June 16, 2025 • 26 mins
Roger Pielke Jr is professor emeritus at CU Boulder and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. We'll talk a little about "Trump and science" but mostly about the serious risk of a global population collapse.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
All right, I am so pleased to welcome back to
the show my friend Roger Pilka, Junior, who is Professor emeritus,
which makes him sound older than he is and he's
not retired, Busier than ever professor emeritus at CU Boulder
and just a great continuing to be really a great
teacher of the intersection of public policy, which means things
(00:22):
government does and science. And if you are even slightly nerdy,
and I certainly am, and you care about discussions about
what government is doing and what they should be doing
based on actual data and rational thinking, you must subscribe
to Roger's podcast, which is called The Honest Broker. Probably
(00:44):
the easiest way to find it is just look up
Roger Pielka p I E l K E Honest Broker
and you will find it that way.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
All right, Roger, great to have you back. Thanks so
much for being here.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
Ross, great to be with you again.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
I got a lot of things I want to talk
with you about today.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
I actually want to start with something that wasn't on
my mind until you told me before we started talking,
what you're soon going to be doing giving a talk
in Europe about Trump and science. Don't give us the
whole talk, but just a couple of highlights. How are
you thinking about Trump and science?
Speaker 4 (01:17):
Yeah, well, it's complicated and no one really, i think,
knows what's going on inside the administration, but we can
see the consequences that the Trump administration is really taking
a wrecking ball to the institutions of science, whether it's Harvard,
whether it's a National Science Foundation, even NASA. And my
talk is going to be about not about what's happened
in the last few months, but how we got here
(01:39):
over the last few decades. And over the last few decades,
there has been a conflict that's erupted between academics and
scientists and Republicans. And some of that is Republicans making,
some of that is the Democrats making, and some of
that is our making in the expert world. And so
I'm just going to walk through how, you know, really
starting with the Bush and administration, science became fractured on
(02:03):
partisan lines, and so it really understands what happening in
the Trump administration. We have to go back in time
and see how this fault opened up.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
What's the issue that you or issues that you think
precipitated this, going back to Bush.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
Yeah, so there's some of them.
Speaker 4 (02:20):
Of one of the big issues is the changing politics
inside science and the academy. I mean, it's well documented
now that if you go back to the sixties, university
faculty were pretty evenly split in most areas across left
center right, and over time there has been a leftward
lean in science more.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
Than a lean and in academia.
Speaker 4 (02:41):
And that makes the politics of science and the academy,
the people who do the work very vanilla. And it
was very easy in the early two thousands to say that,
you know, the Democrats were the party of science, the
Republicans were having a war on Scienceublicans like that framing,
(03:01):
Democrats like that framing. And it turns out we in
the academy kind of fell prey to that. And so
you see, for example, recently, one of the most prestigious
scientific journalist, Nature, It endorsed Joe Biden in twenty twenty
and Kamala Harris in twenty twenty four. There are a
British science magazine. Honestly, nobody really cares who they endorse
(03:22):
for president. A study came out in twenty twenty two
that showed that that initial endorsement led Republicans in the
US to lose trust in science, and yet they did
another endorsement in twenty twenty four. So we've made some missteps.
And what I tell my colleagues is, you know, we
can't control big politics and Republicans, Democrats, Donald Trump, but
(03:44):
we can get our own house in order. And so
it's a long way back to regain the trust of
the broad American public. But I think that's necessary for
whenever the post Trump era comes, for universities and science
to be back where it used to be, which was
trusted by everybody.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
And we won't elaborate on this part any further because
innumerable hours have been spent talking about it and writing
books about it. But the destruction of expertise, the destruction
of the appreciation of expertise or trust and expertise that
happened during COVID, it's not like anything I've ever seen before,
(04:22):
and it certainly didn't help that people suspected and we
now know for sure that Anthony Fauci was intentionally lying
to us. And so when people have suspicions about whether
they can trust trust scientists more than trust science, those
fears are well founded. So I don't want to elaborate
(04:43):
on that, but I do want to tie it into
now one of the things you just wrote about at
your substack, The Honest Broker. It's a piece entitled Who's Experts.
The subhead is the problems with RFK juniors sacking of
a vaccine advisory committee. So you wrote that after RFK
did what he did, and in a moment, I'm gonna
(05:03):
let you tell us what he did. And then there's
a New York Times piece that came out after you
wrote yours about Kennedy announcing eight new members. So tell
us what this is about.
Speaker 4 (05:15):
So when you go to the pharmacy and you pick
up medicine and or you get your children vaccinated, or
you go to the supermarket and get something over the counter,
most people are willing to put these chemicals into our
body with the expectation that, yeah, advil is going to
cure my headache, or the MMR vaccine is going to
(05:36):
help not only my family, but society that reflects trust.
All of us understand what trust is because none of
us are doing chemical analyses. So part of that trust
comes from the institutions of science, and one of the
those important institutions are expert advisors. Experts are people who
have specialized knowledge in a particular area that most everybody
(05:58):
else does not, including policy makers or even other experts.
And so when we're talking about vaccination, for fifty years,
the US government has impaneled a group of independent experts
to advise.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
They don't make decisions.
Speaker 4 (06:14):
They advise the Centers for Disease Control in the Food
and Drug Administration on whether particular vaccines should be approved
and what the schedule should be. Then the government officials,
ultimately political appointees, can decide whether to take that advice
or not. And historically expert advisors have been treated as
(06:37):
independent experts, advise, decision makers, decide, and if you don't
like the expert advice, then make a different decision and
justify it to the public.
Speaker 3 (06:47):
Why.
Speaker 4 (06:47):
And we see increasingly, and you know, it's not just
the Trump administration, we saw this in the Biden administration also,
And there's been a trend where where policymakers, if they
don't like the advice they're getting, they choose different experts.
They go out and say, well, I don't like these cherries,
I'm going to go pick some other cherries. And the
real problem with you know, RFK Junior's decision to to
(07:09):
basically sack an entire advisory committee on vaccinations is that
it might appeal to MAGA supporters.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
They might say, yeah, get the deep state.
Speaker 4 (07:19):
Out of there, or whatever they characterize it as, but
for pretty much everybody else, they're going to lose trust
in the process, and so it represents a politicization of
expert advisory processes, which which don't have to be politicized.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
These are not political appointees.
Speaker 4 (07:35):
You don't get put on a vaccine advisory committee because
of who you voted for or what your politics are,
or who you're loyal to, and you really want a
diversity of expertise so that the experts can argue things out.
So when RFK Junior appointed eight new members, the general
consensus was, well, you know, a majority of those eight
are pretty decent and well respected scientists, but there's a
(07:56):
couple of folks on there with clear conflicts of interest
and I have an anti vaccine bent, and so all
of a sudden, we've taken a committee that no one's
heard of and put it in the spotlight and made
it very political, which is never a good idea for
expert advice.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
If I were to try to look for a silver
lining in this mostly dark cloud, I would argue this
as one one possible bit of optimism. If they've got
these MAGA loved anti vaxxers on this new committee, and
the new committee nevertheless comes out endorsing, for example, your
(08:36):
kids should get the MMR vaccine, then hopefully some of
these people who are at the moment willing to essentially
abuse their own children and other people's children by not
getting their kids vaccinated, maybe they'll come around at some point.
I mean, I know they're not really felts of logical thinking,
(08:58):
but to me that would be the one kind of
upside of having someone like that. They're The potential downside
is you get someone like that who comes out and
the vote ends up being being fifteen to two or
sixteen to two, and then those two go out doing press.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Conferences, right, you know.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
So I don't know, but I do think you're right
that eliminating them all at once is going to reduce
the trust not just as much of the public who
isn't MAGA, but also of scientists and the medical establishment.
And you mentioned that there's maybe some rumblings in the
medical establishment. Maybe this group is now so untrustworthy that
(09:35):
they should just go make their own.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (09:37):
I mean, so this is the problem. And we saw
this during COVID. I mean, remarkably, the United States was
one of the only countries in the world who did
not have a high level expert advisory body. We had
the Coronavirus Task Force, but that was all political appointees
except for Tony Fauci, and we know he's pretty political also.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
So what happens was.
Speaker 4 (09:57):
That every governor in every state impanneled their own advisor committees.
And then if you could go expert shopping, Well, I
don't like Colorado's COVID guidance, so I'm gonna take that
from Arkansas. Oh, I don't like Florida's. I'm gonna go
to California. And I mean, this is this is one
of the problems. It's because there is a real world
out there, and we need experts to tell us if
(10:18):
a vaccine is safe or not. And you can't substitute
your or my or anyone else's politics for judgments about
the real world. And experts have politics and they have
different views. And as you say, having a diverse expert
advisory panel and diversity both in knowledge but also in
where they come from, what their politics are.
Speaker 3 (10:37):
Does help to build trust.
Speaker 4 (10:39):
I mean, but the big problem is if if a
federal department it's putting out a press release saying they've
sacked an entire advisory committee, then you're doing it wrong.
Because we want these advisory committees to be We want
them to be transparent and out in the open, but
not on the front page of newspapers or in the news.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
We're talking with Roger Pielka Junior. He is, among other things,
a senior fellow at AEI, one of the great think
tanks in the world.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
AEI dot org is their website.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
One last quick comment and then we'll, uh, we'll we'll
move on to the next topic. It reminds me a
little bit of gosh, who oh, So they.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Had a NASA.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
They had a guy who was gonna run NASA, and
Elon Musk liked the guy, and Trump and Musk got
into a tussle, and then they said he's not going
to be the guy. But the reason they actually they
said publicly we're not going to have him run run
NASA because he's donated to Democrats in the past.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Really like, is he the best guy or is he
not the best guy? I found that.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
I found that very frustrating. All right, let's move on
to something else. Let's do this one quickly. You wrote
another piece for the Honest Broker. Climate science is about
to make a huge mistake. This has been a topic
of yours for quite some time. Just give us like
forty seven seconds because I like prime numbers on this one,
and then we'll talk about global fertility.
Speaker 3 (12:02):
Yeah, so there's good news.
Speaker 4 (12:04):
Ask you that in climate science that the scenarios of
emissions that scientists use to feed into climate models have
become much less extreme over recent decades. And partly that's
because those scenarios were too extreme to begin with, but
also because the world is not developing using coal. India
and China still using a lot of coal, but the
(12:24):
rest of the world peaked. Most people don't know that
about twelve years ago. So that means there's going to
be less carbon dioxide emitted than we used to think. Unfortunately,
climate science has relied on very extreme emission scenarios that
for some legitimate scientific reasons that these get filtered through
the media into policy, and the climate science community is
(12:44):
about to commit to its next generation of scenarios, and
once again they're choosing to emphasize an implausibly extreme scenario,
so it warps the scientific literature, it warps our discussions
of policy. Climate change is real and serious, but it's
not the apocalypse. But it looks like it's still going
to look like the apocalypse in a lot of research.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Interesting My opinion doesn't matter very much because you're smarter
than I am.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
But I think climate change is real and not serious.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
That's kind of where I am on it not an
existential threat because we don't need to get into all that.
But I do want to ask you one quick follow
up on this and in your note, and again Roger
Pilke's substack is a must subscribe.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
It's called the Honest Broker.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
You you write in this note that the people who
have to make a decision about what models to base
further research on are, if I understand you right, explicitly
choosing not to analyze whether the scenarios are plausible.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
Is that right, That's right, that's right. I mean.
Speaker 4 (13:53):
And here's part of the problem again. This is the
same thing we just talked about. This is a problem
with expert advice. The people who are deciding the X
generation of climate scenarios are for the most part, climate modelers,
climate scientists, and they're selecting those scenarios for what is
best for their research. They are not saying what do
policy makers need? What scenarios look most likely? And and
(14:16):
that's a problem because these scenarios have dual purposes. They're
used for legitimate scientific research where you want to you
want to probe extreme cases. But if you're a policymaker,
you kind of want to know, well, what's plausible, what's
not plausible, where are we headed, where what's off the table?
And that is not part of the discussion. And most
people don't understand that. You know, there's a couple dozen people,
(14:39):
mainly from North America and Europe, who decide what these
scenarios are and it shapes, you know, global economic policy
for a decade.
Speaker 3 (14:48):
All Right.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
The reason I emailed you to get you on the
show yesterday or day before whenever it was, was your
note entitled the global fertility crisis is worse than you think.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
And actually this is something I've talked about a fair
bit on my show.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
I've talked about Elon Musk's comments on this, and I
think that you and I have touched on a couple
of things here that a lot of people believe that
isn't true. And I think a lot of people believe
the older population projections that show population increasing almost forever,
(15:27):
maybe peaking somewhere around twelve billion something like that, and
that is not what's happening. So I want you to
talk about what's actually happening, and then I want you
to go to why what is actually happening is so
important and almost frightening.
Speaker 4 (15:46):
Yeah, So my piece I wrote the other day was
motivated by my colleague, Heesus Fernandez Villevarde, who's a colleague
at AEI and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania,
and he's been doing some deep dives into demographics and
particular the United Nations population projections, and what he has
found is that if you take a look at the
data from around the world, fertility rates, so the amount
(16:09):
of children that each woman has have been dropping, they've
been plumbing. And he had done it's not just in
the rich world, and it's not just in in wealthy
Asia like South Korea. It's in places like Columbia. It's
all over the world. And one thing to understand is
that if you take a look at global population, it
is it is like a hockey stick curve. You know,
(16:32):
there was not a lot of people on the planet,
and then all of a sudden, now there's a lot
of people on the planet. But when those dynamics shift,
that curve can go into reverse. And so the if
you take a look at the UN's population projections for
each of the last you know, five to ten years,
every year they come down for twenty one hundred and hey,
(16:53):
SEUs my colleague, he thinks we're on track for the
low what's called the low variant of the UN. That
population will peak in his estimation by twenty fifty five,
So in the life spans of my children, they will
be at peak human And things can become problematic at
that point because we pay pensions things like social security,
(17:15):
social safety nets based on the idea that there are
more people, more working people to pay into these programs.
If it goes into reverse, we're going to have a
lot fewer young people supporting a lot more old people
like me and you in twenty.
Speaker 3 (17:31):
Thirty forty years.
Speaker 4 (17:32):
So there's some demographic problems. And then I also discuss
if you run these scenarios, and again they're just scenarios,
they're thought experiments. But with lower population variants, very quickly
population plummets. And you know, one simple as the world
has the fertility rate of what Bosnia has today, then
(17:57):
by twenty five hundred there's ten million people left on
the planet.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Oh my gosh.
Speaker 4 (18:02):
So this is why people like Elon Musk and others,
you know what are called pro natalists are talking about, well,
everybody needs to have more kids, I think. I mean,
population projections are very difficult. There is momentum there, but
it is one of those things that we should be
talking about more today, and I'm sure we will be
ten years from now.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
I mean, I'm looking at the chart that's in your note,
and the twenty twenty four low projection, which is what
your colleague is saying, is looking more and more likely, right,
I mean, right now, we're over eight billion people, a
little bit over eight billion people on the planet. In
that projection, the peak is under nine billion people, so
not much more than here, and then turns into almost
(18:50):
equally downward sloped on the right as it was upward
sloped on the left.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
So as you're saying.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
The population really crashing, whereas the other the older projections
had the population peaking, maybe a slight decline, maybe sort
of going flat for a while. But I mean, I'm
seeing the same thing in the day of that year seeing,
not that I or your friend, not that I'm looking
at it to the depth that he is. But fertility
(19:16):
rates have clearly plummeted and are not stopping plummeting.
Speaker 4 (19:21):
Yeah, So there are some people who say, well, maybe
you know, it's it's better for the environment, it's it's
better for the world, maybe if there ultimately will be
fewer people, And that's certainly a valid expression, But think
about it.
Speaker 3 (19:34):
The world that we enjoy today with our.
Speaker 4 (19:37):
iPhones and our airplanes and our supermarkets is because there
are billions and billions of people working to produce those
goods and services around the world. With fewer people, will
have fewer people building modern society. And that is why
AI robots, that turning things into automated processes that humans
(19:58):
are doing today is going to be in recently important
because maintaining and even accelerating the standard of living for
most people on the planet requires people. And so we
we we celebrate the you know, the loss of population
at some risk to our standards of living, which means
that you know, technology continues to be really important to
(20:20):
underpin the society that we enjoy.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
So all right, let's elaborate on that a little bit.
Let's really nerd out here. So what AI and what
all broadly called robots use the term too. What they
do is they massively increase the productivity per worker, if
you are measuring it that way, And therefore, in theory,
as these technologies get better, you can continue to increase
(20:47):
standard of living for workers with not just fewer workers,
but far fewer workers.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
Right when, and that's already happened.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
I mean, just look, the ninety five percent of America
used to be farmers and now it's three percent, and
we produce way more food than ever. So then the
question will become whether all those jobs that are no
longer necessary result in massive unemployment or result in the
creation of new businesses that soak up this employment which
(21:16):
has been our.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
History over the past. But I think we would be
able to maintain or even increase standards of living even
with fewer people. So that respond to that, and then
I want to get to another thing.
Speaker 4 (21:30):
Yeah, So I mean I think You're absolutely right that
we can envision scenarios where there's massively increasing productivity and
it benefits most everybody on the planet in the United States.
We can also envision scenarios where there's massive increases in productivity,
it's enormously disruptive, throws people out of jobs and so on.
This is why I will say, this is why policy matters.
(21:52):
These are not easy questions, and there is definitely a
sweet spot in between throwing everybody out of work and
you know, the the cornucopian scenario of everybody gets everything
they want.
Speaker 3 (22:04):
Hitting that sweet spot requires.
Speaker 4 (22:06):
Thinking, a willingness to adjust along the way, and to
monitor how things are going. If we've learned one lesson
over the last fifty years, it is that disrupting the economy,
you know, offshoring jobs and so on, does have political consequences.
Speaker 3 (22:21):
I just read an interesting.
Speaker 4 (22:22):
Paper that argues that the depopulation of eastern Germany is
one of the factors that led to the rise of
the the AfD far right party, And so we do
have to be paying attention.
Speaker 3 (22:34):
None of this happens by itself.
Speaker 4 (22:36):
None of this there's no such thing as a free market,
and despite people's claims it's an integration of public policy
and in the market, and we have to pay attention
because these trends are underway and we don't want to
be on the other side and say, well, I wish
we would have paid more attention to that upfront.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
All right, last, last two quick things.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
First, I think the thing that made differentiate this this
disruption versus prior disruptions is that the disruption that will
inevitably be caused by AI, and you know, probably pretty
soon will be faster, will be more widespread and faster
than anything we've seen before. And between that and self
(23:16):
driving vehicles and all this stuff, there's gonna be a
lot more people put out of jobs in a much
shorter time span than we've ever seen before, which could
be an interesting thing. The last question I have for
you is I wonder if there is a chicken and
egg question here in that. Okay, if we have all
this technology and it might put people out of work,
(23:39):
but it might mean we don't need as many people.
Could it also be that the rapid rise in technology
that reduces the demand for work reduces the incentive of
people to have more children, and that just the rise
of this stuff itself will cause there to be fewer
(24:01):
people because people will say it's too hard to get
a job or whatever.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
And I wonder if there's a chicken and egg thing
going here.
Speaker 4 (24:11):
Yeah, one of the most interesting things about demographics and
population is that we, and by we I mean broadly
in the expert world, don't have a really good understanding
of the mechanisms that lead to people wanting to have
more or less children. The history of population policy, as
(24:31):
many people know, is pretty horrific, you know, with the
China one child policy, with forced sterilizations in India and elsewhere.
Countries that have tried to motivate more population, some of
the Nordic countries in Europe and Asia have had limited
success in implementing policies like free child care or child
tax credits.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
So the idea that we.
Speaker 4 (24:53):
Can modulate population even if we desired, you know, if
we want the total for rate to be one point
nine children per woman rather than one points two, it's
not clear we know how to do that. And so
for me, as you know, as a policy person, one
of the things I'd like to have is just a
better understanding just in case we decide in this, you know,
(25:15):
futuristic world of AI and automation, that maybe we want
to have a sense of how many people are on
the planet one hundred years from now, because really the
decisions made today by by parents lead to the population
that you know, our grand children are going to be
part of.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
I couldn't agree with you more.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
And recent experiments in Korea in particular, but China and
some other places as well. Paying paying for more babies
and sometimes paying a lot for more babies is not
working and is going to be a very important conversation
for a long time to come. Roger Pielke, Junior Professor
Emeritus at CU Boulder, Senior Fellow at AEI, the American
(25:53):
Enterprise Institute AEI dot org. Everybody subscribe please to Roger's
fantastic subs It's called The Honest Broker. You can find
links to all this stuff on my blog today at
Rosskiminsky dot com. If you forget any of it. Roger,
thanks so much for doing this and safe travels.
Speaker 3 (26:11):
Thanks Ross, I appreciate it.
All right, I am so pleased to welcome back to
the show my friend Roger Pilka, Junior, who is Professor emeritus,
which makes him sound older than he is and he's
not retired, Busier than ever professor emeritus at CU Boulder
and just a great continuing to be really a great
teacher of the intersection of public policy, which means things
(00:22):
government does and science. And if you are even slightly nerdy,
and I certainly am, and you care about discussions about
what government is doing and what they should be doing
based on actual data and rational thinking, you must subscribe
to Roger's podcast, which is called The Honest Broker. Probably
(00:44):
the easiest way to find it is just look up
Roger Pielka p I E l K E Honest Broker
and you will find it that way.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
All right, Roger, great to have you back. Thanks so
much for being here.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
Ross, great to be with you again.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
I got a lot of things I want to talk
with you about today.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
I actually want to start with something that wasn't on
my mind until you told me before we started talking,
what you're soon going to be doing giving a talk
in Europe about Trump and science. Don't give us the
whole talk, but just a couple of highlights. How are
you thinking about Trump and science?
Speaker 4 (01:17):
Yeah, well, it's complicated and no one really, i think,
knows what's going on inside the administration, but we can
see the consequences that the Trump administration is really taking
a wrecking ball to the institutions of science, whether it's Harvard,
whether it's a National Science Foundation, even NASA. And my
talk is going to be about not about what's happened
in the last few months, but how we got here
(01:39):
over the last few decades. And over the last few decades,
there has been a conflict that's erupted between academics and
scientists and Republicans. And some of that is Republicans making,
some of that is the Democrats making, and some of
that is our making in the expert world. And so
I'm just going to walk through how, you know, really
starting with the Bush and administration, science became fractured on
(02:03):
partisan lines, and so it really understands what happening in
the Trump administration. We have to go back in time
and see how this fault opened up.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
What's the issue that you or issues that you think
precipitated this, going back to Bush.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
Yeah, so there's some of them.
Speaker 4 (02:20):
Of one of the big issues is the changing politics
inside science and the academy. I mean, it's well documented
now that if you go back to the sixties, university
faculty were pretty evenly split in most areas across left
center right, and over time there has been a leftward
lean in science more.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
Than a lean and in academia.
Speaker 4 (02:41):
And that makes the politics of science and the academy,
the people who do the work very vanilla. And it
was very easy in the early two thousands to say that,
you know, the Democrats were the party of science, the
Republicans were having a war on Scienceublicans like that framing,
(03:01):
Democrats like that framing. And it turns out we in
the academy kind of fell prey to that. And so
you see, for example, recently, one of the most prestigious
scientific journalist, Nature, It endorsed Joe Biden in twenty twenty
and Kamala Harris in twenty twenty four. There are a
British science magazine. Honestly, nobody really cares who they endorse
(03:22):
for president. A study came out in twenty twenty two
that showed that that initial endorsement led Republicans in the
US to lose trust in science, and yet they did
another endorsement in twenty twenty four. So we've made some missteps.
And what I tell my colleagues is, you know, we
can't control big politics and Republicans, Democrats, Donald Trump, but
(03:44):
we can get our own house in order. And so
it's a long way back to regain the trust of
the broad American public. But I think that's necessary for
whenever the post Trump era comes, for universities and science
to be back where it used to be, which was
trusted by everybody.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
And we won't elaborate on this part any further because
innumerable hours have been spent talking about it and writing
books about it. But the destruction of expertise, the destruction
of the appreciation of expertise or trust and expertise that
happened during COVID, it's not like anything I've ever seen before,
(04:22):
and it certainly didn't help that people suspected and we
now know for sure that Anthony Fauci was intentionally lying
to us. And so when people have suspicions about whether
they can trust trust scientists more than trust science, those
fears are well founded. So I don't want to elaborate
(04:43):
on that, but I do want to tie it into
now one of the things you just wrote about at
your substack, The Honest Broker. It's a piece entitled Who's Experts.
The subhead is the problems with RFK juniors sacking of
a vaccine advisory committee. So you wrote that after RFK
did what he did, and in a moment, I'm gonna
(05:03):
let you tell us what he did. And then there's
a New York Times piece that came out after you
wrote yours about Kennedy announcing eight new members. So tell
us what this is about.
Speaker 4 (05:15):
So when you go to the pharmacy and you pick
up medicine and or you get your children vaccinated, or
you go to the supermarket and get something over the counter,
most people are willing to put these chemicals into our
body with the expectation that, yeah, advil is going to
cure my headache, or the MMR vaccine is going to
(05:36):
help not only my family, but society that reflects trust.
All of us understand what trust is because none of
us are doing chemical analyses. So part of that trust
comes from the institutions of science, and one of the
those important institutions are expert advisors. Experts are people who
have specialized knowledge in a particular area that most everybody
(05:58):
else does not, including policy makers or even other experts.
And so when we're talking about vaccination, for fifty years,
the US government has impaneled a group of independent experts
to advise.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
They don't make decisions.
Speaker 4 (06:14):
They advise the Centers for Disease Control in the Food
and Drug Administration on whether particular vaccines should be approved
and what the schedule should be. Then the government officials,
ultimately political appointees, can decide whether to take that advice
or not. And historically expert advisors have been treated as
(06:37):
independent experts, advise, decision makers, decide, and if you don't
like the expert advice, then make a different decision and
justify it to the public.
Speaker 3 (06:47):
Why.
Speaker 4 (06:47):
And we see increasingly, and you know, it's not just
the Trump administration, we saw this in the Biden administration also,
And there's been a trend where where policymakers, if they
don't like the advice they're getting, they choose different experts.
They go out and say, well, I don't like these cherries,
I'm going to go pick some other cherries. And the
real problem with you know, RFK Junior's decision to to
(07:09):
basically sack an entire advisory committee on vaccinations is that
it might appeal to MAGA supporters.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
They might say, yeah, get the deep state.
Speaker 4 (07:19):
Out of there, or whatever they characterize it as, but
for pretty much everybody else, they're going to lose trust
in the process, and so it represents a politicization of
expert advisory processes, which which don't have to be politicized.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
These are not political appointees.
Speaker 4 (07:35):
You don't get put on a vaccine advisory committee because
of who you voted for or what your politics are,
or who you're loyal to, and you really want a
diversity of expertise so that the experts can argue things out.
So when RFK Junior appointed eight new members, the general
consensus was, well, you know, a majority of those eight
are pretty decent and well respected scientists, but there's a
(07:56):
couple of folks on there with clear conflicts of interest
and I have an anti vaccine bent, and so all
of a sudden, we've taken a committee that no one's
heard of and put it in the spotlight and made
it very political, which is never a good idea for
expert advice.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
If I were to try to look for a silver
lining in this mostly dark cloud, I would argue this
as one one possible bit of optimism. If they've got
these MAGA loved anti vaxxers on this new committee, and
the new committee nevertheless comes out endorsing, for example, your
(08:36):
kids should get the MMR vaccine, then hopefully some of
these people who are at the moment willing to essentially
abuse their own children and other people's children by not
getting their kids vaccinated, maybe they'll come around at some point.
I mean, I know they're not really felts of logical thinking,
(08:58):
but to me that would be the one kind of
upside of having someone like that. They're The potential downside
is you get someone like that who comes out and
the vote ends up being being fifteen to two or
sixteen to two, and then those two go out doing press.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Conferences, right, you know.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
So I don't know, but I do think you're right
that eliminating them all at once is going to reduce
the trust not just as much of the public who
isn't MAGA, but also of scientists and the medical establishment.
And you mentioned that there's maybe some rumblings in the
medical establishment. Maybe this group is now so untrustworthy that
(09:35):
they should just go make their own.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (09:37):
I mean, so this is the problem. And we saw
this during COVID. I mean, remarkably, the United States was
one of the only countries in the world who did
not have a high level expert advisory body. We had
the Coronavirus Task Force, but that was all political appointees
except for Tony Fauci, and we know he's pretty political also.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
So what happens was.
Speaker 4 (09:57):
That every governor in every state impanneled their own advisor committees.
And then if you could go expert shopping, Well, I
don't like Colorado's COVID guidance, so I'm gonna take that
from Arkansas. Oh, I don't like Florida's. I'm gonna go
to California. And I mean, this is this is one
of the problems. It's because there is a real world
out there, and we need experts to tell us if
(10:18):
a vaccine is safe or not. And you can't substitute
your or my or anyone else's politics for judgments about
the real world. And experts have politics and they have
different views. And as you say, having a diverse expert
advisory panel and diversity both in knowledge but also in
where they come from, what their politics are.
Speaker 3 (10:37):
Does help to build trust.
Speaker 4 (10:39):
I mean, but the big problem is if if a
federal department it's putting out a press release saying they've
sacked an entire advisory committee, then you're doing it wrong.
Because we want these advisory committees to be We want
them to be transparent and out in the open, but
not on the front page of newspapers or in the news.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
We're talking with Roger Pielka Junior. He is, among other things,
a senior fellow at AEI, one of the great think
tanks in the world.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
AEI dot org is their website.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
One last quick comment and then we'll, uh, we'll we'll
move on to the next topic. It reminds me a
little bit of gosh, who oh, So they.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Had a NASA.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
They had a guy who was gonna run NASA, and
Elon Musk liked the guy, and Trump and Musk got
into a tussle, and then they said he's not going
to be the guy. But the reason they actually they
said publicly we're not going to have him run run
NASA because he's donated to Democrats in the past.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Really like, is he the best guy or is he
not the best guy? I found that.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
I found that very frustrating. All right, let's move on
to something else. Let's do this one quickly. You wrote
another piece for the Honest Broker. Climate science is about
to make a huge mistake. This has been a topic
of yours for quite some time. Just give us like
forty seven seconds because I like prime numbers on this one,
and then we'll talk about global fertility.
Speaker 3 (12:02):
Yeah, so there's good news.
Speaker 4 (12:04):
Ask you that in climate science that the scenarios of
emissions that scientists use to feed into climate models have
become much less extreme over recent decades. And partly that's
because those scenarios were too extreme to begin with, but
also because the world is not developing using coal. India
and China still using a lot of coal, but the
(12:24):
rest of the world peaked. Most people don't know that
about twelve years ago. So that means there's going to
be less carbon dioxide emitted than we used to think. Unfortunately,
climate science has relied on very extreme emission scenarios that
for some legitimate scientific reasons that these get filtered through
the media into policy, and the climate science community is
(12:44):
about to commit to its next generation of scenarios, and
once again they're choosing to emphasize an implausibly extreme scenario,
so it warps the scientific literature, it warps our discussions
of policy. Climate change is real and serious, but it's
not the apocalypse. But it looks like it's still going
to look like the apocalypse in a lot of research.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Interesting My opinion doesn't matter very much because you're smarter
than I am.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
But I think climate change is real and not serious.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
That's kind of where I am on it not an
existential threat because we don't need to get into all that.
But I do want to ask you one quick follow
up on this and in your note, and again Roger
Pilke's substack is a must subscribe.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
It's called the Honest Broker.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
You you write in this note that the people who
have to make a decision about what models to base
further research on are, if I understand you right, explicitly
choosing not to analyze whether the scenarios are plausible.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
Is that right, That's right, that's right. I mean.
Speaker 4 (13:53):
And here's part of the problem again. This is the
same thing we just talked about. This is a problem
with expert advice. The people who are deciding the X
generation of climate scenarios are for the most part, climate modelers,
climate scientists, and they're selecting those scenarios for what is
best for their research. They are not saying what do
policy makers need? What scenarios look most likely? And and
(14:16):
that's a problem because these scenarios have dual purposes. They're
used for legitimate scientific research where you want to you
want to probe extreme cases. But if you're a policymaker,
you kind of want to know, well, what's plausible, what's
not plausible, where are we headed, where what's off the table?
And that is not part of the discussion. And most
people don't understand that. You know, there's a couple dozen people,
(14:39):
mainly from North America and Europe, who decide what these
scenarios are and it shapes, you know, global economic policy
for a decade.
Speaker 3 (14:48):
All Right.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
The reason I emailed you to get you on the
show yesterday or day before whenever it was, was your
note entitled the global fertility crisis is worse than you think.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
And actually this is something I've talked about a fair
bit on my show.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
I've talked about Elon Musk's comments on this, and I
think that you and I have touched on a couple
of things here that a lot of people believe that
isn't true. And I think a lot of people believe
the older population projections that show population increasing almost forever,
(15:27):
maybe peaking somewhere around twelve billion something like that, and
that is not what's happening. So I want you to
talk about what's actually happening, and then I want you
to go to why what is actually happening is so
important and almost frightening.
Speaker 4 (15:46):
Yeah, So my piece I wrote the other day was
motivated by my colleague, Heesus Fernandez Villevarde, who's a colleague
at AEI and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania,
and he's been doing some deep dives into demographics and
particular the United Nations population projections, and what he has
found is that if you take a look at the
data from around the world, fertility rates, so the amount
(16:09):
of children that each woman has have been dropping, they've
been plumbing. And he had done it's not just in
the rich world, and it's not just in in wealthy
Asia like South Korea. It's in places like Columbia. It's
all over the world. And one thing to understand is
that if you take a look at global population, it
is it is like a hockey stick curve. You know,
(16:32):
there was not a lot of people on the planet,
and then all of a sudden, now there's a lot
of people on the planet. But when those dynamics shift,
that curve can go into reverse. And so the if
you take a look at the UN's population projections for
each of the last you know, five to ten years,
every year they come down for twenty one hundred and hey,
(16:53):
SEUs my colleague, he thinks we're on track for the
low what's called the low variant of the UN. That
population will peak in his estimation by twenty fifty five,
So in the life spans of my children, they will
be at peak human And things can become problematic at
that point because we pay pensions things like social security,
(17:15):
social safety nets based on the idea that there are
more people, more working people to pay into these programs.
If it goes into reverse, we're going to have a
lot fewer young people supporting a lot more old people
like me and you in twenty.
Speaker 3 (17:31):
Thirty forty years.
Speaker 4 (17:32):
So there's some demographic problems. And then I also discuss
if you run these scenarios, and again they're just scenarios,
they're thought experiments. But with lower population variants, very quickly
population plummets. And you know, one simple as the world
has the fertility rate of what Bosnia has today, then
(17:57):
by twenty five hundred there's ten million people left on
the planet.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Oh my gosh.
Speaker 4 (18:02):
So this is why people like Elon Musk and others,
you know what are called pro natalists are talking about, well,
everybody needs to have more kids, I think. I mean,
population projections are very difficult. There is momentum there, but
it is one of those things that we should be
talking about more today, and I'm sure we will be
ten years from now.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
I mean, I'm looking at the chart that's in your note,
and the twenty twenty four low projection, which is what
your colleague is saying, is looking more and more likely, right,
I mean, right now, we're over eight billion people, a
little bit over eight billion people on the planet. In
that projection, the peak is under nine billion people, so
not much more than here, and then turns into almost
(18:50):
equally downward sloped on the right as it was upward
sloped on the left.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
So as you're saying.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
The population really crashing, whereas the other the older projections
had the population peaking, maybe a slight decline, maybe sort
of going flat for a while. But I mean, I'm
seeing the same thing in the day of that year seeing,
not that I or your friend, not that I'm looking
at it to the depth that he is. But fertility
(19:16):
rates have clearly plummeted and are not stopping plummeting.
Speaker 4 (19:21):
Yeah, So there are some people who say, well, maybe
you know, it's it's better for the environment, it's it's
better for the world, maybe if there ultimately will be
fewer people, And that's certainly a valid expression, But think
about it.
Speaker 3 (19:34):
The world that we enjoy today with our.
Speaker 4 (19:37):
iPhones and our airplanes and our supermarkets is because there
are billions and billions of people working to produce those
goods and services around the world. With fewer people, will
have fewer people building modern society. And that is why
AI robots, that turning things into automated processes that humans
(19:58):
are doing today is going to be in recently important
because maintaining and even accelerating the standard of living for
most people on the planet requires people. And so we
we we celebrate the you know, the loss of population
at some risk to our standards of living, which means
that you know, technology continues to be really important to
(20:20):
underpin the society that we enjoy.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
So all right, let's elaborate on that a little bit.
Let's really nerd out here. So what AI and what
all broadly called robots use the term too. What they
do is they massively increase the productivity per worker, if
you are measuring it that way, And therefore, in theory,
as these technologies get better, you can continue to increase
(20:47):
standard of living for workers with not just fewer workers,
but far fewer workers.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
Right when, and that's already happened.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
I mean, just look, the ninety five percent of America
used to be farmers and now it's three percent, and
we produce way more food than ever. So then the
question will become whether all those jobs that are no
longer necessary result in massive unemployment or result in the
creation of new businesses that soak up this employment which
(21:16):
has been our.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
History over the past. But I think we would be
able to maintain or even increase standards of living even
with fewer people. So that respond to that, and then
I want to get to another thing.
Speaker 4 (21:30):
Yeah, So I mean I think You're absolutely right that
we can envision scenarios where there's massively increasing productivity and
it benefits most everybody on the planet in the United States.
We can also envision scenarios where there's massive increases in productivity,
it's enormously disruptive, throws people out of jobs and so on.
This is why I will say, this is why policy matters.
(21:52):
These are not easy questions, and there is definitely a
sweet spot in between throwing everybody out of work and
you know, the the cornucopian scenario of everybody gets everything
they want.
Speaker 3 (22:04):
Hitting that sweet spot requires.
Speaker 4 (22:06):
Thinking, a willingness to adjust along the way, and to
monitor how things are going. If we've learned one lesson
over the last fifty years, it is that disrupting the economy,
you know, offshoring jobs and so on, does have political consequences.
Speaker 3 (22:21):
I just read an interesting.
Speaker 4 (22:22):
Paper that argues that the depopulation of eastern Germany is
one of the factors that led to the rise of
the the AfD far right party, And so we do
have to be paying attention.
Speaker 3 (22:34):
None of this happens by itself.
Speaker 4 (22:36):
None of this there's no such thing as a free market,
and despite people's claims it's an integration of public policy
and in the market, and we have to pay attention
because these trends are underway and we don't want to
be on the other side and say, well, I wish
we would have paid more attention to that upfront.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
All right, last, last two quick things.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
First, I think the thing that made differentiate this this
disruption versus prior disruptions is that the disruption that will
inevitably be caused by AI, and you know, probably pretty
soon will be faster, will be more widespread and faster
than anything we've seen before. And between that and self
(23:16):
driving vehicles and all this stuff, there's gonna be a
lot more people put out of jobs in a much
shorter time span than we've ever seen before, which could
be an interesting thing. The last question I have for
you is I wonder if there is a chicken and
egg question here in that. Okay, if we have all
this technology and it might put people out of work,
(23:39):
but it might mean we don't need as many people.
Could it also be that the rapid rise in technology
that reduces the demand for work reduces the incentive of
people to have more children, and that just the rise
of this stuff itself will cause there to be fewer
(24:01):
people because people will say it's too hard to get
a job or whatever.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
And I wonder if there's a chicken and egg thing
going here.
Speaker 4 (24:11):
Yeah, one of the most interesting things about demographics and
population is that we, and by we I mean broadly
in the expert world, don't have a really good understanding
of the mechanisms that lead to people wanting to have
more or less children. The history of population policy, as
(24:31):
many people know, is pretty horrific, you know, with the
China one child policy, with forced sterilizations in India and elsewhere.
Countries that have tried to motivate more population, some of
the Nordic countries in Europe and Asia have had limited
success in implementing policies like free child care or child
tax credits.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
So the idea that we.
Speaker 4 (24:53):
Can modulate population even if we desired, you know, if
we want the total for rate to be one point
nine children per woman rather than one points two, it's
not clear we know how to do that. And so
for me, as you know, as a policy person, one
of the things I'd like to have is just a
better understanding just in case we decide in this, you know,
(25:15):
futuristic world of AI and automation, that maybe we want
to have a sense of how many people are on
the planet one hundred years from now, because really the
decisions made today by by parents lead to the population
that you know, our grand children are going to be
part of.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
I couldn't agree with you more.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
And recent experiments in Korea in particular, but China and
some other places as well. Paying paying for more babies
and sometimes paying a lot for more babies is not
working and is going to be a very important conversation
for a long time to come. Roger Pielke, Junior Professor
Emeritus at CU Boulder, Senior Fellow at AEI, the American
(25:53):
Enterprise Institute AEI dot org. Everybody subscribe please to Roger's
fantastic subs It's called The Honest Broker. You can find
links to all this stuff on my blog today at
Rosskiminsky dot com. If you forget any of it. Roger,
thanks so much for doing this and safe travels.
Speaker 3 (26:11):
Thanks Ross, I appreciate it.
The Ross Kaminsky Show News
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