- 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'd have no other issue that we should be focusing.

I would argue that climate is a problem, not the end of the world.

[casual upbeat music] - Hello, and welcome to GZERO World.

I'm Ian Bremmer, and this week, we are solving climate change.

Turns out, it wasn't so hard.

Once we got rid of plastic straws, the rest just kind of fell into place.

Just kidding.

Don't try to cancel me, Greta.

It's not worth it.

As daunting as our climate future may be, cue Antonio.

- The era of global warming has ended.

The era of global boiling has arrived.

- The truth is, we are making real progress.

The technology revolution around decarbonization and renewable energy is happening faster than many of the most optimistic observers could have hoped for.

But is all the money that's being spent on climate mitigation going to the right places?

That's what I'm talking about today with controversial climate author, Bjorn Lomborg.

And then a look at how insurance companies are preparing for the change in global climate.

Don't worry, I've also got your Puppet Regime.

- [Announcer 1] Join President Vladimir Putin as he travels time to explain how history's greatest disasters were actually just everything going according to plan!

- But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

- [Announcer 2] Funding for GZERO World is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

[bright music] - [Announcer 3] Everyday, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint, and scale their supply chains.

With a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at Prologis.com.

- [Announcer 2] And by, Cox Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.

We're working to improve lives in the areas of communication, automotive, clean tech, sustainable agriculture, and more.

Learn more at cox.career/news.

Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and.

[bright music] [exciting music] - Question time.

Would you rather a lion eat you, or a tiger?

Personally, I'd rather the lion eat the tiger.

See what I did there?

I took a false choice between death by lion or death by tiger, and I found a third way.

So where am I going with this?

It's a good question.

I'm talking about climate change.

Most discussions frame the climate change issue in cost benefit terms.

Would we rather save the planet, or keep our living standards?

Save the planet or increase profits?

Save the planet, or lift people out of poverty?

In other words, how much are we willing to sacrifice to stop climate change?

In rich countries like the United States, both sides of the aisle assume this trade-off between climate action and economic prosperity exists.

Meanwhile, the consensus in developing nations, which today account for two thirds of global carbon emissions, but are only responsible for about one fifth of historical emissions, is that poorer countries have the right, indeed the obligation, to put economic development above climate action.

And this view also assumes that economic growth can only be powered by fossil fuels, and therefore, that saving the planet requires economic sacrifice.

But just like the lions and the tigers, no bears, I'd argue that this is a false choice.

In 2023, there is no longer a systemic trade-off between decarbonization and economic growth.

Technological advances have now made clean energy, especially solar power, wind power, and battery storage, cheaper, in some cases, much cheaper, than fossil fuels.

Until quite recently, high polluting fossil fuels, especially coal, were by far the cheapest sources of energy available.

Renewable didn't come close.

In the past decade, the unsubsidized price of electricity from solar and wind declined by 89% and 69% respectively.

And the cost of lithium ion batteries, which are needed to smooth out the intermittent supply of solar and wind energy, principle problem there, has declined by 90%.

Now, there are still powerful vested interests that are holding back decarbonization, despite its increasingly obvious economic advantages.

Many actors with political pull benefit from the carbon-intensive status quo, ranging from petro states, and big oil, to retail gas stations and fossil fuel workers.

Fossil fuels still make up 77% of the world's energy production, and for now, the cost of operating existing fossil fuel plants is lower than the cost of building new renewable plants in most, but not all, places.

Absent policy action, that will remain the case for some years yet.

But even without government action, the energy transition is most definitely happening, and it's happening without a reduction in our living standards.

You don't have to stop driving, or ration electricity, or eat bugs.

Poor countries don't have to stay poor.

The opposite is true.

Stopping climate change will be big, big business.

And that brings me to today's guest, the controversial Danish climate author, Bjorn Lomborg.

Lomborg rose to prominence in the early aughts as a climate skeptic, but as you'll hear in our conversation, he's unequivocal that human beings have caused climate change.

He's doubtful, however, that things will turn out as badly as many climate activists and experts fear.

And he also worries that billions of dollars are being wasted on ineffective climate mitigation, and that money could be going to urgent global issues, like global hunger, and disease eradication.

Now, I don't agree with everything he says.

That's true of a lot of guests.

But there's no question that I'm more of a climate optimist today than I was even a year ago.

So here's my conversation with Bjorn Lomborg.

Bjorn Lomborg.

Thanks so much for joining me.

- It's great to be here.

- Where do you most differ with, shall we say, the global narrative on climate?

- 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, if it was this meteor hurling towards Earth, and it's gonna 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.

And 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 the evidence, and we can get more into that, the evidence very clearly shows 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 one where I 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 poorer, 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 gonna 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.

- 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.

- [Bjorn] Yeah.

- What do we think about that?

- 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, in 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.

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 gonna 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 far away from the place where we'll actually be able to run mostly on solar and wind.

- But you look at batteries.

I mean, lithium ion batteries are like 90% cheaper to make now than they were just a decade ago.

I mean, enormously exciting technologies that people were saying we just are nowhere close, you see that trajectory now.

- Well, but the problem is that we're not talking about we need to double or triple, it's more we need to hundredfold increase, and that is enormously costly.

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're just far, far away from this actually being something that will scale even rich countries, and certainly not in poor.

- 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 climatary reasons in their countries, and they are heading to your homelands.

And that is gonna 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?

- So I think there's a couple things to this.

It's a very standard trope to say all climatic events are getting more extreme.

That's just not what the science tells us.

Some things are getting more extreme, so we get more strong rainfall, we get more heatwaves, 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- - More extreme conditions generally in the poorest parts of the world are the ones I'm talking about.

- 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, but 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 will get more people dying if you don't get adaptation, you don't get, for instance, air conditioning, and that kind of thing.

So we need to be a little- - [Ian] I think the audience will be surprised to hear this.

- Yeah.

- So the 10X people that are dying from cold in India are dying primarily where and from what?

- When people die from cold, they typically die because you get, when you get colder, your blood vessels restrict, and so you get higher 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.

So 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.

That's one of the reasons why we don't think nearly as much of cold as we do of heat, because people die from heat- - Immediately.

- 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 that 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.

So I'm not trying to say there's none, but we just need to get a sense of proportion.

- If you realistically thought that your life expectancy was gonna be 200 years, as opposed to, say, 85, do you think you'd feel differently about any of these issues?

- On climate change, no.

I mean, because- - 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 of this.

- Yes.

- I'm just wondering if at all- - Yeah, yeah.

- Because short-term is a reality for all of us, right?

- And 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 the story, life used to be getting better and better, but climate change has sort of gonna undermine the whole thing.

Well actually, what climate change is gonna mean is that the trajectory of things getting better is gonna 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 gonna be a lot of people starving, but no.

What we're expecting is that we'll have, you know, towards the middle of the 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 gonna be living that in 2050, or in 2100, then I would change my mind.

I'm actually making the argument that right now we're making policies that are really poorly adapted to fix climate change.

I would like us to do it smartly, both so they're cheaper, but also they work better.

- I think the fear, 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 gonna feel rather differently.

- Yes.

Yes, absolutely.

- You lose Louisiana, you lose Florida, you can no longer live in the place of your home.

Like, you're gonna just feel very differently- - Oh, absolutely.

- About the future of the planet.

- 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 gonna get inundated.

Lots of, you know, the standard argument, 187 million people are gonna get flooded.

But of course they won't, because we actually have the technology to avoid that happening- - And then poor places don't move.

- Well, in poor places, they will also handle this, they will, some place, so you know, 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.

- 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 gonna 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, they're basically about human development.

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, and 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're 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?

- So we asked economists across all of these different things at the UN, and really the whole world has promised to say where do we know we can make fairly small investments, and make huge difference?

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.

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, and have no clue what's going on, and are 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 learnt 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.

- Give me one more good idea.

- Maternal and newborn health.

So one of the things we've forgotten is giving birth is incredibly dangerous.

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.

So 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.

[Bjorn inhales] And they survive.

Or 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.

So the point here is for every dollar spent, it'll cost about $5 billion in total per year.

It will save 166,000 women, and 1.2 million kids.

- 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 laughs] - 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, go that, we put prices and sizes in that menu, but you still go into the restaurant.

We're the kind of guys who will say, ooh spinach is supposed to be good for you, and it's really cheap.

Maybe you don't like spinach.

That's fine.

So you shouldn't just let the economists 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 gonna get.

And then you make the decision.

- There you go.

Bjorn Lomborg, never just listen to the economists.

- Never just listen to them.

- It's something we can all agree on.

- Yeah.

- [Ian] Thank you so much for joining us.

- Thank you.

[bright music] - One way to get a sense of how bad the effects of climate change will be, and how bad they've already been, is to follow the money, specifically property insurance premiums.

According to a recent report by the Council on Foreign Relations, more than two thirds of Americans own their own home, and for many, it's by far their most valuable asset.

And when those homeowners go to an insurance company to protect their home against catastrophic weather damage, the company charges a premium, essentially putting a price on that risk.

And here's what that risk looks like today.

Last year, extreme weather damage cost the world $165 billion.

California wildfires in 2017 and 2018 wiped out a quarter of a century of profits for insurance companies in the state.

When 2018's Hurricane Harvey inundated Houston, eight in 10 homeowners there affected didn't have flood insurance.

Many of them lived outside of the so-called flood zones.

Back in California, insurance companies have sought rate hikes of $8.5 billion since 2015.

The two biggest US homeowner insurance companies, State Farm and Allstate, announced recently that they'd take a pause from issuing new policies in the Golden State altogether.

And since January 2022, 31 states have experienced double digit rate increases.

The head of AXA, one of the world's biggest insurers, said in 2015 that if the world warms by four degrees Celsius, it will cease to be insurable altogether.

So the growing human toll of a changing climate is irrefutable.

We're living it everyday.

But to those who argue that the so-called climate doomerism is overstating the danger, the people who have money in the game cannot afford to be blase.

Sometimes the coolest head in the room is the one stuck in the sand.

[bright music] And now to Puppet Regime, where Vladimir Putin is traveling back in time, again.

Roll that tape.

- [Announcer 1] From the creators of "That mutiny "was no big deal"- [static buzzes] [speaking Russian] And the minds behind "Russia is actually "the good guy in this war".

[speaking Russian] Comes another episode of the new hit show, "Everything is Going According to Plan".

Join President Vladimir Putin as he travels time to explain how history's greatest disasters were actually just everything going according to plan.

[bright mystical music] [portal whirring] - Oh.

Ah.

Asteroid about to kill all dinosaurs.

Sounds bad for them.

But without this, there would be no Russian oil today.

Thanks, asteroid.

[Vladimir speaks Russian] [playful music] [bright mystical music] [portal whirring] I love classical antiquity.

Every building here looks like my Black Sea palace.

Here in Egypt, we witness burning of Alexandria Library.

Disaster?

Hardly.

Destroying books is a great plan.

Just ask Texas and Florida.

Ha!

[playful music] [bright mystical music] [portal whirring] Yes, it killed two thirds of Europe.

That's something I would like to do myself, actually.

But Black Death helped end feudalism, spark Reformation and Renaissance, and begin Age of Discovery.

Put another leech on my arm, Dr. Big Face.

Everything is going according to plan.

[playful music] [bright mystical music] [portal whirring] Ah.

Ah.

We're here at the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Wasn't this supposed to be over in, like, four or five days?

Huh?

Who made this plan?

This is not going according to plan.

♪ Puppet Regime ♪ - That's our show this week.

Come back next week, and if you like what you see, or even if you don't, but you wanna assess your own carbon footprint, how you can change the global climate.

Why don't you check us out at gzeromedia.com.

[upbeat music] [upbeat music continues] [upbeat music continues] [bright music] - [Announcer 2] Funding for GZERO World is provided by our leader sponsor, Prologis.

- [Announcer 3] Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint, and scale their supply chains.

With a portfolio of logistics and real estate, and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com.

- [Announcer 2] And by, Cox Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.

We're working to improve lives in the areas of communication, automotive, clean tech, sustainable agriculture, and more.

Learn more at cox.career/news.

Additional funding provided by Jerry and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and.

[bright music] [exciting music]