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At around the 52 minute mark, Bjorn Lomborg talks of Gen IV nuclear. Earlier on he talks of his early experience as an environmentalist and what the IPCC reports actually say.
Spoiler: IPCC reports are not catastrophist. Which I confirm also from reading. Most people have not read them as they’re long and dense.Nowhere do they talk of an “existential threat” to humanity. Or the end of civilisation.
Lomborg also discusses the origin on the 1.5C maximum warming target.
Spoiler: 1.5C was an arbitrary choice by politicians. As in “what would we have to do to keep warming to 1.5C?”. The answer to which is: shut down civilisation. An equivalent question might be “what do we have to do to bring road deaths to zero?” A simple answer to which is: “stop driving”. We don’t do that because we take the choice not to do so. Similarly with the 1.5C target. We could (perhaps) reach it if we stopped all economic growth, all driving, all flying, all building, all meat eating… and so on. But we choose not to do so. (Or maybe we do, as Net Zero targets amount to pretty much that level of civilisational cut-backs).
Lomborg shows that the results of exceeding the arbitrary 1.5C are ”a problem but not a catastrophe”. They will lead to slightly lower net wealth increase than would otherwise have happened. But not to the extinction of mankind. Which common sense would also tell you.
There’s interesting discussion on Big Pharma and advertising, starting here. I didn’t know that the US and New Zealand are the only two countries that allow advertising by Big Pharma. In the US, 75% of total advertising spend is by Pharma. Surely that can’t be neutral effect!? Increased hypochondria? Increased anxiety? Increased support for vaccines?
ADDED: First time I’ve seen the PBD podcast. Set up by entrepreneur Patrick Bet-David, whose family fled Iran in 1990 for the United States where he has accumulated a fortune of $200 million. As,Jews in post-revolutionary Iran they would have been hounded and oppressed or worse. It was America that gave his family the opportunity, as it’s done for so many other immigrants.
ADDED II: Today, 6 May, I read that PBD has made an offer of $US 100 million to Tucker Carlson, recently fired from Fox, to join him. Wowsers!
