The World is Not Ending | Bjørn Lomborg | EP 315

51m read

·Nov 7, 2024

[Music] I was very much struck by how the translation of the biblical writings jump started the development of literacy across the entire world. Illiteracy was the norm. The pastor's home was the first school and every morning it would begin with singing. The Christian faith is a singing religion. Probably 80 percent of Scripture memorization today exists only because of what is sung. This is amazing. Here we have a Gutenberg Bible printed on the Press of Johann Gutenberg.

Science and religion are opposing forces in the world, but historically that has not been the case. Now the book is available to everyone, from Shakespeare to modern education and medicine and science to civilization itself. It is the most influential book in all history and hopefully people can walk away with at least a sense of that. Around 1900, almost everyone worried about the fact that you could see cities becoming more and more congested. You had horse carriages, and they left an enormous amount of manure.

So there were lots of people who were really worried about the fact that, you know, by extrapolation by 1920, 1930, all of New York, all of London would be covered by feet and feet of horse manure. How are you going to solve that? And along came the automobile. The again the point here is not to say that a technology that we then innovate a hundred and twenty years ago is the right one for today. Eventually that will go, you know, the way of the dinosaur. We'll find other ways.

But we should not be kidding ourselves and believing that just wishing it wasn't so makes it go away. The way you do this is through technology. My concern is that if you get people adjudicating the, what would you call it, the comparative validity of need, you turn the whole world over to people who say, "Well you don't really need that." Well exactly who are you telling here that they don't get to have what they need because you don't mean that for yourself?

You're not going to go live in a damn hut in the middle of Africa and burn dung. You're not proposing that. You're proposing that these damn poor people in third world countries—and maybe in your own country, and there's too many of those blighters anyways—that they should just be bloody well satisfied with the fact that they've got what they have now and they shouldn't in any manner ever dream of having this sort of wealth of opportunities and security that we have in the West.

[Music] Hello everyone watching and listening on YouTube or associated podcasts. I have the great privilege today of speaking once again to Dr. Bjorn Lomborg. We've talked several times on my podcast before. It's always good to talk to him. Dr. Lomborg researches the smartest ways to do good with his think tank, the Copenhagen Consensus. He's worked with hundreds of the world's top economists and seven Nobel laureates to find and promote the most effective solutions to the world's greatest challenges, from disease and hunger to climate and education. For his work, Lomborg was named one of Time magazine's hundred most influential people in the world.

He's a visiting fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and a frequent commentator in print and broadcast media for outlets including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, CNN, Fox, and the BBC. His monthly column is published in many languages by dozens of influential newspapers across all continents. He's also a best-selling author whose books include: "False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet," "The Skeptical Environmentalist," "Cool It: How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place," "The Nobel Laureates' Guide to the Smartest Targets for the World," and "Prioritizing Development: A Cost-Benefit Analysis of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals."

All right, hello Mr. Lomborg. Very nice to have the opportunity to speak with you again. I thought today we would start our discussion by talking about what young people are being told. I want to lay out a few ideas for you, and we can delve into this and move on from there. So I've just been reading Alex Epstein's book "Fossil Future," and in that book he details out first of all his belief that in the foreseeable future, that not only should we not only will we have to use fossil fuels, but we should use them. And he explains why I would say on ethical and practical grounds.

But he also says something that struck me as very interesting, which is that the view that's being put forward to young people of the role of human beings on the planet in relationship to the environment is essentially predicated on an implicit religious metaphor. I want to lay out the metaphor and I want to lay out why I think his claim that it's a religious metaphor is technically correct.

So the story is something like this: the planet is fragile and virginal and continually pillaged. The pillaging forces are the patriarchy, essentially the social structure. It's a masculine metaphor. The social structure is viewed as a force that's nothing but devouring and negative. And so you have nature, you have culture. Nature's all positive, culture is all negative. Then you have the individual, also part of the story, and the individual is basically characterized as some combination of predator and parasite.

So the reason that's a religious story, as far as I can tell, is this is complicated, but I'd like to be able to lay it out. When I wrote my book in 1999 called "Maps of Meaning," it struck me that the basic cognitive and perceptual categories were something like chaos, order, and the process that mediates between them. I looked at a lot of mythological work, a lot of religious writing across multiple cultures, and tried to look at the correspondence between that and certain neuropsychological models that were being built, including models of hemispheric processing.

Our hemispheres are set up in some real sense so that the right hemisphere processes novelty and chaos and possibility, and the left hemisphere imposes order. The fact that the hemispheres have this structure indicates that because they're adapted to the natural world, let's say, indicates that the most fundamental way of perceiving the world is something like a place of possibility and chaos and potential on the one hand and a place of habitable order and culture and predictability on the other.

So you have those two domains, and then consciousness looks like it's the process that mediates between the two. And Epstein, now I learned in 1999 that these domains—chaos, order, and the process—were always represented metaphorically or symbolically. It's like an a priori axiom of cognitive function and perception itself. The chaotic domain, potential and so forth, tends to be represented with female symbols, feminine symbols, and the orderly domain tends to be represented with masculine symbols.

And so you can see how this plays out in the modern world because you have Mother Nature, who's virginal and fragile, being raped by the catastrophic patriarchy. You can see those metaphors lurking underneath. Right? There's the positive female, the negative male on the cultural front. And then you have to lay the individual on top of that, and the individual in that story—positive feminine, negative masculine— is also represented negatively.

Now that's a very compelling story because it does cover all the domains of existence and there is a beautiful and plentiful and positive element of untrammeled nature, let's say, and there is a tyrannical and predatory aspect of culture. And the individual can be a destructive, parasitical, and predatory force, but that's only half the story, and that's the problem. And so the point I'm trying to make is that we can't structure our perceptions without using something like an a priori category system.

And the a priori category system, whatever your a priori category system is, your religion, it functions in exactly the same way. And we have a religion now that's focused on nature worship, the derogation of culture, and the damnation of the individual. And that's the story that's being told to young people. Right? The planet's fragile, culture is nothing but a destroying force, and individual effort is to be construed as predatory, see in the patriarchal sense, and parasitic in relationship to the natural world.

So I'm wondering what you think about that.

Dr. Lomborg: Yeah, no, I think it's a great metaphor. So again, if we go along with this, and if we all have religion, I would tend to say that my religion is data. You know, there's a famous statistician that says if you, without data, you're just another guy with an opinion. Right? We have a lot of knowledge about the world, and the reality is that much of this is built on stories and metaphors and things that we've heard, and it's probably not very conducive to understanding what the world is actually like.

I totally agree with you that everybody—not really just young people, but especially perhaps young people—are told this is the end of times. You know, this idea of should you really have children? Yeah, put them into this world, this terrible world. The world is going to end in, you know, whatever the number is right now, but you know, eight years or 12 years or whatever.

The feeling is that this is sort of the end of times, and that's very much, as you point out, a sense of we have this beautiful world, this natural world that we've somehow despoiled and made terrible in so many different ways. And I would argue that certainly if you look back in time, this very clearly is a very modern way of thinking about the world.

You know, two, three hundred years ago, we were terrified of nature because we really worried about, you know, the wolves out there. We were terrified about nature in the sense that it would kill us in all kinds of ways. Just think about one of the things I'll talk about a little later—smallpox, a disease that we've eradicated in 1978, but even in the 20th century, it killed about 300 million people. So, you know, it killed, what, a couple of, you know, somewhere up to five million people every year. This is a terrible disease. It was not the only disease that you were struck with. This killed royalty and everybody else.

Nature used to be terrible. What has happened is that we have actually found a way to live such that we can now say we like nature, we love nature, we want to set aside lots of nature. Remember, you know, most of European nations can cut down most of their forests to build navies to fight each other. But the fundamental point is you get reforestation when you're rich, when you're well off, when you can actually deal with the issues.

And so again, that tells you something that I think is incredibly important if we're actually going to have a good conversation. It is that you need to understand overall things are moving in the right direction and that we're much better off. You know, with just one statistic, if you look at the number of people that die from climate-related disasters—so these are the disasters that we hear about all the time, you know, floods, droughts, storms, wildfires, extreme temperatures, those kinds of things—we have pretty good data for that. We certainly have good data for the last 100 years.

How many people die every year? Well, it turns out that in the 1920s, about half a million people died each year from those disasters. That's a terrible outcome of the world. How many people die today? If you ask most young people, if you ask most people in the world, they'll probably think that number has gone up and up and it's just worse and worse. Nothing could be further from truth. Last year—it's the last full year that we have, 2021—less than 7,000 people died. We've seen a decline of more than 99 percent.

Why? It's got nothing to do with climate. It's not because climate has gotten better or indeed really worse. We can't really tell in most of these impacts. There's a few of them we can’t, but mostly we can't. What has changed is our ability to handle it. That's why we don't die from smallpox. That's why we can afford to actually make sure we have forests. That's why most rich nations are reforesting, and that's why fewer and fewer people are dying from these disasters.

So I think we need to tell that alternative story, if you will, that yes, you hear all these terrible things, and it doesn't mean that there are no problems. There's still lots of people that are, you know, terribly troubled from floods. There's still lots of people that are terribly troubled by droughts and all these other things. There's still a lot of infectious disease from both tuberculosis and malaria. The world is not fine, but the world is much better. And that's important because that puts us in a very different frame of mind. It means we are not in looking at the world being despoiled and hence we need to make some sacrificial offerings to, you know, please this deity that we're worried about.

It's instead to say, "Look, we're actually dealing with this in the right direction. We're actually making things better, but we can do even more." That's a very different message, and of course one that's much more optimistic, and I would hope well it's also more balanced.

Okay, so you started talking about the relationship, you know, your concentration on data, and so I wanted to delve into that a little bit. So there's data, of course, and data would be something like a representation of the patterns in the world, not merely the subjective patterns, not merely the psychological patterns, but the patterns in the, well, let's say the objective world, the patterns that exist in some way that transcend mere subjectivity.

And so those are patterns that we're going to test our presumptions against. But part of the reason I wanted to delve into the underlying metaphorical substructures is because a lot of your work, and the work of the more non-naive optimists that I've encountered in the last 10 years, has this counter-narrative element that structures it. I mean, because your a priori axioms, they're the reverse of the environmentalist axioms in some sense.

And in this way, what I mean is that you started your description by pointing out that we shouldn't be lulled into thinking that nature is only benevolent. It's only been a very short period of time in historically speaking that any of us at all anywhere on the planet had the luxury of ever assuming that nature was a benevolent force for more than a few seconds. Right? And so because nature is conspiring in all of its benevolence to destroy us as rapidly as it possibly can all the time, as well with cold and heat and floods and disease and acts of God and volcanoes and earthquakes, etc., etc.

And so you have to be extremely naive if you don't also see nature as a threatening force. So now you shouldn't see it as only a threatening force because we're also dependent on it. All right? So you flesh out the malevolent nature side of the story, but then you also say, "Well, look, everyone who's listening, don't be so pessimistic about our culture, our Western culture, let's say, but the global culture even more broadly because in many ways we've been moving in the right direction."

Things are a hell of a lot better by almost every metric you can imagine than they were 100 years ago. They're better by most metrics than they were 50 or 20 years ago and not just a little bit better, a lot better. And then, so then you can flesh out the positive side of the culture, and then on the individual side, you can say, "Well, you know, there are people who are predatory and there are people who are parasitical and everyone is subject to temptation and failure to hit the mark, let's say. But by and large, people are striving in the right direction, and you can view human beings as a positive force even though there's some ambivalence about that."

And so that fleshes out the story. You know, you can also think about it as Rousseau versus Hobbes. And strangely enough, you come down more on the side of the Hobbesians, even though I don't think that's your temperamental proclivity because for Rousseau, right, nature was all positive. We were turned into negative creatures because we were perverted by our socialization.

And human beings—well for Rousseau, human beings were innately good, assuming that they weren't warped and twisted by culture. But Hobbes had the alternative viewpoint. Hobbes said, "Well, the state of nature is chaos and war, and we need a strong socializing force in order to integrate and organize us so that peace can obtain."

I've thought for a long time that a comprehensive worldview melds Rousseau and Hobbes. It's the same comprehensive religious idea in some sense that you need a representation of nature that's positive and negative. You need a representation of culture that's positive and negative and a representation of the individual that's positive and negative.

And we've offered a crippled religious view to young people. It's also got this apocalyptic end, right? This apocalyptic undertone, which is not only is nature virginal and fragile and culture rapacious and predatory and the individual corrupt, but this is a bloody emergency. And the apocalypse is upon us. Like if it isn't tomorrow, it's 10 years from now. All of that's a religious force, I would say, operating at the metaphorical and mythological level.

And a lot of what you've been doing—and I want to go—I want to get at the foundations of this—a lot of what you've been doing is saying, "Well, look, let's just hold on on the apocalyptic vision side. It isn't obvious that the bloody catastrophe is upon us now in any manner that would make in cautious emergency action anything other than destructive." There's no reason to assume that as a social force we're only predatory and parasitical, and we could give ourselves some credit for striving in the right direction, and also being able to master this.

Because one of the things that I really liked about your work and about many of the people who are working on the optimistic front—this is mostly economists do this—is the idea that, well, we don't have an apocalyptic challenge on our hands, but we have some challenges. But we're the sort of creatures that can actually master those challenges if we don't panic and do something too stupid.

Dr. Lomborg: Yeah, no. And look, that's exactly the right point. I actually think I love your Hobbes and Rousseau. In some ways, you're probably right that I would argue, of course, the world originally was like Hobbes, not Rousseau. But what we've actually managed with 100, you know, three or four hundred years of hard work is that we have turned the world into something that's much closer to Rousseau.

I'm not sure I’m there. I'm going to go down in history with this philosophy lesson, but yeah, the fundamental point is what we achieve is by making the world safer for us by actually achieving to make sure that people don't die from smallpox and that they don't die from all these other things that we can actually produce a lot of the things that we need for our world in a much more sustainable way.

Remember, you know, if you look at the history of, for instance, fire, of the last 10,000 years, typically, whenever, you know, humans come around, they just burn the whole stuff because it's in their way. Right? You know, if you're Indian, we have lots of evidence to show that Indians just burned large tracts of land because it brings out the animals, you know, it makes them defenseless and you can kill them, and you eat them. It makes a lot of sense, but that's really destroying nature.

What we're doing now, of course, is to a very large extent that we grow very efficient food so that in rich countries, at least, in countries that have sufficient resources to actually care about other things than just surviving, they set aside more and more nature. That's why, you know, just in Denmark, where I am right now, you know, we used to have about a third of the country covered in forests. Then we cut down all of it, and we got down to about 2 percent. Now we're back up to 14. Why? Because we're rich.

We actually like nature, and we plant forests so that we have places to take our kids out and watch it. So again, the point here is it's not just optimism; it's actually realism to recognize that you're only going to fix the problem by looking at the data, finding out what are the challenges, fix many of these challenges, and realizing you can't fix everything, or at least not everything at once.

So you fix the most important challenges that takes the least resources to get the most impact. So, you know, fundamentally—and again, this is what the economists love to say, the ones that have the biggest bang for the buck. But in reality, it's much more about making sure that if you can only do some things, sometimes you do the smartest stuff first. And that's what's brought us to here, and that's why we should stop saying it's the end of the world, but still recognize that there are plenty of troubles around.

And again, also just let's remember, you know, we're sitting in two developed countries where we're very well off, where we're not worried about, you know, neither smallpox because we've eradicated that, but we're not worried about tuberculosis either. We're not worried about not having enough food. We're not worried about malaria. All these, yes, all these different things that most people in this world.

So, you know, by far far over four billion or probably more like six, six and a half billion of the eight billion we are on the planet are worried about every day. And that's why I'm also really frustrated with this way that we're very often so focused on saying, you know, for instance on climate change, which is a real problem. We're saying it's the only problem, and then we forget about all these other things where we could help much more make sure that people are saved much better and that they could also then eventually get to a point where they would want to, you know, preserve nature and think about other things and just simply, you know, making sure they survive the night.

Okay, so we talked about some of the reasons that this new quasi-religious view of the world and our place in it might have arisen. Your point was that, well, because of technological progress, we've been able to begin to view nature as a much more benevolent force than we ever had the luxury to before. But there's some other social pressures, let's say, that are pushing this narrative forward that I think are worth delving into.

You mentioned one when we just had a bit of a preliminary conversation: there’s a huge competition for people's attention online. And that competition has intensified dramatically in the last 20 years because there are so many voices clamoring for everyone's attention all the time. And one of the advantages to an apocalyptic vision is that it is attention grabbing.

So any narrative that tilts toward the apocalyptic is likely to get magnified in online communication because, you know, things are good and slowly getting better isn’t much of a headline and there's nothing novel about it. Okay, so that’s one—that’s another possible contributing fact. Can I just give you one so—

Dr. Lomborg: Please do.

Jordan: So the World is a Wonderful website and they point out—I love the statistic—you know, we have no sense of how many people we've lifted out of poverty. So over the last 25 years since, yes—and the order—almost a billion people. So every year for the last 25 years, we could have had a headline in every paper in the world everywhere around telling us, "Last yesterday, 138,000 people were lifted out of poverty." How come you never hear that? That is an astoundingly amazing thing.

And yes, there are still many problems. Yes, there are so many poor people. But the fact is, you know, 200 years ago, we used to be almost all extremely poor. There was a few royalty on that, and then, you know, it was 90, 95 percent of all of us had what would typically be known as a dollar a day, but it's really $2.15 now.

But the fundamental point is we were incredibly poor. Now we have less than 10 percent that are extremely poor. That's still a problem. We should still help them, and there's a lot of ways we could do that. But that is one of those many stories that you don't hear because, yeah, it doesn't generate clicks.

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Yeah, well part of it, part of it—and it’s a deep psychological problem too—is that we are structured psychologically so that the negative has more impact than the positive does. And so—and that’s a very difficult bias to work against when you’re in a situation where you might be making the case that the positive should be what’s predominating. It’s like, well, fair enough, but that isn’t exactly how we’re wired, and I suppose that’s why, because we can be a hundred percent dead but only so happy.

And so it’s right, it’s conservative in some sense. And I don’t mean politically; it’s just that we’re a little more hyper-alert to the negative than to the positive, but that’s a tough thing to fight against when the negative can grab attention, especially when it’s blown up to apocalyptic proportions.

Okay, so there’s a couple of other things I wanted to delve into there too. So there’s this psychologist Jean Piaget, and Piaget is very interested in ethical development and cognitive development. He developed a stage theory of human cognitive and moral development across time, and the last stage in his sequence of cognitive/moral transformations was the messianic stage.

Not everyone hits that, but more philosophically sophisticated young people pass through something approximating a messianic stage, and it occurs somewhere between the ages of 16 and 21, which by the way is the right stage of life to bring young men into the military, if you’re going to do it effectively. Like, there’s a whole radical process of neuronal pruning that takes place between ages 16 and 21 that’s analogous to what happens between the ages of two and four. It’s almost as if at that point you die into your adult configuration, right? Because you’re pared down to what is only going to work for your environment.

Okay, so now one of the psychological consequences of that is that when young people are in this stage of development and they’re looking for how to separate themselves from their parents and to maybe even move beyond the narrow confines of their immediate friendship group, they’re trying to catalyze their identity with a broader social mission.

And in archaic societies, that step would be catalyzed by something like an initiation ritual, where the old personality is symbolically destroyed, put to death. That accounts for some of the torturous elements of the initiation ceremonies. And then the new man—because the initiation ceremonies tend to be more intense for boys—the new man is brought into being as a cultural entity, and then he’s aligned with the mission and purpose, let’s say, of the tribal unit.

It's something like that. Well, right now, I think the radical leftists on the environmental side have been very good at capitalizing on those urges because what they offer to young people is this—but it’s pathological in some real sense because it’s a shortcut to messianic moral virtue.

So the idea would be, well, there is an apocalypse. We need to save the virginal planet. So there’s a bit of a Saint George thing going on there to protect the virgin, let’s say, and the way to do this is to become something approximating an activist who’s dead set against the evil patriarchy and the predatory and parasitical individual.

You can understand why that’s attractive because it does offer young people a grand vision. They’re now protectors of the planet. They’re participating in something that’s beyond themselves. But the problem with it is that it’s an invitation to a very one-sided story and it’s got this terribly destructive anti-human element.

And so, well, I’m curious about what you think about that.

Dr. Lomborg: I think it’s a very good metaphor for, you know, how the world and in many ways have come to work. I think you’re absolutely right. It’s a very sort of stimulating and very easy message to fall into. The world is terrible, but here is how we can help.

And the story very easily becomes, I’m going to help by cutting tons of CO2. Now again, I bring my data points. Yes, yes. And so I think there are two parts of it. I mean, first of all, I think we should recognize it’s wonderful that young people—and really everyone—wants to do good. We should encourage that. We should—that’s wonderful.

And yeah, again, it’s part of the fact that we’re now well off that we can stop worrying where’s our next meal coming from, and then we can start thinking about, so how are we going to help the world? But the reality is that when we’re being told this, it’s the end of the world, and hence this is the only thing that matters. We’re very likely to make very poor decisions.

I mean, if it was true, you know, if there was a meteor hurtling towards Earth, the only thing that mattered—I mean, it was going to, you know, sort of wipe out the whole world. The only thing that matters was to get this, you know, the Space Shuttle, the, uh, whatever, the Starship, or whatever, up there and deflect it. That’s what we should be focused on. But that’s not the right metaphor for climate.

Climate change is a problem, right? And it’s a problem that we—in many ways, as we can, as we saw with that statistic I told you before—yeah, the fact that we’ve seen dramatically declining levels of people dying from climate-related disasters because we can actually adapt to much of this and because we can predict it, we can make sure that the people become more safe from these things.

It’s not the end of the world. It is a problem, and saying this is the only problem makes us very likely to make really poor decisions because we only—we focus on this. Can’t forget all the other—let me just one other thing. So I think there are two key points. One is that thinking it’s the end of the world and thinking this is the only problem makes you forget all the other problems; but also when you look at then, what are the solutions that are typically offered, they’re terribly inefficient!

So they’ll typically involve something along the lines of saying, you know, I’m going to forgo driving my car, which will at best have virtually no impact. It’s not that, you know, please do it if it makes you feel good, especially if it works into your plans, but it's not how you solve the world. And, you know, people will talk about going vegetarian. Again, great thing. I’m vegetarian, yeah. But yeah, it’s not going to save the world.

You need to get a sense of proportion. Most of the things that people talk about are small fractions of what it'll actually take. And what they're really suggesting—and what everybody’s now talking about—is this Net Zero idea, that we need to cut all carbon emissions from all economies by 2050. This would be enormously costly and also terribly, terribly fatal for many countries, especially the poorer countries who basically keep alive by having lots and lots of access to fossil fuels.

One way of seeing that is right now, half the world’s population survive on nitrogen that comes from fertilizer that comes from natural gas. We have no way of knowing how we could possibly get enough nitrogen to feed most of the world if we went to Net Zero. We saw a small example of that was a very badly performed example in Sri Lanka, but still, it’s worthwhile to point out you cannot actually feed most of the people on the planet if you want to go organic and go Net Zero right now.

And that tells you a story, because as Norman Borlaug loved to point out, one of the Nobel laureates that actually helped save, you know, a billion people or so, he said: "I look around the world and I don’t see four billion people willing to give up their lives." Right?

So there’s no four billion volunteers to say, "All right, I’m not going to be here." We need to be realistic about this and say the current solutions are often very counterproductive. So stop believing it’s the only problem and stop asking for bad solutions.

Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about that too from a motivational perspective. So we have this appeal to the messianic urge of young people, but now here’s how the appeal gets warped. Because it is the case that each young person should take their place as a responsible, productive, and generous member of the broader social order, but that’s really difficult. That’s genuine moral effort.

And that would require growing the hell up, being willing to make sacrifices, including the future in your deliberation so you're not impulsively hedonistic, serving other people, starting a family, starting a business. Like all these things that you have to do in the micro world that require real effort. Well, here’s the shortcut that’s being dangled in front of young people.

It's like forget about all that, all that activity, that difficult, painstaking, conscientious local activity that’s all just part of the predatory parasitical patriarchy. So you can just dispense with all of that. Instead you can put yourself forward as an ally of virginal nature, and instantly, as an anti-apocalyptic advocate of that sort, you’re elevated to the highest possible moral stature.

Which is something like, well, it’s something like a messianic figure. I’m saving the planet. It’s like, well, I don’t think you are. I don’t think you’re doing any of the work necessary to save the planet. I mean, one of the things I really liked about your work when I came across it—and that’s probably, it’s got to be 15 years ago or more now—was that you had done the detailed, data-driven work that was necessary to differentiate the landscape of problems.

So first of all, you’d admit to the complexity of the problems that were in front of us. You weren’t falling prey to the idea that there was only one problem, there was one solution, and you were the person merely by advocating for that solution who was now God Emperor of the world. There was none of that in your work.

And I think part of the reason it’s had a hard time getting traction to some degree is that you’re insisting to people that they actually pay some attention to the complexity of the challenges that confront us. Right? And the problem with that is that that runs contrary to this narcissistically attractive metanarrative which is, no, no, you can just oppose the patriarchy, and everything that goes along with it, all that responsibility, which maybe you don’t want to shoulder anyway, and you can instantly become morally superior by being a climate change activist.

And some of that’s attractive to the messianic drive in young people, but also some of that’s attractive to just straight, bloody—what would you say? Hypersimplified narcissism. Because one of the dark motivations of people is to obtain unearned moral virtue. Because we need reputation, and if you can put yourself that’s why we worship allies now.

You know, if you can put yourself forward as an ally of the noble cause, then all of a sudden you have as much moral stature as anybody could hope to gain, but you haven’t done any of the real work. And the real work is—the devil's in the details and the data—in relationship to the real work.

So, one more thing to add on top of that: so there’s this enticement that we’re offering to young people. It’s like, well here’s a world view. We can identify the villains. The villains are culture and the predatory individual. You can be an ally. Now you have overblown moral virtue merely because you're on the right side, and then you don’t have to think through any of this because you’ve already got the story right, even though it’s a one-pixel story.

So that’s a very bad moral trap. But then there’s something darker going on too. You know, in Epstein’s book "Fossil Future," he cites some of these more radical environmentalist types who say things like, I think it was McKibben he quoted who said something like as far as I’m concerned, the vista of an unspoiled river, so any natural environment that’s completely untouched by human beings, is so valuable that it would—one person or a billion isn’t worth that.

And so there’s a malevolent anti-humanism that’s at the bottom of this too, which is also—it’s part of this metaphor. It’s part of the idea that intrinsically human beings are something like a cancer on the face of the planet or a virus or a biological force that’s gone wrong, a Malthusian nightmare, and that only that which is completely unsullied by human beings, untouched by human hands, is intrinsically valuable.

And you can put that forward as a moral claim and say that you’re on the side of nature, but the flip side of that is, like, yeah, like if there’s too many people on the planet, their mate, which of them do you think should go, and exactly how are you going to bring that about?

And so that’s the dark side of this apocalyptic environmentalist utopian narrative is that human beings are categorized as evil in and of themselves and all human activity as evil. And you know, one of the things that we’ve discussed is that not only is that a pathological viewpoint and extremely dangerous, but interestingly enough, it’s probably also counterproductive from the hypothetical perspective of the environmentalist utopians.

Because if the goal is to produce a greener, more biodiverse planet, let’s say, then it seems to me there’s something we can discuss that the evidence suggests very strongly that if you make people richer—we can talk about what that means—if you make people richer in a benevolent manner or at least you get the hell out of their way, then they start caring about the environment in a distributed manner, and you get a positive relationship between the remediation of absolute poverty and environmental awareness.

So not only does this narrative not solve the climate problem and destroy the economy, but it actually makes, I think, it makes the climate problem a lot worse, and we’re seeing that play out in Europe right now. Shopify is the all-in-one commerce platform trusted by millions of entrepreneurs to create their online store and so much more.

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Dr. Lomborg: I think there’s a number of things to unpack here. So I think you’re absolutely right that we have very good evidence to say if people are better off, they're much more likely to be environmentally concerned. Environmental problems are poverty problems—that's really what that is, you know, right? Poor, yes. You just cut down forests in order to feed your kids. You’ll basically litter around everything, because honestly you have other things on your mind right now.

Whereas once you’re well off and most of your future is secure, you can care a lot more about the environment. And I also think, yes, you’re absolutely right. There are a lot of people who seemingly get a lot of instant credit by just throwing paint or whatever—painting it. Whatever famous painting they’re in and a museum with or, or just, you know, get some sort of, you know, glue themselves to highways or whatever. That’s not how you solve this problem because it is very, very complicated.

And as you also pointed out, if you actually want to be part of the solution, help bring the world onwards, it’s actually going to take a lot of painstaking work. And I think you nailed it on why my solutions are much harder to sell. Well fundamentally, because it’s more boring. It is not as flashy and exciting as being able to, you know, get on a TikTok video and show your virtue.

But it’s actually about a lot of hard work. I mentioned Norman Borlaug. He got the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. He was the originator—there’s a lot of other people along with him. For the Green Revolution that basically worked through the 60s and 70s. And most people today probably don’t even remember it, but if you go back and read what people were worried about, we were incredibly worried about the fact that most nations just would not have enough food.

And so, you know, there were literally people considering maybe we should do triage and say, "Well, India is just a goner. You know, they’ll just have to sort of die out." And what Norman Borlaug said was we actually have the technology to make much more food on every hectare, every acre of land. We do that by making genetic modifications.
So he just did it with, you know, normal genetics. He simply constructed, together with lots and lots of other researchers, constructed seeds of both rice and wheat that were shorter.

And that meant they were shorter and so they could put more energy into their kernels, and that meant that there are many more kernels, much less straw, and we got much more food. That’s, you know, in a very short hand, that's basically what fed the world. That’s what brought India from being a basket case to now being the world’s leading rice exporter. It doesn’t mean there are no problems in the media. It doesn’t mean that we’ve fixed everything, but what that tells you is this is the way you actually walk towards a solution.

So a lot of environmentalists, a lot of, you know, very, very smart thinkers back then basically said lots and lots of people are going to die, literally. Yeah, right? Millions of people are going to die. And I’m okay with that because, you know, it had to happen. Yeah. Whereas the right way is to sit down and actually use science and spend, you know, your entire life working and making these rice grains more effective.

It’s not nearly as sexy, and of course I’m only telling the big story because he got the Nobel Prize. You know, there were lots and lots of other researchers whom I don’t even know and none of us really remember anymore, but those are the people that actually made it work. And so I’m often struck, as you also pointed out, I’m often struck when people say there are too many people on the planet because when you, yeah, when you drill into it, it means, you know, just enough of me but too many of you.

It’s never, yeah, you’re actually going to have you or your family leave, but you think someone else should go. Now, I get the idea of saying that maybe in some sort of very detached way we would like to see a world that had fewer people. I think that’s probably wrong, but you can have that argument, but if you actually look at it in, you know, in the philosophical implications of that, is that you’re telling lots and lots of people to die.

The reality should be, I think, and that’s what our history shows us, is when you have rich and wealthy countries, you can actually get both. You both get fewer kids because, yeah, once you grow up, once you get rich enough, kids actually start to be really expensive. So you have few of them, and that’s one of the reasons why we no longer see this population explosion as people talked about in most of the ritual.

Actually, we’re likely to see that, you know, spread over the whole world in the next 40 years or so. So we are over most of the problem and what we have managed to do is we can now grow food more effectively and we should be moving towards growing it even more effectively so that we can have all the people well fed on less and less land so there’s more space for nature. We’re doing that in the ritual; we can also do that in the poor.

The thing that’s interesting here, or one of the things that’s interesting—you talked about Norman Borlaug and about the sexiness of say your vision. And the thing is when I started to delve into the research on the economy and environment front, I actually found the work that you were doing so to speak highly sexy because I thought, "Oh my God, here’s a better story. We could make everybody in the planet rich."

And I want to go into what rich means. And at the same time, make the planet much more sustainable on the biological front. We could do both of those. Why isn’t that just way better than the Malthusian zero-sum game? Let’s delve into those issues a little bit.

So, we're offering young people a cheap way out of their privilege-induced guilt. So now they’ve had—they have this Russoian landscape set in front of them, they’re pretty secure, they’re pretty comfortable, they’re not going to die of malaria or smallpox, they have enough to eat, they have the educational opportunity.

But now they’re scrounging around trying to figure out what to do with their life because they need to justify their miserable existences to themselves. They need something meaningful. And so the radicals come along and say, well, just be an ally of the virginal planet, and that is simple.

So it has that appeal, but it's also simple in an underhanded way because it isn’t the message, "Look, why don’t you be like Norman Borlaug and develop something like a noble vision?" Which is, well, maybe we don’t have to starve four billion people to death. Maybe we can feed them.

Okay, what do people eat? Oh, they eat food! Yeah! So how about if we make food more efficient? We make agriculture more efficient? Let’s see if we can feed all those people, and that’s a pretty hard problem. So how about I devote my whole life to this? And then you might say to young people, well that’s a hell of a price to pay to devote your whole life to something, but we could be saying forthrightly, well don’t you want an identity?

I don’t you want to devote your life to the solution of some genuinely difficult problem? I mean, that’s where you’re going to find meaning. I mean, how meaningful has your work been to you?

Dr. Lomborg: Very meaningful. And I think, so I just wanted to slightly flippantly, but not only flippantly say I’m very, very pleased and gratified that you thought this was a very exciting idea. I think it’s also a little bit because you’re a nerd. So, you know, it is a more nerdy solution, and it is less immediately satisfying, but I think that’s exactly the point we need to get out.

We need to tell people this will ultimately be a much, much more rewarding understanding. Look, we should also have people that work on climate because, again, climate is a real problem, but you’re not going to solve it by throwing paint at something.

You’re not going to solve it by telling people, "You can’t, you shouldn’t, you should freeze, you should not have a nice life." The way you’re going to solve this, of course, is by being the guy that comes up with the technology that actually delivers clean energy or cleaner energy at much lower costs. This is how we’ve solved pretty much all problems. We haven’t solved them by wishful thinking or telling people, "I’m sorry, could you not do stuff that you like to do?" That never works.

What does work is you come along with a better solution. You know, this is a slightly trite metaphor, but back in the 1860s, the world was basically fishing up all whales. Why? Because whales have this wonderful opportunity of whale oil.

Turns out the whale oil just burns much, much cleaner and much brighter than any other oil. Remember that was pretty much the only lighting that you had back in the 1860s. So pretty much all Western European and North American rich homes were lit up with whale oil, and so everyone just went out and, you know, to the ends of the world to catch whales.

You could not have stopped the slaughter of whales by telling everyone, "I’m sorry, could you could you dim your lights a little bit? Could you go back and have that shit light that you didn’t like?" That’s not going to work.

What did work was ironically that we found oil in Pennsylvania, right? That we actually found ground oil—the oil that we just use today—mineral oil. And you could substitute that for whale oil. It turned out it was much cheaper, it burned better, and it was much easier to get hold of, and so we pretty much stopped hunting whales after that.

There are still some because, you know, they also give meat, but the fundamental point is technology solves this problem; not good intentions. Right?

Dr. Lomborg: Well, so that means that we can thank the fossil fuel industry for saving the whales. And you can—if you think about, well we can thank the fossil fuel industry for a lot of things. If you think about in around 1900, almost everyone worried about the fact that you could see cities becoming more and more congested.

You had horse carriages, and they left an enormous amount of manure. So there were lots of people who were really worried about the fact that by, you know, by extrapolation by 1920, 1930, all of New York, all of London would be covered by feet and feet of horse manure. How are you going to solve that?

And along came the automobile. The again the point here is not to say that a technology that we then innovate 120 years ago is the right one for today. Eventually that will go, you know, the way of the dinosaur.

We'll find other ways, but we should not be kidding ourselves and believing that just wishing it wasn’t so makes it go away. The way you do this is through technology. Well especially—okay, so let's talk about wealth a bit, because in the West, it's easy for people, like I saw yesterday, I think it was Extinction Rebellion or one of these damn groups put out this message saying that, well, you know, people should just stop flying because flying produces water vapor and carbon dioxide, and you know, really we don’t need to fly.

And so I’m reading that, and I’m thinking, well, there’s Marxism of a terrible type lurking under this. It’s like, well, who the hell determines what we need? Exactly! I mean, needs are—first of all, needs aren’t self-evident. Really, what you need to do is you need to breathe, you need to drink water, and you need to eat. After that, what constitutes a need gets pretty damn dubious.

And my concern is that if you get people adjudicating the—what would you call it?—the comparative validity of need, you turn the whole world over to people who say, "Well, you don’t really need that," and "You don’t really need shelter; you don’t really need—well, you don’t need—, you can have bugs; you don’t really need food; you can eat a minimal protein source."

Well, you don’t really need children because they’re kind of hard on the planet anyways. You certainly don’t need pets because they add to the carbon dioxide load. You don't need your fireplace, you don’t need a gas stove. You don’t need a heater, and so on.

And then what you have is this insistence that the way to planetary salvation is to tell other people what they don’t get to have. And what’s interesting about that too, and this is the hypocritical element—and I certainly see this at the elite, global level—is like, well, exactly who are you telling here that they don’t get to have what they need? Because you don’t mean that for yourself. You’re not going to go live in a damn hut in the middle of Africa and burn dung.

You're not proposing that. You’re proposing that these damn poor people in third-world countries, and maybe in your own country, and there’s too many of those blighters, anyways, that they should just be bloody well satisfied with the fact that they've got what they have now, and they shouldn’t in any manner ever dream of having this sort of wealth of opportunities and security that we have in the West.

Then we could talk about wealth because people in the West are guilty about wealth. Well we have all these things we don’t need. It's like, well, yeah, that’s actually the definition of wealth. You got a choice of toothbrushes; maybe you don’t need it, but it’s not a bad side effect.

But we should get down to brass tacks here. People, when we’re talking about wealth for the typical person, here’s what we’re talking about: your house isn’t too cold or too hot, so you have heating, and maybe you have air conditioning—that would be kind of nice. You have running water, you have good sanitation, so you have a toilet and you have clean water.

You have a plentiful supply of high-quality food that you don’t have to spend all your time scrounging around to deliver, and it’s reliably sourced, and your children have the opportunity to live healthily and to be educated. That’s like 90 percent of wealth. And so when we’re talking about wealth that we want to provide the rest of the world, we’re not talking about 1920s spats wearing capitalist depredations, champagne, hookers, and cocaine. We’re talking about the basics of life.

Right? Temperature regulation, provision of water, provision of food, health, and opportunity for children—and we still haven’t provided that to everyone in the world. And we could. That’s one of the things that’s so optimistic about your work. Not only could we do that, we should do it, and we could and should do it in a way that would benefit the long-term sustainability of the planet.

Dr. Lomborg: No, and again, you rightly point out that people will want to manipulate your choices. And not only does that have a dubious sort of moral impact, but it’s also, you know, just from an economist point of view, if you tell people you can’t fly, it’s not like they’re going to say, "Oh, I was actually going to spend five percent of my income on flights, so I’m just going to burn this money.

I’m just going to spend it on all that other stuff, which also produces carbon emissions." And so, you know, we’ve no sense of saying, "The only real way—and I have some respect, sort of intellectual respect for these people who are actually saying the only way to solve global warming is by making everyone poor." What’s called “de-growth.”

"First we make the rich world poor, and then once the poor world has gotten slightly richer, we also say stop to them.” At least it’s intellectually honest. It’s also terribly terrible, and it’s not humane, and it’s not going to happen. There’s no constituency; no politician would ever get voted into office or if he or she actually delivered on it would get re-elected on that sort of platform.

And what that tells you is this is just simply, you know, again, wishful thinking. And I keep getting back to saying if you're actually serious about problems, are you going to suggest something that’ll actually work or are you just going to suggest something that makes you feel good or, you know, that, you know, has no chance on earth to get carried through?

Again, there is an argument, and I think there's a legitimate argument for putting a carbon tax on things. That's a simple way that we make regulation that says there’s a global bad here. We tax it, and then you put that global bad into your considerations. But that’s how you solve it efficiently.

And, of course, the reality of that is that in any realistic formulation of this, people will fly slightly less, and that’s no good for many of these moral crusaders because they want to completely get rid of it. It’s not going to happen. What needs to happen, if you truly want to solve this problem again, is to get innovation. You know, we already know how to, for instance, decarbonize most of the electricity system.

It’s just through nuclear. We know that’s worked for 50 years. The reason why we’re not doing it and the reason why I’m a little skeptical about it is that it’s too costly right now. We can have a whole conversation about why that’s the case, but there’s a lot of innovation going on about fourth-generation nuclear that could become much cheaper. We just saw the breakthrough, maybe fusion as well.

But the point is that there’s lots of technologies. Those are the ones that we're going to focus on because again, you’re not going to tell people you can’t have your whale; you have to dim your light. What you can say is, "Oh, here’s a better alternative: Oh, it also happens to be cheaper and it doesn’t kill whales."

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Dr. Lomborg: I think there’s a number of things to unpack here. So I think you’re absolutely right that we have very good evidence to say if people are better off, they’re much more likely to be environmentally concerned. Environmental problems are poverty problems—that's really what that is, you know, right? Poor, yes. You just cut down forests in order to feed your kids. You’ll basically litter around everything because honestly you have other things on your mind right now.

Whereas once you’re well off and most of your future is secure, you can care a lot more about the environment. And I also think, yes, you’re absolutely right, there are a lot of people who seemingly get a lot of sort of instant credit by just throwing paint or whatever, you know, painting it, whatever famous painting they’re in and a museum with, or just, you know, get some sort of, you know, glue themselves to highways or whatever. That’s not how you solve this problem because it is very, very complicated.

And as you also pointed out, if you actually want to be part of the solution, help bring the world onwards, it’s actually going to take a lot of painstaking work. And I think you nailed it on why my solutions are much harder to sell. Well fundamentally because it’s more boring; it is not as flashy and exciting as being able to, you know, get on a TikTok video and show your virtue.

But it’s actually about a lot of hard work. I mentioned Norman Borlaug. He got the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. He was the originator—there’s a lot of other people along with him for the Green Revolution that basically worked through the 60s and 70s. And most people today probably don’t even remember it, but if you go back and read what people were worried about, we were incredibly worried about the fact that most nations just would not have enough food.

And so, you know, there were literally people considering maybe we should do triage and say, "Well, India is just a goner. You know, they’ll just have to sort of die out." And what Norman Borlaug said was we actually have the technology to make much more food on every hectare, every acre of land. We do that by making genetic modifications. So he just did it with, you know, normal genetics.

He simply constructed, together with lots and lots of other researchers, constructed seeds of both rice and wheat that were shorter. And that meant they were shorter and so they could put more energy into their kernels, and that meant that there are many more kernels, much less straw, and we got much more food. That’s, you know, in a very short hand, that's basically what fed the world. That’s what brought India from being a basket case to now being the world’s leading rice exporter.

It doesn’t mean there are no problems in the media. It doesn’t mean that we’ve fixed everything, but what that tells you is this is the way you actually walk towards a solution.

Yeah. Whereas the right way is to sit down and actually use science and spend, you know, your entire life working and making these rice grains more effective. It’s not nearly as sexy, and of course I’m only telling the big story because he got the Nobel Prize. You know, there were lots and lots of other researchers whom I don’t even know and none of us really remember anymore, but those are the people that actually made it work.

And so I’m often struck, as you also pointed out, I’m often struck when people say there are too many people on the planet because when you, yeah, when you drill into it, it means, you know, just enough of me but too many of you.

And it’s never, yeah, you’re actually going to have you or your family leave, but you think someone else should go. Now, I get the idea of saying that maybe in some sort of very detached way we would like to see a world that had fewer people. I think that’s probably wrong, but you can have that argument, but if you actually look at it in, you know, in the philosophical implications of that, is that you’re telling lots and lots of people to die.

The thing that’s interesting here, or one of the things that’s interesting—you talked about Norman Borlaug and about the sexiness of say your vision.

And the thing is when I started to delve into the research on the economy and environment front, I actually found the work that you were doing so to speak highly sexy because I thought, "Oh my God, here’s a better story. We could make everybody in the planet rich."

So we're offering young people a cheap way out of their privilege-induced guilt. So now they’ve had—they have this Russoian landscape set in front of them, they’re pretty secure, they’re pretty comfortable, they’re not going to die of malaria or smallpox, they have enough to eat, they have the educational opportunity.

Maybe we can feed them. Okay, what do people eat? Oh, they eat food! Yeah! So how about if we make food more efficient? We make agriculture more efficient? Let’s see if we can feed all those people, and that’s a pretty hard problem.

So how about I devote my whole life to this? And then you might say to young people, well that’s a hell of a price to pay to devote your whole life to something, but we could be saying forthrightly, well don’t you want an identity?

I don’t you want to devote your life to the solution of some genuinely difficult problem? I mean, that’s where you’re going to find meaning. I mean, how meaningful has your work been to you?

We haven’t solved them by wishful thinking or telling people, "I’m sorry, could you not do stuff that you like to do?" That never works. What does work is you come along with a better solution. You know, this is a slightly trite metaphor, but back in the 1860s, the world was basically fishing up all whales.

Why? Because whales have this wonderful opportunity of whale oil. Turns out the whale oil just burns much, much cleaner and much brighter than any other oil. Remember that was pretty much the only lighting that you had back in the 1860s. So pretty much all Western European and North American rich homes were lit up with whale oil, and so everyone just went out and, you know, to the ends of the world to catch whales.

There are still some because, you know, they also give meat, but the fundamental point is technology solves this problem; not good intentions. Right?

Dr. Lomborg: Well so that means that we can thank the fossil fuel industry for saving the whales. And you can, you know, if you think about, well we can thank the fossil fuel industry for a lot of things. If you think about in around 1900, almost everyone worried about the fact that you could see cities becoming more and more congested.

You had horse carriages, and they left an enormous amount of manure. So there were lots of people who were really worried about the fact that, by, you know, by extrapolation by 1920, 1930, all of New York, all of London would be covered by feet and feet of horse manure. How are you going to solve that?

We'll find other ways, but we should not be kidding ourselves and believing that just wishing it wasn’t so makes it go away. The way you do this is through technology. Well especially—okay, so let's talk about wealth a bit, because in the west it's easy for people—like I saw yesterday, I think it was Extinction Rebellion or one of these damn groups put out this message saying that, well, you know, people should just stop flying because flying produces water vapor and carbon dioxide and, you know, really we don’t need to fly.

And so I’m reading that, I’m thinking, well, there’s Marxism of a terrible type lurking under death. It's like, well who the hell determines what we need exactly? I mean needs are first of all not, needs aren't self-evident. Really what you need to do is you need to breathe, you need to drink water and you need to eat. After that what constitutes a need gets pretty damn dubious.

And my concern is that if you get people adjudicating the—what would you call it—the comparative validity of need, you turn the whole world over to people who say, "Well you don’t really need that," and "You don’t really need shelter; you don’t really need—well, you don’t need—you can have bugs; you don’t really need food; you can eat a minimal protein source."

Well you don’t really need children because they’re kind of hard on the planet anyways. You certainly don’t need pets because they add to the carbon dioxide load. You don't need your fireplace, you don’t need a gas stove. You don’t need a heater, and so on.

And then what you have is this insistence that the way to planetary salvation is to tell other people what they don’t get to have and what’s interesting about that too, and this is the hypocritical element, and I certainly see this at the elite Davis global level. It’s like, well exactly who are you telling here that they don’t get to have what they need? Because you don’t mean that for yourself.

You’re not going to go live in a damn hut in the middle of Africa and burn dung. You're not proposing that. You’re proposing that these damn poor people in the third world country and maybe in your own country, and there’s too many of those blighters anyways, that they should just be bloody well satisfied with the fact that they’ve got what they have now and they shouldn't in any manner ever dream of having this sort of wealth of opportunities and security that we have in the west.

Then we could talk about wealth, because people in the west are guilty about wealth. Well, we have all these things we don’t need. It’s like, well, yeah, that’s actually the definition of wealth. You got a choice of toothbrushes? Maybe you don’t need it, but it’s not a bad side effect.

You have a plentiful supply of high-quality food that you don’t have to spend all your time scrounging around to deliver and it’s reliably sourced, and your children have the opportunity to live healthily and to be educated. That’s like 90 percent of wealth. And so when we’re talking about wealth that we want to provide to the rest of the world, we’re not talking about 1920s spats wearing capitalist depredations, champagne hookers and cocaine. We’re talking about the basics of life.

I’m just going to spend it on all their stuff, which also produces carbon emissions. And so, you know, we’ve no sense of saying the only real way—and I have some respect, sort of intellectual respect for these people who are actually saying the only way to solve global warming is by making everyone poor.

What’s called degrowth. "First we make the rich world poor, and then once the poor world has gotten slightly richer, we also say stop to them." At least it’s intellectually honest. It’s also terribly terrible. It’s not a human and it’s not going to happen.

There’s no constituency; no politician would ever get voted into office or if he or she actually delivered on it would get

The World is Not Ending | Bjørn Lomborg | EP 315

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