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Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. If you could completely remove one phrase from your vocabulary, which phrase would you choose? I don't know. Correct answer. No, I meant I don't know which phrase, and the best way to banish I don't know from your life is by cramming your brain full of stuff you should know. Join your host, Josh and Chuck on the Super Popular podcast packed with fascinating discussions on science, history, pop culture and more episodes that ask, was the lost city of Atlantis Real? I don't know. Is birth order important? I don't know. How does pizza work? Well, I do know. Bit about that. See? You can know even more, because stuff you should know has over 1500 immensely interesting episodes for your brain to feast on. So what do you say? I don't want to miss the stuff you should know. Podcast you're learning already. Listen to stuff you should know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode we're speaking. With Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her impactful behavioral discoveries on chimpanzees, it wasn't until one of the chimpanzees began to lose his fear of me, but I began to really make discoveries that actually shook the scientific world. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. What's badly introducing my podcast, Sophie's ashamed to me. I'm Robert Evans, host of behind the ******** the podcast where every week we talked about a different, terrible person, an exhaustive detail, and I come up with an introduction that's either embarrassingly bad, entertainingly bad, or just plain lame. And and today it was the latter. Sophie agrees with my guest today, Eric Lampaert. Eric, hello, Sir. How are you doing today? I'm doing really good, thank you. I'm actually very excited about this because I I don't often get. Thrown into a podcast without any prior knowledge of what's going to happen. Well, that's the way we like to do it here. Yeah, we like, we like our guests or our subjects to be a mystery. The guests were a mystery. That would be very different. Podcast. Yeah. Yeah, that would be. Robert Evans invites people in off the street. I also like that you've got a machete on the table. Just just to let me know who is boss here. Well, now, you know, this is a very democratic machete. Anybody can use the machete for any purpose if you feel the need to hit something, right? I have it on good authority that all of the equipment in here. Can be hit with the machete. Is that correct, Sophie? We're allowed to damage all the equipment, all of the walls, the windows, the poison room? Absolutely not. Well, technically, it can get, it can be. It is possible. I mean, theoretically, this is a big machete. He's right. I think you want to hit something. It probably be frowned upon. I'll tell you what. I don't want my fingerprints on there. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know you well enough to know what you're gonna do with machete afterwards. I had very different plans, though. I had very different plans for what to do with the machete before you said that. Well. I don't know who to guess to joke about murdering. Damn, that would have been a great time to joke about a good old man. Yeah, good old fashioned murder. Speaking of good old fashioned murder, today we're talking about new fangled kinds of murder. The kind of murder where you just talk to people and write bad books and it leads to unspeakable human suffering and possibly millions of deaths. Wow. Isn't that a cool thing to talk about? That's one hell of a murder. Yeah, it is. It is the guy that we're talking about today. The actual death toll from his work. OK, quite be quantified yet, but I think one of these days he'll be recognized as. Real ***** ** ****. I'm gonna start with a little bit of a winding introduction, so I hope you'll forgive me for that, Eric. When I was 16 years old, Michael Crighton released state of Fear, the 2nd to last novel he would publish in his lifetime. Now, I was a big fan of Creighton's work ever since stumbling across the lost world in second or third grade, I dutifully devoured his cannon. State of Fear was decidedly different from his prior works, though the plot was that a group of radical environmentalists, using experimental technology, were attempting to create a series of natural disasters in order to convince the public of the dangers of global warming. Because, of course, it wasn't real. Now, the book was filled with graphs and charts and like quotes from actual scientific studies, which is not common for a sci-fi techno thriller. It included a 30 page bibliography, all of which was angled at convincing the reader that global warming was not that big a deal, actually. Cool book. Yeah. While a work of fiction, state of fear also served as Creighton's manifesto against what he called the Politico Legal Media Complex should politicize science and unjustly scared people about the dangers of climate change. So. The fun book to read at age 16, Creighton's work was a massive success, as most of his books were, because the man didn't know how to write a crowd pleasing thriller, even if it was a crazy piece of anti climate change propaganda, received widespread praise from conservatives. Senator Jim Inhofe declared it required reading for the Senate Committee on Environmental and Public Works. He called on Creighton to testify before said committee in 2005. Oh **** yeah, if you want. If you want. Like a real nutshell. Encapsulation of how ****** American politics has always been. The Senate called on a science fiction, the author of Jurassic Park, to testify on climate change trust. The guy that blends frogs with dinosaur DNA. Yeah. Have they not seen Jurassic Park? Jurassic Park, 2-3? Jurassic World? It's bound to lead to disaster. Yeah, exactly. They trust him. How can they trust him? It's like if you had if there was like a clown focused terrorist group and you called Stephen King to speak to, like, I like the Senate. About terrorism and stuff, because he wrote it. But I guess King, though it would be interesting to get into his mind. I'd love to have him and sort of CIA or FBI table. Yeah. I do feel like King would actually have some insight into the mind of a terrorist. Yeah, it's it's Einstein says, you know, the true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination and and potentially maybe that's why Kristen is trusted. He was not a dumb man, although, like he had a very specific kind of intelligence. So Michael created a lot of people don't know this was a trained Dr. I forget what he with them. Yeah. Yeah. You know, he created ER oht. He created. Yeah. He's the creator of ER. And he he was a medical student. He got his MD and then kind of ****** *** the college he got his MD at because he then didn't work as a doctor and went on to become a science fiction author and, like, apparently just got the MD so that he could, like, write good science fiction. Oh, wow. About medical stuff like terminal strain or whatever that book was. But yeah, so he's he's he's not a dumb man, but he has. This is the kind of problem you, like, come up with. A lot, especially in the global warming debate, people who are not dumb but have a very specific kind of education and intelligence and then assume that they understand climate science, that's like, yeah, that's what this episode is really about, right? So yeah, yeah. Was called upon to testify before the Senate Committee on Environmental and Public Works in 2005. In 2006, the APG awarded Michael its Journalism Award, which sounds impressive until you learn that the APG is the American Association of Petroleum. Geologists yeah. Famed unbiased source on climate journalism actual climate scientists, of course, did not like state of fear. Several of the people who authored studies that Criton used to prove his points even spoke up to complain that he completely misinterpreted or outright misrepresented their research. Peter Doran, author of a Nature paper on Cooling in the Antarctic, echoed the concerns of many when he complained our results have been misused as evidence against global warming. This is a famous study that cited by anti climate change. But how? Like there there's ice and like one of the poles is increasing and they're like, look, look at these ice sheets are actually getting bigger, so close and it's like, well, no, but the other one is getting smaller and the total amount of ice lost from the polls does not over, like doesn't, doesn't, doesn't balance. They don't balance out. We're net down a **** load of eyes. Thank you, Sophie. Sophie's correcting my mic placement because I'm here in the office. This time she gets to micromanage me by the way I love your tattoo. Ouch. I was just saying, I really like your tattoo. Thank you. Is it a shattering Greek pillar that's a shattering fascist from a well, there's it's from a couple of places. The Roman Empire is where it, but the they also, there's there's big bronze ones up on Congress. Alright. Oh yeah, of course he is the symbol. Yeah. Sorry, Sophie, I didn't mean that. I'm just gonna go cry. I've heard. Sophie, do you wanna hit something with the machete? I wouldn't hand that to me. Right. Well, I'm just trying to make your podcast better. Well, Sophie, I think on everyone to hear every single word that you say. Rob. Now you've shamed me, and now I feel bad. Great, continue your back. I'm once again the ******* of my podcast. Yep, which is it takes 1 to know one. Though you have to dive into the character to truly understand the complexities of bastardry. As Nietzsche said, if you stare into the abyss long enough, eventually you hurt your boss's feelings. Right. Nisha was a very poetic man. Yeah. He was a great podcaster. Little bit very anti-Semitic. Really? Yeah. But it was a different time. Podcasting wasn't this evolved an art form. Didn't even know how to record things. Anyway, I should continue with the episode. So Peter Duran, author of that Nature Paper on Cooling in the Arctic, complained that, yeah, that Creighton had misinterpreted his results and misused them as evidence against global warming. The American Geophysical Union, which includes more than 50,000 scientists, stated unequivocally that state of fear quote. Changed public perception of scientists, especially researchers and global warming, towards suspicion and hostility. This is big books like #1 on the charts. For quite a while it was like a very popular release that had a real negative impact on global warming. And this is the place where I admit, shamefully, that young Republican Robert Evans found this book deeply compelling. Of course, even then I was a bit too savvy to take the words of a science fiction author as the end of the argument against vast scientific consensus. So I started going through the bibliography and while I was doing it, that I came upon the one work. Michael seemed to hold in the highest regard a book called The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg. Have you ever heard of Bjorn ************* Lomborg? No. But I'm guessing he's Scandinavian. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I think Danish. Yeah. So there's a couple of versions of the Bjorn Lomborg story that you'll hear. I'm going to read one paragraph that sort of like how he's generally introduced when you read a news article about this guy. A former member of Greenpeace, a self-described leftist, a backpacking outdoorsman, and a vegetarian, Lomborg, in 1997 was paging through a copy of Wired magazine in a bookstore in San Francisco. He happened across an interview with Julie and Simon, a University of Maryland economist known for his optimistic prediction that population growth was unlikely to exhaust the planet's resources. Later that year, an intrigued Lumberg set about in Denmark with ten of his brightest students to examine Simon's claims. Expecting to prove Simon wrong, Lumberg and his students were surprised to find that many of the economists predictions about the state of the environment. On the mark, this discovery led Lombard to pin a few op eds for a center left Danish newspaper and eventually the publication in Denmark of the 1st edition of the Skeptical environmentalist. Now the book was essentially a thoroughly argued case against the scientific consensus on global warming. Lomborg pointed out what he called a number of inconsistencies that he claimed to have uncovered between the hard scientific data and the party line of climate scientists and environmental activists. Lomborg would use what looked to my 16 year old Brian like compelling scientific data. Argue his points. Among other things, Lampwork argued, #1 species are not going extinct at a weirdly high rate #2 the world is not losing ice, and thus the seas are in no real danger of rising #3 global temperatures aren't increasing in any worrying way, and #4 there's more trees than ever. So what are environmentalists worried about? Yeah, it sounds silly like talking about now in 2019, but in 2001 it was a different media ecosystem. Like the fact that the world was ******** its climactic pants was not quite as obvious to everybody. But yeah, the whole climate change debate has been around for quite a long time. Hasn't 80s at least? At least the 80s? Oh yeah. And really, even before that, Murray Bookchin, who is a philosopher I'm a fan of kind of an anarchist political thinker in night in the 1960s, wrote a lengthy series of essays. Talking about how carbon emissions and like fossil fuels were going to lead to, like, massive climate catastrophe unless we adopted, like, vastly, radically different ways of living that we're like, not compatible with kind of the consumptive capitalist system that we existed in currently. Right? Like, that's 1965. He's writing this stuff very clearly late. So yeah, people knew about this for decades. It's just that nobody took it seriously until we had, what, three category 5 hurricanes hit the US East Coast in the course of like, a year? Yeah, but even that doesn't seem to be enough. Evidence for people, well, I find fascinating. And I and I there's an element of me that's sort of not sympathizers, but there's an until you experience something, you can't actually know anything's real. Right. And so when people say, oh, you know, it's all melting the ice and the poles and stuff until they actually visibly see it, they can't fully understand the complexities of it. Yeah. So. It's not. It's not. Christopher Nolan mentions it in inception. You know, about how, like, one once a seed is planted in your head, it's very hard to sort of unroot. Yeah. And if you don't have trust in your government, then why would you trust that? They say that the climate is being destroyed. And I'm just talking to her, like, because obviously the climate is changing drastically. All we need to do is rub your hands together and you understand the friction causes heat. Yeah. And the more people there are on the planet, the more cars there are, the more food there needs to be grown. All of that. It's it is logical, but I am trying to understand why. People don't believe. You know, there's a lot of reasons. I think a lot of it comes down to people like Lomborg because there's this, this kind of war that really started in the the 90s, the late 90s, against scientific consensus. Like, there was a time when if scientists and like nature came out with a study saying, like, we got a big ******* problem, the idea that you'd have a bunch of people just rejected out of hand because they believe there's a conspiracy by China to like, convince people global warming is real, like. That that would that would sound absurd to people. And now the President has essentially spread that same line like it's some, this is a lot of this is like where we are right now is the culmination of a process that Lomborg was a major part in starting this, this war against. Kind of an understate a shared understanding of reality. And part of the problem is that this issue was so politicized and it's like, I don't think Al Gore was wrong in making it like a key cornerstone of like, his presidential campaign and just like his personal activism. But the fact that Gore was associated with Clinton and that Republican having grown up in a Republican home, I can tell you the kind of hatred of the Clintons that existed in the late 90s and in 2000 was. Beyond rational, it was, it was a kind of mania that overtook the conservative right. And that is still very much present and prevalent. And so because Al Gore, who was connected to the Clintons, was making this point, it had to be fake. And so that was a big driver of all of this. So there's a lot of this that's tied together. It's it's the end of a process in which kind of at the the apex point of the process, nobody believes anything. There's no sort of authority beyond the one guy that you like. If you're that sort of person, right? Or whatever pundits you trust and yeah, it's it's a real problem. Yeah, it's interesting. I also wonder though if all the people that are pushing the climate change is a hoax thing generally are quite wealthy. Well, and they won't be affected by it ultimately. Ultimately, you know, the world and the humanity will survive. Right now there may be 1,000,000 billions of death caused because of climate change. Ultimately, humanity will survive. And I think the very rich will always be good. They could just move somewhere else. Yeah, they'll move somewhere that's going to go from having brutal winters to being like a Los Angeles when Los Angeles burns down. So ultimately, they don't give a ****. Well, yeah. Yeah. That's actually kind of where this is headed a little bit, right. Yeah. Apologies if I no, no, no, no. This is, this is what the podcast is for. So the unavoidable conclusion from reading lomborg's book and taking it seriously was that everything was more or less hunky Dory with the climate. Now Bjorn did not deny that there were some environmental problems. He didn't even come out and deny that human beings were changing the climate. But his argument was that all of the issues we were having were things that could be solved by better conservation and modest infrastructure investments. Nobody needed to say stop driving cars or stop burning coal or stop fracking gas. The people telling us to do all that, we're just fear mongers. And that's that's Bjorn Lomborg's line. Now 16 year old. Robert Evans took Lomborg's book apart and used many of its arguments for a series of debates in his speech and. Weight class. And then he grew up and entered the real world and stopped being a young Republican. Somewhere between reading the work of actual climate scientists, which Lomborg is not, and living through four of the hottest years on record, he came around on the whole climate change thing. But I was not the only person fooled by Bjorn Lomborg. The media narrative around him was just too good for bunches of overly credulous journalists to not flock to him. One example of this was a 2001 New York Times profile released right before the publication of the English translation of the Skeptical Environmentalist, the title scientist at work from an unlikely corner. Eco optimism. That's nice eco optimism quote. Strange to say, the author of this happy thesis is not a steely eyed economist at a conservative think tank, but a vegetarian. Backpack toting academic who was a member of Greenpeace for four years. He is Doctor Bjorn Lomborg, a 36 year old political scientist and professor of statistics at the University of Aarhus in Denmark. Now, the article went into loving detail about how Lomborg had been converted from environmental apocalypticism by reading the work of Doctor Julian Simon. Who's that doctor we talked about a little earlier? Now, Simon is famous for having some very public arguments with a guy named Doctor Paul Erlich over resource scarcity. Erlich was like a doom kind of a doomsayer. He wrote like a book about how, like, human population was going to, like, reach an apocalyptic level and cause massive resource scarcity. And his predictions turned out to be largely untrue. And Simon actually, like, made a bet with him about, like, you know, they picked 5. Resources and airlift bet that they would all increase in cost over the next like couple of decades, and Simon bet that they would decrease. And Simon wound up being right. Do you do you think that people aren't? Listen, he worried about the whole climate change thing as a whole, as an actual doomsday possibility because they've gone through so many doomsday possibilities. So we've had the Millennium bug. We you guys have had the nuclear threats from Russia. We are constantly barraged by these end of the world scenarios that never usually happen, that when we are presented with one that's actually in front of us, happening live in front of our eyes, that most people can just brush it aside because they've experienced other doomsday. Scenarios that have actually just sort of gone by in the wind, I absolutely think that kind of, particularly some of the Hollywood, like the day after tomorrow, **** like that's that's actually really hurt. The cause of getting people to take this seriously, right? Because the problem is not that the world is going to end. Human beings are very adaptable. The majority of us will find a way to survive no matter what happens to the climate. Like, even if a ******* asteroid hits, I have no doubt that a lot of people will figure out how to make that **** work, because we're just, we're cunning little ********. The problem is that, like, it's not an apocalypse thing. It's like, what? What do we want the world to be? What do we want the world to be for our kids? For our grandkids? Do we want it to be the sun racked nightmare hellscape where people knife fight to death over drugs of water? But a lot of people don't. Yeah, that that's another scary thing is I am hoarding water and knives. But that's very little to do with the podcasting machete. No, it's it is weird how a lot of people, you know, hate being by themselves, which means that they always have, like, bad voices in their heads. And if they have bad voices in their heads, they don't really care about other people. And so the idea of an apocalyptic. Yes, the scenario where where their their life gets twist turned upside down is is actually welcoming because most people's lives are kind of difficult and challenging. Well, if I can get into like a my, my own fringe political beliefs on this, I I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that there are some very dehumanizing aspects to the kind of capitalism that we enjoy in the United States and a lot of people's lives are incredibly difficult and there's very little hope that things will lighten up or that they'll be able to retire. There's like no light. At the end of the tunnel, there's just a series of distractions. And so the idea that it might all come tumbling down and you would get to be king of the wasteland and not have to clock in at work at Target the next morning. Right. Right. That that that does that is very attractive to a chunk of the population, especially the people who believe that they would thrive in that environment. Yeah, that's that's an important key, I think, is that they would believe they would thrive when the reality is 2 days in the woods. Yeah. Now, Eric, Speaking of the dehumanizing realities of modern. American consumerist capitalism it's time for Annette plug. Is this a good? This is a good one, Sophie. Yeah, nailing it products. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying one or for a family. And it meant. Families start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any mint mobile plan and keep your same phone number along with all your existing contacts. Just switch to Mint mobile and get premium wireless service starting at 15 bucks a month. Get premium wireless service from just $15.00 a month and no one expected plot twists at mintmobile.com/behind. That's mintmobile.com/behind. Seriously, you'll make your wallet very happy at Mint Mobile. Com slash behind. So by now we imagine that you've seen the theories on Tik T.O.K. You maybe even heard the rumors, your friends and loved ones. But are any of the stories about government conspiracies and cover ups actually true? The answer is surprisingly or unsurprisingly, yes. For more than a decade, we hear at stuff they don't want you to know have been seeking answers to these questions, sometimes their answers that people would rather us not explore. Now we're sharing this research with you for the first time ever in a book format, you can pre-order stuff they don't want you to know now. It's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. My name is Erica Kelly and I am the host and creator of Southern Freight true crime. There are so many people that just have no idea about some injustices in the world and if you can give a voice to them, you can create change to be able to do it within podcasting. It's just such a gift. I believe it was 18 months after I got on with speaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. Always felt like an ambassador for speaker, but that's because. Passionate about podcasting? It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with spreaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love. Spreaker from iheart. We're back. Boy, a lot happened in that break. #1I grabbed my throwing bagels. Yeah, I don't know if you if you're aware of this, but I throw bagels on the show. It's a much kind of substitute to a machete, I think. Well, for your guests, I actually planned to combine the two. So here's what I'd like to do when we when we hit a point of maximum rage in this episode, or perhaps at the end of it, I'm going to throw these bagels, and I want you to slice them out of the air like a modern samurai with the Fiskars machete. Hell yeah. You want to do that? Alright, Sophie says that it's approved by everyone at corporate, so we're good to go. I also have to say I just tried the paradisians sugar free Red Bull. I hate Red Bull. As a general rule. I hate the company. The ad campaign. This is delightful. The the pair version is really tasty. I hate that it's so good, but it's fantastic. And I like that you gave it a little like you are a commercial now. Thank you. You've become America. I *** ****. It happens every time I come back to Los Angeles. When can I show him a photo of this ******? Yeah, show him young beyond Bjorn Lomborg. So you can see how this guy OK? Because I was gonna say Michael's alright. Michael's an alright face. No, no, he's fine. So this is young Bjorn Lomborg. So for anyone listening, he looks like Hitler's wet dream. He kind of looks like, like every Scandinavian. Like he's like what Aaron Carter would look like if he didn't do drugs in like 20 years. You know, this little blue eyes, blonde hair. And it it works for him. Yeah, but how does he look now? Well, we'll talk about that a little bit. I want to get to where this guy winds up. Bad, but not great, right? Now, where the hell is he? A personification of what's going on inside his mind. Yeah, kind of, actually, it's a personification of what's happened to his arguments over the years, which I think happens. I mean, look at Steve Bannon. If Steve, Stevie Bannie, right. Hey, Steve Bannon, if he he looks like he's healthy, you know, he looked like Hercules and was like, just, you know, I hate these types of people. Yeah. I'd be like, I'm gonna listen to that guy. Yeah. He's a beautiful man. Yeah. He must be healthy, both physically and therefore mentally. But Steve is full of like, red alert type skin, you know, where like, you clearly skirmishes have happened on this face. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a war between his acne and his cirrhosis and like, it's it's a vicious battle. Yeah. Pull, Steve. No, don't feel bad for Steve Bannon. You know, you know, it doesn't get said enough. Poll Stake, Steve Bannon. Ohhh, Stevie B. So, yeah, Lomborg wanted. We talked about Julie and Simon. The guy got into that argument with Paul Erlich, and he's like a frequently quoted scientist by people who want to deny climate change because one of the things that they always argue is that well back in the 70s and 80s, everybody was told us there was going to be a population bomb and population a resource crisis, and that didn't happen. So clearly, like, this is the same thing and everybody's worried for nothing. And Simon is one of the apostles. He was right about the the the population crisis and it that is one of the things whenever we get into talks about climate change and people bring up. Population is a problem. That's 0% of the problem. The the overall human population is not an issue, it's resource expenditure by people like us. It it's not like the issue is not that there's too many people being born in sub-Saharan Africa or in India or in China. It's a little bit, but that's most a lot of that's because they're making stuff to be sold in the Europe and in Europe. In the United States. It's not a population issue. It's a the types of resources being consumed. And also like more than anything related to, yeah, it it it it it it, it's more an issue of billionaires and millionaires and upper middle class people in the kind of resources they spend like celebrities flying their private jets from one airport in LA to the other. Skip Midtown traffic, which happens way more often than you would expect. Oh, really? Oh, you can track their planes. Yeah, it's more of that than it is. Like, oh, look at all these people. And yeah, that that's part of, like, what? Steve Bannon, actually, that's one of the racist arguments that he'll make about, like, well, if you're really concerned, we should, like, be concerned about all these population, you know, problems going. So it's like this weird thing on the right where they both point to Paul Erlich and his fears of a population bomb to be like, look, climate change isn't real because they were wrong about overpopulation. And they'll also complain that. Like all these hordes of of poor non white people from like the global S are going to like are using up the world's resources when that's not at all the case. Like it's this double edged sword of racism and also not doing anything about the core problems of climate change. It's very frustrating. I do wonder with these scientists who say, you know, they're opposing climate change and stuff. I do wonder sometimes if that's just good money. It is with lumberg. I'm not going to say it. Simon died, I think before the debate really took off. He was right. About the population stuff. So I mean, I don't want to lump him in with Lomborg, right? But Lomborg sees himself as that kind of figure. So Simon gains a lot of renown for being right about the fact that, like, there was alarmism around the global population and Lomborg painted himself as that kind of guy. And he would bring this story up specifically when he did news interviews so that people would conservatives in particular would see him as like, oh, this is the next iteration of that kind of scientist. This is the clear eyed Galileo type contrarian scientists who sees the reality through the political ********. Climate change and understands that it's not really a problem. We can keep fracking like that's how he's painting himself. So it's important to understand that. So one of the reasons that Lomborg was so convincing, particularly to journalists who again didn't know anything about science like the guys at the New York Times ruthless profile piece, is that his book had a **** load of citations in it. In many of the articles about Lomborg in the early 2000s, you would read quotes like this one from the Times doctor. Lomborg has presented his findings in the skeptical environmentalist, a book to be published in September by Cambridge University Press. The primary targets of the book? A substantial work of analysis with almost 3000 footnotes. Their statements made by environmental organizations like the Worldwatch Institute, the World Wildlife Fund, and Greenpeace. Virtually every one of these pieces you would find includes references and often multiple references to the fact that Lomborg's book had like 3000 footnotes. So like, that's part of the claim of like, how how like, this is a really seriously research, scholarly look at how many foot notes it has, like people would like. There's you can find like videos and stuff of people like, like, opening the book and like, pointing out how thick the section of footnotes is. And like, I did that when I was in school to point out, like, look, this guy's really like, look at how many ******* we're excited he has. That means it's like a real solid work of. Of science. So you. So you were once sort of on his side? Ohh yeah, absolutely. I was. I was raised very conservative, very Republican. I thought that George W Bush was the best president since Ronald Reagan. Who was the best president? And when and how long did it take you to sort of distance yourself from him? I mean, as soon as I went to college and made friends who both were not white and also had not grown up middle class. So bear in mind, like, how challenging it had to take you to be from one place to another. And you're clearly smart and you clearly have resources where you want to read and stuff. And then we're asking the general populace to just switch off Netflix for an hour and maybe read an essay. Yeah, it like, read an essay that's like, dense and hard to understand. And they might come across stuff like research on how 1 Arctic ice sheet is increasing in density. And like, you have to also ask them, no, no, don't stop just because you read one thing that doesn't seem like, like it actually takes understanding a lot of different things. Like, not just. Like what's happening with like ice sheets, but what's happening with like air currents and like like weather patterns and yeah, species like, well, yeah, they they have to understand chaos theory. Yeah. In its most complex form, which is, AH, and and then you get to this situation where like you wind up telling people, just look, all the scientists agree about this, so just believe them. But then there's maybe, if you need to know, comp chaos theory maybe we should talk to Michael Crichton about it's frustrating. Didn't get that. Yeah, in Creighton. Lost world. Still a fine book, but *** **** it, dude, so yeah, uh, journalists who liked Lomborg would point out, like, all of those ******* footnotes. Like that was one of the biggest arguments to, like, why the skeptical environmentalist was a credible book, and most people who looked at all those footnotes assumed that his arguments were actually supported by the research included therein. Spoilers. It was not. As with Creighton, several of the scientists cited in Lomborg's book spoke out to warn that he had misinterpreted their work. A bevy of experts took to the field. Complained that the skeptical environmentalists was nothing but a pack of deadly lies. For one example of how dumb this **** is, I'd like to quote an article written by Doctor EO Wilson, a Harvard professor, a two time Pulitzer Prize winner, and an actual biologist. He's commenting on Lomborg's claims that fears of mass extinction brought on by climate change are bogus. Using bad data and lies, Lomborg estimated a species loss worldwide of just point 7% over the next 50 years .014% per year. Now Doctor Wilson, who's an actual biologist again and not a ******* statistician and economist like Lomborg, wrote this. Before humans existed, the species extinction rate was very roughly one species per million species per year. .0001% estimates for current species extinction rates range from 100 to 10,000 times that, but mostly hover close to the 1000 times Pre. Human levels point 1% per year, with the rate projected to rise, and very likely sharply. Wilson goes on to note, based on the work of Stuart Pimm, of Columbia University Center for Environmental Research and Conservation, Anywhere from one to several bird species go extinct annually out of 10,000. Own species, hence say .01 to .03% of all living bird species are extinguished per year. But birds are unusual in that threatened bird species receive an extraordinary amount of human intervention. The real figure of observed extinctions would be much higher, very likely 10 per year point 1% or more, if it were not for their heroic efforts to save species on the brink of extinction. Now, that article and that quote from Doctor Wilson came from 2001, but time has proved Doctor Wilson right and Doctor Lomborg wrong. The Center for Biological Diversity notes we are currently experiencing the worst spate of species die off since the loss of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Although extinction is a natural phenomenon, it occurs at a natural background rate of about one to five species per year. Scientists estimate we are now losing species at up to 1000 times the background rate, with literally dozens going extinct every day. But it could be a scary future indeed, with as many as 30 to 50% of all species possibly heading towards extinction by mid century, right? So Lumberg says yeah, .7% of all species by mid century. The reality is 30 to 50%, but even the even that, the 3040. I think most people don't care, right. But what it seems like people don't understand is if you lose one animal, it snowballs and sort of triggers the fact like you need to like, we need to win the hearts of people in different ways. I learned. So there's this woman called Doctor Erica McAllister. She works at a Natural History Museum and she is a a fly expert. And I did an interview with her about flies. And there is one fly that creates chocolate, pollinates chocolate. And because of global warming, we're actually losing that flyer, which means that potentially we could lose chocolate. If you get to people in that way, I can see people protesting fast, ladies and chocolate, if you can convince them it's real. Like one of the problems is that, like, there's a lot of people who, when you tell them that we're losing species, will get angry and say, **** all those species. I want them dead. I'm going to drive the big I'm going to modify my car to release more pollution. So that it'll kill them faster. Because there's this big propaganda game that's been played in the US to make it look like the the point out. A couple of specific cases where, like, the Environmental Protection Act led to farmers losing access to pieces of their land to preserve like, wetlands and keep its species of frog alive. And it, like, led to people murdering some of those species like it, like, as an act of protest against what they saw as government overreach. Like it's this. There's this hateful and utterly lunatic chunk of the right that has been trained to respond to any talk of global warming. With just like violent rage, which is why you'll see people threatening to kill Greta Tunberg that that that the the young environmental activists. It's amazing to watch. Yeah, almost. You know, obviously really sad for her and I almost kind of fear what could happen to her. There's a piece of me that's like as ****** ** as it is, and I'm, I'm horribly sorry that she is going through this and very proud of her for being an activist. It's good that it's been made this obvious that there's this young girl just saying I want the world to be. Habitable by current. Like when I'm an adult I want to be able to like enjoy wetlands and like glaciers. Like, I wanna be able to live in the kind of world that y'all grew up in and every like this chunk of the populace threatening to murder her and like like like that we see that this this kind of hate unleashed that like it really is that irrational it really has been because of this. Yeah. Hate and fear is irrational and Lomborg is Ground Zero for spinning that up right. Like he's a part of this convincing everybody like that was the first stage was convincing them there's this conspiracy. And he didn't say it was a conspiracy. He just said that, like, look, there's this, the reality. If you look at the real data, it's actually not that bad on all these groups are just trying to scare you. Like, there's this conspiracy of fear, then that's the like the whole idea behind Creighton's book is that there's a literal conspiracy to like, make you believe this is happening when it's not. And that's the, that's step one to getting and the end stage of this, like, long and I don't even think it was really a plan. But the natural conclusion of the start of this, where you just get everyone to distrust this information, believe they're being lied to, is when this young woman. Steps up, people are just like screaming. Spittle flecked hatred at this this girl for daring to be like, I'd like it if there were ice in the future. Yeah, it's pretty scary. The people, the people that are out there. Yeah. And Lomborg is an important guy to understand, to know how we got from like where we used to be as a species about like kind of basic scientific consensus and where we are right now, particularly in the United States. Right. But but also The thing is I I do try and understand people that don't understand right. And. If most people, well, actually all people, can only experience life through their own share eyes, right? And if people are also not curious because the majority of people are not curious, which is a shame. Their curiosity's focused, they're curious about whatever they're into. They're not curious about. But even now, some people just aren't right. They just sort of float around, just sort of colliding into things and just life takes them in a different path and they almost have no control and where they're going. Yeah, and most people just haven't got that curiosity to read more than one clickbait article. And so it's very so it's so easy to be brainwashed into thinking that, yeah, yeah, what if it is a conspiracy? Because all the proof I have is it's getting hotter, but because the news tells me it's getting hotter. Look at this nicely dressed Danish man with beautiful blonde hair holding up a book with like 3000 citations. Telling me not to worry. Alright, well, I I'll, I'm gonna go back to worrying about, like, you know, the fact that my kid doesn't have health care or whatever, like I have other **** to deal with. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, the IT it turns out that Lomborg, also, Speaking of that bibliography, puffed it up to a kind of ridiculous extent by including a lot of sources that were not rigorously researched scientific studies. So, like, the way that it was framed is like, this is all the scientific citations. It wasn't all scientific citations. I'm going to read a quote from an article by Matt Nisbett, a professor of communication. And a writer with the skeptical Inquirer. He uncritically and selectively cites literature, much of it non peer reviewed and misinterprets or misunderstands the previously published scientific research. Several scientists observed that most of lomborg's 3000 citations are to media articles and secondary sources. Lomborg's research is conceptually flawed. He ignores ecology and connections among environmental problems, taking instead a human centered approach and several cases he uses statistical measures that are not valid indicators of the problems he reports are improving on the topic of biodiversity. EO Wilson and a team of reviewers find that Lomborg's work is. Strikingly at odds with what every expert in the field has stated, the review appearing in nature goes broader and concludes that the skeptical environmentalist is a hastily prepared book on complex scientific issues which disagrees with broad scientific consensus, using arguments too often supported by news sources rather than by peer reviewed publications. So he picks news sources where people have misinterpreted scientific studies, then uses those arguments in his book, and then includes those citations to puff up his 3000 citation counts that it seems like because people think he's actually reading science and actually understands it. But of course he can't. Like one of the things you noticed that's really frustrating that we're going to get to in a bit is how many different types of scientists it takes to debunk lomborg's work. Which points out that it's fundamentally absurd to assume that any statistician, any economist. Anywhere in the world. Could write a competent book on climate change. It's not possible because it requires so much different expertise from so many different fields, right? To actually have a hope of understanding the whole scope of the problem and analyzing all this correctly and Lomborg? That's not what he's good at. I'm sure he's fine enough at ******* economics, but like that this is not economics. Is there not artificial intelligence programs now to sort of create models of climate change and where it could possibly be going in the future? Well, that's just the charms trying to trick us. Right, right. There is so much wrong with Bjorn Lomborg's book that I could literally write five or six episodes just going through everything that's been debunked in it and not finish getting through everything Lomborg got wrong. And I'm not going to do that because we all have better **** to do, and because a number of incredibly authoritative scientists have already gone through the trouble of doing line by line breakdowns of everything in the book rather than just go over every single thing that beyond got wrong, I'm going to quote from the Union of Concerned Scientists. They invited a group of the world's leading experts on water. Sources biodiversity and climate change to review the skeptical environmentalist quote reviewing Dr Lomborg's claims are Doctor Peter Gleick, an internationally recognized expert on the state of freshwater resources, doctor Jerry Mahlman, one of the most highly regarded atmospheric scientists and climate modelers, and top biologists and biodiversity experts, doctors Edward O Wilson, Thomas Lovejoy, Norman Myers, Jeffrey Harvey and Stuart Pimm. This is again, that's, uh, what are we at there? Seven doctors, seven different experts at the top of their fields, all reviewing this book. Liars. Yeah, liars. And of course none of them are statisticians or economists quote these separately written expert reviews. They all had them, like, write separate things that, like they weren't influencing each other. Unequivocally demonstrate that on closer inspection, lomborg's book is seriously flawed and fails to meet basic standards of credible scientific analysis. The authors note how Lomborg consistently misuses misrepresents. Misinterprets data to greatly underestimate rates of species extinctions, ignore evidence that billions of people lack access to clean water and sanitation, and minimize the extent and impacts of global warming due to the burning of fossil fuels and other human caused emissions of heat trapping gases. Time and time again these experts find that lumberg's assertions and analysis are marred by flawed logic, inappropriate use of statistics, and hidden value judgments. He uncritically and selectively cites literature, often not peer reviewed, that supports his assertions while ignoring or misinterpreting scientific evidence that does not. His consistently flawed use of scientific data is in Peter Gleick's. Words unexpected and disturbing in a statistician, all this makes me think, you know what? Maybe free speech isn't the right path for humanity. It's it's it's it's hard to read the story of Lomborg and not feel like we need to have a couple extra laws about when you and I don't think it's a free speech is a problem. I think it's that it's we too narrowly interpret the the fire in a crowded theater rule. Nobody disagrees that. Like, yeah, if somebody's shouting there's a fire and causes a Stampede and someone dies, yeah, of course that person should be criminally liable. What happens when a guy does this? Why isn't he criminally liable for the impact? He knows what he's doing. Yeah, there there should be more tests. Like you shouldn't be allowed to have a book, I think, you know, speaking as a guy who's written the book, yeah, yes, you should just be allowed. You should have like, some basic. Knowledge basic. You should have some knowledge about what you're doing. It's it's frustrating, like there should be I one of the difficulties with this is like. So many of these issues and the issues we have with like, getting people on board with, like, the, A basic understanding of the consensus of climate change is that there's so many individual studies. Like, if you just read the, the summary of the study, you could argue, like, oh, this proves that climate change isn't a problem. And then if you actually go into what the scientists are saying, like, no, no, this may seem like it's not a problem, but it actually plays into this problem and this problem, this problem. And it's a part of this chain of events that leads to this thing. That's exactly what scientists have been telling everybody for years. You're misinterpreting my research. But that doesn't matter. Because somebody just like waves. Look, this study says it's not a problem on Fox News. And then my parents are like, well, I guess we don't have to worry, right? Yeah, it's it's frustrating, you know? It's not frustrating. Ice cream. Ice cream and what the ads for this podcast might be. Ice cream. Sophie, are we sponsored by ice Cream? God, I hope so. Let's hope that it's ice cream sponsoring the show and not another Coke brothers ad. It might be another Koch brothers ad. I hope it's a vaping ad and not a Coke, brothers. Thing? No, it's not same thing. I mean, technically vaping could reduce overall climate emissions if it really is killing people. So that's what I said on the daily zeitgeist the couple days ago. I said that I think that the NRA is actually the best thing America has currently in its fight against climate change. You know, every, every death leads to this, a fewer carbon footprint. I will, I will say if we really want to get down that road, the greatest ally the world has in fighting climate change is climate tobacco industry. Ohh. You mean the best fight is, is climate change in itself? Like it will kill a lot of people, kill that many people. We we've gotten too good at disaster recovery, right? This is how we get sponsor sponsors like Philip Morris Tobacco solving climate Change, 145 year olds lungs at a time. Was that a good ad plug, Sophie? Absolutely not products. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for. None of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Will give you the best rate whether you're buying one or for a family, and it meant family start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. 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With you for the first time ever in a book format, you can pre-order stuff they don't want you to know now. It's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. My name is Erica Kelly and I am the host and creator of Southern Freight true crime. There are so many people that just have no idea about some injustices in the world, and if you can give a voice to them, you can create change. To be able to do it within podcasting is just such a gift. I believe it was 18 months after I got on with Spreaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. I always feel like an ambassador for speaker. But that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with spreaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love. Speaker from iheart. All right, we're back. So all of these debunkings we've gone through were public information. Basically, as soon as Bjorn Lomborg's book was out and serious people had time to read it, but none of the authoritative deconstructions of Lomborg's work seemed to matter. He kept right on making bank as the profit of everything's fine and capitalism will save us all from the climate catastrophe capitalism created. His website, Bjorn Lomborg Get the facts straight, includes a short selection of the many awards he received. One of the 100 top global thinkers, foreign policy, 2011. Thought Leader, Bloomberg Summit 2011. One of the 100 top global thinkers. Foreign policy 2010. One of the world's 75 most influential people of the 21st century. Esquire, 2008. One of the 50 people who could save the planet. UK Guardian, 2008. One of the top 100 public intellectuals. Foreign policy and Prospect Magazine, 2008. One of the top 100 public intellectuals. Foreign policy and Prospect Magazine, 2005. One of the world's most 100 influential people. Time magazine, 2004. Wow. Wow, right? Isn't that ****** **? Well, it's just gardening. It's also not surprising, though, because these people making those lists are probably interns. Like, ultimately, the truth is that that the people making lists aren't educated in that field. It's it's a lot of it's. I think it's a mix of those. And like, editors who come from a wealthy background because a lot of news editors do and who have like, friends and all these industries and stuff and they're like, oh, this is the guy telling us it's fine, right? Yeah. I think that's a chunk of it, especially for like foreign policy in Esquire. Umm, now you know when you do your behind the positive podcast. Yeah. Do you have a lot of anger just boiling through your veins? Yeah, I I go shooting about once a week. I have a lot of different machetes that I hit stuff with. I work out about 90 minutes a day. Yeah, very nice. Yeah, because I wonder, like how just hearing all of that out, how you just stay Zen. I do not stay Zen. I do a lot of drugs. Uh. It does help, yeah. To be honest, like Speaking of the NRA, shooting is probably the best cathartic thing for dealing with that kind of rage. I, I I have to say I, you know, like I'm very much sort of an anti gun person, but at the same time, I don't want to judge people, especially once I've until I've experienced it and I didn't get to a shooting range. And it it's fun whether or not you think they should all be banned, it's objectively fun. Oh yeah, it's very fun. Yeah. Yeah. That has nothing to do with what the law should be, right? Yeah. Right, right now. If you'd notice from all of those top thinker awards, they all came out at latest in 2011, and a majority of them were from 2010 or earlier. It's weird that Lomborg seems to be considered a top thinker much less often in these days of category 5 hurricanes and apocalyptic mud slides in the Midwest and the hottest years ever on record in California's largest wildfires. And like, weird. Yeah, because I guess what what what peoples thought behind it is that things like that have always happened. So I I know that. For example, in the UK during the Roman times there were melons that you could grow. You can grow melons. And then in Charles Dickens times, in one of his books, I think it was David Copperfield, the Thames was frozen over, which is the river that runs through London, which I've never seen it frozen like it was so frozen you they could build bonfires on it. So that's ******* nuts. It's wild. And it's so I understand that that, you know, climate does change all the time. Yeah, but I think people don't understand that. It's sort of changing at a rate, I think. Part of Lomborg's falling from grace is that people have started to like, like, California's always had wildfires. We've never had Malibu burned down. Like, I think that was a wake up call to a chunk of people. I think that like there, especially in like Florida and stuff. Part of why it's gotten harder and why, like a lot of people on the right no longer say climate change isn't happening. They'll say that, like, either humans aren't behind it or that, you know, and we'll get to this. The line Lumberg is pushing now, it's like, Oh no, it's absolutely happening. It's just what everyone says we should do, cut emissions and stuff that's wrong. And there's other things that we should do. Like, you can't even, like a bunch of the the arch conservatives living on the Florida coast, one of the most conservative. Like, you can't, you can't have those kind of hurricanes hit as regularly as they are and be like, nothing's changing it. It's it's at this point it's like, oh, wow, we've had three once in a century storms and like a couple of years. Like, maybe there's a problem, right? So now the debate has changed, like, what do we do about the problem and stuff? And Lomborg has tried to pivot on that. He has been less successful, which again, Will will. Go get to Umm, but you know it. It's in the first few years after the skeptical environmentalist was published by the Oxford University Press in 2001, which ******* Oxford University Press, Lomborg was everywhere. He was on 2020 he was on Newsnight, 60 minutes, the Late Show Larry King, and he made regular appearances on CNN, MSNBC and of course, Fox News. All of these sources accepted Lomborg as an expert, while the real expert shouted desperately that he was as **** filled as a poop factory. Proud of that. Sophie, thank you. I think one hint as to why this happened is included inside that first fawning New York Times article from 2001. Doctor Lomborg also chides, and this is him talking about like, what he calls the litany, which is the the term he used for like the doom and gloom, like stuff being said about climate change in the early 2000s. Doctor Lomborg also chides journalist, saying they uncritically spread the litany, and he accuses the public of an unfounded readiness to believe the worst. The litany has pervaded the debate so deeply and so long, doctor. Humborg writes that blatantly false claims can be made again and again, without any references, and yet still be believed. This is the fault not of academic Environmental Research, which is balanced incompetent, he says, but rather of the communication of environmental knowledge, which taps deeply into our doomsday beliefs. And I think if you completely reverse everything that he just said, that is an accurate explanation for lomborg's access. The problem is not that journalists uncritically spread the gospel of climate change. The problem is that journalists uncritically accept people claiming to be experts and will write. Glowing articles about them? If they just have a 3000, you know, entry work, cited page in their bibliographies. People don't want to buy into doomsday beliefs. Not really. Most people want to believe that everything's going to be fine and they don't need to worry about a problem. So we'll happily listen to a handsome European who misreads real studies to show us that everything is fine. And I think Lomborg's ability to tap into all of these things is why he's been successful. Or at least why he was. Do you think that I I like this of asking you questions. You're very smart and I want to see what comes out of your face. Umm do you think that the world is sort of experiencing a a mass bystander effect? So always it's like always yeah they they are just they're just going Oh well someone else will sort that out. Yeah I think we always are. And I think it's like a natural consequence of I think like when I I'm I'm on record as saying like one of the worst things that ever happened is 24 hour television news. It's might be what destroys us as a species. Like if there is a big apocalyptic nuclear war or something. I think the core of it will lie in the 24 hour news cycle one way or the other. Because it's just this, this machine that exists to exhaust people's ability to give a **** and to productively deal with problems. And I think it's a big part of like, why you have this kind of decision fatigue and this assumption that like somebody else will handle it, which is like a what? A lot of people on the right. Will point to now that we that you can't completely deny climate change. So they'll say, well, scientists are going to figure out a solution like they'll figure out a way to fix the whole problem. As well. Yeah, they they yeah, they should. They sure will. Uh, there won't be consequences. Hey, as a French person, I really miss beheading people. You know, honestly, I really think we should bring that back. I I you know what? I think the actual solution would be? Like, the worst thing you could do to the people who are actually responsible for most of this is if you were to take away, like, the the oil and gas executives, the people that like, what's the company starts with an E? No, no, no. Well, yeah. Those guys too. But like the, the, the, the people that like these, these oil and gas companies who like new back and like at least the 70s and stuff. Yeah, climate change was going to be a problem. And like the right like, like the cigarette companies covered up evidence that it was going to be an issue so they can maintain their profits. I think you take all of those people's money. I think you take all of their family money and you lock them and anyone who profited from the family business into making no more than the like median American salary and make them live in a normal apartment. And make them just be a normal person and you have that enforced upon them so that they they they never will ever be able to get access to the yacht on the way to anything like that. But on the way there though, they have to do the Cersei Lannister style of walking shame. I'm OK with a little bit with the bell and they have to walk around naked. I I think Mitch McConnell naked walking around the streets of Washington DC with his big frog face just shake. Yeah but. OK, hear me out on this. That makes him into that gives him the the opportunity to behave as a victim. If Mitch McConnell has to work 7 shifts a week at the Applebee's to make rent on his one bedroom apartment and then he's got like number #1, he's got to like depend on all these people and they have to depend. He has no privileged position, but also like all these people are like, hey Mitch, it's 115 today. Thanks, *******. Like I I I do think that like the worst thing you could do to a lot of these people. I think there's folks like your. And your Poles Manafort out there who who need to be locked up because they're just too dangerous. But I think most of these people need to be locked away from the things that are are most valuable to them, which is wealth and influence. And I think that will hurt more, more than any guillotine ever could, although I get the impulse. I know it's just a restaurant chain. Applebee's. I didn't say it's bad. I don't want him like, like, no, I want him out of ****** restaurant. Yeah, I don't want the people. I don't want the staff members of Apple. I just have to deal with Mitch McConnell. I I want to be able to go to an Applebee's and get problematically drunk off of their terrible cocktails and make Mitch McConnell serve me any. Why are you shooting an apple? Oh, you know what? You know what? We need to open a brand new Applebee's, right? So that all the staff member Mitch McCabe, Applebee's, Mitch McConnell and Alex Jones. They're all just run. That would be great. Thank God. Just just an Applebee's staffed by the people who are like behind, like largely behind our current era of like, post truth. Yeah, like nonsense. That's that actually would be a great place to get, like, I would never not be vomiting only drunk in that place. Like, I would be a problem to that. That would be, man, it would finally be like, I try to be on my on good behavior when I get really drunk at like restaurants and stuff because I don't want to cause a problem for like the wait staff or something because they're working people. But if Mitch McConnell was serving? The table I would make it my business to puke on like a suggestion. Yes. So according to cheatsheet.com, the most hated restaurant and fast food chain in America is Red Robin. And I think it's a great place for Mitch McConnell. Mitch McConnell had a *** **** Red Robin or a. Texas Roadhouse. Hey, hey, hey, hey, OK, I've not had the privilege yet of of enjoying an Applebee's or a Red Robin. Oh, man, Applebee's is great. That's not about where all Applebee's is. What if he is at a Waffle House? Everybody's thrown up at a Waffle House. Yeah, but they don't serve liquor like a a waffle. I I I have been. I actually have never been sober in a Waffle House. But you, I wanna go to a place where I could get. I want Mitch McConnell to hand me like a gigantic Margarita that's like a leader in length. And I want to, as he's handing it to me, take a sip from it while it's still in his hands, and then vomit directly on to him and make him bring me another. But now you're victimizing. Him? That's fine. I would rather shame him. My kids in Washington DC I'm throwing it out with a big about a Dave and buster's cause. People also bring their screaming children, though that would be or a Chuck e cheese cheese. I can't suggest Chuck e cheese as my friendship with Jamie Loftus is very important, but. Honest people can debate over which specific type of shaming would be most effective. Red Robin? Alright, continue the pod. Maybe have him circulate because it would be fun to have him like clean up after me at a Six Flags too because I can **** ** a Six Flags or like a Burger King. Like I really love to hear him say, would you like fries with that? These would all be very helpful if we could just, if we could just establish like basic income and healthcare and then make it so that like our most unpleasant service jobs are all held by former Republican. Congress people can I managed by the former people who used to do their jobs. Here's another question. A lot of these people, are they religious in terms of like a lot of the American veterans now, they're religious in quotes? Yeah, right, because I do wonder, like the real religious people. Wouldn't they want to take care of their planet? You know, I I've never understood that. Like the the the people that preach that kids will and stuff and then they go and it's God's will for me to be an *******. They're not taking care of the planet. That gets into a really complicated subject of like, theological debate because there's a there's a sizable chunk of American Christians in particular. It's not just the United States phenomenon, but it's big ear who believe that. Umm. The apocalypse is preordained, essentially. So this was like, why would you take care of this world? It's ending soon. There's also a chunk of people like you who believe, like, God gave us Dominion over this planet, so we're supposed to use it and use it up and, like, use all the resources. And there's even people who will argue that, like, God provides us with new resources when we use the old ones. And, like, that's why we've discovered all this, this gas under the Earth. To frack that was God being, like, don't worry about those pesky Arabs holding all the oil here. Just suck it out of the earth and like, right, right. Whatever. Problem? Yeah. There there's a bunch of different. Frustrating things. And I think those people, Once Upon a time you couldn't take them seriously like, like in mainstream politics. And what Lomborg provided was a a chance for like kind of the more technocratic conservatives like my parents who were like religious but not really religious. They could look at this guy's arguments and be like, well, no, here's a smart, educated scientist with a doctor in his name. And he's making, he's not saying like, God's gonna take care of it. He's saying that like, you know, he's he's making what seemed like very logical. Arguments for why this isn't a problem or why what problems exist will be solved very simply. About us changing our lifestyle or dealing with the problems in like a fundamental level of our society and it's it's consumption of resources. So, yeah, it's a it's comfort that's killing humans actually, isn't it? Yeah, it always is. Yeah, it's it's just comfort. People are scared of change. Yeah, yeah, it's always comfort that's killing humans. UM, from a literal point of view, in terms of just the fact that we're eating stuff that's clogging our arteries and giving us heart attacks at a younger age? Up to like, the fact that we'll ignore a doom as it rules, like leers down on our heads because we wanna go out to Applebee's and we don't wanna worry about climate change. I'm not saying Applebee's is bad, Red Robin. Yes, you know what? I'm going to go to an Applebee's off to this. Not maybe not today, but maybe not today. I know that when I drive past one, I might stop just to experience it. Well, Applebee's is is often a staple place for me to get wasted when I'm not at home and I'm at like a roadside motel because you'll often run into an Applebee's next to a roadside motel. And I I have. I have gotten drunk and Minnie and Applebee's and if Mitch McConnell were the ones serving me, I would happily with the pocket on his apron. That would be great. Especially if Paul Ryan came out with like this the the sawdust that you used to soak up the vomit and like, yeah, that would be really sweet. Now back to Bjorn Lomborg. So another reason. Bloomberg was able to have such an outsized impact on the debate over climate change in the United States is the simple fact that misreading and misrepresenting a mix of actual scientific papers and news articles, it's a lot easier than conducting authoritative research. The people who do conduct authoritative research are very busy, and when a guy like Bjorn comes along and shotguns out a book full of nonsense, they have to spend valuable time slowly debunking all of the many, many things he got wrong. I'm going to quote here from something Doctor EO Wilson wrote about the difficulty of combating this sort of misinformation. My greatest regret about the Lomborg scam is the extraordinary amount of scientific talent that has to be expended to combat it in the media. We will always have contrarians like Lomborg, whose sallys are characterized by willful ignorance, selective quotations, disregard for communication with genuine experts, and destructive campaigning to attract the attention of the media rather than scientists. They are the parasitic load on scholars who earn success through the slow process of peer review and approval. The question is how much load should be tolerated before a response is necessary. Lomborg is evidently over the threshold. And this is kind of what we were talking about, like, what do you what do you do about these people in a perfectly sane world? Like, I think that someone like Lomborg would face criminal charges for his misrepresentation of scientific fact for the same reason that, like, if you caught a diving instructor telling kids that the safest way to dive was head first into the shallow end of the pool, that guy would face charges even though all he was doing was giving people information. Because you're clearly misleading people into a dangerous situation. Parasitic scholars. Yeah, that's a great quote. Yeah, parasitic scholars. And that's another thing is, you know, why do these people go into that field? So do they go into the field because of the betterment of the world or the betterment of themselves? And do they do the betterment of themselves because they love themselves or because they have a desperate need for affection and because, like, all those go to different paths? Yeah. Right. And I think in Limburg's case, it is that desperate need to be famous. I think it's this sort of narcissism that, like, he he couldn't accept. He was a professor of, like, statistics and ****. Like, that's not an. The most exciting life in the world. I'm sure it's very satisfying to the people who legitimately like it. But I think Lomborg is the kind of guy that had a thirst to be famous and was like, well, this is the ******* easiest way to do that. I mean, yeah, yeah. Now, we've just talked about sort of how doctor Yale Wilson was, like, expressing his frustration that, like, a guy like Lomborg can just, like, shoot out a bunch of nonsense. And then real scientists whose time is incredibly valuable and limited have to, like, spend hours debunking all of it. And it's it's a very frustrating problem with our current system. And that might make it seem like there were no penalties Bjorn faced for lying constantly. There were a little bit of of there was a little bit of a penalty he faced. Several official complaints were made to the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. They evaluated these complaints and found that the work that he had published was fundamentally dishonest. But they found that they couldn't punish him because Lomborg wasn't an expert in any of the relevant fields, and thus he couldn't be considered guilty of, like, fraud, essentially. Like, because he was not really a climate scientist, they couldn't say that he was purposefully misrepresenting his case rather than just ******* up. That's insane. Yeah, isn't that crazy? All the world is so annoying sometimes. Yeah, I'm glad it's burning. You know what? I'm glad it's you've come around on climate change. **** it. **** all you people, yeah? In 2007 Bjorn published a new book, cool It, in which he explicitly accepted the reality of human caused climate change. This was seen by many as an abrupt reversal of his previous attitude. Bjorn clarified in an interview with The Guardian who declared him an influential thinker that it was not or I think they were one of the ones. He said he was going to save the world. Yeah yeah, they they voted him one of the 50 people who could save the planet. So an interview with them and they were more critical of him in this. In this article Lomborg denies performing a U-turn. They relates that he has never denied anthropogenic global warming and insists that he long ago accepted the cost of damage would be between 2 and 3% of world wealth by the end of the century. This estimate is the same, he says, as that quoted by Lord Stern, whose report to the British government argued that the world should spend 1 to 2% of gross domestic product on tackling climate change to avoid future damage. Incidentally, **** like This is why Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN Climate Change Panel, compared Bjorn Lomborg to Adolf Hitler, not because she thought he was a literal. Nazi, but for the statistical crime of treating human beings like numbers. And the odd thing is, Bjorn isn't even all that great at numbers. The Stern report estimated it would take between 5 and 20% of global GDP to effectively fight climate change. The Guardian pressed Lomborg on this quote. Not unexpectedly, however, the Stern report estimates that damage at 5 to 20% of GDP, however not 2 to 3%. The difference, according to Lomborg, is that the two use a different discount factor. This is the method by which economists but recalculate the value today of money. Spent or saved in the future? Or to put it another way, the value today of this generation's grandchildren's lives. So sorry I got it wrong. The Stern report didn't say it would take 5 to 20% of GDP to fight climate change. It said that the damage of climate change would be 5 to 20% of GDP if nothing was done to fight it right. Lomborg said that the damage would be 2 to 3%. And then he claimed, by sort of weasel math, that the reason for the difference between the two numbers is the differing value that he and Lord Stern put on the lives of our grandchildren. Basically right. Yeah, so that's cool. Well, I mean, I guess in a way there is a sad truth to that, sure. I mean, I do hate kids, so. Ohh yeah. Hey, them invaluable little *******. Yeah, but I I don't like too much when people just go straight for the ad Hitler and nauseam or whatever. Whatever that that Latin phrase is that whenever people just want to use an example, they'll go to Hitler. Yeah. There is a truth to people being numbers. We're just algorithms walking around with little legs, just walking around, right? That's what we are. We're just numbers. We're we're an algorithm. I I think in her case, she was making a really she wasn't. Like, I think she was making actually a pretty salient point, which is that when you treat people like numbers in this way, you really are creating humanized scientific crime. Yeah, sure, yeah, yeah. You're devaluing their lives in the, like in the course of like, making into an argument that shouldn't be an argument over the the numbers, purely like, like devolving it into that. But I guess. But yes. But the reality is that it is like that, right? I mean, there's those beautiful paintings of generals on the on the on sort of horseback, right. And you'll see. Behind them, thousands of soldiers just sort of marching towards the war that they want to fight. But ultimately the most important person is that person on horseback and everyone else is just sort of chess pieces at the back, right? I mean, and and we are using less and less humans to, to get the needs of humans. So we don't need as many farmers, we don't need as many soldiers because we've got drones and we'll have robots one day and stuff. And I guess there is that sort of sad truth that we don't need that much manpower anymore to run society and so. The people at the top, and I'm not saying I agree with this, but I'm just saying that the people at the top are gonna go, look, we don't need as many people anymore. Ohh yeah, I think the people at the top think that way. And I think what you're getting at is sort of a debate that historians have, like the great man theory versus like the trends and forces theory of history. But I think one reason why the people at the top never stay that way all that long, unlike a generational basis, why things switch and turn and the nations and power change so much is because they think like that way. They think that the most important guy is the guy. March it like sitting on the horse with that army of of nameless people around him. And then, uh, poor Serbian peasant named Gavrilo Princep pulls out a gun and shoots the archduke of Austria, Hungary. Oh, ****. Empires fall and the British empires no longer really a thing, right. And like that. That I think is. And that's the kind of thing that people like Lomborg always miss when they treat people like numbers like that. And it's the kind of thing, you know, on the other side of thing. It's the kind of thing that people like. Hillary Clinton, miss. When they, uh, they deride a bunch of people making memes on the Internet is like unimportant to the overall thrust of the election. And then it turns out that actually that may have made a real difference. Ohh, deplorables. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I think that it's the people in power. Always disregard the potential impact of like, one or a small group of just random people who have a thought in their head. And, like, I think that's, I, I think there's nothing that's more powerful. Then individual peoples ability to **** ** the works and that can be good and that can be bad because it means that a little girl like Greta Thunberg can make a an international impact on a problem just by being the face of it. I think that is it, the Dalai Lama. Rising but one of the best quotas. If you think that you're not important or if you're if you think you're not big enough to to make a change, try and sleep with the mosquito. Yeah, and I I'm really paraphrasing and butchering it, but it you know, there's the positive side of that, then there's the negative side, which is that a guy like Bjorn Lomborg can misread or directly misinterpret a bunch of scientific studies and lead to have a major impact on like, why we don't deal with the problem back when the problem is manageable. And instead it becomes something that might consume huge chunks of the world and its population. Hmm. So I think in both ways the the little person is always more important than the big people want to give them credit for being. That's just not entirely a good thing. It's a completely amoral factor in history, but it is, I think, a a factor in history that the people at the top often misinterpret. Yeah. Now, the good news about all of this is that by 2007 people were starting to get wise to be ordered little schemes, the Guardian noted in their write up of his second book, some statements appear to contradict each other. Directly in the space of four pages of coolant, he writes that climate change will not cause massive disruptions or huge death tolls, that the general and long term impact will be predominantly negative, and that it is obvious that there are many other and more pressing issues. The point I've always been making, he explains now, is it's not the end of the world. That is why we should be measuring up to what everybody else says, which is we should also be spending our money. Well, Speaking of spending money, well, Bjorn has a bunch of suggestions for stuff that we should be investing in rather than reducing emissions to directly fight climate change. He's a big advocate in improving nutrition and poor countries, improved access to contraception, more vaccinations, all but you're great things. In 2002, Lomborg formed the Copenhagen Consensus Center, which he billed as a way to bring the world's top economists together to solve the planet's greatest problems. Because, of course, economists are the best folks to solve our problems. If I had to think of one group of professionals most famous for never being. Wrong. It would be economist or maybe weatherman. In 2008, the Consensus Center ranked 30 priorities in order of like, what should be confronted first to deal with like, the greatest challenges of the world. Mitigating global warming was ranked last number, 36th was improving crop yields, 17th was green energy research, and 12th, interestingly enough, was geoengineering. And this gets us onto the subject of what precisely Lomborg thinks would be a better use of money than reducing emissions. He's come around to the necessity of climate. Engineering because now, more than a decade after he started urging everyone not to worry about climate change, reducing emissions is too expensive and slow away to reduce climate change for his tastes. So that's nice. So this is something Lomborg wrote in 2009. There is a significant delay between carbon cuts and any temperature drop. Even halving global emissions by mid century would barely be measurable by the end of the century. Making green energy cheap and prevalent will also take a long time. Consider that electrification of the global economy is still incomplete after more than a century of effort. Many methods. Of atmospheric engineering have been proposed. Solar radiation management appears to be one of the most hopeful. Atmospheric greenhouse gases allow sunlight to pass through but absorb heat and radiate some down to the Earth's surface. All else being equal, higher concentrations will warm the planet. Solar radiation management would bounce a little bit of sunlight back into space, reflecting just one to 2% of the total. Sunlight that strikes the Earth could offset as much warming as that caused by doubling the preindustrial levels of greenhouse gases. When Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991, about 1,000,000 tons of sulfur dioxide was pumped into the stratosphere. Reacting with water to form a hazy layer that spread around the globe and by scattering and absorbing incoming sunlight, cool the Earth's surface for almost two years, we could mimic this effect through stratospheric aerosol insertion, essentially launching material like sulfur dioxide or soot into the stratosphere. Another promising approach is marine cloud whitening, which sprays seawater droplets into marine clouds to make them reflect more sunlight. This augments the natural process where sea salt from the oceans provides water vapor with cloud condensation nuclei. It is remarkable to consider that we could cancel out the centuries. Global warming, with 1900 unmanned ships spraying seawater mist into the air to thicken clouds. He sounds like he's learned his science from that Mr. Burns episode. He wants to cover the sun. He's just a loser stutes sudden the sky and build 2000 boats to fire water up into the clouds like this. That's way better than reducing emissions. That sounds economically friendly. It's just so ******* dumb. Like, like out. Like, it's just like, don't do, he tells everyone. Don't do anything for more than a decade and then he's like, OK. We need to launch 2000 giant boats to shoot seawater into the clouds. And also if we considered spreading sulfur over the same stratosphere. Yeah, so he he's he's gone so far on the other side that he he's been he's lost it again. Yeah, that's clearly more rational than cap and trade stopping rainforest logging, you know, in any of that stuff like 1900 unmanned boats and sulfur into the sky. All perfect solutions with no conceivable downsides. Yeah, bjorn's tactics have gotten no better. In recent years, no better than that is suggesting thousands of boats shooting water into the sky. In 2014, John Stossel, writing for RealClearPolitics, asked Bjorn Lomborg how much President Obama's goal of getting 1,000,000 electric cars on the road by 2015 would slow down warming. Lomborg replied one hour. This is a symbolic act. Once again, Lomborg was very wrong. Greg Laden, a biological anthropologist writing for science blogs, actually spoke to an expert quote I asked atmospheric scientist. An energy expert, John Abraham, about this and here's what he said. If you put 1,000,000 clean cars on the road and have them last 15 years before removing them, and you take the typical admissions of a vehicle and you have saved over in the last 15 years and you know, there's a bunch of basically he crunched the numbers on it and he like came to the conclusion that over their lifetime just one million cars. If you did not build any additional cars after that point, you just put 1,000,000 on the road and kept them there 15 years, you would have saved the total equivalent of 21. Hours of admission for the entire planet. Wow. Which is a significant amount. And that's again just a million. Not increasing it at all. Not replacing them after they wear out in 15 years, which means lomborg's calculations to John Stossel was off by 2100%. It does seem like a lot of scientists are going beyond shut up. Yeah, they're constantly shut up for like 20 years now. Yeah, they've been saying shut the **** ** dude. You don't know what you're talking about, but I think he knows what he's doing. In 2016, Bjorns Copenhagen Consensus Center was paid 640,000. Dollars by Australia's Education Department to help produce a report that, among other things, called limiting world temperature increases to two degrees Celsius. A poor use of money since it would yield less than $1.00 of social, economic or environmental benefits for every dollar spent. Meanwhile, reducing World Trade restrictions through the Doha trade round would, Bjorn calculated, yield 2011 dollars of benefit for every dollar spent. Universal contraception access would return $120.00 per dollar spent. Now, reading stuff like that might make you question a couple of things. Number one, how good is bjorn's math? Are there any factors that might influence his calculation and might have led him to calculate that reducing global temperature increases only yields a dollar of value for every dollar spent? Well, reducing trade restrictions leads to $2000.00 of benefit, like are there maybe any conflicting interests he has that might be influencing his math in some way? What do you think? Like, you know, you can't, you cannot. You just think like an economist, he thinks like an economist who might be being paid by a specific group of people. Well, yeah, yeah. And I do sometimes like some comedians. So a couple of comedians in the UK have gone sort of gone to the right. Yes. Uh, politically speaking, when they weren't really like that when I saw first met them and I was observing them and from afar and sort of not admiring but understanding that. Oh yeah. There's more money. Yeah. If you're not getting that much work as a comedian that you are currently now and you understand that the right is rising. Yeah, they went there and and now they're going there and they are getting more work. And it's interesting because I'm going, whoa, you've become something totally different because you have to survive. Yeah, and you've decided that, uh, it's worth it to take money from. Yeah. You can't. You know, you're not gonna make that great a living as a statistician teaching at a College in Denmark. You'll be comfortable, but you're not gonna you're not gonna be rich doing that, right. Whereas if you become Bjorn Lomborg and tell people that climate change isn't a big deal and open this consensus center that advises people that reducing trade restrictions is a better way to fight global warming than stopping global warming, well, that actually. Turns out to pay pretty well. So I found a good breakdown of where Bjorn Lomborg's funding comes from. Uh, written by Graham Redfern of Desmog, a website focused on cutting through the PR spin around climate change issues. Their research revealed that the Copenhagen Consensus Center, or CCC, registered as a nonprofit in the United States in 2008. Since then, it has received more than $4 million in grants and donations. 3/4 of that came in 2011, and 12 Lomborg salary for a single year was $775,000 representing. You know, you're only 1/4 of what it had received by 2012. He's basically an Instagram model that's pushing those like drinks to lose weight. You know, that's exactly what he's doing, but like, instead telling everyone not to cut global emissions. Now, back in 2006, when the CCC first started to look at gaining support for its efforts in the United States, they hired Washington lobbyists and PR veteran James Harf. And so, like they they like, this is a, this is like a lobbying group for somebody and the lobbying. Group's primary goal has been to like convince people that emissions should not be cut, that carbon should not be taxed, that fossil fuel use should not be reduced. Now, again, this leads us to the question of, like, who's actually giving these people that money? And we don't know where all of it comes from. We know that in its first year, the center received $120,000 grant from the Randolph Foundation. That Foundation's money comes from the $1.2 billion the Randolph family made by selling the Vic chemical company to Procter and Gamble. The trustee of the Randolph Foundation is Heather Higgins, the CEO of Independent Women's Voice and chairman of the Independent Women's Forum. And that sounds good, right? Independent women's voice. That sounds like a woke. Progressive organization, yeah. It's actually a ******** right wing lobbying group that accepts money from, among other people, Charles Koch. I look forward. I look forward to when they start implementing like the transgenders against clouds. Yeah. And yeah, all of these different new groups coming along, we'll get it really woke. Yeah, we'll we'll have like, Bjorn wouldn't be the right spokesperson. Now you'd hire someone who is like very much like, I don't know, you you hire someone like. Non, why? You're gonna take all of that money? Yes. Like 8 year old, like an 8 year old kid from Cameroon and you'd have him be like, I love fossil fuels. Yeah, that's like that is that is where we're going next. Yeah. And then you'll call everyone racist who argues with them, and then you'll, while complaining that all the left does is call everybody racist who argues with them. Like it. It's it's beautiful. I love the way the media works. It's perfect. There are no problems. So yeah, I'm going to read a quote from D smog about the independent women's name Desmog blog. So yeah, they do a lot of really good analysis on, like, the the disinformation campaign, right. Being the name of a company. I thought it was the name of a person. Like, not a great name for someone that works in time, Graham Redfern, which is also pretty good name for something we're gonna read. Firm, actually. But I think it's pronounced red Fern. It's ******* Australian. I don't know, people. Nothing makes sense over there. Yeah, that's not straight so much. No, that's not. I was like more Scottish. Yeah, well, Scott's Irish. Yeah. Quote staff writers of both organizations regularly expressed skepticism about the science of human caused climate change. And site lomborg's views approvingly a recent article from the International Women's Forum Senior fellow Vicki Alger. Named a majority of scientists believe that global warming is largely nature made, ignoring several studies that show the vast majority of research from scientists studying climate change believe exactly the opposite. Now, funders of the IWF include, as I said, the Claude Lamb Foundation, which is controlled by Charles Koch, and the Donors Trust, a conservative political action fund that spent millions of dollars on climate change denial. This means that Charles Koch indirectly has helped fund Bjorn Lomborg. Now, Higgins continued to pump 10s of thousands of dollars directly into Lumberg center over subsequent years. But in 2014, when that Desmog article was written, the author was only able to track down where about $500,000 of the 4.3 million in funding it had received up to that point. That come from, however. In 2015, Reed firm revealed that Paul Singer, a Republican billionaire venture capitalist, was one of the CCC's major backers. He gave more than $200,000 to the group. Mr Singer also helps fund the Manhattan Institute, the think tank behind the fallacious claim that Alexandria Ocasio Cortez's Green New Deal would cost $100 trillion. In recent years, Bjorn Lomborg seems to have dropped most of the pretense of being a leftist environmentalist. He's appeared in five videos for Prager University. With titles like is climate Change our biggest problem? Our electric cars really green? And the Paris Agreement won't change the climate. His grift seems to be less profitable these days than it was in the era before. Mega Hurricanes regularly battered our shores and record setting summers and wildfire seasons were a matter of course, but Lomborg still does a brisk business and media appearances. As of the writing of this episode, his most recent appearance was in a Fox business video with the title Green innovation Trump spending when tackling climate change: expert. He was the expert. Show what he looks like. He's. Yeah. Show him what he looks like now. This is Bjorn Lomborg after 20 years of climate denial. Does he look at me? Doesn't look that bad. So if you really oversold it, I think I I was expecting like a gruesome creature. I think he's he's Mick Jagger at at least 50% in the last 20 years, and Mick Jagger hasn't Mick Jagger that much, but Sophie Sophie definitely has a very negative reaction to his waddle. A waddle waddle shaming. This is waddle shaming. Yeah, I guess she's holding her skin and making it sort of thicker now, Eric, if I know my audience right, and I don't, the one thing they love more than anything else is when we hit things. So I think the one thing they love more than anything else is when we hit things. So I'm going to give you the giant machete and I'm going to throw. I'm going to throw it right past all of the recording equipment because that's a good idea. Yeah. He's got. Are you holding one? Are you holding the whole back? I'm gonna throw the whole bag. I always throw the whole bag, right? It would be. Responsible to throw a single bagel. Alright, so I'm going to throw them at Eric, who's wielding the machete as if it were a baseball bat. And he's going to try to hit him as hard as he can and really just swing it. There's nothing you can hurt in this room full of delicate electronic equipment. Nothing at all. Audience, I have Anderson. She is protected. Anderson's fine. All right, I'm going to throw it. Yeah. All right. Toss it back to me. We got we got you. Got it. We got to get it. We gotta get him going across the room. Like conscious going. What if you drop it? No one. What if you throw? No one's ever been hurt by a 2 foot machete, right? Never. Not once in history. Yeah, yes, nail didn't make a very smooth samurai cut. It's OK. It takes practice to really be able to do damage with that thing. But I definitely got really happy with how that went. How did it feel? I felt? I feel really manly. I wanna go to war now. Yeah, I see. I see how easily I could be turned, you know, hospital. So, you know, I've got some things just makes me follow me on Instagram. That title makes me want to marry a European, renounce my US citizenship, become an EU citizen, go through that whole years long process and then move back to the United States and get a green card so that I can be declared an alien of extraordinary ability. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Also, I'm no longer it because now I have a green card. Ohse it when you get a green card. Yeah. So now I'm. I'm a permanent resident. Well, that's not as cool as being an alien with extraordinary ability. No, but I once was, and it felt good, and I'm sure it did. It felt right. Well, audience, check out. Alien of extraordinary ability, I will say as well, I'm now leaving this podcast slightly angrier. Yeah, you should. Everyone should leave the podcast angrier. I mean, we. I hope the catharsis of hitting the the bagels with the machete energy out. Sure. Yeah, I see. I see why. I see why people get their anger out in violence. I am in no way training the audience for things to come by by pushing machetes and bolt cutters on people and teaching them that these objects can can can help them deal with their anger at the ********. And that's what I'm doing at all. And no wonder why your product placements are machetes coming by them. I you know, any machete company that wants to sell branded behind the ******** machetes? I feel like we can make a lot of money with them. Same thing with bolt cutters, because we're we're big into the. Missing bolt cutters. And right now I just have to suggest people get basically anything about the cheap harbor freight ones because those won't cut through. Theoretically becauses security gate, right. You really you you want some like heavy duty bolt cutters you wanna be spending. I'm sure it's available. You could in fact get the bolt cutters from it on that you used to break through his security. Yeah. Not that we encourage that behavior because we don't. It does seem like that's what I was going to go like in 20-30 years time. Like you know, it's going to be Hunger Games style. You know, the masses versus Amazon. You know, my hope is that we can avoid that by by making some pretty sharp. Course corrections now, but if we can't, Fisker's brand machetes. Resist rust very well. So you know they'll chop bagels, they'll chop. Through please stop. OK? Yeah, you're right, Sophie. How do we leave this out without me at at like, suggesting more crimes? A firm handshake? Do you have anything you want to plug? I already talked about bolt cutters. No, I mean, like, hey, what about the environment, bro? I just want to plug trees. I do wanna plug trees. What about tree frogs? Not mine. Sophie's wearing a sweater. It seems comfortable. We have shirts on teepublic.com behind the ********. You can find the podcast on behindthebastards.com where the sources will be, although the coding of the site is sometimes broken. But you you can generally figure out what the sources are and you can find us on Twitter and Instagram at at Bastarde pod. You can find me on Twitter at I write OK and I have a new podcast with my friends Cody and Katie called worst year ever about the 2020 election so. What we I we will definitely talk more about bolt cutters and machetes on that podcast, so if that's something you're into, check it out. Eric, thanks for being on the show. Thanks for having me. Until next week. Hug a cat. Buy some bolt cutters. Consider investing in a machete. Year 3. My name is Alex Fumero and I host the new podcast more than a movie American Me, a film directed by and starring Edward James Olmos. I'll be diving into the behind the scenes controversy, including an alleged backlash from the Mexican mafia. Several people who worked on the movie have been murdered. I don't want to speak about why would people be murdered for being in a movie. Listen to more than a movie American me on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts. Or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her social discoveries on chimpanzees, the four, oh, months the chimps ran away from me. I mean, they take one look at this peculiar white ape and disappear into the vegetation. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app. Or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Lauren Ober, and in addition to being a charming podcast host, I am also a newly diagnosed autistic person. My new show, the loudest girl in the world, is all about my weird, winding path to diagnosis, my decision at age 42 to finally get evaluated for autism. Listen to the loudest girl in the world on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or. Wherever you get your podcasts.