you're not going to solve global warming by telling people no you're not going to solve this by telling people you can't fly you can't go on your car you can't eat meat you can't do all these things that you like to do because of climate you can try and do it but you'll probably see very very strong resistance hello and welcome to unheard the channel that looks out for herd mentality wherever we find it and there's a lot of it about where we see it we try to provide a more sensible more balanced perspective one thing we haven't spoken a lot about is climate change as the cop 26 summit meets over the next couple of weeks in glasgow expect to be bombarded with disaster scenarios stories of our species imminent demise well bjorn lombari is a danish writer he's visiting fellow at the hoover institution at stamford and he has made himself an expert on climate science over the years he is author of false alarm how climate change panic costs us trillions hurts the poor and fails to fix the planet and as you can tell from the title of his book he brings a slightly different message he joins us now from sweden hi bjorn hey good to meet you friday first of all congratulations on such a beautiful living room it looks like you're single-handedly fixing the global warming problem there yeah no that actually doesn't do very much but yes uh we have lots of plants we have a whole uh uh greenhouse like winter garden out there and two greenhouses out here so yeah i love plants so let me start by saying that your view of this whole issue is not that there isn't a problem you think the global warming is real and that it is in largely man-made let's start by just kind of establishing that because a lot of people might reject the whole thing as some kind of myth but you actually you're kind of centrist in that respect that you you you think it is real look freddie i mean i'm i'm a social scientist i just meet with a lot of of the natural scientists who've looked at climate change i mean i've read the u.n climate panel reports i don't think there's any reason to say that it is not such global warming is real global warming is man-made it is a significant problem but we still need to have that conversation about so there's a problem how do we fix it how do we fix it smartly and how do we replace it among all the other problems that are also there there's a tendency in much of the conversation that because we talk so much about climate we forget that for most people around the planet there are many other problems that are much more important so it's really a question of saying yes to a problem but then how do we fix it so your message is really a sense of proportion that you say yes there's a problem but and i think this is a quote from the book it's not the end of the world explain explain that so so you know the u.n climate panel has actually spent a lot of time also looking at how big of a problem is it so that's typically what climate economists have been doing they've been doing this for the last 30 years uh the leading guy who's uh professor nordhaus out of yale university uh got the nobel prize in 2018 for his work and lots of people have been joining in on this trying to say all right if we try to look at all the different things that global warming gonna impact so we're gonna we're gonna have rising sea levels we're gonna have more heat waves we're gonna have fewer cold waves but we'll also have lots of other problems what do all of these problems and benefits but mostly problems add up to in total their answer in the latest report from 2018 uh the 1.5 degree report tells us that if we do nothing about climate change by the end of the century the impact will be equivalent to each one of us losing 2.6 of our income that's not nothing but it's certainly not what i think a lot of people believe the end of the world that's the economic impact is it well it's it's actually a lot more than so they try to estimate what are all the impacts so typically some some impacts for instance food will become more expensive that's definitely an economic impact but lots of other things loss of wetland uh the fact that you have to protect much of your infrastructure better will partly be economic partly non-economic they actually tried to estimate all of the impacts in money so the un actually because they have to make scenarios all the way to 2100 in order to make their predictions what they find is that in their central scenario the average person on the planet will be 450 as rich as he or she is today simply because of general economic growth so these scenarios don't actually look specifically in climate change because they act as the inputs to the climate models so if if there was no global warming to put it bluntly we would be 450 as rich in 2100 as we are today because of global warming because of the 2.6 reduction we will only be 434 as rich by the end of the century notice that's a very different understanding from what you typically hear today namely that everything is going to be bleak and terrible by the end of the century no everything or most things will be much better but it'll be slightly less better global warming is a problem not the end of the world so in other words there's a trajectory that it needs to be understood against which is one of improving technology expanding economy life conditions improving for large parts of the planet and so even if there's a negative effect and even if that's quite serious it could be more than offset by the improvements over the next century it it definitely will be offset so there's no scenario where you have a negative outcome because of global warming you have a slightly less positive outcome so instead of this trajectory you get one that's slightly lower and remember also on all the uh other non-economic variables so you know the u.n estimate
will live much longer possibly up to about a hundred years by the end of the century we'll all be literate we'll have much higher education all these other things and so it's important to recognize global warming is not the end of the world it's not the reason why kids should just say why should i bother go to school but it's a problem among many other problems that we need to fix one thing that intrigued me from your book is that against the direct negative impact of a rising temperature there might even be some positive impacts for some people and that we should understand it as a balance explain that to us so when you hear the reporting on climate change you inevitably only hear about things a bad bad bad but remember any issue will have both negatives and positive global warming has more negatives and positives that's why it's a problem when you sum all of it up but you're badly informed if you only think it'll have negative impacts so very clearly as temperatures rise you're going to see more heat waves and hence more heat deaths but as temperatures rise you're also going to see fewer cold waves and hence fewer cold deaths now that matters because cold deaths probably outweigh heat deaths by about nine to one so there's about 500 000 uh heat deaths in the world about 4.5 million coal deaths is a new landsat study from this year so overall right now we're actually seeing fewer people die because of global warming this will not continue in the long run it'll probably be a problem that where heat deaths will outweigh uh avoided coal deaths but again you need to know both otherwise you're not well informed so are you saying that up until now global warming has actually produced fewer deaths in other words it's been a net positive for humanity on that specific issue on heat and cold death it's been a net uh positive and that's not me saying it it's the best study that we have from the lancet that is the first one looking at global deaths and it's curious that you haven't heard this in the news but of course what you do here is heat deaths and yes they become more but we should hear both of them because this is the kind of thing that would be absolutely denounced as heresy i'm pretty sure i mean it's sort of the joke as you know i'm half swedish it was the sort of joke we made 10 years ago that oh it's global warming might be quite a good thing up in the north of sweden we could do with a few extra degrees and that sort of comment has been absolutely disparaged as simplistic thinking because climate change will operate in all sorts of complex ways and it might well mean that cold places get colder rather than hotter and we're not supposed to be thinking like that are you saying that that idea wasn't so crazy after all well certainly most of models show that for instance canada scandinavia much of russia will actually benefit from global warming but again i think it's it's a wrong way to think about it as oh there are also benefits so we don't need to worry uh look everything has benefits and and and dis benefits we need to just be able to look at all of them and the fact as you point out that we're not allowed to in in a sense there is a there's a sense of you should not be saying that is obviously not good for having a sensible conversation okay so before we get on to thinking about how we should be fixing it and the measures you think are sensible let's go through some of the myths because one of the things i enjoyed from your book was actually puncturing some of those myths we hear so often so myth number one is that small islands will all be submerged as the sea rises what's the truth of that well so it turns out there's lots of researchers who've looked at this we constantly hear micronesia uh the maldives or shells or something is going to be flooded you know they're only like a meter or two meters above sea level so it makes sense as sea levels rise they're basically going to get flooded what we forget and what these researchers have done is they've actually taken aerial photographs from back in the 60s or 40s or whenever they've been made and compared them with the islands today what happens is most of these islands are coral islands so they have actually occurred because they break off dead coral when they're storms and wash it ashore that accretes the uh the island that makes the island higher at the same time of course sea level rise makes the island lower it turns out that at least for now and probably in the foreseeable future the accretion is higher than the sea level rise so what you've seen in pretty much all of these so for all atolls but probably also for most of the uh individual islands in these atolls you've seen increasing areas not decreasing areas this is just a fact and again it doesn't mean global warming is not real it doesn't mean that they don't have a problem if there was no sea level rise they'd probably be growing even faster but they're not disappearing and they're not likely to disappear in the near future even in this century okay myth number two extreme weather events are on the rise and they are proof of climate change true or false i would love to be able to just give you a true or false here so look there are some things that we should be aware of so extreme weather is typically the argument that most people use for climate change some extreme things increase so you're going to see more heat waves as we talked about before you're also going to see more uh heavy rain those are the two things that we know are gonna happen for instance in storms uh so hurricanes you're probably gonna see fewer hurricanes which is actually good but you'll probably see stronger hurricanes which is bad we become much more resilient towards many of these disasters so as we get richer we don't get nearly as affected by climate impacts so what you've actually seen if you if you take a graph of how many people die from climate-related disasters well we have good data for that for the last 100 years in the 1920s about half a million people died each and every year from climate disasters a lot of them were floods and droughts especially in china and india that you've never heard of what's happened since then is it's declined dramatically so in the 2010s we were down to 18 000 people so about 96 reduction in deaths and last year it was down to 14 000 in 2020 and in 2021 we don't obviously have the whole uh year yet but it looks like 2021 is set to be even lower at about 6 000. so you hear on one side one catastrophe after another and it certainly feels like we're seeing more and more of these damages but when you look at the data much of it tells us we're much more resilient that's absolutely a fact so we've seen a 99 reduction until 2021 in our deaths and remember we quadrupled the global population at the same time and we also and that's important we've actually seen not increasing levels in many of these indicators for instance the best indicator is hurricanes landfalling hurricanes in the u.s
we have not seen an increase either in hurricanes or in strong hurricanes we've actually seen a slight decrease again the point here is not to say that there's not a problem with extreme weather but that we're vastly being told a story that's exaggerated and that's not helping us to get grips with the with the real size of the problem so climate patterns will change there may be more heavy rainfall and other things it doesn't necessarily mean that we're going to be living in perpetual hurricanes or storms in fact they may even go down but i think the most important point you made there is that actually our ability to deal with them our technological and sociological techniques for dealing with extreme weather events will continue to get better so actually do you project that fewer people will die of extreme weather events in we'll see fewer people die and we'll see much less damage in percent of gdp remember you have to adjust for gdp because if you have twice as many houses a same amount of flooding for instance will obviously drown twice as many houses so the reality here is when you look and there's a a very famous study in nature that looked at what will happen with hurricanes right now hurricanes cost about 0.04 of global gdp first of all remember that's actually a fairly small number compared to what i think most people would believe if there was no global warming by the end of the century because we're so much richer and so much better at dealing with these problems the damage will only be 0.01 because of global warming creating more heavy storms we will see an increase in the damage up to 0.02 percent so global
warming has a negative impact but remember we actually went from 0.04 down to 0.02 2100 will be a better place but because of global warming it'll be not quite as good as it otherwise would have been myth number three lockdowns this is something that we've talked a lot about on this channel and you hear a lot that 2020 because it was a lockdown year was a beautiful year for the climate because there was such little flying around and relatively few emissions and that actually some people including professor susan mickey who we interviewed on this channel are beginning to think about those kind of measures lock down style measures to combat climate change what's your view on that well the first thing to realize is despite the fact that we shut down the entire world we still emit it almost as much so we probably cut our emissions about six percent globally so by having all this amazing shot down we managed to cut carbon emissions just a little and of course what's happened is we basically assumed past that in 2021 so the net impact of climate from 2020 is zilch it simply and and there's you know studies that tell us we won't be able to measure this at all ever and that tells you another thing namely if you actually want to cut carbon emissions you have to do much more the um tells us and i think it's it's sort of in your face they actually tell us if you want to achieve the targets that we promised in paris you have had you have to have the lockdown that we had in 2020 actually should have been a little tougher then you need the carbon emission cuts equivalent to two shutdowns in 2021 to three shutdowns in 2022 and onwards till 2030 when we need 11 shutdowns now obviously you could do this smarter than what we actually did because the goal of shutdown was not to cut carbon emissions but it gives you a sense of proportion what we're actually talking about if you really want to achieve the paris target i think almost everyone would agree yeah i don't want to go there and that of course emphasizes you're not going to solve global warming by telling people no you're not going to solve this by telling people you can't fly you can't go on your car you can't eat meat you can't do all these things that you like to do because of climate you can try and do it but you'll probably see very very strong resistance so you're saying that 2020 that extraordinary year where as you say the world pretty much shut down only produced a six percent reduction in emissions and that's because we still have to heat our homes you know we sat at home and and did what we're just doing you know assumed instead and and used electricity in that way so the the the amazing thing is and and we don't quite get this when you shut down one thing you end up doing something else and and so yes you can cut your emissions a little bit but it turns out that it's really really hard to shut down dramatically so the the time the day when china was the most shut down china still emitted 84 of its normal emissions because you still have to live you still have to heat your homes and you still have to produce fertilizer for your food and all the other stuff myth number four electric cars so this is the perhaps the most visible sign that you are a you know helpful and responsible citizen you're going around in your electric car it's a zero emissions car as they're described and here in london the penalties for having a non-compliant non-green vehicle are only getting steeper and steeper what is your view of electric cars so electric cars first of all they're wonderful to drive in you know one of my friends has a tesla and it's fun to drive i always drive it when i'm in california so this is not a critique of an electric car per se but it is to recognize that it's going to deliver very little in the short and medium term in the long term it's likely that electric cars will be part of the solution so even when you look at electric cars remember yes they're being sold as net zero uh but what they actually are they're zero when they're driving but much of the energy that you tank up your car unless you live in norway is basically fossil fuel and of course most of the battery is produced and that takes up a lot more energy is produced in china or somewhere else where it emit a lot of co2 uh from uh typically from coal-fired power plants so the reality is the international energy agency estimates that every time you buy an electric car and if you drive it just as much as you would have a gasoline driven car you probably save about 10 tons of co2 so in the eu that's equivalent to about 600 euros in the u.s it's equivalent to about 60 dollars and yet we spend up to ten thousand dollars you know germany is just giving 10 000 euros for each electric car that's a terrible way so you cut emissions that are worth maybe somewhere between 60 and uh and 600 euros and you pay 10 000 for it that's a really bad idea moreover most people don't actually drive their electric cars as much most people buy their electric car as the second car typically in the us rich people drive it for virtual signaling and then you drive down to the uh to the local mall and you feel really good about yourselves but you've actually not cut very much emissions you've just bought an extra car and you mostly bought it for subsidies that other people that is the rest of the uh of the us or the poor will have to help sponsor that's not a very smart or effective way to tackle this problem it's it's still better though isn't it i mean in theory if if everyone in the planet was driving an electric car as opposed to a gas car a petrol car i mean that would be better for the planet right yes it probably would there's a whole other conversation about how do you actually get the enough resources to do all the batteries it turns out that we don't really know how to scale this up there's a huge amount of other pollution issues with mining all the raw materials that go into the battery it probably is but it's not anywhere near what most people think of as this amazing solution right now it's one of the least effective and most costly ways to cut a little bit of co2 and mostly get the rich people to feel good about themselves and surely that's not how we actually want to fix climb myth number five polar bears so this one made me chuckle a little bit because the the image of the polar bear on a small and reducing ice float is one that we are now really quite familiar with every david attenborough nature series seems to end with that it's almost the symbol of the bleak future we're going towards where these beautiful creatures won't have a habitat that they can thrive in in your book you say that the number of polar bears is actually going up well and again i'm just using the polar bear research group who are the ones who've actually looked at the amount of polar bears and the ones who are also talking a lot about the climate impending climate doom for for the polar bears and what we have is uh remember uh uh just 40 50 years ago we used to shoot a lot of polar bears and one of the good things we did was we said let's stop doing that so we've probably gone from somewhere between five and ten thousand polar bears up till today where we have about 25 000 polar bears that by all means should be and tremendous success for uh for conservation instead most people tell us but they're all going to die because of global boring first of all remember the polar bears lived through certainly the last time there was probably no ice on the uh in the arctic which was uh five to eight thousand years ago uh they lived through that so clearly it's not the end of the world for them but also and i think we need to recognize we're still seeing it trending upwards of polar bears and the real thing that just strikes me so absurd is when people are saying we should help save the polar bear by cutting a ton of carbon emissions remember that will save one or two polar bears per year yet every year we shoot almost a thousand polar bears if you want to save the polar bears you know stop shooting a thousand polar bears first myth number six bjorn meat this is one you hear a lot which is that if we're going to be good responsible citizens doing our bit towards combating climate change we should become vegetarian eating meat is in some way very bad for the climate what's your take on that well so i'm a vegetarian so i love the idea of everybody else joining me and and they'll certainly open up my choices at restaurants but the reality is that going meat free is only going to do a little bit for uh climate we often hear that oh it's 50 of your food intake and you only hear the 50 so you can apparently reduce 50 but it's only 50 of your food emissions so the reality is when you look at the total impact it's about so you know take the biggest uh meta study that we have it's about four percent so if you cut out all of your meat and become vegetarian you will cut your emissions about four percent that's not nothing how does what else actually work can i just ask because i've i've never really understood this is the argument against meat that it's inefficient to rear livestock because they take so much carbon and they don't produce very much and therefore it's a kind of carbon intensive thing that you're eating or is it this business of cows actually farting and producing gas directly what is the problem it's both of those so so these studies try to incorporate and remember this is really really difficult so they try to incorporate all the extra land that they use all the extra uh uh grain typically that they'll be eating so all animals are less efficient cows obviously much less efficient than for instance chicken and then you try to average it over what people eat in western diets and then you try to say what would be the similar impact if you then made it up with other uh uh you probably eat more milk you probably eat more cheese you'd mostly eat more protein from for instance soybeans and others what you find then is if you do those two menus you end up cutting about four percent of your other one of your emissions about 12 tons down to a little less than 12 tons so about 11.5 uh tons so that's a little
nice there's two things you need to remember one is that when you go vegetarian we know typically that a vegetarian diet everywhere in in the rich world is cheaper so that means you now save money you don't buy these big you're going to spend that money on other stuff that also emits co2 and so if you take that rebound as the economist call that you're going to spend this maybe on a trip to majorcare or something else you actually end up emitting about two percent of these there's a study from sweden that shows so instead of cutting four percent you'll actually only when you take into account that you're going to spend that extra money you save from being a vegetarian on other stuff you'll only cut about two percent now that's still fine and by all means if you want to go vegetarian that's great and there are other reasons why you might want to do that but you need to realize that this is equivalent to buying about 500 kilos of co2 emissions rights on the european uh emissions trading system which is about 30 euros so for 30 euros you can buy you could you could basically um reduce your emissions just as much and you can eat all the meat you want it gives you a sense of proportion this is not the main way we're going to solve the problem myth number seven wildfires so this is a really serious one because we've had it feels like a really bad couple of years of wildfires california has had some terrible fires and greece uh similarly has been ravaged by these fires and a lot of people see those and think this is global warming this is climate change becoming real in front of us what's your sense of the truth of that well so again we get that feeling you're absolutely right you know we see these pictures and we're constantly being reminded this is global warming so not surprisingly people are very sure that this must be global warming but if we look at the data and again that's what i try to do we've actually seen that wildfire has been declining in amount of burnt area pretty much every year since 1900 so from 1900 we only have model estimates it has gone down from about 4.2 percent of the earth's surface to about three percent every year that's being burned and in the satellite area we obviously have much much better data we have it from 1997 till today uh it used to be about three three point two percent and now it's down so 2021 seems slated to be one of the lowest at 2.5 percent and if you look further in the climate models they also estimate that yes if you only look at co2 you're going to see more fire but if you assume that people are also actually going to adapt to this which is what we've been doing for the last 100 years you will see even lower levels of fire this is very contrary to what we hear so also for the u.s we've seen declining levels of fire for europe we've seen declining levels of fire remember australia we've seen declining levels of fire actually the big australian fire that you saw in 2019-20 that was on the cover of every news magazine and every paper in the world we now have the satellite data and what it shows is that yes eucalyptus forests that are close to where new stations are burnt a lot more but overall australia had one of its lowest burns ever it used to burn in the early 1900s about 12 percent of the area of australia every year uh it it's down to about six eight percent uh typically in the early 2000s in 2019 20 it burnt little less than four percent it was according to australia environment it was one of the lowest levels ever okay so we've gone through quite a few myths there and you've tried to give a bit more of a sense of perspective people will be watching and thinking okay so each of these things doesn't fix the problem on its own but in aggregate maybe they make a difference or what else should we be doing i mean bjorn tell us what is your solution for this problem because global warming is a problem we definitely should find a solution we should recognize first i think that this is not the end of the world because if it's the end of the world you think well we got to throw everything in the kitchen sink at it and we've kind of been trying to do that for the last 30 years and that's the second lesson we haven't succeeded very well while we've you know we now have cop26 we've had 26 cop meetings we've had climate policies since 1992 and we pretty much blown all the promises that we've made maybe we need to start thinking about a different approach and so my argument would be to say don't try to make stuff that is incredibly hard and incredibly expensive that's typically what we've done with both the rio agreement with kyoto and now with paris it's stuff that nobody really wants to deliver that's going to cost everyone a lot of money and so at the end we're going to fudge it not really do it we're going to do a little bit and feel really really poor from it instead what we should realize is first we should have a global carbon tax that's going to be really really hard to do but you know any economist would say if there's a net bad out there you simply tax it so a carbon tax is a smart thing we should have a fairly low one twenty forty dollars per tonne of co2 and steadily rising across the century we will not be able to do that but we should at least try to do something along those lines the correct carbon tax will cut about half of the emissions of the century but it will mostly cut towards the end of the century where it's cheapest to cut and there will be more uh innovation so in reality it will only cut temperatures a little bit so in the standard sets from 4.1 degrees down
to 3.5 degrees that's nice but it's not going to solve most of the problem that's why we need innovation we really need to recognize that we've never solved anything as a global community by telling everyone don't do this if we can innovate cheaper green energy down below the price of fossil fuels we're done we don't have to have all these arm twisting exercises at top 26 and so on because we'll simply have everyone dashing to get these cheaper energy technologies so in reality the most part of the fix on climate change is not going to be about carbon taxes let's try but it's mostly going to be about innovation if you get a cheap innovation everyone will use it so what does that mean in terms of a bit more detail then i mean does that mean wins does that mean solar does that mean nuclear i mean that's the controversial one isn't it where is this innovation gonna come from and where should the investment be directed well if i knew that i'd be a lot richer so i i think fundamentally the point is we don't have that technology right now but we have a lot of opportunities so as you point out solar and wind would be amazing if we had an enormous amount of cheap storage so if we can make batteries and solar or and or wind much cheaper that could be one solution certainly nuclear could also be a a great opportunity remember nuclear doesn't emit any uh co2 it's a base load power that is you can have it on all the time so it has a lot of the right uh sort of parameters the problem is that right now nuclear when you build new nuclear is incredibly expensive so a lot of people are arguing that's the third generation nuclear a lot of people are arguing but the fourth generation nuclear is going to be a lot safer a lot cheaper a lot better you can you know modulize it and all this stuff it's just going to be wonderful i think we should definitely be spending research money on getting fourth generation nuclear but i just want us to realize they also said about the other three generations that they would be incredibly cheap and incredibly safe and they didn't turn out that way so again the point here is we don't know whether solar and wind will lots of batteries or whether nuclear is going to be the solution but they could do be two of the great ones there's obviously also fusion energy which is nuclear i thought the issue with nuclear is first of all it does require uranium or some kind of for fuels from the earth and so it's not totally neutral and second of all because it produces this waste that then needs to be stored somewhere or buried or put at the bottom of the sea it's not actually truly green is that not true so i mean look solar panels uh also produce lots of uh toxic waste uh we we have no idea how we're gonna recycle all the wind turbine uh the uh the plastic uh fibers so everything has an impact certainly if you're going to power the entire world with it but nuclear just like solar wind i'm not saying this to denigrate solar and wind i mean all all big solutions will have problems but they're not insurmountable but fiona i'm waiting for the silver bullet here i mean we we i was saying what are the solutions we say we should do a carbon tax but that probably won't work we should invest in nuclear but hey that's still really expensive and disappointed us last time when do we get to the good news bit well i i think i think the good news is that it is very likely that innovation is the thing that will actually fix this problem for us because there's a lot of different ways that this could go as we talk about solar and wind with batteries it could be fusion sorry fission it could also be fusion which definitely has great potential but also do we know whether this works and there are lots of other ideas just to give you one uh craig ventry the guy who cracked the human genome and back in 2000 he has this plan of basically growing algae on the ocean surface and these algae would be possibly genetically engineered to basically soak up sunlight in co2 and produce oil so we could basically harvest oil on the ocean surface we could keep our entire energy infrastructure but it would be run by zero oil cirrus co2 emissions oil because they just soaked it up on the ocean surface again this doesn't work in scale and certainly not cost effective but through innovation maybe it could become so the point here is not to recognize that there's one particular thing that's going to solve in the next five years but there's a lot of promising ways that potentially could solve this problem and we should be spending much more resources on every one of them remember we have over the last 20 or 30 years we've seen declining levels of investment in research and development into green energy because we've been so focused on saying no no we got to spend money on buying solar panels or buying existing inefficient wind turbines instead of making the next generation of them become much cheaper that's where we should be spending our money so actually obama and all the other world leaders when they met in paris they also met at the sidelines of paris and made what they called the mission innovation they promised to double their investment in research and development into green energy i'm glad to say we were a tiny part of the reason why they did that that was great but unfortunately if they have not lived up to the uk the u.s almost nobody's lived up to this they have increased it slightly but not nearly enough and we probably need to increase it six-fold instead of double it because innovation we know from past experience is the most likely way to fix us so i'm sorry i can't give you sort of oh this is this is the magic bullet but it is very likely that one or maybe more of these technologies are going to be the ones that power the 21st century why do you think that attitude has set in and that the kind of approach you're talking about which is i guess a more optimistic or it's a more technology focused idea that we can actually solve this as we have with previous problems it's become instead more of a moral issue and a sign of you know sacrifice and that we need to change our way of life and and so on why do you think that happened well i think part of it is because it never feels good it never feels right if we just sort of fix it like that remember how we all had to switch our light bulbs our incandescent light bulbs to cfc uh lamps those compact fluorescent lamps bad lighting and took forever to start them and they flickered and all kinds of stuff people hated them but we outlawed them to make ourselves feel like we were doing something then of course right after we actually had an innovation with the led lights that are beautiful light they're much cheaper they're much more effective and everybody has now switched to them we should not shift to the stuff that make that hurts us all but it feels like you're you know you're sacrificing much more you know what the standard argument i i i get against what i'm saying is but it's too late we gotta act right now we don't have time to wait 5 10 or 20 or more realistically 30 or 40 years for these solutions to arrive and i get that if you think this is the end of the world if you think that we just have nine years left and then we're all going to die then clearly we just got to throw everything at this problem but the reality is this is a problem not the end of the world and that's why we can also be much more realistic i would also say though even if we do what people who are very very scared say we got to do everything right now all we're really going to do and what's of course going to come out of cop26 is basically the way to make a lot of nice promises and we're going to default on them like we've done with all the others so in some sense i don't think doing what we've been doing for the last 30 years just louder and more is actually going to solve anything it's going to make us feel good but actually going to end up with us not solving very much of climate change bjorn lomberg thank you so much thank you that was bjorn lomborg the danish writer of false alarm and commentator on climate issues during the next couple of weeks we are all probably going to hear a lot about climate change and all of the terrible things that are going to happen and no doubt many of them are true and we should certainly take the thing very seriously but let's allow room for some alternative perspectives and quite a lot of what bjorn said there seemed pretty sensible to me interested to know your thoughts do comment underneath this was unheard
2021-11-03