https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=vDNSnMTem98
Hello. If you have found the ideas I discuss interesting and useful, perhaps you might consider purchasing my recently released book Beyond Order 12 More Rules for Life available from Penguin Random House in print or audio format. You could use the links we provide below or buy through Amazon or at your local bookstore. This new book Beyond Order provides what I hope is a productive and interesting walk through ideas that are both philosophically and sometimes spiritually meaningful as well as being immediately implementable and practical. Beyond Order can be read and understood on its own but also builds on the concepts that I developed in my previous books 12 Rules for Life and before that Maps of Meaning. Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast. So today I have the privilege of having as a guest Dr. Bjorn Lomborg who I’ve spoken with before on my podcast and who was recently on my daughter’s podcast, Michaela Peterson as well. And I came across Bjorn’s work, it’s got to be six or seven years ago now when I was working for UN panel, the Canadian panel devoted to analyzing economic problems in the United States. seven years ago now when I was working for UN panel, the Canadian panel devoted to analyzing economic problems in a hypothetically sustainable manner. It was for the Secretary General’s report on sustainable economic development, which was I think put out in 2016. Anyhow, while I was working on that project, I read a lot of books on the various environmental crises that apparently beset us, dozens of books and of all the people I read, I think Dr. Lomborg’s work was the most compelling and that was partly one of the things I realized when I was working for this UN committee, we were trying to write the narrative to restructure the narrative regarding what should be priorities for international consideration over the next 30 to 100 years. And what I realized while working on that was that there were very few people in the world that were trained to think at that level. People just don’t have the expertise to do that. We don’t have the methodology. We don’t know how to specify the problems. And we don’t know how to specify the solutions and we don’t know how to read the problems in terms of their, let’s say, the degree to which they’re crucial and we don’t know how to rank order the solutions in terms of their appropriateness. And the only person that I ran across who had developed a methodology for doing this, which is of crucial importance to develop that methodology was Bjorn and the think tank, the Copenhagen consensus that we had in the United States, and I think that was the only person that I ran across who had developed a methodology for doing this, which is of crucial importance to develop that methodology was Bjorn and the think tank, the Copenhagen consensus that we had in the United States, and I think that was the only person that I ran across who had developed a methodology for doing this, which is of crucial importance to develop that methodology was Bjorn and the think tank, the Copenhagen consensus that we had in the United States, and I think that was the only person that I ran across who had developed a methodology for doing this, which is of crucial importance to develop that methodology was Bjorn and the think tank, the consensus center, which we’ll get him to talk about. And Bjorn, maybe you could elaborate, let’s see, there’s lots of problems, we have lots of problems, human beings have lots of problems, some of them are familial, some of them are at the city level, say some of them are at the state level, some of them are at the national level, and a handful are at the international level, and there’s a good rule of thumb, which is that we shouldn’t solve family problems at the international level, right, you should work at the lowest possible level, but some problems are international, and at least you could make that case, and you’ve been wrestling with this since the mid 1990s, and you wrote a whole bunch of books, The Structure of Solutions and the Iterated Prisoners Dilemma, I think was the first one, The Skeptical Environmentalist, which I think really established your reputation and your notoriety for that matter, Global Crisis, Global Solutions, Cool It, Rethink HIV, How to Spend 150 billion on all the big problems in the world, from peacekeeping forces to dealing with malaria and tuberculosis to HIV, to education, to gender equality, to many, many other problems. But we spend in the order of 24 if I remember correctly from your book. And so then that does the problem then is by pointing that out, you belie your other claim, which is that you want to take people at face value. Now you’ve got a real problem in that situation because you can take them at face value with regards to their explicit claims about what they what they’re afraid of, which is global warming. But then equally explicitly, they tell you they don’t want to spend any money on it. And so then you have to wonder, well, which of those two competing claims do you actually believe? I would tend to go with one that actually it hasn’t saying that you’re afraid of global warming has zero cost. Spending money on it has a cost, obviously. So the thing is, as soon as you put a cost to it, then you find out that people don’t appear to believe it. They’re not concerned. So the question then is, well, what what does saying that they’re concerned about by them? And it might be something like, well, this is again not a particularly original thought, but it’s moral virtue to advertise that I’m the sort of person who’s intelligent enough to conceptualize global concerns and empathic and noble enough to be concerned by them. And then you say, well, what are you doing about it? And the answer is, well, I’m not doing anything. And then you say, well, then I don’t buy your claim. But that’s pretty rude. And two people who get together who are both concerned about global warming aren’t going to be criticizing each other’s lack of diligent attention to the sacrifices. They can just embrace one another. And I’m not being entirely cynical about that. I know why people advertise virtue and people are relatively virtuous. And so it’s not such a terrible thing to advertise it. But it does seem to interfere in this particular situation with practical movement forward. Now, one of the things you drive home continually is that there are real costs to getting this wrong. The costs are the money spent and what that money could have been spent on instead. So maybe you could make a case for everyone who’s watching. What do you see as the proper set of priorities? Where do we as a species get the most bang for the buck with regards to these international problems? What are the top 10 things we should be concentrating on? Yeah, so so absolutely. Just to just to give you a sense of the of the of the twenty four dollars you were just talking about before that people are not willing to spend very much. I think that’s one of the reasons why, for instance, a carbon tax is so hard to do. Carbon tax is one of the smart solutions for climate change. But it also makes it very explicit that you’re spending lots of money. So instead, what most people support is that we should be subsidizing green energy, that we should be subsidizing electric cars, that we should be doing a lot of other things that make you feel virtuous. It doesn’t feel like it costs all that much, but it actually ends up costing huge amounts of resources. So so while people saying they’re not willing to spend very much, their sentiment actually allows politics to end up spending huge amounts of money. So this really matters. So sorry, you asked me what are the things we should be spending our resources on? Yeah, and so that also means what are we sacrificing if we concentrate too much on the moral virtue of driving a Tesla, for example, which is a clear status symbol, very expensive and not obviously related to ameliorating climate change. What are we sacrificing? So as long as we are driving this Tesla, because the government, and that’s typically almost everywhere in the world, because the government has spent five or 10,000 that couldn’t go to other things either in our own states, our own nations, where we obviously could have spent, according to what the, the political decision making process would decide, you know, on better education and better education. And better care for our elderly on better COVID care. Right now, there are lots of other things that are demanding attention. But what we tried to look at was, where could you spend this globally? And I’m going to talk about a few things because I, you know, I’m sure we can get back to more of them. So one of the things that we talked about was free trade. So free trade, we know is one of the reasons why almost everyone has gotten rich. The basic point is that instead of me trying to do everything, I specialize, I do one thing, and then I have a baker bake my bread, I have a butcher do my meat, if I’m not vegetarian, and you know, you do all these other things, and you have all these specialists doing it. Having it on an international scale means even more opportunity to have smarter people do what they do best for everyone else. And that’s why we’ve gotten rich. That’s why China has lifted about what 700 million people out of absolute poverty over the last 30 years, which is one of the biggest achievements in the world. It’s impossible not to be very, very impressive, just simply on the humanity of that project. And of course, we should be doing more of that. But unfortunately, we have, you know, for a variety of reasons, Trump is obviously a big part of this, but it’s also, it started way before Trump. The resentment towards free trade, the sense that this was wrong, has not only meant that many people in the rich world has become less better off than they otherwise could have been, but it’s also meant that we have left a lot of people, especially in Africa and South Asia, much less well off. We should be spending some of our resources on making sure that we get more free trade, not less free trade. How do we do that? How do we do that effectively? And the simple way that we do that, unfortunately, is by subsidizing agriculture. So one of the best, most vested interests against free trade has turned out to be agriculture. It’s agriculture in the EU and the US, Japan, many other places, because they don’t want to have that competition. Look, from a private part of view, I understand that. If I was a farmer, I wouldn’t want, you know, cheap, cheap agricultural produce come in and essentially eradicate my business model. So we need to recognize that we need to subsidize these people. We probably also need to subsidize other people, the people who would otherwise have lost their jobs. So there’s an enormous amount of money that needs to be spent. Okay, so I got confused. Are you speaking about eradicating agricultural subsidies in the West or are you speaking about subsidizing agricultural productivity in third world countries or? I missed the mechanics there. Sorry, I’m talking about subsidizing the people who would otherwise block more free trade. So this is basically subsidizing rich Western farmers to make sure that they’re okay with more free trade. Right, so if their livelihood is endangered by the necessity of allowing for competition on the agricultural market, you just buy them out, like you might do with fishermen who are overfishing the ocean. Yes, exactly. And this is not a potential, this is not perfect by any means, but it’s a way to actually solve the problem of getting more of the stuff that will help humanity. Any idea what the benefit is of that compared to the cost? And is that calculable? Yes, so we made the estimate that for every dollar you spend on these subsidies, you will help the world about 1,000 richer per person per year in 15 years. Okay, so wait, we’re going to slow down there because those are unbelievable claims. Okay, so you said to subsidize rich agricultural producers in the West to the tune of a dollar a year buys you 2,000. It’s a 1,000 is a lot better than if you’re rich, getting another 2,000 return. But the question might be how much money would you have to spend advertising now before people would believe it? And that that’s a crew. It’s a crucial question. You know, with a with a standard entrepreneurial product, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to estimate that 65 to 95% of the cost is in sales and marketing. You know, five percent of this production. And that’s a that’s a great argument. So in some sense, you could argue what we try to do with the Copenhagen consensus where we make these priority list is just simply give you the raw data for what would academically be the smartest things to invest in. But you’re absolutely right. There’s no cute and cuddly, you know, selling points to free trade and actually to most of our top outcomes. So let me just give you a few of the other ones. So the second best is family planning and probably also basic emergency care to women. This will deliver about one hundred dollars back for every dollar. Do you think that would also be extremely attractive to people on the left? It should be attracted to everyone. Yeah. Because look, remember that right now about four hundred thousand mothers die in childbirth and about two million kids die in the first 28 days of their life here on Earth. And we know we could save many of these, not all of them, but many of these by simple measures. You know, for instance, making sure that you don’t get that the pregnant women don’t get high blood pressure preeclampsia and eclampsia, which kills more than one hundred thousand women every year by simple emergency measures. When you come into a facility, give birth and you have a problem. If you have simple procedures to make sure that that problem can be dealt with, often with fairly cheap, you don’t need more doctors. You just need nurses or even assistant helpers. You can do a lot of these things. We know that you can do this for very low cost. And then again, if you have there’s about two hundred and fifteen million people, women who don’t have access to prevention. So family planning, if you could get them family planning, not all of them would use family planning all of the time, but it would mean that they would space their kids better. They would be able to give more investment into each one of their kids that would get them better educated. There would be a lot of knock on effects, but mostly this would mean that a lot of moms wouldn’t die in childbirth and their children that they do give birth to would have better lives. And again, we estimate this would cost about three billion dollars a year, but it would pay dividends both in terms of saving moms, saving kids, but also growing the economy because what’s known as the demographic dividend. If you have slightly fewer kids, you have more productivity because you have the same amount of capital. But if you’re kids, that means you get to be faster, richer. That’s essentially what China has done in a sort of boosted way by their one one child policy. I’m not advocating that at all, but it’s a it’s a it gives you a good sort of insight. Then there are lots of health things. We talked about tuberculosis. We could probably spend a dollar on tuberculosis and help people not die, help people being better off, help families not dealing with tragedies of losing their mom and dad. It’s typically, you know, people in their middle ages that die from tuberculosis. Every dollar spent would avoid about forty three dollars of social benefits. Sorry, would generate forty three dollars of social benefits. If you look at childhood immunization, we’ve stopped a lot of the really damaging childhood diseases. So we’ve gone from a world where about 12 million children died just in 1980 to now only about five million children die every year below the age of five. But clearly that’s still way too many. We could probably save a million children for a billion dollars a year. Just think about that. We estimate that for every dollar spent there, you do about sixty dollars worth of good. So, again, the whole point here is to recognize there are lots of lots of amazing things that you can do. I was letting my internal cynic respond to your arguments and trying to adopt the position of someone who might be critical of them. I know that arguments for ameliorating the lot of the poor that were put forth in the 60s were often countermanded by the claims often of environmentalists that you don’t want to help the poor because they’ll breed more. And that will just lead to more of the kind of problems that you’re trying to solve. And so, you know, the question might be why would someone object to saving a million children a year through immunization or I think you said two million children as a consequence of enhanced maternal care. And I can imagine similar arguments like that being raised, you know, whether consciously or implicitly. But those things should be made implicit. So, so let I would encourage people who are watching this or listening to this, you know, a lot of you have chopped up my YouTube videos into small videos and sometimes animated sections of them and otherwise distributed them. Bjorn just outlined for the for the top four investment strategies for a better planet and it might be useful to consider ways that that can be that that information can be distributed as widely as possible. I mean, Bjorn’s writing his books, but those sell at how many books, if you don’t mind me asking how many copies of false alarm did you sell? I think it’s in the it’s 10 15000 thereabouts. Right. So that’s a good that’s a good selling book from an academic book perspective. But it’s a drop in the bucket. Right. I mean, and that’s not a criticism, obviously. What about total for your books? So it’s, you know, two, 300,000. Right. Right. And so well, a good YouTube video will get a lot of people to watch it. And so well, a good YouTube video will get a million views. And if this was chopped up properly, maybe it would get five or, you know, five to 10 million views. So that would be good. But we don’t want to. Have you thought about allying yourself with an advertising firm? So we’ve talked to some of those. There’s been people come in asking, how can we help? Can we help do some of this? And what I find is that when it ends up part partly these advertising firms sort of retract their offers when they start realizing this is really complicated, that they that it’s not just, you know, the the cute polar bear on the ice flow kind of argument. And I get that. And part of it, of course, is also that unlike when you talk to someone who’s just saying, we should do more about this, a good thing, we should save more moms or we should do more about climate change. We’re the guys who actually say you should do this before this. And that’s always antagonize the people. I think it’s the only intellectually honest argument, because we have limited resources. So we’re simply saying, do this first, do this for don’t do this first, don’t do this first. I think that’s important. But that always creates a lot more antagonism. And I think that’s one of the reasons why this is a much harder argument to make. And obviously, my whole book on climate is very much about that. You don’t you don’t have the problem of having to say no, if you stay in the hypothetical, you know, that’s another advantage to not actually trying to solve a problem when you’re making a moral claim that you’re concerned about it. Because you can be concerned about global warming and world poverty and and the lack of education of women and a host of other issues and never make a sacrifice in your concerns as long as you actually don’t try to practically address those problems, because then you’re faced with the horrible necessity of prioritization. And maybe that is part of what makes you unpopular to the to the degree that people are not so much resisting your message, but critical of your approach. You force you force the recognition that that no has to be said in order to make progress forward and that that interferes with a utope with an imaginary utopian vision. But it and it and so that makes that makes romanticizing the venture much more difficult. It doesn’t seem impossible, though. I mean, you could imagine a heart rending and emotionally compelling video addressing the utility of restoring to health someone who was suffering from tuberculosis or preventing it in the first place. I mean, these things don’t seem completely impossible. You haven’t found any marketing or advertising agency that’s willing to partner with you in in the sale of any of these ideas. We found lots of people who who love to jump on board and look, there are lots of videos out there that that tells you how incredibly important it is to do something that tuberculosis and how important it is to do something about maternal health and and about immunization and about malaria and all these other things. I think it’s much more a question of saying, what is it that you overwhelmingly see when you see open, you know, your TV or your look at YouTube? And I think there’s just a level difference in the amount of knowledge that you have about tuberculosis compared to the amount of knowledge that you have about COVID. Certainly now and about climate change and these other things. It’s just simply a question of saying one of them or the two last ones resonate much, much clearer to most people and to a lot of interest organizations, whereas the other one is sort of, yeah, of course, I also think we should do some tuberculosis. Now back to what we were talking about before. Yeah. So the climate, the other the issue with regards to the climate is that the weather affects everyone all the time. If you’re going to talk about some, if you’re going to talk to someone and you don’t really know what to talk about, you’ll make small talk about the weather. And so it’s an immediate day to day concern in a way that even infectious disease isn’t or wasn’t before COVID. And so maybe that’s another reason that the climate issue has occupied the space for apocalyptic attention. If there is a too hot summer or an extraordinarily hot summer, you have an explanation for it. And it’s something that affects you while it’s happening or a too cold winter day or too much wind or too much rain or, you know, any of the extreme weather events that can manifest themselves. So there’s an immediacy to weather that seems to be associated perhaps with the emotional resonance of climate change that’s also perhaps working against these rational arguments. Well, there’s certainly something. So we have research that shows that when it’s hot, people believe more in global warming than when it’s cold. So there definitely is these kinds of very, very simple connections. On the other hand, if you think about it, when you talk about global warming, it’s going to be, let’s say, four degrees centigrade hotter in 100 years. That’s actually really hard to imagine that most people would get very worked up about. And that’s, of course, also what you saw for the first 20 years or so of global warming. What has happened is that shift from the focus on the basic outcomes of global warming to these catastrophic outcomes. So that every time you see a storm, every time you see a heat wave, every time you see any kind of change in weather, people will often say, see global warming. And there, the problem is that that leads you to believe this could be the end of the world. And that’s what I think. And that’s universal explanatory rubric and hard to. So it buys you explanations for weather alterations and it buys you moral virtue. It buys you a sense that you understand the most important problems in the world. And it occupies that apocalyptic space. Another reason that climate change might have become such a concern, because, you know, people have always believed in the apocalypse. And that’s because things can go cataclysmically wrong. And maybe we have a need for a cultural representation of that. And before global warming, we had the Cold War and the battle between the United States or the West, more broadly speaking, and the Soviet Union. That was a pretty plausible apocalypse. And of course, it did garner much more attention or maybe an amount of attention that’s equal to the attention that global warming attracts now. So that doesn’t solve the sales and marketing problem. It just highlights its difficulty. Can I ask you, I noticed you have these prioritizes books, Bangladesh priorities, Haiti prioritizes, Andrew Pradesh prioritizes. Now you’ve opened up your economic team to use by states, correct? Yes. Yes. Can you tell us a little bit about that? That’s another that’s something else that’s extremely practical. And I’d like to know how you do it and what the effect is. Does it work? Yes. Yes. So, so one of the things we found. So we did a prioritization of the sustainable development goals for the UN that we talked about in the beginning. And what’s, what’s sort of very noticeable is if you talk about what should the world do, everybody thinks that’s intellectually interesting, but nobody feels like they live in the world. They, well, we’re Canada, we’re the US or Denmark or whatever. And so you feel like I want something that’s actually relevant for my political conversation. And so one of the things we wanted to do, we also did this in Latin America, with the Inter-American Development Bank, and we found, you know, these are some of the best things to do in Latin America. And then, you know, obviously, Argentina would say, yeah, that’s probably true in Mexico, but not here. We’re special. And, and likewise, Brazil would say, yeah, that’s true in Argentina, but not here. So, you know, the constant, you could constantly get the sense of it’s true somewhere else, but not here. And that’s why we wanted to have this conversation specifically for nations. So we’ve done this for Bangladesh, we’ve done this for two states in India, Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan. We’ve done it in Haiti. We’ve just completed this in Ghana and Africa, and we’re right now working with Malawi. That must be ridiculously exciting and interesting. I mean, it’s such a combination of rich intellectual possibility, because these problems are so compelling. And, and the the potential excitement of actually operating in the real world. Yes, it is very exciting. It’s also at times very frustrating, as you I’m sure you could imagine. So, so what happens is, everybody thinks that this is a great idea and principle. But of course, everyone worries also, what if my favorite things turn out to be not a very good investment, that’s suddenly going to, you know, make it much harder for me to get money for next from next year’s budget. So there’s this right, there’s this sense of, do we want to invest in the real world? Right. There’s this sense of, do we want this to be too successful? On the other hand, the finance ministry often loves this approach, because they’re the ones who get inundated from all ministries and saying, we need more money for this project, we need more money for that project. And of course, politicians also need projects that sell essentially buy some votes. And so clearly, they’re also very ambivalent about this. On the one hand, they want to do as much good as they can for their country. On the other hand, often, the best political promises are the ones that are not very effective. They’re the ones that you can sell because they sound good, but don’t actually work very well. Or that you can put off endlessly and still promise that you’re going to deliver. Or just deliver and do it really badly. So in India, for instance, one of the things that have turned out to be incredibly good vote winner winners is to give forgiveness for loans for small, small whole farmers. You can imagine how that, you know, if I’m a farmer, I put myself in almost impossible debt, there’s a politician who promises he’s going to forget that. That sounds great. But of course, the problem with that argument is that partly they often don’t pay. But what happens is it actually ends up shifting loaning from the very poorest to the not so poor farmers typically to the rather rich farmers, because the lenders don’t want to see the politicians ending up saying, no, we’re not going to keep your your loans on on the books. So you end up spending huge amounts of money, encouraging bad loans, and then not helping the poor when they need it further on. That’s a lose lose lose outcome. And one of the things we tried to point out was, don’t do that. I’m sure we weren’t very successful because it’s an incredibly successful political strategy, but it becomes a little harder to do. And likewise, some of the things that we found were incredibly effective becomes a little easier to do. So for instance, for for Bangladesh, we found and again, this is not this is not dramatic news, but it’s just a really, really good approach to to basically put your procurement online. So, for many states in the developing countries, procurement makes up about one third to two thirds of their budgets. So everything from pencils to roads, but obviously roads are much, much more expensive. So it’s typically infrastructure projects that dramatically corrupt because they lend themselves to be very corrupt. And one of the things we find is, if you put these online, it becomes a little harder to rig the auctions. So in Bangladesh, for instance, you have to hand in a sealed envelope with your bid to a specific government office. And what not surprisingly happened was they put up goons outside that office so the people who shouldn’t come in with a cheap bid just couldn’t physically come in. If you put it online, you can get bids from further afar. It’s harder to manipulate. You can still manipulate, but it gets harder to do so. So what we found was we we took 4% of Bangladesh spending, put it online and actually found you get higher quality, you get it much cheaper. That means you have to spend less money, you get more for your government tax dollars or taxes in Bangladesh. And that saves Bangladesh about 700 million. Some of these things have really, really good long term growth potentials like for instance, getting digitized, you’re getting your land digitized. Some of these are very obvious things like tuberculosis, but many of them also don’t happen just simply because they’re not the right set of things to do right now. So again, our point is not that we somehow magically make Bangladesh right, that would also be impossible to imagine. And look, you shouldn’t have, you know, economists prioritizing the world, you should have economists informing the electorate in Bangladesh, how do you want to run your country, but we help make slightly better some of the proposals help spend slightly less money really badly. And overall, that means you end up in a place where you’re better off. Yeah, it doesn’t make a good t shirt slogan. No, does it? It doesn’t. Spend your money slightly less badly with Bjorn Lombard. There you go. Yeah, no, it’s a real problem. You know, I’ve been talking, I talked about this a little bit with Douglas Murray just a week or so ago about the, about the rise of extremism. Well, it’s a continual problem, but the polarization of the right and the left that seems to be occurring at an ever escalating rate, particularly in the US, but I would say in the West more broadly. We talked about the collapse of grand narratives, you know, the right, the centrists on the right and the centrists on the left, don’t seem to have anything to offer now, except something like incremental and gradualist improvement and they might quibble about how that could be accomplished with the right wingers taking one viewpoint and the left wingers taking another. Whereas the radicals have a much more romantic cell. And so since the right and the left, the moderates can’t come up with a narrative, even one of progress that’s, I think, you know, back, say in the post war period post World War Two, people were still poor enough, broadly speaking, so that you could sell them the vision of a wealthier future for them and their kids. And there was enough gap between where they were and that hypothetical future for it to be motivating. But now, you know, you might be able to tell your, your, your electorate that well we could make things 20% better over the next 10 years. And that’s true and it’s good, but it’s not punchy. And that’s a big problem and I’ve been struggling. I also talked to Matt Ridley, you know, and he’s, he’s a guy I think who thinks like you. You know, he’s fundamentally optimistic in his view and he thinks things are getting better and that we could continue to make them better and that we should continue to make them better. But all of this incremental gradualism, this optimistic incremental gradualism has the same problem, which is it’s difficult to get excited about it. And I don’t know, I racked my brains trying to figure out how that might be, how that problem might be addressed. But I can’t say that I’ve come up with any solutions that seem useful or credible. I don’t, I’d like you to comment on that. I’m sure you’ve thought about it. I think you’re absolutely right. It’s, it is much, much harder to make the argument. Look, we’re going to muddle through, it’s going to be a little bit better. This is a little bit smarter. Please do this, rather than these very grand narratives. And I think that’s exactly what I try to make with global warming. The grand narrative on global warming is this is the end of the world. We got to throw everything in the kitchen sink at this. And the reality is, no, this is a problem. You know, we estimate that by the end of the century, this will cost us about 4% of GDP. So maybe one or two years of growth. That’s a problem, not by any reasonable means, the end of the world. And that’s why you need to be careful not to end up spending lots and lots more to tackle part of this problem. But the reality of course is if we go down the route of these very alluring, but incorrect arguments, this is the end of the world, you know, let’s spend everything on climate change. What really could happen is two things. We end up spending lots of our resources on things that are not very productive and won’t leave us very well off that will cut maybe half or full or maybe one and a half percent of GDP growth from our growth rate. That could be potentially dramatically damaging in 10, 20, 30 years once we’re a lot less richer, a lot less better off. Because remember, one of the things that keeps societies peaceful is that we all have a future to look forward to that’s going to be much better. Once we start realizing we’re entering into a stable state where if you are better off, it’s because I’m less well off, we will get much, much more antagonism. So I think it’s realistic to say if we follow down those alluring roads, we might actually end up leaving our future of our grandkids much less better off. Not just in the economic sense, but also just simply in a wildly sort of rioting kind of way that everybody will be at each other’s throat. That’s one part of it. But the other part is to remember, we’re right now talking about how the West or the rich part of the world thinks about this problem. Most people in the rich world actually think the future is going to be a lot worse off, which is one of the reasons why global warming fits into that whole pattern. I think it’s wrong. That’s also what the model said that it’s even what the UN climate panel says, but that’s how people feel. The other three quarters of the world, which are China, India, Latin America, Africa, they actually believe that their world is going to be much better in 10, 20, 30 years. They have this future belief that you were just talking about from out of the Second World War. They are not going to say, yeah, we’re going to do strong climate policy and become poor. They want to mostly become middle income countries and maybe even rich countries eventually. They will want to do this. So what will happen is both that we’re leaving ourselves in the rich world to become much more infighting and much less well off than we otherwise would be, and that we’re actually seeing the other three quarters of the world just simply running, possibly even ahead of us, but certainly running ahead without looking at the same kind of problems that we are. Okay, so do you think you could make this case? So what you basically outlined there is a hypothesis that ill spent money will have dramatic consequences. I think I can make that argument, but I also feel a little uncomfortable. I’m just the guy who wants to tell you, you can spend a little smarter here. You can spend a little more dumb here. I think there’s something, there’s something I think that’s a little sort of ugly in saying, all right, everybody else is making up their own. So let me make up another one here, because I think fundamentally doomsday scenarios is what got us into these kinds of problems. Fair enough. But you were trying to address the problem of compounding returns, right? So bad economic decisions or poor economic decisions compound with time. And so is it reasonable to point out when we’re talking about risk? I talked with Matt Ridley about this, and I’ve thought about it a fair bit as well. And I think the data support the proposition that making poor people richer is an extremely intelligent environmental move for a variety of reasons. I mean, the first is perhaps that once you get people above a certain level of income, they can start buying fuels that are cleaner than the fuels they learn they use now. Dung and wood and that kind of thing. But also that as people move up the economic hierarchy, they have time to be concerned about things that are more abstract, like what the environment is going to be like for their children, which they’re not going to be or when they go on holiday, for example, you know, or even where they live as as they have some options to choose where to live. And so it could be, you know, we often construe the relationship between the economy and the environment as a zero sum game, right? And the biologists in particular, broadly speaking have the political biologists have a proclivity to do that, that as the economy grows, we sacrifice the environment to it. But it could be the case that we get the best environmental bang for the buck by making the poor rich as fast as we possibly can around the world. And if we make poor economic decisions, because we’re catastrophizing a certain kind of environmental calamity, we’re inviting, we’re actually increasing the risk of environmental degradation in the medium and the long term. Do you think that’s reasonable? Yes, absolutely. So in a number of different ways. So I think it’s funny how we don’t recognize how terrible it is to be poor. If you’re poor, you’re vulnerable in all kinds of ways. You’re very clearly incredibly vulnerable to global warming. So, you know, if you remember, there was a big hurricane hitting Haiyan, the Philippines, and back in 2013, it was made a big deal out of as global warming, it hit this very, very poor city, who, you know, where most of their city citizens live on the corrugated roof. Not surprisingly, having a hurricane five is terrible when you live on the corrugated roof. The best way to help these people obviously would be to lift them out of poverty. What actually is we can see back in the early part of last century, a similar hurricane hit and eradicate about half the city. This time it was only about a 20th of the city. So much, much better because the city was much richer. But if we focused on making them even richer, they would be much better off just simply from the point of view of being more protected from hurricanes. So, you know, fundamentally, there’s something weird about us saying, oh, those poor people in the Philippines, we should help them by not driving our car today. What? No, you should help them by becoming rich, becoming part of the integrated global economy, making sure that their kids would be better educated, not die from easily curable infectious diseases and so on. So not only would it be better environmentally, but it would obviously also be better for them educationally, for them health wise and all these other things. It would simply generate much, much better lives in the Philippines. But as you also pointed out, as you get richer, you’re actually cleaner in almost all ways. You don’t use dung and cardboard and wood to cook inside. But also you stop cutting down forests. You move to the city instead. And you become a web designer or something else that’s very, very little related to actually clearing out forest land. You do a lot of things in cities that are much more ecologically sustainable. And of course, in the long run, you will actually also say, I would like to make sure that we have better regulations, so we have less air pollution, so we have many of the other things that drive environmental benefits. So absolutely, by getting people out of poverty, we fix most environmental problems. But, and this is the important, but yeah, we don’t fix global warming. As you get richer, you just simply emit more and more CO2 because these guys will then start flying around the world. They’ll start consuming a lot more meat. They’ll be doing a lot of other things because they’re richer. That’s wonderful for them, but it will mean higher emissions of CO2. So we do need to have a conversation about how we’re going to fix that problem. Okay, so why don’t you lead us down that path? Okay, well, let me comment a bit on what you just said, and then let’s go down that pathway. Okay, so to swallow what you just said and to believe it, there’s a set of beliefs that you have to have already in place. You have to believe that the current economic system isn’t fatally flawed and basically works, or at least works better than any hypothetical alternatives that have been tried or that we can dream up. So it basically works, and works means as it runs, it tends to lift people out of absolute poverty. There’s still a maintenance of relative poverty, but absolute poverty tends to disappear. And there seems to be really good evidence for that, especially across, well, since the Industrial Revolution, but it’s really taken off in the last 30 years, maybe non-coincidentally with the demise of communism, which was a competing, you know, a competing economic theory. And produced all sorts of bad economic decisions. In any case, you have to buy the hypothesis that the current system works and that extending it is going to be better. And so you don’t get to adopt revolutionary, a stance of revolutionary criticism of the Western capitalist hierarchy. So that’s a big sacrifice if you’re thinking is oriented in that direction. Now, I don’t know really what to make of that because you’d think the evidence that the poor have been lifted out of poverty at an unbelievable, like an astonishing rate since the year 2000, not just in China, but all over the world, would be essentially irrefutable evidence that the current system works and that it’s going to be better. And so, I don’t understand that. Maybe it’s partly because people just don’t know how much better things have gone. And so, I don’t know. It’s not obvious to me how, if you were truly concerned with the poor, you’d be able to deny the sorts of propositions that you put forward. I don’t understand that. Maybe it’s partly because people just don’t know how much better things have gone in the last 20 years and why. Because it has been difficult news to bring forward and it’s difficult to market. If I can just… Yes. Yes. So, one of the things I think people don’t recognize, if you look at it, at a graph of the last 200 years, 200 years ago, almost everyone in the world were absolutely poor in the sense of less than a dollar a day. Yeah, 95% of humanity was below that level. And we’ve just seen a dramatic decline. As you mentioned, we’re now down below 10%. Even despite of COVID, which a lot of people have pointed out, have actually made more poor people. We’ve gone from 7% up to about 9%. And so, we’ve delayed the benefit for a couple of years. That’s terrible. And I would rather not have had that happen. But it doesn’t change the long-term trajectory that’s amazingly downwards in the sense that we have many, many fewer people that are poor. One of my favorite guys who runs the World in Data website, he points out that every year for the last 25 years, the headline of every newspaper around the world could have been, over the last 24 hours, 138,000 people have been lifted out of poverty. 138,000 people every day for the last 25 years. But of course, it’s not news because it happened every day. It was not, you know, some, oh, this day it happened. We don’t get these good news. And I think we need to get them in order to be able to understand the magnitude of what we’re talking about. Well, you know, the problem with accepting that good news or a problem with it is that it pretty much eradicates the romantic rebel. You know, because it all of a sudden makes it very difficult for you to be cool, to find something cool to stand up against and to resist. You know, you have a benevolent, relatively benevolent society that’s getting incrementally better. It’s not a villain that you can heroically resist. And that’s that is I’m not being cynical about that. That is actually a problem because resisting arbitrary authority is a good story. And, and it served people well for a very long time. And if you don’t have that to catalyze your identity, you have to search for something perhaps equally grand. And that’s difficult, especially when you also don’t have to go out and contend with the brute force of Mother Nature. To anywhere near the degree that you once had to. But if you look at it, there’s plenty of other things you could stand up to. And that was what we were talking to. Instead of being the romantic hero that stands up against society. Why aren’t you the romantic hero that stands up against tuberculosis or the one that stand up against maternal death or the one that stands up for free trade or the ones that stand up for all these other things where we know for very little money, we can make a tremendous benefit. So, so again, I get why it’s a problem. That’s a really hard question. I mean, I think it might have something to do also with the inability to utilize your resentment. You know, if you’re resentful about things and you oppose the capitalist state, you can easily identify an enemy. But if you stand up against tuberculosis, like obviously tuberculosis is bad. It doesn’t make you look good by comparison. All right, so you mentioned you do promote CO2 emission amelioration strategies in false alarm. And you did just point out that although we should be striving to make the poor around the world as much less poor as we possibly can, as quickly as we can, so everyone wins, including us. Just like Henry Ford won when he paid his workers enough to buy his cars. They are going to increase the rate of carbon dioxide emission. And for some people, that would be enough reason to scrap the whole enrichment process. But you have some strategies that you think are wise to ameliorate the problems that would be associated with that. Yes, so I talk about five different solutions in the book. So the first one is a carbon tax. Any economist would say, you know, look, you have a problem, you emit CO2, but you don’t actually take it into consideration because it’s free to emit. So that’s how we think about the polluted pays, you put a price on carbon. In principle, you don’t have to pay carbon. You don’t have to pay carbon. You don’t have to pay carbon. You don’t have to pay carbon. You don’t have to pay carbon. You don’t have to pay carbon. You don’t have to pay carbon. You don’t have to pay carbon. You don’t have to pay carbon. You don’t have to pay carbon. You don’t have to pay carbon. You don’t have to pay carbon. You don’t have to pay carbon. You don’t have to pay carbon. You don’t have to pay carbon. You don’t have to pay carbon. You don’t have to pay carbon. You don’t have to You should do this across the world. You should do it so that it slowly rises with time. It’s the most efficient way to deal with it. There’s two things we need to recognize with it. One is it turns out to be very, very hard because it makes it very explicit to people that tackling global warming is actually costly. Secondly, we know that politicians are just really, really bad at doing something for a long time, very consistently across all areas. What politicians typically end up doing is they’ll put it on something. So, you know, in many places in Europe, for instance, you have enormously high taxes on cars. And you have enormously low taxes on people who are good at lobbying their governments for their particular interests. So, you know, greenhouse gardeners, greenhouse growers don’t have to pay the carbon tax because that would make it really hard for them to grow their tomatoes or whatever. And you can see how this happens across a wide range of areas. So, that’s one part of the problem. The other part is that even if you do this really, really well, it’ll only solve a smaller part of the problem. So, you should do this. We should focus on a carbon tax, but we should also be realistic. This is not what’s going to fix climate change. This will fix a smaller part of climate change. So, it’s part of the solution, but it’s not the most important part. The second part, and that’s where I think we actually have the biggest opportunity, is innovation. So, if you talk to Matt Ridley, this is certainly also his ballpark, but it’s basically recognizing that most things that we’ve solved in this world are about innovation. So, you rarely get people to solve a problem by saying, I’m sorry, could you please not do all that cool stuff that you like? Could you please stop feeling good about all of that? That rarely works out as a political strategy. Unfortunately, that’s typically what we say. Could you please not fly, not eat meat, not do all these things? Could you please have it a little hotter in the summer and a little cooler in the winter? That’s really, really hard to sell to most people. What you need is innovation. And let me just give you an example. Back in the 1950s, Los Angeles was one of the most polluted places on the planet because there are lots and lots of cars, and they have the special sort of geographical notion that just leaves all of the pollution inside this little basin of Los Angeles. It was terrible to live there in many ways. And obviously, the simple answer is to tell people most of this came from cars. So, the simple answer would be to say, stop driving your car. Of course, if you’ve ever met someone from Los Angeles, you know that that’s not a solution that’s actually viable to them. Well, there aren’t even any sidewalks. No, it’s not really viable for anyone in any city. What did solve the problem was the innovation of the catalytic converter. This little thing that costs money, you put on the exhaust pipe, and then basically you have much, much cleaner cars. That made it possible for people to keep their cars, drive a lot, and have much, much cleaner air in Los Angeles. Now, I’m not saying everything is perfect in Los Angeles and there’s still air pollution problems, but it made it a lot better for very little money. That’s the way that we need to solve global warming. If we could innovate the price of green energy down below fossil fuels, and this green energy could be nuclear, it could be fusion energy, it could be solar or wind with batteries, it could be lots of other possible solutions. If we could innovate one or a few of these solutions down below fossil fuels, everyone would switch. You wouldn’t need sort of a Paris Accord where you have to twist everybody’s arm. Let me ask you about that for a minute. So, it’s not a straightforward matter to set up governmental policy to support innovation. I mean, innovation is a very abstract idea and I’ve seen much evidence of failure at the governmental level here in Canada. When governments have set out to foster entrepreneurship and to seed the development of high-tech industry, for example, generally it’s a cataclysmic failure. I mean, obviously, it’s self-evident in some sense that a good idea is good because it solves a complicated problem, and the more good ideas we have, the better. But do you think that it’s, like it seems on the face of it, unless you dig down into the details, it seems like hand-waving. Obviously, we should have better ideas to solve our problems. But what do you think constitute concrete, realistic, evidence-based solutions to the problem of fostering innovation? Do you think it’s actually possible to set up policy that does that? Yes. So, the short answer is yes. And the reason is that what’s lacking is mostly long-term investment. So, investment that will only generate the solutions in 20, 30, 40 years. Remember, this is why we invest a lot of money in health care of basic research that then eventually becomes research that, for instance, pharmaceuticals can make into products that they can make money off of. There’s always too little investment societally in things that you can’t monetize right away. So, it’s very hard to invest in things that you can’t monetize right away. Yes. If I make an innovation that then in 20 years, say, will help us generate this enormously beneficial breakthrough. Unfortunately, I won’t get any money because my patent has run out. That’s why most companies will not be investing in these long-term development. What happens is that you then have a dearth of investment into these terms, these sorts of long-term innovations, unless you have the public invest in them. And I’ll get back to how we do that smartly. Okay. But we do that in medical research. For many reasons, people recognize this is part of the place where we need to produce lots of professors, lots of medical Nobel laureates, and then eventually the pharmaceuticals will take over and actually make products out of this. That’s a great setup. We don’t do this in energy. For a variety of reasons, it is one of the places where we spend very, very little money, partly because it doesn’t feel like you’re solving global warming because you’re not solving it right now. You’re only solving it in 20 or 40 years. That feels like you didn’t really care. But the reality is this is the only way that we’re going to get these sorts of long-term breakthroughs. Now, one reason why politicians often screw this up is because they are not willing to invest in these long-term investments. They’ll say, we want a Silicon Valley in Canada in three years. That makes sense if you need to get re-elected in four, but you can’t do that. You shouldn’t be trying to do this in a very short-term way. Another way is that you end up giving this away to companies. Companies, of course, are just going to spend it on the product that they were going to do next year anyway. But hey, thanks for the money. The point here is you need to do this carefully in a way that will generate long-term innovation. This is not easy. You are going to waste a lot of money. But we know that governments around the world have done this in a variety of different ways. We know, for instance, the internet, the transistor, the fracking in the US. There’s a number of places where you have been successful. All we have to do is to spend lots of money, and I’d love to talk more about specifically how we should set this up, how we should evaluate it, and we should be careful about it. But fundamentally, we should do this in a way that we say we want to generate a lot of knowledge that we believe in the long run can deliver benefits that will actually help companies produce energy that will be viable. But we are not going to try and do this for the next three or five years. We’ve got to stop that panic mode and start this long-term thinking. We do have realistic knowledge about both that we’re investing very little compared to typically almost all other areas and that more investment here would make it more plausible that we would faster get cheaper green energy. Okay, so in Canada, there’s a medical research council and a social sciences research council and the natural sciences and engineering research council. That might be a bit dated, that information, but essentially that’s how it’s been set up. But there isn’t an energy innovation research council. I’m thinking that way because I’m an academic and I’ve seen these granting agencies, I’ve seen how they work and they’re set up to provide funds for basic research. Something like that doesn’t exist. So why aren’t we funding research into energy, into the generation of cheap and clean energy? What’s gotten away? Every year we want to spend it on solar panels that makes us feel like we’re doing something right now. The surprising thing is in 2015 when all countries signed the Paris climate agreement, climate agreement on the sidelines of that event, Obama and 20 other global leaders, Bill Gates and lots of billionaires actually signed another agreement that I’m happy to say we were a tiny part of pushing, which was we’re going to double our investment into green energy research and development. So all countries both promised the thing that you heard about, namely, we’re going to cut our carbon emissions, but they also promised to double their green energy investment in five years. So in 2020, they did quite a bit of the cutting carbon emissions. They did nothing of the increased spending in green energy R&D. And I think fundamentally because it doesn’t feel like a solution. It doesn’t feel like something urgent. It feels like something you can do next year. It feels like something that’s nice to have, but putting up the solar panel is urgent and we need to do it. The reality is the over worry about global warming that we have because we have this existential feel that this could be the end of the world. Surprisingly also, not only is wrong, but it also leads us down the wrong path, namely the path where we say, let’s do anything that just makes it look like we’re doing something next year, rather than actually laying the groundwork for fixing this problem. Now, obviously, and some people will say, well, we should have done this 20 years ago. And yes, that would be wonderful. We should have done that, but we didn’t. It’s sort of too late to do something about what we should have done 20 years ago. But we can do something about what we’re going to spend our money on in 2021. And if you look, for instance, on Biden’s proposal to fix climate change, he’s thinking about spending $2 trillion. You’ll probably not get to spend all that money on a vast array of things, many of which are not going to be very effective. But he’s also saying he wants to dramatically increase, actually, I think probably too much, but certainly a very, very large amount of increase in American spending on R&D. This is what he should be focusing on. But I do worry that he’s going to end up having much more success with all his other much less effective proposals simply because they are more glamorous. All right. So you don’t seem to be an admirer of the Paris Accords. And so my sense of your argument is that the proposals that are part of that accord are extremely expensive, and they’re not cost effective, especially when viewed in this larger framework that encompasses a whole host of problems instead of focusing just on climate change. And so maybe if you don’t mind, you could summarize your, could you lay out your critique of the Paris Accords for us? Yes. So two things. The Paris Agreement is really just an extension of what we’ve been trying for the last 30 years and failed to do the last 30 years. Namely, let’s try to do something that’s really hard, that costs a lot of money, that will have a little bit of impact in 100 years, and try and see if we can’t get everybody to do it. Not surprisingly, that’s a really, really hard thing to get going. And to do what? And to do what exactly? So basically get Canada, get the US, get Denmark, get everybody else to cut their carbon emissions, which privately for them is going to be costly. They have to reduce their use of cheap energy and use a little bit more expensive energy, sometimes less reliable energy. Basically, it puts a slight slower dampener on their economic growth. That’s always going to be hard. That’s always going to be unpopular. You’re basically asking people, could you please pay some more and use a little bit less? That’s a hard sell. Not surprisingly, you do a little bit of it. You typically don’t do a lot of it. You don’t live up to all of your promises. But even if you do, so let’s just take the Paris Agreement. Even if everyone did everything they promised to 2030, that would cut as much CO2 that if you run it through a climate model, it would cut temperatures by 0.025 degrees centigrade by the end of the century. So literally nothing. We wouldn’t be able to measure it. As compared to that magnitude of increase. So it’s about four degrees temperature rise. We’ve already seen one, so about three degrees more. So this would be a trivial part of reduction. Now, it would be a reduction. It would mean we would have less problems because global warming is a problem. So we estimate there would be benefits. But there would also be huge costs because you’d actually have to pay for this. So if you look at how much you’re going to pay, which is in the order of one to two trillion US dollars per year in 2030, for every dollar spent, you will avoid climate damages across the centuries worth about 11 cents. That’s a very poor way of spending money, paying a dollar and actually achieving 11 cents. You could just have paid out the dollar and done almost 10 times as much good in the world. So the reality here is the Paris Agreement is a really well-intentioned agreement, but it will fail just like all the other agreements. So Rio, Kyoto, and all the other national policies that we’ve done, it’ll mostly fail. But even if it succeeded, it would be a very expensive way of achieving very little. And this, of course, is the big problem of the climate conversation that because we’re so worried, we’ve decided, yeah, we’re not going to spend all that much money on all these other problems in the world, tuberculosis, all this other stuff. But we are going to spend one to two trillion dollars. Remember, it’s not going to bring us to the poor house, but it’s a lot of money. It’s one to two percent of global GDP on something that will basically not bias any measurable impact in a hundred years. That’s a bad deal. That’s why we need to do better. Okay, well, that’s a good place to sum up, I would say, unless you think there’s something particularly important that we didn’t cover. I would have liked to have heard perhaps more description of, you know, you listed out the top four things or the top five things that we could be investing in where there’s a huge bang for the buck. But people can get that directly from your website or your book. So, yes, we’ve I’ve shown you this before, but we have a whole folder. I’m sure you can put that up where you can actually see all the different investments here. And you can see for everyone again. So, like, yes, yes. So, so I’ve been talking with Bjorn Lomborg today, the author of False Alarm, and we’ve been talking about global governance, I would say sustainable global governance with an emphasis on two things. And one would be economic growth, which means alleviation of absolute poverty for those who are poorest and some increment in wealth hypothetically for the rest of us, which seems on the face of it to be a good thing, especially at the lower ends of the distribution and discussing also how that might be done in the most appropriate ecological manner, keeping in mind the host of other problems that have to be solved. And Dr. Lomborg has developed a methodology for assessing and rank ordering the problems that we face at an international level and as well at a national level. I’m going to interrupt my summary for one thing, how what’s been what’s been your experience with regards to your success in those countries where you’ve gone in and done this prioritization? What’s been the practical consequence of that? So we’ve very clearly so we’re an organization look at how effective are you? So obviously, we should be looking at how effective are we? Yes, in what we do. Also, you know, I’m using my life on this, I’d like to know that actually has an impact. So yes, we are effective. So what we found is in these countries will change some of those policies, and will change them somewhat towards being smarter, not by any means the whole way or anything, but towards better spending. And because most nation states spends billions of dollars on making lives for their own citizens better, if they just change a little bit of their increased spending, as they get richer over the years, that will have a much, much bigger impact. So to give you a sense of proportion, the whole project that we do costs about two and a half million dollars. And we probably have impacts in the, you know, we change hundreds of millions of dollars, possibly billions of dollars in spending. And each one of those dollars will have impacts in the order of somewhere between five and up to 20 to 30 dollars more, well off. Okay, so that’s, that’s great, you know, because what that actually indicates is that a rationally designed program aimed at incremental gradual improvement, actually works extraordinarily well, it isn’t revolutionary by any stretch of the imagination, but as a strategy, it pays off extraordinarily handsomely. I wish I, for many reasons that I hadn’t been so ill for the last while, because I was going to lobby hard for the utilization of your team here in Ontario and, and in Canada, and I suppose that could still happen in the future, hypothetically, but I’m very, very pleased to hear that the consequences have been positive, and also that you had the fortitude and methodological integrity to include an evaluation of your own process in your evaluation process. There’s a rule for social science intervention, which is almost never followed, which is don’t intervene without assessing the outcome of your intervention. It’s a mistake, it’s an ethical error and can have terrible practical consequences. Okay, so back to the summary. So Bjorn’s team has rank ordered and prioritized a whole set of global concerns. They’ve also started to work at the state level, the country level instead of the international level, as we just discussed, that’s also paid off. And all of this lays out a lovely pathway, I would say for people who, for people to inform themselves about those issues that they could adopt as salient to themselves politically and ideologically to provide some meaning for their life, some practical meaning, and to actually further the development, further positive development in a whole host of areas. And so if you’re interested in that as a viewer or listener, then I’d highly recommend Bjorn’s books, but more importantly his approach and some intelligent investigation as to the methods of that approach and the consequences. And so more power to you as far as I’m concerned, that’s for sure. And I was very pleased as always to talk with you. Is there anything else that you’d like to tell people before? So if you wouldn’t mind, I’d love to just, because I tried to go through the five things that you can do, so I’m just going to really quickly mention the last three. Is that okay? Yes. And then I’d love to also make one more point about my book. So we talked about carbon tax and innovation. Innovation is crucial. You should also focus on adaptation. It’s sort of a naughty word in much of the conversation on global warming, but very clearly adaptation is going to be one of the big ways that we’re going to fix many of the problems. It’s going to happen to a large extent simply because people do that. If you’re a farmer, you’re going to plant later or earlier, depending on the climate changes, and eventually you might plant something else. You should also look at geoengineering. We talked about that very briefly, but basically the idea of saying if there were to be a really catastrophic impact, geoengineering is basically a way of making sure that you can restore the temperature of the earth very quickly at fairly low cost. We should not just go ahead with it, but we should certainly be thinking about it. That’s all I’m going to say about this right now. The last bit, and we also talked extensively about that, is to make sure that prosperity is also a big solution to climate change. Most of the things you’re impacted with, you’re impacted with because you’re poor. If you’re really poor, everything hits you hard, but climate hits you hard as well. If you’re rich, you’re much, much less impacted. Very clearly, the question is, do we want to help Bangladesh a little bit by cutting carbon emissions and basically then leaving them poor, but hey, at least sea levels rose this much less by the end of the century? Or would we rather make sure that we actually leave Bangladesh much richer, which means that they’ll be much better able to handle hurricanes, that they’ll be much better able to handle sea level rise, and so on? There is a very strong basis of evidence that shows that prosperity is actually much better for most countries, not just because it’s wonderful in all kinds of other ways. You can avoid your kids dying and make get them better education and all these other things, but also for climate. Those were the five points, and innovation is by far the most important thing. I just want to say one last thing about, because my book is very much, we’ve talked a lot about all the big problems in the world. The reason why I talk about global warming is because it is the one thing that I experience, most people actually talking about all the time is this existential threat. This is the big thing that we should all be concerned about. Certainly, a lot of people, the UN Secretary General, many others are telling us this is the top priority for humanity, because if this is going to eradicate all of us, surely this should be the thing that we focus on. I think that makes intellectual sense, if it was true, but that’s not what the UN climate panel is telling us. It’s not what the science is telling us. It tells us this is a problem, by no means the end of the world. That is not only important because you can’t really get to all the other things we were talking about, unless you stop believing this is the end of the world. If this is the end of the world, you are going to set everything else aside. Also, of course, it’s the only way that you can actually get a better life. When you see all these kids being really worried about, am I going to have a future when I grow up? People believing literally that humanity is going to end, that must be terrible. Now, if it was true, we should be telling people, but it’s not true. Therefore, being able to relieve yourself from that scare is also really, really valuable on a personal level. This book was written not just to make sure that you can get rid of the scare, but also that you can start realizing this is a problem among many others. Now, let’s think about how do we prioritize? That’s what I’m hoping this conversation will help us. In a sense, you could say the false alarm book is the stepping stone to be able to have that more general conversation, namely, what is it that the world should be prioritizing if we’re not scared witless about global warming, but actually see it as it is a problem among many problems. Great. Well, that’s a really good place to end. Thanks very much. I hope we get a million people to watch this and another 500,000 to listen to it. We’ll see how it goes. Thanks very much for talking to me today, Bjorn. It was a pleasure listening to you. I always learn a lot reading your books and listening to you. It’s very nice to come across sources of realistic hope. That’s what your books provide. They provide sources of realistic hope. Man, those are in short supply. Even though there’s lots of reasons to be hopeful. Perhaps the supply shouldn’t be so short. It’s nice to be able to maintain critical intelligence and not to have to descend into a well of pessimism as a consequence. Yes. It’s wonderful to talk to you. You give me a lot of different perspectives on what we’re doing, which is just as valuable. You’re stuck in your own little way of thinking about this. It’s wonderful to say, oh, yeah, there are all these other perspectives and all these ways that you also need to have that conversation. It’s great. It’s always wonderful to talk to you. Thank you.