WTH Do the California Fires Teach Us About the Need to Invest in Climate Adaptation? Bjorn Lomborg Explains
What the Hell Is Going On
AEI Podcasts
4.4 • 633 Ratings
🗓️ 27 February 2025
⏱️ 55 minutes
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Summary
California has invested tens of billions of dollars in preventing climate change, billions more than California’s investment in adapting to the effects of climate change and directly preventing disasters. And now, the devastation of the recent Los Angeles wildfires is further proof that governments need to focus on protecting citizens through cheap and simple investments in climate adaptation rather than expensive and inefficient investments in climate change prevention.
Bjorn Lomborg is the president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, the former director of the Danish government's Environmental Assessment Institute, and the author of the best-selling book The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001). He has been named one of Time’s 100 most influential people and one of the UK Guardian’s “50 people who can save the planet.” His latest book is Best Things First: The 12 Most Efficient Solutions for the World’s Poorest and Our Global SDG Promises (Copenhagen Consensus Center, 2023).
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute. |
| 0:03.0 | If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. |
| 0:07.0 | Thanks for listening. Here's our show. |
| 0:08.7 | What the hell is going on? |
| 0:10.4 | What's really going on? |
| 0:12.0 | We said, what the hell happened? |
| 0:13.5 | You don't have to know what the hell is on it. |
| 0:15.6 | They see what's going on. |
| 0:16.7 | I don't know what's going on. |
| 0:18.2 | What is going on? |
| 0:19.6 | We must find out what's going on. What is going on? We must find out what is going on. |
| 0:28.7 | Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka. |
| 0:30.7 | And I'm Mark Tiesin. |
| 0:32.0 | Welcome to our podcast. |
| 0:33.6 | What the hell is going on? |
| 0:35.6 | Mark, what the hell is going on now? |
| 0:38.0 | What the hell is going on is we're talking to Bjorn Lomberg because we've had these horrific |
| 0:42.6 | wildfires in California and everyone's sort of running around saying, oh, climate change |
| 0:48.3 | is causing all these fires and all the rest of it. And what is shocking about it is that California has spent a fortune on stopping climate change, |
| 1:00.0 | on investment in zero-emission vehicles and clean energy initiatives. |
| 1:03.3 | They've spent over the last 10 years $28 billion on that, |
| 1:07.6 | and they've committed $45 billion going forward to all these policies. |
... |
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