Bjorn Lomborg: Patient Zero of Climate Denial

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
What's badly introducing my podcast, Sophie's ashamed to me. I'm
Robert Evans hosted Behind the Bastards, the podcast where every
week we talk about a different terrible person in exhaustive detail,
and I come up with an introduction that's either embarrassingly bad,
entertainingly bad, or just plain lame in in. Today it
was the latter. Sophie agrees with my guest today, Eric Lampere,

(00:24):
Eric Helosa, how are you doing today? I'm doing really good.
Thank you. I'm actually very excited about this because 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 are are subjects to be a mystery.
The guests are a mystery. That would be very a
different podcast. Yeah, that would be Robert Evans invites people

(00:45):
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.
I have it on good authority that all of the
equipment in here can be hit with the machetes. That correct, Sophie.
We're allowed to damage all the equipment, all of the walls,
the windows, the poison room. Well, technically can can be.

(01:09):
It is possible. I mean theoretically, this is a big machete.
He's right, I think you want something would probably be
throwned upon. I'll tell you what, I don't want my
fingerprints on there. I don't know. I don't know you
well enough to know what you're gonna do. I had
very different plans. I had very different plans for what
to do with the machete before you said that, Well,

(01:33):
I don't know who to guess to joke about murdering,
Um damn. That would have been a great time to
joke about. Good old 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.

(01:56):
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 can't quite be quantified yet, but I
think one of these days he'll be recognized as real
piece of shit. I'm gonna start with a little bit
of a winding introduction, so I hope you'll forgive me

(02:16):
for that, Eric. When I was sixteen years old, Michael
Crichton released State of Fear, the second to last novel
he would publish in his lifetime. Now, I was a
big fan of Crechton's work ever since stumbling across the
Lost World in second or third grade, I dutifully devoured
his canon. 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

(02:39):
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 thirty page bibliography, all of which was angled at

(03:00):
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 Crechton'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 sixteen. Crechton's

(03:21):
work was a massive success, as most of his books were,
because the man did 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 im Hoff declared it required reading for the Senate
Committee on Environmental in Public Works. He called on Crechton
to testify before said committee in two thousand five. Yeah,

(03:45):
if you want, If you want, like a real nutshell
encapsulation of how fucked American politics has always been. The
Senate called on a science fiction the author of Jurassic
Parks to testify on climate change. That was the guy
that blends for dogs with dinosaur d n A. They've
not seen Jurassic Park, jesssic Park two three, jesssic World.

(04:06):
It's bound to lead the 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 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 in the
sort of c I A or FBI table. Yeah, I

(04:28):
do feel like King would actually have some insight into
the mind of a terrorist. Yeah, isn't Einstein that says,
you know, the true sign of intelligence is not knowledge
but imagination. And potentially maybe that's why Crichton is trusted.
He was not a dumb man, although like he had
a very specific kind of intelligence. Michael Crichton, A lot

(04:49):
of people don't know this. Um was a trained doctor.
I forget he went on he created Yeah, he's the
creator of the R And he was a medical student.
He at his m d and then kind of piste
off the college. He got his m d. Yet because
he then didn't work as a doctor and went on
to become a science fiction author and like apparently just
got the m d so that he could like write

(05:11):
good science fiction about medical stuff like um terminal strain
or whatever the hell that book was um, but yeah,
so he's he's he's not a dumb man, but he
has This is the kind of problem you let come
up with a lot, especially in the global warm and debate,
people who are not dumb but have a very specific
kind of education and intelligence, and then assumed that they
understand climate science. That's like, yeah, that's what this episode

(05:34):
is really about. So yeah, Crichton Yeah, was called upon
to testify before the Senate Committee on Environmental in Public
Works in two thousand five. In two thousand and six,
the APG awarded Michael It's Journalism Award, which sounds impressive
until you learn that the APG is the American Association
of Petroleum Geologists. Yeah, famed unbiased source sub climate journalism.

(06:00):
Actual climate scientists, of course, did not like State of Fear.
Several of the people who authored studies that crit and
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

(06:21):
a famous study that cited by anti climate change people
that how like 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 and it's like,
well no, but the other one is getting smaller. In
the total amount of ice lost from the polls does
not over like doesn't doesn't like they don't balance out.
We're net down a shitload. Eyes thank you, Sophie. So

(06:44):
if he's correcting my mic placement, because I'm here in
the office this time and she gets to micromanage me,
but I love. I was just saying, I thank you.
Is this shattering Greek pillar that's a shattering ashes from well,
there's it's from a couple of places the Roman empires where,

(07:04):
but they also there's there's big bronze ones up on Congress.
It's a symbola. Yeah, sorry, Sophie, I didn't mean that.
I'm just gonna go cry. I've heard Sophie. Do you
want to hit something with a machette? I wouldn't hand
that to me, right, Well, I'm just trying to make

(07:25):
your podcast better. Well, Sophie, I want everyone to hear
every single word that you say. Robin. Now you've shamed me,
and now I feel bad. Great, continue, I'm once again
the bastard of my podcast. Which is it takes one
to know one that 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

(07:49):
hurt your boss's feelings. Natsch was a very poetic man. Yeah,
he was a great podcaster, a little bit at very
anti semitic really, but it was a different time podcasting
was in this evolved an art form. I didn't even
know how to record things. Anyway, I should continue with
the episode. Uh so. Peter Duran, author of that Nature

(08:10):
paper and Cooling in the Arctic, complained that yeah, that
Crichton had misinterpreted his results and misused them as evidence
against global warming. The American Geophysical Union, which includes more
than fifty scientists, stated unequittically that state of fear quote
changed public perception of scientists, especially researchers, and global warming
towards suspicion and hostility. This is a big books, like

(08:31):
number one 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

(08:53):
the one work that Michael seemed to hold in the
highest regard, a book called The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lumborg.
Have you ever heard of Biorn motherfucking Lumborg. But I'm
guessing he's Scandinavian. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think Danish. Um. Yeah.
So there's a couple of versions of the Bijorn Lumborg

(09:13):
story that you'll hear. I'm gonna read one paragraph that's
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.
Lumborg in nineteen nine seven, was paging through a copy
of Wired magazine in a bookstore in San Francisco. He
happened across an interview with Julian Simon and University of

(09:34):
Maryland economists, known for his optimistic prediction that population growth
was unlikely to exhaust the planet's resources. Later that year
and intrigued, Lumborg set about in Denmark with ten of
his brightest students to examine Simon's claims. Expecting to prove
Simon wrong, Lumborg and his students were surprised to find
that many of the economist predictions about the state of
the environment were on the mark. This discovery led Lombard

(09:54):
to pen a few op eds for a center left
Danish newspaper and eventually the publication in Denmark of the
first Day of The Skeptical Environmentalist. Now, the book was
essentially a thoroughly argued case against the scientific consensus on
global warming. Lombard 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

(10:16):
and environmental activists. Lomborg would use what looked to my
sixteen year old brain like compelling scientific data to argue
his points. Among other things, that Lombard argued, number one,
species are not going extinct at a weirdly high rate.
Number two, the world is not losing ice, and thus
the seas are in no real danger of rising. Number three,
global temperatures aren't increasing in any worrying way. And number

(10:38):
four there's more trees than ever. So what are environmentalists
worried about? It sounds silly like talking about now in
two nineteen, but in two thousand one it was a
different media ecosystem, Like the fact that the world was
shifting its climactic pants was not quite as obvious to everybody.
The whole climate change debate has been around one a

(11:00):
long time, in the eighties at least at least oh yeah,
and really even before that. Um Murray book Chin, who
is a philosopher I'm a fan of um, kind of
an anarchist political thinker in nine in the nineteen sixties,
wrote a lengthy series of essays talking about how, uh,
carbon emissions and like fossil fuse we're going to lead
to like massive climate catastrophe unless we adopted like vastly

(11:22):
radically different ways of living that we're like not compatible
with kind of the consumptive capitalist system that we existed
in currently. Like that's nineteen sixty five. He's writing this
stuff very clearly later. So, yeah, people knew about this
for decades. It's just that nobody took it seriously until
we had what three category five hurricanes hit the US
East Coast in the course of like a y area.
But even that doesn't seem to be enough evidence for people. Well,

(11:47):
fine fastening, and there's an elemententy that's sort of not sympathizers.
But until you experience something, you can't actually know anything's real.
And so when people say, oh, you know, it's all
melting beyond and the poles and stuff, until they actually
visibly see it, they can't fully understand the complexities of it.
So um, it's that. It's that Christopher Nolan mentions in

(12:10):
Inception and about how like one wants a seed is
planted in your head, it's very hard to sort of
un route. Yeah, and if you don't have trust in
your government, then why would you trust that. They say,
but the climate is being destroyed and I'm just talking
to hear like, because obviously the climate is changing drastically. Well,
you need to do is rub your hands together and
you understand the friction causes heat. And the more people

(12:31):
that are on the planet, the more cars there are,
the more food there needs to be grown. All of that.
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 Lumbourg because there's this this kind of war that
really started in the nineties, the late nineties against scientific consensus.

(12:52):
Like there was a time when if scientists in like
nature came out with a study saying like, we've got
a big fucking problem. Um, 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 reel like that would that would
sound absurd to people, And now the president has essentially

(13:13):
spread that same line, like it's um, this is a
lot of this is like where we are right now
is the culmination of a process that lumb war was
a major part of starting this, this war against kind
of an understand a shared understanding of reality. Um. And
part 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

(13:36):
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 nineties and in two thousand
was beyond rational. It was. It was a kind of
mania that overtook the conservative right and that is still

(13:59):
very much asn't in prevalent um. 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

(14:19):
of authority beyond the one guy that you like, if
you're that sort of person or whatever pundits you trust. Um,
And yeah, it's it's a real problem. Yeah, um, it's interesting.
I also wonder though, if all the people are pushing
the climate change is a hoax thing generally are quite
wealthy well, and they won't be affected by ultimately, ultimately,

(14:43):
you know, the world and the humanity will survive. Right now,
there may be millions billions of death caused because the
climate change, but ultimately humanity will survive. And I think
they're 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 Los Angeles
when Los Angeles burns down, So ultimately there and give

(15:05):
a ship. Well, yeah, that's actually kind of where this
is headed a little bit. Yeah, 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. Uh Now, Bjorn did not deny that
there were some environmental problems. He didn't even come out

(15:26):
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 fearmongers. That's
that's Bjorn Lamborg's line. Now, sixteen year old Robert Evans

(15:48):
took Lumborg's book apart and used many bits arguments for
a series of debates in his speech and debate class.
And then he grew up and into the real world
and stopped being a young Republican. Somewhere between reading the
work of actual climate scientists, which Lumborg 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 Bijorn Lumborg. The

(16:11):
median narrative around him was just too good for bunches
of overly credulous journalists to not flock to him. One
example of this was a two thousand and one 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

(16:34):
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 Lumborg, a thirty six year old political scientist and
professor of statistics at the University of our hosts in Denmark. Now.
The article went into loving detail about how Lumborg had
been converted from environmental apocalypticism by reading the work of

(16:56):
Dr 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 Dr Paul or Like
over resource scarcity. Erlick 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 made a bet

(17:17):
with him about, like, you know, they picked five resources
and Airlock bet that they would all increase in cost
over the next couple of decades, and Simon bet that
they would decrease, and Simon wound up being right. Um,
can I ask you, do you think that people aren't
necessary worried about the whole climate change thing as a whole,
as an actual doomsday possibility because they've gone through so

(17:40):
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 happened. 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

(18:01):
it aside because I've experienced other doomsday scenars that have
actually just sort of gone bine wind. I absolutely think
that kind of particularly some of the Hollywood like the
Day After Tomorrow ship, like that's that's actually really hurt
the cause of getting people to take this seriously, because
the problem is not um that the world is going
to end. Human beings are very adaptable. The majority of

(18:23):
us will find a way to survive no matter what
happens to the climate. Like even if a fucking asteroid hits,
I have no doubt that a lot of people will
figure out how to make that ship work, because we're
just we're cunning little bastards. Um. 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

(18:43):
healthscape where people knife fight to death over jugs of water? Um,
A lot of people don't. Yeah, that's that's another scary thing.
Is I am hoarding water and nights? But that's very
little to do with the podcasting machete. Um No, it's
it is weird how a lot of people will uh,
you know, height being by themselves, which means that they

(19:04):
always have like bad voices in their heads. And if
that have bad voices in their heads, I don't really
care about other people. And so the idea of an
apocalyptic yes scenario where where their their life gets twist
turned upside down is actually welcoming because most people's lives
are kind of difficult and challenging. Well, if I can
get into like, uh, my my own fringe political beliefs

(19:26):
on this, 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 ideal that

(19:46):
it might all come tumbling down and you would get
to be king of the waste land and not have
to clock in at work at Target the next morning.
Right that that that does, that is very attractive to
a chunk of the population, especially the people who believe
that they would thrive that environment. Yeah, that's that's an
important key I think, is that they would believe they
would thrive when the reality is two days in the woods. Now, Eric,

(20:10):
speaking of the dehumanizing realities of modern American consumerst capitalism,
it's time for an it plug. Is this a good
This is a good one, Yeah, nailing it products. We're
back boy. A lot happened in that break number one.

(20:32):
I grabbed my throwing bagels. I don't know if you
if you're aware of this, but I throw bagels on
the show. It's a much in a kind of substitute
to think, Well, 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, um 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

(20:53):
samurai with the Sisters machete. You want to do that?
All right? 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 pair editions sugar Free Red Bull.
I hate Red Bull as a general rule. I hate
the company, the ad campaign. This is delightful. The pair
version is really tasty. I hate that it's so good,

(21:15):
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 God, damn it. It happens every
time I come back to Los Angeles. When can I
show him a photo of this fucker? Yeah? Show him
young beyond Lumborg so you can see how this guy okay,
because I was gonna say, Michael's all right, Michael's in

(21:36):
all right face. No, No, he's fine. So this is
young born Lumborg. So for anyone listening, he looks like
Hitler's wet dream. He kind of looks like, um, what
I like, what Aaron Carter would look like if he
didn't do drugs, like you know, this little blue eyes,
blonde hair, and it works for him. Yeah, but how

(21:58):
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? 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 Banny, right hat Steve Bannon,

(22:22):
if he looks like you know, if he looked like
Hercules and was like just you know, I hate these
types of people, I'd be like, I'm gonna listen to
that guy. He's a beautiful man. He must be healthy,
both physically and therefore mentally. But Steve is full of
like regular type skin, you know, where like clearly skirmishes

(22:43):
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. Paul, Steve, No, don't ever, Steve Bannon.
You know what, it doesn't get said enough, Paul Steve
Steve Bannon, uh Stevie b So, yeah, Lumbard. When we

(23:04):
talked about Julian Simon, the guy got into that argument
with Paul Aerlic And he's like a frequently quoted scientist
by people who want to deny climate change because one
of the things that they'll always argue is that we'll
back in the seventies and eighties, everybody was telling 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 of he was

(23:26):
right about the population crisis. And that is one of
the things whenever we're getting too talks about climate change
and people bring up population is a problem, that's zero
percent of the problem. The the overall human population is
not an issue. It's resource expenditure by people like us.
Um It's not like the issue is not that there's
too many people being born in Sub Saharan Africa, or

(23:47):
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 the
types of resources being consumed. And also like more than
anything related to Yeah, it's more an issue of billionaires
and millionaires and upper middle class people in the kind

(24:08):
of resources they spend, like celebrities flying their private jets
from one airport in l a to the other to
skip midtown traffic, which happens way more often than you
would expect. Oh, you can track their planes. Yeah, Um,
it's more of that than it is like 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,

(24:28):
we should like be concerned about all these population, you know,
problems going So it's like this weird thing on the
right where but both point to Paul Erlick 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 South are going
to like using up the world's resources, when that's not

(24:50):
at all the case, like it's this double edged sword
of racism, uh, and also not doing anything about the
core problems of climate change. It's very frustrating. I do
wonder with these signs who say, you know, they're opposing
climate change and stuff. I do want to sometimes if
that's just good money it is with Lumberg, I'm not
gonna say Simon died. I think before the debate really

(25:11):
took off, he was right about the population stuff, So
I mean, I don't want to lump him in with Lamborg,
but Lumborg sees himself as that kind of figure. So
Simon gains a lot of renowned for being right about
the fact that like there was alarmism around the global population,
and Lumborg painted himself as that kind of guy, and
he would bring this story up specifically when he did

(25:32):
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 bullshit of 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 um.

(25:54):
One of the reasons that Lumborg was so convincing, particularly
to journalists who again didn't know anything about science, like
the guys at the New York Times wrote this profile piece,
is that his book had a shipload of citations in it. Uh.
In many of the articles about Lumborg in the early
two thousand's, you would read quotes like this one from
the Times. Dr Lumborg has presented his findings and the

(26:14):
Skeptical Environmentalists a book to be published in September by
Cambridge University Press. The primary targets of the book, a
substantial work of analysis with almost three thousand footnotes, are
statements made by environmental organizations like the World Watch Institute,
the World Wildlife Fund, and green Peace. Virtually every one
of these pieces you would find includes references, and often
multiple references, to the fact that Lumborg's book had like

(26:37):
three thousand 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 footnotes it has, Like
people would like there's you can find like videos and
stuff of people like like whole 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 is really like
look at how many fucking we're excited he has. That
means it's like a real solid work of science. So

(27:01):
you see you once sort of side Oh yeah, absolutely,
I was. I was raised very conservative, very Republican. Um
I thought that George W. Bush was the best president
since Ronald Reagan? Who was the best president? And when
and how long did we 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

(27:22):
white and also had not grown up middle class. It's
a 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. Then we're asking the general
populace to just switch off to Netflix for an hour
and maybe read an essay. Yeah, it read an essay

(27:44):
that's like dense and hard to understand, and they might
come across stuff like research on how one 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, species, like, well,

(28:09):
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. It's seemed frustrating he didn't get that. Yeah,

(28:33):
and Creighton Lost World still a fine book, but god
damn it, dude. So yeah, Journalists who liked Lumbourg would
point out, like all of those fucking footnotes, like that
was one of the biggest arguments to like why the
Skeptical Environmentalist was a credible book, um, And most people
who looked at all those footnotes assumed that his arguments
were actually supported by the research included there. In spoilers,

(28:56):
it was not as with Crichton. Several of the scientists
cited in the Borg's books spoke out to warn that
he had misinterpreted their work. A bevy of experts took
to the field to complain that the skeptical environmentalists was
nothing but a pack of deadly lies. For one example
of how dumb this ship is, I'd like to quote
an article written by Dr E. O. Wilson, a Harvard professor,
a two time Pulitzer Prize winner, and an actual biologist.

(29:19):
He's commenting on Lumburg's claims that fears of mass extinction
brought on by climate change are bogus, using bad data
and lies. Lumbarg estimated a species lost worldwide of just
point seven percent over the next fifty years point zero
one four percent per year. Now, Dr Wilson, who was
an actual biologist again and not a fucking statician and

(29:39):
economist like Lumborg, wrote this. Before humans existed, the species
extinction rate was very roughly one species per million species
per year point zero zero zero one percent. Estimates for
current species extinction rates range from one hundred to ten
thousand times that, but mostly hover close to the one
thousand times pre human levels point one percent per year,
with the rate rejected to rise and very likely sharply.

(30:02):
Wilson goes on to note, based on the work of
Stuart Pim of Columbia University's Center for Environmental Research and Conservation,
anywhere from one to several birds species go extinct annually
out of ten thousand known species. Hence, say point zero
one to point zero three percent of all living bird
species are extinguished per year. But birds are unusual, and
that threatens bird species receive an extraordinary amount of human intervention.

(30:23):
The real figure of observed extinctions would be much higher,
very likely ten per year, point one percent 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 Dr Wilson came from two thousand one,
but time has proved Dr Wilson right and Dr Lumbourg wrong.
The Center for Biological Diversity notes we're currently experiencing the

(30:45):
worst spate of species die off since the loss of
the dinosaurs sixty 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. It up to a thousand times
the background rate, with literally does is going extinct every day.
It could be a scary future. Indeed, with as many
as thirty of all species passably heading towards extinction by

(31:07):
mid century. So Lumborg says point seven percent of all
species by mid century. The reality is but even even
that forty, I think most people don't care. Right, But
what it seems like people don't understand is if you
lose one animal, it's snowballs and sort of triggers effect.

(31:28):
Like you need to like we need to win the
heart of people in different ways I learned. So there's
this woman called Dr Erica McAllister. She works at the
Natural History Museum, and she is 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 fly, which means

(31:50):
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 the 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, funk all those species.
I want them dead. I'm going to drive the biggest
I'm going to modify my car to release more pollution

(32:13):
so that it will kill them faster. Because there's this
big propaganda game that's been played in the US to
make it look like um, the point of 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 it species of frog alive,
and it like led to people murdering some of those species,
like like as an act of protest against what they

(32:34):
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 young
environmental active. It's amazing to watch, you know, obviously really

(32:55):
sad for her and almost kind of fair what could
happen to her. There's a piece of me that's like
as fucked up as it is, and 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 currently like

(33:17):
when I'm an adult, I want to be able to
like enjoy wetlands and like glaciers, Like I want to
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 um and like like
like that we see this this kind of hate unleashed
that like it really is that irrational. It really has been,
because yeah, Lumboard is ground zero for spinning that up,

(33:40):
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 that. Like
the whole lady behind Crichton's book is that there's a
literal conspiracy to like make you believe if this is
happening when it's not. And that's the that's step one

(34:03):
to getting and the in 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

(34:24):
if there were ice in the future. Yeah, it's pretty
scary the people, the people that are out there. Yeah,
And Lumbourg 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.

(34:46):
But but also the thing is 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 sis, right, And if people are also not curious
because the majority of people are not curious, which is
their curiosity is focused. They're curious about whatever they're into.

(35:09):
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. And most people just haven't got that
curiosity to read more than one clickbay article. And so
it's very so it's so easy to be brainwashed into

(35:32):
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 is getting hot. Look
at this nicely dressed Danish man with beautiful blonde hair
holding up a book with like three thousand citations telling
me not to worry. All right, Well, I I'm going

(35:54):
to go back to worrying about, like, you know, the
fact that my kid doesn't have healthcare or whatever. I
have other ship to deal with out so yeah, the
uh 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

(36:17):
all scientific citations. I'm going to read a quote from
an article by Matt Nisbet, a professor of communication and
a writer with a 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 Lamborg's three thousand citations are to media
articles and secondary sources. Lomborg's research is conceptually flawed. He

(36:40):
ignores ecology and connections among environmental problems, taking instead a
human centered approach. In several cases, he uses statistical measures
that are not valid indicators of the problems Here. Reports
are improving on the topic of biodiversity. E. O. 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 in
concludes that The Skeptical Environmentalist is a hastily prepared book

(37:03):
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 three thousand citation counts. That it seems like because

(37:25):
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 gonna get to
in a bit is how many different types of scientists
it takes to debunk Lumborg's work, which points out that
it's fundamentally absurd to assume that any statistician, any economist
period anywhere in the world could write a competent book

(37:45):
on climate change. It's not possible because it requires so
much different expertise from so many different fields to actually
have a hope of understanding the whole scope of the
problem and analyzing all this correctly. And Lumborg that's not
what he's good at. I'm sure he's fine enough at
fucking economics, but like that, this is not economics. Is
there not artificial intelligent programs now to sort of create

(38:07):
models of climate change and where it could possibly begin
in the future. Well, that's just the chi coms trying
to trick us, right, right, there is so much wrong
with the Orn Lumborg's book that I could literally right
five or six episodes just going through everything that's been
debunked in it, and not finished getting through everything lumbarg
got wrong. And I'm not going to do that because

(38:28):
we all have better shipped 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 resources, biodiversity, and climate change
to review the skeptical environmentalist quote. Reviewing Dr Lumborg's claims

(38:51):
are Dr Peter Gleek, an internationally recognized expert on the
state of fresh water resources. Dr Jerry Mallman, 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 Stewart Pim This is again,
that's uh, what are we at? There? Seven doctors seven

(39:12):
different experts at the top of their fields, all reviewing
this book. Liars, liers, and of course none of them
are statisticians, are economists. Quote these separately written expert reviews.
They all had them like right, separate things that like
they weren't influencing each other, unequivocally demonstrate that on closer inspection,
Lumborg's book is seriously flawed and fails to meet basic

(39:32):
standards of credible scientific analysis. The author's note how Lumborg
consistently misuses, misrepresents, or 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

(39:53):
and analyzes are marred by flawed logic, inappropriate use of statistics,
and hidden value judgments. He uncritically and selectively cites literally
You're often not be reviewed that supports his assertions, while
ignoring or misinterpreting scientific evidence that does not his consistently
flawed use of scientific data is, in Peter Gleek's words,
unexpected and disturbing in a statistician. All this makes me think,
you know what, maybe free speech isn't the right puff

(40:15):
for humanity. It's it's it's it's hard to read the
story of Lumburg 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 that nobody disagrees that. Like, yeah,
if somebody's shouting there's a fire and causes a stampede

(40:36):
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, Like, yeah, that that should be more tests.
Like you should just be allowed to have a book,
I think, you know, speaking as a guy who's written
a book. Yeah, yes, you should just be allowed. You
should have like some basic knowledge. Basic you should have

(40:57):
some knowledge know all you're doing. It's it's frustrating, like
there should be 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 a
basic understanding of the consensus of climate change is that
there's so many individual studies, Like if you just read
the summary of the study, you could argue like, oh,

(41:20):
this proves that climate changes in a problem, and then
if you actually go into what the scientists are saying,
they're like, no, no, no, no no. This may seem
like it's not a problem, but it actually plays into
this problem and this problem and 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

(41:42):
are like, well, I guess we don't have to worry. Yeah,
it's it's frustrating, you know, it's not frustrating. Um ice cream,
ice cream? And what the ads for this podcast might
be ice cream? Sofiare we sponsored by ice cream? Let's
hope that it's ice cream sponsoring this and not another
coke Brother's ad. It might be another Cooke Brother's add.

(42:06):
I hope it's a vaping add and not a Coke
Brothers add. Same thing. No it's not. I mean, technically
vaping could reduce overall climate emissions if it really is
killing people. But that's so, that's what I said on
the Daily's Like guys a cople of days ago, I
said that, Um, I think that the n r A
is actually the best thing America has currently in its

(42:27):
fight against climate change. You know, every every death leads
to a few a common 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 its
climate tobacco industry. Man, the best fight is climate change

(42:47):
in itself, like it will kill at people, kill that
many people. We've gotten too good at disaster recovery. And
this is how we get sponsor, Yes, sponsors like Philip
ors tobacco solving climate change one year olds lungs at
a time. Was that a good ad? Plug? Sofie absolutely

(43:09):
not products? All right, we're back. So all of these
debunkings we've gone through were public information basically as soon
as Biorn Lumborg's book was out in serious people had
time to read it, but none of the authoritative deconstructions

(43:30):
of Lumborg'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 Boron Lumborg Get the Facts Straight, includes a
short selection of the many awards he received. One of
the hundred Top Global Thinkers foreign Policy two thousand eleven,
Thought Leader Bloomberg's Summit two thousand eleven. One of the

(43:52):
hundred Top Global Thinkers Foreign Policy two thousand and ten.
One of the world seventy five most Influential People of
the twenty first century, Esquire two thousand and eight, One
of the fifty people who Could Save the Planet UK
Guardian two thousand eight, One of the top hundred public intellectuals.
Foreign Policy and Prospect Magazine two thousand eight. One of
the top hundred public intellectuals Foreign Policy and Prospect Magazine

(44:13):
two thousand five. One of the world's most hundred influential people.
Time Magazine two thousand four. Wow, Right, isn't that fucked up? Well,
it's It's also not surprising that because these people making
those lists are probably in turns, like ultimately the truth
is that the people making lists aren't educated in that field.

(44:34):
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 in all these industries and stuff,
and they're like, ah, this is the guy telling us
it's fine. Yeah, I think that's a chunk of it,
especially for like Foreign Policy and Esquire. Um. Now, you
know when you do your behind the Bastard podcast, Yeah,

(44:57):
do you have a lot of anger just boiling? Are
your things? Yeah? I go shooting about once a week.
I have a lot of different machetes that I hit
stuff with. I work out about ninety minutes a day. Yeah,
very nice. YEA. I wonder like, how just hearing all
of that out, how you just stays in? I do
not stays in. I do a lot of drugs. It

(45:20):
does help, Yeah, to be honest, like speaking of the
n r A shooting is probably the best cathartic thing
for dealing with that kind of rage. I have to say,
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 think it's a shooting range and it's fun.

(45:41):
Whether or not you think they should all be banned,
it's objectively fun. Yeah, it's very fun. Yeah. Yeah. That
has nothing to do with what the law should be
right right right now. Um, if you've noticed from all
of those Top Thinker awards, they all came out at
latest in two thousand eleven, and a majority of them
are from two thousand ten or earlier. It's weird that
Lumborg seems to be considered a top thinker much less

(46:02):
often in these days of Category five hurricanes and apocalyptic
mud slides in the Midwest and hottest years ever on
record in California's largest wildfires, and like weird, Yeah, because
I guess what what what people's thought behind it is
that things like that have always happened, So I I
know that for example, in the UK during the Roman

(46:23):
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 they could build bonfires on it. So's
it's wild And so I understand that that, you know, clime,

(46:43):
it does change all the time, but I think people
don't understand that it's sort of changing at a rate.
I think part of Lumburg's falling from graces that people
have started to like like California has 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 especially in like Florida and stuff,

(47:05):
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 Lumborg especially 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, but like you can't even
like a bount of the arch conservatives living on the

(47:26):
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's it's
at this point it's like, oh wow, we've had three
once in a century storms in like a couple of years,
like maybe there's a problem. Um. So now the debate
has changed, like well what do we do about the

(47:47):
problem and stuff? And Lumborg has tried to pivot on that.
He has been less successful. Once again, we'll we'll, we'll
get to um. But you know, it's in the first
few years after The Skeptical Environmentalist was published by the
Oxford University Press and two thousand one, which fucking Oxford
University Press, Lumborg was everywhere he was on. He was
on Newsnight, sixty Minutes, the Late Show Larry King, and

(48:09):
he made regular appearances on CNN, MSNBC and of course
Fox News. All of these sources accepted Lumbourg as an expert,
while the real expert shouted desperately that he was as
ship filled as a poop factory. I'm proud of that one, Sophie,
thank you. I think one hint as to why this
happened is included inside that first fawning New York Times
article from two thousand one, Dr Lumborg also chides, and

(48:32):
this is him talking about like what he calls the litany,
which is the term he used for like the doom
and gloom like stuff being said about climate change in
the early two thousand's. Dr Lumborg also chides journalists, 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. Dr
Lumborg writes that blatantly false claims can be made again

(48:54):
and again without any references and yet still be believed.
This is the fault not of academic environmental research, which
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 lumborg success. The problem
is not that journalists uncritically spread the gospel of climate change.

(49:17):
The problem is that journalists uncritically accept people claiming to
be experts and will write glowing articles about them. If
they just have a three thousand you know, entry work
cited page and their bibliographies. People don't want to buy
into doomsday beliefs, not really. Most people want to believe
that everything is going to be fine and they don't
need to worry about a problem. So we'll happily listen

(49:38):
to a handsome European who misreads real studies to show
us that everything is fine. And I think Lumborg'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 uh, I like to sort of asking you questions.
You're very smart, and I want to see what comes
out of your face. Um, do you think that the
world is sort of experiencing a mass by stand or effect?

(50:03):
So always it's like always, yeah, I'll just con that's
just going, oh well, someone else will sold that out. Yeah.
I think we always are. And I think it's like
a natural consequence of I think like one of I'm
on record of saying, like one of the worst things
that ever happened is twenty four hour television news. It's uh,
might be what destroys us as a species. Like if
there is a big apocalyptic nuclear war or something. I

(50:26):
think the core of it will lie in the twenty
four hour news cycle, UM one way or the other,
because it's just this this machine that exists to exhaust
people's ability to give a fuck and to productively deal
with problems. UM. And I think it's a big part
of like why you have this kind of decision fatigue,
in this assumption that like somebody else will handle it,

(50:47):
which is like what a lot of people on the
right will point to now that we 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. Well yeah, as well, yeah,
they share, well, uh, there won't be consequences. Hey, as
a French person, I really miss beheading people. You know, honestly,

(51:08):
I really think we should bring that back. 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, uh, what's the company? Um starts
with an E. No, no, no, well yeah, those guys too,

(51:29):
But like the the people that like these these oil
and gas companies who like new Back and like at
least the seventies and stuff that climate change is going
to be a problem, and like direct 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 lack them,
uh in, anyone who profited from the family business into

(51:52):
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 never will ever be able
to get access to do anything like that. But on
the way there that they have to do to Sessa
Lanister style of walking, I'm okay with a little bit

(52:14):
with a bell, and they have to walk around naked.
I think Mitch McConnell naked walking around the streets of Washington,
they say, with his big yeah, but okay, 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 seven shifts a week at the
Applebee's to make rent on his one bedroom apartment, and

(52:38):
then he's got like number one. He's got to like
depend on all these people, and they have to depend
on he has no privileged position. But also like all
these people are like, hey, Mitch, it's a hundred and
fifteen today, thanks, asshole. Like I I do think that
like the worst thing you could do to a lot
of these people. Um. I think there's folks like your
your Paul's Maniford out there who need to be locked
up because they're just too dangerous. But I think most

(52:59):
of these people need to be um locked away from
the things that are most valuable to them, which is
wealth and influence. Um. And I think that will hurt
more more than any guillotine ever could. Although I get
the impulse, I don't know, it's just a restaurant, chack.
I didn't say it's bad. I don't want him, like
like I want him at a restaurant. Yeah, I don't

(53:20):
want the people. I don't want the staff members of
Apples have to deal with. Mitch McConnell. 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 in you know what you know, and we
need to open a brand new apple base, right so
the oldest stuff member mc Apple's, Ms McConnell and Alex Jones.

(53:43):
There a just running that would be a great just
just an Applebee's staffed by the people who are like behind,
like largely behind our current era of like post truth
like nonsense. That's that actually would be a great place
to get Like I would never not be mettingly drunk
in that place, Like I would be a problem to that.
That would be man, It would finally be like I

(54:05):
try to be on my good behavior when I get
really drunk at like restaurants and stuff because they don't
want to cause a problem for like the white staff
or something, because they're working people. But if Mitch McConnell
was serving my table, I would make it my business
to puke. Can I make a suggestion? Yes? So, according
to cheat sheet dot com, the most hated restaurant and
fast food chain in America is Red Robin, and I
think it's a great place for choccon. Mitch McConnell at

(54:28):
a goddamn Red Robin or a uh this roadhouse. Hey, hey, hey, hey, Okay,
I've not had the privilege of of enjoying an Applebee's
or a Red Robin. Oh man. Applebee's is great, Applebee's
is well, what if you use at a waffle house?
Everybody's thrown up at a waffle house. Yeah, but they

(54:49):
don't serve liquor like a waffle I I have been
I actually, I've never been sober in a waffle house. Um,
but you I want to 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 onto him. And then you can

(55:12):
bring me another. But now you're victimizing him. That's fine,
I would Washington. I'm out about David Busters because people
also bring their screaming children. That would be Chucky Cheese.
I can't suggest Chuckie Cheese as my friendship with Jimmie
Loftus is very important, but honest people can debate over

(55:34):
which specific type of shaming would be most 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 funk up a six Flags. I really
would 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

(55:55):
and healthcare, uh, and then make it so that like
our most unplay doesn't service jobs are all held by
former Republican congress people kind of managed by the former
people who used to do their jobs. Here's question. A
lot of these people are a religious in terms of
like a lot of the religious Yeah, right, because I

(56:17):
do wonder like the real religious people wouldn't they want
to take care of the planet. You know, I've never
understood that, like the people that preach will and stuff
and then they're going, it's God's will for me to
be an asshole that 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 sizeable chunk of American Christians

(56:39):
in particular, it's not just the United States phenomenon, but
it's bigg here who believe that um the apocalypse is
preordained essentially, so that's like, why would you take care
of this world? It's ending soon. There's also a chuck
of people like 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

(57:00):
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 pesty arabs holding all the oil here,
just suck it out of the earth, the like whatever problem. Yeah,
there's a bunch of different frustrating things, and I think, um,
those people, once upon a time you couldn't take them seriously,

(57:21):
like like in mainstream politics. Um, And what Lumbourg provided
was a chance for like kind of the more technocratic
conservatives like my parents who are like religious but not
really religious. Um, they could look at this guy's arguments
and be like, well, now here's a smart, educated scientist
with a doctor in his name, and he's making he's
not saying like God's going to take care of it.
He's saying that like you know, he's making what seemed

(57:43):
like very logical arguments Forroy, this isn't a problem or
why what problems exist will be solved very simply, um,
without us changing our lifestyle or dealing with the problems,
and like a fundamental level of our society. And it's
it's consumption of resources. Um. So yeah, it's uh, it's
come that's killing humans, actually, isn't it. Yeah it always Yeah,
it's just comfort. People are scared of change. Yeah, yeah,

(58:06):
it's always comfort that's killing humans. Um. From a literal
point of view, um, 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 uh doom as it rules
like leers down on our heads because we want to

(58:27):
go out to Applebee's and we don't want to worry
about climate change. I'm not saying Applebee's is bad. Um. Yes,
you know what, I'm gonna go to an apple Bae's
off for this, not today, but maybe not today. I
know that when I go drive past one, I might
stop just to experience I uh, you know, Applebee's is
often a staple place for me to get wasted when

(58:48):
I'm not at home and I'm at like a roadside motel,
because you'll often run into an Applebe's next to a
roadside motel, and I have I have gotten drunken mini
and Applebee's. And if Mitch McConnell were the ones serving me,
I would happily troubled the pocket on his apron. That
would be great, especially if Paul Ryan came out with,
like this the sawdust that you use to soak up
the vomit, and like, yeah, that would be really sweet.

(59:11):
Now back to Bjord Lumborg. So another reason Lumburg 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 in 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 Biorn comes along

(59:33):
and shotguns at a book full of nonsense, they have
to spend valuable time slowly debunking all of the many,
many things he got wrong. I'm gonna quote here from
something Dr E. O. Wilson wrote about the difficulty of
combating the sort of misinformation. My greatest regret about the
Lumborg 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 Lumborg, whose salies are

(59:54):
characterized by will for ignorance, selective quotations, disregard for communication
with genuine experts, and destruct of campaigning to attract the
attention of the media rather than scientists. They are the
parasitic load on scholars who earned success through the slow
process of pure view and approval. The question is how
much load should be tolerated before response is necessary. Lumbourg
is evidently over the threshold. And this is kind of

(01:00:16):
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 um a diving instructor
telling kids that the safest way to dive was head
first into the shallow wind of the pool, that guy
would face charges even though all he was doing was

(01:00:37):
giving people information. Um, because you're clearly misleading people into
a dangerous situation. Charasitic skullars. Yeah, that's a great quote
from Yeah, parasitic scholars. And that's another thing is you know,
why did these people go into that field? So did
they go into the field because of the bettlement of
the world all the betterment of themselves? And do they

(01:00:57):
do the betterment of themselves because they love themselves little?
Because they have a desperate need for affection, and because
like the old oose, go two different paths, right, And
I think in Lumberg'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 ship like that's not in the
most exciting life in the world. I'm sure it's very

(01:01:19):
satisfying that the people who legitimately like it, um but
I think Lumborg is the kind of guy that had
a thirst to be famous and was like, well, this
is the fucking easiest way to do that. I mean, yeah, yeah,
Now we've just talked about sort of how Dr el
Wilson was like expressing his frustration that like a guy
like Lumburg can just like shoot out a bunch of nonsense,
and then real scientists, whose time is incredibly valuable and limited,

(01:01:40):
have to like spend hours debunking all of it. And
it's it's a very frustrating problem with our current system.
Um And that might make it seem like there were
no penalties Born 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 in Innovation. They evaluated

(01:02:01):
these complaints and found that the work that he had
published was fundamentally dishonest. But they found that they couldn't
punish him because Lumberg 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

(01:02:22):
misrepresenting his case rather than just sucking up does sane? Yeah,
isn't that crazy? Oh? The world is so annoying sometimes. Yeah,
you've come around on climate chande people. Yeah. In two
thousand seven, Born published a new book, cool It, in

(01:02:45):
which he explicitly accepted the reality of human caused climate change.
This was seen by many as an abrupt reversal of
his previous attitude. Borne 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 who
said he was going to save the world. Yeah, uh yeah,
they they voted him one of the fifty people who
could save the planet. So an interview with them, and

(01:03:07):
they were more critical of him in this. In this article,
Lumborg denies performing a U turn. He reiterates that he
has never denied anthropogenic global warming and insists that he
long ago accepted the cost of damage would be between
two and three percent 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 one to

(01:03:27):
two percent of gross domestic product on tackling climate change
to avoid future damage. Incidentally, ship like this is why
Reginda Pechori, chairman of the UN Climate Change Panel, compared
Bjord Lumborg 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

(01:03:48):
Bjorn isn't even all that great at numbers. The Stern
Report estimated it would take between five and twenty percent
of global GDP to effectively fight climate change. The Guardian
pressed Lumborg on this quote, not on a expectedly however,
the Stern Report estimates that damage at five of GDP, however,
not two to three percent. The difference, according to Lumbarg,
is that the two use a different discount factor. This

(01:04:09):
is the method by which economists but recalculate the value
today if money spent or saved in the future, or,
to put it in another way, the value today of
this generation's grandchildren's lives. So sorry, I got it wrong.
The Strent Report did and say it would take five
to of GDP to fight climate change. It said that
the damage of climate change would be five to of
GDP if nothing was done to fight it. Um Lumbourg

(01:04:30):
said that the damage would be two to three percent,
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 current children. Basically, 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,

(01:04:54):
so yeah, them invaluable little fuckers. But um, I don't
like too much when people just go straight for the
ad Hitler um nausea um or whatever whatever that that
Latin phrases that whenever people just want to use an example,
they'll go to Hitler. Because there is a truth to
people being numbers. We're just algorithms walking around with little legs,

(01:05:15):
just walking around, right, That's what we are, which is numbers.
We're not there with them. 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. You're devaluing their
lives in the prod like in the course of like

(01:05:38):
making into an argument that shouldn't be an argument over
the numbers purely, like like deep devolving it into that.
But 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 on 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

(01:05:59):
the most important person and is that person in the 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

(01:06:20):
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 going to go, no, we don't need as many
people anymore. Oh 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 they have
like the great man theory versus like the trends enforces
theory of history. But I think one reason why the

(01:06:42):
people at the top um never stay that way all
that long on like a generational basis. Why things switch
and turn and the nations and power change so much
is because they think that way. They think that the
most important guy is the guy marching like sitting on
the horse with that army of nameless people around him.
And then uh, poor Serbian peasant named Gavrilo princep pulls

(01:07:03):
out a gun and shoots the Archduke of Austria Hungary
Empires fall in. The British Empires no longer really a thing, um,
and like that that I think is And that's the
kind of thing that people like Lumbourg 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 um, Hillary

(01:07:25):
Clinton miss when they derive 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. Yeah, yeah,
I think that 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.

(01:07:49):
And like I think that's I think there's nothing that's
more powerful, um than individual people's ability to funk up
the works. And that can be good and that can
be bad because it means that a little girl like
Greta Thumberg um can make a an international impact on
a problem just by being the face of it. I

(01:08:10):
think that is it the dala lama paraphrasing. But one
of these quota is if you think that you're not important,
or if you're if you think you're not big enough
to make a change, try and sleep with a mosquito. Yeah. Um,
And I'm really paraphising it and butcherying it. But you know,
there's the positive side of that, then there's the negative side,
so that a guy like bord Lumboard can misread or

(01:08:32):
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 uh and its population. Um. So I think
in both ways, the little person is always more important

(01:08:56):
than the big people want to give them credit for
being um. That just not entirely a good thing. It's
completely a moral factor in history, but it is I
think a factor in history that the people at the
top often Now, the good news about all of this
is that by two thousand seven people were starting to
get wise to be Orn's little schemes. The Guardian noted

(01:09:16):
in their rite up of his second book, some statements
appear to contradict each other directly. In the space of
four pages of cool It, he writes that climate change
will not cause massive disruptions are 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

(01:09:37):
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 in poor countries,
improved access to contraception, more vaccinations, all of what you're
great things. In two thousand two, Lumborg formed the Copenhagen

(01:09:58):
Consensus Center, which he build a away 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 economists, or maybe weatherman. In two thousand eight, the
Consensus Center ranked thirty priorities in order of like what
should be confronted first to deal with like the greatest

(01:10:20):
challenges of the world. Mitigating global warming was ranked last number.
Thirty six was improving crop yields, sevent was green energy research,
and twelve, interestingly enough, was geo engineering. And this gets
us onto the subject of what precisely Lumborg thinks would
be a better use of money than reducing emissions. He's
come around to the necessity of climate engineering, because now

(01:10:42):
more than a decade after he started urging everyone not
to worry about climate change, reducing emissions is too expensive
and slow a way to reduce climate change for his tastes,
So that's nice. So this is something Lumborg wrote in
two thousand nine. There is a significant delay between carbon
cuts in any temperature drop, even halving mobile emissions by
mid century would barely be measurable by the end of

(01:11:02):
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. Althose being equal,
higher concentrations will warm the planet. Solar radiation management would

(01:11:26):
bounce a little bit of sunlight back into space, reflecting
just one of the total sunlight that strikes the Earth,
could offset as much warming as that caused by doubling
the pre industrial levels of greenhouse gases. When Mount Pinatubo
erupted in nineteen nine, about a million 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 an absorbing incoming sunlight, cool the Earth's surface.

(01:11:47):
For almost two years, we could mimic this effect through
stratospheric aerosolid insertion, essentially launching material like sulfur dioxide or
soot into the stratosphere. Another promising approach is marine cloud whitening,
which sprace water droplets into marine clouds to make them
reflectable sunlight. This augments the natural process where sea salt
from the oceans provides water vapor with cloud condensation nuclei.

(01:12:09):
It is remarkable to consider that we could cancel out
the centuries global warming with nineteen hundred unmanned ships spraying
seawater missed into the air to thicken clouds. He sounds
like he's learning his signs from that Mr. Burns episode.
He wants to cover the sun. He's just a we'll
just shoots sudden the sky and build two thousand boats
to fire water up into the clouds. That's way better

(01:12:29):
than reducing emissions. That sounds economically friendly. It's just so
fucking dumb, like like out, it's just like, don't do
He tells everyone don't do anything for more than a decade,
and then he's like, Okay, we need to launch two
thousand giant boats to shoot seawater into the clouds and
also if we considered spreading sulfur over the stratosphere. So

(01:12:51):
he's gone so far on the other side that he's been,
he's lost it again. Yeah, that's clearly more rational than
cap and trade stopping rainforest log you know, in any
of that stuff like unmanned boats and sulfur into the sky,
all perfect solutions with no conceivable downsides. Yeah. Biorn's tactics
have gotten no better in recent years. Uh. No better

(01:13:14):
than that is suggesting thousands of boats, uh, shooting water
to the sky. Uh. In two thousand fourteen, John Stossel,
writing for Real Clear Politics, asked Bjorn Lumborg how much
President Obama's goal of getting one million electric cars on
the road by ten would slow down warming. Lumborg replied
one hour. This is a symbolic act. Once again, Lumborg
was very wrong. Greg Layden, a biological anthropologist writing for

(01:13:38):
Science Blogs, actually spoke to an expert quote. I asked
atmospheric scientist and energy expert John Abraham about this, and
here's what he said. If you put one million clean
cars on the road and have them last fifteen years
before moving them, and you take the typical admissions of
a vehicle and you have saved over in the last
fifteen years, and you know, there's a bunch of number.
Basically he crunched the numbers on it, uh, and he

(01:13:59):
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 will million on
the road and kept them there fIF fifteen years, you
would have saved the total equivalent of twenty one hours
of emission for the entire planet um, which is a
significant amount. And that's again just a million, not increasing

(01:14:20):
it at all, not replacing them after they wear out
in fifteen years, which means Lumbourg's calculations to John Stossel
was off by it does seem like a little scientists
are going beyond shut up. Yeah, they're constantly shut up
for more like twenty years now. Yeah, they've been saying,
shut the funk up. Dude, you don't know what you're
talking about. But I think he knows what he's doing.
In two thousand sixteen, Bjorns Copenhagen Consensus Center was paid

(01:14:43):
sixty thou 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 leave you less than one dollar of social, economic,
or environmental benefits for every dollar spent. Meanwhile, reducing world
trade restrictions through the Doha Trade Round would be orn
calculated yield two thousand and eleven dollars of benefit for

(01:15:06):
every dollar spent. Universal contraception access would return a hundred
and twenty dollars 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? 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

(01:15:30):
to two thousand dollars of benefit, Like are there may
be any conflicting interests he has that might be influencing
his math in some way? What he thinks like economist?
He does 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

(01:15:52):
have gone sort of gone to the right, yes, politically speaking,
when they weren't really like that when I sort of
first met them, and uh, I was observing them and
from afar and so 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

(01:16:13):
you understand that the right is rising. 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 it's worth it to take money
from you can't you know, you're not gonna make that
greater living as a statistician teaching at a college in Denmark.

(01:16:36):
You'll be comfortable, but you're not gonna you're not gonna
be rich doing that. Whereas if you become born lumbourg
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. Um, well, that actually turns out
to pay pretty well. So I found a good break

(01:17:00):
down of where Bjorn Lumborg's funding comes from, written by
Graham Redfern of Diesmog, a website focused on cutting through
the pr spin around climate change issues. Their research revealed
that the Copenhagen Consensus Center or c c C, registered
as a nonprofit in the United States in two thousand eight.
Since then, it has received more than four million dollars
in grants and donations. Three quarters of that came in

(01:17:22):
two thousand eleven and twelve. Lumborg salary for a single
year was seven hundred and seventy five thousand dollars, representing
it nearly a quarter of what it had received by
two thousand twelve. He's basically an Instagram model that's pushing
those like drinks to lose weight. Yeah, that's exactly what
he's doing, but like instead telling everyone not to cut
global emissions now. Back in two thousand six, when the

(01:17:43):
uh CCC first started to look at gaining support for
its efforts in the United States, they hired Washington lobbyists
in PR veteran James harf Um and so like they like,
this is a this is like a lobbying group for
somebody in the lobbying group's primary goal has been to
like convince people that emission should not be cut, that

(01:18:04):
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
a hundred and twenty dollar grant from the Randolph Foundation.
That foundation's money comes from the one point two billion

(01:18:24):
dollars the Randolph family made by selling the 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 Form. And that sounds good, right,
Independent Women's Voice. That sounds like a woke progressive organization. Yeah,
it's actually a hardcore right wing lobbying group that accepts

(01:18:46):
money from, among other people, Charles Coke. I look forward.
I look forward to when they start implementing like the
transgenders against clouds and all of these different we'll get
it really woke. Yeah, we'll like Biorn wouldn't be the
right spokesperson. Now, you'd hire someone who is like very

(01:19:07):
much like I don't know, you hire someone like all
of that money, yes, like an eight year old, like
an eight year old kid from Cameroon, and you'd have
him be like I love fossil fuels like that is
that is where we're going next. Yeah, and then you'll
call everyone racist who argues with him, and while complaining

(01:19:27):
that all the left does is call everybody racist who
argues with them like it's 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 d smog blog. So yeah,
they do a lot of really good analysis on like
the disinformation campaign. The name of a company. I thought

(01:19:51):
it was the name of a person. I was like, no,
the great name for someone that works Graham red Fern,
which is also a pretty good name for something read
firm actually, but I think it's pronounced at fern. It's
fucking Australian. I don't know, people, nothing makes sense over there. Yeah, no,
that's not I was like most Scottish, Yeah, well Scott's
Irish quote. Staff Writers of both organizations regularly express skepticism

(01:20:14):
about the science of human clause climate change in site
Lomborg's views approvingly. A recent article from the International Women's Form,
senior fellow of Vicky Alger claimed 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 i w F include, as I said, the Claude

(01:20:35):
Lamb Foundation, which is controlled by Charles Coke and the
Donors Trust, a conservative political action fund that spent millions
of dollars on climate change denial. This means that Charles
Coke indirectly has helped fund be Yord Lumborg. Now Higgins
continued to pump tens of thousands of dollars directly into
Lumborg Center over subsequent years, but in two thousand and fourteen,
when that de small article was written, the author was

(01:20:56):
only able to track down where about five thousand dollars
of the four point three million in funding it had
received up to that point had come from. However, in
two thousand fifteen, read Firm revealed that Paul Singer, a
Republican billionaire venture capitalist was one of the CCCS major backers.
He gave more than two hundred thousand dollars to the group.
Mr Singer also helps fund the Manhattan Institute, the think

(01:21:17):
take behind the fallacious claim that Alexandria Accassio Cortes's Green
New Deal would cost a hundred trillion dollars. In recent years,
Biorn Lumborg seems to have dropped most of the pretense
of being a leftist environmentalist. He's appeared in five videos
for Praguer University with titles like his climate change our
biggest problem, our electric cars really green, and the Paris

(01:21:37):
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 records setting
summers and wildfire seasons where a matter of course, but
Lumborg 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

(01:21:57):
Innovation Trump spending. When tackling him at Change Colon Expert,
he was the expert. YEA, let' show him what he
looks like, now, this is Bejord Lumberg after twenty years
of climate denial. Does he look at me? It doesn't
look that bad. So I think you really have sold it.
I think I was expecting like a gruesome creature. I

(01:22:20):
think he's he's Mick jaggered at least fifty in the
last twenty years. Jagger hasn't Mick jaggered that much. But Sophie,
Sophie's definitely has a very negative reaction to his waddle.
A waddle wattle shaming. This is waddle shaming. Yeah, she's
holding her skin and making it so thicker. Now, Eric,

(01:22:42):
if I know my audience and I don't, the one
thing they love more than anything else is when we
hit things. The one thing they love more than anything
else is when we hit things. So I'm gonna give
you the giant machette and I'm gonna throw I'm gonna
throw it right past all of the recording equipment. But
because that's a good idea, Yeah, he's got holding one.

(01:23:03):
Are you holding the whole bag? I'm gonna throw the
whole bag. I always took the whole back. It would
be irresponsible to throw a single bagel, all right, 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 has protected Anderson's fine.

(01:23:23):
All right, I'm gonna throw it. Yeah, alright, tossing back
to me. We got it, you got you got it.
We gotta get it. We gotta get him going across
the road, because it's conscious going if you drop it.
No one's ever been hurt by a two ft machete, never,
not once in history. Yeah, I didn't make a very

(01:23:44):
smooth samurai cut. It's okay. 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 want
to go to war now. Yeah, I see. I see
how easily I could be turned. You know, everyone can.
And if people like Lumbard get their way that that

(01:24:06):
I will be buying a lot more machetes for a
lot of people to try to get him. The field
that way, I see that there is a box of
tissues on the table. I'm now gonna grab him and
I will remove the prints from the actual machette out
of dumb man. There we go, I did grab the blade.
I'm gonna find Lumbourg's Hollywood Hills home. I've seen enough

(01:24:28):
cs I to know how to get rid of. I
don't think he lives in the Hollywood Hills because it's
one of the places it's going to face the consequences
of climate change fastest. Anderson is on the mic and
you get onto me for pouring liquids on the microphones?
What's wrong with Anderson on the microphone? Anderson slabbers sometimes

(01:24:51):
the classy broad, classy broadskin slab She's a good dog. Eric,
You got any plugg doubles to plug now or at
the end of our episode? Yeah. I do have an
album called Alien of Extraordinary Ability, which is the title
that the American government gives you, and I say, you know,
outsiders when when they come in and apply for a visa.

(01:25:11):
That is a sweet title, like our our immigration. But
that's a great title, Alien of Extraordinary Ability. So I
like that. So that's an album I've also got you know,
my show. If you're in Los Angeles, I've got a
show called Born of Chaos, which is about the time
I escaped the psychiatric hospital. Um, so you know I've
got some things. Just basically follow me on Instagram. That

(01:25:32):
title makes me want to marry a European, renounce my
US citizenship, become any UTH citizen, go through that whole
year's long process, and then move back to the United
States and get a green card so that I can
be declared an alien of an extraordinary ability. Yeah, it's
pretty cool. Also, I'm no longer because now I have
a green card. When you get a green car, yes,

(01:25:53):
and now I'm I'm a permanent resident. Well that's not
as cool as it being an alien with extraordinary ability. No,
but I want was and it felt good and I'm
sure it did right well, audience, check out Alien of
Extraordinary Ability. Um, I will say as well. I'm now
leaving this podcast slightly angrier. Yeah you should. Everyone should
leave the podcast angrier. I mean, I hope like Catharsis

(01:26:14):
of hitting the bagels with the Yeah. Sure, yeah, I
see I see why. Um, I see why people get
there and go out. 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 bastards or what I'm doing at all. And

(01:26:35):
I do wonder what your machetes coming by them? You know,
any machete company that wants to sell branded behind the
bastard's 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 pushing bolt cutters right now.
I just have to suggest people get basically anything with
the cheap Harper freight ones because that's won't cut through

(01:26:55):
theoretically beats his security gate. You really you want some
like heavy beuty bolt cutters you want to be spending.
I'm sure it's available. You could in fact get the
bolt cutters from it one that you used to break
through his security. Uh yeah, not that we encourage that behavior,
because we don't. It does seem like that's what that's
where I was gonna go, like in twenty years time,

(01:27:16):
like you know, it's gonna be Hunger Games style. Um,
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, Fiskers
brand machetes resist rust very well. Uh. So you know
they'll chop bagels, they'll chop through Uh okay, yeah, you're right, Sophie.

(01:27:40):
How do we lead this out without me at suggesting
more crimes? A firm handshake? Do you have, UM 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 want to plug trees.
What tree frogs? Not mine? Sophie's wearing a sweater. It

(01:28:02):
seems comfortable. We have shirts on t public dot com
behind the Bastards UM. You can find the podcast on
behind the Bastards dot com where the sources will be
although the coding of the site is sometimes broken, but
you can generally figure out what the sources are. UM.
And you can find us on Twitter and Instagram at

(01:28:24):
at Bastard's pod. Uh. You can find me on Twitter
at I right, okay, And I have a new podcast
with my friends Cody and Katie called Worst Year Ever
about the election, so we I definitely 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 until next week. Hug a

(01:28:46):
Cat buy some bolt cutters. Consider investing in the machete
your three

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