Climate Change Debate: Bjørn Lomborg and Andrew Revkin | Lex Fridman Podcast #339
people all around the world their lives are basically dependent on fossil fuels and so the idea that we're going to get people off by making it so expensive that it becomes impossible for them to live good lives is almost morally reprehensible people who have the most basic science literacy like who know the most about greenhouse effect they're at both ends of the spectrum of views on climate dismissives and alarmed what is likely the worst effect of climate change the following is a conversation with Joan lomberg and Andrew revkin on the topic of climate change it is framed as a debate but with the goal of having a nuanced conversation talking with each other not at each other I hope to continue having the base like these including uncontroversial topics I believe in the power of conversation to bring people together not to convince one side or the other but to Enlighten both with the insights and wisdom that each hold Bjorn lomborg is the president of Copenhagen consensus Think Tank and author of false alarm cool it and skeptical environmentalists please check out his work at lombard.com that includes his books articles and other writing Andrew revkin is one of the most respected journalists in the world on the topic of climate he's been writing about Global Environmental change and risk for more than 30 years 20 of it at the New York Times please check out his work in the link tree that includes his books articles and other writing this is the Lex Friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's Bjorn lomberg and Andrew rafkin there's a spectrum of belief on the topic of climate change and the landscape of that Spectrum has probably changed over several decades on one extreme there's a belief that climate change is a hoax it's not human caused to pile on top of that there's a belief that institutions scientific political the media are corrupt and are kind of uh constructing this fabrication that's one extreme and then the other extreme there's a a level of alarmism about the catastrophic impacts of climate change that lead to the extinction of human civilization so not just economic costs hardship suffering but literally the destruction of the human species in the short term okay so that's the Spectrum and I would love to find the center and my senses and the reason I wanted to talk to the two of you aside from the humility with which you approach this topic is I feel like you're close to the center and are on different sides of that Center if it's possible to define the central like there is a political Center for Center left and center right of course it's very difficult to Define but can you help me Define what the extremes are again as they have changed over the years what they are today and where's the center oh boy uh well in a way on this issue I think there is no Center except in this if you're looking on social media or if you're looking on TV there are people who are trying to fabricate the idea there's a single question and that's the first mistake we are developing a new relationship with the climate system and we're rethinking our Energy Systems and those are very disconnected in so many ways that connect around climate change but the first way to me to overcome this idea of there is this polarized Universe around this issue is to step back and say well what is this actually and when you do you realize it's kind of an uncomfortable collision between old energy norms and growing awareness of how the how the planet works that you know if you keep adding gases that are invisible it's the bubbles in beer if you keep adding that to the atmosphere because it accumulates that will change everything is changing everything for thousands of years it's already happening what do you mean by bubbles and beer CO2 carbon dioxide the main greenhouse gas why beer look because I like beer it's also in Coca-Cola well you were talking about Cola before uh and it's so it's innocuous we grew up with this idea as CO2 unless you're trapped in a room suffocating yeah is innocuous gas it it's plant food it's beer bubbles and the idea we can swiftly transition to a world where that gas is a pollutant regulated Tamp down from the top is is Fantastical you know having looked at this for 35 years I brought along one of my tokens this is my 1988 cover story on global warming the greenhouse effect yes of 1988 Jim Hansen the famous American climate scientist the really he stimulated this article by doing this uh dramatic testimony in the senate committee that summer in may actually spring lead spring it was a hot day and it got headlines and this was the result but it's complicated look what we were selling on the back cover what you see is when you get to back cigarettes different tobacco yeah yeah you know looking back at my own career on the climate question is no longer a belief fight over is global warming real or not you say well what kind of energy future do you want that's a very different question than stop global warming and um when you look at climate actually I had this Learning Journey on my reporting where I started out with this as the definition of the problem you know the 70s and 80s pollution was changing things that were making things bad so really focusing on the Greenhouse Effect and the pollution but what I missed the big thing that I missed of the first 15 years of my reporting from 1988 through about 2007 when I was the period I was at the New York Times in the middle there um was that we're building vulnerability to climate hazards at the same time so climate is changing but we're changing too and we where we where we are here in Austin Texas is a great example flash flood alley named in the 1920s west of here everyone forgot about flash floods built these huge developments you know along these river basins then one side start saying global warming global warming and the other side is not recognizing that we've built willfully uh greedily uh vulnerability in places of utter hazards same things played out in Pakistan and in Fort Myers Florida if you and you start to understand that we're creating a landscape of risk as climate is changing then that could it feels oh my God that's more complex right but it also gives you more action points it's like okay well we know how to design better we know that today's coasts won't be tomorrow's coasts work with that and then let's chart an energy future at the same time so the story became so different it didn't become like you know a story you could package into a magazine article or the like and it just led me to a whole different way of even my journalism changed over time so I don't fight the belief disbelief fight anymore I think it's actually kind of a waste I don't it's a good way to start the discussion because that's where we're at but this isn't about to me going forward from where we're at isn't about tipping that balance back toward the center so much as finding opportunities to just do something about this stuff what do you think Bjorn do you agree that it's multiple questions in one in one big question do you think it's possible to define the center where is the center I think it's wonderful to hear Andy sort of unconstruct the whole conversation and say we should be worried about different things and I think that's exactly or we should be worried about things in a different way that makes it much more uh useful I think that's exactly the right way to to think about it on the other hand that was also where you kind of ended we are stuck in a place where this very much is the conversation right now uh and and so I think in in one sense um certainly the people who used to say oh this is not happening they're very very small and diminishing crowd and certainly not right um but on the other hand I I think to an ex increasing extent we've gotten into a world where a lot of people really think this is the you know the end of the times uh if if you so the OCD did a new survey of all oecd countries and it's shocking so it shows that 60 of all people in the OCD so the rich World believes that global warming will likely or very likely lead to the extinction of mankind and and and that's that's scary in a very very clear way because look if this really is true if if global warming is this meter hurtling towards Earth and you know we're gonna be destroyed in 12 years or whatever the number is uh uh uh uh today then clearly we should care about nothing else we should just be focusing on making sure that that asteroid get you know we should send up Bruce Willis and get get this done with but that's not the way it is this is not actually what the U.N climate panel tells us or anything else so I think uh it's not so much about arcing against the people who are saying it's a it's a hoax that's not really where I am I don't think that's where Andy are really where the conversation is but it is a question of sort of pulling people back from this end of the world conversation because it really skews our way that we think about problems also you know if you really think this is the end of time and you know you only have 12 years nothing that can only work in 13 years can be considered and the reality of most of what we're talking about in climate and certainly our vulnerability certainly our Energy System is going to be half to a full century and so when you talk to people in say well but we're gonna you know we're really gonna go a lot more renewable in the next half century they look at you and like but that's what 38 years too late uh and I get that but so so I think in in your question what I'm trying to do and I would imagine that's true for you as well is to try to pull people away from this precipice and this end of the world and then open it up and I think Andy did that really well by saying look there's so many different sub conversations and we need to have all of them and we need to be respectful of of some of these are right in the in the sort of standard media kind of way but some of them are very very wrong and actually means that we end up doing much less good both on climate but also on all the other problems the world faces oh yeah and it just empowers people too those who believe this then just sit back even in Adam McKay's movie The don't look up movie there was that sort of knee-list crowd for those who've seen it who just say you know fuck this or uh and and a lot of people have that approach when something's too big no and it just paralyzes you as opposed to giving you these action points and the other thing is I hate I hate it when economists are right about stuff like the I I I I uh no no there are these phrases like I never knew the words path dependency until probably 10 years ago in my reporting it basically says you're in a system the things around you how we pass laws the Brokenness of the Senate you know that those are we don't have a climate crisis in America we have a decision crisis as it comes to how the government works or doesn't work so but those big features of our landscape are it's path dependency when you when you screw in a light bulb even if it's an LED light bulb it's going into a hundred and thirteen hundred twenty year old fixture because and actually that fixture is almost designed if you look at like 19th century gas fixtures they had to screw anything so we're like on this long path dependencies when it comes to energy and stuff like that that you don't just click magically transition a car Fleet a car built today will last 40 Years it'll end up in Mexico sold on a used car et cetera et cetera and so this there is no quick no fix even if if we're true that where things are coming to an end in 13 years or 12 years or eight years so most people don't believe that climate change is a hoax so they believe that there is an increase there's a global warming of a few degrees in The Next Century and then maybe debate about what the number of the degrees is and do most people believe that it's human caused at this time in in the in this history of discussion or climate change so is that the center still like is there still the debate on this Yale University the climate communication group there for like 13 years has done this six Americas study where they've charted pretty carefully and ways that I really find useful what people believe and we could talk about the word belief in the context of science too but and they've identified kind of six kinds of us there's from dismissive to alarmed and with lots of bubbles in between I think some of those bubbles in between are mostly disengaged people who don't really deal with the issue and they've shown adrift for sure there's much more majority now at the alarmed or engaged bubbles then just the dismissive bubble does a durable like with vaccination and all lots of other issues there's a durable never anything belief group but on on the reality that humans are contributing to climate change most Americans when you're asked ask them and it also depends on how you write your survey you know I think I think there's a component globally I mean when you when you ask around I mean and and this is you know if you hear the story from the media of 20 years of course that's what you'll believe and it also happens to be true all right that is what the sign I I think you know it's perhaps worth saying and it's a little depressing that you always have to say it but I think it's worth saying that I think we both really do accept you know the climate panel uh science and you know there's absolutely global warming it is an issue uh and it's probably just worthwhile to get it out of the way it's an issue and it's caused by humans it's caused by humans yeah okay but vulnerability the losses that are driven by climate-related events still predominantly are caused by humans but on the ground it's where we build stuff where we settle Pakistan in 1968 I just looked these data up there were 40 million people in Pakistan today there are 225 million and a big chunk of them are still rural they live in the floodplain of the amazing Indus River which comes down from the Himalayas extraordinary 5000 year history of Agriculture there but when you put 200 million people In Harm's Way and this doesn't say anything about the bigger questions about oh shame on Pakistan for having more people it just says the reality is the losses that we see in the news are and and the science finds this even though there's a new weather attribution group it's a WX risk on Twitter this does pretty good work on how much of what just happened was some tweak in the storm from global warming from CO2 changing weather but and the media glom on to that as I did you know in the 80s 90s 2000s but the reports also have a section on by the way the vulnerability that was built in this region was a was a big driver of of loss so discriminating between loss change in what's happening on the ground and change in the climate system is never solely about CO2 in fact Lawrence Bauer b-o-u-w-e-r um has for I first wrote on his work in 2010 in the New York Times And basically in 2010 there was no sign in the data of climate change driving disasters climate change is up here disasters are on the ground they depend on how many people are in the way how much stuff you built in the way and so far we've done so much of that so fast in the 20th century particularly that it completely dominates it makes it hard impossible to discriminate how much of that disaster was from the change in weather from global warming so a function of uh greenhouse gases to human suffering is unclear that's and that's very much in our control theoretically I mean the the point I think is is exactly right that you know if you look at uh the hurricane em that went through Florida you have a situation where Florida went from what 600 000 houses in 1940 to 17 million houses yeah sorry 10 million houses so uh so 17 times more over uh what a period of 80 years of course you're gonna have one yeah yeah you're going to have lots more damage and many of these houses now been built on you know places where you probably shouldn't be building and and so I think uh a lot of scientists are very focused on saying can we measure whether global warming had an impact which is an interesting science question I think it's it's very implausible that eventually we won't be able to say it has an impact but the real question it seems to me is if we actually want to make sure that people are less harmed in the future what are the levers that we can control and it turns out that the CO2 lever uh doing something about climate is an incredibly difficult and slightly inefficient way of trying to help these people in the future whereas of course zoning making sure that you have better housing rules what is it uh regulations uh that that you maybe you know don't have people building in the flash flood lately what was it called flash flood alley Alleyway yeah it's it's just simple stuff and and because we're so focused on this one issue we sort of it it almost feels uh sacrilegious to to talk about these other things that are much more in our power and that we can do something about much quicker and that would help a lot more people so I I think this is uh this is going to be a large part of the whole conversation you know yes climate is a problem but it's not the only problem and there are many other things where we can actually have a much much bigger impact at much lower cost maybe we should also remember those can you Steel Man the case of Greta who's a representative of alarmism that we need that kind of level of alarmism for people to pay attention and to think about climate change so you said the singular View uh is is not the correct way to look at climate change just the emissions but for us to have a discussion shouldn't there be somebody who's really raising the concern can you still man the case of for alarmism essentially or is there a better term than alarmism uh commit communication of like holy shit we should be thinking about this so I I think you know I I totally understand why credit tunberg is doing what she's doing I I have great respect for her because if you know I I look at a lot of kids growing up and they're basically being told you're not going to reach adulthood or at least not you're not going to get very far into adulthood uh and that of course you know this is the media are hurtling towards Earth and then this is the only thing we should be focusing on I understand why she's making that argument I I think it's at the end of the day it's incorrect and I'm sure we'll get around to talking about that and one of the things is of course that her whole generation uh you know I can understand why they're saying you know if if we're going to be dead in 12 years why would I want to study that you know why would I really care about anything so so I totally want to sort of pull Greta and many others out of this uh end of the world fear but I totally get why she's doing it I think she's done on a service in the sense that she's gotten more people to talk about climate and that's good because we need to have this discussion I think it's unfortunate and this is just what happens in almost all policy discussions that they end up being you know sort of discussions from from the extreme groups because it's just more fun on media uh to to have sort of the the total deniers and the and the the people who say we're going to die tomorrow and it sort of becomes that discussion that's more you know it's more sort of a mutt wrestling fight so what do you think the modern wrestling fight is not useful or is useful for communication for Effective science communication on one of the platforms that you're a fan of which is Twitter yeah I wrote a piece recently on my sustain what column saying if you go in there for the entertainment value of seeing those knock down fights I guess that's useful if that's what you're looking for the thing I found Twitter invaluable for but it's a practice it's just like the workouts you do or you know it's how do I put this tool to use today thinking about energy sufficient energy action in poor communities how do I put this tool today learning about what really happened with Ian the hurricane you know who was most at risk and how would you build back build forward better I hit build back um or you could go there and just watch it as an entertainment value that's not going to get the world anywhere you don't think entertainment I I wouldn't call it entertainment but giving voice to the extremes isn't a productive Way Forward it seems to you know to push back against the main narrative it seems to work pretty well in the American system we think politics is totally broken but maybe that works that like oscillation back and forth you need a grata and you need somebody that pushes back against the ground to get everybody's just to uh to get everybody's attention the the fun of battle right over time creates progress well and this gets to you know people who focus on communication science I'm not a scientist I write about this stuff if you're going to try to prod someone with a warning like yeah this is three years apart nuclear winner nuclear winner global warming well yeah we'll talk about it but look at look at that you know this is three years apart in the covers of magazine yeah and uh but then you have to say to what end if you're not directing people to a basket of things to do and if you're if you want political change then it would be to you know support a politician if you want energy access it would be to look at this 370 billion dollars the American government just put into play on climate and say well how can my community benefit from that and and I've been told over and over again by people in government jigar Shah who heads this giant Loan program the energy Department he says what I need now is like 19 500 people who are worried about climate change maybe because Greta got them worried but here's the thing you could do you can connect your local government right now with these multi-million dollar loans so you could have electric buses instead of diesel buses and that's an action pathway so without so you know alarm for the sake of getting attention or clicks to me is not any more valuable than watching a an action movie and and again I think also it very easily ends up sort of skewing our conversation about what are the actual Solutions uh you know because yes it's great to uh to get rid of the diesel bus but probably not for the reason people think it's because diesel buses are really polluting in the you know in the air pollution sense right that is why you should get rid of them uh and again if you really want it to help people for instance with hurricanes you should have better you know uh rules and Zoning in in Florida uh which is a very different outcome so so the the mud wrestling fight also gets our attention diverted towards solutions that seem uh easy fun you know sort of the electric car is a great example of this the electric cars somehow become almost the sign that I care and I'm really going to do something about uh climate of course electric cars are great and they're probably part of the solution and they will actually cut carbon emissions somewhat but they are incredibly ineffective way of cutting carbon emissions right now uh they're fairly expensive you have to subsidize them a lot and they still emit quite a bit of CO2 both because the batteries get produced and because they you know usually run off of Power that's not strong okay let's go there let's go electric cars okay educate us on uh the pros and cons of electric cars in this complex picture of of climate change what do you think of the efforts of Tesla in Elon Musk on pushing forward um the electric car Revolution so look electric cars are great I I don't own a I don't own a car uh but you know I've been driving there you go socially signaling yeah but yeah I've uh we're in Texas okay flew in here so it's not like I'm I'm in any way uh virtuous guy on on that path but but you know look uh they're great cars and eventually electric cars will take over a significant part of our uh driving and that's good because they're more effective they're more effective they're probably also going to be cheaper uh there's a lot of good opportunities with them but it's because they've become reified as this thing that you do to fix climate and right now they're not really all that great for climate they uh you need a lot of uh uh extra material into the batteries which is very polluting and it's also uh it emits a lot of CO2 a lot of electric cars are bought as second cars in the US so we used to think that they were driven almost as much as as a regular car it turns out that they're more likely driven less than half as much as a brachial cars so you know 89 of all Americans who have an electric car also have a real car that they use for the long trips and then they use the electric car for sure 89 89 yeah so so the the point here is that that it has it's one of these things that become more sort of a virtue signaling thing and again look once electric cars are sufficiently cheap that people will want to buy them that's great and and they will you know do some good for the environment but in reality what we should be focusing on is instead of getting people electric cars in rich countries where because we're subsidizing typically uh in in many countries it's uh you actually get uh uh a sort of sliding scale you get more subsidy the more expensive it is we've sort of subsidized this to very rich people to buy very large uh Teslas uh to drive around in uh whereas what we should be focusing on is perhaps getting uh electric motorcycles and third world developing cities where they would do a lot more good you know they can actually go as far as you need there's no you know worry about running out of them uh and they would obviously they're much much more polluting uh just air pollution wise and they're much cheaper and they use very little battery so it's a it's about getting our senses right but that but the electric car is not is not the it's not a conversation about is it technically a really good or is it a somewhat good uh Insight it's more like it's a virtual signal so just you know I'm an I work with economists I'm actually not an economist but I like to say I claim I kind of am uh but but you know the the fundamental point is we would say well how much do you how much does it cost to cut a ton of CO2 and the answer is for most electric cars we're paying in the order of a thousand two thousand you know Norway they they pay up to what uh five thousand dollars that they're about you know huge amount for one ton of CO2 uh you can right now cut a ton of CO2 for about what is it 14 on the Reggie or something uh you know you can read this that's the regional Greenhouse yes initiative so you can basically cut it really really cheaply why would we not want to cut dozens and dozens of tons of CO2 for the same price instead of just cutting one ton and the simple answer is we only do that because we're so focused on the election from interrupt typical European come here in Texas tell me I can't have my Ford F1 150 but I'll now you can have your F-150 Lightning yes that's true uh I'm I'm just joking but uh what do you think about electric cars if you just link on that moment and uh yeah this particular element of helping reduce uh emissions well you talked about the middle in the beginning and you know I loved moving to the hybrid the Prius was fantastic and did everything our other sedan did but you know it was 60 miles per gallon performance and you don't have range anxiety because it has a regular engine too we still have a Prius we also inherited my dad dear dad's year 2000 Toyota Sienna which is an old 100 000 mile uh Minivan and we use it all the time to do the stuff we can't do in the in the Prius like what taking stuff to the dump all I mean in terms of the size of the vehicle yeah we'll get yeah a size and just you know convenience factor for a bigger vehicle um I would love a fully electrified Transportation world uh it's kind of exciting I think what Elon did with Tesla I remember way way back in the day when the first models were coming out they were very slick Ferrari Style cars and I thought this is cool and you know there's a history of privileged markets testing new technologies and I'm all for that um I think it's done a huge service prodding so much more r d and you know once GM and Ford started to realize oh my God this is a real phenomenon you know getting them in the game there was that documentary who killed the electric car which seemed to imply that uh you know there's there were fights to keep this Tamp down and it's it's fundamentally cleaner funnily mentally better if but then you have to manage these bigger questions if we're going to do a build out here how do you make it fair as you were saying who actually uses transfer cars and Jigger Shaw that guy at the energy Department I mentioned who has all this money to give out he he wants to give loans to um if you've had an Uber Fleet those Uber drivers they're the ones who need electric cars as his work and and there was a recent story in Grist also said that most of the sales of Teslas are the high end of the market they're 60 to 80 000 vehicles each like the how the Hummer the electric Hummer I can't there was a data point on that astonishing data point the battery in that hummer weighs more than I'd have to look it up it weighs more than your price yeah I think it might have been the Prius and and think of the material costs there think of where that battery the Cobalt and the lithium where does this stuff come from to build this stuff out I'm all for it but we have to be honest and clear about that's a new resource rush like the oil rush back in the early 20th century and and those impacts have to be figured out too and if they're all big Hummers uh for rich people there's so many contrary arguments to that that I think we have to figure out a way we I don't like the word we I use it too much we all do but uh we all do we usually refer when you say we we humans we Society we the government yeah there has to be some thought and attention put to where you put these incentives so that you get the best use of this technology for uh for the carbon benefit for the conventional city pollution benefit for the transportation benefit can I step back and ask a sort of the big question we'll mentioned economics journalism uh how does an economist and a climate scientist and a journalist uh that writes about climate see the world differently what are the strengths and potential blind spots of each discipline I mean that's just sort of just just so people may may be aware I think you'll be able to fall into the economics Camp a bit there's climate scientists right and there's climate scientists adjacent people like who hang some of my best friends are climate scientists kind of which is I think where you fall in because you're a journals you've been writing it so you're not completely in the trenches of doing the work you're just up into the trenches every once in a while so can you speak to that maybe Bjorn like what's what does the world look like to an economist let's try to empathize with these beings that uh you know unfortunately has fallen into the disreputable uh economics yeah so so uh I think I think the the main point that that I've been trying for a long time and I think that's also a little bit what Andy has been talking about for a very long time the whole conversation was about what does the science tell us is is it global warming real and and to me it's much more what can we actually do what are the policies that we can take and how effective are they going to be so the conversation we just had about electric cars is a good example of how an economist think about look you gotta you this is not a question about whether you feel morally vert true so whether you know you can sort of display how much you care about the environment this is about how much you actually ended up affecting the world and the honest answers that you know electric cars right now in the next decade or so will have a fairly small impact and unfortunately right now at a very high cost because we're basically subsidizing these things at five or ten thousand Dollars around the world uh per per car that that's just not it's not really sustainable but it's certainly not a very great way to cut carbon emissions so I would be the kind of guy and Economist would be the types of people who would say is there a smarter way where you for less money can for cut more CO2 and the obvious answer is yes that's what we've seen for instance with uh fracking uh the the fact that the US went from a lot of coal to a lot of gas because gas became incredibly cheap because gas emits about half as much as as coal does when you use it for elect uh for power that basically cut more carbon emissions than pretty much any other single thing and we should get the rest of the world in some sense to frac because it's really cheap there are some problems and absolutely we can we can also have that conversation there is no technology is Problem free but fundamentally it's an incredibly cheap way to get people to cut a lot of CO2 it's not the final solution because it's still a fossil fuel but it's a much better fossil fuel if you will and it's much more realistic to do that so that's one part of the thing the other one is when we talked about for instance uh how do we help people in Florida who gets hit by hurricane or how do we help people that get damaged in flash floods the people who are in who are in uh in heat waves and the symbol the simple answer is there's a lot of very very cheap and effective things that we could do first so most climate people will tend to sort of say we gotta you know uh get rid of all carbon emissions we've got to change our entire uh the the engine the uh the the sort of powers the world and has powered us for the last 200 years and that's all good and well but it's really really hard to do and it's probably not going to do very much and even if you succeed it it would only help you know future victims of future hurricane the ends in Florida a tiny tiny bit at best so instead let's try to focus on not getting people to build right on the waterfront where you're incredibly vulnerable and where you're very likely to get hit where we subsidize people uh with uh with Federal Insurance again which is you know actually losing money so we're much more about saying it's not a science question I just take the science for granted yes there is a problem with climate change but it's much more about saying how can we make smart decisions can I ask you about blind spots when you reduce stuff to numbers the costs and benefits is there stuff you might miss about that are important to the flourishing of the human species so everyone will have to say of course there must be blind spots but I don't know what they are but yeah I'm I'm sure uh Andy and would probably be better at telling me what they are uh so we try to incorporate all of it but obviously we're not successful we you can't incorporate everything for instance in the cost benefit analysis but but the point is in some way um I I would worry a lot about this if we were you know sort of close to Perfection human race we're doing almost everything right but we're not quite right then we need to get the last digits right but I think it's much more the you know and the the point that I tried to make before that we're all we're all focused on going to an electric car or you know something else rather than uh fracking we're all focused on cutting carbon emissions instead of reducing vulnerability so we're simply getting in orders of magnitude wrong uh and and while I'm sure I have blind blind spots I think they're probably not big enough to to overturn that point Andy was Bjorn and economists are all wrong about everything well the models we could spend a whole day on models uh their economic models there's this thing called optimization models the there were two big ones used to assess the U.S plan this new big Ira inflation reduction package and they're fine they're a starting point for understanding what's possible but as this gets to the journalism part or the public part you have to look at the caveats you have to look at what model economists expressly exclude things that are not modelable and if you look in the fine print on the repeat project the Princeton version of the assessment of the recent giant legislation the fine print is the front page for me is a deep diving journalist because it says we didn't include any sources of friction meaning right resistance to putting new transmission lines through your community or people who don't want um mining in America because we've exported all of our mining we mine our Cobalt and Congo you know and trying to get a new mine in Nevada was a fraught fight that took more than 10 years for lithium so so if you're excluding those elements from your model which on the surface makes this 370 billion dollar package have an emissions reduction trajectory that's really pretty good and you're not saying in your first line by the way these are the things we're not considering that's the job of a journalist summarize all of human history with that one word friction yeah well inertia friction implies there's a force that's already being resisted but there's also inertia which is a huge part of our you know we have a status quo bias the scientists that I in grappling with the climate problem as a journalist I paid too much attention to climate scientists that's why all my articles focused on climate change and it was 2006. I remember now pretty clearly uh I was asked by the week in review section of the New York Times to write a sort of a weekend thumb sucker we call them on um just sit and suck yourself and think about something why is everybody so pissed off about climate change it was after Al Gore's movie The Al Gore movie came out Inconvenient Truth the hurricane Katrina's big senator inhofe in the Senate from Oklahoma wasn't yet throwing snowballs but it was close to that and so I looked into what was going on why is this so heated in 2006 the story is called Yelling fire on hot planet and that was the first time this is after 18 years of writing about global warming that was the first time I interviewed a social scientist not a climate scientist her name is Helen Ingram she's the UC Irvine and she laid out for me the factors that determine why people vote or what they vote for what they think about politically and they were the antithesis of the climate problem she used the words she said people go in the voting booth thinking about things that are soon Salient and certain and climate change is complex you know has long time scales and and that really jogged me and then I between 2006 2010 I started interviewing other social scientists and I I this was by far the scariest science of all it's the the climate in our heads or inconvenient Minds and in how that translates into Political norms and stuff really became the monster not the not the climate system is there social dynamics did the scientists themselves because uh I've gotten to witness a kind of flocking Behavior with Scientists so it's almost like a flock of birds within the flock there's a lot of disagreement and fun debates and everybody trying to prove each other wrong but they're all kind of headed in the same direction and you don't want to be the bird that kind of leaves that flock no so like there's an idea that science is a mechanism will get us towards the truth but it'll definitely get us somewhere but it could be not the truth in the short term in the long term a bigger flock will come along and it'll get us to the truth but there's a sense that I don't know if there's a mechanism within science to like snap out of it if you're done the wrong track usually you get it right but sometimes you don't when you don't it's very costly and there's so many factors that line up to perpetuate that flocking behavior one is Media attention comes in the other is funding comes in the National Science Foundation or whatever European foundations pour a huge amount of money into things related to climate and so you and then you your narrative in your head is shaped by that aspect of the climate problem that's in the spotlight I I started using this hashtag a few years back narrative capture like be wary of narrative capture where you're you're on a train and everyone's getting on the train and this is in the media too not just science and it becomes self self-sustaining and and contrary indications are ignored or downplayed no one does replication science because you don't your career doesn't Advance through replicating someone else's work so those contrary indications are are not necessarily you know really dug in on and this is for this is Way Beyond climate this is of many fields you as you said you might have seen this in Ai and it's really hard to find it's another form of path dependency the the term I used for the breaking narrative capture to me for me has come mostly from stepping back and reminding myself of the basic principles of Journalism journalism's basic principles are useful for anybody confronting a big enormous Dynamic complex thing is who what where when why just be really rigorous about not assuming because there's a fire in Boulder County or a flood in Fort Myers that climb it which is in your head because you're part of the climate team at the New York Times or whatever is the front is the foreground part of this problem what's the psychological challenge of that if you incorporate the fact that if you uh try to step back and have Nuance you might get attacked by the others in the flock oh I was right well you you've certainly been both of you get attacked yeah continuously from different sides so let me just ask about that how does that feel and how do you continue thinking clearly and uh continuously try to have humility and step back and not get defensive in in that on as a communicator I I mean there are other things happening at the same time right I'm now 35 years into almost 40 years into my journalism career so I have some Independence I'm free from the obligations of you know don't really need my next paycheck I live in Maine now in a house I love I own it outright it's a great privilege and honor and um as a result of a lot of hard work and and so I'm Freer to think freely and I know my colleagues in newsrooms when I was at the New York Times in The Newsroom you become captive to a narrative just as you do out in the world um the New York Times had a narrative about the about Saddam Hussein drove us into that war the times sucked right into that and helped perpetuate it um I think we're in a bit of a narrative we the media my friends at the times and others are on a train ride on climate change depicting it in a certain way that really I saw problems with how they handled the Joe manchin issue in America the the West Virginia senator they really kind of piled on and zoomed in on his Investments which is really important to do but they never pulled back and said by the way he's a rare species he's a democrat in West Virginia and which to see there'll be other otherwise occupied by Republican there would be no talk of a climate deal or any of that stuff without him and but when you once you're starting to kind of frame a story in a certain way you carried along and as you said sometimes it breaks in a new Norm arrives but the climate train is still kind of rushing forward and missing the opportunity to cut it into its pieces and say well what's really wrong with Florida and it's for me when you ask about how I handle the slings and arrows and stuff it's it's partially because I'm fast worrying about it too much um I mean it was pretty intense 2009 Rush Limbaugh suggested I kill myself on his radio show it's a really great what was that about I had this is actually this was a meeting in Washington in 2009 on population at the Wilson Center I couldn't be there so actually this is pre-covered but I was zooming in or something like Skyping in and I was talking about in a playful way I said Well if you really want to worry about carbon this is during the debate over uh carbon tax model for a bill in America we should probably uh have a carbon tax for kids because a bigger family in America is a big source of more emissions it was kind of a playful thought bubble some right-wing blogger blogged about it it got into Russia's you know pile of things to talk about and and the clip is really fun awesome meaning so uh if humans well these are bad for the environment uh we can I can imagine that's how you know you've made it explicit he said Mr revkin of the New York Andrew rev kind of the New York Times if you really think that people are the worst thing that ever happened to this planet why do you just kill yourself and save the planet by dying it was tough for you it was it was tough for my family you know to me it did generate some interesting calls and stuff on my my voicemail and um but but on the left I was also undercut Roger Pilkey Jr a prominent researcher of climate risk and climate policy UC Boulder was actively his career track was derailed purposefully by people who just thought his message was too off off the path when you you know even dealing with this for a very long time so look I I just want to get back to so the science I I don't think the the science get it so much wrong as it just becomes accepted to to make certain assumptions as you just said we we assume no friction so you know there's there's a way that you kind of model the world that ends up being also a convenient message uh in many ways and I think the the main convenient message in climate and it's not surprising if you think about it uh you know the main convenient message is that the best way to do something about all the things that we call climate is to cut CO2 and that turns out to only sometimes be true and with with a lot of caveats but that's sort of the message it takes a long time yes yes it's really really difficult to do in any meaningful sort of time frame uh and and and if you challenge that you yes you're outside the flock and you get attacked I've always uh so uh somebody told me once uh I think it's true they say it at the uh Hobart law school if you have a good case pound the case if you have a bad case pound the table uh and so I've always felt that when people go after me they're kind of pounding to table they're you know they're literally screaming I don't have a good case I'm really annoyed with what you're saying and and so to me that actually means it's much more important to make this argument uh sure I mean I would love you know everyone just saying oh that's a really good point I'm gonna use that but you know uh we're we're stuck in a situation certainly in a conversation where a lot of people invested a lot of time and energy on saying we should cut carbon emissions this is the way to help humankind and and just be clear I think we should cut carbon emissions as well but we should also just be realistic about what we can achieve with that and what are all the other things that we could also do uh and it turns out that a lot of these other things are much cheaper much more effective will help much more much quicker and so getting that point out is just an incredibly important for us to get it right so in in some sense you know uh uh to make sure that we don't do another Iraq and we don't do another uh you know lots of stupid decisions uh I mean this this is one of the things mankind is very good at uh and I guess uh I I see my role uh and I think that's probably also how you see yourself is trying to you know get everyone to do it slightly less wrong so let me ask you about a deep psychological effect for you there's also a drug of martyrdom so whenever you stand against the flock right no there is uh you wrote a couple of really good books on the topic the most recent false alarm I stand as the holder of Truth that everybody who is alarmist is wrong and here's just simple calm way to express the facts of the matter and that's very compelling to a very large number of people they want to make a martyr out of you is that are you worried about your own mind uh being corrupted by that by enjoying standing against the crowd no no no there's there's very little uh I I guess I can see what you're saying sort of in a literary way or something poetic here yeah there's there's very little Comfort or or sort of usefulness in in in Annoying a lot of people uh you know it just it just you know whenever I go to a party for instance I know that there's a good chance people are going to be annoyed with me and I would love that not to be the case but what I try to do is you know uh uh so I I try to be very polite and you know sort of not push people's buttons unless they they sort of actively say so you're saying all kind of stupid stuff on the climate right uh and then try to engage with them and say well what what is it you're thinking about and hopefully you know during that party and then it ends up being a really bad party for me but anyway so I'll I'll you know I'll end up possibly convincing one person that I'm not totally stupid but no I'm I'm not playing the Martyr and I'm not enjoying that see it's so interesting the uh I mean they're the the um martyr complex is all around the climate question uh Michael Mann at the far end of the spectrum of activism from where Bjorn is uh was a climate scientist is a climate scientist who uh was actively attacked by um inhofe and West in Virginia politicians and really abused in many ways he had come up with a very prominent model of looking at long-term records of climate change and got this hockey stick for temperature uh and he you know he definitely sits there in a certain kind of Spotlight because of that so it's not unique at any particular vantage point in the the spectrum of sort of prominent people on the debate Andrew you co-wrote the book The Human planet Earth at the dawn of the anthropocene which is the new age when humans are actually having an impact on the environment let me ask the question of what do you find most beautiful and fascinating about our planet Earth it'd be cheap to say everything but just walking here this morning under the bridge over the Colorado River seeing the birds knowing there's bat colonies massive baton colonies around here that I got to visit a few years ago I experienced one of those bat explosions it's fine mind-blowing uh the the I've been really lucky as a journalist to have gone to the North Pole just to camp on the sea ice with Russian help at this camp that was set up for tourists coming from Europe every year there were scientists on the sea ice floating on the 14 000 foot deep Arctic Ocean and I was with them for several days I wrote a book about that too along with my reporting been in the depths of the Amazon rainforest I've been when I was a very young I was the crew on a sailboat that sailed two-thirds of the way around the world I I was halfway across the Indian Ocean again in 14 000 foot deep water we were just there was no wind and we were this is before way before I was a journalist 22 23 years old and we went swimming and swimming in 14 000 foot deep water uh you know 500 miles from Land the Western Indian Ocean halfway between Somalia and the Maldives is it like so mind-boggling chillingly Fantastical thing with a mask on looking at your Shadow going to the vanishing point below you looking over at the boat which is a 60-foot boat but just looks like a toy and then getting back on and being beholden to the elements the sailboat you know heading toward um Djibouti men's City in the power oh my God and then you know and then um the human qualities are unbelievable you know the anthropocene I played a bit of a role as a journalist and waking people up the idea that this this era called the Holocene the last 11 000 years you know since the last ice age had ended I wrote my 1992 book on global warming thinking about all that we're just talking about thinking about the wonders of the planet thinking about the impact of humans so far in our explosive growth in the 20th century I wrote that perhaps earth scientists of the future we'll name this post Holocene era for uh for its formative element for us because we're kind of in charge in certain ways you know which is hubristic at the same time it's like you know the variability of the climate system is still profound without with or without global warming so this immense powerful beautiful organism that is Earth the all the different suborganisms that are on it do you see humans as a kind of parasite on this Earth no no do you see it as a um as something that helps the flourishing of the entire organism that can can intelligence yeah hasn't yet I mean is our is aren't we on uh the ability of the collective intelligence of the human species to develop all these kinds of Technologies and to be able to uh have Twitter to introspect onto itself I think you know I think we're doing a we're it's always the way we are it's ketchup we're always in catch-up mode you know um right uh I was at the Vatican for a big meeting in 2014 on sustainable Humanity sustainable nature our responsibility and it was a week of um presentations by like Martin Reese who's this famed British scientist a physicist who has been around his podcast yeah great yeah well he's you know he's he's fixated on existential risk right yes he is so there's a week of this stuff and um the meeting was was kicked off by um I wrote about it in the Cardinal maradiaga who's I think from El Salvador he's one of the Pope's kind of Posse he gave one of the initial speeches and he said nowadays mankind looks like a technical Giant and an ethical child meaning our technological Wizardry is unbelievable but it's way out in front of our ability to step back and kind of like consider in the full Dimensions we need to is it helping everybody is it uh what what are the consequences of crispr uh you know genetics technology and there's no single answer to that if if I'm in the African Union I'm just using this as an example crispr's emerged so fast it can do so much by changing the nature of nature will in in a kind of a programming way not you know building genes not just transferring them from one organism to another We've Only Just Begun to taste the fruits of that literally um um and it can wipe out a mosquito species we know how to do that now you can like literally take out the Dengue causing mosquito the scientists have done the work and you think okay cool well that's great uh now there's this big fight over whether that should happen African Union and I'm with their View says hey if we can take out a mosquito species that's causing horrific chronic loss through Dengue which I had once in Indonesia it's not fun and um we should do it you know and here's the other side of the European Union uh they're they're saying using their capital P precautionary principle says no we can't meddle with nature right and this is just like we were talking with climate you know there's the real time question and the long-term question and there's the uh people who are just facing the need to get through the day and be healthy and survive and have enough food which is not integrated sufficiently at all into the climate stop climate change debate and those who like are trying to cut CO2 which will have a benefit you know in the future by limiting the fat tail outcomes of this journey we're on so so when I think about the anthropocene I think about this planet I love that we're here right now I love that our species has these capacities I would love for there to be a little bit more reflection in where things come from and where they might go whether you're a student a kid what's your role the wonderful thing about the complexity of it is everyone can play a role if you're an artist or a designer or architect or an economist or a podcaster whatever you do just tweak a little bit toward um examining these questions stepping back from the simplistic label throwing toward what actually is the problem in front of me whether it's in Pakistan or or in Austin or wherever you know Florida you know what do you find beautiful about this collective intelligence machine we have from an economics perspective it's kind of fascinating they were able to there's there is a machine to it that we've built up that's able to represent interests and desires and value and hopes and dreams in sort of monetary ways um that we can trade with each other we can make agreements with each other we can represent our goals and build companies that actually help and so on do you just step back every once in a while and Marvel at the fact that a few billion of us are able to somehow not create complete chaos and actually collaborate and and have a collaborative disagreements that ultimately or so far have left led to progress yeah I think I think fundamentally the point apart from the fact that you know we should just be joyful of the fact that humans live here uh I think it's incredibly important to remember how much progress we've had uh you know most people just don't stop to think about those stats yeah I get that in the normal bustle of day but just you know in 1900 the average person on the planet lived to be 32 years 32 years that was our average life expectancy uh today it's about 74. uh so we've literally got two lifetimes on this planet each one of us and and you know every year you live in in the rich world you get to live three months longer and the poor world is about four months longer because of medical advances because we get better at dealing both with cancer and especially uh right now with uh with heart disease uh these are amazing achievements of course it's a very very small part of it we're much better fed we're much better educated we've gone from a world where virtually everyone or you know what 90 percent were were illiterate to a world where more than 90 illiterate this is an astounding opportunity and and 200 years ago 95 94 percent of the world were extremely poor that is less than a dollar a day today that uh for for the first time in 2015 it was down below 10 so there and and again these are kind of boring statistics but they're also astounding uh Testaments of how how well Humanity has done so just on on the point of uh we've kind of just been focused on making our own world better uh and in many ways you know so we've hunted a lot of uh big animals either to Extinction or uh down to much much smaller populations there's much smaller populations of fish in the ocean so there's a lot of of things that that sort of fare the brunt of our success not it's not because we're evil in that sense it's just because we didn't All Care all that much about them uh I think it is important as one funnel of that I'm not gonna make a big deal out of it uh but the fact that we're putting out more CO2 in the atmosphere uh because CO2 as you also mentioned before it's actually plant food uh you know if if you're if you're a greenhouse grower you know if you put in CO2 in your Greenhouse you actually get bigger and plumper tomatoes and and that's essentially what we're doing in the world this has overall bad consequences and and that's why we should be doing something about it but one of the good side effects is actually that the world is getting greener uh so we get much more green stuff now I don't know and and this is where I sort of show my Economist uh Roots uh because if you just measure all living stuff in uh in tons uh so in weight there's actually more living stuff than there were a hundred years ago because elephants and uh all these other you know Big Fish and stuff are actually really really small fraction of the world yeah the fact that we have yes so we have an enormous amount of live stuff but that doesn't even measure it it's mostly just wood wooden green stuff that yeah that's dramatically increased in the world now we're still not not there from what it was in 1500 so we've we've still cut down the world a lot but we're actually making a much Greener World again not because we really cared or thought about it but just sort of a side effect of what we're doing I think the crucial bit to remember is when you're poor and you worry about what's going to happen the next day this is just not your main issue yeah am I killing too many large animals in the world but when you're rich and and you can actually sit in a podcast in a convenient place in Austin you can also start thinking about this so one of the crucial bits I think if we want to get the rest of the world to care about the environment care about climate care about all these other issues we really need to get them out of poverty first uh and it's a simple point that we often forget and get them connected to all these gifts yes um I I have these memories of well I was reporting on the next big earthquake that's going to devastate Istanbul in 2009 I was in a slum immigrant poor neighborhood and walking around with an engineer pointing out to the buildings that were going to fall down this is all known there was an earthquake in 1999 and the next one's coming one of my advantages in covering climate is I've covered other kinds of disasters too so it keeps my contexts you know made in touch with other things we can do so I'm walking around and interviewing everybody went to the school that's being retrofit they actually were getting ahead of it there the world bank provided some funding to put in iron bars in the brick building and and I I met these kids um and they came when you're a journalist with a camera and stuff in a pad you get swarmed by kids uh mostly in developing countries and so these kids are running up to me and they weren't going like are you American or just they were saying Facebook Facebook and I went that's interesting and I they led me to their little town a little Community Center that had a bank of eight or ten pretty flimsy computers and they're all there playing uh Farm it was a game that was hot at that time on Facebook Farmville Farmville yeah and and you know my son back in the Hudson Valley I remember him playing it and and I thought wow that is so freaking cool that these kids and actually I became Facebook friends with a couple of them afterwards we traded our and I thought back to my youth when we had pen pals I would write a letter to a kid in West Cameroon and he would write back and it took weeks and it was a crinkly letter and I never met him and now you can kind of connect with people and and that all through my blogging you know at the New York Times I was doing my regular reporting but I still launched a Blog in 2007 called dot Earth which was all about what you were just describing the newest fear the connected world that's a term from uh these two earliest 20 a Russian guy in early fernatsuki and French Theologian and scientist which is so interesting tayard de charda they had this idea in the early 20th century that we're creating a planet of the Mind that that human intelligence can Foster a better Earth and I just became smitten with that especially meeting kids in Istanbul slums who are on Facebook looking for connectedness what can you do with these tools which is what drives me you know with my work now and um but then there are these counterweight counter currents that if the connectedness can cut back you know it allowed Al Qaeda to recruit use decapitation videos to recruit distributed disaffected young people into extremism and you know there's lots of these systems are not they're just like every other tool right they're just for good or ill and and the efficiency thing the econ the economics of the world which I also wrote about a little bit you know late 20th century it was so cool that everything became so efficient that our supply chains are just in time manufacturing you know getting the the stuff from where the sources of the material are to the car factory and to get the car to the floor just in time for someone to buy it and that and everyone got totally sucked in by that including me it's a great you know super efficient cheaper and then covid hit and the whole supply chain concept crumbled and one of the big lessons there hopefully and this is relevant to sustainability generally is efficiency matters but but resilience matters too and resilience is inefficient you need redundancy or or a variety of options right which is not what corporate companies think about which is not what if you're only focused on a bottom line short-term timeline those disruptions are not what you're thinking about you're still thinking about can we get that widget here just in time for this thing to happen and then on we go so it's kind of I love the notosphere this newest fear idea the connectedness is fantastic oh another thing like in the early 90s when I wrote my first book on global warming it was for an exhibition at the Museum of Natural History um the environmental defense fund was involved they were like a partner one of these long-standing environmental groups and they're very old-fashioned it's mostly lawyers really just using the Clean Air Act Clean Water Act to litigate against pollution and now EDF is vastly bigger and they're actually this coming year they're launching a satellite a an environmental group is launching methane sat and it's providing a view an independent view of where there's this gas you know same thing natural gas is basically methane so if you have a leak whether it's in Siberia or in Oklahoma you can cross-reference you can ground true you can identify the hot spot you can know where the problem is to fix in so many ways and that's just one example I'm like if somebody told me in 1993 that EDF was going to launch it methane satellite it would have laughed out loud so technology plays a huge role if it's kind of you know employed with these the bigger vision and Leadership so Bjorn you wrote one of the books you wrote the most recent one called false alarm how climate change Panic costs us trillions hurts the poor and fails to fix the planet good title by the way very intense makes me want to read it what is likely the worst effect of climate change first let me just uh my my editor actually hated the subtitle because it gives away the whole book basically it tells you what the book tries to make I I think you know that's exactly what it should be it's about getting this conversation out in the in in the public sphere so the worst thing that climate change can do is like the worst thing that anything can do is that it wipes out everything and we all die so it's it's not like you know if you're just looking for worst case outcomes uh you know anything can get to the worst case outcome um imagine if we uh suggest what's the worst thing that could happen from HIV it breaks down of a one or more African States because we don't fix it and then you get sort of uh biological warfare and terrorism throwing that in the mix and then you get someone who makes a virus and kills the whole world you know you can make worst case scenarios for everything so let's just call it I get the point and sorry for an interruption and and I appreciate worst case analysis because I'm I am fundamentally computer scientist and that was the thing that defined the discipline of the to measure the quality of the algorithm you measure what is its worth worst case performance that's the Big O notation that's how you discuss algorithms what is the worst possible thing uh in terms of performance this thing can do but for climate change let's even go crazy what is exactly the worst case scenario for climate change because uh I have to be honest and say I haven't really paid it deep attention I just have a lot of colleagues who think about climate and so on and there's a kind of in the alarmism there was a sense what this is this is a very serious problem and then the sentence would never finish what exactly is the problem well the extinction of the human species okay with a virus I understand how that could possibly happen what is the mechanism by which the human species becomes extinct because of climate change I'm not sure I would want to be able to argue that because it really requires you to have sort of very very extreme parameter choices all down the line and so it's more you know it's this kind of idea that we that we hit some of these unexpected uh outcomes so for instance uh the Western Arctic ice sheet uh melts really really quickly it doesn't look like that can happen really really quickly but let's just you know say that this could happen within 100 years or something so we basically get what um seven meters what is that 20 feet of sea level rise uh that will be a real challenge to a lot of places around the world this would have you know significant costs uh it's likely and you know there's actually been a study that's tried to estimate could we deal with that and the this the short answer is yes if you're fairly well off you know if you're a Holland you can definitely deal with it it's also likely that most developing countries are going to be much closer to Holland towards the end of the century because they'll be much richer so they can probably handle it but it will be a real challenge may I ask a dumb question yeah what happens when the C level rises exactly what is the painful aspect of that it is that all of your current infrastructure and a lot of coastal cities around the world that are literally built on you know Jakarta is a good example that are literally built on the uh just you know inches above the sea level uh if if you then get a sea level rise they'll rise say what would uh 20 feet if that would be like a third or a fourth of a of a foot every year yeah kind of thing yeah I see no evidence that that's even well hold on a second let's we're not talking about evidence no talking about worst case analysis and algorithms and and so so basically you would see your infrastructure all all your stuff very quickly being very very challenged and you basically have to put up huge sea walls or uh migrate out of that very quickly well very quickly as in in 50 years or something right right so like I is that as a human species were not able to respond to that kind of course and and look again the point here is then there's there's a lot of other arguments and I I should just you know put the disclaimer this is not what I think is correct but you know you're asking me what's the what's the worst case outcome that you have uh uh so most of global warming is really about that we we're used to one way of doing things so you know we we live in Jakarta because it's right next to the Sea we're used to the Sea being at this level uh we grow our crops because we're used to you know you grow a corn here you grow wheat here because we're used to that where the precipitation and the uh temperature is the right for this kind of crop if this changes and this is the same thing with with you know with houses if it gets colder if it gets warmer it's suddenly uncomfortable because you've built your house wrong so our infrastructure will be wrong if the world changes and that's what climate change is at a large scale yes and so so this is a problem in most of these sentences but if you then sort of take it to the extreme and say well imagine that you're going to get a huge sea level rise imagine that you're going to get a very different sort of precipitation for instance the the uh what is it the rain season rain Monsoon and and uh and and the Indian subcontinent uh changes uh dramatically that could affect a lot of Agriculture and make it really hard to imagine that you could feed India well there there are these kinds of things where you can imagine uh and then that this would be very difficult to deal with and then if you add all of it up you could possibly get sort of a system collapse because you know you just have too many problems and is it possible to model those kinds of things so what I understand is the sea level rise itself isn't the destructive thing it's it's the fact that it creates migration patterns and human tension battle over resources and since start to get these these human things human conflict so the big negative impact won't be necessary from the fact they have to move your house it's the fact that once you move your house that means something else down the line and it's a secondary tertiary effects that can have potentially towards military conflict can have this destabilize entire economies all that kind of stuff because of the migration power is it possible to model those kinds of things so there are people who looked at this and and surprisingly again you know most people will move within their country for a lot of different reasons but you know mainly language and and political structure you have your money you have your relationships there so it's not like we're going to see these big moves you know from uh from uh from the southern Mexico and and Central America up to the U.S or from Africa up to the EU that's not predominantly because of climate that's because there's a lot of you know there's a lot of welfare opportunity uh you can make your life much much better you can become much more productive octave if you move into a richer into a richer country so so yes there are these issues again uh you're asking me for sort of what is it that could really sort of break down the world I think the the fundamental point is to recognize that it's not like we haven't dealt with huge challenges in the past and we've dealt with them really well so just one fun thing I I encourage everyone to just look that up on on Wikipedia the rising of Chicago so in the uh in the 1850s Chicago is a terribly uh uh uh dirty place and they didn't have good sewers and so they decided and we can't really make up all my they decided to raise Chicago one to two feet and so they simply took one block at a time they put like 50 000 Jacks underneath a building and they would just raise the building and then they'd go on to the next building they race all of Chicago one or two feet this is you know almost 200 years ago of course we will be able to deal with these things I'm not saying it'd be it'll be fun or that it'll be cheap of course we would rather not have to deal with this but we're a very inventive species and so it's very unlikely that we'll not be able to what about covid pandemic just said hold my beer uh the response of human civilization to the covert pandemic seems to have not they didn't find the carjacks yeah she seems to have not been as effective as I would have hoped uh for uh as a human that believes in the in the basic competence of leadership and all that kind of stuff it seems like given the the code pandemic luckily did not turn out to be a pandemic that's that would eradicate most of the human species which is something you always have to consider and worry about that I would have hoped we would have less economic impact and we would respond more effectively and um in terms of policy in terms of socially medically all that kind of stuff so if the if the cover pandemic brought the world to its knees then what does a sea level rise so I think there's a different kind of thing that happened in in the in the covet so politicians and a lot of politicians I think made certainly sub-optimal decisions but I also find the fact that we actually managed to get a vaccine in a year uh we should not be uh you know sort of unaware of the fact that yes we did a lot of stupid stuff and a lot of people were really really annoyed but fundamentally we fixed this uh we could have done it better and pretty I mean I I uh rode through uh the covet pandemic in southern Sweden uh so uh and uh yes we we can have that whole conversation it was certainly a much easier to live there than than many other places but the fundamental point was we actually fixed it so yes we'll do and we'll do that with climate we'll make a lot of bad decisions and we'll waste a lot of money like we do with all other problems but it's are we going to fix this yeah can you add on to that uncomfortable discussion of what's the worst thing that could possibly happen I'm not worried about the sea level rise component certainly not nearly as much as the Heat and disruption of Agriculture patterns and water supplies and a lot of it relates to again path dependency and history farmers are the heroes of humanity all through history because they're incredibly adaptable if you give them access to resources uh in some cases it's just crop insurance which is really basically still impossible to get in big chunks of Africa to get you through those hard spots but but the heat issue is the one that's most this most base basic element related to global warming from CO2 buildup is uh hotter heat waves there's still some lack of evidence of the intensification but the duration and and that's really matters for heat is how many days seems to be very powerfully linked to global warming and uh so how many people die as a result of that is important so we're talking about maybe you can also educate me what's the average projection for the next 100 years as the temperature rises at two two degrees Celsius well yeah although this gets us into the modeling realm um you're you're assuming you have to assume different emissions possibilities you have to assume we still don't know the basic physics like how many clouds form in a warming climate and how that relates to limiting warming there are aspects of the warming the fundamental warming question there's still deeply uncertain but the debate is like two three or four Celsius it's in that rate but the thing is all of those are bad for this is an educational question sure it uh doesn't seem like that much from a weather perspective if you just turn up the AC and so on in your own personal home uh but it is from a Global Perspective a huge impact on agriculture well yeah and and getting back to sea level and Glaciers the the melting point of ice is a is a number yeah and so if you pass that number things change start to change what became known about Antarctica and Greenland more is that it's ocean temperature the the sea water in and around and under these ice sheets because it kind of gets under parts of Antarctica is what's driving the Dynamics that could lead to more abrupt change more than air temperature glaciers these big ice sheets live or die based on how much snow falls and how much ice leaves every year and I was up on the Greenland ice sheet 2004. and written about it forever since then you know it's it's the same amount of water that's in the Gulf of Mexico as if you know God or some great force came down and Flash flows the Gulf of Mexico and plunked it up on land that's that's the ice sheet it's a lot of water that's 23 feet if sea level rise if you but we're not going to melt at all and the pace at which that erosion begins and becomes sort of a runaway train is still not well understood that changed from like a manageable level of sea level rise from these ice sheets to something that becomes truly Unstoppable or that has these discontinuities where you get a lot more of a sudden isn't to me it's in the realm of what I've taken a calling known unknowables like don't count on another ipcc report magically including science that says aha now we know it's going to be five feet by 2100 because learning there's a lot of negative learning in science this may be true in your body of science too um there's a guy named Jeremy bassis b-a-s-s-i-s who wrote a paper about the this West antic the the idea that you could get this sudden cliff breakdown of these ice shelves around Antarctica leading to Rapid sea level rise he did more modeling in physics and it turns out that you end up with it's a much more Progressive and self-limiting phenomenon but those papers don't get any attention in the media because they're not scary they're not scary and they're sort of after the fact you know just this past year there's been this cycle around uh collapse the word collapse and Antarctic Antarctic Ice um it started uh actually several years ago with the idea that this the West Antarctic ice sheet is particularly vulnerable and some paper everyone's the science Community like the birds we were talking about flux to it and some high profile papers are written and then a deeper inquiry reveals that you know it's more complicated than that and we the journalists the media pundits don't pay attention to that stuff so and actually which is why I've started to develop kind of a dictionary like I call it watch words like words to if you're out there you're you know you're just a public per your person you want to know what's really going on you hear these words like collapse in the context of ice what do you do with that and so I've created conversations around these words geologists and Ice scientists use the word collapse they're talking about a centuries-long process they're not talking about the World Trade Center and scientists would do well to be more careful with words like that unless your focus is what we're saying earlier your idea that alarming people will spur them to act then you use that word carelessly uh can I just follow up on the on the other point that you said you know two three four degrees you know that doesn't sound like much I can just crank up the air conditioning I think that sort of touches on a really really important point that for most rich people much of climate change is not really going to be all that impactful it still will have an impact but fundamentally if you're well off you can mitigate a lot of these impacts and as a young scientist at Carnegie Mellon Destiny knock she just was the lead author on a study um what poor and prosperous households do in a heat wave when they have access to air conditioning in a poor household you wait they found through science they delay turning on the air conditioner four to seven degrees more of heating before they start to use the air conditioner and that create adverse outcomes if you have an estimatic in the house an old person you're you're endangering endangering their lives and that's just a little tiny microscopic fractal example this powerful real phenomenon that there's a divide in vulnerability and it's not just based on where you live this is families in like Pittsburgh we're not talking about you know Botswana and so that that divide and capacity to deal with environmental stress is something you can really work on and it gets hidden in all this talk of climate crisis people and and that that's one of the important parts is is both to say look if seven billion people sorry eight billion people will now have all experienced this even though for each one of them it's manageable it's still a big problem because it's you know eight billion people living through this and the second condition eight billion yes and and then it's uh it's the it's the point of getting to realize it's very very much about how do you help the world's poor and that's very much about making it more affordable uh yeah basically getting them out of poverty and remember getting out of poverty doesn't just mean that they can now afford to air condition themselves but they get better they get better education they get better opportunities they get you know better lives in so many other ways and then at the end of it it is it's not just about making sure that we focus on this one problem but it's recognizing that these families and and have have lots of different issues that they would like us to focus on climb climate and heat waves just being one of them so you know it's sort of taking Progressive steps back and realizing all right okay this is a problem not the end of the world and one tiny little last example you mentioned Jakarta at the beginning it's really valuable to look around the world at places that are sort of leading indicator places whether it's sea level rise or heat and you could do that Jakarta is sinking like a foot a year literally a foot a year it's some insane number from withdrawing groundwater from gas withdrawal from it's a Delta you know it's sediment it's built on sediment I wrote a piece of Ages ago the New York Times calling it delta blues you know I'm a musicians and and Jakarta so what are they doing they're moving they're moving the capital to uh another uh area and so that says to me there's a lot of plasticity too it's it's a city that's going through this that rate of sea level of their relationship with the sea level through syncing is way faster than what's happening with global warming so look there look to those kinds of places and you can start to build a Tokyo had the same thing in the 1930s so we're also withdrawing a lot of water way too fast uh and and so you know one of the obvious things is maybe you should stop withdrawing water so fast you know and and again we seem to almost be intent on finding the most politically correct way to fix a problem or you know the most the thing that sort of gets the most clicks instead of the thing that actually works the best uh so a lot of these things are really you know not rocket science Solutions we'll we'll get there let me add one more on on top of the pile of the worst case analysis so what people talk about which is hurricanes and earthquakes does is there a connection that's well understood between climate change and uh the increased frequency and intensity of hurricanes and earthquakes I've dug in on both a lot the earthquake connection to climate change I'm not worried about compared to just the earthquake risk that we live with in many parts of the world already the Himalayas even with that earthquake in 2015 and Kathmandu that whole range is overdue for major earthquakes and what has happened in the last 50 years since they last had big earthquakes huge development big cities a lot of informal construction like the stuff I wrote about in Istanbul where the family builds another layer and another they put a floor on every time someone gets married has a kid you put another flooring house and unfortunately that's you know the what was the term this Turkish um engineer um Rubble in waiting it's rubble and waiting and we're looking at it you know videotaping it and there are people playing there so I don't worry about the earthquake connection to climate change the Hurricanes I've written about for decades um and the most Illuminating body of science that I've dug in on literally related hurricanes is this field that's emerged it gets a tiny bit of money compared to like climate modeling it's called paleo tempestology it's like paleontology you know they look for evidence of past hurricanes long coasts that we care about and they dig down into the lagoons behind like the barrier beaches along Florida or the Carolinas or in Puerto Rico and what you have is a history book of past hurricanes so there's this mud mud mud mud mud mud mud mud made of accumulating over centuries and then there's a layer of sand and seashells and what that indicates is that there was a great storm that came across the beach pushed a lot of sediment into the mud and then there's and when you look at that work I first wrote about this in 2001 in the times in a long story and then kept track of these Intrepid scientists putting these core tubes down and it shows you we're in a landscape where big bad hurricanes are not they're the norm but something that's rare and big is something that's extreme when you think about the word extreme right it means it's at the end of the spectrum of what's possible they're rare rare in human time scales um hurricane Michael four years ago devastated category five came ashore in the panhandle of Florida leveled that much photographed Town Mexico Beach and um people are actually the Tallahassee National Weather Service said unprecedented hurricane and the damage was unprecedented because there hadn't been a community there before but the hurricane was not unprecedented at all if you look at the history and this is published research it's just that no one bothers to we have this blind spot for um the longer time scale you need to examine if you're thinking about big bad things that are rare and hurricanes are still rare I was recently covering Fort Myers the awful devastation there's a young climate scientist at Florida Gulf Coast University Joe Muller who's done that paleo tempestology work there right in Fort Myers she lives there and she was away in London at a meeting of reinsurance companies that reinsured all the world's big bad risks when this was happening but she has done the work that shows uh it's a Thousand-Year record of past hurricanes and it's super sobering when you consider how fast people have moved into Florida and built vulnerably in an area that hurricanes will Hammer that it part of the fundamental dynamics of the Gulf of Mexico and these storms come off of Africa it's a place where they would come now the question of global warming impact is subtle there are aspects of hurricanes that haven't changed there's aspects like rainfall that seem pretty powerfully linked to global warming of warmer atmosphere holds more moisture so when you have a big disturbance like a the heat engine of a hurricane comes through it you get more rain does rapid intensification you know how quickly these storms jump from like you know category one to five or four before they hit isn't is a new area of science so I think it's still early days and knowing because no one was looking for that there were no data back 300 years ago you know when these big bad previous hurricanes came to know whether they were rapidly intensified or not so I as a journalist I try to you know keep track of what we don't know not to be too constrained and think about new science as being you know robust and let's it's considering and actually actively stating we don't really know what's going on with earlier Harkins and all of that is swamped ultimately literally by the vulnerability building vulnerability in these areas you know if there's a marginal change in a storm and you've quadrupled or sex tupled how much stuff and how many people are in the way and if some of those people are poor and vulnerable or elderly and can't swim you're creating a landscape of Destruction so a lot of the human suffering that has to do with storms is about where and how you build versus the frequency and the intensity of storms still you didn't quite answer okay the question uh you know when I'm having a beer with people at a bar and they say hey why are you having a beer we're all going to die because of climate change usually what they bring up uh and I'm just trying to add some leaves no this is good usually what they bring up is you know the hurricanes and the most recent hurricanes saying like this they're getting crazy hurricanes all the time they're getting more intense more frequent and so on as is there I'm sure there's incredible signs going on trying to look at this uh is there is it possible is there evidence and is it possible to have evidence that there's a connection between what would we can call Global Warming and the increased frequency and intensity of Storms and is okay no thank you if you're out of intensity you know it's it's let me just get into this a tiny bit more I mean hurricanes I grew up with them in Rhode Island in the new and you know in my youth and there was a very active period of hurricanes in New England in the 50s and 60s 70s and then in the North Atlantic generally was very very active the number 50 when I was a kid and the Dynamics of them forming off of Africa and coming here circling up the coast was just prime time then there was like what Kerry Emanuel who's the most experienced hurricane climate scientist around at MIT I he was in he's in this story he's in he's in my 1988 article he and colleagues have found and others that there's what they call the hurricane drought from like the 70s through about 1994. in the Atlantic specifically the Atlantic basin and there's been a lot of questions about that people thought it was ocean circulation something about the currents do these multi-decatal variabilities in the oceans right and then now it looks robustly I can't find a climate scientist who disagrees that the thing that caused the drought was pollution smog and significantly in Europe and you think well how did smog in Europe relate to hurricanes crossing the Atlantic and getting to the United States it's because of the smog was changing the behavior of the Sahara Desert which is just south of Europe and and the Sarah Harrah does it kills hurricanes sand and dust coming off the Sahara you can see this every year and when that's active it stifles these big storms at the point right in their Nursery they all form there's this area for hurricanes off of West Africa that's like the nursery Zone and so if you're stifling those hurricanes because of pollution in in Europe before the Clean Air acts kind of you know cleanups and then that goes away none of that has anything to do with global warming it's another kind of forcing in the climate system a local one that created a regional dynamic that created a quiet period when all these friends in the bar we're maybe they maybe they were born you know in the 90s or whatever they grew up in an area of like you know where no hurricanes weren't a big deal um and now we have an end to that drought because we cleaned up the air pollution the sooty kind of air pollution sulfury and anyone who says global warming global warming without saying well that's in there too is kind of missing that and when you look globally you know there's still I think was it 90 or so hurricanes a year to Cyclones hurricanes typhoons globally that hasn't changed the number of these tropical storms that reach that ferocity has not changed it's just a fundamental Dynamic of and and by the way on the long time scale the models still indicate as you warm the planet and remember the Arctic worms quicker this is something people probably understand you're actually evening out the imbalance between the Heat of the Equator and the cold that the in the northern part of the hemisphere and that calms the whole system down so there could be fewer hurricanes later in the century because of global warming and for me you know that's a lot of information but if I'm in a bar I start with what what do you care about you care about safety you care about security you care about having everybody safe not just you you get in your car and you can evacuate what about the old person you know or the poor family who can't do that they're not going to leave their house what are we doing to limit vulnerability now that I Circle back to that over and over again I have like a pocket card I have this graphic card I created about risk and like what we really care about is climate risk like who's at risk what's driving the risk how do you reduce that it's car you can almost pull it out in a bar I should print them you should do that it's like a risk risk is risk is the hazard like you know the hazard is is a storm times exposure how many people how much stuff factoring in um vulnerability or resilience and climate change is changing the hazard for some things not for tornadoes not for not for everything exposure is this expanding Bullseye this is another hashtag expanding bullseye get out there and look for that and you'll see I I've pushing these two geographers who do this for every Hazard wildfire earthquake flood Coastal storm and we're building an expanding Bullseye in an area and Nature's throwing darts some of the darts are getting bigger because of global warming some of the darts we don't know what do you do like what do you do well you get out of the way right you don't want to be on the dartboard and that it just simplifies the whole formula to me it was it's kind of a transformational uh potential to go into a bar maybe I should print these things 100 and I should go ahead with you more often they should be coasters and bars because that was fascinating about Smog and I mean it's just it's nice to be reminded about how complicated and fascinating the weather system is let me try to answer the the the questions slightly quicker before your your friends have drunk too much uh but never enough or not enough um so if you look at the amount of uh of uh the number of hurricanes as uh as Andy brightly pointed out um it doesn't look like it's changing so we see more because we have now much better detection systems with satellites but if you look since uh 1980 when we have good satellite coverage for instance last year was the year that had the lowest number of hurricanes in the world and you know you're sort of like that's that's odd because it's probably the year where I heard the most about hurricanes and what that tells you is that just because you hear a lot about hurricanes doesn't actually mean that there is a lot of hurricanes you can't just go that way if if you remember uh in the 1990s and 2000s uh there was an enormous amount of talk about how violence uh how crime was getting worse in the U.S while all the objective indicators showed that it was going down but there's sufficient amount of violence that you can fill every radio and TV show with a new crime and so if you get more and more TV shows that talk about crime actually most people end up thinking that there's more crime while the real numbers going down so the reality here is yes climate change will probably affect hurricanes in the sense that they'll be the same number or slightly fewer as Andy was mentioning but they will likely be somewhat stronger this seems to be the the best outcome we're not sure but this seems to be the the outcome and it's important to remember stronger is worse than fewer is better so overall climate will make the world a little bit worse so that's that's the that's the sort of bottom line but and that's the real issue here all the other things the fact that people are much more vulnerable is is just vastly outweigh this which is why if you look at the impact of hurricanes and impact of pretty much everything is typically going down if you look for instance in percent of GDP you have to look at percent of GDP because if you have twice as many houses obviously you know the same kind of impact will have twice the the impact or if they're twice as worth twice as much if you do that in percent of GDP and even the UN says that's how you should measure it's going down why is that it's because we're becoming more resilient you know just simply we you know if you look at what happens with when hurricanes come in we have much better prediction in the long run that means you now know you know two or three days out that there's a big hurricane that's likely to come here what does that mean all the things that can be moved so you know typically all All Buses old trucks everything that's not bolted down will leave this area and so you'll get less damage from that you will have more people knowing oh this is going to be a big one they move to their relative somewhere else so you'll have fewer people being vulnerable there's if people are responsive and aware yeah yeah you can do this so the outcome and this is important for the whole conversation the outcome is that we're actually becoming less vulnerable and the damages are becoming smaller not bigger but had they not been global warming it would probably have gone down even faster so we would have become even better off quicker had there been no global warming but this is a crucial difference and this is what I find really hard to communicate climate change is not this oh my God everything is going off the off the off the charts and we're all going to be doomed kind of thing climate change is a thing that means we're going to get better slightly slower and that's a very very different kind of attitude it's one of the many problems rather than this is the end of all of us and by the way if you look at what's happening in the world um the data also show that in rich places in four places we still are moving into zones of Hazard faster than climate is changing Beth Tillman was at Columbia and she moved to Arizona she and colleagues at this outfit called Cloud to Street did an amazing study showing this is a year or so ago I wrote about showing again we're moving into zones of Hazard which it applies to me um just what Bjorn was saying that we wouldn't be people wouldn't be doing that if they thought that was going to lead to Devastation and this is today we're doing this now and it's flood flood zones Wildfire zones so that means there's these things to do you there's so much plasticity in the human behavior and how we build and where we build you can make a big big change in the outcomes I mean one of the things to remember is you know people move to where hurricanes hit because when they're not there it's a really beautiful place to be yeah yeah right so so in in many ways we we make the trade-offs and say look I'm I'm happy to live you know have an ocean view and then maybe a hurricane is going to hit and of course it becomes a lot easier than when the federal government is actually subsidizing your risk by saying we'll insure you really cheaply uh and that's one of the things that we should stop doing you know we should actually tell people look if you want to live where hurricanes sit maybe you should be more careful yeah by the way what I was saying about um past storms the Paleo tempestology past fires it's the same thing we've suppressed fire in the United States for 100 years through much of the west through uh wanting to save the forests you know the whole Smokey the Bear thing don't stop when these are Landscapes that were that evolved to burn and what happened in the last hundred years a lot of people love the West we love we love these environments we love to live with the trees the Boulder County area the explosive development in zones of implicit hazard leads to Big Bad outcomes when conditions align and climate change is worsening some of those conditions and sometimes it's really counter-intuitive a wet season builds more grass dry season comes along parches the grass then comes a human ignition it's almost always human ignitions and then you have this disaster where a thousand homes burn in Boulder County and it's like there's so many elements there that can be worked on that give me confidence that we can change these outcomes you can natural disasters are not natural disasters are designed really as some people say can I take a quick aside and ask about terminology of climate change and global warming so you use it interchangeably it is an aside but it's one that's worthy of taking do those carry different meanings and has that meaning changed over the years uh between those two terms are they really equivalent well some people say there was this industry or propagandistic shift from let's see what was that which came first oh no they're going to climate change now like it's a new thing which is crazy it's ridiculous the intergovernmental panel on climate change in 1988 wasn't the intergovernmental panel on global warming it was on climate change so these these terms have been there they've been sort of evolving when I wrote this cover story it was the greenhouse effect so green and that's fallen out of favor greenhouse effect is not often talked about well it's really that's that's the physical effect that's holding in the heat but see the it's not a good there's terms that mean stuff and there's terms that are actually used in public discourse to designate what you're a whole umbrella of opinions you have and I guess if somebody me who doesn't pay attention uh to this carefully you have to use terms carefully sure because people will you know a noob that rolls into the topic will often use terms to mean exactly what they mean like literally but they actually have political implications and all that kind of stuff so I guess I'm asking is there like uh is is there uh are you signaling something by using global warming versus climate change or people have calmed down in terms of the use of these no no but the guardian newspapers made it worse now they have their style book you know every newspaper has a they they prescribe they don't want their reporters to use any of those terms anymore they call it climate crisis climate emergency oh no oh yeah Global heating it's literally in their rule book Global heating that sounds more intense and that was the point well I wrote about the global Heating thing more than a decade ago that that's been around but you know so they're they're doing the um what was the movie where the the comedy the rock and roll comedy where he sets his his loving yeah yeah his amplifier goes to 11. you know the idea that you turned up the rhetorical volume and that's going to change people's is ridiculous so so for me I mean uh I use global warming and climate change uh uh interchangeably and I think it's it's fair there's you know there's some technical ways that you can differentiate them uh but the reality is global warming is probably a better way to describe a lot of it because this is really what is the main Drive of what we worry about uh climate change seems a little diffuse but you know it's convenient to when you talk about climate all the time that you can call both of them but I think the climate crisis and the climate catastrophe is really sort of this is the amping up uh of of a catastrophe and again as we've talked about before uh if it really were true we should tell people uh but if it's not true and I think there's a lot of reasons why this is not a you know a climate catastrophe this is a problem uh we're actually doing everyone a disservice because we we end up making people so worried that they say we got to fix this in 12 years or whatever the number is and also that it makes it almost impossible to have a conversation of you know well you know maybe we should be focusing on vulnerability first and it a lot of people and I think a lot of well-meaning uh and well-intentioned people feel that it's almost sacrilegious to do you know to say it's a it's about uh vulnerability because you're taking away you the guilt of climate change you're taking away our focus on on on dealing with climate change whereas I think we would say no it's about stuff that actually works and you know doing that first right and and by making it about carbon dioxide you're impliciting implicitly making it about fossil fuels which implicitly gives you another great narrative good guy bad guy it's these big companies where's the source of alarmism so is it the ipcc the intergovernmental panel on climate change like what there's a chain here is there somebody to blame along the chain or is this some kind of weird complex as to where everybody encourages each other can you point to one place is it the media is it the scientist I think the U.N climate panel is fundamentally a really good uh uh uh climate research group that you can have some quipples with the way that they sort of summarize it and politically coordinated documents and stuff but you know fundamentally I think they do a good job of of putting together all the research this also means it's incredibly boring to read which is why virtually Nobody Does it I'm I'm sure you have but I'm pretty sure a lot of climate journalists have never sort of looked past the uh at least the uh the summary for policy climate panel they do like us they do predictions as well no well they they pull together all the stuff that people have published in the period literature and then try to summarize it and basically tell you so what's up and down with climate change they do that in four four large volumes every four to five six seven years or something uh and um and yes it's it's you know I think it's the gold-plated version of what we know uh there tends to be a lot of um uh well this is what they say actually they say so many different places with so many different people that it's not quite clear exactly what they're saying often you know you can sort of find contradictions between one volume with one set of authors and another but yeah look I I think this is fundamentally the right way that we know about climate but then it gets translated into how do you how do you know about this when most people don't read these 4 000 Pages you read a news story in a newspaper and that new story will be very very heavily slanted towards you know if if you say so sea levels could rise somewhere between one and three foot what do you hear yeah you obviously hear the three foot three foot is just you know more fun more scary more interesting than one foot uh and and it's that way with all of these you know so what what's the prediction for for temperature arises it's uh somewhere from not very scary to pretty damn scary uh and again you hear the pretty damn scary all the time uh and and then there's there's obviously always researchers who are saying well but actually it could be a little more scary than that and then they're likewise researchers who say well you know it's probably not going to be as scary as that and most of the journalists will you know interview do you really put the blame fundamentally on the on the journalists on the media setup look media is simply trying to get clicks or sell newspapers and if if you were just going to say this is not a big issue it just doesn't sell anything but I think you're probably much better able to address this well no I folks can Google for my name revkin and the words front page thought in The Newsroom every afternoon now we have a 24 7 News cycle so it's different but back in the day of the New York Times when it was a flourishing print institution every afternoon there was a front page meeting and the big Pupa editors to go in there and the desk editors come in with their pitches for the day and my friend Corey Dean who is the science editor for chunk of my time uh you know I remember having a conversation with her about some new study of I think it was Greenland the ice sheet and I laid it out for her and she said where's the front page thought in that so we're all set up to look for the that's scary but and the News environment has gotten so much worse than than 10 or 20 years ago at least you had filters and limited number of outlets and there was some sense you could track what's good or bad there's lots of problems with that system too but now you have an information Buffet so if you're if you want to be alarmed or you want to be con stay in the tribe of those who think this is utter bull you can find your flow and that that has led but getting back to this specific question I think the 2018 ipcc report which was a special report commissioned to learn about the difference between 1.5 degrees of warming and two which sounds so weird and technocratic and complicated that's the one that generated the whole meme about eight years left 12 years and that's the one this was the uh the idea that there's a point we're gonna if we don't cut emissions in half by whatever it was 2015. we're doomed that emerged from that specific report and it wasn't something that was in the report it was in the spin around the report and that's what captivated Greta appropriately as a young person going you know and with her unique vantage point and stuff and that report I still need to dig in and write something deeper about what happened with that particular Dynamics created this recent burst of resumed rhetoric that that I think you're focusing on and it's all in the external interpretations which journalism laps up because we're looking for the front page thought but it's not just the journalists it's the whole system uh ngos environmental groups if you're if in developing country uh well-meaning leaders in developing countries because of the structure of this treaty that goes back to 1992 that's the Paris agreement is part of they are now um really looking for a way to portray this as a CO2 problem not a vulnerability well there's a vulnerability aspect but like in Pakistan they're they're um climate Minister which they didn't even have a climate Minister five years ago is blaming everything that happened in Pakistan on carbon dioxide warming the climate creatings when a lot of what was going on was also on the ground and you can blame colonialism Pakistan's history all kinds of things but but under the treaty you want it to be about CO2 because that puts the onus on rich countries you're not paying us where's our money and they're right you know in the context of what everyone agreed to there was supposed to be 100 billion dollars a year from rich countries to poor countries starting in 2020 it didn't happen it's like basically some money is Flowing but it's not really made up of money yeah and so so that whole dynamic they latch onto the climate science and they they you know so they're there and they're very handy quotable people and you have a Justice angle you have bad guys and good guys which fits all these narrative threads that come together into this information storm we're still living with and and then of course it's not Pakistan's fault either right I mean it also actually almost all leaders now say it's because of climate because then it's not you know we didn't do anything wrong uh in Germany for instance uh when we had that flood last year it's it's not impossible that the climate had a part in in that but it's very very clear that the main reason why so many people died in Germany and Belgium was because the Alarm Systems didn't work and this was plainly the local leaders in Germany now if I'm stuck here and basically have caused the you know the death of 200 people would I rather say yeah that's on me or what I climate it's just such an easy scapegoat I don't want to place it all in the journalists I think because there's a lot of if I were to think about what did you call it front page thought there's a lot of really um narratives that uh result in destruction of the human species so nuclear war pandemics all that kind of stuff it seems that climate is a sticky one so the fact that it's sticky means there's other interests at play like you guys are talking about in terms of politics all that kind of stuff so it's not just a journalists I feel like journalists will try anything for the front page but it won't you won't stick unless there is bigger interest to play for which these narratives are useful so journalists will just throw stuff out there and see if it gets clicks and sure um it all it's it's like a first Spark maybe uh it's maybe a tiny Catalyst of the initial stuffs but it has to be picked up by the politicians by interest groups and all that kind of stuff let me ask you if you want about the um first part of the subtitle how climate change Panic costs us trillions how does climate change depending cost us trillions so we're basically deciding to make policies that'll have fairly little impact even in 50 or 100 years that literally cost trillions of dollars so you know give you two examples so uh the European Union is trying to go to Net Zero so our attempt to go halfway there by 2030 uh will cost about a trillion dollars a year uh and yet the net impact will be almost unmeasurable by the end of the century why is that that's because the EU and the rich countries is a fairly small part of the emissions that are going to come out in the 21st century now we used to be a big part of it as that's mainly because nobody else you know it was just the US and and Europe and a few others have put out CO2 in the in the 20th century so we used to be big but in the 21st century will be a small bit player and so we're basically spending a lot of money and remember a trillion dollars is a lot of money that could have been spent on a lot of things that could have made you know Humanity better on something that will only make us a tiny bit better now it will do some good but you know the reasonable estimates is if you do a cost benefit analysis and again you know technically it's really really complicated but the basic idea is very very simple you just simply say what are all the costs on one side and what are all the benefits so the costs are mainly that we have to live with more expensive energy you have to forego some opportunities you have to have you know more complicated services that kind of thing the benefit is that you cut carbon emissions and that eventually means that you'll have less climate damage you'll have lower temperature rises and so on if you try to weigh up all those it's reasonable to assume that the EU policies will deliver for every dollar you spend it'll deliver less than a dollar probably about 30 cents back on the dollar which is a really bad way to spend dollars because there's lots of lots of other things out in the world where you could do you know multiple you know so for instance if you think about tuberculosis or uh education of small kids or nutrition for small kids and that those kinds of things every dollar you spend will do like 30 to 100 worth of good so they're much much better places where you could spend this money likewise uh the us is thinking of going Net Zero by 20 50. it's not actually going to happen but it's sort of a thing that everybody talks about Biden is talking a lot about it if you look at the models that indicate how how much will that cost it's not impossible that this will cost somewhere between two and four trillion dollars per year by mid-century and remember if the US went carbon neutral today by the end of the century that would reduce temperatures by about 0.3 degree Fahrenheit so you would just be able to measure it probably wouldn't in real life but you know if you'd just be able to measure it again this is not saying that there's not some good coming out of it but you're basically spending an enormous amount of money on fairly small benefits so that's that's my main point yeah this reminds me of what we were saying earlier about um the things that models don't integrate and the things that cost benefit leave out because you really can't go there one of the issues facing the world right now is the reality that we're reminded of that energy availability is a geopolitical destabilizer if you have uneven access to energy and you have Vladimir Putin coming into office or something else happening that disrupts that system you're you're vastly increasing poverty you this is playing out across the world fertilizer process fertilizer comes from gas um natural gas um if you can Envision a world later in the century where we're no longer beholden on this material in the ground at least fossil fuels you know Cobalt and lithium for batteries that's pretty cool you know because you're taking away geopolitical instability and you don't but that's not factored in right that's like way outside of what you'd factor in but it does feel like to me you know if I was going to make the case for you can choose your trillions whatever that investing big isn't for these marginal things it's for looking at the big picture of Worlds of abundant energy that doesn't come from from a black rock or a gooey liquid that when you burn it creates but isn't that what the proposals are is investing in different kinds of energy renewable energy so what is but I don't think most people are making that case what's in the in the trillion and the T costs what's in corporate what are the big costs there so the big cost is that you have slightly lower productivity gains so basically again you know this is sort of the opposite of what we just talked about by climate change we're we're going to get richer and richer in the world this is all models also the UN this is really the only way that you can get big climate changes because everybody gets a lot richer so also the developing world gets a lot richer so we're likely to get richer but one of the things that drive uh wealth production is the fact that we have ample and cheap and available energy if you make that slightly harder which is what you do with climate legislation because you're basically telling people people you have to use a source of energy that you'd rather not have used had because if people wanted to do it we'd already solved the problem so you're basically tell them you've got to use this wind turbine instead of this uh natural gas plant or you know that kind of thing it makes it's it's not that you suddenly become poor or anything it simply makes production slightly harder what do you do when when the wind is not blowing kind of thing and of course we have lots of ways to somewhat mitigate that but it's a little more costly a little more complicated a little less convenient and that means you grow a little less that's the main problem with with these policies that it simply makes you somewhat less well-off the energy becomes more inefficient yes so let me challenge you here uh try to steal man some critics so you have critics uh uh I would love you to take it seriously and sort of consider this criticism and try to steal me in their their case uh there's a bunch uh I could mention uh this this list of criticisms from Bob ward in London School of Economics I don't know if you're familiar with him but just on this point in terms of one of the big cause being an energy he criticizes your recent book in saying you consider the 143 billion in annual support for renewable energy but ignore the 300 billion in fossil fuel subsidies so a lot of the criticism has to do with well you're cherry picking the models which the models are always cherry picking and you anyway so um but you know you want to take those seriously so uh he cleansed it you ignore you're not uh fully modeling the costs the the trade-off here how expensive is the renewable energy and how expensive is the fossil fuel can you still manage case sure so uh two things uh uh the first the quote it's absolutely true that the world spends a large a chunk of money on fossil fuels and that's just stupid and we should stop doing it we should also recognize that this is not rich countries this is not the countries where we're talking about climate change this is poor countries this is Saudi Arabia uh no that's actually not a terribly poor country uh it's China it's Indonesia it's uh uh Russia uh it's places where you're basically paying off your population just like that you subsidized bread you make sure that they don't rebel by making cheap uh fuels available that's dumb but it's not like they you know they don't know what they're doing they're mostly doing this for things that have nothing to do with climate so I totally agree we should get rid of it it's hard to do Indonesia is actually somewhat uh managed to to get rid of it because remember if you spend a lot of money on fossil fuel subsidies you're basically subsidizing the rich because you know poor people don't have a car it's the rich people who can now buy you know a very cheap gasoline that's you know that's unjust as well so it's dumb in so many different ways I would never argue that you shouldn't done I've plenty of time said we should stop that but we should also recognize these are mostly regimes that are not going to be taken over either by my argument or Bob Wards or anyone else's they're doing this for totally different reasons now on the model side there is virtually no model that don't show economic model that don't show this has a cost and that's the fundamental point is that the you know this is sort of a basic point from from economics the system is already working most effectively because if it wasn't you know you could actually make money changing over so if you want to have a change outside of what the system is already doing it's because you're saying you have to do something that you rather not want to do namely use an energy source that is less convenient or less cost effective and so on and that will incur a cost now there's a huge discussion about just exactly how much cost is that so there's definitely a cost is the cost going to be one or five trillion that's absolutely a discussion about where do you take your models from I try to do and and again this is not possible everywhere I try to actually take the average of all of the economic models so there's a there's a group called the Stanford energy modeling Forum which tries to pull together all these different groups that do the modeling so some models a lot of this cost actually comes down to uh uh the fact that we don't quite know how much more fossil fuels you're going to need in the future and so if you're not gonna if your projections are you're not going to use that much the cost of reducing it is going to be very small if you think you're going to use a ton of extra fossil fuels and you have to reduce that the cost is going to be bigger so I think that's just one of the variables that's oh yeah yeah and there's many many many more I think the the point here is to say that if you take the average of all the best model is a sort of aggregated for instance at the Stanford energy modeling form you're pretty secure ground and and uh so so again I I would argue that uh Bob Ward yes I've had a lot of run-ins with Bob board uh uh and and he has a very different uh set of views on on things uh but but I I just don't think he's right in saying that I'm cherry picking well yes and I mean he also has similar criticism about the estimate of the EU cost of climate action uh based on the knob 2013 model But ultimately these criticism have to do is like what are the sources for the different models and and just very briefly I mean I'm I'm laying it out very transparently where I get these models of where I get these estimates from in the book I've really tried to document this and yes I mean look there's nobody who sort of has all the information and gets everything right in all of these areas uh I I think most of uh uh but Ward's uh argument is is not a uh a good faith effort to uh to sort of uh improve on on these estimates he's he's right and saying some of these estimates we only have a few estimates and you know yeah I'd like to have more of them I one thing I should mention is that there is very little interest in general and there's very little funding in finding out how much do our climate policies cost because that's you know that's just inconvenient to everyone yeah in in the whole game you know who wants to know that that you know for instance uh uh would would you want to fund uh something that says that the inflation reduction Act is not going to be very effective of course you don't want to do that right so so it's it again it's a little bit the you know flock of birds it will look some at something else and and what I think is that given that we're paying for at the end this is you know this is public money we're deciding we're going to spend money here rather than there let's at least you know look at what are the best estimas out there I would love to be have more estimates uh more estimates is always better and just a quick comment on the good faith part me as a consumer looking for truth that's hard to find who's good faith and not so it's not only are you looking for a sort of accurate information you're also trying to infer about the communicator of that information that's very difficult it's uh you know you put me on the on the podcast of course I'm gonna say I'm a trustworthy guy but yeah I mean but and we believe we're trustworthy too but um you know I've been reading for various reasons but mostly because I've been traveling to Ukraine and thinking and just about the people's um suffering through war I've been reading a lot about World War II and and Stalin and Hitler and you know from the perspective of Hitler uh he really believed he's doing good for the world and he was communicating from his perspective in good faith um he started to believe I think early on his own propaganda so you're even your understanding and perception of the world completely shifted so it's it's very very very difficult to understand who to trust um and uh just because it's consensus in a particular Community doesn't necessarily mean it's a source of trust so it's a I mean basically I don't know how to operate in this world except to have a humility and constantly question your assumptions and but not so much that you're completely out in the ocean not knowing what is true or not so it's this weird weird world because I I ultimately bigger than climate my hope is to have institutions that can be trusted and that's been very much under attack um in as as part of the climate debate as part of the covid debate as part of all these discussions and science to me is one of the sources of truth and the fact that that's under question now is uh something that hurts me on many levels uh deeply you said something earlier as I took a note on down here and I can't find it about cooperation it was like collaborative cooperation or something like that sure what to me there was a point like in 2013 after just dealing with all everything you've been grappling with what if you don't if you know you don't know how this is going to work out what do you work on and I one morning I made a list of words that kind of summarized basically system properties that give you confidence in a system trust or in their transparency is one as you were saying earlier um connectivity is another you know so everyone's connected so on the subsidy issue for example they're young entrepreneurs in Nairobi who are selling ingeniously using nairobi's digital currency uh propane the fuel that's in our backyard barbecue grills which comes out of gas Wells but it's a separate fuel in little increments that poor people can use instead of charcoal and LPG subsidies are helping them get people off of charcoal which is a horrific trade from The Source through the Warlords in Somalia and elsewhere who are getting the money to the pollution in houses so so having be sure being sure when we're having these big debates about who the World Bank is going to give loans to and drawing a simple line no more fossil fuel subsidies hurts a really good valuable small scale but scalable way to have people not die from cooking smoke in their houses and and take down for us so but that only is considered if they're in the conversation so connectivity full connectivity digital access so so those entrepreneurs are in the mix of people when they're thinking about subsidies you're not just thinking about big bad ex song you're thinking about this little company in Nairobi Pago Pago LPG I think is the name and India the same thing so so you can list those properties of systems and the ipcc wasn't originally transparent when I started writing about it in 1988 and 1990 and now it's way more transparent they have more public review so it's even better than it was it's like a really good example of a science process of assessing the science providing periodic output to the world and iteratively improving the model going forward because of critique because because of you know scrutiny and finding better ways for that to interface with people so they have information they can use from that big thing and the media you know are not doing a good job um because of this front page thoughtism um but we can all you know I work partially in Academia Colombia on an initial initiative partially in communication Innovation like how can we have an open landscape of access to information that matters how can you what can you do to Foster better conversations so that words like collapse aren't just thrown around like emblems and so system properties give you confidence I think and then you then you don't have to like be flailing around for Bjorn or Tom Tom Friedman or uh Catherine hayho you can always right now find your you're you're your character to follow but I think what would be better is if you actually develop some skills to just have a basic ability to know how to cut to the chase can I can I just follow up on that because one of the things that I try to do and and so my day job is actually something else I work with I think thing called The Copenhagen consensus uh where we work with uh more than 300 of the world's top economists and we work with seven noble alerts in economics and and the point there is really to talk about where can you spend a dollar and do the most good for the world that's that's basically the the thing that we try to do and and as as you rightly point out look there are lots of different estimates of what can you do for instance on climate what can you do on tuberculosis what can you do for uh vulnerability in all kinds of different different ways and and if these were all sort of well you can spend a dollar here and do 2.36 but you can spend it all here and do 2.34 over here that I would worry a lot but that's not how the world works because we're terribly inefficient so they're literally lots and lots of amazing things you can do out there there's a lot of little hanging fruit and there's a lot of not terribly great things that you can do and unfortunately one of the things that I try to sort of battle is that you know we get a lot of things right that's why you know the world is a lot better than what it used to be uh but the things that are sort of left left over are often you know the boring things that happen to be incredibly effective and the exciting things that are often not that terribly effective and and so I think one way to look at this is basically to have people do cost benefit across a wide range of areas and we try to get a lot of different economists to do this and they come up with different numbers and different models and different results but if you sort of consistently get that some things give you you know in tens or maybe even hundreds of dollars back per dollar remember this is not actually you getting rich it's the world getting rich it's the the world gets better worth a hundred dollars for for every dollar you spend and over here you can spend a dollar and do somewhere between 30 cents and maybe a couple dollars you should probably be focused on the other opportunity first and that's really the point that I try to make with climate there are some smart things we can do and I hope we get to talk about them uh in in climate but there's also a lot of sort of the standard approaches to fixing climate turns out to be very likely below one dollars back in dollar and certainly not terribly High you know even if you're very optimistic it'll be like two or three whereas many other things are just fantastically better Investments like the thing I've been advocating uh a modest proposal to eat the children the of the poor in England was that the in Jonathan Swift Modest Proposal from a few centuries ago um so it's not just cause benefit it's also in the context of what is moral and not and all that the full the full complexity of it but that you just hit on something really important you know having been on this beat for so long and again on the disaster beat as well earthquakes I can't tell you how many disaster science experts keep telling me like everyone says preparedness invest for preparedness a strict cost-benefit analysis will always tell you a dollar invested in resilience before a community gets hit by whatever is worth 10 you'll always have to spend 10 after and so it's fine to do the cost benefit stuff but it's just the Baseline then you have to look at the social science which shows or history which shows you how few times we do it it's like we just don't do it therefore you can bang that drum your work is valuable but it's really constrained because show me in the world where that does happen and then how you turn that success which is basically something not happening into the story just very briefly you know we we try to so we we do this for a lot of countries so we did it for uh Haiti for instance uh uh funded by the Canadian development uh Ministry because they're basically saying we spent a billion dollars in Haiti since the earthquake and we really can't tell the difference so they want it to fight they I mean they actually say that right and so they said we want to find out what are the really smart things you can do in Haiti and so we we uh together with lots of you know uh people in Haiti and all the you know the business community and the political community and the religious community and labor community and everybody else what are the smart things to do and then we had economists evaluate it and there are a lot of these things that everybody wanted that we're not all that smart there's actually a lot of smart things and yes the politicians didn't pick most of them so our our senses we try to give people uh you know you're thinking about these 70 things you should actually just think about these 20 things right and then we consider ourselves incredibly lucky if they actually do one of them so you wrote the book how to spend 75 billion dollars to make the world a better place so on can we just list some of the things if I if if you got 75 billion dollars what how do you spend them all right so there's some incredibly good and very very well documented things that you could spend money on so we have two big infectious diseases that almost nobody think about uh because we only think about you know covet but tuberculosis used to be the world's biggest infectious disease killer uh it still kills about one and a half million uh people every year the reason why we don't you know really worry about it is because we fixed it a hundred years ago we know how to fix it it's just you know it's just basically getting medication to people it's also about getting them to take it while when they're sort of been cured because you need to take it for four to six months and that's actually hard to do so you also need to incentivize that in some kind of way it turns out it's incredibly cheap to basically save almost all of the 1.5 million people these are people that die in the prime of their lives they're typically parents so you would also have a lot of knock-on effects and basically we find for a couple billion dollars you could save the value number of these not all of them but you could save the vast number of them it will also improve you know outcomes and all kinds of other ways likewise with malaria another it has some somewhat better uh PR it's funny to think of malaria as PR and tuberculosis 9 they need to improve their PR department those mosquitoes are the good PR but by far the biggest infectious disease uh that got good PR if you will was HIV right yes because and that and and I'm not trying to compare and say oh it's worse or better to have HIV than to tuberculosis or anything but I'm simply saying we are under funding because it doesn't really get the public attention we just yeah we don't spending money on that as uh in terms of benefit a much bigger impact so every dollar you spend on TB will probably do about 43 dollars worth of good so we'll do an amazing amount of good basically because it'll save lives they'll make sure parents stay with their kids and be more productive of in their communities and it'll you know have a lot of knock-on effects and it's incredibly cheap to do same thing with malaria it's mostly mosquito Nets that we need to get out and you're saying just the contrast with climate change the dollar you spend on no not climate change but decreasing emissions does not have does not come close to the 43 dollar benefit no nobody nobody would ever argue that so very very enthusiastic climate Advocates would probably say it'll do two or three dollars worth of good for every dollar so you know it's still worthwhile to do that's what they would say I would argue and I think a lot of the evidence seems to side that way that a lot of the things that we're doing deliver actually lessen it all or back but but it's certainly not nearly the same kind of place but there's many many other things and you know just if if you'll allow me yeah I love this but uh yeah there are lots of other things for instance uh e-procurement so uh you know it's incredibly boring so most developing countries well actually most governments spend most of their money on procurement is typically incredibly corrupt so we did this project for Bangladesh uh where can you explain procurement yes so that's governments buying stuff so a large part of the government revenue is spent on buying anywhere anything from you know Post-it notes to roads and obviously you know roads are much much more expensive it's mostly infrastructure stuff hugely corrupt uh for instance in Bangladesh um it would already have been decided among the ruling Elite in that local area who's going to get this so they'll have this bidding competition where you have to hand in an envelope a seal envelope with your bid on it but you put a goon outside the office so you literally physically can't get in with your uh with your bid now what we found and this is you know I'm not I'm not claiming any sort of ownership to this a lot of smart people have done this way before we're just simply proving that it's a good idea um it turns out that if you put this on eBay essentially so if you do an e-procurement system where bidders can come in suddenly it becomes harder to put up the Goon you can still do it but it's harder to do it it also means you get bits from all over Bangladesh and and in general you'll get bids from all over actually turns out you get better quality but most important is you get it much cheaper so basically you can simply save money so we we did a scaled experiment in Bangladesh where we had about four percent go to uh to be uh e-procurement and you could compare what it would have cost and then what it did cost and the average reduction was as I remember it's seven percent and the Finance Minister loved it you know because that basically gives him a lot more money or you know you can buy more stuff at the same cost no digital corruption so it's it's basically you get rid of some corruption there'll still be corruption but less corruption Ukraine has actually been big on this they I have talked to them I talked to the digital transformation Minister it's kind of incredible I mean this is before the war but still working uh it's like the entirety of the government is in an app and that one of the big effects is the reduction of corruption and not like from uh this was a politician say to say we've reduced we've taken these actions through this court no it literally is just much more difficult to be corrupt yeah the incentives aren't quite there and they there's friction for corruption yeah oh yeah yeah so basically uh you can spend a little bit of money and you can make a huge benefit there's still about 70 countries that haven't gone e-procurement so obviously they should do that food for small kids another thing so you know uh basically you know it's morally wrong that people are starving uh but it also turns out that it's a really really dumb thing not to get kids good food because if you get them good food their brains develop more so that when they get into school they learn more and so when they come out in adult lives they're much more productive so we can actually make every kid in especially in developing countries much more productive by making sure they get good food so getting good food is not cost free so it probably cost about a hundred dollars uh both in and you you need some uh directed advertisement you need to make sure that you actually get some of the food out there that you help the families and you also make sure you don't just give it to everyone because then it becomes a lot more expensive if you do that right it costs about a hundred dollars per kid but for two years so it's for their first two years of life um and if you do that you then get a benefit in that they become smarter and go longer to school and they actually learn more and become more productive of forty five hundred dollars remember this is far out into the future so the this is discounted the benefit is actually much higher and this is one of the things that we also have a conversation about in in climate change because all and when you talk about climate change costs and benefits all the costs are now and all the benefits are in the future but it's just like that in education you know all the costs are now all the benefits are far into the future and if you try to do that right and that's a whole other conversation that we could have uh then it turns out that for every dollar spent you do 45 dollars worth of good again remember about a a third of all kids that go to school right now just don't learn pretty much anything yeah and if we could make them more productive in the school system we have another proposal and how to do that in the in the school system but you know by just simply making sure that they're that they're smarter when they get into School we've been focusing so much on making the education system better which is really hard but it's actually really easy to make the kids smarter then when you say the education system is not working well that's we're talking about not the American education system we're talking about globally yes we're talking about globally you know so about a third of the teachers in the developing countries have a hard time passing the tests of the things they have to teach their students right and and you know all these students have lots of other issues you know there's there they need to do farm work they they need uh yeah uh they they're constantly considering should I just go out and start working instead uh you know there's there's constant disruption there's a lot of teachers that don't show up in India you know you have uh you have this absurd situation where all the teachers are basically paid and hired for eternity for the rest of their lives and so not surprisingly a lot of them decide not to show up so now they've hired assistant teachers that basically have taken over so they're paying you know for I think it's seven million teachers that I'm not saying they're not all all not working but a lot of them are not working as much as they should and we now hired another seven million teachers that have it will eventually you know stop working as well they're they're working much better right now because they're you know they're they're not on on permanent contracts but eventually they'll get empowerment contracts and then you have the same problem again there's lots of these issues and you know it's just simply about saying we can't fix all problems but there are some problems that are incredibly easy to solve and there are some that are incredibly hard to solve why don't we start with solving the easy and effective ones and this of course Bears them that whole conversation on climate change because in some ways you know that's that's also Andy's point of saying look if you want to save people from from the impacts of hurricanes let's fix this simple easy things about vulnerability first whereas we have somehow latched on to this let's fix the hardest thing to do which is to get everyone to stop using fossil fuels which is basically what's Driven the last 200 years of development that's going to be that's a tall order no matter how you look at it there's some really cool elements that you guys just brought up would you mentioned that word moral before I wasn't alleged on it because it relates to these time scales that really are immeasurable if you know it's going to take decades to confirm the benefit of some investment now that implies you're doing the investment with some moral imperative not because you can do a spreadsheet and come up with a number and that that process letting go of the need for kind of a mechanistic cost benefit approach thinking about kids education in poor countries or several things we talked about seems to be really important and it's very hard for all of us to do philanthropists suck at it I've worked at National Geographic Society for a year building some new programs when they got a big infusion money they have a whole department that's called M and E it's measurement and evaluation which is if you don't prove it it goes away I mentioned Spotify earlier Spotify killing a climate podcast because that podcast didn't measure measure out for their impact you know what they want to do and um if we're always making the judgments based on strict cost benefit we're going to miss larger realities another thing is another a really exciting example of what you're talking about in terms of in Ukraine with the trust and lack of less corruption and stuff was in India for all of his issues Modi um recognized that middle class people in India Cook on LPG propane or on piped gas natural gas if they're in cities much cleaner much healthier in so many ways and actually compared to like chopping down trees and cook cooking on wood it's actually better for the climate even though it's a fossil fuel so he he and others there was the American scientist Kirk Smith who worked this all out um if you find a way you had to tr they were getting a subsidy they had they had that energy subsidies you were talking about many poor countries subsidized energy just to stay in office you know to make something cheap that everyone wants um but they wanted to shift the subsidy away from the middle class to the poor poor people who were cooking on firewood and dying Young from pneumonia and what the the critical Factor was India's digital currency India went to a digital economy very poor families there now if you have a phone you basically that's your bank and you could make the case to the public that we're we're going to be starting to shift your LPG your propane subsidy to poor people but we know they're poor we know they're not just going to be using it behind their restaurant which was you know the when it was a general subsidy people were hoarding the LPG and and the system has worked they've shifted a lot of capacity to cook on a clean blue flame that turns off and on in homes that previously where the woman would spend hours collecting firewood Smokey fire cooking clean the pots and start all over again but it's all built on trust all built on the digital economy and the same thing in Nairobi so that excites me every day you know with all the doomism I just hope people can literally take a breath look for these examples um that show the potential when you have a trustworthy system when you have a clear path to making lives better and then knowing you know that kid having electric light as opposed to a kerosene lamp we don't know how much that's going to improve his homework and lead to a better outcome but we know from history that sometimes it does ban ki-moon former Secretary General so the most powerful story I ever heard from a U.N Secretary General was like 2012 when they were rolling out this sustainable energy for all initiative which is not just climate it's just like getting people energy they need to survive and thrive he's he was growing up in post-war Korea everyone's poor everything was broken destroyed sadly like so much of you many parts of Ukraine and he would do his homework by kerosene lamp he said when he was studying for his finals his mom would give him a candle because it was a brighter flame you know better grades maybe and he became Secretary General it's a hell of a story so which uh for climate change which policies work which don't which are when we look at this formula of one dollar in forty five dollars out for climate change what dollar in what policies for dollar in and and dollar out are good and which are not yep so so we actually did a a whole project back in 2009 when when the The Whole World Circus was coming to Copenhagen and we were going to save the world there uh we brought together about 50 climate economists and three Noble alerts to look at where can you spend a dollar and do the most good for climate and what they found was a lot of these things as we've been talking about before that that basically investing in in the current sort of technology that we're trying very hard is at best at pretty dicey outcome uh much of it's probably less than a dollar back in the dollar uh there's some uh Investments and on adaptation for instance that's pretty good but it's you know sort of two three dollars back in the dollar the obvious thing is that you built a dike for a sea level rise or that you make people uh you get some apps that people know that there's a hurricane coming or that you know so you can adapt infrastructure right yeah it is the physical and the digital infrastructure the point is that people are really good at doing this already because they have a strong incentive to do it so the extra thing that governments can do outside is somewhat good but it's not amazing or anything what we found by far the best uh investment in the long run was on investment in energy Innovation so and and I think this also sort of corresponds with what we would think in general uh if we could innovate so you know for instance Bill Gates is arguing we should have fourth generation Nuclear So the next uh the more advanced than what we currently have in third generation nuclear which would be uh industrial scale process you'd just be building these you know uh modular nuclear power plants they would be instead of being these artwork that we design once for every different plant which is one of the reasons why they're so expensive they would just be mass produced and you'd have one you know uh uh they'd all be recognized in one go so be much cheaper they would also be passively safe so uh if if all the power goes they'll shut down rather than go boom uh so that's that's another very good thing and then they'll also uh be very hard to transform into nuclear uh weapons so you can actually imagine them being out in a lot of different places where we'd perhaps be a little worried about having you know plutonium lying around now this is all still being worked out but imagine if that actually comes out and again remember the other three generations they were we were also told they'll be incredibly safe and it'll be incredibly cheap and it didn't turn out that way so let's let's wait but it could be and so the argument is invest in these ideas for instance fourth generation nuclear and if fourth generation nuclear becomes cheaper than fossil fuels we're done everyone will just switch not just Rich well-meaning Americans or Europeans but also the Chinese the Indians everybody in Africa the rest is uh Indian subcontinent that's how you fix these issues right so the idea here is to say instead of thinking that we can sort of push people to do stuff they really don't want to do which is basically saying let's let's use more of the uh you know the solar and wind that you would otherwise have invested in force people to buy an electric car by giving huge subsidies because otherwise they're clearly not all that interested in buying it and so on then get the Innovation such that they become cheaper than fossil fuels and everyone will switch this is how we solved problems in the past if you think in in Los Angeles in the 1950s was hugely polluted place mostly because of cars this sort of standard climate approach today would be to tell everyone in Los Angeles I'm sorry could you just walk instead and of course that just doesn't work that doesn't pay off you never get you know politicians voted in office or at least staying in office if you make that kind of policy what did solve the problem was the innovation of the catalytic converter you basically get this little Gizmo and it cost a couple hundred dollars and you put it on your tailpipe and then you can drive around basically almost not pollute and that that's how you fix the air pollution in Los Angeles basically we've solved all problems in humanity all big difficult problems with Innovation we haven't solved it by telling everyone I'm sorry could you be a little less comfortable and a little more cold and a little poorer and believing that that can go on for you know decades and and while it possibly Works in some pockets of the US and I I think actually in large parts of Europe at least it used to uh the this uh the the war in Ukraine is definitely sort of changing that whole perspective but yeah there's a willingness to say we're gonna you know suffer a little bit then we'll fix this problem but the point is we're going to be willing to suffer a little and so fix a tiny bit of the climate problem instead of actually focusing on Innovation so what we found was if you spend a dollar on Innovation you will probably avoid about 11 of climate damage in the long run which is a great investment and the terrible thing is we have not been doing this so because everybody is focused on saying we need the solution within the next 12 years it means you're not thinking about the Innovation we're actually spending less money not more money on uh on Innovation globally so everyone is really missing and reducing carbon emission versus innovating on Alternate energy you're basically focusing on putting the existing solar panels or wind turbines which are either you know just about inefficient or inefficient instead of making the Next Generation or it's more likely the 10th Generation after that that comes with lots of you know a battery backup power or you know a fourth generation nuclear or you know Craig Venter has this great idea Craig venzo the guy who cracked the human genome back in 2000 he has this idea of growing algae out on the ocean surface these algae they'd be genetically modified and they would basically soak up sunlight and CO2 and produce oil then we could basically just grow our own Saudi Arabia on the ocean surface and we'd Harvest it we'd keep our entire fossil fuel economy but it'd not be Net Zero because we just soaked up the CO2 out there one dollar invested in the portfolio of different ideas back I I first wrote about that in the New York Times it was one of my actual page one stories um in 2006 it was declining r d in energy at a time of global warming and the Baseline is so low for this that it's a it's a supermarket we were in during the there was during the energy crisis the 70s the first energy crisis in the 70s before the current one um are annual spending the United States and constant dollars on R D research and development for energy was about five billion dollars and then it just dribbled away since then and recently now there's a big burst of new money coming through these new bills that got passed but what I was told over and over again by people in that Arena is you can't just have these little bubbles of investment you don't get young people away from thinking about Wall Street for jobs towards thinking about energy Innovation if there isn't like a future there and a lot of the in the United States and Europe the presumption was the wage that future was taxing carbon you'd make that so punitive that the your basically the leveling even in the landscape for cleaner stuff that's more expensive that's a that has failed completely they're little examples in Europe where it's working and what's happened now is well the United States this big chunk of money is designed to take us over a Finish Line that was started with not just Innovation but with the production efficiency too this is one thing I got wrong I think a little bit my reporting I was so fixated on the Innovation part just because I love science too I saw this untapped possibility that others were saying no no production efficiency the more people are producing batteries the cheaper they'll get this is Elon musk's uh you know path and many others and it really is both so when you were talking about purchasing power for governments for example that can stimulate production capacity for batteries or whatever the good thing is and take you down faster and it's all about getting that margin of the new thing out competing the old and it's not just Innovation it has so many parts of the pipeline that need to be nurtured so so and and the other thing is relative costs the United States when I was writing about this in 2006 our budget for DARPA the advanced research project Agency for for the defense department for just for science for was 80 billion a year for health from for medical Frontier research on cancers of 40 billion energy was two or three so we weren't taking this remotely seriously so now that if we get that up to me to me there's like this level you know we're taking something seriously when it's like in the tens of billions for r d it's not that r d would solve the problem but are but it's a proxy for what we really care about We Care a shitload about defense what's the defense budget in the United States now like 800 billion it's some insane number who's County when you're having fun yeah yeah yeah and so um Innovation is not just like for the better you know camera the better solar panel the better battery social Innovation actually matters hugely like the guy in nairobia mentioned with a company doing micro payment gas to get people off charcoal we need that as much as this and I actually I interviewed Bill Bill Gates uh we had to spend an hour with him in Seattle in 2016 um was when he was rolling out his breakthrough energy thing I got to spend it was 45 minutes me and Bill Gates which was pretty fun but I I brought this up I said you know because he's all about the new nuclear thing that will solve The World's problems and I yes yes but we all brought up nuclear Sergeant oh he did oh sure so he's interested in one of the oh he's investing heavily in nuclear but he invests in everything you know he's got a big portfolio um but I brought up a guy I met in India um who runs a little outfit called Selco that they do really interesting cool Village to Village they're like an energy analyst will come to your house here in the states and tell you how to weatherize your house but they do it at the Village scale and in a village that has um where they're Milling wheat he'll put in a solar powered wheat wheat Mill and you know that's not going to solve The World's problems but it gives them a way to control their energy they don't have to buy something to grind their wheat and that needs just as much attention as the the things I really like too the cool Technologies and and I I thought I cornered Bill the gates I was like because he really does focus on these big wins the big you know like nuclear that would make Net Zero completely doable and I said well you know what about nuclear like New York City where I was still living at the time or near and I said it's got a million buildings New York City has one million buildings and in 2013 the Bloomberg government analyzed they said looking ahead to 2050 75 of the buildings in New York City that will exist in 2050 already exist think about these Brave New Futures right like we're just going to come in have these shiny cool passive house cities and I so I put this to Bill and I said so what's how do you do that how do you how do you retrofit all those boilers many of which were coal-fired like 20 years ago to get a zero energy New York City and he I thought I kind of thought I had him yeah he immediately he kind of sat back and went well but if you have unlimited clean power coming into that City it doesn't really matter it's a pretty good Bill Gates impression really good that's a good answer I mean there's a good he said oh yeah it's a leaky bucket but you know pour in zero carbon energy then it doesn't matter but I still think we have to figure out the other part too the that end how do you how do you innovate at the household level of the village level it's much more of a distributed problem we used to think the one the one big change I've had in my own thinking too is is from top down to distributed everything about the climate problem through the first three decades of my reporting was that the the ipcc will come out a new report the the framework convention the treaty will get us on board we'll all behave better this it has this like top-down you know parent to child architecture and everything's I've learned has gone the other way it's distributed capacity for improved lives you know kids getting through school women not having to spend three hours collecting firewood and if it means propane for that household in that context that's a good thing so stop with all your yammering about ending all fossil fuel subsidies and you know what's in America look like that has some claim climate safe Energy Future find your part in that don't get disempowered by the scale of it there's just like a thousand things to do when you start to cut it into pieces so so it's very different it's not a top-down thing you know no one's going to magically come in and and and that's that's where I think so I agree that everyone should try to play their their part and and and do you know whatever they can uh but I also think you know just the the sheer incentives you know what we saw happening with you know with the Shale gas is a great example when Shale gas becomes so cheap that you just stop using coal but then you don't really have to convince you know lots and lots of people you know because it wasn't labeled a climate no it wasn't a climate thing it was an energy thing it was totally uh and and and the point is just you know the power of an innovation is that you you almost don't see it anymore it just happens uh and and I think that's really the only way we're gonna fix you know these big problems if you think about you know of the uh nutrition problem back in the 60s 70s uh we worried a lot about India and other places uh solution is not worrying or the solution was not you know us eating a little bit less and sending it down to India wherever the solution was the Green Revolution right it was the fact that some scientists made ways to make every seed produce three times as much so you could grow three times as much food on an acre and you know that's what basically made it possible for India to go from a basket case to what the world's leading uh rice exporter uh and and and that's how you do these things you know you solve these big problems true Innovation and again I'm not saying that you know we're actually arcing our carbon tax is a smart thing to do you know that's what any Economist would tell you to do but it also turns out that it's partly is not going to solve most of the problem and it's incredibly politically hard to do so it may also just be the wrong sort of tree to bark up against you know if you can do it please do uh but this is not the main thing that's going to solve climate the the main thing is that we get these innovations that basically make green energy so cheap everyone will just want we mentioned nuclear quite a few times yeah that you know there was a for a long time it seems to have shifted recently maybe you can clarify and educate me on this but there for the longest time people thought that nuclear is um is almost unclean energy or dangerous energy or all that kind of stuff when did that shift what was the source of that alarmism uh and what maybe is that a case study of how alarmism can turn into um though a productive constructive policy productive from whose standpoint um is it not is it not like uh nuclear we're not trying to do you mean productive in terms of yay we banned it or protect it for those oh I see I see what you mean yes I meant productive for human civilization no the alarmism over nuclear power dominated any alarmism over global warming absolutely yeah really oh yeah just in the United States um Three Mile Island then you turn Chernobyl there and the traditional environmental movement will still won't go there they still the big groups nrdc edfs that whole alphabet soup of the big greens are reluctant to put forward the nuclear option because they know a lot of their aging donors basically grew up in the thinking about nuclear as as the problem not the solution I lived for the last 30 years I moved to Maine recently uh but I lived in Hudson Valley 10 miles from the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant which was built in the 60s 70s and had some problems none of them were to the point of a meltdown or the threat of it or even the theoretical possibility of one I've been I was in it twice as a reporter you know looking down in the cooling pool I can send you a fun video of bubbles in the cooling pool with the rods and progressively they demonstrated how to handle waste in the United States now the waste is uh because we haven't figured out how to move it across state lines it's uh glassified it's put into kind of containers that sit there at the plant we just simply don't have a long-term solution um the Nevada politicians were successful in saying not here not here not Yucca Mountain and um but my wife who I've been married to well I met 30 years ago and she lives with me she's an environmental educator she was very happy when Cuomo shut it down said we're going to shut it down three or three or four years ago which just happened a year it actually is shut down now it's being mothballed and I was like that sucks we need if she's happy yeah and we still love each other she's environmentalist so that that just speaks to a lot of environmentals still see nuclear as bad oh totally oh yeah you know and you bring in the way the weapons proliferation issues and but it's a safety thing it's a generational thing I think young people are different I hope these small modular reactor designs several of which there's a couple of phds from MIT who did transatomic power they're both like in their early 30s we need so much more of them and just briefly the one thing I say about nuclear is like with so many of these things like subsidies don't talk to me about yes no nuclear talk to me about what do you want to do with existing nuclear power plants and what do you want to do about the possibility of new ones let's parse this out in chunks that we can have constructive conversations about the idea of no nuclear drives me crazy just like no fossil fuel subsidies is silly in the world we inhabit that has these pockets of with no energy so that that's just my you know my sustain what mantras start with some dividing it and divide and conquer to conquer the dispute over by saying let's at least get real this power plant has been in the Hudson Valley for 30 years it was the base load it was base load base load is a real thing and guess what has filled the Gap since that power plant is turned off natural gas natural gas but and you don't hear that from the environmental community that was so eager to turn off the Indian Point I I think both the point of you know saying that people are saying it's the end of the world but no I don't want a new clip it just doesn't make sense right um and Andy's absolutely right to talk about so existing nuclear power plants we already paid for them we already have them we already committed to decommissioning them eventually while they're running they're pretty much the cheapest power you can possibly have on the planet because it costs almost nothing to run them day to day so you know it's basically cheap or almost free CO2 base load power there's just nothing there that is that doesn't you know you should embrace now new nuclear power plants turn out to be very expensive currently so you know the one they built in Finland and some and and and and the UK and France and several other places turn out to be incredibly expensive so they're much more expensive than you know the the the costliest uh Renewables you can imagine so they're actually not a solution right now and that's why we need the Innovation that's why we need the potentially fourth generation new clip how it's just simply it's a bad deal and that's why you know nuclear is never going to win on its third generation now it may never get there you know who knows but it's certainly a a a a a a possibility and we should be looking into it and there are there are you know wonky realities that need to be dealt with the nuclear Regulatory Commission in the United States their approval process is still locked and designed on this 50 year old model of big giant power plants there's an intense discussion right now about evolving a new regulatory scheme for small modular ones because of all these implicit advantages they offer and that so it along with the Innovation you need to have this right get out of the way or you're never going to have the investment so it really isn't all the above thing and looking at these systems uh problems systems Solutions is really important uh let me ask you about Alex Epstein so he wrote I'm not sure if you're familiar who he is but he wrote a couple of books it's just interesting to ask a question about fossil fuels because we're talking about reality and he's somebody that doesn't just talk about the reality of fossil fuels but he wrote a book uh moral case of fossil fuels and uh fossil future where he makes the case that as a subtitle says Global human flourishing requires oil coal and natural gas or more oil coil and natural gas not less uh what do you think about the argument he makes so he he pushes we've had this kind of speaking of the center of this balanced discussion of the reality of fossil fuels but also investing a lot into renewable energy and that having the one dollar to eleven dollar return so he says like well I'm not sure exactly how to frame it but like investing and maintaining investment to fossil fuels also as a positive return because of how efficient the energy is I've read the first book yeah I haven't read I've got this second one I've been planning to have them on my webcast my tiny webcast no he makes the name of the webcast sustain what everything I do is sustain what because it's like don't talk to me about sustainability sustain what for whom how then we're talking you know um interrogatory approach to things so um I think the valuable part of what he has done is to remind people particularly in the west or north or whatever the developed world that everything we take for granted low fertilizer from low fertilizer prices to air conditioning to everything else exists because we had this bounty that we dug out of the ground or pumped out of the ground it's a boon it's been an amazing Boon to society period so start there which means going forward what we're talking about is a substitution or having your fossil fuel isn't eating it too meaning getting rid of the carbon dioxide if you focus on the carbon dioxide which is the thing warming the planet not the burning of the fuels then that's another way forward that could sustain fossil fuels as far as I can tell from at least the first book he makes the moral case the fossil fuels are essentially a good overall um I don't think he adequately accounts for the need to stop global warming you know I think that we have to slow slowing global warming is a fundamental need in this coming in this Century we're in and that's just not factored into his math well I think that's where and I've had a few sort of offline conversations with them and I think he he said because I mentioned I'm talking to the two you said that he that's probably why he disagrees about sort of the the level of threat that um global warming causes well Steve coon and there's another one uh he he's a brilliant guy he lived right close to me in Hudson Valley he was in the Obama Administration energy Department it's k-o-n-i-n he wrote a bestseller that came out recently on skepticism about climate and other there are other smart people who somehow feel we can literally adapt our way forward without any constraint on the gases changing the climate and I you know I've spent enough time on this I I think I'm pretty level-headed reporter when it comes to this issue and I think having some sense that we can adapt our way into the world we're building through Relentless climate change with no new normal remember more gas accumulating in the air every year these are not static moments that that's a good thing to do is doesn't strike me as um smart I'll probably say that I I think it's more sort of a at least the thing that I take away from Alex is um is the fact as as you point out that we need to recognize that fossil fuels is basically the backbone of our society today we get 80 of our energy from fossil fuels to still as we did 50 years yeah four years ago yeah yeah and and people have no sense of this right so they have the idea because you see so many wind turbines and solar panels and everybody's talking about that this is huge big things but the reality is remember only about a fifth of all energy uses electricity the rest is you know in processes and heating industrial processes and so on so uh actually you know solar and wind right now produces one percent from of of energy from wind and 0.8 percent from solar this is not a huge thing it's a fairly tiny bit and growing explosively yes it's absolutely gross but actually it's growing slower than what nuclear it was growing in the 70s and 80s which I thought was a fun Point not by a little amount by like two or three times so so we're we're still talking about you know something which is you know somewhat Boutique at least and and when you then look out into the future and and I think this is the interesting part of it when you look out into the future if you look at the Biden administration's own estimate of what will happen by 2050. we will be at you know if all countries do all the stuff that they promised and everything we will be at 70 percent fossil fuels by 2050. globally this this is just yes it's a it's a better world I I think it's good that we're now down to 70 instead of uh of 80. but it is still a world that's fundamentally dependent on fossil fuels for almost everything that we really like about the world and forgetting that and I think we are doing that in the sense as you also mentioned that people say no fossil fuels and you know we're in all development organizations we're now telling the poor countries you can't get any funding for anything that has to do with fossil fuels we have literally reduced our our uh investment in uh in oil and gas by more than half since 2014 and much of this is because of climate concerns this has real world consequences this is why and Enterprises have gone up it's not the only reason covet also certainly the war in Ukraine but this is an underlying systemic reason why fossil fuel costs will go up dramatically now a lot of greens will sort of tend to say well that's great because you know we want fossil fuels to be expensive we want people to be forced over to Renewables but that's very easy to say if you're rich you know it's the kind of thing that New Yorkers will say you know when when you go to Rich well-meaning uh Green New Yorkers and say Yes gasoline should cost twenty dollars a gallon well you don't have a car just right at the Metro it's very easy for you to say that but lots of people both in the rich world but you know in in poor parts of the U.S but all around the world their lives have basically dependent on fossil fuels and so the idea that we're going to get people off by making it so expensive that it becomes impossible for them to live good lives is almost morally reprehensible and I think Alex has the right point there we need to get people to realize we're not going to get off fossil fuels anytime soon so we need reasonably affordable fossil fuels for most of the world and that's of course course why we need to focus so much more on the Innovation so that we can get to the point where we no longer need fossil fuels as soon as possible but to say to everyone look we're going to make fossil fuels expensive way before we have the solution is just terrible and the rich the so much is on the rich countries of the world um I did a conversation recently with Johann rockstrom who's a famed sustainability scientist in Stockholm actually Potsdam now um right and he's come up with the idea of planetary boundaries you know there's lots of things he has said that I as a journalist I'm still looking into about that planetary boundaries yeah that there are limits to what Earth can absorb in human our use of water phosphorus or carbon dioxide loading in the atmosphere there are these tipping there are these boundaries if we cross them we're in a Hot Zone a danger zone right he's an interesting thinker but on this point last year at the Glasgow climate talks he gave a very important talk about the equity thing here that you he basically laid out a landscape saying the rich nations of the world need to greatly ramp up their reduction of emissions or what they're going to pay for countries to do to allow poor countries some of which have fossil resources like in Africa to have the carbon space to to own whatever space or time is left to be able to develop their their fossil fuels as a fundamental right because also they're starting from this little Baseline gagana hasn't contributed squat to the global warming problem in terms of emissions Ghana has natural gas and right now this month the environmental groups are outside the world bank today actually tonight saying this was on their list of dirty projects World Bank should stop financing Ghana's right to get gas out of the ground to develop its economy get its people less poor make them more productive Innovative parts of humanity it's to me that's really reprehensible one of the other projects on their list as the World Bank kind of gotcha like how dare they give money was for a new for a fertilizer Factory in Bangladesh that is designed to get three times as much fertilizer from the same amount of natural gas as the old plants that are not dormant that's this is in a time when we're facing High Energy prices high gas prices high high food prices when food insecurity is spreading rapidly when a country like Bangladesh has millions of rice farmers who need urea tablets to put in the rice fields and to say that shouldn't that that how dare they finance that because there's a fossil fuel involved is demoral so so yes on that point from Alex so this is 2022 poll polls uh just this is a bunch of different ways to look at the same basic effect in the United States Democrats younger Americans identify dealing with climate change is the top priority U.S adults 42 say uh 42 say that dealing with climate change should be a top priority 11 of Republicans 65 percent of Democrats and we could see this effect throughout 46 of Americans say human activity contributes a great deal to climate change by the way this is a little bit different than what we're discussing I was uh just looking through different polls in the public there seems to still be uncertainty about the how much humans contribute to climate change more than scientifically it would only be 24 that disagree with the U.N climate panel right three three quarters I would agree are you uncomfortable about the 29 I I know 29 is actually it's exactly right I mean okay well everyone doesn't say it's all well they say that could be the Border case but anyway this is interesting but to me across all these polls if you look Republican versus Democrat yeah Republican um it's say that 17 say it's a great deal Democrats say 71 say it's a it's a great deal and you just see this complete division I think you probably would call it pandemic uh you know you can ask a lot of questions like this do masks work are they an effective method to slow transmission of a pandemic you'll probably have the same kind of polls about Republicans and Democrats and um while the effectiveness of masks to me is a scientific question but um so there's different truths here apparently one is a scientific truth uh one is a truth held by the scientific Community which seems to be also different than the scientific truth sometimes uh and the other is the public perception that has that's uh polluted or affected by political affiliation and then there's uh whatever is the uh narrative that's communicated by the the media they will also have a question the answer to the question of whether masks work or not and they will also have an answer to the question about all these climate related things so that's a long way of asking the question of what how is politics mixed into all of this yeah on the communication front on the figuring out what the right policy is front on the friction of humanity in the face of the right policies well I've written a ton on this after I had that conversion about the social science when 2006 I began digging in a lot more on how people hold beliefs and what they do as opposed to what they think and questions about polling and there's two things that come to me that make me not worry about the basic literacy like is is climate change X percent of whatever I don't really care about that and I'll explain why um for one thing more science literacy more basic literacy like what is a greenhouse gas all that stuff Dan cahane a k-a-h-a-n at Yale he's actually a law school the last decade he did all this work in what he calls cultural cognition which is and he did uh studies that showed you know how what you believe emerges based on culture based on your background you know your red blue your where you are in the country and one of the one of the really disturbing findings was that the people who have the most basic science literacy like who know the most about greenhouse effect or whatever they're at both ends of the spectrum of views on climate dismissives and alarmed Steve coonan as I mentioned is a good example he's brilliant physicist and he knows every all the science and he's completely at the end of skepticism um will happer Who was close to being Trump's science advisor was even more out there and he's on they're both on the uh Jason committee that advises the government on big strategic things um and people at the who are really alarmed about it also have the same belief so as a journalist I was thinking do I just spend my time writing more explanatory stories that explain the science better no do I dig in on this work to understand what brings people together and then these same surveys the same science shows you if you don't make it about climate among other things this becomes you don't have to worry about this anymore if you could Google for Google for no red blue divide climate revkin you'll find a piece I did with some really good graphs essentially it shows that in America this is the Yale group again the uh their climate communication group there's no red blue divide on energy Innovation none we need more climate energy clean energy Innovation there wasn't even a divide country bias state by state on whether CO2 should be regulated as a pollutant but it's all like what are the questions you ask if you ask about Innovation if you ask about more and more incentives for Renewable Power Oklahoma Iowa you know I did a piece when I was at propublica showing that the 17 states that were fighting Obama in court over his clean power plan we're actually the majority of them were actually meeting the targets that the clean power plan had because they're expanding wind power already not because of the climate because it makes money sense and energy sense so you don't think there's a political divide in this there is on climate if you call it climate if you say it's a climate do you believe in the climate crisis you're not asking what kind of energy future do you want in your town and so if you if you ask that question the polarization goes away well I guess I'm asking is there polarization on policy no well well there again the bipartisan infrastructure law that was passed last November that was bipartisan all of Congress said yes and that's a trillion dollars several hundred billion of which are for cleaner energy and resilience yeah but that's but it's not a climate Bill and it wasn't a tax it's it's a it's a it's a it's incentives so the word climate and similar words are just used as part of the signaling like masks it's it's absolutely it's not as Dan cahane's work the guy at Yale um he really demonstrated powerfully abortion gun rights um climate in a more parse level nuclear power has enduring camps that for and against what what why do the camps form some of its cultural cognition it's how you grew up it's what you fear P there's no common human frame because like like folks like certain individuals like Al Gore ah like he would make a film he cares about this thing he's a Democrat therefore I hate this thing that therefore I don't like this thing yeah oh sure yeah you know when people get attached to an issue if that's what pops into your head when you hear climate then and it got politicized it became emblematic and and the you know the whole vaccine thing I mean I'm not American so I should stay a little bit out of this but I think uh it seems to me that a lot of the thing that people believe and talk about is really about what they worried that that will lead to in terms of policy down the line so a little bit like do masks work I'm I'm sort of imagining I don't know whether this is true but I think part of it is if I say masks work they're gonna force me to wear it for the next year so it doesn't work because then I don't have to wear it kind of thing that it's really uh uh you're you're looking much further down the line and certainly on climate it seems to me that a lot of the people who say it's not real it's not because they don't know it's of course it's real but it's that they don't want you to then come and regulate it heavily yeah uh so it's because they don't like top-down government yeah and also because they don't want another tax and you know there's lots of of so it's it's really it's not a science it's not a straight science question it really is a question what do you want to do and that's where I think Andy you're much much more right in saying we should you know have that discussion so what do you want to do because that will be a much easier conversation to say do you want to do really smart cheap stuff or do you want to do pretty dumb expensive stuff when you put it that way you you can get most people of course it's not as simple as that I know and it gets back to what you said earlier that again you talked about collaborative cooperation or whatever there's a guy at Columbia Peter Coleman who runs this thing called the difficult conversations Laboratory yeah yeah that's awesome and when I first heard about it I was like oh man we need that you know and uh his background's the psychology and uh conflict resolution mostly at the global scale related to atrocities the countries are trying to get over and um and there's there's a science to how to hold a better conversation is you either through experience or whatever no um you could if you hold a debate like I wouldn't want to be in a debate with Bjorn we could find lots of things we disagree on but that's that takes it back to the win-lose model right who want that's not how you make progress and what Peter when I what I learned absorbed from him Peter Coleman because I was thinking like we need room for agreement I need to build a room for agreement my blog and at the times and then the stuff I do now you know it's like how can we talk and come to agreement he says no no you don't want agreement you want cooperation that allows you to hold on to your beliefs but to we're good you know we can disbelieve it we can disagree on all these things but let's cooperate on that one thing and that's that's a really valuable distinction that's needed so much in this Arena because as I said earlier you can parse it right down to the home menu of things Joe manchin wanted you know transmission lines you're now we're going to have big fights over transmission lines we've got billions of dollars to spend expanding America's grid in every community in America is going to say not here so how do you Foster a federal local dialogue that allows that to happen if you want to have any hope of a better grid um so that's like that those insights come from behavioral sciences that I think are completely under valued um in this area Pilkey loves to quote uh I can't I think it's liberate but oh Walter Lipman Lipman yes that uh democracy is not about you know everybody agreeing but it's about different people disagreeing but doing the same thing yeah together yes I mean agreeing that we're going to do this thing so you can disagree but still do a thing you know possibly for very different you know reasons there's an amazing video clip that shows this so powerfully 2015 was the build up to the Paris talks that led to the Paris agreement you know this and a really talented journalist at CNN at the time John Sutter who's from Oklahoma originally he um he saw another Yale study that was a county by county study of American attitudes on global warming like right down to the county level and there's this little glowing data point in Woodward County West uh Oklahoma Woodward County Oklahoma was Ground Zero for climate skepticism climate denial what everyone call it and he's like oh I'm going to go there and he went there just as a just to meet people on the street to talk to them about energy and weather and he did these little interviews and there's this one with this guy who's like a middle-aged Oil Company employee like a business like a administrator Thai Thai kind of guy and he he starts out the interview and the guy is saying like well you know God controls the environment and if you're watching this you're going okay this is going to be interesting and the backstory by the way is the guy he he paid for the local uh playground to have dinosaurs and people like toy dinosaurs and people all the playground Because he believes in creation you know six thousand a year creation yeah so so that's the guy right and and then he gets to energy and the guy says you know the same guy who believes God controls the environment says you know we have half of our roof covered with solar panels and we want to get off the grid entirely and when I show this I show this to audiences I say just pause and think about that for a second if you went why do you think that's happening and it's because he's independent he wants to have his own source of power he's libertarian he just want the government telling what to do he would never vote for Hillary I guarantee you this is 2015. but he wanted to get off the grid entirely to be his own to be to be himself and so then I say okay so if you were going around the country with your climate crisis placard and you go to Woodward County do you think that would be a productive way to go to that place and make your case and the answer is pretty obvious no if you go in there and you listen like listening is such an important property that we all forget including journalists um you much more have to find a path to cooperation you could talk to him about I guarantee if I went there today maybe I should go to talk about this new bill 370 billion dollars how do we make that work you know at the local level how do we answer that guy at the energy Department Jigger Shaw so how do we put this to work to get our buses off electricity to get electrified or transition our street lamps and stuff you could have a good chat with him if you go in there say I'm here to debate you to death on global warming forget about it actually let me ask you a question given your roots as a journalist yeah um so yeah talking to a guy you disagree with that's one thing what about talking to people that might be Society might consider bad unethical even evil what's the role of a journalist in that context so climate change is a large number of people that believe one thing yeah that believe another thing uh it turns out even with people that Society deems as evil there's a large number of people that support them what's your role as a journalist to talk to them well when I I have talked to really bad people when I wrote about the murder of Chico Mendez a Brazilian Amazon rainforest activist in 1989 I interviewed The Killers um one was in jail several of them were just ranchers who you know they had their point of view they were there in the Amazon rainforest to the word in Brazil in Portuguese is limpar to clean the land you know they're the bandarantes the pioneers of Brazil they go into these Frontiers and tame them like we had in our West you know and they would bring that up too they would say to me well you did this out you know didn't say you murdered your your Native Americans and stuff but they could easily have said that to and you deforested all your Landscapes um so who are you to come down here to but if I didn't talk to them uh that would be not a way to do journalism but when you talk to them did you empathize with them or did you push back that's the ultimate question like if you want to understand like uh if you talk to Hitler in 1941 you empathize with him or do you push back because most journalists would push because they're trying to signal to a fellow journalist right and to people back home that this me the journalist is on the right side but if you actually want to understand the person you should empathize uh if you want to if you want to be the kind of person that actually understands in the full Arc of History you need to empathize I find that journalists a lot of times perhaps they're protecting their job their reputation their sanity are not willing to empathize yeah well I think this happened with Joe manchin I'm not doing any kind of equation here related to history yes yes or Trump I mean Trump I interviewed the guy will happer I mentioned who was a physicist at Princeton who thinks carbon dioxide is the greatest thing in the world and we should have more of it in the atmosphere I profoundly disagree on that point um but I interviewed him for an hour and and it was so interesting because he was trying to kind of rope-a-dope me into making it about CO2 and climate because he's a super smart physicist and I kind of said let's let's talk about some other things and we started talking about education and Science Education he went on for like 20 minutes about the vital importance of better Science Education for Americans he drew on people he knew from Europe Hungary a bunch of Nobel Prize winners came from some some town in Hungary for at least a couple and he said that he learned their teachers at any rate we he went in a long Exposition on that he he then defended climate science he said we need more climate science he says I love this stuff I love the ocean buoys there are now thousands of them in the oceans charting clear pictures of ocean circulation and satellites and he said something really important that many people discount which is we need sustained investment in monitoring this planet uh we let our system we neglect our systems that just tell us what's happening in the world and that's happened over and over again um so if I had left it if I'd gone into the terrain of the fight over CO2 some journalist friends might say oh that was good mashup you know match up and but I found these really profound and important things that I wanted the world to know about in the context of whether Trump was going to have him as a science advisor and so if I hadn't gone there and a lot of people if you look back I got hammered for doing that from even from Friends and then later John holdren who had been Obama's science advisor for eight years he said I would rather have will happer as Trump's science advisor the no science advisor in other words there's a landscape of things that are important he recognized that happer is really smart about defense and all kinds of things too so it's like you do have to sort of screw up your ideally screw up your courage but then not necessarily get into the it's like with the guy in Oklahoma you know if you go in looking for the differences you'll find them you can amplify them you can leave with us paralyzed sense of nothing having happened that was useful or you can find these nuggets that are everyone is a human being I can't play the mind game of what I would have said asked to Hitler but um I played that mind game all the time but that's that's for another conversation yeah yeah that many in my family um that have suffered on them nevertheless he is a human being yeah and I you know people sometimes caricature Hitler is saying like that that's when you mentioned Hitler the conversation all right but I don't agree I think sort of these extremes are useful thought experiments to understand because if you're not willing to take your ideals to that extreme then then maybe your ideals need some rethinking and from a journalistic perspective all that kind of stuff a number of years ago my wife and I were with our veterinarian who was german-born Dr Bach b-a-c-h we were talking about the dog and stuff and then we were talking about Trump and and he just mentioned in passing he said my mother voted for Hitler wow that hit me like a brick yeah because it was so yeah these at the very least understanding how Pathways that lead to people doing things like he did and ordered it's essential and the only way to understand that is to dig in and ask questions and get uncomfortable that still makes my hair prickle when I think back to him saying yeah my mom voted for Hitler I somehow makes it super real like oh yeah yeah wow yeah there's elections There's real people living their lives and exactly struggling with a broken economy and all kinds of having their own Littles personal resentments and all that kind of stuff let me ask you about presidents American presidents um what who had a positive or negative impact on climate change efforts in your view Clinton Bush Obama Trump Biden or maybe you could say that they don't have much of an impact so like they in public discourse presidents have a kind of um maybe disproportional like we imagine they have a huge amount of impact how much impact do they actually have on on on climate policy very I don't know if you have comments on this well the there is a background decarbonization rate that's happened for 150 years you know we moved from wood to uh charcoal to Coal to oil and gas is cleaner it's more hydrogen less carbon and when you I asked recently I asked some really smart scientists who studied these long trajectories of energy when you look at those curves is there anything in that curve that says oh climate treaty 1992. oh yeah oh Paris and it's really hard or China I mean when China came in with his huge growth and Emissions that that created a bit of a recarbonization blip but that was this huge growth in their economy they pulled a bunch of people out of out of poverty um so yeah no presidents don't really change anything on time scales that we would measure as meaning where you could parse it out I I think that's not to say that Obama's and the current focus on on the stimulus that's happening which includes a lot more money for research Etc and innovation I do think that will have to be beneficial in a very very long run but I have to say you know when Obama stood up and made credit you know took credit for reductions from moving from coal to gas because of fracking that was actually Cheney who said that emotional thing I was thinking I would say Bush not because I like him or anything but he's the guy who inadvertently started fracking right and it goes further back than that it was a federal investment in fracking in the 60s and 70s and then this one guy in Texas right here in Texas uh George Mitchell who you know cobbled together technology and that led to this real dramatic change from gas to Coal that mostly played out in the Obama years but that really was stimulated by Cheney's early energy task force the 2001 when they were getting into office and also bush bush did something interesting in the whole wonky climate treaty process it was under Bush that they started to focus on sectors let's do a they did a oh and also on big emitters let's this isn't about 200 countries it's about basically eight or ten countries let's get them into a room and let's have these little sub rooms on like electrification on mining on whatever and by parsing it out and Obama picked up the same model they had different names for it because presidents always named something different than the last president when was the major economies forum and then it was the major emitters something or other and that getting away from the treaty dots and dashes toward just sectoral big sectors that matter you know gas electrification makes a difference but but again you couldn't ever measure enough it's always the lag time and also I I think one very under reported fact the uh uh so the unep the environment program uh they come out with a what they call a gap report every year uh where they estimate how much is the world doing compared to what should it or has it promised to do emissions um yeah and uh in 2019 so just before covet hit they actually did a survey of the 2010s so the last big sort of report on how well are we doing and their takeaway quote and I'm not going to get this right but it's pretty much what they said was if you take the world as if we hadn't cared about climate change since 2005. we can't tell the difference between that world and the world that we're actually living in so despite the fact that we've had 10 years of you know immense focus on climate and everybody talks about it and the Paris agreement which is perhaps the biggest Global sort of agreement and what we're going to be doing you can't actually tell and that I think is incredibly important because what it tells you is all that we're doing is not even on the margin it's sort of smaller than that and I'm not sure what that is but you know we're basically dealing in you know so for instance the UK loves to point out that they have dramatically reduced their carbon emissions and they have they've really dramatically lowered their emissions but mostly because they've de-industrialized they've basically said look we're just going to be Bankers for all of you guys and then everybody else is going to produce our stuff which of course is great for Britain or I don't know if it's great for Britain but we can't all do that and and so most of what we're trying to do right now is is sort of you know this virtue signaling it makes us feel good it's sort of yeah on the margin or in the very tiny margin but you know what we basically in those those Andy your point with China and the reason why we can't tell the difference of course is because China basically became the workshop for everyone yeah and and so not only did they lift more than half a million people out of poverty sorry yes half a billion people out of poverty but they also you know basically took over most production in the world uh and so of course you know much many rich countries could decarbonize and or or at least reduce their carbon emissions and feel very virtuous about it but fundamentally we haven't solved how does the world do this and and that's why I think we're also left with this sense of not only are we being told this is a you know unmitigated catastrophe and that's why this is the only thing we should be focusing on but also somehow and and we can all fix it and and I don't think we have any sense of how hard this is actually going to be and that's of course why I would go back and say look the only way you're going to fix this is through Innovation because if you have something that's cheaper than fossil fuels you fixed it if you have something that's harder and you know costlier and more inconvenient no well you're just not going to make it and getting more time by cutting vulnerability yes the pockets of vulnerability on the planet are huge and they're identifiable and you know what to do what are the biggest pockets of vulnerability well the infrastructure of cities no it's where people are living and what their capacities are um involving people how do you how do you decrease the vulnerability in the world what are the big affordable housing one reason so many people moved out of San Francisco and adjacent cities into the countryside and then had their houses burned down it's because they can't afford to live in the city anymore so affordable housing in cities can limit exposure to in that case Wildfire Durban South Africa that terrible devastating flood they had this year past year who was who was washed away poor people who don't have any place to live so they settle on in a flood plain along a stream bed that's livable you know when it's not raining buckets and those are vulnerabilities that are there because of um dislocation housing Taco ban this typhoon that hit the Philippines terribly ahead of the Paris talks or was it the previous one in 2013 I believe yeah yeah yeah thousands died um most of the stories that were written were framed around climate change because the pope made a deal about it it was just before the climate talks of that year and what happened partially why there were so many losses was Tacloban City had quadrupled in population in the last 30 years and most of the people coming into the city were poor looking for work and settling in marginal places where a surge storm surge killed them so those are things we we the whatever the we is in the different places really can work on and that gives more Flex for sure and thinking about how this long trajectory that seems so immovable and so hard the decarbonization part there's there's no excuse I wrote a piece not I guess a year ago I said there's a vulnerability emergency hiding behind this ex this climate emergency label that that's really what needs work and and also on the taco Bond I mean the the hurricane that hit in 2013 there was almost a similar hurricane in the early part of uh 1900s that hit pretty much the same pretty much the same strength and it eradicated half the city it killed half the city uh and so what's happened since then is you know people just got much much richer you know from early 1900 to 2013 we've just moved a lot of people out of poverty now and yeah Bangladesh is even a bigger example of that in the 1970s they had horrible Cyclones one of which was the Beatles of George Harrison's concert for Bangladesh great album that I still have somewhere hundreds of thousands it's a it was he did a concert a fundraising concert the concert for Bangladesh after this terrible Cyclone tragedy had hit Bangladesh and I think there was there were several hundred thousand which were killed uh and a couple like that around that time Bangladesh has been hit by comparable storms recently and it's terrible every death is terrible but it's like 123 deaths and it's not just because of wealth it's because people know what to do it's because there's cell phones it's because they have elevated Platforms in many towns in many communities in the flood Plains there that you know to get to so they went from hundreds of thousands of deaths in a cyclone to 123. and we were working with Bangladesh it's no longer the problem of of people dying it's the fact that their cattle dies so you know they want it they want to cattle places where you could herd your cat this this is their capital and it's not to make fun of it but you know it's an amazing progress that you've stopped worrying about your you know your parents dying and you worry about your cows dying and when I was talking about social Innovation the other hour there's a model emerging in Bangladesh for uh Farmers to move from raising chickens poultry to ducks and it's working and Ducks actually fetch a higher price at the market and guess what when you get flooded they survive you can still have your income and your future let me ask you to give advice put on your Sage wise hat and give advice to young people that are looking into this sure yeah um into this world and see how they can do the most good we talked about what is the one dollar that can do the most positive Improvement and to lead to forty dollars forty five dollars and so on what advice would you give to young people in high school in college how to have a positive impact on the world how to have a career they can be proud of maybe ask Bjorn first and how to have a life to be they can be proud of so I think and and this really you know pretty well reflects the whole conversation we've had we've got to sort of take the the uh the catastrophism out of the uh of the climate conversation uh and and you know this really matters because a lot of kids literally think that the world is going to end pretty soon and that obviously makes any other kind of plan uh uh uh uh meaningless so first of all look you're not going to die uh you know that that poster that people that a lot of kids have you're going to die from old age but I'm gonna die from climate no you're not you're gonna die from old age and you're gonna die much older very likely right so the reality is the world is has improved dramatically and it's very likely to improve even more so the Baseline is good this is just you know the facts then there's still lots and lots of problems and what you should do as a young person is stop being you know Paralyzed by fear and then realize what you can do is basically help Humanity become even smarter there's a lot of different places you can do I mean the obvious thing when you're talking about climate is what if you could become the guy that you know develops fourth generation nuclear up it's very likely something that neither of us know anything about right now but develop that you know the energy source they'll basically power the rest of humanity how cool would that be that's one of the many things you could do but again also remember there are lots and lots of other things that need Solutions so what about you come become the guy that makes the or the girl that makes the uh the social innovation in in Tanzania or in Kenya sorry in Kenya or what about if you become the person who finds a way that is a much cheaper more effective way to tackle tuberculosis right now it needs four to six months of medication that one of the big problems is once you've popped the pills and you're you're fresh it's really hard to get people to do it for the other five and a half months right and and and you need that otherwise you actually have a big risk of of getting multi-drug resistant tuberculosis which is a real Scourge on the on the earth so you know what if you develop that so the the truth is not only can your life be much better when you sort of ditched that uh that doomerism but it also becomes much more possible for you to be a positive part of making sure that you do that progress why has the world improved so much because our parents and great grandparents they made all this work you know this was all their Innovations and a lot of hard work and I'm incredibly grateful that they've done it but now it's kind of time to pay back so you know you got to do this for our you know our grandkids you've got to make those Innovations make those uh policy opportunities they'll make the world even an even better place totally and and to me there's never been a better time to be effective as a young person because the internet connectedness you can brainstorm with someone in another country just as easily as you can brainstorm with someone down the block when we were kids as I said earlier with my my pen pal with letters taking weeks to come and um so the Key Properties ideally that young people would do well to cultivate our um well certainly adaptability because change is changing not just you know the rate of change is changing these layers of change are all piling up on each other um having an ability to understand the information environment is this fundamental need now that wasn't a need when we were growing up we read that a few newspapers my dad would turn on the Nightly News and Walter Cronkite would say that's the way it is because that's the way it is and that's so not the way the media environment is now so courses in media literacy should be kind of fundamental parts of curriculum from like kindergarten on or parents can do the same thing that there's a woman at URI University of Rhode Island Renee Hobbs who teaches a course in propaganda literacy and she said you know the the the history of the word is not bad propaganda could be good it's Pro it's for the for the church yeah she did a wonderful chat with the uh she laid this out and but understanding when it is propaganda like the tobacco you know there is hopefully a difference between that and and that right cigarette ads and and and and journalistically acquired information so Akita all everything Bjorn was talking about too is just understanding how how to not be sucked into this information environment and spit out as a paralyzed doomist entity because once you have the ability to step back then you can use Twitter or whatever you're on to find people who might have a skill set you don't have that is something you need to do to to incorporate to harness to do the thing you want to do in the world finding your way to make the world better and it can have nothing to do with climate but if it makes a few more people's lives better then overall you're leading toward better capacity for all this stuff so that and and then the climate problem the Prismatic giant nature of it is what makes it so daunting but it's also it gives everybody an opportunity like there's something for artists scientists poets everybody needs to get into the game I just spent some time with Kim Stanley Robinson who wrote that book Ministry of the future which is this sprawling novel about a worst case a worst case outcome where everyone in India is dying and and uh you know so fiction can help experiment different kinds of fiction different kinds of Arts can help us sort of experiment with what the future might look like different ways and just get get started and the other thing unfortunately that's needed I think I first said this in 2008 when someone asked me something about climate I said weirdly you have to sort of have a sense of urgency but a sense of patience at the same time like just roll those words around in your mind like what does that mean urgent and patient how could that possibly be but actually it really is the reality you there is an urgency with this building gas that's cumulative that doesn't go away like smoke when when the when it rains and every year that happens it's adding to risk and you can kind of wake up completely freaked out urgent but when you realize energy transitions take time then you have to sort of find patience or whatever your word is for that yeah I think you have to oscillate back and forth throughout the day having a sense of urgency when you're trying to actually be productive and a patience so you can have a calm Header by you in terms of putting everything into perspective yeah and like you said with information that is interesting especially in the scientific Community I think you've spoken about this before you know that there is some responsibility or at least an opportunity for scientists to not just do science but to understand the Dynamics of the different mediums in which information is exchanged so it could be Twitter for a few years then it could be Tick Tock then it could be you know I'm a huge believer in the power of YouTube over the next several years perhaps decades I mean it's a very interesting medium for education and communication for debate and that's Grassroots that's from like the bottom up you know that that every scientist is able to communicate their work and I I personally believe have the responsibility to communicate that work if anything the internet made me realize the science is not just about doing the science it's about communicating it like that this is not some kind of virtue signaling on my part no no no like I feel like if the tree falls in the forest and nobody's around to hear it it really didn't fall like that's not you should there should be a culture of um whoever at MIT is a place called the media lab yes sir where they really emphasize uh like you always be able to demo something to show off your work they really emphasize showing off their work and I think that was in some part criticized in the bigger MIT culture that you know that's that's like being focusing too much on the pr versus doing the science but I really disagree with that of course there's a balance to strike you don't want to be all smoke and mirrors but there really is a lot of value to communication and not just sort of some broad you almost don't want to teach a course on communication Because by the time you teach the course at 38 too late it's always being on top of how what is the language what is the culture and the etiquette what is the technology of communication that is effective yeah I actually had a big conversation about that in my my University because I think and this is perhaps especially true for for social sciences but I think it's probably true for everyone uh just simply communicating what it is that you've done in research makes it possible for you to sort of get an outsider's perspective and see did I just go into an incredibly deep uh you know whole that you know just three other people really care about in the world or is this actually Something That Matters to the world and and being able to explain what it is that you've done to everyone else uh makes you know my sort of sense is if you can't say it in a couple minutes it's probably it's not necessarily true but it's probably because it wasn't all that important there was a hashtag generated maybe seven years ago by a Caltech PhD candidate a woman and it was fantastic the hashtag was I am a Scientist because and she posted it with a picture of herself with her answer you know and that I when I talked to scientists or basically anybody about communicating I say start don't start with I am a I'm a phytologist and I use a spectrophotometer to do X start with I'm a scientist because the world is endlessly interesting and I just found these salamanders which are going to vanish if we don't stop this fungus from coming to the United States utterly interesting and then you then you've got people hooked but it's the motivation part because everyone grew up as a kid and a kid is basically like a scientist wow what the hell is this how does this work so you can connect with people that way the but the this other issue you approached is really important and what I love about MIT particularly I spent a lot of time there over the decades not just talking to the hurricane guy um Amy Smith who's the development lab in the basement there somewhere most of my team looks like it's the basement but yeah it's sort of like this part of the charm here but it's a usability function as part of a lot of that goes on there it's engineering and Science and it reminds me of 1997 these two very different scientists Dan Cameron at Berkeley and Michael Dove at Yale wrote a Manifesto it was um the virtues of mundane science that's what they called it it was a prod to the scientific Community to actually it's about useful utility because the whole arena is set up to advance your career through revealing new knowledge that will get you 10 years someday and actually doing useful science is disincentivized having a conversation and especially if it involves more than one discipline because as a young scientist I there was some science some postdocs at Columbia who wrote this other Manifesto paper saying here are the things universities need to do to Foster the collaborative capacity we need to have sustainable development and it was like four or five things that universities don't do give you time to become fluent and for a for a physicist to talk to an anthropologist and understand how anthropology works for sociology takes time and then building a relationship with a community that has a problem that you want to fix takes time and you so you do these like quick turnaround papers that get you toward your little micro career goal but they're not actually getting you what you want in the world those are really hard problems going forward but starting with that idea of usability what can I do with my skill sets you know a lot of great physicists I know are dug in on string theory and stuff and this some someone has to dig in on that too but I'd like to pull a little bit of their brain power away to think about some of the Practical things Bjorn thinks about too so the the two of you have been thinking about some of the biggest questions which is life here on Earth the history of life here the future of life here on Earth of Earth itself and how to allocate our resources to alleviate suffering in the world so let me ask the big question what do you think is the the why of it all what's the meaning of it what's the meaning of our life here on Earth you you waited till the last moment to ask us that question yes yes in case there's uh yeah in case in case I can trick you into finding an answer well so I mean again I'm just going to take a stab in this because uh I think in some ways it's um it's the same thing that you were talking about before it's not about getting everybody sort of on the same track and all agree on something but it's about getting a lot of people with very different you know uh goals and targets and ways of thinking about the world to go in the same direction so for me the goal of Life certainly Michael but I think for for most people is to make the world a better place it sounds incredibly pedestrian because it becomes so overused but that really and literally is the point you you know your point of your life is to you know when when one of your friends is uh sad to make sure that they sort of get out of that and and find out why they're sad and maybe move them a little bit in the right direction and you know and and all the things that we've talked about you know stop people from dying from tuberculosis and live longer lives and fix climate change but fix it in such a way that we actually use resources smartest because there are lots of problems so let's make sure we you know we we deal with them adequately this is this is very unsexy in some sense uh but I think it's also very basic and really what it matters well you know biologically Evolution that has demanded that life is about finding sources of energy and perpetuating yourself right so that's the Baseline and that's led us into a bit of a bollocks because we have this easy energy that's come from the ground so far and um but our Brilliance has given this this larger awareness of everything about the planet is transitory and I said well how do you work with that productively is is really an important question I could just sort of you know try to be as rich as possible and use as much energy as possible and have other people I mean Alex Epstein I think again this is one of the constraints on my support for what he says is he's just talking about growth and progress in that sense but there are consequences and there are long-term trajectories here that have to be taken into account too um so what do you wake up to do to me it's finding your part of this and as Bjorn said finding a way to pursue and expand betterment when I taught I was at Pace University for six years and one of the courses I launched there was called blogging a better planet and it was for grad students mostly in communication it wasn't an environment it wasn't like better Planet like save the climate it was but my task for the students was to blog about something they're passionate about first of all because you can't do this just like you can't do your conversations if you don't wake up in the morning wanting to do what you're doing right you're doing this I used to call myself a selfish blogger because I was learning every day I still am I loved this you know I would I would my wife laughs she thinks I work too much but I'm always like asking those questions like sustain what yeah so so my charge to the students was harness a passion build a Blog either alone or with others that not just the world a little bit towards some better better outcome and so there was a musician who did a thing on music musicians who use their art for their work for making the world better some of it was like music therapy you know bands contributing money whatever another one did her blog was on Comfort comfort food all around the world and I thought it was my favorite it was a video this year I think it should be viral actually it was like looking at the world every different cultures that she was in Queens so every culture every Cuisine is there in Queens 200 countries right yeah but she would go and talk to people's moms and have them cook the food of that country that's their comfort food I mean I just love this because it's through we all need to eat and you're getting this expanded sense of what Comfort is by thinking about what other cultures you know choose and that felt like a great course because it was not directive it was just it gave them this potential to go forward you know I'd love to think they've all gone on to become Superstar whatever is I don't know that's the giving that's the Letting Go part even if one did something special then that makes me feel job done and you know when I after I've been writing about climate for 30 years 2016-ish I did a lot of writing about what did I learn unlearned and stuff and I had had a stroke in 2011. which is interesting it was the first time I really thought about my brain you don't think about your brain on a day-to-day basis but this is my brain telling me you know ding ding ding ding some weird shit's happening and when I was thinking about climate or confronting climate change it felt like some of the things I learned about my own existence you know I'm going to die but you don't really absorb that is that the first time you kind of that was like my face yeah this is really the shit you know or at least deep disability if not death and um that that ability is transitory and I thought about the climate problem we're not going to solve the global warming problem at least not in our lifetimes but you you work on making those trajectories sustainable you know the end of life particularly you work on making sure other people don't get strokes if they can avoid it in my case I wrote about I was blogging about my stroke while I was having it I was tweeting about it there's a funny tweet that's kind of mistyped because um you know um yeah yeah right right so so if you so that's like share your knowledge share your learning and everyone can do this now like on whatever platform and then um there's also this like giving up part but not in a depressing well maybe you could call depressing I started to zoom in years ago and the idea of the Serenity Prayer the sobriety thing you know it's like know what you can change know what you can't grab me the serenity to accept the things that cannot change the courage to change the things that can and the wisdom to know the difference yeah see those three properties are really important right now some aspects of this we know absolutely what we can work on cutting vulnerability energy transitions take time science can help us discriminate the difference and that's an iterative changing landscape going forward but at the same time science like I personally on climate modeling or like narrowing how hot it's going to get or more clarity on when an ice sheet is going to collapse I think those are what I call known and Nobles so being able to I've seen enough evidence that those are deeply complex problems that we're not going to get there quickly so then that gives you a landscape to act on and that you know whether you bring God into the mix is irrelevant it's really know what you can change know what you can't and know what that gives you the quality to work on them and serenity is comfort with that this is transitory that the human Journey like anyone's individual Journey will have some and that doesn't mean it has to be near it does this anthropocene that I've been writing about for decades is uh can still be a good anthropocene or at least a less bad one in terms of how we get through it and you're also a musician so in context one one of my favorite songs of yours an album a very fine line I should mention that with the stroke coming close to death the lyrics here are quite brilliant I have to say oh yeah it's a very fine lie between winning and losing a very fine line between living and dying a very fine line by the way people should listen to this I can't play this because YouTube will give me trouble a very fine line between loving and leaving most of your life you spend walking a very fine line and the rest of the lyrics are just quite brilliant it is a fine line yeah I'm glad you walked in with me today gentlemen you're brilliant kind beautiful human beings thank you so much for having this quote-unquote debate that was much more about just exploring ideas together Bjorn thank you so much and uh Andy thank you so much for talking today you know these kinds of extended conversations or the more of it the better and finding ways to spread that capacity just to get people out of this win-lose thing is really important so thanks for what you're doing yeah thanks for listening to this conversation with Bjorn lomberg and Andrew revkin to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from Henry David Thoreau Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads thank you for listening and hope to see you next time