Two (Totally Opposite) Ways to Save the Planet (Rebroadcast)

The environmentalists say we’re doomed if we don’t drastically reduce consumption. The technologists say that human ingenuity can solve just about any problem. A debate that’s been around for decades has become a shouting match. Is anyone right?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 0:38Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:21Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:53Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey there. Stephen Dubner. Hope you're enjoying the summer so far. We are, so much so that we are reaching into the archive this week to play you an episode we first published in the summer of 2018. With all the extreme weather events going on this summer around the world, floods and drought-fueled wildfires especially, we thought this one might be worth another listen. It is called "Two Totally Opposite Ways to Save the Planet." Hope you enjoy.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  At one point, I was going to call the book Toblerone for $10 billion. That was vetoed by my editor for some reason.

• 3:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  Charles C. Mann is a journalist who writes big books about the history of science. His current interest is the modern environmental movement.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  The modern environmental movement, which I would argue is the only successful ideology to emerge from the 20th century.

• 3:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  By the middle of the 21st century, the global population is expected to reach 10 billion.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  And the question is, are we going to be able to satisfy all their demands for food, water, energy?

• 3:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Also, Toblerone.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  Because in addition to food and water and the basics, they're going to want occasional treats.

• 3:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  And there's one more big concern.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  How are we going to deal with climate change? Those are the big challenges.

• 3:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  The future of food, water, energy, and climate change. Big challenges, indeed. How will those challenges be met?

• 3:53Speaker 01

  There have been two ways that have been suggested, overarching ways that represent, if you like, poles and a continuum. And they've been fighting with each other for decades.

• 4:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  That fight and those two worldviews are the subject of Charles Mann's latest book, which he wound up calling "The Wizard and the Prophet." The prophet sounds the alarm and wants us all to cut back. The wizard urges us to charge forward, confident that technology will solve our problems. Surely, you've heard these prophets and wizards speaking to us.

• 4:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  And usually speaking past each other.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  The next generation would be justified in looking back at us and asking, what were you thinking? Couldn't you hear what the scientists were saying? Couldn't you hear what Mother Nature was screaming at you?

• 4:39Speaker 03

  The way to have dramatic messages is to say we're all going to die.

• 4:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  The prophet encourages a return to nature.

• 4:46Speaker 04

  And we need to replant and save rainforests.

• 4:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  The wizard finds the prophet's suggestions naive.

• 4:52Speaker 03

  Well, that argument is so absurd on so many levels that the miracle is that there are people who can say it with a straight face.

• 5:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  The prophet sees grave danger in the immediate future.

• 5:04Speaker 04

  We're going to be into tipping points. The Arctic is going to go. We're going to see a sea level rise that will wipe out islands.

• 5:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  The wizard is more optimistic.

• 5:13Speaker 03

  I think that if we put our heads together, we will come up with ways to cope. But that's no fun compared to saying we're all going to die next Thursday.

• 5:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  Today on Freakonomics Radio, are you more prophet or wizard? Why? And is anyone right?

• 5:41Speaker 05

  This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 5:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  When Charles Mann was in college, there was a book that showed up on the reading list in several classes.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  Ecology, you know, political science, demography.

• 6:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  So he had the chance to read it several times. It was called The Population Bomb. There was a warning on the cover. While you are reading these words, it said, four people will have died from starvation, most of them children.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  And it really hit home. And I thought, oh, my gosh. And the edition I read, which was the first edition, said there would be massive famines in the 1970s. Basically, it said, we are in deep, deep trouble.

• 6:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  And then in the 1980s.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  And then in the 1980s, I sort of noticed this hadn't happened.

• 6:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  So were the famine predictions simply wrong? Or was the doomsaying a calculated strategy designed to shrink the Earth's population before it was too late? Environmentalists were saying humankind was pushing the Earth's limits. Technologists, meanwhile, said those limits were nowhere in sight.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  The world is finite, obviously, and the real question is not whether there are limits, but whether the limits are relevant. At some point, we do run out of planet, but what exactly that limit is and when we're going to hit it, I think is much less well-known than either side says it is.

• 7:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, did you come to feel then that both camps, rather than wizards and prophets, we can call them techno-optimists and environmentalists, do you feel that both camps, to some degree, intentionally misrepresent their strengths in order to engender support when, in fact, the reality and indeed most solutions are probably much more nuanced than that?

• 7:31Speaker 01

  I think so. I'm not sure about the intentionally, because people get convinced, I think, that neither side truly appreciates how much of a leap-o in the dark jumping into the future is. They're both overly confident that we know what we're doing. Take energy, for instance. The best solution for the prophets is this whole sort of neighborhood solar thing. But that depends on there being innovations in computer technology and innovations in energy storage and energy transmission that simply aren't here yet. Maybe they can be done, but do we actually know how to do it? No. Similarly, the wizards, they typically imagine very, very large numbers of next-generation

• 8:15Speaker 01

  nuclear plants. And they argue totally rationally and totally correctly that these have the smallest environmental footprint of any form of energy generation. They're completely right about this. But I'm not actually seeing that happening. Nobody seems to be building these things. Next-generation nuclear plants have been around for 30 or 40 years, at least on the drawing board, and only a few of them have actually ever been tried. So you wonder, how is that going to happen? Both of these, how is this going to happen?

• 8:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  While wrestling with the best ways to move forward when it comes to energy, food, water, and climate change, Charles Mann found himself looking backward, specifically to two men, the wizard and the prophet, who make up the title of his book. Its subtitle is "Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World." Let's start with your prophet, William Vogt. So tell us briefly about him and why he was the one who qualified to become the prophet in your book.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  Well, he is, more than anyone else, the progenitor of the modern environmental movement. And the basic idea of it is one of limits. He called it carrying capacity. And this is that the Earth, you know, the environment, another idea he invented, the environment, is governed by these ecological processes, and we transgress them at our peril. And therefore, we have to hunker down, we have to, you know, put on our cardigan sweaters and turn down the thermostat and eat lower in the food chain and all that sort of stuff. And he put this all together in a book that's now forgotten but was hugely influential called Road to Survival. It was published in 1948, and it's the first modern "we're all going to hell" book, if you know what I mean.

• 9:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  As apocalyptic as his beliefs and predictions were, the title itself connotes at least survival, if not prosperity. Was the road to survival basically hope that a lot more people don't get born and/or a lot of people die, and we have enough to go around and we get small?

• 10:14Speaker 01

  Much of the book is a passionate screed for population control, sometimes written in language that makes you cringe. Another big chunk of the book is about how we should do things in a way that fits better within nature. And that's things like stop farming within marginal land, it's, you know, paying attention to erosion, it's not overuse of fertilizer.

• 10:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  So when you say that his discussion about population growth makes you cringe, was it from a classist perspective the cringing comes from, or racist? How would you describe it?

• 10:49Speaker 01

  I would say yes, both. He was basically pretty misanthropic and it's hard to avoid noticing that although he was very, very hard on rich white people and, you know, overconsumption and, you know, being wasteful and destructive and so forth, that the brunt of the population reduction stuff he's talking about are on poor brown people in other parts of the world. And he sometimes described them in a language that is really kind of appalling. He talks about Indians breeding with the irresponsibility of codfish and so forth. In this, he was very much a man of that time, unfortunately. And this is something that environmentalists today should be aware of and think about

• 11:34Speaker 01

  in that their movement has some pretty deep roots in some pretty bad places.

• 11:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  William Vogt's work inspired the first bestselling environmental book, Silence Spring, by Rachel Carson. Here's Carson.

• 11:52Speaker 06

  Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life?

• 12:01Speaker 01

  And books like, you know, The Population Bomb and Al Gore's first book, Earth in the Balance, The Limits to Growth, all these great environmental classics all stem directly from his work. And so that's why I picked him.

• 12:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  William Vogt was born in 1902 on Long Island, New York, back when it was largely bucolic.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  And then it was just engulfed by suburbanization. So he tried to find nature. He ends up in a Brooklyn slum and is plucked from that and goes to one of those schools they have in New York where the deserving poor are given special education.

• 12:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  He becomes the first college graduate in his family with a degree in French literature.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  And a degree in French literature was probably as useful in career building then as it is now. And he turned to ornithology. He was a passionate bird watcher. That's, I should mention that he had polio as well and he went all over the place despite finding great difficulty in walking and having canes and braces and having to be hauled around and so forth. He was a gutsy guy. And through a whole series of unlikely circum- He ends up becoming the kind of official ornithologist of the Peruvian government on these Guano Islands, which are these islands off the coast of Peru. And these islands have had seabirds roosting on them for millennia upon millennia. And the seabirds do what they do, which is to eat fish nearby and excrete huge quantities

• 13:20Speaker 01

  of bird poop. I'm allowed to say that on your.

• 13:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Sure are, absolutely.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  You guys are just, you know, hang loose, right?

• 13:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  We're very pro poop, yep, mhm, yep, yep.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay. And this, in the 1850s, became the origin of today's hugely important fertilizer industry. These vast heaps of bird poop that were on these islands off the coast of Peru. And they became very, very important to the Peruvian government. To maintain the supply of poop, you needed to maintain the supply of birds. In the 1930s, the supply of birds started declining, and they brought him in, as he said, to augment the increment of excrement. And he spent three years there. And he actually did a kind of a remarkable piece of ecological science, a foundational piece, which is, he realized that there is an oscillation of the currents there.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  It's called Enso today, El Nino, La Nina. And he argued that when the warm water came in, when the El Nino phase came in, the anchovies, or anchovetas, excuse me, which were the fish that the birds ate on these islands, swam far out into the Pacific to avoid the warm water, they like cold water, and the birds couldn't reach them. And this recurring phenomenon put a cap on the number of birds that you could have on these islands. And you could not augment the increment of excrement. That nature set these bounds. And if he did increase the bird supply, it would just mean that things were, temporarily, things would be worse when the next El Nino came in. And this was this powerful.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  Insight for him, this is the way nature worked. And he put it together and then he made two big steps, which I think are enormously important. One is that he said, this kind of phenomenon, which is called a carrying capacity, means that only so much can be produced because of these natural limits, could be stretched like taffy to cover the entire world. The world can be thought of as a single environment with a single carrying capacity. And the second, he said, is that we're exceeding it, or we're about to exceed it, and that's going to bring us into trouble.

• 15:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  William Vogt predicted specifically, personally, he predicted famine, which, as you write, hasn't come true. The global famine rate today is a tiny fraction of what it was for much of the 20th century. So, let me ask you this, as a prophet, do you need to be right, or is it enough to sound the alarm? Because obviously, on that dimension at least, of prediction of famine and population wipeout, Vogt was wildly wrong.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  Now, I think there are two responses to that. The first is, okay, you're right, it didn't happen, but it will happen eventually. We just got the time thing wrong. And the second response, which, to my way of thinking at least, is more nuanced, is, you're right, we didn't get that right, but a lot of the other things they predicted, we did get right. And that is true. Nitrogen pollution's a huge issue. I mean, about 40% of the fertilizer that's been used didn't get absorbed by plants and got, either went up in the air where it interferes with the ozone layer, not a good idea, or it becomes nitrous oxides closer to the ground in the air, which is, cause all kinds of health problems. Or even worse, it goes into the streams, which goes into the rivers, which goes into the ocean, causes these enormous blooms of algae and other aquatic plants.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  These die, they fall down to the bottom, microorganisms consume them, it's sort of an orgy of breakfast, and they metabolize so quickly, they suck all the oxygen out of the air, and you get these huge dead zones in coastal areas around the world. And you can go on and on. All that stuff, if you point to that, they're looking better.

• 17:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  At the same time as William Vogt, the prophet, was sounding the alarm on overpopulation and what he saw as the resultant famine, there was another scientist whose discoveries would lead to a dramatic growth of the global population. This is the wizard in Charles Mann's book. His name? Norman Borlaug.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  He was born in a very poor family in Iowa. Poor soil, terrible hardscrabble farm, worked like a dog. He was determined to get off of that. He really hated it, clearly. He thought his way to do it because he didn't think it was very smart. It was athletics. To that, he needed to go to college, which he was able to do, really, thanks to the fact that Henry Ford had invented the cheap tractor.

• 17:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  Which let his family free him up from the labor, yes?

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Right, freed him up from labor. And even more important, when you have horses and oxen and so forth doing the labor for you, you have to grow food for them. And you have to tend to them. And they're just huge time sinks, and they're land sinks. And a typical small farmer in those days, about 40% of the family's land was devoted to growing the food for the animals.

• 18:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  That was one of my favorite statistics in your book. I mean, it's one of those things that the minute you see it, it makes perfect sense, but I never would have imagined it.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's almost like doubling your land. And of course, your land becomes more productive. A tractor is a huge, huge deal.

• 18:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  On two dimensions at least, right? In terms of making more available land and obviously increasing the pace of the labor.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  Right, and making people's lives better and also being able to accomplish more, it's vastly better.

• 18:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Thanks to that tractor, Borlaug did go to college. He studied forestry and eventually got a PhD in plant pathology and genetics. During World War II, he worked at DuPont, trying to make waterproof ration boxes and mold-proof condom wrappers. Then he got a job with the Rockefeller Foundation, trying to boost the production of wheat in Mexico.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  And the remarkable thing is, he succeeded despite not knowing Spanish, never having been out of the country, never having bred wheat before, hardly having worked with wheat before. And wheat genome is terrifically complicated. It's five times as many genes as there are human genes. And because plants can do weird things that mammals can't, there's three copies of each genome in every cell. And so there's six different versions of each gene. It's just a mess.

• 19:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  So his breakthrough came about from what you describe as shuttle breeding. Can you describe, A, why that was unusual, why more people didn't try that, and B, why it worked?

• 19:26Speaker 01

  More people didn't try it because it was literally written in the textbooks that it wouldn't work. And the thing was, he was so ignorant. Very occasionally, ignorance is good. And what he thought to do was, plant breeding is very slow, because in most places, there's only one crop of wheat that you grow a year. They're called winter or spring wheat. And then you have to wait an entire year to grow the next. And there had been a dogma that you have to breed the crop in the area in which it's going to be grown. And he thought, well, wait a minute. What if I grow one crop in, you know, the south of Mexico, one crop in the north of Mexico where it's warmer, and that way I can do two a year and make things go twice as fast?

• 20:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, Borlaug found a way through, as you said, grit and luck and a handful of other things, to make wheat a much, much, much more productive and much more flexible crop. And this gave way to what we came to call the Green Revolution. And Borlaug went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize. And so talk to me about the consequences of really this one man and what he helped produce, good and bad consequences?

• 20:34Speaker 01

  Well, the good consequences are really striking. If you look at the data, shortly after the Green Revolution, wheat production in Mexico just soars. It basically quadruples. The same techniques come to the American Midwest, and that's when the American Midwest becomes a huge agricultural powerhouse. Our yields just increase enormously. Goes to India and Pakistan, same thing. Then the Rockefeller and Ford Foundation are

• 21:05Speaker 01

  ...by what they're seeing in wheat. And they set up the International Rice Research Institute outside the Philippines. And they resolved to do the same thing with rice, and yields triple there. And the world just grows enormously more food. And sometime in the 1980s, for the first time in recorded history, the average person on earth has enough food year round. And famine, except for famine induced by war, basically ends. It's a huge moment, and I sort of think this should be taught in all the schools. So that's the good part, and it's a huge good part.

• 21:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so let's talk about the downsides of the Green Revolution. One of them, you write, is that it essentially fueled income inequality. Land became more valuable, you know, it just created a lot of leverage. On the other hand, the alternative would be that everyone gets to be poor and hungry other than maybe warlords and kings, right? So how much credence should we give inequality as a downside of the Green Revolution?

• 22:00Speaker 01

  I think you should give quite a bit of credence to it because when we say inequality, it sort of minimizes the actual experience, just as we were talking about when a small holder's farm is able to grow four times as much food, the land becomes four times as much valuable, and it becomes worth stealing. And in countries with very weak institutions, which is unfortunately most of the world, it was stolen, often with the active support of the elites in the government. And huge numbers of people were pushed off the farms and forced into slums, and, you know, communities were broken up.

• 22:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  And what about the environmental costs of the Green Revolution, then?

• 22:38Speaker 01

  The big environmental costs of this are nitrogen pollution, what we talked about before.

• 22:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  So did Borlaug later in life acknowledge the costs of the growth that he helped produce?

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Kind of. I mean, there's a way that when you've accomplished something and somebody is carping, that you say, "Well, yes, but..." And you acknowledge what they do, and then you brush past it. He said, "Wait a minute. The work that we've done has saved hundreds of millions of people from starvation. That's a big deal. And there's no upside without a downside. So, okay, yeah, there's a downside, but holy cow." And I think that's pretty easy to understand. I should tell you that I talked briefly with Borlaug before his death. An article had just come out that was trying to estimate the impact of the Green Revolution and said that Borlaug and his people, if you looked at it carefully, had saved 600 million lives.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  So I put this to him, and he was, you know, an exceptionally modest guy, a very personally attractive guy. And he said, oh, you know, I think that number is exaggerated, and it was a whole bunch of people, and it wasn't just me, and all the things he was expecting to say. And I said, OK, look, suppose that they're off by an order of magnitude, and you yourself are only responsible for saving 60 million lives. How's that feel? There's a long pause. He says, you know what? It feels pretty good.

• 24:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  Norman Borlaug died in 2009, but the legacy of his wizardry lives on in force, not only in the modern day miracle of global agriculture, but in the belief that science and technology can save lives. Coming up after the break, we'll hear from one such believer, the technologist Nathan Myhrvold.

• 24:20Speaker 03

  You know, there was no golden age of mankind that was better than today. That's the first point.

• 24:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  William Vogt died way back in 1968. His legacy also roars on with countless prophets warning us of the coming dangers. We'll hear from one of them, too. Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

• 24:42Speaker 04

  How could we be mad enough, cruel enough, insane enough to have a world for our children and grandchildren which will be unlivable? And that is what we're heading towards at the moment.

• 24:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's coming up right after this. You're listening to a special playback episode from the Freakonomics Radio archive. All our episodes going back to 2010 are available free on any podcast app. You can also listen to the other shows in our Freakonomics Radio network, No Stupid Questions, People I Mostly Admire, and the Freakonomics Radio Book Club. We'll be right back.

• 25:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Angie. Angie's been connecting homeowners with skilled pros for over 30 years, and they've made it easier than ever to tackle home projects. Their nationwide network has experts in everything from plumbing and landscaping to roofing, remodels, and more. You can read verified reviews and request and compare quotes to find your best price. So join the millions of homeowners who use Angie to get the job done well. Download the Angie app today or visit Angie.com.

• 25:53Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 26:30Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 27:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  We've been speaking with the author Charles C. Mann. So you called your book The Wizard and The Prophet, not The Wizard vs. The Prophet, but in some ways, it is asking us as readers to judge the two men and the movements that they helped create against each other. It strikes me a little bit as an unfair fight in that wizards actually do stuff. They invent things, and they push new ideas and systems and products, whereas prophets, it seems, at least to me, primarily shake their fist against the sky and urge people to stop doing things.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  Well, I failed if I've completely convinced you that the prophets don't do anything. Because I don't think that's really true. I think there is certainly a lot of decrying and fish-shaking going on. So, you know, that's absolutely right. But they are arguing for really a different way of life and, if you like, a different kind of technology. So, there is this clash, but it really represents a preference for different kinds of technology, which need to be invented and supported, rather than an idea of a technology versus decrying technology. Although, you're absolutely right, there is that overtone.

• 28:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's time now to hear from a modern-day prophet, one with impressive credentials.

• 28:39Speaker 04

  Mary Robinson. I'm president now of the Mary Robinson Foundation Climate Justice, former president of Ireland, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

• 28:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  Robinson was the head of the Climate Justice Foundation when we spoke for this episode. It has since been dissolved. She also published a book called Climate Justice in 2018. Let's talk for a moment about what you've been doing between the UN position and now you've just written a book called Climate Justice. I'd love to know about the road in politics that led you to this topic.

• 29:14Speaker 04

  Well, in a way, I'm quite late coming to the importance of climate change in undermining and negating human rights. When I finished my seven years as President of Ireland in 1997, I became High Commissioner for Human Rights. I don't remember making any significant speech because another part of the UN was dealing with climate change. It was when I started work in Africa on behalf of a small NGO, and everywhere I went in Africa, people kept saying, "Things are so much worse." And it was the unpredictability of the weather. People didn't know when to sow, and then their harvest would be destroyed, and the rainy seasons wouldn't come. And I realized, "My goodness, I miss this.

• 29:58Speaker 04

  This is a huge issue of human rights, and it's so unjust, so unfair." And that's why I don't talk about climate change, I talk about climate justice.

• 30:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  You argued that our environmental problems are at heart human And rights injustices largely committed by big rich countries like the US against small and poor countries. And it's an argument that I'm sure resonates for many, many people. On the other hand, the technology and resources from rich countries also have a lot of benefits. You know, food production, just to take one. How do you find a middle ground to have conversations that are not so accusatory toward the big rich polluting countries?

• 30:35Speaker 04

  I think that climate justice finds a very good balance in this because we do acknowledge the injustice of the fact that the emissions have been caused historically particularly by the richer countries and now also by the emerging, the Chinas and the Indias and Russians, et cetera. But and that that has a big negative impact on food security, on life security, on health, on so many things for poorer developing countries who are not responsible for the emissions. But we also say that we want, when we move to this renewable energy world, which will be so much better for health, for jobs, et cetera, that there is a fairness

• 31:19Speaker 04

  in ensuring that the poorer countries, and particularly the poorer people in those poorer countries, get the benefit. We need to get to those 1 billion people who never switched the switch for electricity. We've now got off-grid solutions. We need to get to the women in particular who cook on open fires with animal dung, coal, wood, and ingest and die in very large numbers from that inhalation. And we need to make this, you know, kind of an engagement of people in solidarity with other people.

• 31:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's a really interesting, not a conflict quite raised, but a two-headed problem, I guess. You know, technologists, and I guess you could include economists in there, you know, they often advocate for a certain set of solutions to problems, whether it's famine or pollution or so on, than environmentalists do. And I think, you know, it mirrors a little bit political partisanship whereby there's very little middle ground and very little collaboration trying to convert people who are using animal dung as fuel. Obviously, that would require a technological solution that may require more energy from the grid.

• 32:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  So can you talk about what the two camps, if we consider it truly to be two camps, let's say environmentalists on one side and real technologists on the other? What are some ways to accomplish a middle ground that you've seen in action that you think are scalable?

• 32:47Speaker 04

  I'm not so sure, as you put the issue that way, that we have the kind of middle ground you're talking about. We have to get out of coal rapidly, period. We have to get out of oil and gas pretty quickly and be out of all three by 2050 to have that safe world. And what is happening, and I have to say this quite unequivocally, the fossil fuel world is using the tactics of the tobacco industry. It's using these tactics to muddy the science, delay things, and deny that there is a real problem. How do we understand that the new economy is the renewable energy economy? Solar and wind are becoming so much cheaper, they're very competitive, far more competitive than coal.

• 33:30Speaker 04

  We need to have that shift.

• 33:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you're calling for the global community, however that can be created or defined, to come together to carry out climate justice. Talk to me about what you see as big previous successes in the global community coming together to solve problems.

• 33:49Speaker 04

  Well, one example is when we knew there was a threat to the ozone layer. We came together with the Montreal Convention to make sure that what was causing that problem with the ozone would be completely banned. We need to have exactly the same attitude to climate change. I mean, it has been said, and said very eloquently, we're the first generation to really understand the dangers of climate change. And that's why we have the Paris commitment to stay well below two degrees of warming and work for 1.5 degrees and be carbon neutral by 2050, meaning out of greenhouse gases, coal, oil, gas, et cetera. And we're the first generation to understand all of this and the last generation with time and opportunity to make sure we do get out of it. We're going to be into tipping points.

• 34:34Speaker 04

  The Arctic is going to go. We're going to see, you know, a sea level rise that will wipe out islands. How could we be mad enough, cruel enough, insane enough to have a world for our children and grandchildren which will be unlivable? And that is what we're heading towards at the moment.

• 34:59Speaker 03

  The way to have a dramatic message is to say, we're all going to die.

• 35:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer of Microsoft and now CEO of an invention and technology firm called Intellectual Ventures.

• 35:13Speaker 03

  You know, if you said, oh, my God, this, the changes in the food system mean we're all going to die, is a lot worse than saying, changes in the food system mean we're all going to be at least five pounds heavier than we would ideally like to be. I mean, it's just, you don't get any oomph out of that.

• 35:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  If you had to declare yourself, let's say, X percent prophet and Y percent wizard, with prophet representing environmentalist and concerned about population and the environment, and wizard representing technology and maybe techno-optimist, what are those numbers for you, Nathan Myhrvold?

• 35:49Speaker 03

  Oh, probably 90, 10.

• 35:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay.

• 35:52Speaker 03

  And, you know, if you push me, it might be 98, 2. The part where I would differ from many environmentalists is I also understand that technology is not just a bad thing that got us in this terrible situation. Technology is also our salvation. And the notion that we have caused problems in our society, which we have to fix, at least in part through technology, that is the story of mankind.

• 36:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, The Economist has said that you have, quote, "an unshakable belief that human ingenuity will sort everything out." What's that belief based on, other than, you know, history?

• 36:31Speaker 03

  Well, historical experience. What do you mean, other than history? Our species has faced many, many great challenges. And when we face a great challenge, one of the things that we fall back on is technology. And frankly, that is what distinguishes us from other creatures. Most animals have to undergo biological evolution. They can't learn and undergo a cultural evolution. When we went from being hunters and gatherers to being agriculturalists, that wasn't because we evolved new kinds of limbs meant for agriculture.

• 37:12Speaker 03

  What it meant was, we learned how to sow crops and harvest them and build a civilization that could stay in one place because we had a regular food supply. And every time we have a really powerful technology that really changes the world, well, of course, there's problems that come up. And you can blame technology, but I think the constant in that equation is is humans. So of course, we will overexploit things. Of course, we will do a set of of things that is very much human nature. But for most problems, we wind up realizing it eventually, and we fix it.

• 37:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  But a prophet might say, well, just because technology or technologies were the solution to one set of problems, doesn't mean it will be the solution to the next set of problems. And indeed, if one makes the argument, as many prophets do, that these problems are actually the result of technologies, then indeed, the most natural solution would be the opposite of that, which is some kind of reversion, some kind of return to a more natural state, a smaller population, and so on. What do you say to that argument?

• 38:23Speaker 03

  Well, that that argument is so absurd on so many levels, that the miracle is that there are people who can say it with a straight face. You know, there was no golden age of mankind that was better than today. That's the first point. You know, there's a lot of, oh, let's hearken back to those wonderful old days, you know, when the feudal lord oppressed us, when the number one killer of women was childbirth, when infant mortality was 50%. Oh, yeah, I really want those days back. In order to worship the past, you have to have a very bizarre filter on to filter out those aspects of the past that you don't like.

• 39:06Speaker 03

  Look, the single biggest thing that would help world population is to get a higher standard of living in the parts of the world where it's still crushingly bad. If the bottom 2 billion people in the world had a better lifestyle, ironically, that's what would lower their population and help them have a better lifestyle going forward.

• 39:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  This is a point on which Myhrvold and Mary Robinson, wizard and prophet, happen to agree.

• 39:39Speaker 04

  We know exactly what will reduce population. It's educating girls and women, and it's having a health system that works, universal access to good health care. And we've seen in countries all over the world that the population comes down very rapidly when you educate girls and women and have a health system that functions.

• 40:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  On the issue of carbon emissions and climate change, meanwhile, not much agreement between wizard and prophet there.

• 40:07Speaker 03

  I am not saying that global warming is a solved problem. I think it's an incredibly hard problem to solve. So I'm not saying, oh, all of our problems are trivial. Far from it. I think that if we put our heads together, we will come up with ways to cope and maybe eliminate. And that is a really important thing.

• 40:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Myhrvold has spent some time thinking about technological solutions to the climate change problem.

• 40:35Speaker 03

  So climate change is a 1% effect. Now, all we have to do is make the sun 1% dimmer. Now, I don't literally mean changing the sun, but there are a variety of things that bounce sunlight back into space. Clouds are one of those things. White clouds bounce white light back up into space. It turns out that volcanoes throw ash and particles, if it's a big volcano, very high in the atmosphere. That reflects some of that light. And in fact, this happened in 1991, when Mount Pinatubo went off. It cooled worldwide temperatures by a degree, degree and a half Fahrenheit for 12 to 18 months.

• 41:21Speaker 03

  Well, my company has come up with some very practical and cost-effective ways of deliberately putting particles into the upper atmosphere. And on paper, it works out that you could nullify all of global warming that way.

• 41:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  These geoengineering ideas are, in many quarters, quite poorly received.

• 41:41Speaker 03

  People get extreme, some people, anyway, get extremely angry. And they say, oh, technology got us in this problem. We're using technology to get us out. And that's where I come to think of saying, well, OK, so are you sincere about worrying about global warming? Or you're using global warming as a stalking horse for your political agenda? If you're sincere about the harm of global warming, you say, I don't want my environment screwed up. I don't want millions of people to die. So if you take that problem-oriented view, if we can stop that problem, that's good, right?

• 42:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  This is one characteristic of the wizard's solution, a large-scale, top-down fix. Many prophets, meanwhile, think about small-scale, bottom-up. Mary Robinson again.

• 42:32Speaker 04

  Well, there's a lovely story of this woman that I was very impressed by. She's an anthropologist, Mrs. Tong. She was a professor who moved from Vietnam to Australia and could have had a very good living in Sydney and came back to her country because she wanted to work with poor people in her region. She introduced me to the regional officer. She introduced me to the elders. She introduced me to the women, et cetera. They had broken down the level at which women could be involved comfortably. She said, if we did it at the district level, women would feel disempowered. So we broke it down to eight families coming together and forming a cooperative.

• 43:14Speaker 04

  And we now have, you know, a number of cooperatives who are in charge of a certain part of the forestry to maintain that forest. And the regional officer, at her persuasion, had given them the right to the fruits of the forest, as they say. The first fruits were medicinal and actual fruits. And then they said, next year, we'll be able to cull some of the trees. But we will plant new trees. We will maintain the forest. And this, for me, was a wonderful example, which I know is happening in indigenous communities all around the world. They actually save forests. And if we'd only listened to indigenous peoples, we would save far more forests. And we need to replant and save rainforests.

• 43:58Speaker 04

  And if we listen to those who really understand their neighborhood and their forests, we'll do it much more quickly and more effectively.

• 44:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  A lot of the solutions that you praise and suggest that we scale up are reliant, to some degree at least, on behavior change, on people deciding to make a different kind of consumption decision or whatnot. And as most of us know, even if just from our own personal experience, whether it's a diet, or exercise, or spending, saving money, and so on, behavior change and self-discipline can be very difficult. And I'm curious whether you truly believe that relying on humans to, quote, "do the right thing" on a large scale will be successful enough to have the kind of effect in the climate realm that you hope for.

• 44:41Speaker 04

  Well, I certainly think it is important that we change our behavior to a significant extent, and it is happening. People are recycling more. More young people are vegetarian or even vegan. There is a real acknowledgement that we need to do this. And actually, women in the home and in their community are more likely to be leaders on changing behavior. You know, that's what we're good at in the family. You know, may not always be successful, and I'm not the best myself. I mean, I'm more vegetarian than I was, but I'm not pure vegetarian yet. I aspire to be. I love some west of Ireland lamb, that sort of thing. But the point really is that we need to understand the health and the economic benefits that come from...

• 45:26Speaker 04

  A change in vision about where we want to see the world. And that's the most important thing.

• 45:31Speaker 03

  I am skeptical that we will solve it by just doing the right thing. And I mean that somewhat facetiously, but to give an example, there was a little book that was popular a few years ago called Fifty Simple Things You Can Do to Save the World. Well, those are fifty simple things that you could do to feel self-righteous, and none of them are going to save the world. And I think that approach and that attitude fundamentally mistakes what the problem is. And it creates a situation where people can feel good about themselves. Oh, I unplugged my iPhone charger while I was away today. And yet, no matter, even if all of us did that, it would not materially change what's going to happen with global warming.

• 46:14Speaker 03

  We have to make actually very painful cuts, which our society isn't very good at doing.

• 46:18Speaker 04

  We need to be careful about how we will move rapidly to having renewable energy in developing countries. Developing countries have become very ambitious to get renewable energy. We're learning that there are human rights abuses occurring where clean energy is being put into a country in the wrong way. And the wrong way tends to be mega projects that don't have any concern for land rights or water rights or indigenous people's rights to consent locally. An example that I'm aware of was a big wind farm in Kenya. And it was on pastoral land belonging to pastoralists. Nobody thought they had land rights, but they had always brought their animals on

• 47:03Speaker 04

  this land. And these big 365 wind turbines were being built. And they wouldn't have even benefited from the energy, from the clean energy, the electricity. So they took a case, actually, in court in Kenya.

• 47:17Speaker 03

  Well, then there's nuclear power. So nuclear power is a carbon-free energy source that absolutely works. The United States got scared of nuclear in the, well, starting in the 1970s and through the 1990s. You know, then Vice President Gore presided over the announcement of killing the last nuclear plant in the United States because we were going to build safe coal plants. Now, we realize, inconveniently, that global warming is a threat.

• 47:52Speaker 04

  Well, I'm not an expert on the nuclear issue, I have to admit that. The way I see it, nuclear energy has its own problems. We saw that in Japan, when the nuclear power plants were flooded. What incredible problems, and they're lifelong problems for the Japanese. There are problems at the end of the life cycle that make it very expensive. There are problems in building nuclear power stations that make it very expensive. And meanwhile, we have the much cheaper renewable energy coming on stream, and that I understand much better. So, I'm not making a whole statement. I think it's true that nuclear power does not produce greenhouse gas emissions, and that's important. France has nuclear energy and has benefited from it, but also has the problems now of aging nuclear power stations

• 48:37Speaker 04

  and the cost to the economy of getting rid of those.

• 48:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  I went back to Charles Mann, author of The Wizard and the Prophet, about the nuclear power conundrum.

• 48:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  Nuclear power is one of these things that a lot of environmentalists have come around to embrace as an energy. At least some. And what's interesting is that I look to that as an example of how the standoff between the wizards and the prophets can turn into inertia. Because if there'd been more collaboration and less grandstanding, rather than inventing a technology that then kind of got old and got exported to Japan and France, we probably would have kept building a better technology that by now would be, whether universally accepted or not, who knows? But it seems that the environmentalist protest against nuclear was so strong that it really stymied invention or innovation.

• 49:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  So that strikes me as one of the potentially worst paths of having wizards and prophets or technologists and environmentalists not sharing a language, sharing a middle ground. And I'm curious where you see this can go or should go.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  Well, the present that we have, as you say, I think quite accurately is the worst of the many worlds, right, in which people are loggerheads. I suspect that one of the underlying issues is that much of these discussions, the debates, the arguments are couched in, I think, what the philosophers call prudential terms. So the people who don't like nuclear power say, well, we don't like it because it's unsafe, we don't like it because of the waste, we don't like it because of proliferation, and so forth. And they don't like it, and those are all true, but they're mainly pretexts. They don't like it because they don't like the path it takes you down, which they see

• 50:38Speaker 01

  as giant centralized facilities, under state control, and further and further away from democracy. They don't like it for the same reason, they just don't like big corporations. And so the argument, fundamental arguments, are really about values, and we typically argue them on the basis of practical things, as if that is actually what is fueling the debate. I've never seen, to my knowledge, a nuclear power person saying, what if we built compact nukes with smaller scale and shorter lifespans that could be used as a bridge fuel in the way that people talk about natural gas? And say, okay, we'll have this nuclear power plant for 30 years, and that will buy us time so that the renewable stuff can kick in.

• 51:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  And why do you think that conversation isn't happening? Is that a failure of one camp, or is it this construct that has been set up by people like William Vogt, and maybe by Borlaug as well, that we can't escape?

• 51:31Speaker 01

  There's a tendency for people to get really entrenched in their own walls. Our society is now so large that even advocacy groups have become an industry of their own. They have to protect their credibility, and they start acting like the corporations that they decry. And it becomes more and more difficult for, not even just a middle ground, but a creativity to happen. And I think some of that is just a consequence of scale.

• 52:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let me ask you one last question. I want to know what you think is the prophets' view and the wizards' view on, let's say, colonizing Mars, right? So I can see that appealing, maybe not equally, but quite robustly to each camp. Obviously, it requires a great deal of technology, but for the prophets, it's a chance to start anew with a planet we haven't screwed up yet.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  That's interesting. I should say that I am and ever have, since I was a child, have been a space enthusiast. So I think the kind of trade-off there is, do you know the science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy?

• 52:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  No.

• 52:41Speaker 01

  It's a kind of a fascinating look at exactly colonizing Mars. And in a certain way, it's all about the clash between the wizards and the prophets, because it's about how we should live on this new planet. And yes, we need all kinds of technological development, but what is the life that we're going to have here? And also, how are we going to terraform it? How are we going to make it more habitable? And I think there's rich room for disagreement and argument there. You could put it inside a dome city, which in a certain way would be the most efficient way, or else you could really take the challenge of trying to transform the whole planet and make it breathable.

• 53:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  If you were going to bring one science advisor with you on that establishment of human colony there, would it be William Vogt or would it be Norman Borlaug?

• 53:28Speaker 01

  Well, I haven't thought about this. What I'm thinking is, which person would I like to be locked up with in a small vessel for several years? And Borlaug, I think, had a better sense of humor.

• 53:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, that seems an easy answer. But forget about being locked up. So let's say that personal confinement was not the one metric that you had to choose your scientist on, but would you rather have the guy who figured out a new dimension of botany or a guy who understood that resources are finite and carrying capacity is a concept that should be applied to the environment and so on?

• 54:08Speaker 01

  You know, it's funny. I think I would choose vote, and here's the reason. That is a hostile environment. Mistakes will kill you. As I'm starting out, I want somebody who's hyper-aware of potential mistakes. And so I think I would probably have a chance at coming up with some of the innovations and so forth. I'd really want somebody who would point out how I might be on the path to killing myself. So if I could have Borlaug on the way over, and transform him to vote when I'm there.

• 54:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Charles Mann's book, Remember, is called The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World. Thanks to him, and also to Mary Robinson and Nathan Mirbold. Again, this episode first aired a few years ago, and there has been some change since then. Most significantly, scientists, technologists, and inventors continue to make progress in the areas of solar and nuclear technology, as well as battery technology. Solar panels in particular are increasingly more efficient and less expensive. And the nuclear power industry, in retreat for years, in the US especially, has perhaps turned a corner with a spike in federal funding for SMRs, small

• 55:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  modular reactors, that are smaller, cheaper, and presumably safer than traditional nuclear plants. And one SMR manufacturer, NuScale, has gained government approval of its design and looks to be moving toward construction. Coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  So, love it or hate it, there will never be another country in the world that is more auto-oriented than the United States.

• 55:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Another installment in our series about how the US is just different from other countries. This time around, infrastructure. It's the job of the economist to stand in the middle of the road and say, "Stop, let's get out our calculators." Yes, we'll talk to economists, but also federal transportation officials from the recent past. People sometimes wonder how China is able to have these huge infrastructure projects done, finished, completed right away. And the president.

• 56:27Speaker 07

  I'm U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.

• 56:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  So what's the infrastructure future all about, Mayor Pete?

• 56:34Speaker 07

  It's not about being anti-car. It's about making sure that the car fits in a bigger picture.

• 56:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's next time on Freakonomics Radio. Until then, take care of yourself, and if you can, someone else, too.

• 56:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. We can be reached at [email protected]. The Freakonomics Radio network also includes No Stupid Questions, People I Mostly Admire, and the Freakonomics Radio Book Club. This episode was produced by Harry Huggins. Our staff also includes Alison Kreglo, Greg Rippon, Joel Meyer, Tricia Bobita, Mary De Duke, Zach Lepinski, Brent Katz, Ryan Kelly, Emma Terrell, Lyric Bowditch, Jasmine Klinger, and Jacob Clemente. Our theme song is "Mr. Fortune" by The Hitchhikers. All the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can get the entire archive of Freakonomics Radio on any podcast app. If you'd like to read a transcript or check out the show notes, which have links to all the underlying research,

• 57:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  visit Freakonomics.com. As always, thanks for listening. Is it true, or was I mishearing? Is your nickname for the Archbishop Arch? Is that what you call him?

• 57:41Speaker 04

  Yes, he always said, "Call me Arch."

• 57:47Speaker 05

  The Freakonomics Radio Network.

• 57:53Speaker 05

  Stitcher.

• 57:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by EverPure. Is the value of AI not living up to the promise? The problem is probably your data, not your AI models. When it's scattered across different systems, getting your data AI-ready is a challenge. You keep your AI waiting and everything slows down. EverPure unifies your data so you can see it, understand it, and control it all from one simple place and get it AI-ready fast. Unlock the true value of your AI at everpuredata.com. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Ozempic. Innovation happens through rethinking what's possible, and when it comes to GLP-1s, Ozempic pill does just that.

• 58:41Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 59:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  and affordable energy is accessible for generations to come. Go to southerncompany.com to learn more. Southern Company: building the future of energy.

• 59:39Speaker 08

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