Don't Panic! How to talk about climate change

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 25 August 2020

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Can the conversation around climate change all too often get heated, hysterical, and panicked? Should we be appealing for more calm in the climate debate? In the first of this mini podcast series featuring Bjorn Lomborg and Matt Ridley, host Kate Andrews challenges Bjorn and Matt on their views over the best way to conduct what some say is the most important debate of our lifetimes.

Bjorn Lomborg is the President of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and author of False Alarm.

Matt Ridley is a Conservative peer, journalist, and author of How Innovation Works.

To hear all previous episodes in this series, click here

Transcript

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0:00.0	Get 12 weeks of The Spectator in print and online for just £12.
0:05.0	And we'll give you a £20, Amazon Give Voucher, absolutely free.
0:10.0	Go to spectator.co.uk forward slash voucher.
0:14.0	Hello and welcome to a special edition of Spectator Sounds. I'm Kate Andrews. Today I'm joined by
0:26.0	Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and author of False Alarm, and Matt Ridley,
0:32.2	conservative peer, journalist, and author of How Innovation Works. Over the next three weeks,
0:37.3	this mini podcast series will discuss and challenge their perspectives on the best way to tackle climate change and the role that human innovation has to play as we strive for a greener planet.
0:46.3	In the first of the three episodes, we'll be discussing reactions to climate change, to what extent people should or shouldn't panic, and whether more radical calls for change
0:55.1	actually represent the environmental movement more broadly. Bjorn, I'll come to you first. Have
1:00.6	conversations around climate change been made easier over the past decade or so, as we've all become
1:05.4	more knowledgeable on the topic? Or has politics clouded our conversations more so than it did
1:10.3	before?
1:11.9	I think it's different.
1:17.2	You know, fundamentally, we have a situation where a lot of people are really, really scared.
1:24.2	So you look at kids around the world, especially in the rich world, a lot of them are really worried about climate change.
1:28.0	They think there's a real risk that they will not make it to adulthood.
1:32.3	You know, why should I study when there's no future to study for kind of thing?
1:39.6	Washington Post shows that 57% of all U.S. teenagers are alarmed of climate change. And, you know, a new survey around the world showed that almost half of everyone believes that global warming will likely lead to the extinction of the human race.
1:50.1	So we used to have a conversation where it was, how do we fix the problem of climate change?
1:55.8	And then, of course, there are other people saying, oh, it's not a problem, which I think is wrong.
1:59.6	But now it's, oh my God, everything is
2:02.6	ending. We've got to do something and we've got to do it right now. Alarm and panic is usually not
	...

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