his. Watch this. I'm gonna make this work.

So I can see him continuing to try to connect. Hey Bjorn, are you there? I can hear you. Success. Wonderful.

Bjorn Lomborg, you are the author of "False Alarm," this excellent book that I'm holding up right now. And can I describe you as the president of the Copenhagen Consensus think tank? Would that be accurate? You certainly can, yes.

And I'm looking at your Twitter profile in which you say that that involves smart solutions through economic prioritization, which is exactly, you're talking my language. Now Bjorn, this is your new book "False Alarm." When is this out? Is this out now? This is not from yesterday, so just fresh off the press. All right. And your topic of primary concern, at least in terms of this book, is climate change, correct?

Yes.

And before I start asking you some questions I have to tell you that you and I have a weird thing in common that you don't know about. And correct me if this is wrong, but I think I have a pretty good memory of this. The first time I ever saw you was on an appearance on Bill Maher's show. Do you remember the first time you were on his show?

It was actually my second time. I remember that I contacted you afterwards.

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, yeah. And the thing I remembered was that you put Bill Maher into cognitive dissonance because of course he's a big climate change doomer. And normally the doomers are talking to scientists, not business people who are looking at both the costs and the benefits and know how to project things into the future as people like you do. And you completely destroyed his worldview to the point where the only thing he could do is act like you didn't just say something. It was the damnedest thing. I was watching and I said, what just happened here? And then I realized it was just cognitive dissonance. He couldn't process how logically and obviously right you were because it didn't fit any of his worldview. So he just pretended it didn't happen and went on.

So enough about me. In your book "False Alarm," available everywhere, so I'm sure you can get it wherever books are sold, you're basically going through the skeptic, would you call it the skeptical argument on climate science? Or do you have a term you prefer?

Well, I would tend to think of it as the rational point of climate, the rational climate argument. Because look, what I'm trying to say is it's actually a real problem. But the way that we've been presented with this is it's the end of the world. And if you're being told this is the end of the world, and remember this is not just a vague little sort of claim, kids around the world are scared witless. You know, Washington Post survey showed that 57 percent of all American kids now are afraid of global warming. And if you ask adults around the world, it turns out that almost half of all adults in the world now believe that it's likely that global warming will lead to the extinction of the human race. This is just outrageously out there. This is way beyond reasonable concern. This is a small alarm.

And so I try to say, look, that's not what the UN climate panel is telling us. It is a problem, not the end of the world, and we should fix it smartly now.

We're having a little bit of connection problem. I hope that will resolve itself. But walk us through, my understanding is that even the IPCC, the ultimate international body that tells you what's going to happen with climate change, that if you actually look at what they say, their impact on the GDP in the future is trivial. Is that true?

It's well, perhaps not trivial, but it's very small. So to give you a sense of proportion, they've done estimates of what is the negative impact on climate change in about 50 years. So half a century from now, the net impact of all climate change if we do nothing will be equivalent to each person on the planet losing somewhere between 0.2 and 2 percent of his or her income.

Hold on. Nothing. But hold on, let's add a little bit of context to that. When you say losing it, that's an economic term, right? You don't actually start with more and then you end up with less. I think what you're saying is that instead of making a hundred dollars over 50 years you only made 98 dollars. Exactly. Which means you wouldn't even know it. There would be nothing in your environment or your experience which would tell you you didn't get that extra two percent, right?

Well, it would be very hard for anyone to notice. Just to give you a sense, the UN also expects that in 50 years time the average person on the planet will be 2.63 times richer than we are today. So that means in the worst case, instead of being 2.63 times as rich, we will be 2.56 times as rich.

Bjorn, if you have some place in your wherever you are that you've got a little stronger signal, that would be good. Your signal is coming in and out. But I look for the viewers. Let me just, the point is that you'll be 2.6 times richer by then. So that little bit you didn't get that maybe you could have gotten, you won't even know the difference.

And the big problem with the climate change argument is that there are not enough people like you who are looking at not just the science of it, because people get stuck on the science because it's not really a scientist who can tell you what the problem's going to be. And people don't get that the person who can tell you what the problem is going to be is the person who can tell you what's going to happen to the economy. Because if the economy is still strong you can fix almost anything. Would you say that's true?

That's absolutely true. And I think we also need to recognize it's not like this is an unheard of argument. So the only climate economist to get the Nobel Prize is William Nordhaus from Yale University. And this is exactly what he points out. He says look, global warming is gonna be a problem, yeah.

And by the way, as far as I know I've never heard a scientist argue with what you say because you're sort of a slightly different domain than science. But I don't think scientists say you're wrong, do they?

Well, a lot of scientists are not comfortable with this not being alarmist. So I think a lot of them will say that doesn't sound right.

Talking about real world impacts, one of the things that drive me up the wall, and that's what I use pretty much the first third of the book to talk about, is how you are being scared with stories that are technically true but often dramatically misleading. Let me give you one example. Last year Washington told us how because of global warming, 187 million people being flooded by the end of the century. This one, Bjorn, there's a little bit of problem with your connection. I might break in and just summarize what I'm hearing you saying so the audience hears it clearly. So you're saying there were 187 million people projected to be victims of flooding, is that what you said?

Yes. Sorry, I'm just trying to move to another part of the house. Does this work better?

That's better, yes.

Okay. So yes, 187 million people would get flooded. This was the Washington Post headline and everywhere on the planet. What that required was that nobody did anything in the next 80 years. So basically this, yeah, we're having more audio problems. But I think what you're saying is that the assumption is that nobody would do anything about it. There would be no remediation over 80 years. When in fact, what is the country that's already underwater? Holland. All right. So we can see that the ability to remediate against flooding is pretty good if you have 80 years and you've got a lot of time.

Now what the study actually showed was if you allow people to adapt, which of course they will, of course you will not see 187 million people having to move. You'll see 305,000 people having to move. So it was 600 times exaggerated. And of course remember every year more than twice that number move out just of California. So it's not something that the world can't adapt and handle. We're simply being told stories that are very scary but end up being very little representative of the real world because we forget adaptation.

Give me an idea what's behind all the exaggeration. In the sense that the obvious thing is that the news model requires you to get worked up in order to click on things for them to get advertising income. So aside from the media which has an incentive to exaggerate things for their business model, is there anything else behind the wrongness?

Well, I think the media part is an incredibly important part of it. And we tend to forget that media exaggerates on all kinds of things. It's just that global warming turns out to be such an incredibly good generator of really scary stuff. But of course it's also because politicians love this setup. Look, you can't really make a better setup than what you're seeing with global warming. Politicians get to say the end of the world is near but I can save you. Right? And also we get to say I can save you and the cost will only come in the next election cycle.

Well, you know, I used to do financial projections and stuff in my corporate job long ago. And the perfect situation for any corporate person is that you get to spend money today and be a hero for what you're fixing. But nobody will know if it will work until you've already been promoted or left for another job. In other words, exactly what you want. To spend money today because that's how you get power and influence and hey, look at all these things I did. And then you will never be responsible for the outcome because that's in 80 years.

And you know, the fun thing is to see we've been doing this for 30 years. So you can actually look back and see how little we've achieved. So last year the UN actually released a very surprisingly honest review of what we've achieved over the last 15 years. And what they said was we cannot tell the difference after all the work up from Obama and everybody else around the world. All the money, they could not tell a difference in the world. Nothing since 2005.

You know, isn't there, this feels like a subset of a problem that is plaguing basically every big public decision, which is our data is undependable and the people who are analyzing the data are not qualified. It feels like it's everything from coronavirus to you name it. It just seems to be the same problem. The data's bad and we don't know how to look at it.

Anyway, I would probably analyze it slightly differently because I think we spent in the order of 50 billion dollars on climate research. So it's not like we don't have a lot of good data. I think there is a lot of organizations that want to convince you this is the end of the world because then they can get you to support really, really expensive policies. And I think we as taxpayers need to fight back and say look, I'm happy to spend money on solving real problems that'll actually have dramatic impact to better the world in the future. But I'm not just going to spend my money to do almost no good and waste most of it.

And what do you think of, if you had a moment to look at, I don't know if you follow American politics enough, but Joe Biden's two trillion dollar plan, which I had to dig really hard, I had to look through multiple articles to find out if nuclear energy was even part of it. So two trillion and most of the coverage didn't even mention nuclear energy. But I found one article that suggested he wants to go strong at nuclear and especially the new designs, which the Trump administration doesn't talk about it but they're doing all of that stuff. They're pushing for the new test facilities, etc. Is that a productive way to go? Does that, is nuclear on your good list?

Nuclear is definitely one of the solutions that we could envision for global warming. I think the big problem about nuclear is that right now nuclear is much more expensive than most other power sources. That's why we need a lot more research and development into fourth generation nuclear power plants. So for instance Bill Gates and many others are spending lots of resources to get that next generation that's going to be safer, cheaper, and also much more dependable. If we can do that that'd be amazing. But again this is just one of the many ways that we could fix climate. You know, innovation fundamentally is going to be the way that we will fix this problem like basically every other problem.

Yeah, exactly. And when I look at the nuclear situation it's too expensive. I don't know if you've dug into the details of that enough to answer this question. But the things that are stopping us is number one it's hard to iterate. If you try something it's really expensive to build a second nuclear energy plant and see if the second one is better than the first one. So it's not like building an iPhone where you can just do it in the lab until you get it right. So that's one problem. The other problem is that we don't standardize the big ones. So we've got multiple models. And if you just built the same damn thing one after another even using current generation three technology before you even get to the super safer stuff of generation four, could we do generation three, let's call it current technology, which has had zero deaths historically? Is that true?

Zero deaths from, it's very, very, very low deaths. Yeah, I think it's zero actually depending on how you count it.

And are those the two problems you see? Iteration, I guess government regulation and how long that takes, but iteration and standardization, are those the two things that will change the economics? My understanding again from nuclear technology is that that's really what's been lacking. We've been building masterworks each one of them instead of actually building just a long stream of them.

And indeed that is one of the points that they're trying to do with fourth generation, to say if we can standardize this and basically build it like a factory or a assembly plant, sorry that was what I was looking for, an assembly plant where we just churn out all of these and you just assemble them like Lego on the spot and then you run it, that will be enormously much cheaper. But again it requires a lot of research and development because we're not there. You know when you look at the new power plants, nuclear power plants that they build around the world, they end up being fantastically expensive. And one of the reasons as you just pointed out is because there's all this regulation. And I just find it's going to be very hard to imagine that that regulation will go away.

And the secondary problem I understand is that if the nuclear power plants are these one-offs then you don't have something that you can export to other countries. And if you're not the big brother of the smaller nuclear program in the smaller country then somebody else is going to be and that could be China or Russia. So simply by not having a robust nuclear energy program in this country we're giving up influence over a lot of the planet. But worse, when you go to space it's going to be nuclear power. And if you don't own space you might as well just give up because whoever owns space owns the planet. That's the end of it. That's my opinion.

No, but I think the fundamental point here and the insight is to recognize that unless we get cheap green energy we're just not going to switch over. Because you're not going to convince most people around the planet to say all right I'll get the same power, slightly less effectively, slightly less dependably, and much, much more expensively. That's just not a selling point except for a few percent of people who are very, very engaged in climate. And so the reality is we need to invest a lot more into green energy research and development to do that. And actually to his credit that is part of Biden's plan. So at least there's a lot of things in Biden's plan and a lot of them I think are going to be a waste of money but that actually turns out to be a really good idea.

And there's also a weird thing that I can't get over which is the people who are most concerned about climate change, you know they tend to be focused on the political left. I don't think that they understand how racist it is because that's their other biggest issue, to let's reduce racism. But if you say to the developing countries you can't use what we used to get here because it's too polluted, then are you basically just telling all the brown people that they can't have what white people have now? It's like oh no, no, we got here this way by using your oil and coal but you can't do that. You're gonna have to wait. Why don't you just wait and we'll find something clean for you. We don't know how long it'll take but until then you'll have to starve. Would you mind waiting? It's the most freaking racist thing you've ever heard. There's no Black Lives Matter thing. I mean this is on a level literally with slavery in terms of how prejudicial it is against people of other colors. I mean it's massively destructive. And yet the same group are in favor of both of those things.

And we think this all the time. You know we're basically telling poor countries no you can't have coal power because it is going to make climate worse, which is true. But of course that coal power is also going to make that country much, much richer. So we work together to look at what would it take to put in extra. It would dramatically increase life quality in Bangladesh. The average person in Bangladesh is about 16 times richer. Yeah, create global warming problems. But just to give you a sense of proportion, for every 100 you produce for Bangladesh you create 20 cents of climate problems.

We have a little audio problems again. So let me just do one more topic here and then we'll let you get to the rest of your day. I'm sure with a new book out you've got a lot to do this week. My guess is. So I'm really interested in the super storm and the natural disaster story where every time there's a hurricane somebody on television will tell us that climate change is what caused that darn hurricane. What's the more reasonable, rational view of the big storms and natural disasters?

So we're certainly not seeing more storms hitting the U.S. Actually if you look at landfalling hurricanes and strong landfalling hurricanes they've slightly declined over the last 120 years for the U.S. But in general much, much more importantly is that many more people live much closer to harm's way with much more stuff. So fundamentally the reason why you see dramatic impacts of hurricanes now is because there's many more people. You know look at Florida coastal counties. Florida coastal population has increased over the last 120 years a 67 fold whereas the U.S. population has only increased fourfold. So clearly they also have much more expensive homes. So clearly you're going to get a lot more damage.

And again if you want to help these people the way to do so is by getting better building codes. And also still they're going to get wiped out every now and then.

And you know I always look at that situation and I ask myself who is it that lives on the beach because it's not the poor people, right? No. Okay, in the United States. I mean it must be different in other places but in the United States it feels like there's a pretty strong correlation between being rich and being able to have a house on the beach. And if I were to ask, if I were to say what would be the best thing for the economy of the United States, I'm just joking here but just to make a point, the best thing for the economy of the United States would be for a big storm to come by about every three years, knock down all the rich houses and give the poor people, not poor people but the middle class people who do construction, more work. Because the rich people have insurance. Insurance is priced to pay for itself. The rich people live in their other house while the beach house is being repaired. I mean you could imagine that it would be a plus to wipe out rich people's houses every few years just so people have enough to do to rebuild them. I'm just kidding on that but yeah it would certainly teach them to be better at producing their houses.

Well I mean and one of the big problems of course is that we're subsidizing rich people because we're subsidizing much of their insurance. So we should definitely not be doing that. And that of course would get fewer people to build close to harm's way, right?

Yeah, subsidizing people to build that, that's just crazy.

All right. So what is it that I, I'll give you the question that every author hates but since you're toward the beginning of your book tour I'll get you ready for it. Okay, so this would just be practice. The worst question everybody wants to hear as an author, what is it I forgot to ask you? In other words it's just a chance to mention something that maybe you wanted to mention that.

Sure. So I think the rest of the book really is about two things. It's first of all talking about all the things that haven't worked. So you know we promised the Paris Agreement. It's gonna cost one to two trillion dollars a year and it'll do almost nothing to actually fixing climate change. We're telling you a little bit, Bjorn, we're losing the audio a little bit. I think we got the gist of that though. Would you mind if we end now just because the audio is kind of sketchy? Sorry about that.

I don't know, I can hear you perfectly.

Oh okay, you're cutting a little bit. Now I'll make sure everybody knows your book. I'm holding it up. I'll tweet about you and I thank you very, very much for coming on this. You're exactly the kind of author that my audience likes to hear from. So thank you very much and good luck with the book.

Hey, thank you very much, Scott.

All right, take care everyone.

All right, Bjorn is one of my favorite public figures, has been for years because he's one of the few people who look at the costs and the benefits and know how to do it. It's refreshing.

All right, a few other things. Yesterday I was trying to change a light bulb and I ended up tweeting about it because it was so hard. It was one of those compact fluorescents. And in theory you just pull it out straight and push it in straight but it didn't work. And so I'd spent over a month trying to change one light bulb. I'd ordered different bulbs thinking maybe I had the wrong one. I tried everything. And the funniest part about it was listening to the other people's comments because when I tweeted it people weighed in with their comments. But the funny part was how many people have thrown away perfectly good lamps and light fixtures to change the light fixture because they couldn't figure out how to change the light bulb.

Now if you've never tried to change a compact fluorescent light bulb you don't know how hard it is. And again this is, let me explain this. This is the entire process. Here's a hole. Here's the light bulb. Pushes straight in. If you want to take it out pull it straight out. And I spent a month not being able to do it even trying that exact thing. And apparently other people have just thrown away their lamps, changed their fixtures, hired a handyman to just change the entire light fixture because they couldn't change the light bulb.

And here's the point of this. This was not just to complain about my personal inability to do things. The larger point is this and I'm going to hit this a lot. Who tested that? This is a gigantic national standard. Who tested that? How many times did they have an average person come in and say hey can you see if you can change this bulb and then watch them? Now if you try to remove a compact fluorescent you'll find that it breaks in your hand about half of the time. It breaks. The glass part just breaks off in your hand when you're trying to just change the bulb. Nobody tested that.

And so I submit to you that we have a gigantic problem in this country and the world of products that were never tested and yet are now standard in all of our homes. Never tested.

Have you heard a lot about Mary Trump's book? No, you know Mary Trump, the niece of Trump who wrote an anti-Donald Trump book. And apparently the worst thing that came out of this because it's the one that they pull from the book is that she alleges that Donald Trump paid someone to take his SATs. That's it.

Now first of all I doubt it's true. I mean anything's possible. It wouldn't change my opinion of anything because I have that 20-year rule. I just don't care what people did when they were 18. Do you care what anybody did when they were 18? Would you say we've got to impeach this president because when he was 18 he did something clever that worked out well? I'm sure it wasn't, you know if it happened. And by the way I would say the odds of it being true are not really that high. But even if it is true that's it. That's the best you have. You're an insider. You've got all this access to the family and the best you have is that when he was 18 he did something that any 18 year old would have done if they could have gotten away with it. Ah, that's pretty empty.

Apparently Kanye is out. He's out of the race. But here's what's interesting. He actually did try to get on the ballots. So there is documented evidence that he put real money into trying to get on the ballots. So he was serious. Some of you wondered if he was serious but I think that's been answered. He was serious.

Now what do you make of the fact that he was in the race for less than two weeks? Do you say to yourself well that proves he's a flake and he was never really that serious and what kind of a president would he be if he didn't even plan the getting nominated and all that the way it should be? Here's my answer to that. He played it perfectly. I think Kanye played it perfectly. Because here's what I always say. There's nothing better for improving your odds of becoming president than having run in the past, right? Trump had sort of flirted with running in the past and therefore because every time there was an election for several elections before the time he actually got elected, Trump's name was always in the top ten because he put it there. Trump put his name in the top 10 for every future election by simply making noise but not going very far in initial attempts or initial flirtations with running, initial talking about running, etc.

Kanye is using the same playbook. You know people who have lost elections then went on to win were quite a few, right? Nixon, Reagan, Trump himself. It's fairly common. Biden has run before and that has a lot to do with why he's where he is although being vice president was more of it. And I would say that Kanye's play of reminding us of Kanye for president, letting us wrestle with the idea for a little while and then waiting until 2024 was exactly the right play. Exactly the right play. Because he didn't really have a chance of winning and everybody would have been mad at him if he changed the election result which he would have. It probably would have caused Trump to win. Sorry my cat's in the way. So I don't think he could have played that better honestly. The get in and get out in 2020. If I could have advised him, and I didn't by the way, but if I could have advised him on the best way to play this I would have said this. I always said flirt with it, get in there, get some noise, but really you're getting ready for 2024.

Perfect.

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