#617 - Dr Bjorn Lomborg - Climate Alarmists Are Getting It All Wrong

26:57about 15 % of them need that shove in the back end to get them going. Okay, and then they start gasping, right? But the last 5 % actually need a little mask and then you pump air into their lungs and then they start breathing and they survive. This little bag, it costs what $60 or something and it can save 25 kids over a period of two or three years. Why don't we have this? And there's part of the solution is, or part of the reason is that this is not a high priority thing. If you talk to politicians everywhere, politicians typically being old, often also men, they'll want cancer hospitals or stuff that they and their wives and others die from.

27:43And maternal health is just far down the line. It's also, you know, this little back, that's not fun. If you've ever seen, if you haven't, you should, the machine that says ping, do you remember that one from the Monty Python? It's a Monty Python sketch where they're giving birth to, they're helping a woman get birth. And, but the doctors and the administrators only really focus on all the expensive machines they have. And especially this one machine that says ping. And that's really, you know, there's something, oh, the woman. So, you know, doctors love, and I totally get that, right? They love, you know, the exciting stuff.

28:25And this mask thing is just not one of them. So what we're trying to say is you should invest in these cheap, simple things. It turns out that the total cost is about $4 .9 billion. Two billion of that is women's time. So that's actually not money that we need to come up with, but it's of course still a cost because we need to get women into Facilities to give birth instead of giving it back home because then they have that emergency option of opportunities in the hospital But so for about five billion dollars a year we could make benefits that would basically say 1 .4 million lives It's say to 166 ,000 women each year at say 1 .2 million kids How amazing is that?

29:11And the cost is so, or the benefit is so great, that each dollar will deliver $87 of social good. So those are the kinds of things they're slightly boring, they're not things you usually knew about, but they're just incredibly effective. They're not climate change, but there is something in some sense much, much better because they actually work right now. they'll help a huge chunk of people either getting better off as an education or just simply surviving and they'll make life much better at very, very low cost. Let me do a little recap here to make sure that I've got my brain in order. So the first person that I learned about why climate change is such a powerful existential risk from is Mike Salana that writes pirate wise, the sub -stack.

29:59And what he said was that he was talking about demographic collapse and he was saying that there's no smoke in the sky There's no plumes. There's no hurricane. There's no forest fires. Nothing galvanizes people to get after it What it seems like that you're saying here is there are lots of very boring very unsexy very kind of behind the scenes no press release Solutions that we can spend money on which will do the thing that ostensibly a lot of climate activism is trying to do. Presumably the reason that people are doing climate activism is because they want to save human lives. People proselytize about the fact that they want to save human lives specifically in the most poverty -stricken regions.

30:41You don't care about poor people's son and so forth. But my time with Alex Epstein taught me that a lot of the green policies that are being enacted hurt people from poverty significantly more than they do developed countries. So when you're doing this climate approach, when people are obsessed in climate as the highest, the longest lever point in order to affect people from poverty, they are applying a salve to everything which actually needs a slightly more targeted response. They are spending money in a way which doesn't benefit and cause positive changes in the now. It is an investment which takes a very long time to pay off which may be benefited facilitated by technology advances in the future.

31:24There are more targeted solutions that we can do to people that are in these poverty -stricken areas. But because of the cultural hold, that climate alarmism and activism and green new deal and 169 different targets has taken hold of, it's very difficult to pull any one person out of this because you have a cohesive group where if one person decided to retract you'd say, you don't care about the climate, you don't care about poor people and you go, and actually, no, I'm doing a thing that cares more about poor people. It's more effective for poor people than what you're doing, but it doesn't seem that way, which means that they would then get lambasted, which is a disincentive for them to go and then do it.

32:03And all of this together gets rolled into, how do we spend money to achieve the goal? And presumably, the goal is human well -being, human flourishing, an acceptable standard of living for as many people on planet as something like that, right? while fast doing it. I would say the goal is a better world and that could be a lot of different things that could be that you're better off materially. It could be that you don't die and it could be that you have a better environment. And we try to balance all of those. It turns out that it's very much hard. When you ask people, it's not very surprising, they care a lot more about not dying than they care about having more wetlands.

32:45And so much of the effective stuff that we have is either getting people out of poverty or getting the amount of death So in this regard climb I I loved your summary and Are off was I was I wrong with much? No, no, I think that's that's great and and one more thing You know when people say and this is absolutely true climate change will affect the poorest the most That's absolutely true But what you have to remember is everything bad effects poor people most Yeah, so they're most affected by infectious diseases or bad environments or any kind of hurricane whether it's a cost -pensive and in -on -reliable energy access?

33:25Absolutely. And so the main point is there's something slightly odd about the whole idea of us saying, you know what? I see you, you talk to some person who's really poor and you say, I really care about you. I want to help you. I'm not going to drive to work tomorrow. And oh, and sorry, and that will actually mean that I won't emit CO2, which will mean in a hundred years your descendants will be much warmer, but slightly less much warmer. That's just that just seems almost careless. You know about these people. The real point is that why wouldn't you want to help them now? And by making them better off, of course, you will also make them more resilient to climate and to all these other things that they're child.

34:11with. So again, it's an efficiency conversation of saying, do you want to do a lot of good or do you just want to feel good? I hope that a lot of people actually want to do good. But yes, you're absolutely right. It's really, really hard to have this conversation. And I think it's also important to just take a little bit of a step away from climate change. It's not just climate change. It's also a lot of other things. People care about plastic straws and the ocean stuff. I think That's great. But again, you know, let's get a sense of proportion here. There's one other solution. There is 1 .4 million people that die from tuberculosis every year.

34:51Last year, tuberculosis was again the world's leading infectious disease killer. Yeah, COVID disrupted that in 2020 and 2021. But yeah, this has been a huge it's killed a billion people over the last 200 years. Every fourth person that you well we didn't know but in the 1800s had died from tuberculosis and yet we fixed in the rich world and then we sort of think oh it's fixed everywhere. No it's not. And again because we fixed it we know very very well how to fix this is about making sure that there's enough medication that people keep taking. You have to take it for six months so it's actually somewhat complicated.

35:33Most of us forget to take our pills after two weeks when we get better. And then you need to overcome some of the stigma and you need to make sure that people actually get found, the people who are sick. There's about 11 million people who are sick every year, but we only identify about six million of them. And that's what keeps the infection going because there's a lot of people who don't get diagnosed and hence either die or just pass on the tuberculosis. This again would cost in the order of $5 billion a year, but the benefits in terms of saving, so over a long run, we'd save about a million people in the short run because you actually need to ramp it up.

36:14We'd save about 600 ,000 people. Yeah, that's still pretty damn good. And imagine we could do that for every dollar spent would do $46 worth of good. So yeah, the point that we're trying to keep saying is that there's these amazing things that we really make a huge difference and that would also make people more concerned about all of the things, you know, when you get out of poverty you'll actually start caring about climate change. And of course as you point out, also reliable energy is incredibly important. It's one of the things that means that we are not affected by, you know, incredible heat waves or incredible cold waves because we can cool and heat our homes.

36:56And not surprisingly, most people, for instance, in sub -Saharan Africa, want that as well. Not primarily because of global warming, but simply because it's really uncomfortable if it's very, very warm or very, very cold. And it's always been that way. Now we've made it a little more uncomfortably warm and a little less uncomfortably cold in Africa. Overall, it's still a big problem and they would want most of the heating and cooling anyway. The point here is if you get well off or if you at least get out of poverty, you're much more likely to actually have good life and you know be able to afford the stuff that'll make it possible for you and your kids to start learning and and doing better.

37:36I saw a tweet from you that said, cold kills much more than heat. Each year, heat kills half a million people, but cold kills 4 .5 million people. How does that work? How is it in nine times more deaths from cold than there is from heat? So this is very well established. This is from the world's first estimate of a truly global estimate. We have very bad data from many places in the world. We have lots of great data for rich countries, but we only have mediocre data for a lot of poor place in the world. This is from the Lancet magazine. And so what we know is that if you look at cross temperatures, If it's very cold, people die more.

38:18If it's very warm, people die more. And so what they're basically looking at is they say, where do you die at the least? And it turns out that there's an optimal temperature almost every one of the planet, it shifts so. So in England, it's what? Eight degrees in India, perhaps, why I don't know, 20 something. Degrees centigrade, and I'm totally lost in Fahrenheit. But cold, England, and warm in India. And the point is, most of the time we spend time below the optimal temperature. That is colder than the optimal temperature. That's why most people actually die from cold, especially in the cold week months of the year, people, especially old people, will stay inside if they're not really wealthy and typically old people suffer more in this way.

39:06They can't afford to keep their home quite as heated as they'd like. And so what happens is when it's cold, your body constricts the blood vessels to keep your inner core heat, but that drives up your blood pressure. So we know everyone has high blood pressure and winter time. And that means you have much higher chance of getting a stroke or a blood clot or many other complications that sometimes lead to a death. And because this happens for literally almost everyone on the planet, this is makes for a lot of deaths. You know, it's not, it's like smoking deaths. It's not something that you take a smile and then you die, but it's something of a statistical correlation.

39:53This is what all the people who've looked at heat and cold deaths say when it gets really hot, you die or you have a higher risk of dying. And when it gets cold, you have a higher risk of dying. Unfortunately, most of humanity spends way more time being a little too cold. So the amazing thing is, if you look at India, because they've done studies for India as well, India, you'd imagine a lot of people die from heat, but actually, again, about seven times more people die from cold. And this is because it's very easy to die and very easy to see when you die from heat because you die right after you die within the next 24 hours.

40:35That's why heat waves are great TV. But cold waves, you don't die the next day, you die over the next 30 days because you've constricted your blood vessels, you've increased your risk of heart attack and then maybe 15 days down the line, you get this heart attack. But yeah, it doesn't show up on CNN. The problem here is, again, that we're guided by what we see on TV, rather than what the evidence actually tells us. Now, this doesn't mean global warring is not a problem, because global warring will mean we'll have more heatwaves and we'll have fewer cold waves. In the short term, it actually turns out that that's good for mankind overall, because we'll see more heatwaves, that would mean more dead, but we'll see fewer cold waves, and because many more people die from coal, that'll actually be a benefit for mankind.

41:27Over the long run, of course, eventually, will run out of coal deaths. And so it may turn out to be a problem. The other part is it's much, much easier to avoid heat death than it is coal death. Because heat death, you really just need access to a conditioning for like, you know, 48 hours or so. We know you can open up the malls, that kind of thing. There's a lot of ways that you can make sure people get more cooling for avoiding cold deaths, you need heating on for months on end, especially for poor people. And that's one of the reasons why not having access to an off -energy is actually really, really harmful.

42:05There's a wonderful study in the US that looked at what happened when you had fracking the fracking revolution. Fracking revolution meant that gas prices dropped to about half as much. that matters because the vast amount of people in the US use gas for heating. And so they estimate it, what that mean that gas became cheaper? Well, especially poor people kept their homes better heated. And that, of course, means they die less. The net effect this study estimate is that every year 11 ,000 people didn't die in the US from cold deaths. You saved 11 ,000 deaths from cheaper gas. And so there's something weird about the way that we worry about.

42:46Oh my goodness, the heat dome and 800 people died. That's absolutely something we should be concerned about. But we should have sort of a sense of proportion that, you know, fracking probably saved 11 ,000 people every year, every year, about, you know, so about 20 ,000 people died from heat in the US, but 170 ,000 people died from cold. why are we only talking about the heat deaths and not the cold deaths? You've run a couple of numbers previously to do with education, to do with tuberculosis, etc, etc. What is the return on money when it gets spent on climate and green movement? So it depends on how you spend it.

43:31So the best analyzed data is for the EU. they had a 2020 climate policy and that has been sort of looked back at and we've analyzed in a lot of different ways and the simple answer and this is wrong in the sense that there there's so much uncertainty that is zone in an order of magnitude estimate is that every dollar spent avoided about three cents of climate damage. It could actually have been 30 cents back on the dollar if we'd been really really lucky it could also have been even less but it It was not a good deal, right? Instead of spending a dollar and doing three cents of good, mostly poor countries in a long time from now, you could just have given away the dollar and done, 97 cents more good.

44:19Most climate policies are very close to one or below one. So they do very poorly. And that's basically because politicians love to put a lot of restrictions on, no, no, no, no. you can't solve climate change with nuclear power plants, which would be somewhat cheaper, or switch from cold to gas, which would often be a net positive for people. That's something that people would actually want to do, as the US did in the 2010s. Instead, they say, no, no, you have to put up solar panels or wind turbines, which are often fairly expensive. So the estimate is that most climate policies is somewhere between 10 cents back on the dollar, and maybe even a dollar, maybe a dollar and a half.

45:03So you can do pretty good policy, but typically you don't. There is one policy that's incredibly good. So we actually did a whole project just for climate, together with 50 of the world's top climate economists and three Nobel laureates to look at, where can you spend a dollar and do the most good just for climate? So not talking about, well, you could do something about tuberculosis or something else, just for climate. It turned out that the best long term policy was investment in green energy R &D. And this is not very surprising really because imagine if you could come up with innovations that would make green energy cheaper than fossil fuels.

45:41Not the cheaper that we're saying right now that still needs hundreds of billions of dollars and subsidies from the inflation production act or something. And the reason why China and India and everywhere else is only taking up a little bit of this. But actually cheaper, which of course would mean that people would just jump on it. You wouldn't need any big summits. People would just do it themselves because it was cheaper. If we had those kinds of breakthroughs, this could be fourth generation nuclear. Again, there's a lot of reasons why fourth generation might actually fail is at the end. But imagine if fourth generation was just vastly cheaper than anything else.

46:19China, India, Africa, everybody would just buy it. And tons of it and the world would decarbonize. It wouldn't be the complete solution because there's lots of other ways that we need to decarbonize apart from electricity, but it would be a big part of it. So the point is, this is the solution that we've always used. If you think that there's a good story back in the 1850s, the world was basically running out of whales. We were hunting whales almost to extinction because whales happen to have this wonderful whale blubber that burns really, really brightly. So, most rich people in Western Europe and North America would keep their homes lit with this wonderful new whale blubber.

47:04It was much cleaner, much nicer, far, much brighter. I mean, the solution to saving the whales wasn't to tell everyone, I'm sorry, could you go back to the dirty old stuff that doesn't burn as well. You couldn't convince people to do that. What you did convince them with was that we found oil. And so we found oil first in Pennsylvania and then everybody else, everywhere else. And you could basically make the same clean burning oil product, but without having to go out in the middle of the ocean and kill whales and just get a little bit of blower, which was incredibly more inefficient. So fundamentally, innovation saved the whales.

47:41Instead of telling people, no, you have to do without. We came up with an innovation that was better. We've done that in many other ways, you know, back in the 1970s when everybody worried about there not being enough food for people. The solution was not to tell anybody, I'm sorry, could everyone just eat a little less and then we'll send it down to the poor people? The solution was the green revolution, the guy who actually got the Nobel Prize for this in 1970 in Norman Blollock. He was the leader of finding ways to make seeds more effective. And so he basically made these new higher yield seeds.

48:20They would, you know, delivered two or three times as much rice or wheat or corn per acre or per hectare. And so you could basically give this to poor people and they could make more food themselves. This is what saved, for instance, India and many other countries. There's this Y India has gone from, you know, basically a basket case in the 70s to now being the world's leading rice exporter because we innovate it then. So it's not again about saying, oh, you know, be a little more hungry, then we'll save the world. No, it's about technology. And that's how we're going to save global warming. That's going to, how we're going to fix global warming by innovation.

48:58If we can come up with technologies that are cheaper and less carbon intensive, we've already done one, you know, fracking, which basically made a very cheap gas, which has meant that the US has switched over from coal to gas. Gas emits about half as much. That's a great climate solution. It's not the final climate solution because gas is still emitting CO2. And so we need to go further. But you know, surely that's one of the first things we should do to get sure that Europe, that Africa, that India and that China starts fracking so that they can also switch away from coal and start using gas instead and become much cleaner and emit much less.

49:37So again, the point here is simply to say, there are smart ways to do this and there are dumb ways. And unfortunately, we seem to be insistent and say, no, we're going to do the dumb stuff, which will be incredibly costly and actually not work. It's strange to think that the biggest point of contribution that you can make as opposed to try to wipe your finger or get a Swedish girl to wipe her finger and say, you should change, this is something that you should do, it's just offer up a solution that people are naturally going to want to do because the incentives end up being aligned. What you're trying to do is force people through shame or guilt or sad imagery to do something that they fundamentally don't want to do and you know, incentives will as incentives do, basically.

50:24Like people are going to end up aligning themselves with what it is that they want. You were talking there about the whales. I also saw a tweet from you that said, the polar bear population is increasing. Polar bears were intensely hunted, but in 1976, the world banned much hunting. The polar bear population recovered and now is at its highest in six decades. Yeah. And again, this is to simply a question of a saying. This is not saying that overall climate change might actually be a problem in the long run for polar bears. I think the science is much less clear than what they want to tell us. But there is undoubtedly a problem.

51:01But that we are so focused on making climate change the only problem. And so we're somehow thinking, no, no, no, I want to help save polar bears. So I'm going to, you know, not drive my car tomorrow, which is just like the weirdest kind of connection that, you know, in a hundred years, maybe I'll, I, and everybody else in the US will save a quarter of a polar bear. What wears, if you actually cared about Polar Bears, we should stop shooting them. Now, the amazing thing is that every year, so there's about 26 ,000 Polar Bears in the world right now, and every year we shoot 700 Polar Bears. If you worried about Polar Bears, stop shooting Polar Bears.

51:47Now, it's not rocket science. And so again, I simply try to point out what works and what doesn't. I actually forgot to say just on the research and development for green energy, we also did a cost benefit analysis in that. And of course, it's very, very uncertain because you're basically making arguments about what's going to happen the far future. But what we estimated was with world's best minds was that every dollar spent will do 11 dollars of social goods. So essentially, by investing one dollar on green energy, you will help push forward the day when green energy will be so cheap that everybody will switch over, which will then reduce climate damages and long run About $11.

52:30That's a great investment. It's not as great as some of these other things I'm arguing for But it's still a great one. It's by far the best one we can do in climate also There are again as we said before you need to account for the fact that we have this Desire to be seen as altruistic and empathetic and so on and so forth. You need to account for the biases that everybody's got at the moment. And one of them is we should be focusing on climate. So perhaps it's still within the realm of climate, but it's the highest leverage point of doing that might be a nice halfway house to get people to think a little bit more nuanced about this kind of a problem.

53:10Yeah, and look, I really appreciate those thoughts. We've tried for a very long time to get people to think about stuff that's fundamentally boring but incredibly good. And we tried all of these different things. So what we're trying right now is simply to say, we made all these promises. We're going to fail on pretty much all of the promises. If we can't do it all, shouldn't we do the smartest stuff first? So we're simply saying 12 amazing things. Just to give you a sense of proportion, if you add up all of these, it'll cost about 35 billion dollars, there's another six billion in social cost that you know the mom's waiting that kind of thing But we need 35 billion dollars 35 billion dollars is basically couch money, right?

53:55Yeah for the world. This is almost nothing You know, we spend what three times as much on cosmetics globally every year So yes, we could probably afford 35 billion dollars a year the benefit would be that we would avoid 4 .2 million deaths each and every year. We'd save 4 .2 million lives, and we'd make the poor, poor half of the world, 1 .1 trillion dollars better off every year. That's almost one dollar per person per day in the poor half of the world. Are you not just screaming at the walls in your office every day with these figures in your hands and with, you know, these campaigns that everybody else is putting out.

54:40You must just be losing your, you must want to throw yourself off the roof. Like why? Why? Well, I clearly haven't. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's no praise to your sanity for sticking up with it. I, I think, yes, we have a saying at the, in my think tank, the Copenhagen consensus that, you know, we would love for everyone to be incredibly rational. But, you know, We'd love for everyone to do the right thing, but actually we'll settle for just people doing it slightly less wrong. And you know, there's a lot of reasons why we don't get it right. A lot of it is just simply we're ecotistical creatures, right?

55:19I mean, fundamentally most so David Hume back from 1700 You know, he would describe how we he would sit and reading the paper and read about a big earthquake in China that killed you know hundreds of thousands people and then he'd cut his thumb on the on the paper. He'd be a lot more focused and he's no different from the rest of us. Of course, that's how we, you know, we act. We just care a lot more about, you know, I just cut my thumb. But it doesn't mean we're uncaring people. It just means we're, you know, sort of limited caring people. And so I just want to get our attention to at least saying, all right, look, you're gonna spend most of the money on yourself and you're going to spend some of them and really silly stuff and that's fine, that's how the world is.

56:03But when we're not, when we're actually saying, I want to do this because I want to do good in the world. That's, as you pointed out, sometimes when people talk about climate change and many other things, when they talk about plastic straws and everything else, when we really want to do good in the world, then let's really do good in the world and not just end up feeling good about ourselves. And if I can push people a little bit to the smarter solutions, I would love us to do all 35 billion dollars, but I'll settle for Elon Musk saying, I'm going to do that one thing or whatever it takes. So we're throwing out these 12 amazing things and hoping some of it will stick.

56:43How dumb of a policy is net zero? It's an impossible policy. Well, look, in the long run, we'll probably get to net zero. I struggle to believe that we won't be net zero in a couple of centuries, but for 2050 or some of these states that are talking about it even before, it's just absolutely bonkers for two reasons. One of them is we don't have the technology for at least half of it. Even if we had, it would be fantastically expensive, which of course is why most people We'll talk about it, but most people don't actually want to do it. There was a wonderful story in Politico just today about Germany where they say that most Germans would love to do all their climate goals.

57:33But they are somewhat skeptical about paying for all of that. And that's sort of the basic dilemma of most of these things that you talk about this stuff. But then if you actually realize how much it's going to cost, you can see that there's going to be nobody saying yes to this. There's one study of how much it was from nature, how much it cost for the average American to reduce carbon emissions by 80%. And the cost would be, so pretty far from net zero, by 2050 would be more than $5 ,000 per person per year. So if you're a family of four, that's $20 ,000 for you every year. And if you want to go all the way or they couldn't actually get the model to do it all the way, it would cost more than twice as much.

58:23So fundamentally, this is just not going to happen in any realistic sense. McKinsey did a study for what it's going to cost to go net -series. They estimated like many others have done. If we do really smartly, which we won't do, but even if we did, it would cost, you know, in the order of 5 to 6 trillion dollars a year. It would cost India about 9 % of its GDP every year. Remember, the total budget intake in India is about 12%. So they'd have to spend almost their entire budget on net zero. Of course, they're not going to do that. So we just got to get to grips with the fact that we're talking about these policies that are absolutely fanciful.

59:05And even if we did, just remember, if everyone in the rich world went net zero today and stayed that way for the rest of the century, it would reduce temperatures by about half a degree centigrade or one degree Fahrenheit. So yes, it would be noticeable, but it wouldn't have fixed most of the problem. That's of course because the vast majority of emissions are going to come from China, India, and Africa. forget who are all places that want to get much richer. So again, we have no sense of proportion here. Net -series both impossible and it's probably also a net -series by 2050 or something is an incredibly ineffective way to help the world.

59:48It's a good idea to say we want to fix climate, but I think there's something long in saying we want to fix climate to the extent that we're just going to leave off a lot of the money that could have helped save a lot of other stuff. And it's also wrong to tell people we're going to go down a road that will eventually make every one of you yellow vest protesters because it's just going to be so expensive. So there's a limited amount of time, resources, money, energy, focus that can be spent on looking after the world. There are trade -offs between going green, stopping poverty, health, pollution, women's education, child mortality, etc., etc.

1:00:30At the moment, the most widespread of these, whether it go to public campaigns, political campaigns, government talks, stavos conferences, the ability to click that button to offset your carbon when you fly on a plane, the ability to round up and donate money to greenpeace or whoever it might be, all of these different vectors could be pointing at places that were longer levers, ones that would give you a better multiplier on all of these. Given that we have what seems to be a culture of altruism, right? That's like one positive white -pilled way of looking at what's happening. People want to make an impact.

1:01:12The problem is that the less sexy risks and the ones that galvanize them more poorly, what is a way that you foresee of trying to get people to buy into your 12 points? So I think there's one thing, and we've talked about that in several different ways, you need to get people off the ledge. If climate change is the end of the world, of course that's the only thing you should worry about. AOC said it very beautifully when she was talking about, there's only 12 years left, It's been a recurrent phrase, at least since 1972, when the UN first told us we had just had ten years left. We only have twelve years left, she said, and you're worried about how we're going to pay for it?

1:01:59That makes perfect sense. If the world was really ending, this is the only thing you should be focused on. It makes sense if you believe you're on the edge. And so we need to first pull people back. And that's what I've been trying to do. You mentioned the polar bears, the fact that a lot more people die from cold and heat. I have another graph that I love, which is basically how many people die from climate related disasters. So we have pretty good data at least for the last 100 years. And in the 1920s, on average, every year people die from climate related disasters of cold cold and heat and drought storms, floods and extreme temperatures.

1:02:45About half a million people died each year, a hundred years ago. Now, most people would certainly, when you look at the presentation, think that that had increased since then. It's actually dramatically decreased such that in the last decade in the 2010s, it was 18 ,000. Last year, it was 11 ,000 people globally and mind you, we've for droopled in size. So actually the individual of risk has gone down even more. We have seen a decline of about 98 % in total deaths from climate related disasters. This is nothing to do with climate. This is everything to do with the fact that when you're richer, you're more technologically advanced, you don't die as much.

1:03:27You're more resilient. We've just simply become much better at dealing with whatever nature throws at you, which is one of the reason why we should make sure that the rest of the world also gets out of poverty so they can get the same benefits that we're having. But the reality here is once you pull people back from that ledge, you can then start talking about, now, all right, so what do you want to do? Do you want to, you know, not drive your car tomorrow and help a hapless guy in 100 years and a tiny, tiny amount? Or do you want to do something really, really effective right now? And once you point that out, once you've taken away the end of the world, I think it's a lot easier to get people to start realizing, oh, wait, there's some really, really good stuff here.

1:04:11But what I'm trying to do with this particular thing, and that's because I've, you know, this is what I've been saying for 20 years and failed. So what I'm trying right now is basically to say, look, whatever else you're doing, I'm simply saying, why don't we spend $35 billion? us, couch change, you know, spend all the other stuff that you want, but let's just spend this tiny, tiny, tiny amount and make the world immensely much better. How about that? And I think even a lot of people, you know, even the AOCs of the world would also say, sure, I'd love to do that. And then let me go back and worry about climate change.

1:04:44And that's fine. That's sort of another way that, you know, I would probably still disagree with her. But, you know, fundamentally, I want to get everybody on board with this boat. We've made all these promises. We're not actually going to deliver. Why don't we at least do the really smart stuff that's incredibly cheap first. Where should people go if they want to support these efforts and try and make some sort of an impact themselves? So there's a number of different ways. First of all, I'm an academic, so I'm not, we're not looking for money to do this. We're not the right guys to go out and actually fix tuberculosis.

1:05:17Then it's a stock TV or it's a red cross or many, many of these other organizations. It's also very much about getting your politicians to think about this. It's also just about getting that conversation going. So I'm really hoping that when people watch this, they'll simply start having these conversations with their kids or their peers or grandparents around the tables and say, why aren't we focused on these things? I'm coming out with a book next month. It's also available on our website, but it's still working on it. We're publishing this in 35 papers around the world so you can go to our website.

1:05:56It's called CopenhagenConsensus .com slash half time. And that's basically because we're at half time but nowhere near halfway, right? So we're basically saying let's do the smart stuff now. You can also follow me on Twitter and obviously I'm hoping to help give that sort of input that will make you better at pushing all the other people to become slightly more aware that this is how we should be spending our money. Because at the end of the day, this is not gonna happen unless also everybody, I live in the same country as Greta Tonberg. I think she's a great girl. I really have a lot of respect for her because she's heard the message loud and clear, the world is ending, and it seems like nobody's doing enough.

1:06:43So I understand why she's doing what she's doing, but I would love her to then say, why aren't we doing the real stuff first? right? So if we could take away some of the fear, I think a lot of people like Red Attember could actually start saying, I want to do the real stuff. And then of course, we could actually get our politicians to do a little, yeah, a little less of the dumb stuff and a little more of the smart stuff. You know, I really appreciate you. I like the fact that you are very measured with the way that you put this stuff across. I think that you need to be delicate when sort of broaching this topic with people because you'll just trigger a response that's going to get them to dig their heels in and ignore what you're saying.

1:07:20I think it's definitely the right demeanor and the right sort of rhetoric to go about this stuff with very much looking forward to the book coming out. And yeah, I really hope that this has opened a lot of people's eyes. Every time that I speak to someone that's got a measured response when it comes to how we should be dealing with current problems facing the world, it just gives me a glimmer of hope. So congratulations for doing that. Dude, I really appreciate you. Thank you for your time today. Thank you, Chris.