Transcript of Nobel Prize Economist: 3 Choices Every Country Has On Climate | Ep. 456 with Gary Yohe

In 5 or 10 years, if the temperature has gone up another couple of tenths of a degree centigrade, it's going to be even worse. It's before the fact, everybody's in danger. After the fact, we know who it was.

Gary You spent 40 years fighting a war most people never saw. 8 reports for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a share of the Nobel Peace Prize, 30 words he wrote adopted by 195 nations. But are we past the point of no return?

No, we are not. past the point of better preparation, these predictable monsoons would create tens of thousands of deaths of people who would drown from the flooding. The reason so many people died is they stayed behind because—

So Gary, I don't think most people would understand why somebody studying economics and climate would go together well. What are the similarities between those two?

It's really a matter of being connected to each other. Economics is a study of its own, has to do with worrying about scarce resources on the planet. Climate change is driven by emissions of greenhouse gases from economic activity. And so the connection of those emissions back to those drivers and their markets is one place where economists have something to say. And then the emissions cause increases in concentrations and temperature warming. That warming causes climate impacts like sea level rise and droughts and a variety of things like that. Those all have consequences. And it's when the consequences show up that economists have something to say as well. One of the metrics that people want to use to measure the consequences of the events caused by climate change have to do with economics and the trade-offs in the economic system and how it responds automatically to those sources of risk and what's left over that causes real trouble to humanity.

So you said that there's only 3 choices right now, abate, adapt, or suffer. Can you break those down?

Yeah, it's a very simple way of organizing your thoughts. They aren't my words, they're John Holdren's words when he was climate science advisor to President Obama for 8 years. whenever he would give talks about climate change, he would mention that. And it really, really makes a difference. The story that I told about emissions going to temperatures and then impacts and then consequences has policy levers embedded in it. Abate means investing in processes and policies that reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases. That's mitigation, that's abatement. Adaptation says, okay, look at the impacts and then think about the consequences. How can you respond to ameliorate some of the damages, some of the effects of the impacts that are harming things that you value? So that's the adaptation part. And then the last part is a realization that No combination, feasible combination of abatement and adaptation will fully eliminate all of the potential consequences, all of the risks, particularly the high consequence events that may or may not have been anticipated or even experienced before. But even in normal times, you won't make enough investment in either of the first 2 to To make yourself completely safe. So that leads to a third response, which is try to build resilience as much as you can.

Try to make the consequences of the residual damages to individuals as small as they can, allow them to recover more quickly than they otherwise might. Invest in a variety of those sorts of programs. Invest in insurance coverage for damage from poisonous chemicals that get into your house from fires down the road, make your house uninhabitable, as uninhabitable as the houses that burned down, a variety of things like that.

Seems like every day I hear on the news about some sort of natural disaster That is way worse than ever before in that area. Obviously, information does travel faster now and we're seeing more of it, but are we past the point of no return?

No, we are past the point of better preparation. We've known about this problem for 40 years and we haven't been successful. And in doing very much. Climate change will continue. And it is possible, though, that we could get temperatures to peak and then start to come down. That's another whole story. But in terms of a lot of the damages that we're seeing and the extreme events, which were unimaginable a few decades, a decade ago maybe, which now seem to be routine, is here to stay for a long time, decades, maybe centuries. You are absolutely right about the coverage on the news. I watch the ABC World News Tonight. It's 30 minutes They do 22 minutes of content. And I would say that 9 days out of 10, out of a 2-week period, there will be at least 2 or 3 minutes on an extreme event with large consequences that can be quickly attributed to warming temperatures and human emissions of greenhouse gases. And so that's 2 or 3 minutes out of 22 every night that's devoted to things that are related to climate. They don't always say that. They give you the pictures, but the wildfires in France and Lahaina, the droughts, the fires in Canada, the droughts and the high heat.

And the infestation of beetles that no longer die in the wintertime because it doesn't get cold enough makes those fires much, much higher and hotter than they used to be. And they just don't go out and they're remote. And so you can't get there to fight them. You just have to wait for them to get out. So who cares? The smoke is poisonous. And it goes hundreds and hundreds of miles and it enters all sorts of ecosystems and human systems. So those are the sorts of things. It's not the new normal, but it is what we look at now. And in 5 or 10 years, if the temperature has gone up another couple of tenths of a degree centigrade, so we're well past 1.5, closer to 2, it's going to be even worse.

So Professor Yeo, what is the biggest risk that you'd say we're facing right now?

I think it is, there's so many natural ones and there are so many consequences that are very diverse, becoming increasingly frequent and much more intense. I think the biggest risk is born from the casual attitude of many people who are comfortable with deniers or skeptics or people that create misinformation and disinformation about the client, the climate, that undermine the possibility of even working on the suffer part. to minimize suffering. And those things you should be in favor of regardless of whether or not you believe the science about climate change. But we have come close a number of times to something that was significant with respect to mitigation. That's never really happened in the US. It's happening worldwide these days. Adaptation has taken hold in a number of places because Local governments have been convinced that they're facing some problems. But the lack of unity in accepting this is a global problem and one that's only getting worse is a huge risk, I think.

So you and your colleagues have faced threats for decades because you're talking about science. What kept you showing up

It was something that I was good at, that I had hope that I was helping people. I had evidence that we were helping people. My colleagues and I were sure that we were getting the word out and that people that we didn't know were made better off. People that hadn't been born yet were made better off. We also have lived very privileged lives and have been allowed to do the science that we want and felt an obligation to use that science. And lately, the last 5 or 10 years, stopped communicating with each other, writing scientific papers and patting ourselves on the back that we got something in Science or Nature, but instead writing good science that's rigorous, and accurate that's accessible to laypeople, the general population. And so that's what we're trying to do. We think it's our obligation and we're not necessarily optimistic, but we are hopeful that we're still doing good. It was Václav Havel when he was trying to create the Czech Republic, who thought about it and said, hope is not the same thing as optimism. Optimism requires that you're really pretty sure that something good is going to come from what you're about to do.

And hope really is just, you can tell yourself a believable story that it will make a difference in a positive way. And if you have the appropriate gratitude and ethical push behind you, you feel it's your job to do it.

Take me back to the day you got that phone call about the Nobel Peace Prize.

Yeah, I actually didn't get a call. I was getting, it was a day when I was teaching an 8:30 class. So I was in my loft where I am now collecting my stuff to take into class. And my wife stuck her head in and I said, I think the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, just won a share of the Nobel Peace Prize. And in fact, we had, and that meant the senior contributors to the IPCC like me were in fact recipients of a share of the Nobel Peace Prize. And so what do you do? I knew enough that somebody might call, So I should probably think about winging it in class and preparing something to say if somebody called. And 15 minutes later, a friend of mine, Andy Revkin at the New York Times, called and wanted to chat about what it was like and what happened and stuff like that. After that, the day was sort of a bit of a blur. But we all tried to be very proud, but not self-important and not take ourselves any more seriously today than we did yesterday.

Would you say that as a professor, as an expert, as an advocate, that's the highest prize or the highest thanking that somebody could give you?

I would for 2 reasons. I didn't get to go to the awards ceremony. They only invited 25 people and I lost in the lottery. But my senior mentor at Yale in my PhD program, who was the reason I got into climate, he phoned me up a couple, 3 or 4 years after I was out of graduate school and asked if I wanted to become part of a of a National Academy of Sciences panel to write an assessment of what we knew in 1981 about climate change, which wasn't much, but we took that on. But anyway, Bill won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in climate. And he invited, he was allowed to invite 14 people and 10 members of his family were first on the list. So that left 4, and I was one of the 4 that he invited. So I did get to go to Stockholm for a week for his ceremony. And for an academic and a scholar, it is the top of the world.

What type of conversations did you have when you're among all of the smartest people, like the smartest of the smart of the smart people in the world, all in one room? What was that experience like?

It was— there's an awful lot of diversion there. The King of Sweden was there. At the dinner, I was sitting next to the person who sang the anthems before the dinner. There was occasionally, do I really belong here? But after the dinner, after the awards, it's the 3rd or 4th day, everybody goes upstairs and there's this just enormous party and everybody turns into a human being.

Even you have imposter syndrome. It sounds like that. It's fascinating. The fact that you are asking yourself, do you belong here?

I think all of us that do that every once in a while wake up and say, am I a fraud? Am I an imposter? Did I really think up any of these things or just did I discover them in a book and forget about it or whatever? The test is in a Wesleyan classroom. And there's another story about my going back and worried about AI, but But it is, if you can stand in front of a group of really smart undergraduates who are really engaged in a classroom that's used to— classrooms is used to discussion and everybody can talk. Preparation for a class in economic theory would be, here are the 5 things I want to cover today. And the class would just take us hither, thither, and yon. And every once in a while, you kind of pull them back and say, you know, we've got one more thing we have to do. So if you can stand in front of that group and answer the 2 questions, so what? What do I know now that I didn't know before you talked to me about this that makes a difference, maybe in my life, maybe in the science, but so what?

Explain it to me. And The second thing is why? Explain to me why it's true. And if you can do that without the fancy theorems and calculus and equations and mathematics and analysis, if you can explain how and why, Then you're not a fraud. You thought it up. Nobody but the person who thought it up could do that.

What's more of an existential threat to the world, AI or climate?

I don't know, but I'll tell you the difference. From what I'm hearing on the television, The threat from AI is all these little agents get very, very smart and they have assignments and they decide to cheat by working together. And then somehow the people that discovered them think that, okay, they went covert because they knew cheating was wrong. No, they didn't. They knew cheating was an efficient way of getting where they wanted to do. So they keep doing this. And this story is apparently that they collude, they think faster than humans. They're already solving math theorems that haven't helped the smartest people on the planet for 150 years, haven't been able to prove. So that They're capable of doing that. And apparently the story is they get ahold of weapon systems and stuff, and for reasons that don't make any sense, they irrationally eliminate all of the humans on the planet, as well as probably everything else on the planet, which also seems to me to mean the AI agents. And why did they do so? Okay. That is a story that says entire humanity goes away. Climate isn't that sort of existential threat. It's not something that in this millennia or the next is going to eliminate the human race from the face of the Earth.

But it is existential in the sense that the impacts are Ubiquitously distributed around the world, and the consequences of those impacts happen locally and exposes people of all sorts of all people of all backgrounds and and all the full diversity of humanity to risks mortal risks generated by those climate consequences. And it's already happening so far that if you just take the number of people who die from climate climate consequences. Consequences over the course of a month these days. And divided by time, you find out that 1 or 2 people died since I talked a long time in this sentence from a climate consequence while I was saying this. And happens second, you know, minute after minute after minute, tens or Dozens of people, some rich, some poor, some in Asia, maybe a few in the US, maybe a consequence that robs somebody of a baby. So that's a person that will never live. That happened. So I find that an existential threat. It's, it's, uh, before the fact, everybody's in danger. After, after the fact, after these 10 seconds, we know who it was. It wasn't me. Okay. Oh, by the way, here's another 10 seconds.

So you've been in this for 40-plus years. What is one thing that you wish everyone on this planet right now could understand?

Uh, I've gone over, um, a couple of them. Optimism is different than hope. Uh, Abate, adapt, or suffer. Maybe the one is that, like a lot of policies, don't be too hard on the policymakers. Don't expect them in the climate world to sit down and in 2026 write down a policy or a trajectory and And a policy that will achieve that trajectory. This is the best policy between now and the year 2100. We're done with this problem. We got it 75 years off. Acknowledge that people, when they make their policies and their programs and design those sorts of things, are doing the best they can with the information that they have. And they are beginning to recognize that they're going to have to make some mid-course corrections. And as they do, what they, when they, they're starting to design their adaptation, San Francisco is doing this, so that you protect certain, the Embarcadero, for example, over the next 20 years, as if there were going to be 6 feet of sea level rise. which is a really, really low likelihood or maybe unknown likelihood scenario, but it's not impossible. And the reason you do that is because you plan to change your mind potentially in 2050.

So in 2050, if it's really going towards 6 feet, you're on your way. If it's going to be 2 feet, well, you've overdone it and you can sort of slow down. That was a mistake, but it's not as costly It's not doing anything until another 2050 that you're really, really, really behind the 8 ball. So why is that important for people to know? Look at how people treat— have treated Dr. Fauci, who led us through the beginnings of COVID when we didn't know much. We thought it was on surfaces, then we thought it was airborne, so we didn't need masks, then we did need masks. And it was very, very contagious. So you needed masks and you needed to isolate and blah, blah, blah. And then find out that they got the DNA from China and they figured out what it was. And that's how they got a vaccine so quickly. But then he's labeled it somebody who knew it came out of China and he He helped finance that lab, and suddenly he's the wrong person, and he lied to us when he said we didn't need masks, or he lied to us when he said we did need masks because the vaccine works, or whatever.

You can't allow policies to be judged in 2026 on the basis of what we know in 2026 for decisions that were made in 2019. If that's what you do, then iterative risk management doesn't work, and the people who are going to try iterative risk management aren't going to want to do it. So I think that's the fourth thing I would like people to to know. Adapt, abate, and suffer is one. Iterative risk management is one. Hope is not the same thing as optimism is one.

Do you think science is under attack?

Yes.

Why do you think we've gotten to this place?

Science wasn't under attack because for a long time when I was just starting, Because it wasn't political and it didn't get political until somebody said it was. There is a historian at Duke, trying to remember her name, and I'm looking for her book on my shelf. Nancy MacLean. She did a story of how groups of people who were working on Jim Buchanan's notion of personal security as an economic system. He won a Nobel Prize for this. He ended up at George Mason, but he became the focus of a group of people who wanted to fight for personal security. And they were first to pick up the idea that smoking caused cancer and figured out ways of fighting the science about that by misinformation and disinformation and things like that. The Koch brothers were involved and so on and so forth. And so when I was just starting all of this, that had happened. And eventually the word got out and people were convinced smoking causes cancer. And that was a success story. But in the early 1990s, I gotta remember, I'll write it down. A friend of mine named Ben Santer in the second assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, wrote language that was accepted by consensus by then 170 or so countries.

And it said, and this was 1995, the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate. That was the first public international statement that humans looked like they were causing climate change. That raised all sorts of alarm bells with this group of the Koch brothers and so on and so forth. So they picked up the apparatus that they had gone after the tobacco industry and went after the climate science community. I won't tell you what has come by my transom, but My friend Ben Sander, who wrote that language shortly thereafter, he was in Palo Alto, he was at Stanford. He started to get crosses burned on his yard a couple of nights in a row. And that was unsettling. He was Jewish and so on and so forth. Then his 12-year-old son was kidnapped and they found him in Germany. So these people were starting very early to make people who wanted to do climate science think long and hard about whether or not they wanted to put themselves and their families in that sort of harm's way.

Well, thank you for all your hard work. You've stuck to it now for multiple decades. My dad would be proud that I'm having this conversation because he is also a professor in Connecticut before, an environmentalist, and has been talking to me about this topic when I didn't even want to hear it. You know, when you're a kid, you don't want to hear things that your parents do, and it was annoying. I'm like, Dad, don't talk to me about water and pollution and stuff. I just want to go about my day. So you've written words that 195 nations have adopted and through consensus. What is it like to know that what you're saying is changing how the world thinks?

That was the real highlight. There are 30 words that I wrote them with Steve Schneider and Bill Hare. We were writing the synthesis report for the summary for policymakers of the 4th IPCC assessment. And uncertainty was becoming a big deal. We wanted to express that. And so we wrote, responding to climate change involves an iterative risk management process that includes both adaptation and mitigation and takes account climate change damages, co-benefits, sustainability, equity, and attitudes towards risk. And what We wanted that to get through plenary, and you're right, it needed to be consensus, which meant that word for word, no country represented in the plenary, 195 of them, objected to that word. So to achieve that, what you do is, for something like this, which is going to be very controversial, you stop it, start at the beginning of the 7-day meeting and put it up on the screen and let everybody see it and then bracket it so everybody talks about it. And the 3 of us spent 7 days going to these people in those countries, the United States and the small island states and the developing countries and stuff. And they would make suggestions and we would change the language a little bit and then continue on.

And finally it got to be the last day and we had to do it. So we said, okay, we'll We'll take what we want, put it up there and, and say, does anybody object to any of these words? And 2, 2 interesting things. One, nobody objected to any of them. And 2, they were exactly the same 30 words in exactly the same order as we presented on the morning of day 1. We had gone all around in a circle and ended up back exactly where we wanted. And so it was a big deal. It was suddenly risk was the way to look at this problem. And risk is likelihood times consequence so that if you had a low likelihood event that had enormous consequences, that was a high risk event. And so you had to talk about that and you couldn't be accused of being fearmongering. Because risk management told you, you have to worry about the tails. You have to worry about that, that sort of stuff. Cost-benefit analysis had been the currency of the day, and it was very convenient because it would give you an answer. This never gave you an answer, but it gave you a really clear way of thinking about it and organizing your thoughts.

Likelihood, mitigation affects likelihood. Consequence, adaptation affects

Do you think that the introduction of carbon credits, I think Europe is more into this than maybe other parts of the world from what I hear, and I could be wrong though, but do you think carbon credits has had any positive impact on climate risk?

Yes. Well, it has slowed the pace of carbon dioxide emissions. Below, not below what would be targeted, but below what would've happened if nothing had happened. As opposed to telling everybody how many emissions they could have, it is typically a system of telling a country, this is the total emissions that you can have over a period of time. You decide how you want to allocate them. Best way to do that is a market because market is very efficient moving things around. So people who have permits can sell them, people who need permits can buy them. The price isn't set. You don't have to do this fancy calculation. What should be the tax of carbon? It's the price of the permits. And that has worked. Alberta, The province in Canada has one. New England has a modest one for electricity generation. Europe has a European Union-wide program, and the total number of permits goes down over time, so the price goes up. They also have a program that imposes a tariff on imported goods from countries who haven't kept up with Europe. That's sort of on pause for obvious reasons for all sorts of other things.

China has, believe it or not, a permit system and is dramatically reducing its emissions below what we thought 10 years ago they would be doing. It's not the only reason. They've discovered that they They can make alternative energy. They make windmills really well and solar panels really well. The developing countries want to buy that stuff. And so China has become the go-to place for importing those sorts of things. US is walking away from that and every month is losing competitive edge on a global market. Especially with the war in Iran, fossil fuel, oil in particular, doesn't look like a particularly reliable source of energy. And solar and wind sort of are. If you have a little bit of coal sticking around or a little bit of oil for a cloudy day or a battery for a cloudy day, you don't have to worry about the Straits of Hormuz or the Red Sea.

What would you say is one of the best things that any country or group of countries have done to try and reduce threat?

Well, there are some. It depends on how you're measuring best. Best, if it means had the most significant impact, I think it would be Europe, the European Union, and their permit market. They work on that very, very hard. And that's had a real effect. If you want to think about the science and social science though, I think you would want to know, give me an episode where we learned the most or something that's really, really valuable. And the story goes like this. In the monsoons that occur on the Indian Peninsula, they create enormous floods in the Ganges rivers and a couple of other ones that are very predictable in India and even in East Pakistan, Bangladesh. And for years and years and years, these predictable monsoons would create tens of thousands of deaths of people who would drown from the flooding, notwithstanding that they had plenty of notice that the floods were going to happen. And so you wander around, you go up to the Kennedy School and they worry about diking the river. And people think about that, all of the sort of Western northern ideas of her adaptation. And there was a think tank, a friend of mine named Salim Haque was in charge of that, tackled the problem.

And he recognized that the reason so many people died is that they stayed behind because they wanted to protect their animals. And other people stayed behind, women, because they couldn't leave the house until their men came and got them. And so then they could, then they could leave. So that meant that storm warning, the people who had animals wouldn't leave because they were afraid for the animals. That was fixed by putting stables on the top of high ground where communities could bring their animals. There'd be some food and somebody would monitor the animals. They could leave them there and then go continue off the high ground. And the woman problem was solved by requiring that the people who were employing the men who couldn't come home and take the women and leave town. As soon as the warning was sounded, had to tell their men employees to go home and seek higher ground. So 10,000, that's a recognition of the local culture and the constraints put on by the way people live in society. And nowadays, maybe 100 people die. in the monsoon floods. Everybody else gets out of the way. So that's a real success story and it didn't cost very much.

You've had an incredible career going from an amateur nationally ranked golfer to economist, professor, Nobel Peace Prize, going against the odds when people were obviously not believing in you and what you're talking about, a science like All the stuff that you're teaching, there's a lot of naysayers out there, but you kept going now for decades. What is one piece of advice that you would give to somebody, maybe they're in their 20s, maybe it's somebody, a student in your class who is thinking, is this something I should pursue?

Right.

What advice would you tell them?

The same advice the president of Wesleyan gave his university and A lot of universities around the country, when they were starting to get attacked, don't make knee-jerk reactions based on practicality that comes from short-term influences. For universities, go back to your mission statements. Find out what it is that you said when you were founded that you were going to do. And then figure out what to do to protect those missions from the outside stresses that you're finding. So for young scholars who are passionate about doing science or passionate about the environment or even really interested in learning about climate risks and stuff, but now are wondering if they should go into that is go back and evaluate your passions. Have they changed or is it just some influence that's setting up an obstacle? And if you still have the passion, then there are ways. In the United States, there was a brain drain and a lot of really top-notch scientists went to Europe and they've opened their labs there or Gone to Canada. Follow them. Go there. And when you do, don't make the mistake that we made by insulating yourself and having a small coterie of people that you work with and writing for each other and then trying to impress other people around the world with what you discovered with this fancy paper or that.

Yeah, you have to do that, but follow current events and get a small cohort of folk and talk every week. What's going on? What you've seen in the news? How your work is going? How could we communicate what we're doing? How do we answer the so what question? A variety of things like that. I'm currently involved in a in a group of IPCC colleagues from 30, 40 years of experience and before IPCC. So there are 7 of us. Among us, we probably have over 200 hours of experience in climate science, writing and assessment and research and things like that. We now have a Substack presence, which requires us to meet once a week, to worry about the projects that we're working on, opinion pieces or educational pieces, maybe put them someplace else and then repost them on our, on our site, find some things that we think were important that you might have missed. We will post that. The real value is that every Tuesday at 2 o'clock Eastern Standard Time, we Regardless of where anybody is, and a lot of times people are— a lot of times we have 3 continents represented. We hold an hour's meeting and we talk about that.

And to tell you what we do, the first 20 minutes or so is sort of current events and where we might find the new topic. That's what those things. And then about 40 minutes of working on how we're editing what individuals have written. Some people have gotten together and have written drafts and they go around and people edit them and that becomes something we do. And then the last 30 minutes is essentially therapy. And we just support each other and worry about people's depression and what If we're sources of anxiety or we're becoming each other's best friends, we're becoming some— we know each other very well, much better than we knew when we were just colleagues. And that really makes us productive and is really good. And if you're a young scholar and you do that, you will go through your life with a cohort of people like that. Right. will not have waited until you were 65 to take advantage of it. And if you are a scholar going into science, you will have noticed that those minutes add up to an hour and a half. So that's about how long our hour meetings go generally.

Shoot for 3 o'clock and it's usually 3:30.

Professor Gary Yo, this has been great. I appreciate your time. I learned a lot today. I've been wondering about these questions and I wanted to talk to an expert. We are in the age now, I think, on social media where people want to hear from experts because before it was a lot of people that were reading from a script stating something that they had no expertise really in. They're just reading. Now we want to hear from people who have been doing it like yourself for 40 years and living it.

Plus, Thank you. Thank you for finding me. And if anybody wants to look us up, we're climatecafe.substack.com once a week.