my bread.

[384] I have a butcher, do my meat, if I'm not vegetarian, and you know, you do all these other things and you have all these specialists doing it.

[385] Having it on an international scale means even more opportunity to have smarter people do what they do best for everyone else.

[386] And that's why we've gotten rich.

[387] That's why China has lifted about, what, 700 million people out of absolute poverty over the last 30 years, which is one of the biggest achievements in the world.

[388] It's impossible not to be very, very impressive, just simply on the humanity of that project.

[389] And of course, we should be doing more of that.

[390] But unfortunately, we have, you know, for a variety of reasons, Trump is obviously a big part of this, but it's also, it started way before Trump, the resentment towards free trade, the sense that this was wrong has not only meant that many people in the rich world has become less better off than they otherwise could have been, but it's also meant that we have left a lot of people, especially in Africa and South Asia, much less well off.

[391] We should be spending some of our resources on making sure that we get more free trade, not less free trade.

[392] How do we do that?

[393] How do we do that effectively?

[394] And the simple way that we do that, unfortunately, is by subsidizing agriculture.

[395] So one of the best, most vested interests against free trade has turned out to be agriculture.

[396] It's agriculture in the EU and the US, Japan, many other places, because they don't want to have that competition.

[397] Look, from a private part of you, I understand that.

[398] If I was a farmer, I wouldn't want, you know, cheap, cheap agricultural produce come in and essentially eradicate my business model.

[399] So we need to recognize that we need to subsidize these people.

[400] We probably also need to subsidize other people, the people who would otherwise have lost their jobs.

[401] So there's an enormous amount of money that needs to be spent.

[402] But it's a trivial amount of money.

[403] I got confused.

[404] Are you speaking about eradicating agricultural subsidies in the West?

[405] Or are you speaking about subsidizing agricultural productivity in third world countries?

[406] I missed the mechanics there.

[407] Sorry.

[408] I'm talking about subsidizing the people who would otherwise block more free trade.

[409] So this is basically subsidizing rich Western farmers to make sure that they're okay with more free trade.

[410] Right, so if their livelihood is endangered by the necessity of allowing for competition on the agricultural market, you just buy them out, like you might do with fishermen who are overfishing the ocean.

[411] Yes, exactly.

[412] And this is not a potential, this is not perfect by any means, but it's a way to actually solve the problem of getting more of the stuff that will help humanity.

[413] Any idea what the benefit is of that compared to the cost?

[414] And is that calculable?

[415] Yes.

[416] So we made the estimate that for every dollar you spend on these subsidies, you will help the world about $2 ,000, basically because you can generate an enormous amount of internal growth.

[417] So we estimate that you could actually make every person in the developing world about a thousand dollar richer per person per year in 15 years that's okay so wait you got it we're going to slow down there because those are unbelievable claims those are unbelievably massive claims okay so you said to subsidize rich agricultural producers in the west to the tune of a dollar a year buys you a thousand dollars in increased revenue globally two thousand it's a two thousand to one return Yes.

[418] And this is basically because this is the World Bank's dynamic trade models that show that once you get a society that's able to trade internationally and openly, you also get enhanced growth within those countries.

[419] So that means they by themselves get to be better so that, and these would mostly be poor countries, that would also be a lot of rich countries, but these would mostly actually help the world's poor because they have the most catching up to do.

[420] And they will then be much better off.

[421] Not only would that be better for them, because if you're poor, $1 ,000 is a lot better than if you're rich getting another $1 ,000, but also because it will help them generate all the other things that would like to have, education, health, resilience to global warming.

[422] So the whole point here is to recognize that this is one of the things that are hard to have a discussion about.

[423] There are very few people advocating global free trade.

[424] lots of people advocating against it, but we need to recognize this is one of the things that have helped pull out most people of poverty that we know could do even more in the future and that we have a real opportunity to achieve.

[425] Well, you don't have ice flow abandoned, cuddly polar bears as portraits of the farmers that you're going to help abstractly in third world countries.

[426] So you have a sales and marketing problem there, and that's a real problem, right?

[427] You know, it's interesting that the economic models don't take into account the difficulty of propagating the message.

[428] You know what I mean is that because there is a sales and marketing problem there, and it's not trivial.

[429] And it might be that a dollar spent in agricultural subsidies to rich farmers in the West would produce that $2 ,000 return.

[430] But the question might be how much money would you have to spend advertising that before people would believe it?

[431] That's a crucial question.

[432] You know, with a standard entrepreneurial product, I don't think it's unreasonable to estimate that 65 to 95 % of the cost is in sales and marketing.

[433] You know, 5 % is production.

[434] And that's a great argument.

[435] So in some sense, you could argue what we try to do with the Copenhagen consensus, where we make these priority lists, is just simply give you the raw data for what would academically be the small.

[436] smartest things to invest in, but you're absolutely right.

[437] There's no cute and cuddly, you know, selling points to free trade.

[438] And actually to most of our top outcomes, so let me just give you a few of the other ones.

[439] So the second best is family planning and probably also basic emergency care to women.

[440] This will deliver about $100 back for every dollar.

[441] Do you think that would also be extremely attractive to people on the left?

[442] It should be attracted to everyone.

[443] Yeah, because look, remember, right now about 400 ,000 mothers die in childbirth, and about two million kids die in the first 28 days of their life here in earth.

[444] And we know we could save many of these, not all of them, but many of these by simple measures, you know, for instance, making sure that you don't get, that the pregnant women don't get high blood pressure, preeclampsia and eclampsia, which, kills more than 100 ,000 women every year.

[445] By simple emergency measures when you come into a facility, give birth and you have a problem, if you have simple procedures to make sure that that problem can be dealt with, often with fairly cheap, you don't need more doctors, you just need nurses or even assistant helpers.

[446] You can do a lot of these things.

[447] We know that you can do this for very low cost.

[448] And then again, if you have, there's about 215 million people, women who don't have access to prevention.

[449] So family planning, if you could get them family planning, not all of them would use family planning all of the time, but it would mean that they would space their kids better.

[450] They would be able to give more investment into each one of their kids.

[451] That would get them better educated.

[452] There would be a lot of knock -on effects, but mostly this would mean that a lot of money.

[453] moms wouldn't die in childbirth and their children that they do give birth to would have better lives.

[454] And again, we estimate this would cost about $3 billion a year, but it would pay dividends both in the terms of saving moms, saving kids, but also growing the economy because of what's known as the demographic dividend.

[455] If you have slightly fewer kids, you have more productivity because you have the same amount of capital, but for fewer kids, that means you get to be faster, richer.

[456] That's essentially what China has done in a sort of boosted way by their one child policy.

[457] I'm not advocating that at all.

[458] But it gives you a good sort of insight.

[459] Then there are lots of health things.

[460] We talked about tuberculosis.

[461] We could probably spend a dollar on tuberculosis and help people not die, help people being better off, help families not dealing with tragedies of losing their mom and dad.

[462] It's typically, you know, people in their middle age.

[463] that die from tuberculosis, every dollar spent would avoid about $43 of social benefits.

[464] Sorry, would generate $43 of social benefits.

[465] If you look at childhood immunization, we've stopped a lot of the really damaging childhood diseases.

[466] So we've gone from a world where about 12 million children died just in 1980 to now only about five million children die every year below the age of five, but clearly that's still way too many.

[467] We could probably save a million children for a billion dollars a year.

[468] Just think about that.

[469] We estimate that for every dollar spent there, you'd do about $60 worth of good.

[470] So again, the whole point here is to recognize there are lots of, lots of amazing things that you can do.

[471] I was letting my internal cynic respond to your arguments and trying to adopt the position of someone who might be critical of them.

[472] I know that arguments for ameliorating the lot of the poor that were put forth in the 60s were often countermanded by the claims often of environmentalists that you don't want to help the poor because they'll breed more and that will just lead to more of the kind of problems.

[473] you're trying to solve and so you know what the question might be why would someone object to saving a million children a year through immunization or i think you said two million children as a consequence of enhanced maternal care and i can imagine similar arguments like that being raised you know whether consciously or or implicitly um but those things should be made implicit so so let I would encourage people who are watching this or listening to this.

[474] You know, a lot of you have chopped up my YouTube videos into small videos and sometimes animated sections of them and otherwise distributed them.

[475] Bjorn just outlined the top four investment strategies for a better planet.

[476] And it might be useful to consider ways that that can be that that information can be distributed as widely as possible.

[477] I mean, Bjorn's writing his books, but those sell at how many books, if you don't mind me asking, how many copies of false alarm did you sell?

[478] I think it's in the, it's 10, 15 ,000 thereabouts.

[479] Right, so that's a good, that's a good selling book from an academic book perspective, but it's a drop in the bucket.

[480] Right?

[481] I mean, and that's not a criticism, obviously.

[482] What about total for your books?

[483] So it's, you know, two, three, a hundred thousand or that's.

[484] Right, right.

[485] And so, well, a good YouTube video will get a million views.

[486] And if this was chopped up properly, maybe it would get five or, you know, five to ten million views.

[487] So that would be good.

[488] But we don't want to.

[489] Have you thought about allying yourself with an advertising firm?

[490] So we've talked to some of those.

[491] There's been people coming.

[492] asking, how can we help?

[493] Can we help do some of this?

[494] And what I find is that when it ends up, partly these advertising firms sort of retract their offers when they start realizing this is really complicated, that it's not just, you know, the cute polar bear and the ice flow kind of argument.

[495] And I get that.

[496] And part of it, of course, is also that unlike when you talk to someone who's just saying, we should do more about this, a good thing.

[497] We should, you know, save more moms or we should do more about climate change.

[498] We're the guys who actually say you should do this before this.

[499] And that always antagonizes people.

[500] I think it's the only intellectually honest argument because we have limited resources.

[501] So we're simply saying, do this first, do this first.

[502] Don't do this first.

[503] Don't do this first.

[504] I think that's important.

[505] But that always creates a lot more antagonism, and I think that's one of the reasons why this is a much harder argument to make.

[506] And obviously my whole book on climate is very much about...

[507] If you don't have the problem of having to say no if you stay in the hypothetical.

[508] You know, that's another advantage to not actually trying to solve a problem when you're making a moral claim that you're concerned about it, because you can be concerned about global warming and world poverty and the lack of education of women and a host of other issues and never make a sacrifice in your concerns as long as you actually don't try to practically address those problems because then you're faced with the horrible necessity of prioritization.

[509] And maybe that is part of what makes you unpopular to the degree that people are not so much resisting your message but critical of your approach.

[510] You force the recognition that, that no has to be said in order to make progress forward.

[511] And that interferes with an imaginary utopian vision.

[512] And so that makes romanticizing the venture much more difficult.

[513] It doesn't seem impossible, though.

[514] I mean, you could imagine a heart -rending and emotionally compelling video addressing the utility of restoring to health, someone who was suffering from tuberculosis or preventing it in the first place.

[515] I mean, these things don't seem completely impossible.

[516] You haven't found any marketing or advertising agency that's willing to partner with you in the sale of any of these ideas.

[517] Oh, we found lots of people who love to jump on board.

[518] And, you know, look, there are lots of videos out there that tells you how incredibly important.

[519] it is to do something that tuberculosis and how important it is to do something about maternal health and about immunization and about malaria and all these other things.

[520] I think it's much more a question of saying what is it that you overwhelmingly see when you see open your TV or your look at YouTube and I think there's just a level difference in the amount of knowledge that you have about tuberculosis compared to the amount of knowledge that you have about COVID certainly now and about climate change and these other things.

[521] It's just simply a question of saying one of them, or the two last ones resonate much, much clearer to most people and to a lot of interest organizations, whereas the other one is sort of, yeah, of course I also think we should do some of tuberculosis.

[522] Now back to what we were talking about before.

[523] Yeah.

[524] So the climate, the other issue with regards to the climate is that the weather affects everyone all the time, if you're going to talk to someone and you don't really know what to talk about you'll make small talk about the weather and so it's an immediate day -to -day concern in a way that even infectious disease isn't or wasn't before COVID and so maybe that's another reason that the climate issue has been has occupied the the space for apocalyptic attention if there is a too hot summer or an extraordinarily hot summer you have an explanation for it and it's something that affects you while it's happening or a too cold winter day or too much wind or too much rain or you know any of the extreme weather events that can manifest themselves so there's an immediacy to weather that seems to be associated perhaps with the emotional resonance of climate change that's also perhaps working against these rational arguments well there's certainly something so we We have research that shows that when it's hot, people believe more in global warming than when it's cold.

[525] So there definitely is these kinds of very simple connections.

[526] On the other hand, if you think about it, when you talk about global warming, it's going to be, let's say, four degrees centigrade hotter in a hundred years.

[527] That's actually really hard to imagine that most people would get very worked up about.

[528] And that's, of course, also what you saw for the first 20 years or so of global warming.

[529] What has happened is that shift from the focus on the basic outcomes of global warming to these catastrophic outcomes.

[530] So that every time you see a storm, every time you see a heat wave, every time you see any kind of change in weather, people will often say, see, global warming.

[531] And there, the problem is that that leads you to believe this could be the end of the world.

[532] And that's what I think, and that's universal explanatory rubric and hard to, so it buys you explanations for weather alterations and it buys you moral virtue.

[533] It buys you a sense that you understand the most important problems in the world.

[534] And it occupies that apocalyptic space.

[535] Another reason that climate change might have become such a concern, because, you know, people have always believed in the apocalypse.

[536] And that's because things can go cataclysmically wrong.

[537] And maybe we have a need for a cultural representation of that.

[538] And before global warming, we had the Cold War and the battle between the United States or the West, more broadly speaking, and the Soviet Union.

[539] That was a pretty plausible apocalypse.

[540] And of course, it did garner much more attention, or maybe an amount of attention that's equal to the attention that global warming attracts now.

[541] So that doesn't solve the sales and marketing problem.

[542] It just highlights its difficulty.

[543] Can I ask you, I noticed you have these prioritizes books, Bangladesh priorities, Haiti prioritizes, Andrew Pradesh prioritizes.

[544] Now, you've opened up your economic team to use by states, correct?

[545] Yes.

[546] Can you tell us a little bit about that?

[547] That's something else that's extremely practical.

[548] I'd like to know how you do it and what the effect is.

[549] Does it work?

[550] Yes.

[551] So one of the things we found, so we did a prioritization of the sustainable development goals for the UN that we talked about in the beginning.

[552] And what's sort of very noticeable is if you talk about what should the world do, everybody thinks that's intellectually interesting, but nobody feels like they live in the world.

[553] You know, they, well, we're Canada, we're the U .S. or Denmark or whatever.

[554] And so you feel like I want something that's actually relevant for my political conversation.

[555] And so one of the things we wanted to do, we also did this in Latin America with the Inter -American Development Bank, and we found, you know, these are some of the best things to do in Latin America.

[556] And then, you know, obviously Argentina would say, yeah, that's probably true in Mexico, but not here.

[557] We're special.

[558] And likewise, Brazil would say, yeah, that.

[559] That's true in Argentina, but not here.

[560] So you know, you constantly get the sense of it's true somewhere else, but not here.

[561] And that's why we wanted to have this conversation specifically for nations.

[562] So we've done this for Bangladesh.

[563] We've done this for two states in Indiana, Pradesh, and Rajasthan.

[564] We've done it in Haiti.

[565] We've just completed this in Ghana and Africa, and we're right now working with Malawi.

[566] That must be ridiculously exciting and interesting.

[567] I mean, it's such a combination of rich intellectual.

[568] intellectual possibility, because these problems are so compelling, and the potential excitement of actually operating in the real world.

[569] Yes, it is very exciting.

[570] It's also, at times, very frustrating, as I'm sure you could imagine.

[571] So what happens is everybody thinks that this is a great idea in principle.

[572] But of course, everyone worries also, what if my favorite things turn out to be not a very good investment.

[573] That's suddenly going to, you know, make it much harder for me to get money for next year's budget.

[574] So there's this, there's this a sense of do we want this to be too successful?

[575] On the other hand, the finance ministry often loves this approach because they're the ones who get inundated from all ministries and saying, we need more money for this project, we need more money for that project.

[576] And of course, politicians also need projects that sell essentially buy some votes.

[577] And so clearly they're also very ambivalent about this.

[578] On the one hand, they want to do as much good as they can for their country.

[579] On the other hand, often the best political promises are the ones that are not very effective.

[580] They're the ones that you can sell because they sound good, but don't actually work very well.

[581] Or that you can put off endlessly and still promise that you're going to deliver.

[582] Or just deliver and do it really badly.

[583] So in India, for instance, one of the things that have turned out to be incredibly good vote winners is to give forgiveness for loans for small hold farmers.

[584] You can imagine how that, you know, if I'm a farmer, I put myself in almost impossible debt.

[585] There's a politician who promises he's going to forget that.

[586] That sounds great.

[587] But of course, the problem with that argument is that partly they often don't pay.

[588] But what happens is it actually ends up shifting loaning from the very poorest to the not -so -poor farmers, typically to the rather rich farmers, because the lenders don't want to see the politicians ending up saying, no, we're not going to keep your loans on the books.

[589] So you end up spending huge amounts of money, encouraging bad loans, and then not helping the poor when they need it further on.

[590] That's a lose, lose, lose outcome.

[591] And one of the things we tried to point out was, don't do that.

[592] I'm sure we weren't very successful because it's an incredibly successful political strategy, but it becomes a little harder to do.

[593] And likewise, some of the things that we found were incredibly effective becomes a little easier to do.

[594] So for instance, for Bangladesh, we found, and again, this is not dramatic news, But it's just a really, really good approach to basically put your procurement online.

[595] So from many states in the developing countries, procurement makes up about one -third to two -thirds of their budgets.

[596] So everything from pencils to roads, but obviously roads are much, much more expensive.

[597] So it's typically infrastructure projects.

[598] They dramatically corrupt because they lend themselves to be very corrupt.

[599] And one of the things we find is if you put these online, it becomes a little harder to rig the auctions.

[600] So in Bangladesh, for instance, you have to hand in a sealed envelope with your bid to a specific government office.

[601] And what not surprisingly happened was they put up goons outside that office so the people who shouldn't come in with a cheap bid just couldn't physically come in.

[602] If you put it online, you can get bids from further or far.

[603] to manipulate, you can still manipulate, but it gets harder to do so.

[604] So what we found was we took 4 % of Bangladesh spending, put it online, and actually found you get high a quality, you get it much cheaper.

[605] That means you have to spend less money, you get more for your government tax dollars or taxes in Bangladesh.

[606] And that saves Bangladesh about $700 million a year.

[607] Right.

[608] But there's something else that's very hard to romanticize.

[609] Oh, it's absolutely impossible.

[610] And again, remember, this is simply a question of saying, we look across a wide range of things that you could do in Bangladesh.

[611] Some of these things got picked up by politicians because they save them money.

[612] Obviously, the finance minister wants to save $700 million.

[613] Some of these things have really, really good long -term growth potentials.

[614] Like, for instance, getting digitized, getting your land digitized.

[615] Some of these are very, obvious things like tuberculosis, but many of them also don't happen just simply because they're not the right set of things to do right now.

[616] So again, our point is not that we somehow magically make Bangladesh right.

[617] That would also be impossible to imagine.

[618] And look, you shouldn't have, you know, economists prioritizing the world.

[619] You should have economists informing the electorate in Bangladesh, how do you want to run your country?

[620] But we help make slightly better some of the proposals help spend slightly less money really badly and overall that means you end up in a place where you're better off yeah it doesn't make a good t -shirt slogan though does it spend your money slightly less badly with bjorn longer you go yeah no it's a real problem you know i've been talking i talked about this a little bit with douglas murray just a week or so ago.

[621] About the rise of extremism, it's a continual problem, but the polarization of the right and the left that seems to be occurring at an ever escalating rate, particularly in the U .S., but I would say in the West more broadly.

[622] We talked about the collapse of grand narratives.

[623] You know, the right, the centrists on the right and the centrists on the left don't seem to have anything to offer now, except something like incremental and gradualist improvement.

[624] And they might quibble about how that could be accomplished with the right wingers taking one viewpoint and the left wingers taking another, whereas the radicals have a much more romantic cell.

[625] And so since the right and the left, the moderates can't come up with a narrative, even one of progress that's, you know, back, say in the post -war period, post -World War II, people were still poor enough, broadly speaking, so that you could sell them the vision of a wealthier future for them and their kids.

[626] And there was enough gap between where they were and that hypothetical future for it to be motivating.

[627] But now, you know, you might be able to tell your, your electorate that, well, we could make things 20 % better over the next 10 years.

[628] And that's true and it's good, but it's not punchy and that's a big problem and I've been struggling I also talk to Matt Ridley you know and he's he's a guy I think who thinks like you you know he's fundamentally optimistic in his view and he thinks things are getting better and that we could continue to make them better and that we should continue to make them better but all of this incremental gradualism this optimistic incremental gradualism has the same problem which is it's difficult to get excited about it and I don't know I've racked my brains trying to figure out how that might be how that problem might be addressed but I can't say that I've come up with any solutions that seem useful or credible I don't I'd like you to comment on that I'm sure you've thought about it I think you're absolutely right.

[629] It is much, much harder to make the argument.

[630] Look, we're going to muddle through.

[631] It's going to be a little bit better.

[632] This is a little bit smarter.

[633] Please do this rather than these very grand narratives.

[634] And I think that's exactly what I try to make with global warming.

[635] The grand narrative on global warming is this is the end of the world.

[636] We've got to throw everything in the kitchen sink at this.

[637] And the reality is, no, this is a problem.

[638] We estimate that by the end of the century, this will cost as about 4 % of GDP, so maybe one or two years of growth, that's a problem, not by any reasonable means, the end of the world.

[639] And that's why you need to be careful not to end up spending lots, lots more to tackle part of this problem.

[640] But the reality, of course, is if we go down the root of these very alluring but incorrect arguments, this is the end of the world, you know, let's spend everything on climate change.

[641] What really could happen is two things.

[642] We end up spending lots of our resources on things that are not very productive and won't leave us very well off that will cut maybe half or full or maybe one and a half percent of GDP growth from our growth rate.

[643] That could be potentially dramatically damaging in 10, 20, 30 years once we're a lot less richer, a lot less better off.

[644] Because remember, one of the things that keep societies peaceful is that we all have a future to look forward to that's going to be much better.

[645] Once we start realizing we're entering into a stable state where if you are better off, it's because I'm less well off, we will get much, much more antagonism.

[646] So I think it's realistic to say if we follow down those alluring roads, we might actually end up leaving our future of our brand kids much less better off, not just in the economic sense, but also just simply in a wildly sort of rioting kind of way that everybody will be at each other's throat.

[647] That's one part of it.

[648] But the other part is to remember, we're right now talking about how the West or the rich part of the world thinks about this problem.

[649] Most people in the rich world actually think the future is going to be a lot worse off, which is one of the reasons why global warming fits into that whole pattern.

[650] I think it's wrong.

[651] That's also what the model said.

[652] It's even what the UN Climate Panel says, but that's how people feel.

[653] The other three quarters of the world, which are China, India, Latin America, Africa, they actually believe that their world is going to be much better in 10, 20, 30 years.

[654] They have this future belief that you were just talking about from out of the Second World War.

[655] They are not going to say, yeah, we're going to do strong climate policy and become poor.

[656] They want to mostly become middle income countries and maybe even rich countries eventually.

[657] They will want to do this.

[658] So what will happen is both that we're leaving ourselves in the rich world to become much more infighting and much less well off than we otherwise would be and that we're actually seeing the other three quarters of the world just simply running possibly even ahead of us, but certainly running ahead without looking at the same kind of problems that we are.

[659] Okay, so do you think, do you think you could make this case?

[660] So what you basically outlined there is a hypothesis that ill -spent money will have dramatic consequences.

[661] I think I can make that argument, but I also feel a little uncomfortable.

[662] I'm just the guy who wants to tell you, you can spend a little smarter here, you can spend a little more dumb here.

[663] I think there's something, there's something I think that's a little sort of ugly in saying, all right, everybody else is making up their own doomsday scenarios.

[664] So let me make up another one here because I think fundamentally doomstay scenarios is what got us into these kinds of problems.

[665] Fair enough, but you were trying to address the problem of compounding returns, right?

[666] So bad economic decisions or poor economic decisions compound with time.

[667] And so is it reasonable to point out when we're talking about risk, I talked with Matt Ridley about this, and I've thought about it a fair bit as well.

[668] And I think the data support the proposition that making poor people richer is an extremely intelligent environmental move for a variety of reasons.

[669] I mean, the first is perhaps that once you get people above a certain level of income, they can start buying fuels that are than the fuels they learn they use now dung and wood and that kind of thing um but also that as people move up the economic hierarchy they have time to be concerned about things that are more abstract like what the environment is going to be like for their children when which they're not going to be or or when they go on holiday for example you know or even where they live as as they have some options to choose where to live and so it It could be, you know, we often construe the relationship between the economy and the environment as a zero -sum game, right?

[670] And the biologists in particular, broadly speaking, have the political biologists have a proclivity to do that, that as the economy grows, we sacrifice the environment to it.

[671] But it could be the case that we get the best environmental bang for the buck by making the poor rich as fast as we possibly can.

[672] around the world.

[673] And if we make poor economic decisions because we're catastrophizing a certain kind of environmental calamity, we're inviting, we're actually increasing the risk of environmental degradation in the medium and the long term.

[674] Do you think that's reasonable?

[675] Yes, absolutely so in a number of different ways.

[676] So I think it's funny how we don't recognize how terrible it is to be poor.

[677] If you're poor, you're vulnerable in all kinds of ways.

[678] You're very clearly, incredibly vulnerable to global warming.

[679] So, you know, if you remember, there was a big hurricane hitting high on the Philippines back in 2013.

[680] It was made a big deal out of as global warming.

[681] It hit this very, very poor city where most of their citizens live on the corrugated roof.

[682] Not surprisingly, having a hurricane five is terrible when you live under corrugated roof.

[683] The best way to help these people obviously would be to lift them out of poverty.

[684] What actually is we can see back in the early part of last century, a similar hurricane hit and eradicate about half the city.

[685] This time it was only about a 20th of the city.

[686] So much, much better because the city was much richer.

[687] But if we focused on making them even richer, They would be much better off just simply from the point of view of being more protected from hurricanes.

[688] So, you know, fundamentally there's something weird about us saying, oh, those poor people in the Philippines, we should help them by not driving our car today.

[689] What?

[690] No, you should help them by becoming rich, becoming part of the integrated global economy, making sure that their kids would be better educated, not die from easily curable infectious diseases and so on.

[691] So not only would it be better environmentally, but it would obviously also be better for them educationally, for them health -wise, and all these other things, it would simply generate much, much better lives in the Philippines.

[692] But as you also pointed out, as you get richer, you're actually cleaner in almost all ways.

[693] You don't use dung and cardboard and wood to cook inside, but also you stop cutting down forest.

[694] You move to the city and instead, you become a web designer or something else that's very, very little related to actually clearing out forest land.

[695] You do a lot of things in cities that are much more ecologically sustainable.

[696] And of course, in the long run, you will actually also say, I would like to make sure that we have better regulations, so we have less air pollution, so we have many of the other things that drive environmental benefits.

[697] So absolutely, by getting people out of poverty, we fix most environmental problems.

[698] But, and this is the important, but, we don't fix global warming.

[699] As you get richer, you just simply emit more and more CO2, because these guys will then start flying around the world.

[700] They'll start consuming a lot more meat.

[701] They'll be doing a lot of other things because they're richer.

[702] That's wonderful for them, but it will mean higher emissions of CO2.

[703] So we do need to have a conversation about how we're going to fix that problem.

[704] Okay, so why do you lead us down that path?

[705] Okay, let me comment a bit on what you just said.

[706] And then let's go down that pathway.

[707] Okay.

[708] So to swallow what you just said and to believe it, there's a set of beliefs that you have to have already in place.

[709] You have to believe that the current economic system isn't fatally flawed and basically works, or at least works better than any hypothetical alternatives that have been tried or that we can dream up.

[710] So it basically works.

[711] And works means as it runs, it tends to lift people out of absolutely.

[712] poverty.

[713] There's still a maintenance of relative poverty, but absolute poverty tends to disappear.

[714] There seems to be really good evidence for that, especially across, well, since the Industrial Revolution, but it's really taken off in the last 30 years, maybe non -coincidentally with the demise of communism, which was a competing, you know, a competing economic theory and produced all sorts of bad economic decisions.

[715] In any case, you have to buy the hypothesis that the current system works and that extending it is going to be better.

[716] And so you don't get to adopt revolutionary, a stance of revolutionary criticism of the Western capitalist hierarchy.

[717] So that's a big sacrifice if you're if you're if your thinking is oriented in that direction.

[718] Now I don't know really what to make of that because you'd think the evidence that the poor has been lifted out of poverty at an unbelievable, like an astonishing rate since the year 2000, not just in China, but all over the world, would be essentially irrefutable evidence that the current system works.

[719] And then if you look at China after they adopted free market policies compared to before they adopted free market policies, there's absolutely no comparison with regard to growth.

[720] And so it isn't obvious to me how, if you were true, concerned with the poor you'd be able to deny the sorts of propositions that you put forward.

[721] I don't understand that.

[722] Maybe it's partly because people just don't know how much better things have got in the last 20 years and why, you know, because it has been difficult news to bring forward and it's difficult to market.

[723] If I can just, yes.

[724] Yes.

[725] So one of the things I think people don't recognize.

[726] If you look at it at a graph over the last 200 years, 200 years ago, almost everyone in the world were absolutely poor in the sense of less than a dollar a day.

[727] Yeah, 95 % of humanity was below that level.

[728] And we've just seen a dramatic decline.

[729] As you mentioned, we're now down below 10%.

[730] Even despite of COVID, which a lot of people have pointed out, have actually made more poor people.

[731] we've gone from seven up to about 9%, and so we've delayed the benefit for a couple of years.

[732] That's terrible, and I would rather not have had that happen, but it doesn't change the long -term trajectory that's amazingly downwards in the sense that we have many, many fewer people that are poor.

[733] One of my favorite guys who runs a World and Data website, he points out that every year for the last 25 years, the headline of every newspaper around the world could have been over the last 24 hours, 138 ,000 people have been lifted out of poverty.

[734] 138 ,000 people every day for the last 25 years.

[735] But of course, it's not news because it happened every day.

[736] It was not, you know, some, oh, this day it happened.

[737] We don't get these good news.

[738] And I think we need to get them in order to be able to understand the magnitude of what we're talking about.

[739] Well, you know, the problem with accepting that good news or a problem with it is that it pretty much eradicates the romantic rebel, you know, because it all of a sudden makes it very difficult for you to be cool, to find something cool to stand up against and to resist.

[740] You know, you have a benevolent, relatively benevolent society that's getting incrementally better.

[741] It's not a villain that you can heroically resist.

[742] And that is, and I'm not being cynical about that.

[743] That is actually a problem because resisting arbitrary authority is a good story.

[744] And it served people well for a very long time.

[745] And if you don't have that to catalyze your identity, you have to search for something perhaps equally grand.

[746] And that's difficult, especially when you also don't have to go out and contend with the brute force of Mother Nature to anywhere near the degree that you once had to.

[747] But if you look at it, there's plenty of other things you could stand up to, and that was what we were talking to.

[748] Instead of being the romantic hero that stands up against society, why aren't you the romantic hero that stands up against tuberculosis, or the one that stand up against maternal death, or the one that stands up for free trade, or the ones that stand up for all these other things, where we know for very little money, we can make a tremendous benefit.

[749] So, so again, I get why it's not a set question, man. I mean, I think it might have something to do also with the inability to utilize your resentment.

[750] You know, if you're resentful about things and you oppose the capitalist state, you can easily identify an enemy.

[751] But if you stand up against tuberculosis, like obviously tuberculosis is bad.

[752] It doesn't make you look good by comparison.

[753] And all right.

[754] So you mentioned you do promote CO2 emission amelioration strategies in false alarm.

[755] And you did just point out that although we should be striving to make the poor around the world as much less poor as we possibly can, as quickly as we can, so everyone wins, including us.

[756] just like Henry Ford won when he paid his workers enough to buy his cars the cars they made they are going to increase their rate of carbon dioxide emission and for some people that would be enough reason to scrap the whole enrichment process but you have some strategies that you think are wise to ameliorate the problems that would be associated with that yes so I talk about five different solutions in the book so the first one is a carbon tax.

[757] Any economists would say, you know, look, you have a problem, you emit CO2, but you don't actually take it into consideration because it's free to emit.

[758] So that's how we think about the polluted pays.

[759] You put a price on carbon.

[760] In principle, you should do this across the world.

[761] You should do it so that it slowly rises with time.

[762] It's the most efficient way to deal with it.

[763] There's two things we need to recognize with it.

[764] One is it turns out to be very, very hard, because it makes it very explicit to people that tackling global warming is actually costly.

[765] Secondly, we know that politicians are just really, really bad at doing something for a long time, very consistently across all areas.

[766] What politicians typically end up doing is they'll put it on some things.

[767] So, you know, in many places in Europe, for instance, you have enormously high taxes on cars.

[768] And you have enormously low taxes on people who are good at lobbying their governments for their particular interests.

[769] So, you know, greenhouse gardeners, greenhouse growers don't have to pay the carbon tax because that would make it really hard for them to grow their, you know, tomatoes or whatever.

[770] And you can see how this happens across a wide range of areas.

[771] So that's one part of the problem.

[772] The other part is that even if you do this really, really well, it'll only solve a smaller part of the problem.

[773] So you should do this.

[774] We should focus on a carbon tax, but we should also be.

[775] realistic.

[776] This is not what's going to fix climate change.

[777] This will fix a smaller part of climate change.

[778] So it's part of the solution, but it's not the most important part.

[779] The second part, and that's where I think we actually have the biggest opportunity, is innovation.

[780] So if you talk to Matt Riddley, this is certainly also his ballpark, but it's basically recognizing that most things that we've solved in this world are about innovation.

[781] So you rarely get people to solve a problem by saying, I'm sorry, could you please not do all that cool stuff that you like?

[782] Could you please stop feeling good about all of that?

[783] That rarely works out as a political strategy.

[784] Unfortunately, that's typically what we say.

[785] Could you please not fly, not eat meat, not do all these things?

[786] Could you please have it a little hotter in the summer and a little cooler in the winter?

[787] That's really, really hard to sell to most people.

[788] What you need is innovation.

[789] And let me just give you an example.

[790] Back in the 1950s, the Los Angeles was one of the most polluted places on the planet because there are lots and lots of cars and they have the special sort of geographical notion that just leaves all of the pollution inside this little basin of Los Angeles.

[791] It was terrible to live there in many ways.

[792] And obviously the simple answer is to tell people, most of this came from cars.

[793] So the simple answer would be to say, stop driving your car.

[794] Of course, if you've ever met someone from Los Angeles, you know that that's not a solution that's actually viable to them.

[795] Well, there aren't even any sidewalks.

[796] No, it's not really viable for anyone in any city.

[797] What did solve the problem was the innovation of the catalytic converter.

[798] This little thing that cost money, you put on the exhaust pipe, and then basically you have much, much cleaner cars.

[799] That made it possible for people to keep their cars, drive a lot, and have much, much cleaner air in Los Angeles.

[800] Now, I'm not saying everything is perfect in Los Angeles and there's still air pollution problems, but it made it a lot better for very little money.

[801] That's the way that we need to solve global warming.

[802] If we could innovate the price of green energy down below fossil fuels, and this green energy could be nuclear, it could be fusion energy, it could be solar or wind with batteries, it could be lots and other possible solutions.

[803] If we could innovate one or a few of these solutions down below fossil fuels.

[804] Everyone would switch.

[805] You wouldn't need sort of a Paris accord where you have to twist everybody's arm.

[806] Let me ask you about that for a minute.

[807] So it's not a straightforward matter to set up governmental policy to support innovation.

[808] I mean, innovation is a very abstract idea.

[809] And I've seen much evidence of failure at the governmental level here in Canada, when governments have set out to foster entrepreneurship and to seed, you know, the development of high tech industry, for example, generally it's a cataclysmic failure.

[810] I mean, obviously, it's self -evident in some sense that a good idea is good because it solves a complicated problem and the more good ideas we have, the better.

[811] But do you think that it's like it seems on the face of it, unless you dig down into the details, it seems like hand -waving.

[812] Obviously, we should have better ideas to solve our problems.

[813] But you, what do you think constitute concrete, realistic, evidence -based solutions to the problem of fostering innovation?

[814] Do you think it's actually possible to set up policy that does that?

[815] Yes.

[816] So the short answer is yes.

[817] And the reason is that what's lacking is mostly long -term investment.

[818] So investment that will only generate the solutions in 20, 30, 40 years.

[819] Remember, this is why we invest a lot of money in healthcare basic research that then eventually becomes research that, you know, for instance, pharmaceuticals can make into products that they can make money off of.

[820] There's always a too little investment societally in things that you can't monetize right away.

[821] It's very hard to invest in things that you can't monetize right away.

[822] Yes.

[823] If I make an innovation that then in 20 years, say, will help us generate this enormously beneficial breakthrough.

[824] Unfortunately, I won't get any money because my patent has run out.

[825] That's why most companies will not be investing in these long -term development.

[826] What happens is that you then have a doth of investment into these terms, these sorts of long term innovations, unless you have the public invest in them.

[827] And I'll get back to how we do that smartly.

[828] Okay.

[829] But we do that in medical research for many reasons, you know, people recognize this is part of the place where we need to, you know, produce lots of professors, lots of medical Nobel laureates.

[830] And then, you know, eventually the pharmaceuticals will take over and act.

[831] make products out of this.

[832] That's a great setup.

[833] We don't do this in energy.

[834] For a variety of reasons, it is one of the places where we spend very, very little money, partly because it doesn't feel like you're solving global warming because you're not solving it right now.

[835] You're only solving it in, you know, 20 or 40 years.

[836] That feels like you didn't really care.

[837] But the reality is this is the only way that we're going to get these sorts of long -term breakthroughs.

[838] Now, one reason why politicians often screw this up is because they are not willing to invest in these long -term investments.

[839] They'll say, we want a Silicon Valley in Canada in three years.

[840] That makes sense if you need to get re -elected in four, but you can't do that.

[841] And so you shouldn't be trying to do this in a very short -term way.

[842] Another way is that you end up giving this away to companies, and companies, of course, are just going to spend it on the product that they were going to do next year anyway, but hey, thanks for the money.

[843] So the point here is you need to do this carefully in a way that will generate long -term innovation.

[844] This is not easy.

[845] You are going to waste a lot of money, but we know that governments around the world has done this in a variety of different ways.

[846] We know, for instance, the internet, the transistor, the, the, the fracking in the U .S. There's a number of places where you have been successful.

[847] And all we have to do is to spend lots of money.

[848] And I'd love to talk more about specifically how we should set this up, how we should evaluate it, and we should be careful about it.

[849] But fundamentally, we should do this in a way that we say we want to generate a lot of knowledge that we believe in the long run can deliver benefits that will actually help companies produce energy that will be viable.

[850] but we are not going to try and do this for the next three or five years.

[851] So we've got to stop that panic mode and start this long -term thinking.

[852] We do have realistic knowledge about both that we're investing very little compared to typically almost all other areas and that more investment here would make it more plausible that we would faster get cheaper green energy.

[853] So, okay, so in Canada, there's a medical research council and a social sciences research Council and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, that might be a bit dated that information, but essentially that's how it's been set up.

[854] But there isn't an energy innovation research council.

[855] And, you know, I'm thinking that way because I'm an academic and I've seen these granting agencies.

[856] I've seen how they work and they're set up to provide funds for basic research.

[857] And something like that doesn't exist.

[858] So, Why aren't we funding research into energy, into the generation of cheap and clean energy?

[859] What's got in the way?

[860] Every year, we want to spend it on solar panels that makes us feel like we're doing something right now.

[861] The surprising thing is, in 2015, when all countries signed the Paris Climate Agreement, On the sidelines of that event, Obama and 20 other global leaders, Bill Gates and lots of billionaires, actually signed another agreement that I'm happy to say we were a tiny part of pushing, which was we're going to double our investment into green energy research and development.

[862] So all countries both promised the thing that you heard about, namely we're going to cut our carbon emissions, but they also promised to double their green energy investment.

[863] in five years, so in 2020.

[864] They did quite a bit of the cutting carbon emissions.

[865] They did nothing of the increase spending in green energy R &D.

[866] And I think fundamentally because it doesn't feel like a solution.

[867] It doesn't feel like something urgent.

[868] It feels like something you can do next year.

[869] It feels like something that's nice to have.

[870] But this, you know, putting up the solar panel is urgent and we need to do it.

[871] The reality is the over worry about global warming that we have because we have this existential feel that this could be the end of the world.

[872] Surprisingly also, not only is wrong, but it also leads us down the wrong path, namely the path where we say, let's do anything that just makes it look like we're doing something next year, rather than actually laying the groundwork for fixing this problem.

[873] Now, obviously, and some people will say, well, we should have done this 20 years ago, and yes, that would be wonderful.

[874] We should have done that, but we didn't.

[875] You know, it's sort of too late to do something about what we should have done 20 years ago.

[876] but we can do something about what we're going to spend our money on in 2021.

[877] And if you look for instance on Biden's proposal to fix climate change, he's thinking about spending $2 trillion, you'll probably not get to spend all that money.

[878] On a vast array of things, many of which are not going to be very effective, but he's also saying he wants to dramatically increase, actually, I think probably too much, but certainly a very, very large amount of increase in American spending on R &D.

[879] this is what he should be focusing on but I do worry that he's going to end up having much more success with all his other much less effective proposals simply because they are more glamorous all right so you don't seem to be an admirer of the Paris Accords and so my sense of your argument is that the proposals that are part of that accord are extremely expensive and they're not cost effective especially when viewed in this larger framework that encompasses a whole host of problems instead of focusing just on climate change.

[880] And so maybe if you don't mind, you could summarize your, could you lay out your critique of the Paris Accords for us?

[881] Yes.

[882] So two things.

[883] The Paris Agreement is really just an extension of what we've been trying for the last 30 years and failed to do the last 30 years, namely, let's try to do something that's really hard, that costs a lot of money, that will have a little bit of impact in 100 years and try and see if we can't get everybody to do it.

[884] Not surprisingly, that's a really, really hard thing to get going.

[885] And to do what?

[886] And to do what, exactly.

[887] So basically get Canada, get the U .S., get Denmark, get everybody else to cut their carbon emissions, which privately for them is going to be costly.

[888] They have to reduce their use of cheap energy and use a little bit more expensive energy, sometimes less reliable energy.

[889] Basically, it puts a slight slower damper on their economic growth.

[890] That's always going to be hard.

[891] That's always going to be unpopular.

[892] You're basically asking people, could you please pay some more and use a little bit less?

[893] That's a hard sell.

[894] Not surprisingly, you do a little bit of it.

[895] You typically don't do a lot of it.

[896] You don't live up to all of your promises.

[897] But even if you So let's just take the Paris Agreement, even if everyone did everything they promised to 2030.

[898] That would cut as much CO2 that if you run it through a climate model, it would cut temperatures by 0 .0 to 5 degrees centigrade by the end of the century.

[899] So literally nothing.

[900] We wouldn't be able to measure magnitude of increase.

[901] So it's about four degrees of temperature rise.

[902] We've already seen one, so about three degrees more.

[903] So this would be a trivial part of reduction.

[904] Now, it would be a reduction.

[905] It would mean we would have less problems because global warming is a problem.

[906] So we estimate there would be benefits.

[907] But there would also be huge cost because you'd actually have to pay for this.

[908] So if you look at how much you're going to pay, which is in the order of $1 to $2 trillion US dollars per year in 2030, for every dollar spent, you will avoid climate damages across the centuries worth about 11 cents.

[909] That's a very poor way of spending money, paying a dollar and actually achieving 11 cents.

[910] You could just have paid out the dollar and done almost 10 times as much good in the world.

[911] So the reality here is the Paris Agreement is a really well -intentioned agreement, but it will fail just like all the other agreements.

[912] So Rio, Kyoto, and all the other national policies that we've done, it'll mostly fail, but even if it succeeded, it would be a very expensive way of achieving very little.

[913] And this, of course, is the big problem of the climate conversation that because we're so worried, we've decided, yeah, we're not going to spend all that much money on all these other problems in the world, tuberculosis, all this other stuff.

[914] But we are going to spend one to two trillion dollars.

[915] Remember, it's not going to bring us to the poor house, but it's a lot of money.

[916] It's one to two percent of global GDP on something that will basically not bias any measurable impact in 100 years.

[917] That's a bad deal.

[918] That's why we need to do better.

[919] Okay.

[920] Well, that's a good place to sum up, I would say, unless you think there's something particularly important that we didn't cover.

[921] I would have liked to have heard perhaps more description of, you know, you listed out the top four things or the top five things that we could be investing in where there's a huge bang for the buck.

[922] but people can get that directly from your website or your book.

[923] Yes, I've shown you this before, but we have a whole fold.

[924] I'm sure you can put that up, where you can actually see all the different investments here.

[925] Absolutely, we'll link to that again.

[926] So I've been talking with Bjorn Lomburg today, the author of False Alarm, and we've been talking about global governance, I would say, sustainable global governance, with an emphasis on two things.

[927] And one would be economic growth, which means alleviation of absolute poverty for those who are poorest and some incremented wealth hypothetically for the rest of us, which seems on the face of it to be a good thing, especially at the lower ends of the distribution, and discussing also how that might be done in the most appropriate ecological manner, keeping in mind the host of other problems that have to be solved.

[928] And Dr. Lomberg has developed a methodology for assessing and rank ordering the problems that we face at an international level and as well at a national level.

[929] I'm going to interrupt my summary for one thing.

[930] How what's been your experience with regards to your success in those countries where you've gone in and done this prioritization?

[931] What's being the practical consequence of that?

[932] So we've very clearly, so we're an organization to look at how effective are you.

[933] So obviously we should be looking at how effective are we in what we do.

[934] Also, you know, I'm using my life on this.

[935] I'd like to know that actually has an impact.

[936] So yes, we are effective.

[937] So what we found is in these countries will change some of those policies and will change them somewhat towards being smarter, not by any means the whole way or anything.

[938] but towards better spending.

[939] And because most nation states spends billions of dollars on making lives for their own citizens better, if they just change a little bit of their increased spending as they get richer over the years, that will have a much, much bigger impact.

[940] So to give you a sense of proportion, the whole project that we do costs about $2 .5 million.

[941] And we probably have impacts in the, you know, we change hundreds of millions.

[942] millions of dollars, possibly billions of dollars in spending, and each one of those dollars will have impacts in the order of somewhere between five and up to $20 or $30 more well off.

[943] Okay, so that's great, you know, because what that actually indicates is that a rationally designed program aimed at incremental gradual improvement actually works extraordinarily well.

[944] It isn't revolutionary by any stretch of the imagination, but as a strategy, it pays off extraordinarily handsomely.

[945] I wish I, for many reasons, that I hadn't been so ill for the last while because I was going to lobby hard for the utilization of your team here in Ontario and in Canada.

[946] And I suppose that could still happen in the future hypothetically.

[947] But I'm very, very pleased to hear that the consequences have been positive and also that you had the fortitude and methodological.

[948] integrity to include an evaluation of your own process in your evaluation process.

[949] There's a rule for social science intervention, which is almost never followed, which is don't intervene without assessing the outcome of your intervention.

[950] It's a mistake.

[951] It's an ethical error and can have terrible practical consequences.

[952] Okay, so back to the summary.

[953] So Bjorn's team has rank ordered and prioritized a whole set of global concerns.

[954] They've also started to work at the state level, the country level, instead of the international level.

[955] As we just discussed, that's also paid off.

[956] And all of this lays out a lovely pathway, I would say, for people to inform themselves about those issues that they could adopt as salient to themselves politically and ideologically to provide some meaning for their life, some practical meaning, and to actually further the development, further positive, development in a whole host of areas.

[957] And so if you're interested in that as a viewer or listener, then I highly recommend Bjorn's books.

[958] But more importantly, his approach and some intelligent investigation as to the methods of that approach and the consequences.

[959] And so more power to you as far as I'm concerned.

[960] That's for sure.

[961] And I was very pleased, as always, to talk with you.

[962] Is there anything else that you'd like to tell people before?

[963] So if you would mind, I'd love to just, because I tried to go through the five things that you can do, so I'm just going to really quickly mention the last three.

[964] Is that okay?

[965] Yes.

[966] Yes.

[967] And then I'd love to also make one more point about my book.

[968] So we talk about carbon tax and innovation.

[969] Innovation is crucial.

[970] You should also focus on adaptation.

[971] It's sort of a naughty word in much of the conversation in global warming, but very clearly adaptation is going to be one of the big ways that we're going to fix many of the problems.

[972] It's going to happen to a large extent simply because people do that.

[973] If you're a farmer, you're going to plant later or earlier, depending on the climate changes, and eventually you might plant something else.

[974] You should also look at geoengineering.

[975] We talked about that very briefly, but basically the idea of saying, if there were to be a really catastrophic impact, geoengineering is basically a way of making sure that you can restore the temperature of the earth very quickly at fairly low cost.

[976] We should not just go ahead with it, but we should certainly be thinking about it.

[977] And that's all I'm going to say about this right now.

[978] The last bit, and we also talked extensively about that, is to make sure that prosperity is also a big solution to climate change.

[979] Most of the things you're impacted with, you're impacted with because you're poor.

[980] If you're really poor, everything hits you hard, but climate hits you hard as well.

[981] If you're rich, you're much, much less impacted.

[982] And so very clearly, the question is, do we want to help Bangladesh a little bit by cutting carbon emissions and basically then leaving them poor?

[983] But hey, at least sea levels rose this much less by the end of the century.

[984] Or would we rather make sure that we actually leave Bangladesh much richer, which means that they'll be much better able to handle hurricanes, that they'll be much better able to handle sea level rise and so on.

[985] There is a very strong basis of evidence that shows that prosperity is actually much better for most countries, not just because it's wonderful in all kinds of other ways.

[986] You can avoid your kids dying and get the better education and all these other things, but also for climate.

[987] So those were the five points.

[988] And innovation is by far the most important thing.

[989] I just want to say one last thing because my book is very much, we've talked a lot about all the big problems in the world.

[990] The reason why I talk about global is because it is the one thing that I experienced, most people actually talking about all the time as this existential threat.

[991] This is the big thing that we should all be concerned about.

[992] Certainly a lot of people, the UN Secretary General, many others are telling us this is the top priority for humanity.

[993] Because if this is going to eradicate all of us, surely this should be the thing that we focus on.

[994] I think that makes intellectual sense if it was true, but that's not what the UN Climate Panel is telling us.

[995] It's not what the science is telling us.

[996] It tells us this is a problem, by no means, the end of the world.

[997] And that is not only important because you can't really get to all the other things we were talking about unless you stop believing this is the end of the world.

[998] If this is the end of the world, you are going to set everything else aside.

[999] But also, of course, it's the only way that you can actually get a better life.

[1000] You know, And you see all these kids being really worried about, am I going to have a future when I grow up?

[1001] People believing literally that humanity is going to end, that must be terrible.

[1002] Now, if it was true, we should be telling people, but it's not true.

[1003] And therefore, being able to relieve yourself from that scare is also really, really valuable on a personal level.

[1004] So this book was written not just to make sure that you can get rid of this scare, but also that you can start realizing this is a problem among many others.

[1005] Now let's think about how do we prioritize and that's what I'm hoping this conversation will help us.

[1006] So in a sense, you could say the false alarm book is a stepping stone to be able to have that more general conversation, namely what is it that the world should be prioritizing if we're not scared witless about global warming, but actually see it as it is a problem among many problems.

[1007] Great.

[1008] Well, that's a really good place to end.

[1009] So thanks very much and I hope we get a million people to watch this and another 500 ,000 to listen to it.

[1010] We'll see how it goes.

[1011] So thanks very much for talking to me today, Bjorn.

[1012] It was a pleasure listening to you.

[1013] I always learn a lot reading your books and listening to you and it's been well, it's very nice to come across sources of realistic hope.

[1014] You know, and that's what your books provide they provide sources of realistic hope man those are in short supply so even though there's lots of reasons to be hopeful and perhaps uh the supply shouldn't be so short but it's nice to be able to maintain critical intelligence and not to have to descend into a well of pessimism as a consequence yes it's wonderful to talk to you and it's always you give me a lot of different perspectives on what we're doing which is just as valuable you know you're sort of you're stuck in your own little way of thinking about this.

[1015] And it's wonderful to sort of be able to say, oh, yeah, yeah, there are all these other perspectives and all these ways that you also need to to have that conversation.

[1016] It's great.

[1017] So it's always wonderful to talk to you.

[1018] Thank you.