Bjørn Lomborg is author of "False Alarm". Andrew Revkin is a climate journalist (21 years at NY Times). Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Eight Sleep: https://www.eightsleep.com/lex to get special savings - Linode: https://linode.com/lex to get $100 free credit - InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/lex to get 20% off - Onnit: https://lexfridman.com/onnit to get up to 10% off EPISODE LINKS: Andrew's Twitter: https://twitter.com/Revkin Andrew's Substack: https://revkin.substack.com Andrew's Linktree: https://linktr.ee/revkin Bjørn's Twitter: https://twitter.com/BjornLomborg Bjørn's Website: https://lomborg.com Andrew's Books: The Human Planet: https://amzn.to/3MRuLUY The Burning Season: https://amzn.to/3Dmr5Hq Bjørn's Books: False Alarm: https://amzn.to/3Sqt5D4 How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place: https://amzn.to/3gwoIJ7 PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (06:59) - Politics of climate change (24:01) - Greta Thunberg (30:31) - Electric cars (37:53) - Economy (45:30) - Journalism (59:32) - Human emissions (1:17:19) - Worst-case climate change scenario (1:37:40) - Hurricanes (1:56:29) - Climate change vs Global warming (2:00:35) - Climate alarmism (2:15:25) - Economic models (2:46:52) - Climate change policies (3:02:54) - Nuclear energy (3:09:30) - Alex Epstein (3:20:00) - Public opinion on climate change (3:41:57) - US presidents (3:52:35) - Advice for young people (4:06:10) - Meaning of life
Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
The following is a conversation with Bjorn Lomborg and Andrew Refkin 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 debates like these, including on controversial 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 Environmentalist. Please check out his work at lomborg.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. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description.
It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got 8sleep for naps, Linode for Linux, Insight Tracker for biological data, and Onnit for supplements. Choose wisely, my friends. And now the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I hate those. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.
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I remember how much joy it brings to my world, whether that's through a short power nap or a great night's sleep. Warm blanket, cold bed surface, with the rain gently falling outside. I'll even sometimes drink a coffee right before, and I pass off for 20 minutes, and I wake up a new human being. I don't know why that works.
I don't know if everyone enjoys naps as much as I do, but they work for me. And sometimes it can make the difference between a mind that is cynical and is really struggling with life and the world to a mind that is open to the possibilities and the beauty of the world. I do that on an 8sleep bed. Check it out and get special holiday savings of up to $400 when you go to 8sleep.com slash Lex.
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Chapter 2: How do Bjørn Lomborg and Andrew Revkin define the spectrum of beliefs about climate change?
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. And 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, getting them in the game.
There was that documentary who killed the electric car, which seemed to imply that there were fights to keep this tamp down. And it's fundamentally cleaner, fundamentally better. 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 transit cars?
And Jagir Shah, that guy at the energy department I mentioned who has all this money to give out, he wants to give loans to – if you had an Uber fleet, those Uber drivers, they're the ones who need – electric cars. His work, 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 $60,000, $80,000 vehicles.
The Hummer, the electric Hummer, 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 a car. Yeah, I think it might've been the Prius. 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 those impacts have to be figured out too. And if they're all big hummers 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.
We all do. You usually refer when you say we, we humans.
We society, we 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 the carbon benefit, for the conventional sooty pollution benefit, for the transportation benefit.
Can I step back and ask a sort of big question? We mentioned economics, journalism. How does an economist and a climate scientist and a journalist 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 so people may be aware. I think you'd be able to fall into the economics camp a bit.
There's climate scientists. 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 journalist, you've been writing it, so you're not completely in the trenches of doing the work. You're just stepping into the trenches every once in a while.
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Chapter 3: How do we address vulnerability in the context of climate change?
As you just said, we assume no friction. So there's a way that you kind of model the world that ends up being also a convenient message. in many ways. And I think the main convenient message in climate, and it's not surprising if you think about it, 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 a lot of caveats. But that's sort of the message. And it takes a long time.
Yes, yes.
It's really, really difficult to do in any meaningful sort of timeframe. And if you challenge that... Yes, you're outside the flock and you get attacked. Somebody told me once, I think it's true, they say at the Harvard Law School, if you have a good case, pound the case. If you have a bad case, pound the table.
And so I've always felt that when people go after me, they're kind of pounding the table. They're literally screaming, I don't have a good case. I'm really annoyed with what you're saying. And so to me, that actually means it's much more important to make this argument. Sure. I mean, I would love everyone just saying, oh, that's a really good point. I'm going to use that.
But we're stuck in a situation, certainly in a conversation where A lot of people have invested a lot of time and energy on saying we should cut carbon emissions. This is the way to help humankind. 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.
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 It's just incredibly important for us to get it right. So in some sense, you know, to make sure that we don't do another Iraq and we don't do another, you know, lots of stupid decisions. I mean, this is one of the things mankind is very good at.
And I guess I see my role, and I think that's probably also how you see yourself, is trying to, you know, get everyone to do it slightly less wrong.
Yeah.
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Chapter 4: What are the potential impacts of climate change on human populations?
It's the same amount of water that's in the Gulf of Mexico as if God or some great force came down and flash flows the Gulf of Mexico and plunked it up on land. That's the ice sheet. It's a lot of water. That's 23 feet of sea level rise. But you were 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 change from 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 all of a sudden, to me, it's in the realm of... what I've taken to calling known unknowables. 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. There's a guy named Jeremy Bassis, B-A-S-S-I-S, who wrote a paper about this West Antarctic, 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. Just this past year, there's been this cycle around collapse, the word collapse, and Antarctic ice.
It started actually several years ago with the idea that the West Antarctic ice sheet is particularly vulnerable. And some paper, everyone, the science community, like the birds, we were talking about flocks to it, and some high-profile papers are written. And then a deeper inquiry reveals, you know, it's more complicated than that.
And we, the journalists, the media, pundits, don't pay attention to that stuff. And actually... which is why I started to develop kind of a dictionary. I call it watch words, like words to, if you're out there, you're just a public person, you wanna 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. Scientists would do well to be more careful with words like that.
Unless your focus is what we were saying earlier, your idea that alarming people will spur them to act, then you use that word carelessly.
Can I just follow up 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.
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Chapter 5: What are the economic implications of climate change policies?
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 much will that cost, it's not implausible that this will cost somewhere between $2 and $4 trillion 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. It probably wouldn't in real life, but 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 my main point.
Yeah, this reminds me of what we were saying earlier about 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 vastly increasing poverty. This is playing out across the world. Fertilizer prices, fertilizer comes from gas, natural gas.
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 But that's not factored in, right? That's way outside of what you'd factor in.
But it does feel like, to me, 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, a world of abundant energy that doesn't come 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?
But I don't think most people are making that case.
What's in the trillion and the T costs? What are the big costs there?
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Chapter 6: How does energy availability impact geopolitical stability?
So basically, again, and this is sort of the opposite of what we just talked about by climate change. 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 our 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 you have to use a source of energy that you would rather not have used because if people wanted to do it, we'd already have solved the problem.
So you're basically telling me you've got to use this wind turbine instead of this natural gas plant or that kind of thing. It's not that you suddenly become poor or anything. It simply makes production slightly harder. What do you do 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 these policies, that it simply makes you somewhat less well-off.
So energy becomes more inefficient. Yeah. So let me challenge you here. Try to steel man some critics. So you have critics.
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Chapter 7: What role do young people play in addressing climate change?
I would love you to take it seriously and sort of consider this criticism and try to steel man their case. There's a bunch, I could mention 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 costs 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 well, you're cherry picking the models, which the models are always cherry picking anyway. But you want to take those seriously. So he claims that you ignore, you're not fully modeling the costs
How expensive is the renewable energy and how expensive is the fossil fuel? Can you steal man's case? Sure.
So two things. The first, the quote, it's absolutely true that the world spends a large 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. No, that's actually not a terribly poor country.
It's China. It's Indonesia. It's Russia. It's places where you're basically paying off your population, just like that you subsidize bread. You make sure that they don't rebel by making cheap fuels available. That's dumb. But it's not like they don't know what they're doing. They're mostly doing this for things that have nothing to do with climate.
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Chapter 8: What is the relationship between fossil fuels and global development?
So I totally agree we should get rid of it. It's hard to do. Indonesia's actually somewhat managed 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 poor people don't have a car. It's the rich people who can now buy very cheap gasoline. That's unjust as well. So it's dumb in so many different ways.
I would never argue that you shouldn't. I've plenty of times 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 Ward's 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 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 again, this is not possible everywhere, I try to actually take models the average of all of the economic models. There's a group called the Stanford Energy Modeling Forum, which tries to pull together all these different groups that do the modeling.
Some models, a lot of this cost actually comes down to the fact that we don't quite know how much more fossil fuels you're going to need in the future. And so 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.
That's just one of the variables. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's many, many, many more. I think the point here is to say that if you take the average of all the best models that are sort of aggregated, for instance, at the Stanford Energy Modeling Forum, you're pretty secure ground.
And so, again, I would argue that Bob Ward, yes, I've had a lot of run-ins with Bob Ward, and he has a very different set of views on things. But 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 based on the NOP 2013 model. But ultimately, these criticisms have to do is like, what are the sources for the different models?
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