 When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its highly anticipated report on global warming in early August, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres declared it nothing less than a code red for humanity, insisting that the alarm bells are deafening and the evidence is irrefutable. Greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk. Guterres's code red language was echoed by the press and activists, some of whom called humanity guilty as hell of climate crimes. Others prophesied that the climate news is only going to get worse and that the choice before us was immediately passing the Green New Deal or death. Roger Pelkey Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, writes that such reactions are not only wrong but irresponsible. Pelkey believes that temperatures are rising in response to human activity but that the alarmism that dominates the discussion is counterproductive. Nowhere does the IPCC report say that billions of people are at immediate risk, he says, stressing the gap between what's actually in the report and the highly politicized way we discuss climate change. Reason talked with Pelkey about why apocalyptic scenarios about temperature change are severely mistaken. Well, the planet is getting more hospitable to human life and how ongoing incremental improvements in energy technologies will almost certainly lead to a brighter, cleaner future for all. Roger Pelkey Jr., thanks for talking to me. It's great to be here. So in a response to the IPCC report that dropped recently, you wrote that this prompted a flurry of interpretations and yes, spin and I'm quoting you. You say the secretary general of the United Nations warned of and you're quoting him now, a code red for humanity. The alarm bells are deafening and the evidence is irrefutable. Greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk. You respond to this at your substack saying, not only is this wrong, it is irresponsible. Let's start with what's wrong with that. How is what the secretary general of the UN, the organization that oversees the IPCC? What is he getting wrong? Yeah, the part of that that I think is most troubling is the fear inducing statement that billions of people around the world are at immediate risk. The reality is, and according to statistics kept by the UN, the world is actually much safer a place than it has been in the past when it comes to extreme weather and climate. Vulnerability has gone down dramatically. Can you put some numbers or facts on that? When you say, because everybody agrees, unless you deny global warming, temperatures have gone up, you hear a lot of stories about extreme weather events. We'll get into that in a little bit, but when you say the planet, people are at less risk, it means fewer people are dying from weather related events. Yeah, I mean, think of it like this, in the 1920s, 100 years ago, let's say there's two billion people on the planet and millions of people died from extreme weather and climate events, millions, literally. Today, there's seven to eight billion people on the planet. And every death is a tragedy, of course, but we see thousands of deaths from extreme weather and climate. Going from millions to thousands is a drop of several orders of magnitude. It is one of the greatest scientific, technological, and policy success stories of humanity in the last century. So to claim that billions of people are at immediate risk is simply scientifically, empirically, factually incorrect. Okay, what else is wrong in the UN Secretary General's announcement of a Code Red for humanity? Yeah, I think the idea that an IPCC report is some sort of a threshold or announcing new information. The reality is the IPCC, which is an important institution. It's been around for more than three decades. If it didn't exist, we'd have to recreate it. But its message to policymakers for that time has been largely solid and consistent over that time. And its job is to assess a sprawling vast scientific literature. But there's really nothing new there. So, and I know politicians and policymakers like to use reports as a newsworthy event to try to motivate this or that action. But the idea that the IPCC report when it came out was giving new information that we didn't have the day before or honestly 10 years ago or 20 years ago. It's put finer points and more precision on, and there's new science, of course, but the core messages haven't changed. So the idea advanced by policymakers that this, finally, this report is the trigger, I think it's a misleading interpretation of how science actually works. Is that also true of the report, the IPCC reporter update that came out in the fall of 2018, which gave rise to the mantra or the trope that we have 12 years to fix the planet's climate. Otherwise, we're done. This was popularized by people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Greta Thunberg. But also, Joe Biden, when he was running for president, talked about how we only have X number of years to go before we lose the planet. Yeah. I mean, deadlineism, it's not unique to climate change, certainly. And it's a common trope in political debates to try to motivate people to action. Climate change is particularly difficult because it's not particularly amenable to deadlineism. The climate is changing, we're responsible, and it's incremental. It's not a sudden threshold type issue. There is some science about tipping points and so on. But the reality is, and we just look back over the last 30 years, that's a good metric for how the next 30 years are going to be. So the IPCC has generally been responsible in not stating deadlines like you hear politicians and advocates state, but the IPCC does sometimes lend itself to that interpretation. So that 12 years until the end of time from the 1.5 degree report, that was a creation of the media advocates citing the IPCC. The IPCC never said we have 10 years till catastrophe or whatever. Right. And I mean, part of that, just to get a sense of part of it, there's a belief or that's widespread among activists as well as politicians and people in the media that it's kind of like the environment is kind of like cooking an egg, where at a certain point, the egg, the white solidifies and it turns white and the yolk gets cooked and it can't be uncooked. That is kind of the wrong analogy for the environment. There isn't a point, at least from the science, where you can say, okay, now we're done. It's just more that there's a ramp up, right, or incremental change. Yeah, I mean, I think there was a Time Magazine cover with an egg and a frying pan that your comments reminded me of. But both climate change and successful climate policy are long-term incremental effects. If you look at sea level rise, sea level rise is not something that, oh my gosh, we're going to wake up tomorrow and there's a meter more ocean out there. It's millimeters per year, basically forever. And so climate policy decarbonizing the economy is not something that, oh, we wake up tomorrow and all of a sudden there's a nuclear power plant on every corner. It's incremental. It's steady, slow change. The analogy I often use, it's like the advance in human life spans. It doesn't happen overnight. It's a decades, even century long process. So I think this is one of the challenges with deadlineism, is that in the context of climate change, we don't have deadlines for the effects of climate change. We don't have deadlines for successful climate policy. And that's really hard to square with the science when advocates keep pushing for, you know, we have 100 days, we have 12 months, we have 12 years and so on. So is that, I mean, does the science refute the kind of hockey stick paradigm that, you know, you're going along, you're going along and like things are going up a little bit, a little bit and then suddenly they shoot way up that people like Michael Mann, the scientist or Al Gore, you know, and it seems like a million years ago, but in talking about an inconvenient truth, whether it's the book or the movie, that hockey stick paradigm is just not accurate. Is that safe to say? Well, I mean, it depends what you mean by the parrot. I mean, you know, fortunately or unfortunately, I'm not, you know, an expert in the paleo climate world. And so that's, you know, a very long-term perspective. And yeah, and there's been debates about the proper use of, you know, hockey stick like graphs, there's one that appears, it's the first graph in the summary for policymakers in the current IPCC report. But I think, you know, where it has relevance is in the context of extreme events, the idea that we're seeing an abrupt change in the number of hurricanes or the number of floods, you know, that marks a departure from what we've seen in the past. And that's not supported by the evidence. So what is the evidence then? Say, you know, with things like hurricanes and, you know, and storms like that, what is going on? Yeah, the first thing for people to understand is that extreme weather is a big category. It's got a lot of things in it. It's a little bit like disease, right? We wouldn't talk about disease. In general, what we do is we talk about heart disease or cancer or COVID. And, you know, we have treatments specific to disease. So the IPCC actually has done a very nice job in summarizing the evidence and the literature on a wide range of extreme events. And, I mean, just to pick several, heat waves are one where the IPCC has explained that we've seen an increase in the number of heat waves and they have attributed. That means that they have, you know, determined that the causality behind that increase in heat waves to some significant degree is human. And of course, there's factors like urbanization and so on that also contribute to heat wave. Extreme precipitation is another one of the IPCC has identified an upwards trend in some places around the world and attributed that to human causes. The IPCC is also very explicit that extreme precipitation is not necessarily the same thing as flooding. I think there's a lot of reasons for that. But if you want to look at trends in flooding, look at flooding. And the IPCC very responsibly has said, if you look around the world in certain places and, you know, there's uptrends and downtrends, but there's no overall signal. There's nothing overall to attribute to human causes. Hurricanes, which is, you know, the name for the broader category tropical cyclones. The IPCC, again, very responsibly says on a century timescale looking back on planet Earth, they don't detect trends. It's very hard to detect trends. And if it's hard to detect trends, they can't be very large. Is that, you know, to go back so fewer fewer people are dying from weather events like hurricanes or, you know, tsunamis or whatever. But there's more damage caused by hurricanes, right? Because we have built up along coasts and things like that. Or is that is that a source of confusion then? Yeah, there's a lot of confusion. So the decline in deaths is really easy for people to see and to understand because it's, you know, sharp going way down. And it's down both in absolute numbers, but also in terms of the proportion of people on the planet. Economic damage is a little bit more complicated and difficult to understand because the absolute costs of damage is going up. There's no doubt about it. And why is it going up? Because we have more buildings. We have more property. We have more wealth. We have more stuff that's exposed to extreme weather or hurricanes, you know, whatever it happens to be. So we would expect as we get wealthier that we're going to see an absolute increase in costs. What you can do though is you can say, well, let's see how damage has increased as a proportion of our wealth. And given that, and we do this all the time in all sorts of contexts, usually GDP is in the denominator, but there's more sophisticated ways to look at disaster losses. But once we do that, we actually see, and this is, there's a large literature, this shouldn't be particularly controversial, that the cost of extreme weather events and climate events has actually gone down as a proportion of our wealth. That's fantastic news. And the reason is we're less vulnerable than we used to be. It's, we know how to build structures that can withstand extreme weather. And if you look around the world, particularly in poor countries or countries that used to be poor, the decline in vulnerability is just remarkable. Again, it's a great scientific success story. And that means that people are less likely to die because of, you know, a hurricane, you know, a flood, a landslide, something like that. Yeah, I mean, it's, there's a lot of moving parts in risk, but, you know, among them are weather forecasts and warnings and the ability for people to actually respond when they hear a forecast or a warning. I mean, if you take a look at the Indian Ocean basin, for example, Bangladesh and India, in the 1960s routinely tens of thousands of people would die when a cyclone hit, often unworned and people were, you know, didn't get out of the way. Today, you know, fortunately, tens, maybe hundreds might die in an event that would have been tens of thousands, you know, 50 years ago. It's a remarkable success story. I can't even overstate how great this application of science and technology has actually been. It's like, you know, it's similar to vaccination, right? It's, most people don't know what the world looked like before we had vaccines. And most people don't know what the world looked like before we had, you know, this great reduction in vulnerability to weather events. You know, in the IPCC report, you, and in your critique of it, you talk about how they, they lay out a bunch of different scenarios. And there's, you know, there's essentially five major scenarios. Can you talk about the range of them and then the way in which the authors of the report either do or don't assign probabilities of, you know, that this one scenario is going to be the outcome. What's the, what's the range of scenarios and, you know, how seriously should we take different, you know, different scenarios? Yeah. So scenario planning is a really important tool for policy analysis. Goes back to the 1960s. And the reason why we use scenarios is that the long-term future is basically unpredictable. We've learned this over and over, even aspects of the near-term future are unpredictable. So for, you know, 30 years since the IPCC started, it has used scenarios to look into how climate change might manifest itself decades and towards the end of the century and even longer. To produce those scenarios, you need to know something about, well, how many people are going to be on the planet? What's our economy going to look like? What kind of energy sources are we going to use? How efficient will we be? Many of these variables are very difficult or impossible to predict. So the IPCC has used a range, which makes a lot of sense. There's been a debate in the IPCC and in the community. Do we want to have a scenario that is our best guess as to where we're going in the future? Or do we just want to present them as, hey, here's a whole bunch of plausible futures, policymakers, you can figure out how you want to deal with that. The advantage of having a best guess scenario is that you can use that for things like cost benefit analysis or cost effectiveness. You can say, well, if this is where we're headed and we alter course, what are the economic benefits of doing so? And that can be traced to cost benefit analysis, which goes back to the 1980s. The problem is, and I think you can see this right away, is if we can't predict the future, identifying a best guess is a pretty risky enterprise because we're likely to be wrong in our best guess. We've always seen that. So the IPCC has bounced back and forth between these different approaches. In its recent report before the current one, 2013, it did identify a scenario as what I call a reference scenario, the best guess, often also called business as usual. And the current report abandoned that approach. And so this makes it, I think, difficult for people to understand what the report's actually saying because if you provide a range, people will interpret that as some sort of set of likelihoods. And media and advocacy loves to focus at the top of the range. And so my critique with colleagues, and we publish this in the literature, is that the IPCC, its upper-end scenarios are simply no longer, can be considered plausible. What are the upper-end scenarios in terms by 2050 or 2100? What are they predicting in terms of increase in temperature and attendant effects? Yeah, so the upper-end scenarios, and they have technical names that are attached to them, project something like a four to five degrees Celsius temperature change by 2100. Dramatic, dramatic climate effects. And so, and to contrast that with more plausible scenarios that are, you know, the IPCC calls intermediate scenarios, these are more like three degrees Celsius. I think the best, the best guess for the intermediate scenario of the current IPCC is 2.7 degrees. So it's something like, you know, almost twice as much warming overall by 2100. These scenarios are implausible and that, you know, the short story is they're grounded in socioeconomic assumptions that it's not our planet. So, for example, one of the assumptions of these extreme scenarios is that we are going to abandon all of our energy sources except coal. We're going to replace wind and solar and nuclear and gas and even gasoline with coal. And we're going to consume six more than six times per person the amount of coal in 2100 than we do today. Right. And that is, that's implausible partly because you've written and others have noted that we probably have either reached the peak use of coal or it's, or we're just about to and it's actually going to be declining. Yeah, the scholar who really has done the most work on this is my colleague Justin Richie in British Columbia. And he identified an assumption of the scenarios goes back to the 1990s that assume that the assumption in the scenario is that we're going to learn how to extract fossil fuels and by extracting them, it's going to be cheaper and easier. And it's going to be like an avalanche going down a hill. We're just going to do more and more and more of it. It's called learning by doing. That's not how things have panned out. And unfortunately, unfortunately for the IPCC and for climate policy, that assumption has been baked into the scenarios, really all of the scenarios that underpin what ultimately is really, really important climate modeling work and so on projecting the future. The result is we get these upper end scenarios that once were deemed the most probable that have been the focus of a lot of policy debate of advocacy. And the problem is they they they project a future that is is not one that we're headed to. We can say confidently. Can we say it's possible but very unlikely? I mean, you know, it's conceivable, right? Yeah, I mean, I think when we do scenario planning, we certainly want to do what are called exploratory scenarios, right? So it would be perfectly reasonable for a scientist to say, you know, what would happen if an asteroid like the one that apparently got, you know, took care of the dinosaurs, hit the earth in 2030? That's very different than saying, hey, an asteroid is going to hit the earth in 2030. And so, yes, it's really important. And, you know, climate models will tell you and they tell me all the time, I really like extreme scenarios because that helps me to separate the signal of greenhouse gas forcing, for example, from the noise of natural variability. Great, that makes a lot of sense. The problem is when we conflate exploratory extreme scenarios with plausibility or probability, a little bit like the asteroid example. So what out of the out of those scenarios that are kind of put forth in the IPCC report, they don't ascribe particular likelihoods, right? Like they don't say, you know what, this one is 80% likely to come true. This one is 5% or anything. Right, right. And you actually, you hail that as a sign of progress. Yes, because in the previous report, the 2013 report, there was a scenario identified as a reference, you know, the most likely scenario, which was the most extreme. In the current report, they very explicitly say, we don't assign likelihoods to these different scenarios. The problem is when you go into the meat of the report, not all scenarios are treated equally. Right, and you point out in a chart where you've referenced that the number of references to the more extreme scenarios than to the more moderate or the, I guess, more optimistic ones, what did you find there? Yeah, I mean, if you look at the report and you just do a simple, you know, how much, where's the focus of attention? Where are they summarizing the literature? More than half of the mentions of scenarios are two implausible extreme scenarios. So it has this built in and there's a long history here. And it is, you know, I think it's an accurate reflection of the scientific literature that's out there. There is an overwhelming emphasis on the extreme implausible scenarios. The problem is this is a report for policymakers. And it gives the impression that again, you know, even without saying it up front, that this is where the world is headed or the interpretation that you get from looking at a report with 50% extreme scenarios is a built in catastrophe bias, I guess I would call it in the report. Is that, you know, is it because the scientists putting it together, the researchers putting this together, believe that? Or I mean, you know, how is there bias among researchers to, you know, kind of gravitate towards extreme scenarios? Yeah, and there is definitely a bias and it's not, you know, I would hate to disappoint people, but it's not a political bias and it's not an advocacy bias. It's a bias that for the purposes of climate modeling, extreme scenarios are really useful. They tell you something about the science. And this is where something went wrong. There was a short circuit in the IPCC process in the development and prioritization of the scenarios that underpin a lot of climate research. Decisions were made literally 10, 15 years ago about these scenarios, apparently with no assessment of policy relevance or likelihood. So we find ourselves in 2021 with this vast literature, this incredible report that hundreds of scientists spent time on, and the foundation that it's built on, these scenarios never went underwent evaluation for plausibility or probability. So, you know, in one sense, it's not surprising then that whatever cultural and scientific factors went into the selection and prioritization of the scenarios, you know, we can explain it, but it's not surprising then that the report isn't as policy focused as we might hope it would be in 2021, leading to a media discussion advocacy that centers on these extreme scenarios that are highly improbable. So now we're getting towards that notion that this report is, you know, the Secretary General's characterization of it is not only wrong, but is irresponsible. It's kind of the report. I mean, is it right to say the report is somewhat irresponsible then, or is it really our treatment of it? I mean, it's both. I mean, the working so the IPCC has three working groups, you know, the first one, which this is this report is the physical science of climate change. The second one is impacts. And the third is economics. And, you know, I've had discussions with IPCC leaders and folks, you know, in the past week. And I'm routinely told, hey, it's not our job in working group one to assess scenarios to evaluate their likelihood or probability. And for me, that's, you know, that's a problem for the IPCC. It's a problem for all of us because it lends itself to an uncorrectable set of misinterpretations. So when the head of the UN says it's code read for humanity, and that's, you know, that's not correct. That's not what the IPCC says. But if you look at the report and you say, oh my gosh, look at all these extreme scenarios, we're in a situation where, you know, part of the IPCC's job is to evaluate the literature. And so it would have been much more helpful for the world, if the IPCC had an ability to say, all right, we're going to ring fence to these extreme implausible scenarios, we'll put them in a chapter called exploratory scenarios, something like that. It says upfront in the report, these extreme scenarios are its language is low likelihood. And then it ignores that throughout the report. So what are the, what are the, in your kind of analysis, or in the report itself, what is the most likely scenario, the more likely scenarios, you know, where will we be in 2100? And what will that mean for our day to day life? Well, we, you know, we're not, we're not going to be at, you know, five or seven degrees hotter Celsius. Where are we going to be? And what will that mean? Yeah, so it's important. I mean, we have to distinguish between, you know, what, how, how much CO2 emissions are going to be put out? And then what's the corresponding temperature? There's still scenarios where we could have high temperature change or large climate change for reasons independent of carbon dioxide emissions. So, and unfortunately, those scenarios aren't, you know, aren't present in the, in the current report. But assessments, so the first thing to say is prediction is a mug's game. It's one who thinks they can tell you what the world's going to look like in 2100, you know, they're probably selling you something. But, but we can do some things. And there are some quantitative ways to evaluate scenarios. And one of the things we've done is if you take the scenarios that were produced several decades ago, they project out to 2100. They give us, you know, now 15 or 20 years of data on how the world has actually evolved for, you know, 20% of the, of the century. So we can take the, the evidence from the real world and say, all right, let's match that up with this massive body of scenarios. The IPCC and its 2013 report has almost 1200 scenarios. So we can say, all right, of those 1200 scenarios, which ones best match what's happened in the last 20 years. And so we've done that. And so we can throw out, you know, literally, you know, 700 or 900 scenarios, depending on how, how closely you want it to match. Then we can say, well, what are those scenarios project into the future into, you know, after 2100. And what we get when we take that subset that looks like the real world so far, they project about 2.2 degrees warming by 2100. And this is very much in line with a lot of the physical sciences, literature and other work looking at current policies and projecting that forward. It's still climate change. The problem doesn't go away. It doesn't become invisible. But what it does say is that, yeah, these, these extreme scenarios are really implausible. It also says that the the three degree projection that that now is people are talking about is likely a worst case scenario, not not a central tendency. And also, I guess I'll say that, you know, if our goal is to limit climate change to a two degree change or even 1.5 degree, we're actually in better position than we thought we would have been 10 or 15 years ago. And that's goodness. Why is 1.5 or two degrees, you know, 1.5 degrees, two degrees, why people seem to catch on these numbers? Is there anything magic or, you know, particular in those figures or is it just that's what people latch onto? It's the nature of politics and policy to focus on simple targets and timetables. The two degree temperature target comes from work of William Nordhaus, in particular an economist, won the Nobel Prize in the 1970s, who looked at earlier climatological research focused on temperatures in central England. And the discovery there was that, well, historically, temperatures fluctuated to plus or minus one degree from some baseline. So Nordhaus said, well, it looks like two degrees is the threshold within which humanity can operate. Nice round number. And it kind of propagated through the literature and eventually became adopted as a target. It was realized at some point that two degrees was a threshold the world would exceed decades into the future. It did not lend itself to targets and timetables sort of approaches. And so 1.5 degrees, which is right on the horizon, was proposed as part of the Paris Agreement. And it was more an aspirational target. But that lends itself much more to immediate targets and timetables sort of discussions. So the answer is, yeah, there's a pseudo scientific background to it, but it's much more arbitrary in terms of supporting policy discussions. Is part of the climate change discussion and the way to deal with it? And I want to get into that in a minute. But as part of it, it seems like people are coming at it with very different kind of end states or presumptions where it's, the main thing is to keep the global temperature, the average median mean temperature at or below a certain level. That's one camp. And so everything has to go towards that. And then the other, and you've kind of articulated this, where the real measure is, are we able to support more or fewer people on the planet or more or fewer people dying because of weather? Is that part of what's going on here, is that people are talking past each other? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, climate change. And Mike Hume, who's a researcher at Cambridge, has written a wonderful book called Why We Disagree About Climate Change. But climate change has developed into, I mean, it's sort of like a Christmas tree and everybody gets to hang their ornament on it. And it really now encompasses discussions of all of human and ecological status of the planet. And yes, for some people, they boil it down to a simple temperature target. For others, it's about energy access and justice around the world. For others, as you say, it's about vulnerability and exposure and risk. For still others, it's about particulate pollution. I mean, we could go on and on and on. So it is a sprawling, encompassing topic that we really have to take apart if we want to talk about specific policies. It is a symbol. Climate change is a symbol. I mean, is it wrong to suggest, and this may be far outside your area of expertise or interest, but has it become, and I don't mean this pejoratively, but almost a theological debate, where it's really about our relationship to this life and the afterlife of the future. And as a result, we're all bringing very different conceptions of what is good and just and proper. And as a result, it's hard to even have meaningful conversations with people that you disagree with. Yeah, I mean, I think that's fair. And I also think that that has been the tenor of environmental debates and discussions, you know, going back decades and longer, even if we go back to the population resources debate in the 70s, you know, with the carrying capacity of the earth and so on. Ultimately, the debates we have about climate change are debates about how we want as a global community to go into the future with all of the complexities and all the baggage and all the politics and all that. So of course it is. And how could it not be? But it does make it very difficult to have healthy productive debates because policymaking is precise. It's incremental. It occurs in different places on different scales. And policymaking is not in response to big global views about how we should go into the future. It's very precise. So there is that disconnect that makes it difficult. So let's talk a little bit about what your ideas about what are the best ways to deal with climate change. And you unambiguously, you know, you believe that climate change has happened, you know, that climate change is happening and that, you know, human activity is a major cause of it. The IPCC report says, you know, over the past 50 years, there has been a significant increase in temperatures, you know, and going back to the mid 19th century, that you know, a lot of it has happened since 1970. That is primarily that's that's a function of human activity, right? Yeah. Yeah. So I think I mean, let me just say, I mean, the IPCC reports, I mean, we can criticize them and they can do better and they should do better. But over the last 30 years, they provide a really important touchstone for the core findings of climate science that haven't changed. So yeah. And I guess one of the things and this is where it gets difficult and in your work, I mean, you do some stuff for kind of lay readers at your sub stack and in the popular press, and then there's technical debate. So, you know, you know, there's there's a level of, you know, of kind of expertise that you can you can find in your work and other people's work. But then what what are the primary ways forward? Like what what is going to happen like between now and 2100? And I realize, you know, prediction is a mug's game. But what are the main outcomes that we need to minimize or to redirect? What's what's the problem? If we don't do anything, you know, what, what's the problem going to look like in 2100? Yeah, I mean, and the way that I like to frame it is the best way to to predict the future is to create that future. And we create the future by making decisions, we take one fork in a road versus another fork in the road. And if we look at the climate problem and the broader climate issue, I mean, we can there's really two two parallel tracks that have developed over time. One is called mitigation, which is reducing the human effect on climate. The other's adaptation, which is reducing the climate's effect on humans. And there are a lot of reasons and I've, you know, I wrote a book about this, why we might want to decarbonize the global economy beyond just global temperature change. I mean, one thing to realize is that there are still large numbers of people on this planet that don't enjoy the kind of energy access that you or I have. And if we look, you know, going forward, one thing that I think is a pretty safe bet, there's going to be more energy consumption worldwide going forward, as far as the eye can see, until, you know, the world, people around the world reach the level of energy access that people in Europe or North America or South America have. And this is a well-recognized paradigm. I mean, there's two points. There's one, just a lot of people are really not on the energy grid yet, but then also as energy gets more efficient, it isn't like, okay, we'll use less, we actually use more because it's cheaper and we can do more things with it. Right. So for all those reasons, we're going to be using more energy. And energy production, as we know, can be dirty, can have environmental consequences. Setting aside climate change, particulate air pollution from burning things like coal or even natural gas, leads to millions of deaths around the world. So the idea of, you know, moving towards cleaner energy, it makes a lot of sense for a lot of reasons. And so, you know, the good news is that the energy system has been decarbonizing for almost a century. So what we're talking about with climate policy is accelerating a trend that's already in place on purpose. And we do this all the time. We want, so another, you know, I'll cite the same example, human lifespans. We want human lifespans to be longer because we like living and we want disease to be reduced. And so we do that incrementally, disease by disease over time and we see progress. Decarbonization is very similar. Right. We make incremental progress. And I think the news is actually really good on, you know, the costs of solar and wind energy. There are, of course, debates over nuclear and, you know, whether people fear nuclear more than they fear climate change or vice versa. But the trend in mitigation is a positive one. Will countries reach net zero by 2050? I mean, it's a huge endeavor. But, you know, one thing we can say is it's front and center in our policy debates right now. So I think we have good reason to be optimistic. What is, can I ask from a kind of doctrinaire libertarian perspective, what is, what are the prime, you know, the mode of forces in decarbonization? Is it a kind of market driven innovative search for more efficient and energy producing forms of energy? Or is it government policies where, you know, people on some level representative bodies have said we want cleaner air or we want less carbon, we want this, we want that? You know, is that, you know, what are the, what are the forces that have driven the decarbonization? Yeah, you know, I tell my PhD students to beware questions that have an oar in the middle. The answer's always yes. Yeah. I mean, if you look at the energy economy, which is a significant part of the global economy, something, you know, depending on how you measure it, like 10 or 20 percent, it is a complicated mix of market and government forces. And when I say government, you know, the Saudi Arabian government is different than the United States government is different than the Chinese government. So the energy economy is, you know, the pacemaker is technological change and economics. So all things equal, people tend to prefer spending less money on energy than more money. And that provides a very powerful motivation for technological progress. Governments play a role both in, you know, on the regulatory side, but also on the innovation side. If you look at, you know, look at your iPhone, you know, there's nice graphs that show, you know, a lot of the technologies came from, you know, private and public sector intersection. It's the same with energy. Fracking is a great example. Folks at the Breakthrough Institute in particular have documented how, you know, that was an overnight success story with 30 years of, you know, government investment behind it collaborating with the private sector. You can't really tease that apart. So I'm very much of the view that if we want to accelerate the rate of decarbonization, then we need to have market ready deployable energy technologies at scale that will lead to lower costs for consumers than the ones we have now. That's going to both support decarbonization, but also support the politics of decarbonization. Yeah, I was just going to say, we see this right now. Joe Biden is wrestling with $4 a gallon gasoline. And it's a political issue. And for people who are wealthy, whether it's, you know, $3.50 or $4, it doesn't matter. But for a lot of people, that's a significant difference and affects their life. So being able to produce lower costs, sources of energy, and then technologies that consume energy is how we're going to accelerate decarbonization. So what are the best ways forward? Because I'm old enough as I suspect you are to remember the 70s. And there was a hell of a lot of money and time, taxpayer money spent on developing alternative fuels or synthetic fuels, etc. Because people were tired of the good old odd, even, you know, gas pump days and things like that. What is the best, what are the best policies for government to pursue to help kind of speed along the decarbonization, as opposed to kind of do political favoritism where it, you know, I mean, shifting, if we shift to electric cars, but the electricity is all generated by burning coal, you know, it kind of makes you, you know, feel morally superior in your Prius or something like that are in your Tesla, but you're not really fixing the problem. What are the best things that government can be doing to kind of speed up decarbonization? Yeah, and, you know, ultimately, this is a challenge of innovation. And I recommend let's look at innovation success stories for issues that are similar to the climate issue. Long term incremental, but we want to, we know where we want to go. And the two best examples are health and agriculture. The agricultural innovation system is, just like I described, a complex brew of public private sector. Yeah, is there political favoritism and cronyism and failures in agriculture? Of course. But undeniably, the world and, you know, the United States as well has continued to improve its productivity in agriculture. If you look at health, you know, again, are there, are there market failures or there are public failures in health policy? Absolutely. And, but if you look at the long term, the improvement in human lifespans and the reduction of disease is undeniable. The fact that the United States, even before COVID started to see a dip in lifespans, mainly because of opioids and substance abuse issues, was identified as a problem. But over the long term, we have good examples of how the public and private sectors can work together to accelerate progress towards a target. So is that something like Operation Warp Speed? I guess in a generic way, maybe that's the wrong way to look at it. You know, something where the government, you know, issues a bounty or a reward for, you know, if you develop something that passes this threshold, you will pay you or will subsidize you. Yeah, I mean prizes and awards have been looked at in as part of, you know, innovation policy and they can be effective in a lot of respects. I mean, one thing for people to understand is that that energy, excuse me, energy investment by the federal government has not typically been that large compared to say how much is spent on defense or health research. So one thing that could be done would be to expand and we see, you know, calls for this with, you know, an ARPA-E and so on, but to expand the ecosystem of energy, not just R&D, R&D is important, but the whole innovation ecosystem that to be able to bring things to market to test things out to see what works, see what doesn't work. We're really bad at picking technological winners in because we, you know, the future is hard to predict. So the more opportunities you have to create winners, the more winners you'll have. And of course, innovation policy is littered with failures and that's going to go, you know, so is drug research. It's littered with drugs that never make it to market or potential drugs. So we should expect there's going to be failures, but we have a pretty good ability to accelerate innovation when we direct our attention towards that. So I mean, the climate debate, the focus is on temperatures and carbon dioxide emissions. And I've recommended, it's a little bit more technical, but I focused on rates of decarbonization. So carbon dioxide per unit of GDP. We want our economy to get bigger and we want carbon dioxide to go down. And so we can actually better manage to that sort of a target than say, you know, very abstract temperature target. And that lends itself to evaluating the success or failure of alternative innovation policies. Is there a role for nuclear energy? I mean, you talked about wind and solar hydroelectric power is also, you know, booming in certain parts of the world and typically as a kind of state enterprise. Nuclear power, if you go back to the early sixties, I always find it fascinating that the foundational documents of both the young Americans for freedom, a right wing student group in the early sixties, and students for democratic society, a left wing group in the founded in the early sixties, both take for granted in their foundational documents that we will have limitless pollution free, essentially cheap, if not absolutely free energy provided by nuclear power plants. Obviously, that hasn't quite worked out. Countries like France still produce a majority of their electricity or energy through nuclear power. Other places in the US were decommissioning South Germany, you know, getting rid of it. What is the role of nuclear power in, you know, in a decarbonized global scenario? Yeah, so I think one thing to understand an energy policy that different energy technologies are like teams and people, you know, cheer for them or root against them. And they, you know, it's it's it's if we want to achieve deep decarbonization of the global economy, we need all the tools on the table is my view. Every energy technology has risks. And I know, you know, people that are of my parents generation, the environmentalists of the sixties and seventies developed a very strong anti nuclear views. You know, Richard Nixon proposed that the United States would have a thousand nuclear power plants. And, you know, we topped out at about 100. If we had a thousand, we'd be a lot closer to decarbonizing. There's, there's, you know, nuclear technology is like any technology can advance, it can improve, there's plans for modular nuclear reactors and shipping containers that can power a small city and so on. So yes, I absolutely think that nuclear power has a role to play. If we look at Japan, Germany, Vermont, California, places that are shutting down or have shut down nuclear power plants, it gets replaced with fossil fuels. And that increases carbon dioxide emissions. It's perfectly legitimate for people to be afraid of this or that technology. But politically, people have to decide, am I more afraid of climate risks? Or am I more afraid of nuclear power risks? Because guess what? They kind of trade off right now because nuclear power is one of the technologies that delivers an enormous bang for the buck, bang for the land use for addressing carbon dioxide. And would you agree that the risks of nuclear energy have been overstated? They're often overstated, absolutely. And, you know, if you look at what happened, you know, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, these were, you know, horrible disasters. But if you look at, you know, how many people invisibly die from particulate air pollution every year, you know, the consequences of those disasters is minuscule compared to the consequences of burning coal and natural gas. What, you know, how does China, in particular, obviously China and India are the two, you know, the most populous countries on the planet. And China in particular, is now, you know, a geopolitical threat, or it's, you know, and many people in the American kind of, you know, political class are kind of pushing for a new Cold War with China. China is, you know, is our counterpart, blah, blah, blah. Does the environmentalist movement or the decarbonization movement is part of it kind of working through its fear and anxiety about China trying to get, you know, the developing world or China in particular to give up, you know, its proven energy resources in things like coal and fossil fuels? Or, you know, how much of, I guess, environmental concerns for the developing world and for China is actually geopolitics masquerading as kind of empathy? Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting question. I see often in environmental discussions, I mean, I don't know if it's the opposite, but the idea that, well, let's just be friends with China because we're going to need to cooperate or, you know, you see this in some of John Kerry's discussions that, you know, climate change is too important to allow geopolitics to get in the way. And I think it's a little bit fanciful because geopolitics is always there. I think it's probably more healthy for the environmental community to embrace the realities of the global economy in which the United States and its workers are going to be competing with workers in China elsewhere in India to produce the energy systems that are going to power all of Africa, Southeast Asia. I mean, the energy economy is going to continue to expand. And there are going to be winners and losers in that economic development. And whether it's China's Belt and Road program or Joe Biden's Build Back Better or whatever, we have to understand that it is in our interest to develop the technologies and forget about climate change. We want high paying jobs. We want people who are making a lot of money in our economy that's good for politics. Somebody is going to be building the grids, installing nuclear power plants, solar wind in places around the world. And the argument I would make, you know, if I'm a politician is, you know, let's make that Americans, not Chinese, not Indians and so on. And then you have more of a virtuous cycle. Of course, the military geopolitical overlay on global power is always going to be there. And I don't think that's going to supplant or displace these economic forces, which also will always be there. As a final question, what are the best ways rhetorically, you know, your vision of what's going on is a comforting one. It's non alarmist, you know, while being, you know, explicitly environmentalist in your concerns. What are the best ways to reach people who are very committed to the idea that, you know, there is a kind of on off switch that we're approaching, you know, that like the internet meme, the finger is getting closer and closer to the red button where, you know, the earth is just boiling in its own juices and and it's all over. What is the best way to convince people that what we're actually talking about is a kind of gradient upon which temperature or climate is going to be changing temp or temperatures are going to be going up, but that this, you know, it's it's not yes or no, it's not on or off, but rather it's, you know, it's dealing with, you know, a kind of scenario where things gradually change and get better or worse and that we adapt as well as kind of change how we're, you know, actually impacting the universe or the environment. Yeah, I mean, it's a fantastic question. I'm probably not the best person to answer it because I found that the people on the apocalypse side and the people on the hope side take up a lot of the oxygen in this issue. The reality is that that's not where policy is actually made. And so I tend to to gravitate away from those extremes on both sides. And when you start talking to people about real policy and people who are involved in making real policy around the world, there is an enormous appetite for a more grounded and more pragmatic approach to climate policy. So I am I'm actually very optimistic that we're well positioned that we're making good progress. And if you're, you know, if your view of the world is, you know, the extreme right or the extreme left or you spend all your time on social media, you could get a very different perspective than that. But I think that, you know, very much like the population debates of the 1970s, which were also very extreme, we didn't move past those debates because people on the extremes got convinced of anything. We moved past those debates because the evidence from the real world became undeniable that, you know, we got this. Yeah, are there hungry people? Yeah, there sure are. There's still, you know, 700 million hungry people around the world. But are we doing better and moving in the right direction? Yes. And so I think the population debate is a good model for how the climate debate might evolve is that, you know, it's not going to it's not going to end with a bang, it's going to end with a whimper and pretty soon we're, you know, we're going to see, oh, it's true. Last people are dying from extreme weather. Oh, we're still producing food. Our energy system is changing. Is climate change a threat and hazardous? Yes. Does population create pressures? Yes. But as we go forward, I think that the evidence of the real world will help us to move on to fight about something else loudly. That's not climate change. Roger Pelkey, Jr. Thanks for talking to reason. Thanks for having me, Nick.