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Hello and welcome to Spectator Sounds. I'm Kate Andrews.

Today I'm joined by Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and author of False Alarm,

and Matt Ridley, conservative peer, journalist, and author of How Innovation Works.

Over the next three weeks, this mini podcast series is discussing and challenging

their perspectives on the best way to tackle climate change. In the second of three episodes,

we're talking about the role human innovation has to play as we strive for a greener planet

and how far human progress can really take us. Matt, I'll start with you. Human innovation

is the linchpin of your latest book. Can you tell us

what exactly you mean when you're talking about innovation and how can it help us tackle climate

change? I think innovation is more than just invention. So I draw the distinction between people

who invent prototypes and people who innovate them into being affordable, reliable and available. And that's often

much harder work than people think. It tends to be that we assume that if you build a better

mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. That's not the case. Like someone like Thomas

Edison was very good at realizing that you've then, having invented the first light bulb, you've then

got to make it reliable so people are going to want it. And he tried 6,000 different types of

plant before he found a type of Japanese bamboo that would make the filament of a light bulb

that would last for a large number of hours. There's a very nice story told by Charles Towns,

the inventor of the laser, about a rabbit and a beaver looking at the hoover dam.

And the beaver is saying, no, I didn't build it, but it is based on an idea of mine.

...