[Scott] Coming up on "Energy Switch," how urgent an issue is climate change?

- So I think that there are two worlds of adaptation.

There's one world where we try to adapt to the impacts of climate change, and there's another world where we try to adapt to a world without fossil fuels.

And so the question is, which of these adaptations is a better world?

But adaptation as a primary response, I think is going to be an absolute disaster because we're not gonna do it.

- It's gonna cost money, and we would like to not have to spend all that money.

But it's a very different conversation to say the world is gonna be better, but because of global warming, it'll be slightly less better.

That's a much, much different conversation than the one that we typically have today, which is the world is gonna be terrible because of global warming.

[Scott] Next on "Energy Switch," part one of our discussion on the urgency of climate.

[Narrator] Funding for "Energy Switch" was provided in part by, The University of Texas at Austin, leading research in energy and the environment for a better tomorrow.

What starts here changes the world.

[upbeat music] - I'm Scott Tinker, and I'm an energy scientist.

I work in the field, lead research, speak around the world, write articles, and make films about energy.

This show brings together leading experts on vital topics in energy and climate.

They may have different perspectives, but my goal is to learn, and illuminate, and bring diverging views together towards solutions.

Welcome to the "Energy Switch."

Warming temperatures and their potential impacts are predicted to escalate in the coming decades.

One guest argues this calls for urgent action to reduce emissions.

The other maintains that climate change, while a concern, is a smaller problem than others we face, like poverty and education.

Addressing those would bring their own benefits while helping global populations better adapt to climate.

I'll begin this fascinating discussion with my expert guests, Andy Dessler, he's a climate scientist and professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, an author of three books on climate change.

Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus, a think tank, a political scientist and researcher, and the popular author of four books on climate and global society.

On this episode of "Energy Switch," The Urgency of Climate Change, Part One.

We're gonna start real high level.

Just real briefly, thinking about climate, how urgent is it?

- Well, let me start out by saying that essentially nothing that happens in the physical climate system wasn't predicted.

Higher temperatures, more intense rainfall, sea level rise, ocean acidification, they're all coming true.

What we've experienced now, which is already stressing human systems, is just a small preview of what's coming.

[Scott] So, urgent.

- Yeah, urgent.

- Andy and I agree, climate change is real.

It's a manmade problem.

It's a real problem that we need to fix, but we disagree on how urgent it is.

And I think to a very large extent this is because there are many other challenges that the world needs to fix in the 21st century.

Poverty, hunger, education, jobs, all these other problems that are also important.

- Interesting.

So, let's just, for our viewers, what is climate change, in your mind?

- Right.

So climate change in the scientific community is a changing of the statistics of the weather.

So, you know, there's an average temperature, there's a range of temperatures, and climate change means those things shift.

And it's not just temperature, people focus on temperature, but it's also things like precipitation.

There's a range of precipitation you get, that shifts.

It's sea level.

There's a range of sea levels, that shifts.

And so it's the changing of the statistics, and let me emphasize that- - Over some period of time.

- Yeah, usually a few decades.

So because if you look at too short a period, you will confuse short-term variability with long-term change.

So usually we're looking at 30-year averages, or we call 30-year normals.

And the important thing about this is that we built our world, we adapted our world to the temperature of the 20th century.

You look around, storm sewer systems are designed to handle the range of rainfall that occurred when they were built in the middle of the 20th century.

And as we depart from that, we're no longer adapted to that.

And that means that we have to change those things and that's very expensive.

- Yeah, yeah, interesting.

Climate change.

- Yeah, Andy's absolutely right to say as we see changing temperatures or changing rainfalls, it will have an impact on the way that we have adapted our societies, which are adapted to the past.

And so what we find very often is that yes, climate has an impact, but the vast majority of the impact is actually from changing what we do with our infrastructure.

One crucial bit that we'll get back to, I'm sure many, many times is also to realize there's a huge disconnect between what are the physical impacts and then how does that affect people.

If you are poor, if you live under corrugated roof and have no abilities, no infrastructure to speak of, any storm, any presentation can be incredibly dangerous.

If you're much better off, if you have much better technology, if you have much better forecasting, you're much more likely to actually be able to adapt to these things.

- Yeah, can I say to that?

I mean, I agree 100% with what Dr. Lomborg said, that poverty reduction has to be a major goal of the 21st century.

And so whatever policies we adapt can't be built on the backs of poor people.

- So that's an and.

- Yes.

- Human flourishing and.

- Yeah, absolutely.

- Does media coverage under-report or over-report, exaggerate, the urgency?

Thoughts on that.

- Well, look, the first thing to recognize about media is media does a very good job at what they do, but their job mainly is to tell you about the worst things that happened the last 24 hours around the world.

So it's not very surprising- - To get our attention.

- Yes, to get your attention.

And of course, they also want to tell it with a lot of gusto and a lot of emotion.

It has to feel dangerous and preferably also be someone's fault.

And so yes, they're vastly exaggerating this point, but the reality is that because we just hear one bad story after another, we fail to see the full picture.

Since 1980, if you look at what has happened in the world, we've actually seen a dramatic decline from those impacts on human societies.

So if you look at flood storms, droughts, wildfires, and so on, what we've seen is that the death rate has gone down more than sixfold since 1980.

And the impact in terms of economic impact has gone down almost fivefold.

- Is that the rich world or the whole world?

- No, this is true for both the rich world and for the poor world.

And surprisingly, it's actually gone down faster for the poor world.

The point is not to say that media doesn't tell you correct things, but it's not the same thing as saying that you're actually counting all of these right.

To do that, you need to sort of actually do the statistics and then it becomes boring and then you don't hear it on mainstream.

- Yeah, it's all completely factual, but it's not factually complete.

There's no complete context.

How do you think, is it media coverage over, under?

- You know, I think media is a huge, a huge enterprise.

There are people that overestimate it, there are people that underestimate it, a lot of the people that are underestimating it, they're pushing a political agenda and they will never talk about the bad side of climate change, they just will never do it.

Now, there are exaggerations, I won't disagree with that.

And so it's a mixed bag.

I mean, overall I think media is fine, but you have to know who you're listening to.

- Well, everybody is interested in climate now.

I mean, NGOs, pretty well-funded universities, corporations, governments of course, nations, states, everybody.

How do they kind of encourage or discourage climate action, these different actors?

- You know, the climate problem is a political problem.

And in public political debates, every stakeholder who's everybody on the planet gets into the debate and makes an argument.

So there's nothing wrong with all of these groups coming in.

I think the most important thing to understand about the climate change debate is that one of the actors is far more powerful than anybody else, and that's fossil fuels.

And they have the power to go in there.

And even though renewables are now our cheapest energy, they can go in there and they can literally change the rules of the market to entrench them in there.

I'll give you one example.

If you look at the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas, if you look at their, what they call their interconnection queue, it's what people are hooking up.

It is 80% solar and batteries, 145 gigawatts.

Natural gas is five percent.

So fossil fuels are getting killed in the market.

And a prominent Texas politician came on the other day and said, "If the free market doesn't build gas, we are gonna build gas."

And this is a reaction to the power that fossil fuels have.

And you look across all of these places in the Dakotas, they essentially criminalizing people protesting against fossil fuel infrastructure.

In North Carolina, they were passing laws that were prohibiting people from using climate projections in setting planning.

I mean, everywhere we go, fossil fuels are tipping the scales in favor of them.

And they're never gonna lose.

- We do know that, that solar and wind were heavily advantaged by policy in Texas for 15 years that's why some- - In the past, yeah.

- And so you can call it market signals, but it's really been government- - But it's not today.

Let me just emphasize for your viewers.

The metric that matters is the bill you get in the mail and given that the bill you get in the mail for a largely renewable grid is the same as you're paying today.

- Do you agree with that?

- No.

And unfortunately, it's a little bit wishful thinking, but of course, we'll get to that.

If you look almost across the world, almost everyone in power will be very pro renewables.

And that's of course why we are seeing, as Andy was just pointing out, we're seeing, what was it, 90, almost 95% or something was of the additions were renewables.

Andy, you've said that, but many other people make the same point that solar and wind is the cheapest energy on the planet.

Well, it's true... when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, but if you have just four hours of storage to wind and solar, it's not nearly enough to get them to be competitive with base load power.

But already then, they're vastly more expensive than most fossil fuels.

So the reality here is that it's very hard to push solar and wind as a solution right now, you can do it to a certain extent, there are places where it actually would happen with no market interference.

I absolutely agree with Andy that we shouldn't be discouraging it and the political places where people are sort of insisting, no, we have to have more fossil fuels, they're wrong.

But likewise, the places that are saying we should push a lot of renewables and give them special treatment are probably also wrong.

But the reality is, if you look at what has happened, for instance, for China, India, Indonesia, and Bangladesh, four places that obviously have a lot of opportunity to go to a lot more solar, last year, so 2023, they used more coal, sorry, more new coal than they used more solar and wind.

Andy mentioned several times that fossil fuels are this big, you know, slightly ugly creature that's forcing us to do a lot of things.

And I think there's some truth to that.

But we should also recognize that fossil fuels is why we got out of poverty in the first place.

I mean, the last 200 years of fossil fuels have been incredibly good.

Remember, the Industrial Revolution basically started because we stopped just being dependent on draught animals, and wood.

- Let me agree with a lot of what Dr. Lomborg said, a tip of the hat to fossil fuels.

They got us here, but this is not a debate about the past.

This is a question about the future, what's the future?

And I think Dr. Lomborg sort of alluded to something which I'd like to flesh out, which is fossil fuels are doomed on a century timescale, in 150 years, we're not gonna be using fossil fuels.

And, you know, getting to Dr. Lomborg's point about economists, I don't want to brag on economists, I do on social media a lot, I don't wanna do it.

I actually respect economists.

They do a really good job of estimating the damages, but they're never complete.

And so it's inevitable in my mind that economists, the price of impacts have been going up, the price of renewals is going down that pretty soon their off in warming will be two degrees.

The economists will say, in fact, some economists already say that.

- So the urgency piece from all these different things varies depending on the organization and the context of what they're pushing essentially.

So we've heard recently, we've got, we've gotta act soon, 2030 is a number we hear quite often, or 2035 sometimes, or it's too late.

And I know from lectures I do in university, it scares the hell outta some kids.

They truly think they have 15 years and humans are gone.

How's this determined?

I mean, where's this date even come from and is it real?

- So I think that's the wrong way to think about it, in terms of these specific deadlines, 1.5 degrees or 10 years.

What I tell my students is don't feel bad or depressed about it, get mad because we have the solutions, we have the technology to solve this problem.

It is not a scientific problem, it's a political problem and it's a political problem that's tied up with problems that the U.S. is having in democracy and voting and things like that.

And so I tell students, don't get mad, go to the ballot box.

That's the solution.

And so I avoid 2030, I don't talk about 12 years, I don't talk about 1.5 degrees, we need to slow down emissions as fast as we can.

- Yeah.

- Basically.

- And emissions is the key, right?

- Emissions is, for climate change, yeah.

- Yeah, yeah.

Thoughts on the dates?

- So the reason why we got this 2030 deadline was because back in 2018, you know, a lot of politicians were talking about we need to get 1.5 degrees centigrade, which keep the temperature under that.

That's very technical.

It means under what, 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit.

But it really just means something that's almost impossible.

And so this is really what climate economists have been spending the last 30 years on trying to do to say what is the right level?

So 1.5, very, very low temperature rise, that means that you minimize the damages from climate, that's great.

But of course getting to 1.5 degrees is also incredibly expensive.

And so that means you'll have lots of damages from climate policy that is real cost from climate policy.

If we do nothing, very high climate damages, and of course no climate policy damages.

And given that we have to pay both, you actually have to find a place where it minimizes the sum of these two.

You definitely need to do more than what we are doing today, but it's much, much less than what the 1.5 degree target is.

- Let's come back to climate and weather, extreme weather, but let's talk about the timeframes.

How rapidly is climate change contributing to these extreme weather events?

And be as specific as we can.

Let's talk about storms and floods and fires and droughts.

- And let me get one thing out straight, which is climate change never causes an extreme event.

The way to think about climate change is it's like steroids for the weather.

You have steroids.

If you give it to a baseball player, you turn what would be a routine out into a home run because it goes 15 or 20 feet further.

- You do realize you just lost the European here.

- Oh, okay.

- I get it, I get it.

- Yeah, it's like this way, climate change doesn't cause a soccer game, but it's like adding an additional player to a team.

- Thank you.

- You take a team that maybe it would've been an even match, you add an extra player that's climate change, all of a sudden it's a rally.

So when we get a heat wave, climate change didn't cause the heat wave, climate change makes it worse by a few degrees.

So it might add 20% to the heat.

Now you might say, oh well, 20% of a heat wave not that big a deal.

But the impacts are strongly non-linear.

We pass thresholds.

If you pass a threshold, things get rapidly worse.

Now that's just heat waves is just one.

Let's talk about floods.

So we know that climate change is increasing the intensity of precipitation.

- Everywhere or in certain regions more than others?

- In general, when you see a really intense rain event, especially one that's record setting, climate change has played a role in that.

Hurricanes, we are very confident that climate change is making rainfall in hurricanes more intense.

And so when you look at something like Harvey, their peer-reviewed analyses suggest 25-30% of the rain was attributable to climate change.

And again, that means that there are people in Houston who flooded because of Harvey that wouldn't have flooded otherwise.

So talk about fires.

Fires are tricky.

What's true about forest fires today is that their character has changed.

Places that used to not burn like the Arctic are burning and these fires are bigger, that you get these mega fires now and these things are virtually impossible to put out.

They're impossible to contain.

And not even to mention all the air pollution that comes from the fires, that's new.

That wasn't happening at the beginning of the 20th century, wasn't happening in the middle of the 20th century.

It's really brand new and those have extremely high costs.

- Your thoughts on that?

- So it's absolutely true that climate has an impact on many of these things.

It is important to recognize that not all of these things are gonna be negative.

So obviously when you mentioned that there's gonna be more heat waves, you're also gonna see fewer cold waves, sea level rise, that's very hard to see an upside to.

That's only downside, floods is much, much harder to determine because a very large part of this is because of how we build up our systems.

But overall, and I think this is the important point, overall, Andy, is absolutely right, more higher temperatures, so more global warming will mean that they will, all other things equal, be more problems.

But we also need to remember this is about the social impacts.

And so overall what we see when we look at floods, drought, storms, and wildfires, how many people die from this?

Well, actually it turns out over the last 100 years, we've gone from about half a million people dying on average to about say a little less than 15,000 people.

So about a 97% reduction.

Remember at the same time the world has quadrupled in size, so the actual per person risk has gone down by more than 99%.

And that's important to keep both of those alive.

- Are you worried that those are gonna go away if we go too far in some direction?

- There's definitely a concern of saying, sure, things have gone well until now and things have gone better, but, just you wait, in just a few years...

There's a lot of reasons why it seems inconceivable that with better technology and with better opportunities, that we won't be able to adapt to most of these things.

Now, it's gonna cost money.

And that's again why global warming is a real problem and we would like to not have to spend all that money.

But it's a very different conversation to say the world is gonna be better, but because of global warming, it'll be slightly less better.

That's a much, much different conversation than the one that we typically have today, which is the world is gonna be terrible because of global warming.

If we think the world is sort of gonna go on a downhill slope in just a couple of decades and it's all gonna be terrible, then obviously we are willing to spend a lot more money.

One of the great sort of examples, this used to be a really big thing, people were worrying a lot about malaria because temperature rises would make, and at least theoretically would make it more possible for the malaria mosquito to live in more places.

And that would mean that more of the world would be exposed to malaria.

But of course, remember, Texas and 38 states in the U.S. were endemic with malaria.

Most of the world was used to be endemic of malaria.

The reason why you get rid of malaria is because you're rich.

So what you see, if you look at the World Health Organization for malaria, it's declined dramatically over the last 100 years.

And if we do nothing about climate, it will stay slightly higher than if to do something about climate.

But both of them show that it's gonna be diminishing.

- So you're arguing that the data show that we're safer from climate impacts tremendously because of wealth and technology and adaptation.

Do you think the data show that, would you agree with that?

- So I think that there are two adaptations or two worlds of adaptation.

There's one world where we try to adapt to the impacts of climate change.

And there's another world where we try to adapt to a world without fossil fuels.

And so the question is, which of these adaptations is a better world?

- Well, hold on though, to this point in time, I think what you were saying is we're a lot safer from climate than we have been because of partly because of energy.

Mostly fossil fuels.

- Yeah, yeah, that's right.

But adaptation as our primary response I think is going to be an absolute disaster because we're not gonna do it.

And so let me give you a few examples.

So in Texas, 70% of prisoners don't have air conditioning.

And so last summer, they were in these basically concrete boxes in 110 degree heat.

And it was just, you know, it's essentially torture.

And the Texas legislature actually had a bill about whether to air condition prisons and they didn't do it.

And so instead of actually spending money on adaptation, what we're going to do is we're gonna normalize suffering.

Let me give you another example.

So the Ike Dike, which is a dike that's supposed to protect Galveston Bay from a hurricane like Hurricane Ike.

Everyone agrees it's a good idea, but no one will pay for it.

Adaptation is a great idea, but it requires rich people to pay, to adapt poor people.

It's simply not gonna happen.

You know, the fossil fuel interests, they absolutely love Dr. Lomborg's message because it gives them social license to keep pumping oil.

But the thing that I don't know if Dr. Lomborg understands, they have no intention of spending even one cent on helping the world adapt.

- I just gotta strongly object to that conversation.

I see your view, I think it's a terribly dismal view of the world, but I think it's also wrong and we just know that it's wrong because that's what happened the last 100 years.

It's not that people didn't adapt, it's not that society didn't come together and actually decided we're gonna pay for these kinds of things.

We can see in this statistic very, very clearly that overall across the world, almost all places adapted.

Now, did they adapt entirely correctly and efficiently at the right time?

No, I would love the world to be perfect and sort of right on spot and right on time and we're probably never gonna be there.

But we mostly know that the world did adapt and so it seems very unlikely that that won't happen in the future.

I think we would do well in saying, well, we need to get a sense of what's the cost and a sense of what's the benefit, rather than just going on saying what seems like the nicest thing to do.

- This is a really good place to take a break I think and we're gonna do it in this context.

If I'm a young person listening to this, I'm hearing one view that says, yes, this is happening, but we'll be able to adapt in a reasonable way and afford to do that through time.

Another view says we need to invest in this to try to not adapt to it but mitigate it to keep it from happening so we don't have to spend all this money adapting 'cause we probably can't or won't do that.

One is probably a little more urgency.

I think that's how you started, Andy.

And one's a little less urgency, but agreeing on this problem's happening, it's really strategies around what we do about it.

So I wanna come back and kind of start with that thought and get pretty granular around these things now, different approaches to this.

So let's take a break and we will come back.

My guests agreed climate change is a problem but disagreed on nearly everything else.

Bjorn thinks the media and politicians exaggerate climate impacts to lure viewers and voters.

Andy believes the media is fairly accurate on climate.

He also thinks fossil fuel interests have great political power, keeping cheaper renewables from deploying more widely.

While Bjorn thinks most politicians are pro solar and wind, which is why they've grown, even though they're more expensive, when you add the backup generation and battery storage to become reliable.

Andy thinks we won't adapt to climate impacts because no one wants to pay.

Bjorn thinks we will adapt because that's what we've been doing.

Deaths from weather dependent events are down 97%.

In part two, we'll look at policies we might pursue depending on our view of the urgency of climate change.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Narrator] Funding for "Energy Switch" was provided in part by The University of Texas at Austin, leading research in energy and the environment for a better tomorrow.

What starts here changes the world.