WEBVTT - Bjorn Lomborg: Patient Zero of Climate Denial 0:00:01.040 --> 0:00:05.800 What's badly introducing my podcast, Sophie's ashamed to me. I'm 0:00:05.920 --> 0:00:08.799 Robert Evans hosted Behind the Bastards, the podcast where every 0:00:08.800 --> 0:00:12.160 week we talk about a different terrible person in exhaustive detail, 0:00:12.680 --> 0:00:16.000 and I come up with an introduction that's either embarrassingly bad, 0:00:16.239 --> 0:00:19.680 entertainingly bad, or just plain lame in in. Today it 0:00:19.760 --> 0:00:23.920 was the latter. Sophie agrees with my guest today, Eric Lampere, 0:00:24.160 --> 0:00:27.120 Eric Helosa, how are you doing today? I'm doing really good. 0:00:27.160 --> 0:00:29.400 Thank you. I'm actually very excited about this because I 0:00:29.880 --> 0:00:33.320 don't often get thrown into a podcast without any prior 0:00:33.360 --> 0:00:36.040 knowledge of what's going to happen. Well, that's the way 0:00:36.080 --> 0:00:37.839 we like to do it here. Yeah, we like. We 0:00:37.920 --> 0:00:40.519 like our guests are are subjects to be a mystery. 0:00:40.560 --> 0:00:42.600 The guests are a mystery. That would be very a 0:00:42.600 --> 0:00:45.840 different podcast. Yeah, that would be Robert Evans invites people 0:00:45.840 --> 0:00:47.839 in off the street. I also like that you've got 0:00:47.840 --> 0:00:50.239 a machete on the table, just just to let me 0:00:50.280 --> 0:00:52.519 know who is boss here. Well, now you know, this 0:00:52.560 --> 0:00:55.600 is a very democratic machete. Anybody can use the machete 0:00:55.600 --> 0:00:57.720 for any purpose if you feel the need to hit something. 0:00:58.160 --> 0:00:59.880 I have it on good authority that all of the 0:01:00.000 --> 0:01:02.680 equipment in here can be hit with the machetes. That correct, Sophie. 0:01:02.680 --> 0:01:04.839 We're allowed to damage all the equipment, all of the walls, 0:01:05.160 --> 0:01:09.480 the windows, the poison room. Well, technically can can be. 0:01:09.720 --> 0:01:12.640 It is possible. I mean theoretically, this is a big machete. 0:01:13.240 --> 0:01:17.080 He's right, I think you want something would probably be 0:01:17.160 --> 0:01:18.560 throwned upon. I'll tell you what, I don't want my 0:01:18.600 --> 0:01:21.560 fingerprints on there. I don't know. I don't know you 0:01:21.600 --> 0:01:24.960 well enough to know what you're gonna do. I had 0:01:25.200 --> 0:01:28.480 very different plans. I had very different plans for what 0:01:28.560 --> 0:01:32.280 to do with the machete before you said that, Well, 0:01:33.959 --> 0:01:35.840 I don't know who to guess to joke about murdering, 0:01:36.120 --> 0:01:38.680 Um damn. That would have been a great time to 0:01:38.760 --> 0:01:42.520 joke about. Good old Yeah, good old fashioned murder. Speaking 0:01:42.520 --> 0:01:46.480 of good old fashioned murder, today, we're talking about new 0:01:46.640 --> 0:01:49.200 fangled kinds of murder, the kind of murder where you 0:01:49.320 --> 0:01:51.560 just talk to people and write bad books and it 0:01:51.640 --> 0:01:55.639 leads to unspeakable human suffering and possibly millions of deaths. 0:01:56.280 --> 0:01:58.200 Isn't that a cool thing to talk about? That's one 0:01:58.240 --> 0:02:00.280 hell of a murder. Yeah, it is. It is the 0:02:00.280 --> 0:02:03.120 guy that we're talking about today. The actual death toll 0:02:03.200 --> 0:02:05.840 from his work can't quite be quantified yet, but I 0:02:05.880 --> 0:02:09.440 think one of these days he'll be recognized as real 0:02:09.480 --> 0:02:14.320 piece of shit. I'm gonna start with a little bit 0:02:14.320 --> 0:02:16.480 of a winding introduction, so I hope you'll forgive me 0:02:16.560 --> 0:02:20.239 for that, Eric. When I was sixteen years old, Michael 0:02:20.240 --> 0:02:23.120 Crichton released State of Fear, the second to last novel 0:02:23.160 --> 0:02:25.160 he would publish in his lifetime. Now, I was a 0:02:25.160 --> 0:02:27.640 big fan of Crechton's work ever since stumbling across the 0:02:27.680 --> 0:02:30.440 Lost World in second or third grade, I dutifully devoured 0:02:30.480 --> 0:02:33.320 his canon. State of Fear was decidedly different from his 0:02:33.360 --> 0:02:35.560 prior works, though. The plot was that a group of 0:02:35.680 --> 0:02:39.640 radical environmentalists using experimental technology were attempting to create a 0:02:39.680 --> 0:02:42.400 series of natural disasters in order to convince the public 0:02:42.400 --> 0:02:44.960 of the dangers of global warming, because of course it 0:02:45.000 --> 0:02:49.920 wasn't real now. The book was filled with graphs and 0:02:50.040 --> 0:02:53.359 charts and like quotes from actual scientific studies, which is 0:02:53.480 --> 0:02:57.160 not common for a sci fi techno thriller. It included 0:02:57.200 --> 0:02:59.920 a thirty page bibliography, all of which was angled at 0:03:00.000 --> 0:03:02.519 convincing the reader that global warming was not that big 0:03:02.520 --> 0:03:06.760 a deal. Actually cool book. Yeah. While a work of fiction, 0:03:06.800 --> 0:03:09.680 State of Fear also served as Crechton's manifesto against what 0:03:09.720 --> 0:03:13.920 he called the politico legal media complex should politicize science 0:03:13.919 --> 0:03:16.880 and unjustly scared people about the dangers of climate change. 0:03:16.960 --> 0:03:21.680 So the fun book to read at age sixteen. Crechton's 0:03:21.680 --> 0:03:24.040 work was a massive success, as most of his books were, 0:03:24.120 --> 0:03:25.840 because the man did know how to write a crowd 0:03:25.880 --> 0:03:28.160 pleasing thriller, even if it was a crazy piece of 0:03:28.680 --> 0:03:33.800 anti climate change propaganda. Received widespread praise from conservatives. Senator 0:03:33.880 --> 0:03:36.960 Jim im Hoff declared it required reading for the Senate 0:03:37.000 --> 0:03:40.560 Committee on Environmental in Public Works. He called on Crechton 0:03:40.600 --> 0:03:45.280 to testify before said committee in two thousand five. Yeah, 0:03:45.440 --> 0:03:48.640 if you want, If you want, like a real nutshell 0:03:48.920 --> 0:03:52.680 encapsulation of how fucked American politics has always been. The 0:03:52.760 --> 0:03:56.320 Senate called on a science fiction the author of Jurassic 0:03:56.360 --> 0:03:58.920 Parks to testify on climate change. That was the guy 0:03:58.920 --> 0:04:03.200 that blends for dogs with dinosaur d n A. They've 0:04:03.240 --> 0:04:06.480 not seen Jurassic Park, jesssic Park two three, jesssic World. 0:04:06.760 --> 0:04:10.320 It's bound to lead the disaster, Yeah, exactly. They trust him, 0:04:10.440 --> 0:04:12.920 how can they trust him. It's like if you had 0:04:13.080 --> 0:04:15.920 if there was like a clown focused terrorist group and 0:04:15.960 --> 0:04:18.640 you called Stephen King to speak to like like the 0:04:18.640 --> 0:04:22.120 Senate about terrorism and stuff because he wrote it. But 0:04:22.560 --> 0:04:24.280 I guess King though it would be interesting to get 0:04:24.320 --> 0:04:25.880 into his mind. I'd love to have him in the 0:04:25.920 --> 0:04:28.640 sort of c I A or FBI table. Yeah, I 0:04:28.680 --> 0:04:30.880 do feel like King would actually have some insight into 0:04:30.920 --> 0:04:34.480 the mind of a terrorist. Yeah, isn't Einstein that says, 0:04:34.520 --> 0:04:37.480 you know, the true sign of intelligence is not knowledge 0:04:37.480 --> 0:04:42.640 but imagination. And potentially maybe that's why Crichton is trusted. 0:04:43.040 --> 0:04:47.080 He was not a dumb man, although like he had 0:04:47.080 --> 0:04:49.440 a very specific kind of intelligence. Michael Crichton, A lot 0:04:49.440 --> 0:04:52.159 of people don't know this. Um was a trained doctor. 0:04:52.520 --> 0:04:57.160 I forget he went on he created Yeah, he's the 0:04:57.200 --> 0:04:59.720 creator of the R And he was a medical student. 0:04:59.800 --> 0:05:02.200 He at his m d and then kind of piste 0:05:02.200 --> 0:05:04.280 off the college. He got his m d. Yet because 0:05:04.279 --> 0:05:05.960 he then didn't work as a doctor and went on 0:05:06.000 --> 0:05:08.520 to become a science fiction author and like apparently just 0:05:08.560 --> 0:05:11.479 got the m d so that he could like write 0:05:11.480 --> 0:05:16.120 good science fiction about medical stuff like um terminal strain 0:05:16.200 --> 0:05:18.560 or whatever the hell that book was um, but yeah, 0:05:18.600 --> 0:05:20.839 so he's he's he's not a dumb man, but he 0:05:20.920 --> 0:05:22.480 has This is the kind of problem you let come 0:05:22.560 --> 0:05:24.640 up with a lot, especially in the global warm and debate, 0:05:24.680 --> 0:05:27.120 people who are not dumb but have a very specific 0:05:27.200 --> 0:05:30.320 kind of education and intelligence, and then assumed that they 0:05:30.400 --> 0:05:34.120 understand climate science. That's like, yeah, that's what this episode 0:05:34.200 --> 0:05:39.479 is really about. So yeah, Crichton Yeah, was called upon 0:05:39.560 --> 0:05:42.080 to testify before the Senate Committee on Environmental in Public 0:05:42.120 --> 0:05:44.880 Works in two thousand five. In two thousand and six, 0:05:45.040 --> 0:05:49.400 the APG awarded Michael It's Journalism Award, which sounds impressive 0:05:49.440 --> 0:05:52.400 until you learn that the APG is the American Association 0:05:52.440 --> 0:06:00.560 of Petroleum Geologists. Yeah, famed unbiased source sub climate journalism. 0:06:00.880 --> 0:06:04.119 Actual climate scientists, of course, did not like State of Fear. 0:06:04.360 --> 0:06:06.360 Several of the people who authored studies that crit and 0:06:06.440 --> 0:06:08.400 used to prove his points even spoke up to complain 0:06:08.440 --> 0:06:12.800 that he completely misinterpreted or outright misrepresented their research. Peter Doran, 0:06:13.000 --> 0:06:15.680 author of a Nature paper on cooling in the Antarctic, 0:06:15.839 --> 0:06:18.520 echoed the concerns of many when he complained, our results 0:06:18.560 --> 0:06:21.440 have been misused as evidence against global warming. This is 0:06:21.440 --> 0:06:23.719 a famous study that cited by anti climate change people 0:06:23.720 --> 0:06:26.440 that how like there's ice and like one of the 0:06:26.480 --> 0:06:28.600 poles is increasing and they're like, look look at these 0:06:28.600 --> 0:06:30.760 ice sheets are actually getting bigger. So and it's like, 0:06:30.760 --> 0:06:33.160 well no, but the other one is getting smaller. In 0:06:33.200 --> 0:06:35.800 the total amount of ice lost from the polls does 0:06:35.839 --> 0:06:39.960 not over like doesn't doesn't like they don't balance out. 0:06:40.000 --> 0:06:44.240 We're net down a shitload. Eyes thank you, Sophie. So 0:06:44.279 --> 0:06:47.000 if he's correcting my mic placement, because I'm here in 0:06:47.040 --> 0:06:49.640 the office this time and she gets to micromanage me, 0:06:50.720 --> 0:06:56.960 but I love. I was just saying, I thank you. 0:06:57.000 --> 0:07:01.600 Is this shattering Greek pillar that's a shattering ashes from well, 0:07:01.720 --> 0:07:04.159 there's it's from a couple of places the Roman empires where, 0:07:04.440 --> 0:07:07.799 but they also there's there's big bronze ones up on Congress. 0:07:09.400 --> 0:07:13.320 It's a symbola. Yeah, sorry, Sophie, I didn't mean that. 0:07:14.520 --> 0:07:16.960 I'm just gonna go cry. I've heard Sophie. Do you 0:07:17.000 --> 0:07:19.720 want to hit something with a machette? I wouldn't hand 0:07:19.760 --> 0:07:25.720 that to me, right, Well, I'm just trying to make 0:07:25.800 --> 0:07:29.840 your podcast better. Well, Sophie, I want everyone to hear 0:07:29.920 --> 0:07:32.880 every single word that you say. Robin. Now you've shamed me, 0:07:32.920 --> 0:07:35.960 and now I feel bad. Great, continue, I'm once again 0:07:36.000 --> 0:07:38.880 the bastard of my podcast. Which is it takes one 0:07:38.920 --> 0:07:40.560 to know one that you have to dive into the 0:07:40.680 --> 0:07:45.320 character to truly understand the complexities of bastardry. As Nietzsche said, 0:07:45.560 --> 0:07:48.720 if you stare into the abyss long enough, eventually you 0:07:49.040 --> 0:07:55.800 hurt your boss's feelings. Natsch was a very poetic man. Yeah, 0:07:55.840 --> 0:07:58.800 he was a great podcaster, a little bit at very 0:07:58.840 --> 0:08:02.960 anti semitic really, but it was a different time podcasting 0:08:03.040 --> 0:08:05.720 was in this evolved an art form. I didn't even 0:08:05.760 --> 0:08:08.000 know how to record things. Anyway, I should continue with 0:08:08.040 --> 0:08:10.960 the episode. Uh so. Peter Duran, author of that Nature 0:08:10.960 --> 0:08:13.040 paper and Cooling in the Arctic, complained that yeah, that 0:08:13.520 --> 0:08:16.360 Crichton had misinterpreted his results and misused them as evidence 0:08:16.560 --> 0:08:20.000 against global warming. The American Geophysical Union, which includes more 0:08:20.000 --> 0:08:24.000 than fifty scientists, stated unequittically that state of fear quote 0:08:24.080 --> 0:08:28.120 changed public perception of scientists, especially researchers, and global warming 0:08:28.160 --> 0:08:31.640 towards suspicion and hostility. This is a big books, like 0:08:31.720 --> 0:08:33.960 number one on the charts. For quite a while, it 0:08:34.040 --> 0:08:36.160 was like a very popular release that had a real 0:08:36.240 --> 0:08:38.760 negative impact on global warming. And this is the place 0:08:38.840 --> 0:08:41.839 where I admit shamefully that young Republican Robert Evans found 0:08:41.840 --> 0:08:44.280 this book deeply compelling. Of course, even then, I was 0:08:44.280 --> 0:08:45.760 a bit too savvy to take the words of a 0:08:45.800 --> 0:08:48.200 science fiction author as the end of the argument against 0:08:48.360 --> 0:08:51.480 vast scientific consensus. So I started going through the bibliography, 0:08:51.679 --> 0:08:53.760 and while I was doing it that I came upon 0:08:53.760 --> 0:08:55.680 the one work that Michael seemed to hold in the 0:08:55.760 --> 0:09:01.280 highest regard, a book called The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lumborg. 0:09:01.840 --> 0:09:05.160 Have you ever heard of Biorn motherfucking Lumborg. But I'm 0:09:05.200 --> 0:09:09.760 guessing he's Scandinavian. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think Danish. Um. Yeah. 0:09:09.960 --> 0:09:13.880 So there's a couple of versions of the Bijorn Lumborg 0:09:13.920 --> 0:09:16.640 story that you'll hear. I'm gonna read one paragraph that's 0:09:16.640 --> 0:09:19.280 sort of like how he's generally introduced when you read 0:09:19.280 --> 0:09:22.920 a news article about this guy. A former member of Greenpeace, 0:09:22.960 --> 0:09:26.640 a self described leftist, a backpacking outdoorsman, and a vegetarian. 0:09:26.720 --> 0:09:29.280 Lumborg in nineteen nine seven, was paging through a copy 0:09:29.280 --> 0:09:31.880 of Wired magazine in a bookstore in San Francisco. He 0:09:31.880 --> 0:09:34.520 happened across an interview with Julian Simon and University of 0:09:34.559 --> 0:09:38.000 Maryland economists, known for his optimistic prediction that population growth 0:09:38.400 --> 0:09:41.360 was unlikely to exhaust the planet's resources. Later that year 0:09:41.360 --> 0:09:43.960 and intrigued, Lumborg set about in Denmark with ten of 0:09:44.000 --> 0:09:47.480 his brightest students to examine Simon's claims. Expecting to prove 0:09:47.520 --> 0:09:49.840 Simon wrong, Lumborg and his students were surprised to find 0:09:49.840 --> 0:09:51.920 that many of the economist predictions about the state of 0:09:51.920 --> 0:09:54.960 the environment were on the mark. This discovery led Lombard 0:09:54.960 --> 0:09:56.680 to pen a few op eds for a center left 0:09:56.720 --> 0:09:59.520 Danish newspaper and eventually the publication in Denmark of the 0:09:59.520 --> 0:10:03.960 first Day of The Skeptical Environmentalist. Now, the book was 0:10:04.040 --> 0:10:07.960 essentially a thoroughly argued case against the scientific consensus on 0:10:08.000 --> 0:10:10.880 global warming. Lombard pointed out what he called a number 0:10:10.880 --> 0:10:13.960 of inconsistencies that he claimed to have uncovered between the 0:10:14.000 --> 0:10:16.959 hard scientific data and the party line of climate scientists 0:10:16.960 --> 0:10:20.440 and environmental activists. Lomborg would use what looked to my 0:10:20.480 --> 0:10:23.480 sixteen year old brain like compelling scientific data to argue 0:10:23.520 --> 0:10:26.880 his points. Among other things, that Lombard argued, number one, 0:10:27.000 --> 0:10:29.760 species are not going extinct at a weirdly high rate. 0:10:30.040 --> 0:10:32.320 Number two, the world is not losing ice, and thus 0:10:32.360 --> 0:10:35.400 the seas are in no real danger of rising. Number three, 0:10:35.480 --> 0:10:38.520 global temperatures aren't increasing in any worrying way. And number 0:10:38.520 --> 0:10:41.320 four there's more trees than ever. So what are environmentalists 0:10:41.320 --> 0:10:46.520 worried about? It sounds silly like talking about now in 0:10:46.559 --> 0:10:49.680 two nineteen, but in two thousand one it was a 0:10:49.720 --> 0:10:52.719 different media ecosystem, Like the fact that the world was 0:10:52.760 --> 0:10:57.199 shifting its climactic pants was not quite as obvious to everybody. 0:10:57.400 --> 0:11:00.280 The whole climate change debate has been around one a 0:11:00.320 --> 0:11:03.360 long time, in the eighties at least at least oh yeah, 0:11:03.400 --> 0:11:06.280 and really even before that. Um Murray book Chin, who 0:11:06.640 --> 0:11:09.439 is a philosopher I'm a fan of um, kind of 0:11:09.480 --> 0:11:12.400 an anarchist political thinker in nine in the nineteen sixties, 0:11:12.480 --> 0:11:16.240 wrote a lengthy series of essays talking about how, uh, 0:11:16.400 --> 0:11:19.120 carbon emissions and like fossil fuse we're going to lead 0:11:19.160 --> 0:11:22.520 to like massive climate catastrophe unless we adopted like vastly 0:11:22.600 --> 0:11:25.280 radically different ways of living that we're like not compatible 0:11:25.320 --> 0:11:28.319 with kind of the consumptive capitalist system that we existed 0:11:28.360 --> 0:11:31.360 in currently. Like that's nineteen sixty five. He's writing this 0:11:31.400 --> 0:11:33.640 stuff very clearly later. So, yeah, people knew about this 0:11:33.679 --> 0:11:36.760 for decades. It's just that nobody took it seriously until 0:11:36.800 --> 0:11:39.559 we had what three category five hurricanes hit the US 0:11:39.800 --> 0:11:41.920 East Coast in the course of like a y area. 0:11:42.559 --> 0:11:46.640 But even that doesn't seem to be enough evidence for people. Well, 0:11:47.200 --> 0:11:51.960 fine fastening, and there's an elemententy that's sort of not sympathizers. 0:11:52.080 --> 0:11:55.920 But until you experience something, you can't actually know anything's real. 0:11:56.880 --> 0:11:58.920 And so when people say, oh, you know, it's all 0:11:59.000 --> 0:12:02.040 melting beyond and the poles and stuff, until they actually 0:12:02.120 --> 0:12:05.600 visibly see it, they can't fully understand the complexities of it. 0:12:06.200 --> 0:12:10.600 So um, it's that. It's that Christopher Nolan mentions in 0:12:10.600 --> 0:12:12.920 Inception and about how like one wants a seed is 0:12:12.920 --> 0:12:15.079 planted in your head, it's very hard to sort of 0:12:15.160 --> 0:12:17.880 un route. Yeah, and if you don't have trust in 0:12:17.920 --> 0:12:20.719 your government, then why would you trust that. They say, 0:12:21.080 --> 0:12:23.760 but the climate is being destroyed and I'm just talking 0:12:23.760 --> 0:12:27.480 to hear like, because obviously the climate is changing drastically. Well, 0:12:27.520 --> 0:12:28.920 you need to do is rub your hands together and 0:12:28.960 --> 0:12:31.920 you understand the friction causes heat. And the more people 0:12:31.960 --> 0:12:33.600 that are on the planet, the more cars there are, 0:12:33.640 --> 0:12:35.839 the more food there needs to be grown. All of that. 0:12:36.200 --> 0:12:39.000 It is logical, But I am trying to understand why 0:12:39.040 --> 0:12:42.240 people don't believe. You know, there's a lot of reasons. 0:12:42.280 --> 0:12:43.880 I think a lot of it comes down to people 0:12:43.960 --> 0:12:46.920 like Lumbourg because there's this this kind of war that 0:12:47.040 --> 0:12:52.480 really started in the nineties, the late nineties against scientific consensus. 0:12:52.480 --> 0:12:55.400 Like there was a time when if scientists in like 0:12:55.520 --> 0:12:57.920 nature came out with a study saying like, we've got 0:12:57.920 --> 0:13:01.000 a big fucking problem. Um, the idea that you'd have 0:13:01.040 --> 0:13:03.280 a bunch of people just rejected out of hand because 0:13:03.280 --> 0:13:07.120 they believe there's a conspiracy by China to like convince 0:13:07.160 --> 0:13:10.000 people global warming is reel like that would that would 0:13:10.120 --> 0:13:13.319 sound absurd to people, And now the president has essentially 0:13:13.400 --> 0:13:17.760 spread that same line, like it's um, this is a 0:13:17.840 --> 0:13:19.320 lot of this is like where we are right now 0:13:19.440 --> 0:13:21.680 is the culmination of a process that lumb war was 0:13:21.720 --> 0:13:25.000 a major part of starting this, this war against kind 0:13:25.040 --> 0:13:28.720 of an understand a shared understanding of reality. Um. And 0:13:28.800 --> 0:13:30.560 part part of the problem is that this issue was 0:13:30.600 --> 0:13:33.200 so politicized and it's like, I don't think al Gore 0:13:33.360 --> 0:13:36.280 was wrong in making it like a key cornerstone of 0:13:36.360 --> 0:13:39.839 like his presidential campaign and just like his personal activism, 0:13:39.880 --> 0:13:43.040 but the fact that Gore was associated with Clinton and 0:13:43.080 --> 0:13:45.440 that Republican having grown up in a Republican home, I 0:13:45.440 --> 0:13:47.240 can tell you the kind of hatred of the Clintons 0:13:47.280 --> 0:13:49.680 that existed in the late nineties and in two thousand 0:13:50.320 --> 0:13:55.960 was beyond rational. It was. It was a kind of 0:13:56.040 --> 0:13:59.240 mania that overtook the conservative right and that is still 0:13:59.360 --> 0:14:03.520 very much asn't in prevalent um. And so because al Gore, 0:14:03.600 --> 0:14:06.040 who was connected to the Clintons, was making this point, 0:14:06.040 --> 0:14:07.959 it had to be fake and so that was a 0:14:08.000 --> 0:14:10.000 big driver of all of this. So there's a lot 0:14:10.000 --> 0:14:12.120 of this that's tied together. It's it's the end of 0:14:12.120 --> 0:14:15.439 a process in which kind of at the the apex 0:14:15.520 --> 0:14:19.480 point of the process, nobody believes anything. There's no sort 0:14:19.520 --> 0:14:22.120 of authority beyond the one guy that you like, if 0:14:22.160 --> 0:14:26.840 you're that sort of person or whatever pundits you trust. Um, 0:14:26.960 --> 0:14:32.080 And yeah, it's it's a real problem. Yeah, um, it's interesting. 0:14:32.120 --> 0:14:34.960 I also wonder though, if all the people are pushing 0:14:35.480 --> 0:14:39.000 the climate change is a hoax thing generally are quite 0:14:39.000 --> 0:14:43.080 wealthy well, and they won't be affected by ultimately, ultimately, 0:14:43.160 --> 0:14:48.080 you know, the world and the humanity will survive. Right now, 0:14:48.120 --> 0:14:52.080 there may be millions billions of death caused because the 0:14:52.160 --> 0:14:54.800 climate change, but ultimately humanity will survive. And I think 0:14:54.800 --> 0:14:57.080 they're very rich, will always be good. They could just 0:14:57.120 --> 0:14:59.560 move somewhere else. Yeah, they'll move somewhere. That's going to 0:14:59.720 --> 0:15:02.840 go from having brutal winters to being like Los Angeles 0:15:02.880 --> 0:15:05.480 when Los Angeles burns down, So ultimately there and give 0:15:05.520 --> 0:15:08.200 a ship. Well, yeah, that's actually kind of where this 0:15:08.280 --> 0:15:12.280 is headed a little bit. Yeah, no, no, no, no, 0:15:12.320 --> 0:15:15.080 this is this is what the podcast is for. So 0:15:15.640 --> 0:15:18.560 the unavoidable conclusion from reading Lomborg's book and taking it 0:15:18.640 --> 0:15:21.520 seriously was that everything was more or less hunky dory 0:15:21.560 --> 0:15:24.360 with the climate. Uh Now, Bjorn did not deny that 0:15:24.400 --> 0:15:26.440 there were some environmental problems. He didn't even come out 0:15:26.440 --> 0:15:29.080 and deny that human beings were changing the climate. But 0:15:29.160 --> 0:15:31.240 his argument was that all of the issues we were 0:15:31.240 --> 0:15:33.720 having were things that could be solved by better conservation 0:15:33.760 --> 0:15:38.360 and modest infrastructure investments. Nobody needed to say stop driving cars, 0:15:38.480 --> 0:15:42.200 or stop burning coal or stop fracking gas. The people 0:15:42.280 --> 0:15:45.000 telling us to do all that, we're just fearmongers. That's 0:15:45.040 --> 0:15:48.880 that's Bjorn Lamborg's line. Now, sixteen year old Robert Evans 0:15:48.960 --> 0:15:51.240 took Lumborg's book apart and used many bits arguments for 0:15:51.280 --> 0:15:53.560 a series of debates in his speech and debate class. 0:15:53.880 --> 0:15:55.680 And then he grew up and into the real world 0:15:55.720 --> 0:15:58.840 and stopped being a young Republican. Somewhere between reading the 0:15:58.880 --> 0:16:01.880 work of actual climate scientists, which Lumborg is not, and 0:16:01.960 --> 0:16:04.400 living through four of the hottest years on record, he 0:16:04.440 --> 0:16:08.440 came around on the whole climate change thing. But I 0:16:08.480 --> 0:16:11.120 was not the only person fooled by Bijorn Lumborg. The 0:16:11.160 --> 0:16:13.600 median narrative around him was just too good for bunches 0:16:13.600 --> 0:16:16.880 of overly credulous journalists to not flock to him. One 0:16:16.920 --> 0:16:18.920 example of this was a two thousand and one New 0:16:19.000 --> 0:16:21.680 York Times profile released right before the publication of the 0:16:21.680 --> 0:16:25.880 English translation of The Skeptical Environmentalist. The title scientist at 0:16:25.880 --> 0:16:30.120 work from an unlikely corner eco optimism. That's nice eco 0:16:30.200 --> 0:16:33.960 optimism quote. Strange to say the author of this happy 0:16:34.000 --> 0:16:36.800 thesis is not a steely eyed economist at a conservative 0:16:36.800 --> 0:16:39.880 think tank, but a vegetarian, backpack toting academic who was 0:16:39.920 --> 0:16:42.600 a member of Greenpeace for four years. He is doctor 0:16:42.680 --> 0:16:45.640 Bjorn Lumborg, a thirty six year old political scientist and 0:16:45.680 --> 0:16:50.000 professor of statistics at the University of our hosts in Denmark. Now. 0:16:50.080 --> 0:16:52.600 The article went into loving detail about how Lumborg had 0:16:52.600 --> 0:16:56.040 been converted from environmental apocalypticism by reading the work of 0:16:56.120 --> 0:16:58.200 Dr Julian Simon, Who's that doctor we talked about a 0:16:58.200 --> 0:17:00.960 little earlier. Now. Simon is famous for having some very 0:17:01.040 --> 0:17:03.280 public arguments with a guy named Dr Paul or Like 0:17:03.480 --> 0:17:07.000 over resource scarcity. Erlick was like a doom kind of 0:17:07.000 --> 0:17:08.960 a doomsayer. He wrote like a book about how like 0:17:09.040 --> 0:17:11.880 human population was going to like reach an apocalyptic level 0:17:11.960 --> 0:17:15.399 and cause massive resource scarcity, and his predictions turned out 0:17:15.400 --> 0:17:17.680 to be largely untrue. And Simon actually made a bet 0:17:17.680 --> 0:17:20.240 with him about, like, you know, they picked five resources 0:17:20.280 --> 0:17:22.520 and Airlock bet that they would all increase in cost 0:17:22.640 --> 0:17:25.200 over the next couple of decades, and Simon bet that 0:17:25.240 --> 0:17:28.439 they would decrease, and Simon wound up being right. Um, 0:17:28.760 --> 0:17:32.360 can I ask you, do you think that people aren't 0:17:33.400 --> 0:17:36.080 necessary worried about the whole climate change thing as a whole, 0:17:36.280 --> 0:17:40.000 as an actual doomsday possibility because they've gone through so 0:17:40.040 --> 0:17:43.800 many doomsday possibilities. So we've had the millennium bug, we 0:17:44.200 --> 0:17:47.119 you guys have had the nuclear threats from Russia. We 0:17:47.160 --> 0:17:51.080 are constantly barraged by these end of the world scenarios 0:17:51.760 --> 0:17:54.399 that never usually happened. That when we are presented with 0:17:54.480 --> 0:17:58.399 one that's actually in front of us, happening live in 0:17:58.400 --> 0:18:01.680 front of our eyes, that most people can just brush 0:18:01.720 --> 0:18:04.320 it aside because I've experienced other doomsday scenars that have 0:18:04.440 --> 0:18:08.440 actually just sort of gone bine wind. I absolutely think 0:18:08.560 --> 0:18:10.960 that kind of particularly some of the Hollywood like the 0:18:11.000 --> 0:18:13.560 Day After Tomorrow ship, like that's that's actually really hurt 0:18:13.640 --> 0:18:16.600 the cause of getting people to take this seriously, because 0:18:16.600 --> 0:18:19.960 the problem is not um that the world is going 0:18:20.000 --> 0:18:23.199 to end. Human beings are very adaptable. The majority of 0:18:23.280 --> 0:18:25.560 us will find a way to survive no matter what 0:18:25.680 --> 0:18:28.240 happens to the climate. Like even if a fucking asteroid hits, 0:18:28.240 --> 0:18:29.760 I have no doubt that a lot of people will 0:18:29.800 --> 0:18:31.560 figure out how to make that ship work, because we're 0:18:31.560 --> 0:18:35.600 just we're cunning little bastards. Um. The problem is that, 0:18:35.640 --> 0:18:37.800 like it's not an apocalypse thing, it's like what what 0:18:37.840 --> 0:18:39.439 do we want the world to be? What do we 0:18:39.480 --> 0:18:41.520 want the world to be for our kids, for our grandkids. 0:18:41.520 --> 0:18:43.760 Do we want it to be the sun racked nightmare 0:18:43.800 --> 0:18:47.840 healthscape where people knife fight to death over jugs of water? Um, 0:18:48.359 --> 0:18:51.360 A lot of people don't. Yeah, that's that's another scary thing. 0:18:51.480 --> 0:18:55.720 Is I am hoarding water and nights? But that's very 0:18:55.800 --> 0:18:58.640 little to do with the podcasting machete. Um No, it's 0:18:58.720 --> 0:19:00.920 it is weird how a lot of people will uh, 0:19:01.000 --> 0:19:04.440 you know, height being by themselves, which means that they 0:19:04.920 --> 0:19:07.119 always have like bad voices in their heads. And if 0:19:07.160 --> 0:19:08.640 that have bad voices in their heads, I don't really 0:19:08.640 --> 0:19:10.800 care about other people. And so the idea of an 0:19:10.840 --> 0:19:16.040 apocalyptic yes scenario where where their their life gets twist 0:19:16.040 --> 0:19:19.440 turned upside down is actually welcoming because most people's lives 0:19:19.480 --> 0:19:21.959 are kind of difficult and challenging. Well, if I can 0:19:22.000 --> 0:19:26.160 get into like, uh, my my own fringe political beliefs 0:19:26.160 --> 0:19:27.800 on this, I think a lot of that has to 0:19:27.840 --> 0:19:30.560 do with the fact that there are some very dehumanizing 0:19:30.600 --> 0:19:34.000 aspects to the kind of capitalism that we enjoy in 0:19:34.000 --> 0:19:36.359 the United States, and a lot of people's lives are 0:19:36.400 --> 0:19:40.080 incredibly difficult and there's very little hope that things will 0:19:40.160 --> 0:19:42.040 lighten up or that they'll be able to retire. There's 0:19:42.040 --> 0:19:43.760 like no light at the end of the tunnel. There's 0:19:43.760 --> 0:19:46.600 just a series of distractions. And so the ideal that 0:19:46.680 --> 0:19:48.680 it might all come tumbling down and you would get 0:19:48.680 --> 0:19:50.280 to be king of the waste land and not have 0:19:50.400 --> 0:19:52.480 to clock in at work at Target the next morning. 0:19:52.920 --> 0:19:56.040 Right that that that does, that is very attractive to 0:19:56.119 --> 0:19:59.080 a chunk of the population, especially the people who believe 0:19:59.160 --> 0:20:02.640 that they would thrive that environment. Yeah, that's that's an 0:20:02.680 --> 0:20:04.840 important key I think, is that they would believe they 0:20:04.840 --> 0:20:10.200 would thrive when the reality is two days in the woods. Now, Eric, 0:20:10.560 --> 0:20:15.360 speaking of the dehumanizing realities of modern American consumerst capitalism, 0:20:15.359 --> 0:20:17.800 it's time for an it plug. Is this a good 0:20:17.920 --> 0:20:28.120 This is a good one, Yeah, nailing it products. We're 0:20:28.160 --> 0:20:31.160 back boy. A lot happened in that break number one. 0:20:32.040 --> 0:20:34.879 I grabbed my throwing bagels. I don't know if you 0:20:35.080 --> 0:20:37.119 if you're aware of this, but I throw bagels on 0:20:37.160 --> 0:20:39.919 the show. It's a much in a kind of substitute 0:20:39.920 --> 0:20:43.119 to think, Well, your guests. I actually planned to combine 0:20:43.160 --> 0:20:45.000 the two. So here's what I'd like to do when 0:20:45.040 --> 0:20:46.840 we when we hit a point of maximum rage in 0:20:46.880 --> 0:20:49.439 this episode, um or perhaps at the end of it, 0:20:49.560 --> 0:20:51.439 I'm going to throw these bagels and I want you 0:20:51.480 --> 0:20:53.159 to slice them out of the air like a modern 0:20:53.200 --> 0:20:56.080 samurai with the Sisters machete. You want to do that? 0:20:56.800 --> 0:20:59.760 All right? Sophie says that it's approved by everyone at corporate, 0:20:59.800 --> 0:21:02.360