Podcast: Challenging the climate change narrative with Bjorn Lomborg

Transcript

Listen: On the GZERO World Podcast, Ian Bremmer sits down with Danish author Bjorn Lomborg, a controversial figure in the world of climate change. Lomborg is unequivocal that climate change is a real problem and that humans are responsible for causing it. But where he differs from the global climate narrative is that the current focus on reducing carbon emissions is misguided and ineffective. Lomborg argues the world is too fixated on stopping climate change at the expense of… everything else.

He worries billions are being spent on incremental climate mitigation when that money could be spent more effectively on things like education or maternal mortality. Bremmer challenges Lomborg on a range of issues, from the exponential advancements in renewable technology to the disproportional impact of climate disasters in poor countries. While the two don’t agree on everything, their conversation affirms that climate change is a complex issue that requires nuanced thinking and effective solutions to avoid worst-case scenarios for future generations.

TRANSCRIPT: Challenging the climate change narrative with Bjorn Lomborg

Bjorn Lomborg:

Global warming is a real problem, but it's not the end of the world and that's incredibly important because if global warming really was the end of the world, then clearly we have no other issue that we should be focusing on. I would argue that climate is a problem, not the end of the world.

Ian Bremmer:

Hello and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. This is where you'll find extended versions of my interviews on public television. I'm Ian Bremmer, and today we're solving climate change. No, just kidding. We are going to talk about the surprising amount of progress many countries have made to decarbonize and hopefully prevent the worst from happening. Don't get me wrong, the world is nowhere near where it needs to be to avert climate disaster, but we're not totally doomed either.

And that's some of what I'm talking about with my guest today. The controversial climate author Bjorn Lomborg. Lomborg rose to prominence in the early aughts you may remember as a climate skeptic, but as you'll hear in our conversation, he is unequivocal that human beings have caused climate change. He's more skeptical, however that things will turn out as badly as many climate activists and experts fear.

He also worries the billions of dollars being wasted on ineffective climate mitigation rather than going to issues he considers more urgent like global hunger and disease eradication. And while I don't agree with everything he says, I am more of a climate optimist today than I was even a year ago. So let's get to it. Here's my conversation with Bjorn Lumbar.

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Ian Bremmer:

Bjorn Lomborg, thanks so much for joining me.

Bjorn Lomborg:

It's great to be here.

Ian Bremmer:

Big topic coming after United Nations General Assembly, the whole world converging on New York and one of the topics is always, of course, climate change, how you respond. You have been very public, sometimes very controversial on that topic. Where do you most differ with, shall we say, the global narrative on climate?

Bjorn Lomborg:

So I think it's really two things and they're interconnected. The first one is global warming is a real problem, but it's not the end of the world and that's incredibly important because if global warming really was the end of the world, it was this meteor hurdling towards earth and it's going to extinguish all life, then clearly we have no other issue that we should be focusing on. We should just focus all of our attention on climate change.

That's very much the conversation. This is the overarching dominating conversation on we need to fix climate before we fix everything else. I would argue that, and we can get more into that, the evidence very clearly show climate is a problem, not the end of the world. That matters because that gives us a lot better chance to actually fix the problem. And that's the second where I sort of disagree with the main narrative.

A lot of people would argue, "We need to go net-zero right now. We need to stop everything." And of course that doesn't actually happen because most of the world still runs on fossil fuels for a lot of different reasons and remember much more so actually in the rich world than in the poor world because we've gotten accustomed to a lot of things and it's really hard to tell voters, "I'm sorry, could you be a little poor, a little more uncomfortable, not drive your car that much." And all these things that just doesn't work.

What we need to do is what I try to tell constantly, we need to focus a lot more on green innovation. That's really the way we're going to fix this problem, so not the end of the world. And that means we can start thinking more smartly about things that'll actually work rather than all these promises that don't deliver.

Ian Bremmer:

What you just said sounds very thoughtful, balanced, clear. For the last 50 years, there've been an awful lot of very powerful global actors that have done their best to not be thoughtful. To lie about climate change, said, "No, this isn't a problem. No, it's not happening. No, we're going to deny it." And so number one, that's gotten us into a much worse place now than we would've been if we had been addressing it earlier.

And a lot of the people that are out there that are yelling like savages, that are gluing themselves to the pavement or to a Van Gogh or whatever it happens to be, which we all find kind of annoying. But those people saying, if we hadn't been doing that for decades, all of these people would still be lie and we wouldn't be at 1.2 degrees centigrade warming heading to two or 2.5. It would be much worse than that and we wouldn't be investing in green innovation. How do you respond to that?

Bjorn Lomborg:

It's great that these guys have been screaming and pointing out this is a real problem. The screaming now also means that people can't really see further ahead than five or 10 years. The sense is we have to do everything right now and that's actually been the conversation at least for a decade or so, and that's very unhelpful for dealing with this. What Vaclav Smil, William Nordhaus, the only climate economist to win Nobel prize will tell you is this is a problem you need to fix over a century.

Now that feels uncomfortable because we want to say no, we want to fix it in the next five years, but it's not. It's just not going to happen. We're probably not going to fix it either in 50 years. And so trying to do everything now means that we're doing expensive stuff that doesn't really scale rather than doing smart stuff that eventually will also be useful for China, India and Africa.

Ian Bremmer:

So some of the things that excite me, I mean I spend a lot of time thinking about climate in the context of the macro environment and I've become kind of a climate optimist and not because I'm unconcerned about all of the natural disasters that we continue to see, but rather because the technology is getting so much cheaper. Because we now see that wind and solar, which just a decade ago were much more expensive than the cheapest fossil fuel plants, now are actually less expensive.

So they make sense for Texas, they make sense for India, they make sense for poor countries and for red states that aren't tree hugging at all, right? That to me is exciting. But that of course is only possible because you finally had people with governments helping them that were investing heavily in these new technologies and they were subsidized to begin with. What do we think about that?

Bjorn Lomborg:

Well, so I think to a very large extent, it's very clear that they're still subsidized. So we're subsidizing in lots of ways. Again, people would like to say that solar and wind is cheaper than fossil fuel, and that's true. Many places when the sun is shining or when the wind is blowing but most places actually want power 24/7. And so what you really have is a situation where for rich countries, because we already have all the backup capacity.

You can actually fairly cheaply build a lot of the extra solar and wind and then just rely on old gas power plants or coal-fired power plants as backup up. But very clearly you can't do that in most other countries where you need more power. There, you really need to have it 24/7. So solar and wind can be a nice add-on, it can help somewhat, but it's not going to be the main supplier unless you actually have a way of storage that's going to be so cheap that you can actually keep it going when you have those periods when there's no wind and obviously every night when there's no sun.

And that is phenomenally costly right now. So we're talking in the order right now. The world has a couple of minutes of batteries and by the end of this decade we might have 11 or 12 minutes for our electricity. So we are far away from the place where we'll actually be able to run mostly in solar and wind.

Ian Bremmer:

You look at batteries, I mean lithium ion batteries are like 90% cheaper to make now than they were just a decade ago. Enormously exciting technologies that people were saying we just are nowhere close. You see that trajectory now.

Bjorn Lomborg:

But the problem is we're not talking about we need to double or triple. It's more sort of we need to hundred fold increase and that is enormously costly. So the International Energy Agency estimate, we can probably see batteries again half in price or more than that. You need more sort of 99.9% reduction in price and that's just nowhere near if you're actually going to... So just to give you one example, so Germany every year has at least five days of what they call [foreign language 00:09:08].

That's a fun name to say where there's very little sun in the daytime and there's no wind for five days. That means you need batteries for 7,000 minutes and you have just batteries for a couple of minutes. That's a huge and very, very, very costly thing. And again, I'm not saying we can't figure, you know. You can make demand of adjustments and there's lots of other ways that you can do some of this, but we are just far, far away from this actually being something that will scale even rich countries and certainly not important.

Ian Bremmer:

So I found it very interesting that the IEA, the International Energy Agency, they have systematically underestimated the growth in renewable energy. They've systematically overestimated fossil fuels every year for decades. Precisely because they talk about how far away if you have these path dependent straight line expectations, these technologies are, but you have Moore's law type logarithmic responses in bringing prices down of new technologies and you see that in solar falling off a cliff.

You see that in battery technology exploding. I get daunted when I hear 99% away, but when I see those costs coming down the way semiconductors are, suddenly I think to myself, "Maybe this isn't a hundred years away. Maybe this is 10 years away. Maybe the economists need to be more optimistic."

Bjorn Lomborg:

It's true that solar has come down dramatically, but it's also flattening out just simply because most of the costs now are no longer the silicon, but it's the actual installation and it's all the other stuff that you need around it, which is much, much harder to get down in price. So in some sense, you're now at the place where it's the rest of the computer. It doesn't help that the chip gets cheaper and cheaper when the rest of the computer and the monitor and all that other stuff is still fairly costly.

And that's why computers are not actually keep dropping down to the floor. So the reality here is yes, it is part of the cost, but you're not going to get there as fast as a lot of people would like. Now, the IEA tells us that what would you do given the current political setup? With the current, we estimate that you're going to get this much solar and wind because if you do more than that it's not going to be cost-effective.

But what happens is every year policymakers say we want more and more solar. So in some sense the IEA is probably telling you this is right if there were no new policies, but politicians keep saying we want to spend more and more on solar and wind, and that's why we keep getting more and more than what the International Energy Agency says.

Ian Bremmer:

Now when we look at climate, we all know that we're at 1.2 degrees centigrade of warming. We know we've got 442 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere. We know the methane. Then when you start talking about actual steps to reduce that trajectory, to try to eventually get to net-zero. There are a whole bunch of different components of that conversation. There is all of the species that we are losing.

There's the sixth extinction, some of which is climate, some of which is just human encroachment on animal environments, for example, some of which intermingling and bringing new invasive species, all of that. There's deforestation which is going on. There's salinization in oceans. There's issues of carbon and methane reduction. If I look across all of the different plastics in the ocean, that's not necessarily climate change, but it's a component of humans degrading this little ball that we're on.

And so I'm wondering when you look at that space, not whether we should spend on climate or whether we should spend on something else. Before we get there, I want to talk about of all of the things that humans are doing and still doing to actively damage the planet, some of which are the necessary results of growth and some of which are just stupidity, corruption, indecency and the rest. What are the places, if your resources were only going to climate and nothing else, where would you be spending that money?

Bjorn Lomborg:

We know the biggest environmental problem by far is air pollution. That's really what's terrible and damaging. It's kills somewhere between six and 10 million people depending on how you do the models every year. This is by far the biggest issue. This is indoor air pollution for really poor people. So that's about getting them better energy and it's mostly about outdoor air pollution in the rest of the world, and that's about getting catalytic converters in all cars.

It's about making the little tuk-tuks and the scooters and all that other stuff much more efficient. They're very simple things. It's not totally cheap, but it's a minuscule part of what we're spending in climate and that would help so much more very basically for the environment. If you want to fix climate, you can try to do it by telling everyone to do stuff they don't really want to do, but you try to push them with lots of money.

That's what we've done with, for instance, electric cars around the world. You basically try to bribe people with lots of money and lots of extra features. So let me just give you an example. So Craig Venter, the guy who cracked the human genome back in 2000, he has this idea of taking genetically modified algae, put them out in the ocean surface and let them soak up sunlight and CO2 and produce oil. Then we'd all be harvesting our own Saudi Arabia's out in the ocean surface.

Then we could keep our entire fossil fuel economy, that would actually be bad for air pollution, but we'd fix that. But we would not have CO2. So that would be a fantastic solution. Now it works in principle in the laboratory, but there's no way this is cost-effective. We should give him a couple million dollars to try to make this better. Maybe tens of millions of dollars. But the point is researchers are incredibly cheap and that's why we could afford to do a lot of these researchers.

Likewise, when you put up solar panels or wind turbines, right now the model sort of say, let's have government spend 50 or a hundred billion dollars building a lot of these wind turbines that we still know are somewhat inefficient. And that of course means that Vestas and other companies will be investing more money in research and development. They will typically be investing about 6%. But if it was innovation that we wanted, we should have spent that money mostly on innovation and that of course would've bought us a lot more innovation.

Right now, the world since basically 1980s have seen declining levels of investment in green energy R&D, despite the fact that back in 2015 in the Paris Agreement there was a side Paris Agreement or Paris two with Obama and Bill Gates and many others called the Breakthrough Initiative, where they were talking about they were going to double investment in green energy R&D. Nothing like that happened. Why?

Because we were so focused on trying to cut emissions for next year that we forgot this is about making sure that we get all the innovation that'll make it possible to do not just for rich countries, but for China and India and Africa in 20 or 30 years.

Ian Bremmer:

You talked a lot about human beings. The first place you went on environmental conditions was about air pollution. So many of the species on this planet either don't exist anymore or soon will not exist anymore. Yes, maybe you can genetically engineer some of that so they can come back. But we don't know the implications of that. Strikes me as a dangerous thing. Do you spend any time worrying about that?

Bjorn Lomborg:

The vast amount of risk to biodiversity does not come from climate change, but comes from agriculture, from our interaction, as you also mentioned, from city encroachment, that kind of thing. And one of the things that we've also been arguing for is you need to make sure that agriculture becomes much more effective because when you do that, you can set aside a lot more place for nature. That's what we've done in much of the rich world.

Most places in the rich world are reforesting, partly because forests are beautiful, partly because we can afford it and partly because a lot of environmentalists would like to do so. The point here is to recognize that you're only going to get poor countries to do this if they don't face a hunger catastrophe. So the reality here again is to say, I think it's much more likely that we can do something about the biodiversity crisis if we both make sure that agriculture gets more effective so that we don't take up as much space.

We should also stop doing biofuels, which is a really bad thing. But that's a sort of a separate conversation. And then we also make sure that people get rich in poor countries. People don't go and slash and burn forests in the Amazon and many other places for fun or to destroy biodiversity. They often do it because it's the only way to make a living.

Ian Bremmer:

So let's look a little bit just when I think about the extreme weather events that we're increasingly seeing in terms of the property damage, certainly in terms of the ability to live in certain areas, the human migration we're seeing as a consequence. I mean this is now becoming priority one for so many European governments.

That you have people that increasingly cannot live for climatory reasons in their countries and they are heading to your homelands. And that is going to happen to a vastly greater degree. What kind of steps need to be taken to limit the level of damage that so much of which seems to be baked in at this point?

Bjorn Lomborg:

It's a very sort of standard trove to say that all climatic events are getting more extreme. That's just not what the science tell us. Some things are getting more extreme so we get more strong rainfall, we get more heat waves, but for instance, we also get fewer cold waves. That's very, very clear and we need to tell all of those stories. So overall global warming will deliver more bad things than good things. So it is a problem.

Ian Bremmer:

More extreme conditions generally in the poorest parts of the world are the ones I'm talking about.

Bjorn Lomborg:

Yes, but again, remember, so even in Sub-Saharan Africa or in India, most people die from cold not from heat. That's very surprising for India where we have good evidence. About 60,000 people die from heat, but about 600,000 people die from cold. And so when temperatures go up, yes, you get more heat waves, but you actually also get fewer cold waves.

And that means overall, at least for a period of 20, 30, 40 years, you get fewer people dying then eventually you'll get more people dying if you don't get adaptation. You don't get, for instance air conditioning and that kind of thing.

Ian Bremmer:

I think the audience will be surprised to hear this. So the 10x people that are dying from cold in India are dying primarily where and from what?

Bjorn Lomborg:

When people die from cold, they typically die because when you get colder, your blood vessels restrict and so you get high blood pressure and we know that there's high blood pressure when it's cold. And especially if you can't keep warm, you get high blood pressure and that leads to strokes and cardiovascular disease. This is the main reason why people die much more. And that's also true in India because you need to keep warm at night.

You need to keep warm when it's cold because people die from heat in a 24-hour period, but they die from cold in sort of 30 days. And so we don't see it. It doesn't show up on TV, but it doesn't mean it's not real. But let me just go back to your point of saying. So there are a lot of problems with climate change. I'm not trying to say there's none, but we just need to get a sense of proportion. We need to make sure that people are better able to protect themselves against heat.

And the very obvious solution, and the US has been a front-runner for this, is air conditioning. You've basically seen, despite the fact that temperatures have gone up in the US, you've seen dramatically declining levels of heat deaths in the US because getting air conditioning actually saves most lives. Remember, most people in Africa would like to have air conditioning, even if there is no global warming, just simply because it's a much, much more comfortable way of living.

They're going to get air conditioning and if we make sure that they get rich, that they have more opportunities, they will get it sooner. Global warming basically means they will get a little more a little quicker because they will have to.

Ian Bremmer:

What's your general view? How long do you think it will be before the majority of the planet is able to be run on the back of sustainable post carbon energy?

Bjorn Lomborg:

So this is more sort of my intuition from talking to a lot of really smart people on this is going to happen the second half of the century.

Ian Bremmer:

For a net-zero target where we right now have like 2070 for India for example, but much earlier for the developed countries. Are those the right targets or the wrong targets in your view?

Bjorn Lomborg:

I think they're the wrong targets, partly because setting a net-zero target is one of those things that you'll just end up pushing forward once it becomes too close and you can't figure it out, it doesn't actually help you today or in the next couple of years. It's the kind of thing that you say aspirational out in 2050. My point is this is much more about doing stuff that you can do this year and next year.

And again, one of the ways that people like to say we should do it is, well, we should cut our emissions by three to 5% or something. Partly that's hard to do because it also depends on how well the economy goes, but mostly that means you end up spending on fairly expensive ways to cut carbon emissions. And very often also things where you really just cheating. You are either buying biofuels, which honestly are almost as bad as real fuels and they have a lot of the negative impacts you worry about with animals as well.

Ian Bremmer:

With environment.

Bjorn Lomborg:

And we burn biomass. In Europe, we buy lots of forest products from the US, we burn them and call them CO2 neutral, which is at best very, very difficult to believe that that's true. Some of it is okay, but most of it is not. But that's the kind of thing you do when you have short-term targets you need to meet. And that's where I would say our goal should much more be. We're going to double our investment in green energy R&D. That's something we can do very simply.

It's not going to solve the problem in the next year or even in five or 10 years, but we need to do this in the next century. So in the second half of the century, I believe we will have all those technologies. They'll start coming in a couple of decades and we will have completed that journey towards the end of the century.

Ian Bremmer:

Last question before I pivot to the Sustainable Development Goals in your new book, which is if you realistically thought that your life expectancy was going to be 200 years as opposed to say 85. Do you think you'd feel differently about any of these issues?

Bjorn Lomborg:

On climate change? No.

Ian Bremmer:

And because you're going to be living through and experiencing so much of what the world is going to be like as we get through all it. I'm just wondering if that it all... Because short-termism is a reality for all of us.

Bjorn Lomborg:

That's a fair point. But again, one of the things I think we fail to understand with climate change, we're very much told this story. Life used to be getting better and better, but climate change is sort of going to undermine the whole thing. Well, actually, what climate change is going to mean is that the trajectory of things getting better is going to be slightly lower. So it'll get better slightly less fast.

So let me just give you one example. So the World Health Organization estimate that because of climate change we will have more people starving. That is typically understood as, "Oh my God, there's going to be a lot of people starving." But no, what we are expecting is that towards middle of century, we'll have very, very few people starving.

What we will then see because of global warming that it will be slightly more very much fewer people starving by 2050. So in that sense, it's not that, "Oh, if I'm going to be living in that in 2050 or in 2100, then I would change my mind." I'm actually making the argument that right now we are making policies that are really poorly adapted to fix climate change. I would like us to do it smartly both so they are cheaper, but also so they work better.

Ian Bremmer:

The rejoinder is that I think there's a lot of fear, that straight line trajectory is underestimating the nature of the crisis. That what happens when you actually see the polar caps melt. If you lose New York, you're going to feel rather differently. You lose Louisiana, you lose Florida, you can no longer live in the place, your homeland. You're going to just feel very differently about the future of the planet.

Bjorn Lomborg:

But I would then counter and say, that's exactly straight line thinking, right? People will tell you if sea levels rise and we do nothing, yes, a lot of places are going to get inundated. The standard argument, 187 million people are going to get flooded, but of course they won't because we actually have the technology to avoid that happening.

Ian Bremmer:

And in places they'll move.

Bjorn Lomborg:

Well, in poor places, they will also handle this. So in Alaska for instance, you will give up land because it's just not economically viable to protect. But most places in the contiguous US, you will defend it and you will actually live fine.

Ian Bremmer:

Let me ask you about your book. So best things first, and here is a book where you are taking your general approach, which is we have limited resources. We want to make sure that we are focusing on the areas that are going to get us the most return, given those constrained resources. You take aim at the Sustainable Development Goals. And Sustainable Development Goals for those that don't know, what are all the things that we should be working on in the world, whether it's getting people access to clean water and it's reducing disease.

No one would take issue. These are all laudable things to accomplish. Taken as a whole, we look at the constellation of human development and generally speaking has been getting better for the course of the last 50 years plus with globalization. You are saying way too many, everything can't be a priority. You actually have to take your resources and focus on a small number of things that we can make a huge amount of difference, which again, most people would say sounds pretty sensible. What are those things?

Bjorn Lomborg:

So we asked economists across all of these different things that the UN, really, the whole world has promised to say, where do we know we can make fairly small investments and make huge difference? And we found 12 policies where we have very good evidence and period research to show that if you spend a little money, you can make enormous impacts. Let me give you a couple of examples. So education obviously is a huge issue. So I don't think most people understand the level of lack of education in the world.

So there's almost half a billion kids in the poor half of the world, so low and low middle income countries that are in primary school right now. Most of them have no ability to read just basic sentences. Now we say they're technically literate, but if you give him a sentence, and I'm just going to give you this one sentence. Vijay has a red hat, a blue shirt, and yellow shoes. What color is the hat? 80% fail on this.

This is partly because the teachers are not very good, but it's mostly because most of these kids... You put all the 12-year olds in the same grade, but some of these kids are far ahead of the teacher and many of them are far behind the teacher. Have no clue what's going on and about to give up. If we could do this right, we would teach each one of these kids at his or her own level. But of course if you have 50 kids in the class, a teacher can't do that, but technology can.

So one of the very, very well proven technologies is put this kid one hour a day in front of a tablet with educational software. And the tablet will just very quickly take that student ahead and teach him or her at that exact level. Take them there and make them much, much better taught each and every day for one hour. Now, this has a cost of about $31 per kid per year, but the benefit is that they triple their learning.

So when they've gone one year to school, most of the year is still spent in that very boring, not very effective school, but one hour a day, they learn a lot. They will have learned three years of normal schooling by the end of that year. We know that that means they'll become much more productive. We estimate that for the whole low and low middle income countries, it will generate about $600 billion in additional income.

Ian Bremmer:

Give me one more good idea.

Bjorn Lomborg:

So maternal and newborn health. In the rich world, it is pretty safe, but in the poor half of the world, it's terribly unsafe. So 300,000 moms die each and every year. About 2.3 million kids die in their first 28 days in life. And we can very simply do something about a large part of that. It's about getting moms into facilities to give birth and then have the basic obstetric emergency care for them when something bad happens.

About 700,000 kids die each and every year because they don't start breathing. It's a very, very simple thing. You just need to have positive air pressure in their lungs. So you need a mask and a hand pump. Then you put in air and they survive. Not all of them, but a lot of them will survive. It costs $75 and then you can actually save over its three-year lifetime, about 25 kids. It's a large assortment of different technologies that you put in there, but they're all very cheap and they could save an enormous amount of kids.

So the point here is it'll cost about $5 billion in total per year. It will save 166,000 women and 1.2 million kids. Every dollar spent will deliver $87 worth of food.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, what I like about the book and the general approach is that these are operational ideas that a few sensible individuals, foundations, small governments, could easily take up and say, here's some good things that we can actually do. Since the book has come out who has come to you and said, "Hey, here is something that we think we can actually get behind?"

Bjorn Lomborg:

The Gates Foundation is actually looking at maternal and newborn health. I don't know whether they're going to decide this is where we're going to go, but we've certainly delivered some really strong arguments for why this would be an incredibly good investment for them. I'm talking to the Swedish government. I'm trying to talk to USAID and those kinds of development organizations. We're talking to a lot of poor countries.

So Malawi for instance, we did analysis just on the tablets that we talked about, and they've actually decided that they're going to get tablets in all their primary schools. Again, the important point here is to say it's not about saying education is important. That's often what you take away, and then you end up spending lots of money on building new schools or giving more teacher higher pay or lower the class sizes. All of which are nice things, but they rarely work very well.

But it's very specifically, tablets with educational software to primary school students. So it's a very, very limited little thing, but it just has a huge impact. So they're actually doing this, and again, if you want to help them spend money, that's where we could actually make a huge difference.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, foundationally, what you seem to be saying is something I've tried to resist all my life, which is that economists are the answer.

Bjorn Lomborg:

No, the economists are a great part of the conversation. So they're basically just telling you... We like to think of ourselves a little bit like there's this big menu of things that you can buy in society where you tell them, "Oh, go do this, go do that." We put prices and sizes in that menu, but you still go into the restaurant. We are the kind of guys who will say, "Oh, spinach is both good for you and it's really cheap."

Maybe you don't like spinach, that's fine. So you shouldn't just let the economist do the order in the restaurant, but they can help you be better informed when you have that menu and say, this is the cost, this is the price, this is the benefit you're going to get, and then you make the decision.

Ian Bremmer:

There you go, Bjorn Lomborg. Never just listen to the Economist.

Bjorn Lomborg:

Never just listen.

Ian Bremmer:

Something we can all agree. Thank you so much for joining us.

Bjorn Lomborg:

Thank you.

Announcer:

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