Climate Alarmists Are Getting This All Wrong - Dr Bjorn Lomborg

climate change will affect the poorest the most that's absolutely true but what you have to remember is everything bad effects poor people most so they're most affected by infectious diseases or bad environments the main point is there's something slightly odd about the whole idea of us saying you know what I see you I really care about you I want to help you I'm not going to drive to work tomorrow and that will actually mean that I won't emit CO2 which will mean in a hundred years your descendants will be much warmer but slightly less much warm that just seems almost careless five years ago Greta thundberg tweeted climate change will wipe out all of humanity in five years now she's deleted it what's going on what so Greta tunberg is doing what I think most rational people should really be doing she's listening to what the media is telling us and they're telling us climate change is not just a problem it's not just dangerous it's actually likely to wipe us all out and and so you know she's scared like many many other people uh but of course it isn't actually a problem that's going to end Humanity climate change is a problem not the end of the world if it's a problem it's something that we should fix along with all the other problems in the world if it's the end of the world of course that's the only thing we should be focused on so I understand why there's such a focus on making us believe this is really the end of the world there's a new survey of the all the rich countries in the world the OCD it's at 60 of all people now believe that it's likely global warming will lead to the end of mankind that's terrifying because that's not what the U.N climate panel is telling us so problem yes not the end of the world and that's what you know Greta she she tweeted this it was it was a bad tweet in the first place because it didn't actually reflect what the author said and it just it felt right I'm sure at the time but of course you can't actually get away with saying that and then you know realizing five years later we're still here for the people who haven't been uh fully red pilled on the X risk definition and why climate change doesn't meet that criteria what's the 30 000 foot view of that I'm a little worried I never remember whether it's the blue or the red pill what what is the what is the red pill is seeing why why is why is climate change not a genuine existential risk so fundamentally if you see temperatures rise or if you saw them drop for that matter our societies will be ill-prepared so you know uh look at uh you live in Austin right uh and compare that to you know sort of Boston they're both well adapted to where they are but if it got very much warmer or very much colder both would be ill-adaptive that's the main point that if you change the temperature of the world it'll be a problem for all humans and of course there'll also be problem for all other living things so there's a real problem here but the idea that somehow a few degrees of temperature would then suddenly eradicate everything is just simply way outside of what anyone the U.N climate panel anyone else is really telling us there is a problem here so the cost that you know you will have to have more air conditioning cost of course you'll have less heating costs most places and you know many of those places it'll sort of weigh out each other but some places one will outweigh the other dramatically so it will be local problems it will have some problems globally there's a lot of researchers including a guy called uh William nordhaus he's a economic professor at the University of Yale in uh in New Haven I believe uh uh and he is the only climate Economist to get The Nobel Prize in climate economics and he estimates that if we do nothing about climate for the rest of the century the impact will feel a little bit like we're four percent less well-off than we otherwise would be now that's a problem remember four percent is not the end of the world and also if you think about it the UN estimate that by the end of the century the average person in the world will be about 450 percent as rich as he or she is today so we'll be much much richer but because of global warming we'll be slightly less much richer so instead of being 450 as Rich will only be 434 percent as Rich yes that's a problem no it's not the end of the world why use the metric of richness why is it that that's the uh outcome that's being optimized for here when it comes to climate oh look look and and this is a common misunderstanding that somehow economists and especially you know sort of welfare economists only care about money uh you know that's not what this is about it's just a convenient way of measuring a lot of different things so it'll be you know uh losses of wetlands it'll be uh that some people will die some people won't die it'll be a lot of other things so we do this routinely in many different ways uh for instance when we decide whether to put up a traffic circle or I believe it round about in in America uh or you know if we put up Highway protection in the in the median or lots of other things do we hand out vaccines or make expensive uh operating procedures uh operation sorry we decide on that from a societal point of view on saying how much more good does it do and that will typically be in safe lives or if we're talking about nature and preserved nature compared to how many resources we spend economists tend to translate all of that into money because it's a convenient measure but it's just one measure uh it's a fairly important one because that is what very often correlates very very well with pretty much anything else we know that you know if you're if you have higher incomes you also might likely to survive more you're likely to have more spare time you're likely to be better educated you have lots and lots of other attributes that are similar in the sense of desirable oh you also have better environment typically so the the point here is it's just one measure and many of getting a sense of what is the size of this when it comes to existential risk the proper definition of existential risk permanent unrecoverable collapse right of human civilization um it really does it's been a a pet irritant of mine ever since I started reading Nick Bostrom and Toby odd that people see climate change as an actual existential risk when I say existential risk permanent unrecoverable collapse we are all paper clips we're all gray goo or we are basically permanently locked into being in the Stone Age and we can't get back out of it again almost all of the things that people focus their attention on stuff like climate change nuclear war even nuclear war every nuke goes off not an existential risk now unaligned super intelligent AGI big existential risk nanotechnology big existential risk engineered pandemics big existential risk I am blown away by the fact that of all of the Myriad of different X risks that we could be focused on climate change is the one that's galvanized the most public attention and Toby's book The precipice which is great says it's got a one in one thousand or no sorry one in ten thousand chance over the next hundred years of being the end of human civilization whereas I think AGI is one in ten engineered pandemics are one in ten natural pandemics are one in 30 basically it seems like all of the attention is focused on something which doesn't require it or deserve it why welcome to the media age right this is this is fundamentally because climate change has all the great pictures it also has some other things that are very desirable like for instance you get to sell a lot of stuff uh so last year we spent about 1.1 trillion dollars on climate policy a lot of people are making money off of this so obviously they're pushing this uh when we have the big climate meeting in Denmark uh uh in 2009 where we were going to save the world as they always have to do in in those meetings uh uh Vestas our big uh uh wind turbine producer I believe still the world's biggest uh uh wind turbine producer they've plasted everywhere in Copenhagen would say get a great agreement which you know I'm sure they're nice guys and they actually want that but also it was a basic way of saying and make us lots and lots of money so so there's a lot of reasons why uh with climate you can basically turn every weather story Into Climate catastrophe a potential climate catastrophe it's great for for visuals it's very very hard to do that with gray goo or with artificial intelligence or even if you think about it uh back in 2019 virtually nobody took a pandemic seriously we knew it was going to happen I mean we were very lucky that coach Bill Gates won this Bill Gates won this in what 2014 that favorite famous video and look we saw it in 1918 right so it's not like it it's a surprising unprecedented and and yeah we've seen this many times and and of course asteroids is an obvious uh uh point we know that they can basically kill everything in in the universe so so I think one of the points that I tried to do and I guess that's also why you'd like me on on the show is I tried as hell tell people this is not about what looks best on TV or in this case most scary on TV it's about where we can actually do the most good for every dollar spent now there's another thing and that's where economists tend to get really annoying as well as of course to say some things we can fix fairly cheaply some things are incredibly hard to do something about and and so again I would tend to say let's focus on the places where we can make a huge impact at low cost first before we try and that's unfortunately what climate is we try to make a small impact in a long time from now at an incredibly high cost which is not very effective yeah so what you're trying to do is front load some of the gains that you can get because it's easy we have probably the technology at the moment to be able to do it there are some problems that you could foresee if you project out where technology is going that we may be more able to do it at a better price point in the future so okay you've been doing this research you've got this new big chunk of research that you've spent an awfully long time doing which is looking at the most cost effective ways to make the world a better place what did that involve what have you discovered what was surprising so back into teen we're all set targets for the world they're called the sustainable development goals you may have heard of them uh the U.S to sign up Britain has signed up every country in the world that was that thing where there was a hundred 180 of them or something 169 targets or goals uh so we basically promised everything to everyone everywhere all the time uh and you know the guys who did this in New York these were all U.N ambassadors undoubtedly felt really cool about being able to say I promise this oh and I also promise this and I promise you know we basically just promised our own promise to you promised to you uh but but you know that's not how the world works and so not surprisingly we're actually failing on pretty much all of the promises now they're all nice promises yeah so they're you know stop poverty stop hunger stop climate change uh stop corruption stop War stop you know anything you don't like and do everything you do like make make sure everybody has good jobs and there's also some really odd ones in there you know we should recycle more and we should eat more Organics and we should have more uh Parks accessible for for handicapped people and yeah it's slightly different levels of of attention but what we tried to do back then was to basically tell them please some of these goals some of these targets some of these promises are incredibly effective you can spend a few dollars and do an amazing amount of good some of them are going to be incredibly expensive and really hard to do like you know stop War for instance so maybe you should start focusing on the stuff that's really doable and effective first and no they didn't listen I I met with a lot of them they loved this idea and they said you know this is all great but the reality was you know when you meet with Brazil's in basketball I'm not pulling out Brazil for any good reason right but you know he would say but fundamentally I'm here to tell what Brazil's five points are and meet with Norwegian Ambassador and he wanted Norway he's four points in there and that's how we ended up with 169 uh targets so we try to look across all these different areas and say where can you do good one of the things that everybody talks about is climate obviously but the problem is you can spend trillions of dollars in literally trillions of dollars and make no impact today that's just how the climate system works make a tiny change in 50 or 100 years now that's not nothing you know if we had infinite resources we should also do that but it's funny that people worry so very little about the fact that many people live terrible lives right now you know so about half the world's population live in low and Low Middle income countries so less than eleven dollars a day and these guys could use a lot of things that in the rich world we take for granted so you know they die from easily curable infectious diseases they don't have enough food they have terrible education they're all these problems there so what we try to basically say is shouldn't we take a look across all these different areas that we're promising and say if we can't do it all what should we do first so that was a very very long way of saying this is why we've been doing this so what we've tried to do is with lots of economists say where can you spend a dollar or Yen or rupee or whatever your currency is and make the biggest ban and it turns out that some things are incredibly effective some things are not let me just tell you one so we found 12 great things and obviously you know uh we we've uh set a cut off point and this is sort of what's called benefit cost of analysis we look at what are all the costs not just the uh the economic cost but also social and environmental costs and likewise we look at what are all the benefits so not just economic but also social and environmental and then we try to say we're looking for the really good ones the one that deliver at least 15 of good for every dollar you spend this is not investment advice so you you can't actually make your money back right you're doing good with your dollar but what we found for instance was education so it's clearly a huge problem so around the world we have spent the last what 50 years getting people educated getting them out of illiteracy and that's great we got most kids into school today but unfortunately there's a what the academics call a learning crisis nobody's learning anything or very very many don't learn anything so they can technically read but they can't understand a sentence so let me just give you one example uh so we ask people around the world not we I don't do this a lot of really smart people do this I'm I'm just aggregating all this stuff uh but they ask uh you know 10 year olds to read this sentence Vijay has a red hat a blue shirt and yellow shoes what color is the Hat this is not super complicated I mean the right answer is red uh but unfortunately eighty percent of all kits in the developing world in the port low and lower middle income countries can't answer this question so they've learned technically to spell their way through this these sentences but they don't they can't string the words together and that's a terrible outcome because that means they committed to Poverty even if we sort of get everything else right they still can't be very productive and so what we've tried to estimate is what would it take to make schools better and there's a lot of knowledge about what doesn't and what does work so one of the things is uh you want to make better schools how do you do that well you give teachers better pay uh a lot of people will argue that uh they did that in for instance Indonesia Indonesia double teacher pay uh back in the uh around 2010 uh and uh because they did it in different districts in different times we can actually estimate the impact on this on kids learning outcomes turns out there was no learning outcome uh the famous paper is called double for nothing uh so you know fundamentally we spent twice as much money it made the teachers much happier not surprisingly but it didn't have any measurable impact on the learning of kids there's a lot of other studies that show what doesn't work but here is the stuff that does work the real problem in schools is that you put all the 12 year olds together in one group all the 13 year olds and other group and so on but these guys are vastly different in their outcomes some are really smart and know a lot of stuff and are incredibly bored and some have no clue what's going on and everywhere in between right what is the teacher going to do if you have like 30 or 60 kids in your class you're sort of teaching to some middle ground and most kids are either incredibly bored or totally lost instead what you should do is teach at the right level you should teach at their level one way you can do that is by giving each of these kids a tablet we're not actually going to give them a tablet because that's really expensive they get to sit in front of a tablet one hour a day and then some other kids are going to be using for the other hours of the day if you do that and you have software that very quickly realize you know they know that oh it's Chris he's back and they'll know pretty much your level and then they will start teach you right from there it turns out that that tablet one hour a day can teach you so much that by the end of the year you'll have learned three times as much as what you normally would have done you've learned three years of school in one year of schooling and you know the cost is about thirty dollars per kid so that's for you need to have solar panels to recharge the uh them you need uh you know some lockers for the tablets because otherwise they're going to get stolen and all that kind of stuff but fundamentally this is super cheap and could do an amazing amount of good so there are some other uh Solutions in there we try to estimate What's the total cost of doing this for 90 so there's almost half a billion kids in the low and Low Middle income countries each year they need to get this education that's better it's going to cost almost 10 billion dollars but you know what the benefit is and we again calculate that in dollars but the real benefit is that they will learn more they'll go out and be productive when they're old old enough and they will help both build more wealth for themselves and for their societies but the benefit of those 10 billion dollars is 600 billion dollars we can make the world 600 billion dollars richer that's 60 back on each dollar how amazing is that that's the kind of points that we're trying to make so I'm sorry I just you know talked for way too long but I I think in some ways this is the central point this is not sexy but it's incredibly useful and those are the kinds of things that we should be focused on how close do you see this work that you're doing to the effective altruism movement so effective altruism I love the uh those guys and and they're a lot of fun to be with um it's very much the same spirit so they are also very focused on saying what works and what doesn't uh there's two things I think that sort of differentiate us uh I think the main thing is that they tend to say the future is just as important as as the present uh this is one of the reasons why they worry about existential risk they worry about the fact that what about you know us us sort of running uh uh running out of track in a million years or something I think that's intellectually interesting but it's just not how people react certainly not most people in the poor part of the world but even in the rich part of the world if you really thought the future was just as important as a present all you would do was eat porridge every day and save all the rest to your descendants we don't right you the honest answer is we actually spend most of the money on ourselves on our immediate surroundings then we spend some money on our descendants we typically spend it through investment in infrastructure and in learning so that we're basically saying here is a little bit more of wealth here's a lot more of information now go fend for yourself that's pretty much how we actually do it and that makes for a very different sort of setup because the Ultras or the effect of altruist although the you know they'll say they care a lot about people right now they're sort of the way they think end up focusing a lot on the future likewise they also like to focus on on animals for instance where and again I think they make some fascinating stories I I'm a vegetarian because I don't want to kill animals I I love the fact that they focus on animals but again I tend to see it as a professional Economist as a way of saying it's about how much people value these these animals not about the animals in and of themselves uh and and that's a very different sort of approach uh so again you know I tend to probably say it's a little more important to to save humans I see the um similarities with regards to what is the best way to get a return on the money that we put in that was what sort of aligned it for me and I also that's something I hadn't considered William mccaskill's been on the show I found him very compelling I think he's a really lovely dude big fan of Toby odd big fan of Nick Bostrom and everybody coming out of that world but you are right um in a perfect hermetically sealed sandbox you might be able to say well look we've got you know 14.5 trillion future human lives that will spread across the Galaxy if we make these steps and get us there but you need to account for human irrationality you need to account for human biases like hyperbolic discounting and you know self-serving bias and stuff like that so you need to go okay I understand that that would be optimal but I need to factor in the fact that all of the people around us are going to spend most of their money on themselves they're not going to leave everything to Future Generations they are going to inherently be selfish even if they try to be selfless so yeah I think and if I could just I would actually tend to go uh one step further because you're absolutely right that's that's how people act but I think that also tells us about what is our actual preferences about this uh so people will say well you know if you ask them do you care about the future nobody's going to be you know Annoying and say no [ __ ] them or whatever you're just gonna say um uh I I really want us to focus on the future but then when you vote when you spend your money you're very clearly saying look I care somewhat for the future but I actually care a lot for right now and for the next year and that kind of thing and I think we need to reflect that and and the the second part is also it makes a slightly more boring stories uh because it's fun to talk about you know us going out and colonizing uh the universe and all that stuff and it's slightly more boring talking about how do we make better education in developing countries for sixth graders but this is what's actually going to fix a lot of the problems and of course also what is going to get us to the Stars quicker if you will because you know I I think there's something slightly wrong about us thinking about going to the Stars while a lot of people are still starving uh and and you know more fundamentally you know if we actually get the whole world together there's also a much greater chance that people are going to be saying we should also fix global warming we should also fix lots of other things because now we're so rich that we can actually afford to care about the future so education is one of the longest levers that you found what is another one you got you managed to spend 10 billion and get 600 back not bad what is another very long lever that you discovered so there's so there's 12 all in all another one is maternal and newborn Health uh one of those things that I didn't know anything about really uh so every year 300 000 moms die in uh uh uh close to childbirth from childbirth and about 2.3 million kids die each year in the first 28 days of their life here in on on the planet and most of these deaths are absolutely avoidable so you know a lot of women uh used to die in rich countries uh it was actually such that uh you know upper uh class women died more uh because they went to hospitals you know in the 1800s and of course the doctor fresh from operating on somebody else came and helped her uh delivery it's not a good time bad idea bad idea uh so so uh but but you know we fundamentally fixed this in the rich world but you know every two minutes a mom died nine nine kids die and we could do something about this so the simple and these are really you know sort of almost strikingly simple things is something the World Health Organization called bee monk this is one of the reasons why these these sorts of solutions don't work right then that's not fun uh but it's basic obstetric uh and emergency uh maternal and newborn Health Care see I just screwed it up something along those lines anyway so it's a you know it's a simple list of things that we should do so it's for instance make sure that you have clean operating environment yeah you sound like soap and disinfectant yeah that's probably a good idea but if you think about it you know about a third of all these areas uh in in the uh in low and Low Middle income countries they don't have uh uh clean water they don't have clean sanitation they often lack of uh disinfectants um about a third of all the kids that die die from as fiction so they basically don't get to breathe uh and I again I didn't know this but if you if you take even just you know European kids are rich uh country kids about 80 that come out of mom they just start breathing right away uh about 15 of them need you know that shove in the and the back end to get them going okay and then they start gasping right but the last five percent actually need a little mask and then you pump air into their lungs and then they start breathing and they survive this little bag it cost what sixty dollars or something and it can save 25 kids over a period of two or three years why don't we have this and and there's part of the solution is or part of the reason is that this is not a high priority thing you know if you talk to politicians everywhere you know politicians typically being old often also men uh they'll want you know cancer hospitals or stuff that they and their wives and others die from uh and and and maternal health is just far down the line uh it's also you know this little back that's not fun if you if you've ever seen if you haven't you should uh the machine that says ping do you remember that one from uh the uh Monte python it's a month's python sketch where they're giving birth to uh they're helping a woman give birth and but the doctors and the administrators only really focused on all the expensive machines they have and especially this one machine that says ping uh and that's really you know there's there's something Miss oh the woman yes yeah so so it you know doctors love and I I totally get that right they love you know the exciting stuff and this mask thing is is just not one of them so what we're trying to say is you should invest in these cheap simple things it turns out that the total cost is about 4.9 billion dollars two billion of that is women's time so that's actually not money that we need to come up with but it's of course still a cost because we need to get women into facilities to give birth instead of giving it back home because then they have that emergency option opportunities in the hospitals but so for about five billion dollars a year we could make benefits that would basically save 1.4 Million Lives let's say 166 000 women each year at say 1.2 million kids how amazing is that and the cost is so uh or the benefit is so great that each dollar will deliver 87 of social good so you know those are the kinds of things they're slightly boring they're not things we you usually knew about but they're just incredibly effective they're not climate change but they're something in some sense much much better because they actually work right now they'll help a huge chunk of of people either getting better off as an education or just simply surviving and they'll make life much better at very very low cost let me do a little recap here to make sure that I've got my brain in order so the first person that I learned about why climate change is such a powerful existential risk from is Mike Solana that writes pirate-wise the sub stack and what he said was that um he was talking about demographic collapse and he was saying that there's no smoke in the sky there's no plumes there's no hurricane there's no forest fires nothing galvanizes people to get after it what it seems like that you're saying here is there are lots of very boring very unsexy very kind of behind the scenes no press release solutions that we can spend money on which will do the thing that ostensibly a lot of climate activism is trying to do presumably the reason that people are doing climate activism is because they want to save human lives people proselytize about the fact that they want to save human lives specifically in the most poverty-stricken regions you don't care about poor people so on and so forth but my time with Alex Epstein taught me that a lot of the green policies that are being enacted hurt people from profit poverty significantly more than they do developed countries so when you're doing this climate approach when people are obsessed in climate as the highest the longest lever point in order to affect people from poverty they are applying a salve to everything which actually needs a slightly more targeted response they are spending money in a way which doesn't benefit and cause positive changes in the now it is an investment which takes a very long time to pay off which may be better facilitated by technology advances in the future there are more targeted solutions that we can do to people that are in these poverty-stricken areas but because of the cultural hold that climate alarmism and activism and green New Deal in 169 different target has taken hold of it's very difficult to pull any one person out of this because you have a a like a cohesive group where if one person decided to retract you'd say oh you don't care about the climate you don't care about poor people you go and actually no I'm doing a thing that cares more about poor people it's more effective for poor people than what you're doing but it doesn't seem that way which means that they would then get lambasted which is a disincentive for them to go and then do it and all of this together gets rolled into how do we spend money to achieve the goal and presumably the goal is human well-being human flourishing an acceptable standard of living for as many people on planet Earth something like that right whilst factoring in I I would say the goal is a better world and and that could be a lot of different things it could be that you're better off materially it could be that you don't die and it could be that you have a better environment and we try to you know balance all those uh it turns out that it's very much hard you know when you ask people and it's not very surprising uh they care a lot more about not dying than they care about yeah uh having uh having more wetlands and so much of the effect of stuff that we have is either getting people out of poverty or uh getting them out of death so in this regard I loved your summary was I was I wrong with my children no no no I think that's that's great and and one more thing you know when people say and this is absolutely true climate change will affect the poorest the most that's absolutely true but what you have to remember is poor people so they're most affected by by infectious diseases or bad environments or uh you know any kind of hurricane whether it's expensive and in unreliable energy access absolutely and and so you know the the main point is there's something slightly odd about the whole idea of us saying you know what I see you you uh you talk to uh some person in the really poor and you say I really care about you I want to help you I'm not going to drive to work tomorrow and oh and sorry and that will actually mean that I won't emit CO2 which will mean in a hundred years your descendants will be much warmer but slightly less much warm that's just that just seems almost careless uh you know about these people the real point is that you why wouldn't you want to help them now and by making them better off of course you will also make them more resilient to climate and to all these other things that they're challenged with so again it's an efficiency conversation of saying do you want to do a lot of good or do you just want to feel good and you know I I hope that a lot of people actually want to do good but yes you're absolutely right it's really really hard to have this conversation and and I think it's also important to just take a little bit a step away from from climate change it's not just climate change you know it's also a lot of other things you know people care about plastic straws in the ocean and stuff I I you know I think that's great but again you know let's get a sense of proportion here there's uh one other solution there is 1.4 million people that die from tuberculosis every year last year tuberculosis was again the world's leading infectious disease killer you know covet disrupted that in 2020 and 2021 uh but yeah this has been a huge Kelly it's killed a billion people over the last 200 years uh every fourth person that you we didn't know but in the 1800s it died died from tuberculosis and yet we fixed in the rich world and then we sort of think oh it's fixed everywhere no it's not and again because we fixed it we know very very well how to fix this is about making sure that there's enough medication that people keep taking it you have to take it for six months so it's actually somewhat complicated most of us forget to take our pills after two weeks when we get better and then you need to overcome some of the stigma and you need to make sure that people actually get uh uh found the the people who are sick we uh there's about 11 million people who are sick every year but we only uh I identify about six million of them and that's what keeps the infection going because there's a lot of people who don't get uh diagnosed and hence either die or just pass on the uh tuberculosis this again would cost in the order of five billion dollars a year but the benefits in terms of saving so over the long run we'd save about a million people uh and in the short run because you actually need to ramp it up we'd save about 600 000 people yeah that's still pretty damn good and imagine we could do that for every dollar spent would do 46 dollars worth of good so you know the point that we're trying to keep saying is that there's these amazing things that we really make a huge difference and that would also make people more concerned about all other things you know when once you get out of poverty you'll actually start caring about climate change uh and and of course as you point out also uh reliable energy is incredibly important it's one of the things that mean that we are not affected by you know incredible heat waves or incredible cold waves because we can cool and heat our homes and and not surprisingly most people for instance in sub-Saharan Africa want that as well not primarily because of global warming but simply because it's really uncomfortable if it's very very warm or very very cold and it's always been that way now we've made it a little more uncomfortably warm and a little less uncomfortably cold in Africa overall it's still a big problem and they would want most of the uh the heating and cooling any anyway the point here is if you get well off or if you at least get out of poverty you're much more likely to actually have a good life and you know be able to afford the stuff that'll make it possible for you and your kids to start learning and and and doing better I saw a tweet from you that said cold kills much more than heat each year heat kills half a million people but cold kills 4.5 million people how does that work how's the nine times more deaths from cold than there is from Heat so this is very well established this is from a the world's first estimate of a truly Global estimate we have very bad data from many places in the world we have lots of great data for for rich countries but we only have mediocre data for a lot of of a poor place in the world uh this was from the Lancet magazine uh and so what we know is that if you look across temperatures if it's very cold people die more if it's very warm people die more and so what they're basically looking at is they say where do you die the least and it turns out that there's an optimal temperature almost everywhere on the planet it shifts so so in England it's what eight degrees and in India is perhaps why I don't know uh 20 something degrees centigrade and now I'm totally lost in Fahrenheit but cold in England and warming in India and the point is most of the time we spend time below the optimal temperature that is colder than the optimal temperature that's why most people actually die from cool especially in the cold week months of the year people especially old people will uh stay inside if they're if they're not really wealthy and typically all people suffer more in this way they can't afford to keep their home quite as heated as they'd like and so what happens is when it's cold your body constricts uh the the uh the uh uh the blood vessels to keep your inner core uh heated but that drives up your blood pressure so we know everyone has higher blood pressure and winter time and that means you have much higher chance of getting a stroke or a blood clot or many other complications that sometimes lead to a death and because this happens for literally almost everyone on the planet this is makes for a lot of deaths uh you know it's not as it's like smoking deaths it's not something that you you take a smile and then you die but it's something of a statistical correlation this is what all the people who've looked at heat and cold essay when it gets really hot you die or you have a higher risk of dying and when it gets cold you have a higher risk of of dying unfortunately most of humanity is spent way more time being a little too cold so the amazing thing is if you look at India because they've done studies for India as well uh India you know you'd imagine a lot of people die from heat but actually again about seven times more people die from coal and this is because it's very easy to die and very easy to see when you die from heat because you die right after you die you know within the next 24 hours that's why heat waves are great TV but cold waves you don't die the next day you die over the next 30 days because you've constricted your blood uh vessels you've increased your risk of a heart attack and then maybe 15 days down the line you get this heart attack at but yeah it doesn't show up on CNN the problem here is again that we're we're Guided by what we see on TV rather than what the evidence actually tell us now this doesn't mean global warming is not a problem because global warming will mean will have more heat waves and we'll have fewer cold waves in the short term it actually turns out that that's good for mankind overall because we'll see more heat waves that'll mean more dead but we'll see fewer cold waves and because many more people die from coal that'll actually be a net a benefit for mankind uh over the long run of course eventually we'll run out of coal deaths and so it may turn out to be a problem the other part is it's much much easier to avoid uh heat death than it is cold death because heat deaths you really just need access to air conditioning for like you know 48 hours or so uh we know you can open up the malls that kind of thing there's a lot of ways that you can make sure people get more cooling free avoiding cold deaths you need heating on for months on end especially for poor people and that's one of the reasons why uh uh not having access to enough energy is actually really really harmful uh there's a wonderful study in the U.S that looked at what happened when you had fracking the fracking Revolution uh fracking Revolution meant that gas prices dropped to about half as much that matters because the vast amount of people in the US use gas for heating uh and so they estimated what that mean the gas became cheaper well especially poor people kept their homes better heated and that of course means they die less the net effect this uh study estimate is that every year 11 000 people didn't die in the U.S from coal death you saved 11 000 deaths from cheaper gas and so there's something weird about the way that we worry about oh my goodness you know the the uh uh the Heap Dome and 800 people died that's absolutely something we should be concerned about but we should have sort of a sense of proportion that you know uh fracking probably saved 11 000 people every year every year about uh you know so so about 20 000 people die from heat in the U.S but 170 000 people die from coal why are we only talking about the heat deaths and not the cold deaths you've run a couple of numbers previously to do with education to do with tuberculosis et cetera Etc what is the return on money when it gets spent on climate and green movement stuff so it depends on how you spend it uh if you so the best analyzed uh data is for the EU they had a 2020 climate policy uh and that has been sort of looked back at and we've analyzed in a lot of different ways and this simple answer and this is wrong in the sense that there there's so much uncertainty that it's on an order of magnitude estimate is that every dollar spent avoid it about three sets of climate damage it could actually have been 30 cents back on the dollar if we've been really really lucky it could also happen even less uh but it was not a good deal right instead of spending a dollar and doing three cents of good mostly in poor countries in a long time from now the dollar and done you know 97 cents uh more good most climate policies are very close to one or below one so they do very poorly uh uh and and and that's basically because politicians love to put a lot of restrictions on yeah no no no you can't solve climate change with nuclear power for instance which would be somewhat cheaper or switch from cold to gas which would often be a net net positive for people that's something that people would actually want to do as the US did in the 2010s uh instead they say no no you have to put up solar panels or wind turbines which are often fairly expensive so uh the estimate is that most climate policies is somewhere between 10 cents back on the dollar and maybe even a dollar maybe a dollar and a half so you can do pretty good policy but typically you don't there is one policy that's incredibly good so we actually did a whole project just for climate uh together with 50 of the world's top climate economists and three Noble alerts to look at where can you spend a dollar and do the most good just for climate so I'm not talking about well you could do something about tuberculosis or something else just the climate it turned out that the best long-term policy was investment in green energy r d and this is not very surprising really because imagine if you could come up with innovations that would make green energy cheaper than fossil fuels not the cheaper that we're saying right now that you know still needs hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies from you know uh the inflation production act or something and and the reason why China and India and everywhere else is only you know taking up a little bit of this but actually cheaper which of course would mean that people would just jump on it you wouldn't need any big Summits people would just do it themselves because it was cheaper if we had those kinds of breakthroughs uh this could be fourth generation nuclear again there's a lot of reasons why fourth generation might actually fail us at the end but imagine if fourth generation was just vastly cheaper than anything else China India Africa everybody would just buy it and you know tons of it and the world would decarbonize it wouldn't be the complete solution because there's lots of other ways that we need to decarbonize apart from electricity but it would be a big part of it so the point is this is the solution that we've always used if you think back there's there's a good story back in the 18 uh 50s uh the world was basically running out of whales we were hunting whales almost to extinction because whales happen to have this wonderful whale blubber that burns really really brightly so you know most rich people in Western Europe and North America would keep their homes lit with this wonderful new whale blubber it was much cleaner much nicer much brighter right the solution to saving the whales wasn't to tell tell everyone I'm sorry could you go back to the dirty old stuff that doesn't burn as well yeah you couldn't convince people to do that what you did convince them with was that we found oil and so you know we found oil first in Pennsylvania and then everybody else everywhere else and you could basically make the same clean burning oil product but without having to go out in the middle of the ocean and kill whales and just get a little bit of blower which was incredibly more inefficient so fundamentally Innovation saved the whales instead of telling people no you have to do without we came up with an innovation that was better we've done that in many other ways you know back in the 1970s when everybody worried about uh there would not be enough food to be for people the solution was not to tell him I'm sorry could everyone just eat a little less and then we'll send it down to the poor people the solution was the Green Revolution the you know uh the guy who actually got the Nobel Prize for this in in 1970 Norman Bullock he was the leader of finding ways to make seeds more effective uh and so he basically made these new yield higher yield seeds they would you know delivered two or three times as much rice or wheat or corn per acre or per hectare and so you could basically give this to poor people and they could make more more food themselves this is what saved for instance India and many other countries this is why India has gone from you know basically a basket case in the 70s to now being the world's leading rice exporter because we innovated them so it's not again about saying oh you know be a little more hungry then we'll save the world you know it's about technology and that's how we're going to save global warming that's going to how we're going to fix global warming by Innovation if we can come up with technologies that are cheaper and less carbon intensive we've already done one you know uh fracking which basically made us very cheap gas which has meant that the U.S has switched over from coal to gas gas emits about half as much that's a great climate solution is not the final climate solution because gas is still emitting CO2 and so we need to go further but you know surely that's one of the first things we should do to get sure that Europe that Africa that India and that China starts fracking so that they can also switch away from coal and start using gas instead and become much cleaner and emit much less so again the point here is simply to say there are smarter ways to do this and they're dumb ways and unfortunately we seem to to be insistent and saying no we're going to do the dumb stuff which will be incredibly costly and actually not work it's strange to think that the the biggest point of contribution that you can make as opposed to trying to wag your finger or get a Swedish girl to wag her finger and say you should change this is something that you should do is just offer up a solution that people are naturally going to want to do because the incentives end up being aligned what you're trying to do is force people through shame or guilt or or sad imagery to do something that they fundamentally don't want to do and you know incentives will as incentives do basically like people are going to end up aligning themselves with what it is that they want uh you were talking there about the whales I also saw a tweet from you that said the polar bear population is increasing polar bears were intensely hunted but in 1976 the world banned much hunting the polar bear population recovered and now is at its highest in six decades yeah and and you know again this is just simply a question of saying this is not saying that overall climate change might actually be a problem in the long run for polar bears I I think the science is much less clear than what they want to tell us uh but there is undoubtedly a problem but that we are so focused on making climate change the only problem and so we're somehow thinking no no no I want to help save polar bears so I'm gonna you know not drive my car tomorrow which is just like the weirdest kind of connection that you know in a hundred years maybe I'll uh I I and everybody else in the U.S will save a quarter of a polar bear what whereas you know if you actually cared about polar bears we should stop shooting them yeah the the amazing thing is that every year so there's about you know 26 000 polar bears in the world right now um uh and every year we shoot 700 polar bears if you're worried about polar bears stop shooting polar bears is you know it's not rocket science and so again I simply try to point out what works and what doesn't I actually forgot to say just on the research and development for green energy we also did a cost benefit analysis and that and of course it's very very uncertain because who you know you're basically making arguments about what's going to happen the far future but what we estimated was with world's best Minds was that every dollar spent will do eleven dollars of social goods so essentially by investing one dollar on green energy r d you will help push forward the date when green energy will be so cheap that everybody will switch over which will then reduce climate damages in the long run about eleven dollars that's a great investment it's not as great as some of these other things I'm arguing for but it's still a great one it's by far the best one we can do in climate also there are again as we said before you need to account for the fact that we have this desire to be seen as altruistic and empathetic and so on and so forth you need to account for the biases that everybody's got at the moment and one of them is we should be focusing on climate so perhaps it's still within the realm of climate but it's the highest leverage point of doing that um might be a nice halfway house to get people to think a little bit more um nuanced about this kind of a problem yeah yeah and and look I I I really appreciate those thoughts uh we've tried for a very long time to get people to think about stuff that's you know fundamentally boring but incredibly good uh and we've tried all of these different things so what we're trying right now is simply to say we made all these promises we're going to fail on pretty much all the promises if we can't do it all shouldn't we do the smarter stuff first so we're simply saying 12 amazing things uh just to give you a sense of proportion uh if you add up all of these it'll cost about 35 billion dollars there's another 6 billion in Social costs that you know the mom's waiting that kind of thing uh but we need 35 billion dollars 35 billion dollars is basically couch money right yeah for the world this is almost nothing you know we spend what three times as much on Cosmetics globally every year so yes we could probably afford 35 billion dollars a year the benefit would be that we would avoid 4.2 million deaths each and every year we'd save 4.2 Million Lives and we'd make the poor poor half of the world 1.1 trillion dollars better off every year that's almost one dollar per person per day in the poor half of the world are you not just screaming at the walls in your office every day with these figures in your hands and with you know these campaigns that everybody else is putting out you must just be losing your you must want to throw yourself off the roof like why why why I clearly haven't yeah yeah well there's no praise to your sanity for for sticking up with it I I think yes we we have a saying at the uh in my Think Tank the Copenhagen consensus that you know we would love for everyone to be incredibly rational uh but you know we'd love to for everyone to do the right thing but actually we'll settle for just people doing it slightly less wrong uh and and you know there's a lot of reasons why we don't get it right and you know a lot of it is just simply we're egotistical creatures right I mean fundamentally most of so David Hume back from the 1700s uh you know who described how we he would sit in the reading the paper and read about a big earthquake in China that killed you know hundreds of thousands of people and then he'd cut his thumb on the on the paper and he you know he'd be a lot more focused and he's no different from the rest of us of course that's how we you know we act we just care a lot more about you know I just cut my thumb but it doesn't mean we're uncaring people it just means we're you know sort of limited caring people and so I just want to get our attention to at least saying all right look you're going to spend most of the money on yourself and you're going to spend some on really silly stuff and that's fine that's how the world is but when we're not when we're actually saying I want to do this because I want to do good in the world and that's as you pointed out sometimes when people talk about climate change and many other things when they talk about plastic straws and everything else when we really want to do good in the world then let's really do good in the world and not just uh end up feeling good about ourselves and if I can push people a little bit to the smarter Solutions uh you know I would love us to do all 35 billion dollars but I'll settle for you know Elon Musk saying I'm gonna do that one thing or whatever it takes uh so you know we're we're throwing out these 12 amazing things and hoping some of it will stick how dumb of a policy is net zero possible palsy well look in the long run we'll probably get to Net Zero I I struggle to believe that we won't be Net Zero in a couple of centuries uh but um but for 2050 or you know some of these states that are talking about it even before it's just absolutely Bonkers uh for two reasons one of them is we don't have the technology for at least half of it and even if we had it would be fantastically expensive which of course is why you know most people talk about it but most people don't actually want to do it there was a wonderful story in Politico just today uh about Germany where they say uh uh that most Germans would love to do all their climate uh goals but they are somewhat skeptical about paying for all of that and you know that's that's sort of the basic dilemma of most of these things that you talk about this stuff but then if you actually realize how much it's going to cost you can see that there's going to be nobody saying yes to this there's one study of how much it would cost uh it was from nature uh uh how much it would cost for the average American to reduce his or her or the the US carbon emissions by 80 and the cost would be so you know pretty far from Net Zero by 2050 would be more than five thousand dollars per person per year so you know if you're a family of four that's 20 thousand dollars for you every year and if you want to go all the way or they couldn't actually get the model to do it all the way it would cost more than twice as much so fundamentally this is just not going to happen in any realistic sense uh uh McKinsey did a study for what it's going to cost to go nuts early estimated like many others have done if we do really smartly which we won't do but even if we did it would cost you know in the order of five to six trillion dollars a year it would cost India about nine percent of its GDP every year remember the total budget intake in India is about 12 so they'd have to spend almost their entire budget on netzera of course I'm not going to do that yeah so we we just got to get to grips with the fact that we're talking about these policies that are absolutely fanciful and even if we did just remember if everyone in the rich World Went Net Zero today and stayed that way for the rest of the century it would reduce temperatures by about half a degree Centigrade or one degree Fahrenheit uh so yes it would be noticeable but it wouldn't have fixed most of the problem that's of course because the vast majority of emissions are going to come from China India and Africa who are all places that want to get much richer so again we have no sense in proportion here uh Nets here is both impossible and it's probably also a net syrup by 2050 or something is an incredibly ineffective way to help the world it's a good idea to say we want to fix climate but I think there's something wrong in saying we want to fix climate to the extent that we're just going to leave off a lot of the money that could have helped save a lot of other stuff and it's also wrong to tell people we're going to go down a road that will eventually make every one of you yellow vest protesters because it's just going to be so expensive so there's a limited amount of time resources money energy Focus that can be spent on looking after the world there are trade-offs between going green stopping poverty Health pollution women's education child mortality etc etc at the moment the most widespread of these whether it go to public campaigns political campaigns government talks Davos conferences the ability to click that button to offset your carbon when you fly on a plane the ability to round up and donate money to Greenpeace or whoever it might be all of these different vectors could be finding pointing at places that were longer levers ones that would give you a better multiplier on all of these given that we have what seems to be um a culture of altruism right that's like one positive white pilled way of looking at what's happening you know people want to make an impact the problem is that the less sexy risks and the ones that Galvanize them more poorly what is a way that you foresee of trying to get people to buy into your 12 points so I think there's one thing and and we've talked about that in several different ways you need to get people off the ledge if climate change is the end of the world of course that's the only thing you should worry about you know AOC said it very beautifully when when she was talking about there's only 12 years left it's you know it's been a sort of recurrent phrase at least since 1972 when the UN first told us we just had 10 years left uh but you know the the we only have 12 years left she said and you're worried about how we're going to pay for it that makes perfect sense if the world was really ending this is the only thing you should be focused on so it makes sense if you believe you're at the on the uh on the uh on the edge and so we need to First pull people back and that's what I've been trying to do you know you you mentioned the uh the polar bears the uh the fact that you know a lot more people die from cold and heat uh I have another graph that I love uh which is basically how many people die from climate related disasters uh so we have pretty good data at least the last 100 years uh and in the 1920s on average every year people die from climate related disasters or cult uh uh cold and heat and drought storms floods and and extreme temperatures uh about half a million people died each year uh 100 years ago now most people would certainly when you look at the presentation think that that had increased its own it's actually dramatically decreased such that in the last decade in the 2010s It Was Eighteen thousand last year it was 11 000 people globally and mind you we've quadrupled in size so actually the individual risk has gone down even more we have seen a decline of about 98 in in in total deaths from climate related disasters this has nothing to do with climate this is everything to do with the fact that when you're richer you're more technologically advanced you don't die as much you're more resilient we've just simply become much better at dealing with whatever nature throws at you which is one of the reasons why we should make sure that the rest of the world also gets out of poverty so they can get the same benefits that we're having but the reality here is Once you pull people back from that ledge you can then start talking about now all right so what do you want to do do you want to you know not drive your car tomorrow and help a hapless guy in a hundred years and then tiny tiny amount or do you want to do something really really effective right now and once you point that out once you've taken away the end of the work I think it's a lot easier to get people to start realizing oh wait there's some really really good stuff here but what I'm trying to do with this particular thing and that's because I've you know this is what I've been saying for 20 years and failed um so what I'm trying right now is is basically to say look whatever else it is you're doing I'm simply saying why don't we spend 35 billion dollars couch change you know spend on all the other stuff that you want but let's just spend this tiny tiny tiny amount and make the world immensely much better how about that and I think even a lot of people you know even the aocs of the world would also say sure I'd love to do that and then go let me go back and worry about climate change and that's fine that's sort of another way to you know I would probably still disagree with her but you know fundamentally I want to get everybody on board with this boat we've made all these promises we're not actually going to deliver why don't we at least do the really smart stuff that's incredibly cheap first where should people go if they want to support these efforts and and try and make some sort of an impact themselves so there's a number of different we're not looking for money to do this we're not the right guys to go out and actually fix uh tuberculosis then it's a stock TB or it's uh uh a Red Cross or many many of these other organizations it's also very much about getting your politicians to think about this it's also just about getting that conversation going so you know I'm really hoping that when people watch this uh they'll they'll simply start having these conversations with their uh with their kids or their peers or you know their grandparents around the tables and say why aren't we focused on these things uh I'm coming out with a book next month uh it's also available on our website uh but it's yeah I'm still working on it uh we're publishing this in 35 papers around the world so you can go to our website it's called Copenhagen consensus.com halftime uh and that's basically because we're at halftime but nowhere near halfway right so we're basically saying let's do the SMART stuff now uh you can also follow me on Twitter uh and and obviously I'm hoping to help give that sort of input that will make you better at pushing all the other people to become slightly more aware that this is how we should be spending our money because at the end of the day this is not going to happen unless also you know everybody yeah I I want it's not you know I live in the same country as greater tunberg I think she's you know I think she's a great girl I I really have a lot of respect for her because you know she's heard the message loud and clear the world is ending and it seems like nobody's doing enough so I understand why she's doing what she's doing but I would love her to then say why aren't we doing the real stuff first right so if we could take away some of the fear I think a lot of people like Greta tunberg could actually start saying I want to do the real stuff and then of course we could actually get our politicians to do a little you know a little less of the dumb stuff and a little more of the smart stuff Beyond I really appreciate you I like the fact that you are very measured with the way that you put this stuff across I think that you need to be delicate when sort of broaching this topic with people because you'll just trigger a response that's going to get them to dig their heels in and ignore what you're saying I think it's definitely the right demeanor and the right sort of rhetoric to go about this stuff with uh very much looking forward to the book coming out and yeah I really hope that this has opened a lot of people's eyes every time that I speak to someone that's got a measured response when it comes to how we should be dealing with current problems facing the world uh it does give me a glimmer of hope so uh congratulations for for doing that dude I really appreciate you thank you for your time today thank you Chris what's happening 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