we have a fantastic one speaker. this is a real treat to welcome dr. bjorn lombard to steamboat institute dr. lomborg is the president and founder of the copenhagen consensus center. he is the author of the best-selling false alarm how climate change panic costs us trillions hurts the poor and fails to fix the planet. he will be signing copies of your books that you brought with you in the four year after his presentation. dr. longboard challenges mainstream concerns about development and the environment and points out that we need to focus the attention on the smartest solutions first. he's a visiting fellow at the stanford stanford university's hoover institution. and of course president of the copenhagen consensus center, which brings together many of the world's top economists including seven nobel laureates. dr. longboard is a frequent participant in public debates on policy issues his analysis and commentaries have appeared regularly in such prestigious publications as the wall street journal usa today the new york times the economist and many many others his monthly column appears in multiple languages in influential newspapers across all the continents. he's also a tv commentator on cnn fox msnbc in the bb bbc among others. he's also been on many news programs that you watched 2020 60 minutes and many others in 2011 and 12 dr. lamborgh was named the top 100 global thinker by foreign policy for looking more right than ever on the politics of climate change. time magazine ranked him among the world's 100 most influential people in 2004 and in 2008 esquire magazine named him. one of the world's 75 most influential people of the 21st. injury following his remarks dr. lomborg will be joined on stage by jackie pick deason to take your questions. so be sure to submit those questions. let's give a warm steamboat. welcome to dr. bjorn lombard. and make believe and we don't buy that game. while the boss man takes. yeah, so they shouldn't have this long music right because you sort of stopped clapping while i'm arriving. so look, i'd love to talk to you about how we think about climate change and how we should think more smartly about this. you've heard a lot of facts throughout this morning, and i'm going to be emphasizing some of them. i'm also going to try and give you a sense of how do we do the whole argument because i think it is important that we start having a conversation about are we doing the right thing in climate and that actually takes multiple steps. i'm going to just try to spend about 35 minutes. so we have plenty of time for q&a afterwards. so look i'm simply going to jump in. i'm a social scientist. so i'm not a natural scientist. i talk to a lot of them, but that's not what i do. i'm simply going to say global ring. it's real. it's man-made. it is a problem, but it's also often exaggerated and this is important. because if you think this is the end of the world, i don't know if you saw at the very first show we see aoc telling us. the world is going to end in 12 years if that was really true. it makes a lot of sense what she says is if the world is ending and you're worried about how to pay for it. you should just be you know, you should if it's a media or hurtling towards earth. we should just throw everything else aside and you know, give all the money to bruce willis and get out there and you know do something about it. so the the point here is to say it's because it's exaggerated that we actually making really bad decisions. and so i want to share with you some of these things and and just to give you a sense and we've heard a lot of this and and steve coonan also gave you some of these quotes guteris are un secretary general is perhaps the best sort of source for these kinds of exaggerated claims. he tells us the world is facing a great climate emergency every week brings new climate related devastation floods droughts heat waves why if i a super storms we hear all of this and we're in a battle for our lives and climate change is the to the economy. these claims are mostly false. they're not entirely wrong, but they're mostly false and i'd like to show you why again if i'm just going to do 35 minutes. i'm just going to give you some of those tidbits and i'm sure we can take up some of the other ones. of course, i describe in my book and my period articles and so on, but let me just take you through a few of these. so do we see all these super storms are hurricanes as a lot of people like to point out. well if you look at the un climate panel, that's so cool ipc. they tell us in their latest report in the past identifying past trends and tropical cyclones. that's what they call hurricanes remains a challenge and low confidence and most reported long-term trends but for the future they do tell us we will likely see more really strong hurricanes. we will probably also see fewer future hurricanes. you need to know both now overall. that's a net negative because stronger outweighs fewer so there is a problem and we are going to see more damage, but it's also important to get a sense of proportion right? you hear this constantly that every hurricane you hear that's the end of the world and this is because of global warming. and again, one of the problems is we have very very bad long-term trends. this is fundamentally because it's really hard to go back to 1900 and expect most hurricanes have been noticed back then of course, we notice all of them now because we have satellites. so how do we adjust for that? well, if you look at the best long-term trend, sorry best long-term data source, that's us landfolding hurricanes because since 1900 it's very unlikely that there is a hurricane that hit the us and nobody noticed so we have good evidence for this and actually what you see is not an increasing trend. it's a slightly decreasing. it's not significant, but fundamentally, it's not increasing and again people will then tell you oh, but there's going to be more strong hurricanes, of course, we also have for strong hurricanes for major and again not increasing actually if anything slightly decreasing we need to tell this we also have reasonable evidence for landfalling hurricanes back from 1945 for the two major hurricane basins, and they show the same thing the fundamental point is that data does not tell us that right now things are getting out of hand, but it doesn't mean that there's not a problem. there is a problem in the future and that's one of the things that we'll talk about. but again, it doesn't warrant this exaggeration that we get from guterism a lot of other leaders likewise if you look at wildfire, i mean i picked this it's in public domain. that's why i'm sharing but these these pictures are cool. you understand why newspapers want to print them because they get you to click on this this terrible. this looks frightening. this is something that we don't want right so clearly the sense we get when we listen to the media is that there's more more fire new york times just recently did the world is on fire where they looked at fire across the entire world. it's a common trope to say the world is on fire because of global wine. actually we have good data and again the point that i try to make is let's get the data to actually get a sense of what does it tell us? well, we have good data back from 1900. the first of course is modeled because we don't actually have good evidence for the entire planet, but almost everyone accepts that this is probably what it looked like in the early part of last century about 4.2% of the earth's surface burnt and today or just around 2,000 is probably down to about three point two percent. from the late 1990s. we actually have very good data because we have satellites circling the world all the time and picking up and that satellite shows that we've seen a decreasing amount from about 3.2 now down to about 2.5 the world is not burning more the world is burning less. why? mostly because most people don't want stuff to burn. it's not really very complicated. right and that's of course why we adapt to this we actually make sure stuff doesn't burn. it's not rocket science. but again if we don't want to scare our kids if we want to have a good data sense of where should we start? what should we be concerned about? we need to know this data. we very often don't what's going to happen into the future. what if you only look and this is what most climate models will do if you only look at temperature and assume temperature is going to rise that means you're going to see more fire all other things equal, but of course all the things are not equal one thing is that we also have gonna have more co2, which means we go have a greener planet, which means we'll have a different combination of of greenery on most places in the world if you just run that you probably get less burning not more and if you include people that is people actually act you definitely get that this trend we've seen a last 120 years. we'll continue. so if we do nothing if there's no climate policy, the world will keep burning less and less. but if we do climate policy it will burn even less. point here is and this is the important part of the conversation global warming is not something that make the whole world burn, you know, this is not going up. it makes the world burn slightly less than it otherwise would have been. that's a very different kind of conversation. all right, so do i want a world that's better, or do i want to world? that's even better. that's a good conversation, but it's a very different one from the one where we have the catastrophe waiting right around the corner, which it's not. so that's the first part of it. we're vastly seeing an exaggerated argument and that of course leads to a lot of bad decisions. why do we get this so wrong because of adaptation we typically ignore adaptation and i'm going to show you some of these costs also destler mentioned several times. it's a little unfair because tesla had to leave so he can't really defend himself, but i'm gonna do it anyway, so we have good. i talked to him out there and i told him about the the resources. i'm going to send them to him as well. we have good evidence and some of these costs about adaptation and they're not exceptional or incredible or something. they're about sarah point one percent of gdp. they're not zero, but they're certainly not huge. so let me just show you and alex already stole my thunder and this one, but i still think it's important to point out. yeah, if people what has happened with deaths from climate related disasters. so basically flood strout storms wildfire and extreme temperatures. we have good data for about a hundred years and it's not such most people would imagine that this just goes up that certainly what we get the impression from from the media. no actually in 1920s almost 500,000 people died every year from these climate-related disasters and since then this has been declining and declining and declining so that in 2010 zoos about 18,000 people in 2020. it was 2000. sorry. it was 14,000 and in 2021 the day or the year where you heard about all these catastrophes you remember the heat dome you remember the floods in germany? well, there was a lot of other things you never heard about for instance a thousand people died in india floods. there's two afghan flash floods and so on and so on if you add up all of those lesson 7,000 people died last year why do we hear that more and more people die when the truth is fewer and fewer people die. this has very little to do with climate change but has everything to do with the fact that when you're richer you're more resilient and hence you don't die as much we need to know this to stop being scared witless because if we're scared whitlers, we're unlikely to make good decisions. so, let me just show you thank you. so let me just show you another instance and this is very much on tesla's point. so how much is future flighting actually going to address. this is one of the most quoted papers hinkled 2014. wow, you can't actually read the no you can sorry. it's just my monitor 2014, so it's very hard to estimate how many people are actually affected by flooding because are you affected by flooding? that's a very elastic number. they use a lot of models and this is basically showing you what the average of all these models is they tell us that in 2000 every year 3.4 million people were flooded because of typically they just live terrible lives, right? this had a cost about 11 billion dollars. we also spend about 13 billion dollars in diet cost. the total cost was 0.05% of global gdp. first of all, that's not a whole lot right? you hear a lot more about this than you'd actually imagine that the cost are worth 0.05. yeah. it's a big it's a problem. it's certainly not one of the biggest problems in the world what then happens if you take a look at the worst case warming the highest population and the highest gdp, so i'm just going to show you one. this is true for all different kinds of scenarios. i'm just going to show you if you will the worst one what happens if you just assume there's no adaptation you get this you get a dramatic increase, right? by the end of the century about a hundred and eighty seven million people are going to get flooded each and every year this number has been repeated in new york times in washington post and their leaders and their op-eds many other places. it's been published widely and it tells us, you know, if you know david wallace wells, this is one of his main points. this is going to cost a 55 trillion dollars every year. it's also going to have 24 billion dollars and diet cost they cost. they're not going to be very high because we didn't bother to do anything about the -- right and it's going to cost five point three percent of global gdp. the important point to remember though is this assumes that everybody over the next 80 years. stand there. and just watch sea level rise and say this is getting uncomfortable. and you know, you start getting it up over your knees and your hips and eventually you get really old and you get really uncomfortable and maybe even drown that was what rolling stone said. this is going to drown 187 million people. no, i mean first of all, they're probably move but more likely is that they would adapt. we've actually done this right remember if you go to holland you see a very good example of people who have adapted if you've ever flown into amsterdam ship whole airport as the world 14th largest airport and it on its website points out that we are the only major airport in the world that was previously seen for a major naval battle. and and you know, it's not like you're there and you're thinking oh my god, it could be flooded at any moment. we know how to do with this now. tesla tells us this is going to be incredibly expensive. no, it's not. we know this because people have done the models. so this is what happens if you assume adaptation, you almost can't see the different by the end of the century. we will have 15,000 people flooded. how come that we can have seen sea level rise about three feet? and many fewer people are going to be flooded. because we'll be much richer and because we know how to deal with these issues. we will also have a significantly increase in flood costs. it's not going to be 55 trillion, but 38 billion will also have to spend much more in -- so we'll be spending 48 billion dollars in dyches. remember desolate kept on saying that houston is going to cost 10 billion dollars. that's probably true. but this is once over the century. and of course across the whole world, this is not going to be free, but it's not going to be a big imposition. so the results showed that it's about 0.1% of gdp across the world across the century. this is certainly something we can afford the total cost and this is important the total cost. of flooding and of diecast is now going to be zero point zero zero eight percent. so despite sea levels rise because of adaptation. we will see much lower damages overall. we'll see only 15,000 people instead of 3.4 million people and we will see less damage that is 0.08% rather than 0.0. sorry 0.08 instead of 0.05 almost 10 times less. it shows you the ability of adaptation and when we ignore it or forget about it, we are likely to be vastly over worried about climate change. this does not mean that there's no problem again had we done climate policy here and i can't show you this because you wouldn't be able to tell the difference if we had done adaptation if sorry if we had done climate policy if we dramatically reduce our emissions and almost gone netzera by 2050 we could have reduced the number of people flooded in 2100 from 15,000 people all the way down to 10,000 people. that's a better world, but it's not like this is really what matters right. it's the three point four million down to 15,000 that matters. it's the adaptation that really matters not the climate policy. what is the cost in alex briefly alluded to that? well again, we have good global costs from 1990 and we've again seen a decline in the cost not an increase and this of course again is because richer societies a more resilient better able able to deal with this problem. point that i try to get through here is to say global warming is a problem. yes, but thinking it's the end of the world thing is going to burn the whole world that we're going to have super storms everywhere and that we're just going to see the cost escalate out of hand is simply not in keeping with the facts. so the problem is that right now we're being told while we need to go net zero andrew deslo was setting up here and saying it's going to be fantastically cheap which of course as alex also pointed out is somewhat belied by the fact that nobody seems to want to do it unless they get their arms twisted, right? it seems weird that this would be a great idea if you have to twist everybody's arm and they still really don't want to do it. but let's just take a look at what has actually happened if you take a look at the share of renewable energy since 1800 what we've seen since 1800 is a dramatic reduction, right? i mean we used to get almost all of our energy from renewables because we had very little then we realized oh wait we can get a lot of energy and we did that and that's what we've been doing for the last half century. we've been down at 13 or 14 percent. this is from the international energy agency, right what you see here in after 20 2000 is a slight increase. that's what our climate policy has bought. if you look at the envelope of what we're likely to see this is from the international energy agency from the un several others. we will probably see this prediction we might get up to 20% by 2050 but what our leaders are saying is no we should go up here. it's important somebody calls this the narvale chart and it's important to recognize how out of character this is it is just simply historically absolutely implausible just to get a sense of proportion to go net zero we would have to build two new clear power plants every three days for the next 11,000 days. there's about 11,000 days till 2050. we have achieved nothing like that. we're achieving about in the next six years. perhaps seven new power plants per year. so we're nowhere near this or we'd have to build 1500 wind turbines on an area that's equivalent of all the five borers in new york every day. we're achieving about a tenth of that and we'd have to retire a coal plant every day not surprising. i don't need to say that's not what we've been doing. we've actually been building one at least every week for the last 21 years. we're simply not there at all. and this of course is why the cost of going netzero is going to be phenomenal. so bank of america estimates the total cost of going netzero is going to be the global cost is going to be five trillion dollars every year from 2021 to 2050. five trillion dollars. i know we've gotten a little in your in europe. what does the word in your word? we're sort of a trillion, but it's actually a lot of money. it's worth just pointing out, right? this is a lot of money. and they also assume that this will actually lead to about a 3% and additional annual green inflation as they call it. this is not cool. this is not what we like this is going to be phenomenally costly if you look at a new nature study, it actually shows that netzero will cost each and every american more than 11,000 per person per year so notice if we just cut 20% that's going to be cheap that 75 dollars per person per year. most americans would actually accept that, you know, when we serve them they probably give you about a hundred 200 dollars to fix climate. so this could be done 40% already stretching it right 60% now 80% no and 95% no. right. that's just not going to go. you're not going to get people to say sure. i'm gonna spend eleven thousand dollars every each and every year being that much poorer that much colder that much more uncomfortable. that's just not gonna happen. i don't know if you saw a new study from mckinsey just showed that nets here is going to cost 9.2 trillion dollars every year again. they had a really bad chart. so i'm taking this from bloomberg which gives you the same. this is the cost and percent of gdp for different nations as you can tell this is going to cost 7.5% of global gdp every year for the next 30 years just to give you a sense of proportion. this would mean that we would have to spend half of the entire global tax intake of every nation on the planet. to do netzero. can i just get us to think about that for a second are most notions going to say sure we're gonna spend half about tax intake on this. i don't know if you saw india promised in glasgow coonan talked about that india promise that they were going to go netzer by 2070, which is no a lot far away, but you know, they promised that and then five days later they came out and said, oh there's there's a little asterisk. sorry. we forgot to say that if we want if you want us to go down that route you have to give us a trillion dollars before 2030. and there was no takers i might add. it's going to cost 6.4% of gdp for the us, which is 1.5 trillion dollars this year according to the cob. that's about the cost of the scaled down bill back better. that's a build back better plan every year for the next 29 years again. it's hard enough to apparently we can't get one build back plan through right imagine getting 29 of them. this is simply unsustainable. there's no way you can get politicians to be reelected to have these kinds of costs and again, and i think this is worth pointing out sure you might be able to get this for some rich well-meaning americans and europeans. but that's a trivial part of the world. you're not going to get most south africans. sorry sub-saharan africans the poorest people in the world to say sure. i'd like to spend 10% of our national income every year on net zero or the indians again. this is just yeah, it's fantasy. so i want us to start thinking about. why is this so costly? because we're not ready. we're essentially trying to do everything without the appropriate technology. i just want to emphasize one thing and your dessler also brought that up and a lot of people will say that sure solar and wind is as but you know batteries. well, no batteries won't actually save us. this is the amount of batteries that we have if we translate this in to the average electricity and say how many minutes of batteries do we have if you look here on the global level? oh, sorry about that. i i pushed the wrong button if you if you look here on the global level we have about one and 15 seconds. a batteries right now, right? so if the sun dies down happens every night by the way, or if the wind dies down we have a minute and 15 seconds, and then we're out of batteries. by 2030 we will have a little more than 10 minutes. remember the average time. the sun is out is about what 12 hours and the average time wind is out every year in germany for instance is five days. so it's 7,000 minutes. this is just nowhere near what is going to take? of course, you can do anything you want if you're willing to pay for it, but it's the 9.2 trillion dollars that makes this impossible. that's why i would argue we need to get smarter. and i just want to wrap your head around before i actually get to so what should we be doing? the world economic forum in january of this year asked all their eminent people so more than 4,000 people. what are the most severe global risks for the next 10 years. this is what they did and i'm going to show you this like we do the european music song contest. i'm going to show you from behind right first three biodiversity loss to extreme weather and one climate action failure. really? i don't know if if you guys noticed but we just come out of the worst in a century. we have global infection and possible reception of recession. we have an increasingly authoritarian china and just now we have have a russian invasion of ukraine. there is something fundamentally wrong about a world where all of our leaders can come out and say no it's biodiversity loss extreme weather and climate action failure for the next 10 years that really matter. when it's so obvious that there are other and bigger and more important challenges and this of course is why in many ways the russian invasion has become this wake-up call. it's a realization that wait a minute. maybe we're not worrying about the right thing. remember we're in advanced species. we can walk and chew gum at the same time just because they're bigger problems out there doesn't mean we shouldn't also be concerned about global warming, but it means that we possibly should get it in the context of how much should we worry? so i'd like to just show you how should we do clients smart climate policy and then wrap up with what i think is the solution and then love to hear your questions. so look the point of the last 30 years of climate economics has been to make this one point. this is what the nord house coonan mentioned william nordhouse of yale university. this is what he got the nobel prize for so if you can come up with the similar sort of two line that you could you're in line for a noobell as well fundamentally. what assesses climate means costly damages. this is what you hear all the time. this is absolutely true. but climate policy also means costly damages given that we have to pay both. we have to find a world where the sum of those two is the smallest this requires us to get a sense of proportion. how big of a problem is global warming. this is the chart from the only guy who've ever won the nobel prize in climate economics william nordhouse. this is his estimate from 2017. this was all so what the un estimated in 2014. these are all the different studies greater circle means that we have more confidence in the studies and as you can see as temperature get higher so we get further out on the temperature increase the damage cost gets wider. this is what norhouse has to mates. this is probably the best estimate of the total cost of climate change including a minute damages, which of course is really hard because we haven't studied it, but that's a conversation for a whole lot of time. so if assuming that will probably end up around somewhere, you know four to six degrees fahrenheit more will probably have damages from you know, say two to maybe four percent of global gdp. this was what kunan mentioned when he said a couple degrees of temperature increase in centigrade means a couple percent in damages. this is a problem. yes. it's not the end of the world. i just want to spend a few seconds and i'm sorry this is going to go into the deep weeds couldn't mentioned this but the new un climate panel report has come out and say well, we're not quite sure about this because there's some estimates out there. they're much much worse. i'm just going to show you the most prominent much much worse namely one that suggests that here. we would have a damage cost down here. it's absolutely ridiculously off, but i want to show you how so it's called burke 2015 and there's an update from 2018 it basically estimates that climate is going to cost us 23% of gdp by 2100. this is wrong and i just want to briefly tell you why. it shows that economic historically economies grow faster when they're around 55 degrees fahrenheit. it kind of makes sense if it's really cold or it's really hot. you're just not as productive. we know that that's probably true and that's what he uses as his basic argument to say well when temperatures rise, we're going to see some of these very cold countries i come from one of them, right? they're actually going to become more productive, but then a lot of countries like the us and many others. i actually gonna go on the other side of that hump and they're gonna go grow less fast, and that's what's going to really do us in as a humanity now this assumes some really really bad modeling. first of all, there's a lot of papers actually showed. this is simply wrong. i've put it more more politely and say it's implausible. it assumes an incredibly unrealistic scenario of emissions, but mostly it ignores adaptation, so it assumes that this vulnerability that we have to today will also be the vulnerability that everybody on the planet will have in 2100, which is just so unbelievable by so many different standards one is that they actually found that we adapt it faster over the last 40 years than what they're assuming in the entire period it also assumes not surprisingly that iceland will become the richest country in the world. by a very wide margin you can imagine why because iceland is really cold and they actually get to be much warmer. so they're gonna grow fastly out of everyone else iceland is going to rule the world at 1.5 million dollars per person if there had been no climate. they would only be at about 200,000 per person and one the sickest bingle stick is leapfrog is mongolia. mongolia which would just have been a backward country also in 2100, but because they're so cold they will actually be an incredibly rich country. those are the ones these are the guys we need to watch out for if you believe this if you think yeah, that sounds right. you're in for burke. and i have some other things i want to sell you. otherwise. this is simply bonkers. but this is the kind of argument that's used to say no. maybe it'll get much costly. i know it will not that's not what the nobel laureate tells it. this is not what most of the research tells us. it actually tells us this is the cost. just to show you. what's the impact here? so the un makes estimates of how much richer we're going to be throughout the century. they need to do this because otherwise you can't run the climate models. they this is i'm just showing you the median scenario. so the the sort of middle of the road scenario and what they show is that over this century. we're going to get a lot richer. so the average person is going to be 450% richer by 2100 then he or she is in 2020. so we were at about 19,000 back then we're going to be almost at 86,000 in. 2100 that is an amazing achievement. right what will happen because of global warming because global warming is going to make this worse. we actually are not going to see this, but we're going to see a slightly different. trajectory right that leads us to 434% richer the important point to recognize is global warming means that instead of us being 450% richer by the end of century. we will only be 434% richer. yes, that's a problem. no, it's not an existential threat. it me doesn't mean we are going to end up dead all of us. we're going to be much better off. but of course we can still have a conversation about could we make that gap a little smaller, but that's what the conversation about climate change is it's not this end of the world. it's a question about how do we make an enormously much better world by 2100 a tiny bit even more amazing. that's a very different question. this is what nordhouse shows and that's what i just want to briefly share with you and then i'll wrap up. he tells us what is the cost? of if we do nothing. well the cost not surprisingly is pretty significant climate change is a real problem as deslo is appointed out because we're all adapted to current temperatures if temperatures change if they go up it's going to be costly so his estimate. is that over the next 500 years the cost of not doing anything will be in the order of a hundred and 140 trillion dollars. that's a lot of money remember the whole worth of globus about 4,500. so we're still talking about fairly small bits about three percent, but it's not nothing. if we reduce temperatures, we will see less damage. and this i would argue is the standard story that all of you have heard. the lower the temperature the less cost. that's absolutely true. but it's not the only cost we have to pay. we also have to pay a policy cost now. what's the policy cost of not doing anything? nothing but if we start doing something and remember we're assuming that everybody would do reasonably smart not amazing, but reasonably smart policies the cost of getting to 6.75 is about 20 trillion dollars the cost of getting to 5.3 and and this looks better in celsius. that's why it looks that's weird is about a hundred trillion dollars and then it gets just more and more costly. this is the diagram. you never see. yes climate is costly but climate policy is also costly. given that we have to pay both. we really should add up both of them. this is how you get a nobel prize. right? so you basically say or this is the cost from climate. but then you also have the add-on cost. there's no add-on cost for no policy. then there's a little add-on cost and then a bigger and bigger from a realistic policy cost. it doesn't take rocket science to say what's the best thing to do for our kids and grandkids and everybody else in the planet? it's this one. this is the optimal outcome where we actually weigh the cost of both climate and climate policy. this was what nord has found and this is the story that we ought to here, but we almost never hear so i'm just going to wrap up and say so what should we do? well, we know a lot of things i haven't shown you all of this by just want to briefly show you we know some of the existing climate policies. so the eu 2020 policy which was concluded in 2020 is one of the best analyzed studies. we know that for every dollar spent on climate policies. we achieved about three cents of climate benefits now, that's not nothing but it certainly very good. i mean you just have handed out the dollars and people have been 97 cents better off right if we look at the paris agreement if we assume that people will do the smartly we will probably do about 11 cents of good for every dollar spent again a really bad idea if we do a smart global carbon tax, which is going to be hard and be difficult and probably not going to happen in many places. we could actually do some good. that's what norhouse shows if we do the smartly if we do reservely if we have a small one that ramps and goes up across the century that actually be a pretty effective policy. every dollar spent would give you two dollars back, but it wouldn't solve most of climate problems and that's why and i ran a project together with 47 the world's top climate economists three, no by lawrence where we looked at. where can you spend resources and do the most good and what they found was by far? this is about green energy innovation. every dollar spent in green energy innovation will give you $11 back. why? about it is really very very simple. right now the reason why it's hard to do climate policy is because we're asking everyone on the planet to do stuff. they don't want to do. this is why we keep coming up short, right? this is why everybody goes to glasgow and say no you go first. no you go first, right and everybody says, okay. i'm gonna promise something unrealistic in 2050 if you do it, too and then everybody says that and they sign it and they all you know, get all the applause. but of course they never actually do this because it's really costly and it gets you booted out of office if you actually do this as long as climate policy is incredibly expensive. you're never going to get anything, but this, you know signaling. oh, i'd like to show you i'm a really great guy. however, if we could innovate the price of new green below fossil fuels repeat on everybody would just buy it. you wouldn't need all these grand big un conferences. everybody would just get on with her. that was alex point up here if solar and wind with lots and lots of batteries or other backup opportunities was cheaper than fossil fuels china and india would be doing it the point that we need to make sure is that we make that happen. now we can talk for ages about should third generation new clip hour be cheaper. probably should be but it probably won't be however if we invest in fourth generation nuclear like gates and many others are doing if we make that cheaper than fossil fuels we're done. if we could make batteries and solar and wind and everything else incredibly cheap we could possibly actually lift quite a bit of this. this is not going to happen the next decade or two, but eventually it might happen craig venture the guy who cracked the human genome has this great idea of basically using algae out of the ocean surface. these algae would just soak up sunlight and co2 and produce oil. we could basically have a floating sodium arabia on the in the pacific ocean right? we'd harvest it. and we run our entire fossil fuel economy on this oil and it would be co2 neutral because yes just six months ago. it actually soaked up that co2 out there. this is vastly inefficient right now, but maybe it will be efficient. there's thousands of these kinds of ideas and we just need one or a few of them to come through. that's how innovation works if you think about the world has never solved problems by saying. all right, we're gonna promise that everybody feels really bad and they're going to be worse off and they're gonna be a little colder and it's gonna be inconvenient, but we'll do it to solve a problem. that just doesn't work how we do solve problems is through innovation if you think in the 1970s the world was it felt a little bit like it and a lot of nations were running out of food. the answer was not to tell everyone. i'm sorry could all of you guys just eat a little less and be a little more uncomfortable, but at least we'll be able to you know, save the indians and the africans that doesn't work. what did work was green revolution we basically made these seeds that produce a lot more for every acre of food and that's why we have now today india is the world's leading right rice exporter. so the point here is it's all about innovation by all means. let's try and do the carbon tax. i think it's going to be phenomenally hard, but the real solution to climate change is going to be innovation. it always has been the only big solution to any big global problem and it certainly is that today for climate, but that requires us to realize it's a problem, but it's not the end of the world. thank you very much. should i welcome back jackie busy, man. hello. yeah you thank you. fantastic presentation. thank you. we have lots of questions from the crowd. to start off dr. lombard you started by saying climate change. it's real. it's man-made. wouldn't it be more accurate to say it's real and some of it is man-made? yes, yes, it would be again, i think. i think fundamentally having this discussion where you say, you know what i only think it's 55% it just it gets us down this wrong road of saying this is this is not really a problem or i'm not quite sure. i think there's value to that conversation, but i think there's much much more value to tackle people head on because remember most people are not coonen and most people have no idea what these climate models meet. but most people know what it means to fill up your car with seven gallon gas and they don't like it. so, you know, i think there's a much stronger argument to be made in the economic sphere and that's why i'm simply trying to skip ahead and say this is not my conversation. i'm simply trying to get people to think about the economics of this. okay, given the world has decreasing fire. can you address the united states? it seems we have had tremendous wildfire issues these past few years exclamation point yes, and i love the exclamation point so if you look at us fire, so i show we have good data. so we have forest fire a data back to 1926 and we've good model data at least back to 1900 and what you see and i i didn't bring this wow have this light by i can't just show you it looks like this you can look up my latest article from 2020 that also shows it looks like this. it was incredibly high in 1900 then it's been declining and it reached a low point in the 1960s 1970s and since then it's been increasing slightly so that there is a real increase. much of this is probably because we managed to dramatically reduce fire by basically. what is the word? fire suppression and and once you do this sufficiently much you build up a lot of extra fuel and then eventually we'll see a higher equilibrium point a lot of people will only show you that last bit of the graph which is true but in a historical term, very very unrepresentative. i i want to just emphasize over the last 20 years did any one of you notice that the us had much less fire in 1920. sorry in 2020 and in 2021, then you had on average for the last 20 years. no because that's not how news work. news works by somebody taking a film crew to where it's burning. yeah, there's no reporting. i'm out here where there's no burning at all. and it hasn't burnt here the whole year right? it's just not a news story, but it doesn't mean we're well informed. yes. there are huge problems and in california and one of the points that a lot of people so there's a big paper in nature last year that basically said you have to make a prescribed fires of about 20 times more than what california is actually doing every year and they're not doing it because a lot of people a lot of well-meaning people say, i don't want that extra air pollution. i totally understand if you live next to one of those places you'd rather not have it but of course if the alternative if you do that was eventually your house will burn down. maybe you'll be like, okay, i'll cough for one year for one day a year. so we need those conversations. but again this becomes no, this is because of climate just like the hurricanes and all these other terrible things. so you this heat dome and this was absolutely real a lot of people died because of the heat dome, so probably 715 people, but i'm sort of a little surprised that every year according to the global burden of disease about 2,500 people die in us and canada from coal. sorry from from heat every year. why are we only looking at the 700 the made the news and more importantly a hundred and thirty thousand people die every year in the us from cold. why don't we ever hear about them? i i know why because when people die from heat, it happens very quickly, and it's a great new story when people have died from cold. it happens because they can't afford to keep their homes heated for months on end. and so they are little cold and they're blood vessels contract and so they get slightly higher blood pressure and we know that that's one of the main reasons for getting heart attacks and all kinds of other bad things. so you die a little more but it's not something, you know, people just die in these anonymous apartments without anyone and any cnn cruise noticing but it doesn't mean it's a right way to think about it. okay. your data is compelling. why are the top experts on earth getting this wrong example germany's climate envoy just said the germany will accelerate its commitment to the energy transition even with the war. there are smart people in germany what gives yeah, so i think the fundamental problem here is that there's so much data out there and there's so many different stories that it's very easy to pick whatever you want to listen to and then there's of course also a lot of politicians who've sort of hooked up their their entire careers on saying we should go green. so germany very clearly through 20 years have been saying we want to go green. we want to show the world how it's done. if anything they've managed to show the world how it's not done but the fundamental point is they still want to say well if you crane is a really big problem what that shows us is we should have more solar and win so we wouldn't be in the pickle. but of course the problem is this is exactly why you're in the pickle because you need something for when the sun is in shining and the wind isn't blowing. it's not really rocket science. that's what you use the gas for you could use coal. but of course, there's all kinds of other reasons why you might not want to use that and i think we should accept what deslo say if you want to use coal. you should have much stronger environmental regulations because all really does kill, you know a million several million people because of air pollution. we know how to fix that but it's costly and you should have have a talk about that but you could also use a nuclear and again nuclear currently is too expensive. so you need to think about fourth generation. there's all these sort of knock-on effects and that's why it's so easy for politicians to say, you know what i get that. it's really hard to get gas from from russia right now, but in just a few years, we'll all have soul and wind we i mean we heard desolate say that up here just like two hours ago. it sounds really cool, but it's just fantasy. it's not gonna happen because you need some backup power and that back up power undoubtedly will be fossil fuels at at least for the foreseeable future. okay. what do you believe is the motive behind the exaggeration of climate claims. is it related to the great reset goals of the world economic forum and first you should probably define great reset and how that's related to climate policy. so but it's very hard to tell exactly what's behind all of these people. i mean, i i met a lot of people i i had the opportunity so andrew dessler and i've debated several times on twitter, which is never a great platform to do that. and and he said i hope you don't you're not really annoyed with me and i i was like no, i mean this is what happens right? but but i might my understanding is that most people in this debate and i think it's also just a good sort of way to approach a conversation most people in this really do want to do good. most of the people i met with you know, so al gore and everyone else they also want to do good. look. they also want political power and get rich and all kinds of other stuff and you can't blame them really so so i i think the the honest answers to say they want to do good. most of the world is telling them the way you do good is to go further down the line of reducing carbon emissions and that is in some small. true but there's all these other things. so again, it's back to this. do we want the 450 percent or do we want 434% of course, we want 450% but unfortunately much of what many climate people are climate campaigners are actually achieving is perhaps only making us 300% as rich. so in some sense, we're we're arguing about how we think about the world when we don't just talk about climate and i think a lot of climate people really don't think any other way. i i don't know if you saw john kerry was interviewed right after the war the ukraine broke out. and they said, you know it was he was also led into this question. they asked him. how is this going to affect global warming? you know, he was honestly say i really, you know, this war is going to emit a lot of co2 and and and and you know, it's probably also going to take away our attention to for global warming which seems just sort of incredibly short-sided and and sort of wrapped up in your own in your own world. but yeah, i'm pretty sure if if you talk to you know, one of one of the people who arranged local dog show and hungry, she would probably also be really annoyed that this is you know, this is totally disrupting her dog show and and you know, she's like why couldn't they take a better time for that warren you pray and i get that people are there but of course so it's it's not really john kerry's fault. he is certainly right now on this planet to make us care about climate change. it's awful for allowing them to say that's the only issue and that's what we should keep coming back and say, i'm sorry. yes, biodiversity and extreme weather and and failure and climate action, but maybe also pandemic and russia and china and inflation and all these other things and maybe that first i think that's the way to have that conversation so i don't think they're evil. i don't think they're you know, there's this grand nefarious sort of conspiracy. i think it's just a lot of people love to just jump on whatever band where i can there is if you think back to the 1970s, i you know when you read all of that stuff, i i think it's sort of telling how everybody knew everybody knew. we're gonna run out of everything and we're all gonna starve if you read there's this wonderful story for the first earth day in 1970 it was made up as i report to the president in the year 2000. and it was talking about how you know about the 26 million americans left over in 2010. they were sort of scrounging away and they were you know, they were plowing the fields and in the in the the middle strip of the highways and los angeles and you know e king out meeker existence of their world and it see through at the time. most people actually bought into this. it was not because we didn't know better and most people would tell you you're wrong most of the experts but it just fell right and everybody just jump on that bandwag and i think that's the same thing that's happening here. and so again, i think the crucial bit is to tell people these very specific instances. so for instance how many people died in 1920s how many people died today from climate? oh wait, it's actually decline dramatically that probably tells us something do you want to have a chat about that? that's a way to have to get a better conversation. what countries are the most honest about the climate and their climate policy do any of them echo your sentiments and is russia funding the green movement? so russia probably well russia was was certainly funding the anti-fracking movement in europe. how much is very very unclear but it makes sense for them to do so right. would you rather have people buy your product or find a way to make it yourself cheaper? of course. you don't want that so, you know, russia and and putin several times said, i'm really worried about the impacts of fracking and you're kind of touched that you really worry about that. but yeah a rational putin would do exactly that so, you know that i i get that point. sorry the other your other part of question, which countries are most about their climate policy. i would love to be able to say that there's some really smart countries out there. i don't think so because you know when as as kunis mentioned when you talk to a lot of political leaders in private they kind of know this is just a boat killer. you know if you go out and say, you know what that climate change now, i'm not gonna buy into that. that's just you know, that that's going to kill you and so many different ways. so most countries seem to have this competition. where are they going to do it really badly or we're going to be proud and do slightly less badly. and and you know, well, that's that's the way of the world. i mean, i experience that firsthand in denmark where i was advisor to the government at some point and and you know, the prime minister was just yeah, we're never going to survive this. we're just going to jump over there and worry about climate, but perhaps slightly less badly and and that's what most countries do. i think our point has to be to make sure that we at least expand what's possible so we can maybe do it even less badly, you know, we have a great saying, you know, sorry. no, you can't say that because i we have a saying in my organization the code making consensus. it's not about getting it right. it's about getting it slightly less wrong. and you know if we could make the world a slightly less wrong place. i'd be amazing. so let's try and do that. i have one minute left. are we close to ever creating sustainable fusion energy, for example, the progress that china and the un have made with iter and tokomak. if i'm saying that correctly, could it solve the carbon emissions and energy problems for the whole planet? it would be amazing right? i don't know enough about this. i know that we've heard a long time that oh, it's going to be incredibly cheap, but do you remember the two cheap to meter from from fishing? yeah. there's always this technology optimism if i was a guy working in fishing, sorry fusion you you did that at one point chris, you know, you'd be around telling everybody how this is just this close. we just need another 100 billion dollars and and then we're ready to go and and i would probably say we should give him. yeah, i i don't know whether the right number is 100 billion dollars, but the point is we research is incredibly cheap. so we should be spending money on. fission and fusion and you know batteries and solar and wind and craig benders great idea and all these other ideas out there because they are incredibly cheap so we can afford to do all of it. remember. i don't most people don't know this in paris in 2015 the world signed this grand treaty that nobody's actually living up to of cutting carbon emissions. and of course, even if we done all our promise, we would only get very very tiny part of the way, but this was what everybody heard but on the sidelines of paris president obama and a lot of other world leaders and many of the world's richest people including bill gates and many others actually met on the sidelines. i'm happy to say we had tiny bit of of the we were tiny part of the reason why this happened they met in the in the mission innovation where they promised solemnly to increase their spending on research and development into green energy. they actually double it by 2020. of course, we didn't know such thing the world increased its slightly, but we're nowhere near that i would argue we should increase at six-fold. that was what our nobel lawrence told us. the point is increasing our spending on research and development into green energy six-fold would still just be about 20% of the current cost of what we're spending on renewables. so again, we need to get people away from this. oh, here's another solar partner the wind turbine part and ask instead. should we fund a few more of those, you know egg heads because that's the thing that'll actually save the planet. all right. the clock is struck 130. we're on time jordan. thank you very much. i'm jennifer palmieri, and i'm very excited to welcome my friend susan paige to annapolis. i'm a proud edgewater. yay. i'm a proud edgewater anne arundel county resident. i