The climate problem is real. The 12-year asteroid story is not.

Lex Fridman frames a spectrum. At one end, climate change is a hoax, not human-caused, and scientific, political, and media institutions are fabricating it. At the other, alarm about catastrophic impacts runs all the way to the extinction of human civilization in the short term—not just costs and hardship, but the destruction of the species. He invited Bjørn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus think tank and author of *False Alarm*, *Cool It*, and *The Skeptical Environmentalist*, and Andrew Revkin, who has written about global environmental change and risk for more than 30 years, 20 of them at the *New York Times*. Both men, Fridman says, approach the subject with humility and sit near a center that may not exist.

Revkin’s first move is to refuse the spectrum. On social media and television, he says, people are fabricating the idea that there is a single question, and that is the first mistake. We are developing a new relationship with the climate system and rethinking our energy systems, and those projects are disconnected in many ways even as they meet around climate. Step back and ask what this actually is, and it looks like an uncomfortable collision between old energy norms and a growing awareness of how the planet works: if you keep adding invisible gases to the atmosphere, they accumulate, and that will change everything for thousands of years. It is already happening.

The main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, is “the bubbles in beer,” Revkin says, because he likes beer; it is also in Coca-Cola. Unless you are trapped in a room suffocating, everyday life treats CO2 as innocuous—plant food, fizz—not a pollutant to be regulated from the top. The idea of a swift transition to that world is, after 35 years of looking at it, “fantastical.” He brought a 1988 magazine whose cover story, stimulated by Jim Hansen’s dramatic Senate testimony on a hot spring day, announced that the greenhouse effect had been found. On the back cover: cigarettes. What counts as a public-health threat has always been moving, and climate coverage was born inside the media’s appetite for heat, conflict, and a headline.

Revkin’s own reporting had a 15-year blind spot. From 1988 through about 2007, while he was at the *Times*, he defined the problem as 1970s-and-80s pollution changing the environment, so he focused on the greenhouse effect. What he missed was that we are building vulnerability to climate hazards at the same time. Climate is changing, but we are changing too. West of Austin, a landscape named Flash Flood Alley in the 1920s was later covered with huge developments along the river basins. One side then shouts “global warming”; the other refuses to see that we willfully, greedily put people in places of utter hazard. The same script, he says, has played out in Pakistan and in Fort Myers, Florida.

The story becomes more complex than a magazine piece, but it also yields more action points: today’s coasts will not be tomorrow’s coasts, we know how to design better, and an energy future can be charted at the same time. He no longer fights the belief-disbelief war. Lomborg agrees that the remaining hoax crowd is small and wrong, then adds the other pole. In 1968 Pakistan had 40 million people; today it has 225 million, a large share still rural on the floodplain of the Indus. That is not a scolding about population, Revkin stresses. It is a physical fact: the losses in the news sit on top of people and assets placed in harm’s way.

Weather-attribution teams now estimate how much extra punch a storm got from CO2. The media glom onto that, as Revkin did in earlier decades, but the same reports also say built-in vulnerability drove the loss. Disaster researcher Laurens Bouwer’s work, which Revkin first wrote up in 2010, found no clear climate signal in disaster data then: climate is “up here,” disasters are on the ground, and 20th-century building completely dominates. Florida went from about 600,000 houses in 1940 to 10 million—seventeen times more in 80 years. Measuring warming’s fingerprint is a fair science question, Lomborg says. If the goal is fewer people harmed, zoning, building rules, and staying out of Flash Flood Alley are faster, cheaper levers than the CO2 knob. Talking about those other things has come to feel almost sacrilegious.

Lomborg cites an OECD survey of all member countries: 60 percent of people in the rich world believe global warming will likely or very likely lead to the extinction of mankind. If that were true—if warming were a meteor and we had 12 years—then nothing else would deserve attention, and we should “send up Bruce Willis.” That is not what the UN climate panel says. The 12-year frame still skews decision-making. Anything that only works in 13 years cannot be considered, yet climate, vulnerability, and the energy system are half-century to century problems. Tell people we will go a lot more renewable in the next 50 years and they look at you as if you are 38 years late.

Revkin adds the other cost: the story paralyzes. In Adam McKay’s *Don’t Look Up*, a nihilist crowd shrugs; a problem that feels too big produces the same freeze in real life, instead of action points. He only learned the phrase *path dependency* about a decade ago. “We don’t have a climate crisis in America,” he says. “We have a decision crisis” in how government works or does not. Screw in an LED and it still goes into a 110-to-120-year-old fixture descended from 19th-century gas lamps. A car built today lasts 40 years and ends up as a used car in Mexico. There is no magic click even if the world really were ending in 12 years.

Yale’s climate-communication group has run a “Six Americas” study for about 13 years, from dismissive to alarmed, with disengaged bubbles in between. The alarmed and engaged groups have grown; a durable never-anything cluster remains, as with vaccines. Most Americans, depending on survey wording, accept that humans contribute to climate change. Lomborg puts the shared premise on the table: both guests accept the IPCC science. There is global warming, it is an issue, and it is caused by humans. Revkin’s rider is that losses from climate-related events are still predominantly caused by humans *on the ground*—where we build and settle.

Fridman asks Lomborg to steel-man Greta Thunberg: perhaps someone has to shout or no one listens. Lomborg says he understands and respects what she is doing. A generation of children has been told they will not reach adulthood, or not get far into it; in that information environment, treating climate as the only issue is a natural reaction. She has done a service by getting more people to talk. His objection is the conclusion. If you will be dead in 12 years, why study, why care about anything else? Policy fights, he adds, almost always get captured by extremes because television prefers the mud-wrestling match between total deniers and people who say we die tomorrow.

Revkin wrote that Twitter is useful as entertainment if knockdown fights are what you came for, and invaluable as a tool if you use it to ask how energy action reaches poor communities, what Hurricane Ian actually did, who was most at risk, and how to build forward. The United States had just put about $370 billion into play on climate. Energy Department loan chief Jigar Shah keeps saying he needs something like 19,500 people who are worried about climate—maybe because Greta got them worried—who will connect local governments to multi-million-dollar loans so diesel buses become electric. That is an action pathway. Alarm for clicks, Revkin says, is not more valuable than watching an action movie.

Lomborg’s rider on the buses is the reason that actually justifies them. Diesel buses should go because of air pollution—the particles residents and riders breathe every day—not because they are a climate mascot. Want fewer hurricane deaths? Change Florida zoning. That is a different outcome from swapping a bus fleet. The mud-wrestling match, he argues, also diverts attention toward solutions that feel easy and fun. The electric car has become the sign that you care. The cars are part of the solution and they cut some emissions, but they are an incredibly ineffective way to cut carbon right now.

Lomborg likes electric cars. He expects them to take a significant share of driving because they are more efficient and will probably get cheaper; Tesla and Elon Musk, he says, did a public service by forcing GM and Ford into the game. The problem is that they have been reified as the thing you do to fix climate. Batteries take extra material and emit a lot of CO2 in production. In the United States, 89 percent of EV owners also have a regular car for long trips, and the electrics are typically driven less than half as much as a conventional car. Many countries slide the subsidy up with the sticker price, so public money helps rich people buy large Teslas. The better near-term use, he argues, is electric motorcycles in developing cities: short trips, little range anxiety, severe air pollution, and a much smaller battery.

The economist’s question is what it costs to cut a ton of CO2. For most electric cars the answer is on the order of $1,000 to $2,000; Norway pays up to about $5,000. The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative has cut a ton for about $14. Why cut one ton at that price instead of dozens? Because the car is a virtue signal. Revkin loved the hybrid stage: a Prius that did everything their sedan did at 60 miles per gallon, plus his father’s 2000 Toyota Sienna for dump runs. He wants a fully electrified transport world and thinks early rich-buyer markets are how new tech gets tested. Then he turns to fairness. Shah wants loans for Uber fleets whose drivers burn gasoline all day. A *Grist* story found most Tesla sales at the $60,000-to-$80,000 end. The electric Hummer’s battery pack, as Revkin recalled the figure, weighs more than a Prius. Cobalt and lithium are a new resource rush, with the same honesty owed to the places they come from.

Asked how economists, climate scientists, and climate journalists see the world, Lomborg says the economist asks what a policy actually does, not how moral it looks. Fracking made U.S. gas so cheap that coal-to-gas switching cut more emissions than almost any single policy, because gas emits about half as much as coal for power. No technology is problem-free, and gas is still a fossil fuel, but cheap things get adopted. The same lens says: do not subsidize waterfront building and federal flood insurance that loses money. Revkin’s journalistic caveat is friction. Optimization models of the Inflation Reduction Act look good until the fine print excludes resistance to transmission lines and a decade-plus fight over a lithium mine in Nevada. In 2006, after 18 years on the beat, a social scientist named Helen Ingram told him people vote on what is soon, salient, and certain. Climate is the opposite. The monster, he decided, is the climate in our heads.

Fridman asks what the worst effect of climate change actually is—the sentence that never finishes in a lot of alarm. Lomborg’s first reply is that anything can be walked to extinction if you stack extreme parameters: HIV plus state collapse plus bioweapons is a worst case too. For climate, a rapid West Antarctic melt giving perhaps seven meters, about 20 feet, of sea-level rise would be a real challenge. Well-off places like Holland can deal with it; most developing countries will be much closer to Holland by late century because they will be richer. The pain is not the physics of water. It is that Jakarta and other coastal cities were built inches above today’s sea, so infrastructure, crops, and houses become the wrong kit for a changed world.

Could that cascade into migration, conflict, and system collapse? Most people, he says, move inside their countries for language, money, and relationships; the big northbound flows from Central America or Africa are predominantly about opportunity, not climate. In the 1850s Chicago raised itself one to two feet, block by block, with tens of thousands of jacks. We would rather not have to do that again, but we are an inventive species. Covid showed plenty of bad decisions; it also produced a vaccine in a year. Revkin worries less about sea level than about heat, agriculture, and water. Heat-wave duration is the part most tightly tied to CO2. Carnegie Mellon’s Destenie Nock found that poor households with air conditioning delay turning it on until the indoor temperature is four to seven degrees higher, which endangers children with asthma and the elderly—in Pittsburgh, not only in Botswana.

The debate over 2, 3, or 4 °C still sits on uncertain cloud physics, Revkin notes, and ice sheets live or die on snow in versus ice out. Ocean water under Antarctica, not air temperature, is driving the dynamics that could become more abrupt. Papers showing West Antarctic change as more progressive and self-limiting get little media, because they are not scary. Geologists use “collapse” for a centuries-long process, not a World Trade Center. For rich people, Lomborg adds, much of climate change will not be that impactful; they can mitigate. The live problem is eight billion people living through it, and especially the world’s poor—who need prosperity, not only a cooler thermostat. Jakarta is sinking on the order of a foot a year from groundwater withdrawal, far faster than global sea-level rise, and is moving its capital. Tokyo had a version of this in the 1930s. One obvious fix is to stop pumping so fast.

Fridman adds hurricanes and earthquakes to the worst-case pile. Revkin is not worried about a climate–earthquake link next to the quake risk already on the books: Kathmandu’s range is overdue, and informal extra floors are “rubble in waiting.” On hurricanes he points to paleotempestology: cores in lagoons behind barrier beaches hold centuries of mud interrupted by sand-and-shell layers from great storms. Hurricane Michael was called unprecedented; the damage was unprecedented because Mexico Beach had not been there before, not because the storm was new. Joanne Muller’s thousand-year record at Fort Myers is sobering once you see how fast Florida built into a Gulf that has always been a hurricane alley. Rainfall looks more clearly tied to a warmer, wetter atmosphere; rapid intensification is early science. All of it, he says, is swamped by how much stuff and how many people we put in the way.

Kerry Emanuel and colleagues described an Atlantic “hurricane drought” from the 1970s through about 1994. The robust explanation is not ocean cycles but European smog, which changed Saharan dust and stifled storms in their West African nursery—another forcing, nothing to do with global warming. Cleaner air ended the drought. Globally the number of tropical cyclones that reach hurricane strength has not clearly changed, on the order of 90 a year. Models even suggest later-century warming, because the Arctic warms faster, could even out the equator-to-pole gradient and calm the system. Revkin’s bar-stool card is simple: risk is hazard times exposure times vulnerability. Nature throws darts; some darts may be getting bigger; we keep widening the bullseye. Get off the dartboard.

Lomborg’s shorter version: we see more storms because satellites see more, and last year had the lowest global hurricane count in the satellite era even as coverage peaked—the crime-on-TV effect. Best estimate: the same number or slightly fewer storms, somewhat stronger. Stronger is worse, fewer is better; overall, climate makes the world a little worse. Yet hurricane impact as a share of GDP is going down, which is how the UN says to measure it, because prediction, evacuation, and wealth make us more resilient. Without warming the decline would have been faster. That is the attitude he finds hard to communicate: not doom, but getting better slightly more slowly. People still move into flood and fire zones because the places are beautiful when the dart is not in the air, and because federal insurance cheapens the risk. On language, both men use “global warming” and “climate change” interchangeably; *The Guardian*’s house style now wants “climate crisis,” “climate emergency,” and “global heating.” Lomborg calls that turning the amp to 11.

Where does alarmism come from? Lomborg thinks the IPCC is fundamentally a good research group, even with quibbles about politically coordinated summaries. It is also incredibly boring, which is why almost nobody reads past the Summary for Policymakers. Gold-plated knowledge then becomes a news story. If sea level could rise one to three feet, you hear three. If temperature could be not very scary or pretty damn scary, you hear pretty damn scary. Revkin’s *Times* science editor used to ask, of a Greenland ice-sheet study, “Where’s the front-page thought?” The 2018 IPCC special report on 1.5 versus 2 °C is the one that generated the meme about eight or 12 years left. That deadline, Revkin says, was not in the report. It was in the spin around the report, which journalism laps up and which captivated Greta.

It is not only journalists. Environmental groups, and well-meaning leaders in developing countries operating under the 1992 treaty architecture that Paris sits inside, have incentives to portray disasters as a CO2 problem. That puts the onus on rich countries and on the $100 billion a year that was supposed to flow from 2020 and did not really arrive. Pakistan’s climate minister blaming floods on carbon is handy copy with a justice angle. Local leaders get a scapegoat too. Lomborg notes that last year’s floods in Germany and Belgium killed people mainly because alarm systems failed; a mayor who has 200 deaths on his books would rather say climate than “that’s on me.” Climate sticks, Fridman suggests, because politicians and interest groups need the narrative, not only because reporters will try anything for page one.

Lomborg’s book subtitle says climate panic costs trillions. The EU’s attempt to get halfway to net zero by 2030, he estimates, will cost about a trillion dollars a year for a net 21st-century temperature effect that is almost unmeasurable, because Europe is now a small share of future emissions. A reasonable cost-benefit read is about 30 cents back on the dollar. Tuberculosis treatment, early-childhood education, and nutrition can return $30 to $100. U.S. talk of net zero by 2050, which he does not think will happen, sits in models at perhaps $2 to $4 trillion a year by mid-century. If the United States went carbon-neutral today, temperature by 2100 would fall about 0.3 °F. Revkin’s steel-man is the thing models leave out: energy as a geopolitical stabilizer, fertilizer from gas, a later century less beholden to what is in the ground. Lomborg’s reply is still relative cost. Forcing a less convenient energy source shaves productivity; you do not become poor, you grow a little less.

Fridman reads Bob Ward of the London School of Economics: Lomborg counts $143 billion a year in renewable support and ignores $300 billion in fossil-fuel subsidies. Lomborg agrees the fossil subsidies are stupid. They are mostly not a rich-world climate policy; they are Saudi Arabia, China, Indonesia, Russia paying off populations the way other states subsidize bread. They are also regressive, because poor people do not have cars. Indonesia has trimmed some of them. No economic model he knows shows a forced energy shift as free: if the better option were already winning, you could make money switching. He tries to take the average of models gathered by Stanford’s Energy Modeling Forum. There is little funding, he adds, for research on how much climate policy costs, because the answer is inconvenient.

Revkin’s confidence list is system properties: transparency, connectivity, who is in the room. Young Nairobi entrepreneurs selling propane in tiny digital increments get people off charcoal; a blunt “no fossil subsidies” line at the World Bank can kill that. The IPCC, secretive when he started covering it in 1988–90, is now far more transparent. Lomborg’s day job at Copenhagen Consensus is to ask more than 300 economists and seven Nobel laureates where a dollar does the most good. The leftovers of progress, he says, are often boring and incredibly effective, or exciting and not. Tuberculosis still kills about 1.5 million people a year, mostly parents in their prime; a couple of billion dollars, plus incentives to finish four to six months of pills, could save the vast number of them, at about $43 of good per dollar. Malaria is mostly nets. Even a very enthusiastic climate advocate, he says, might claim $2 or $3 back on an emissions dollar; a lot of current policy delivers less than one.

E-procurement in Bangladesh cut average contract cost by about 7 percent by putting bids online so a goon at the door could not block competitors; some 70 countries still have not done it. Directed food for a child’s first two years costs about $100 and, discounted, yields about $4,500 in later productivity—$45 per dollar. About a third of children in school learn almost nothing; in some developing systems a third of teachers struggle to pass the tests they teach. Revkin’s caution is that preparedness always wins on paper—a dollar before the hit is worth ten after—and we still do not do it. India’s shift of LPG subsidies toward the poor, built on a digital identity, got clean blue-flame cooking into homes that had been burning wood. Ban Ki-moon’s story: postwar Korea, homework by kerosene, a candle from his mother for finals, then Secretary-General. That is energy for thriving, not a climate sticker.

In 2009, as the world circus came to Copenhagen, Lomborg’s group gathered about 50 climate economists and three Nobel laureates. Current technology pushed hard was a dicey bet, often less than a dollar back. Adaptation—dikes, warning apps, tougher infrastructure—was somewhat good, maybe $2 or $3, partly because people already have strong incentives to adapt. By far the best long-run investment was energy innovation. Bill Gates’s pitch for fourth-generation nuclear is the example: modular plants mass-produced instead of one-off artworks, passively safe, hard to turn into weapons. Earlier generations were also sold as cheap and safe and were not, so wait and see—but if new nuclear, or something else, becomes cheaper than fossil fuels, Chinese, Indian, and African buyers switch without a lecture. Los Angeles smog was not fixed by telling people to walk. It was fixed by the catalytic converter.

A dollar on that innovation portfolio, they estimated, avoids about $11 of climate damage. The terrible finding is that the 12-year frame means the world has been spending less, not more, on energy R&D. Craig Venter’s idea of ocean algae that soak up sunlight and CO2 and make oil would keep a liquid-fuel economy while closing the carbon loop. Revkin’s 2006 page-one story was declining U.S. energy R&D: about $5 billion a year in 1970s constant dollars, then a dribble, against tens of billions for DARPA-style defense science and medical research and $2 to $3 billion for energy. Carbon taxes to “level the landscape” have mostly failed. What he got wrong, he says, was underweighting production efficiency: more batteries made, cheaper batteries, Musk’s path. Social innovation counts too—the Nairobi micro-payment gas company, village solar mills in India. Gates’s answer on retrofitting New York’s million buildings was: pour in unlimited clean power and the leaky bucket matters less.

Revkin’s three-decade shift is from top-down (IPCC report, treaty, everyone behaves) to distributed capacity: kids in school, women not walking three hours for firewood, propane in that context as a good. Shale gas displaced coal because it was cheap, not because it was labeled climate. The Green Revolution tripled grain per acre; it did not feed India by asking rich countries to eat less. Economists still like a carbon tax if you can pass one; it will not do most of the job. On nuclear, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl still dominate aging green donors. Cuomo shut Indian Point; Revkin’s environmental-educator wife was glad, and the gap filled with natural gas. Existing plants, Lomborg says, are almost free CO2-free baseload we already paid for. New third-generation plants in Finland, the UK, and France have been more expensive than the costliest renewables, which is why fourth generation is the research bet—and why the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s 50-year big-plant rulebook has to move for small modular designs.

Fridman raises Alex Epstein, author of *The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels* and *Fossil Future*, who argues global human flourishing needs more oil, coal, and gas, not less. Revkin thinks Epstein’s service is reminding the rich world that fertilizer, air conditioning, and the rest exist because of a bounty from the ground. Going forward is substitution, or using the fuel without the CO2. He does not think Epstein adequately accounts for the need to slow warming this century. Lomborg’s takeaway is the backbone fact: we still get about 80 percent of energy from fossil fuels, as we did 50 years ago. Electricity is only about a fifth of energy use. Wind is about 1 percent of energy, solar about 0.8 percent, growing fast but still slower than nuclear grew in the 1970s and 80s. The Biden administration’s own 2050 outlook, if every promise is kept, still has the world at about 70 percent fossil fuels.

Development agencies now refuse fossil financing; oil and gas investment has fallen by more than half since 2014, much of it on climate grounds. That is one reason prices jumped, alongside Covid and Ukraine. Greens who want expensive fuel, Lomborg says, are easy to find among carless New Yorkers who would be fine with $20 gasoline. “People all around the world, their lives are basically dependent on fossil fuels, and so the idea that we’re going to get people off by making it so expensive that it becomes impossible for them to live good lives is almost morally reprehensible.” Johan Rockström told Glasgow that rich nations must cut faster so countries such as Ghana, which has barely contributed to warming, can use their own gas. Environmental groups were outside the World Bank over Ghana’s gas and a Bangladesh fertilizer plant designed to get three times as much urea from the same gas—at a moment of food insecurity. That, Revkin says, is demoralizing.

U.S. polls still split: 42 percent of adults say dealing with climate should be a top priority, including 11 percent of Republicans and 65 percent of Democrats. Dan Kahan’s cultural-cognition work finds the most scientifically literate people at both ends, dismissive and alarmed. There is no red–blue divide, Revkin has written, on energy innovation or, in some surveys, on regulating CO2; the word *climate* is what polarizes. Oklahoma and Iowa fought Obama’s Clean Power Plan in court while meeting its targets with wind that made money. A Woodward County, Oklahoma, oil-company man who believes God controls the environment and paid for a creationist dinosaur playground also had half his roof in solar because he wanted off the grid. Peter Coleman’s Difficult Conversations Lab at Columbia: you do not need agreement, you need cooperation that lets people keep their beliefs. Walter Lippmann’s line, via Roger Pielke Jr.: democracy is different people disagreeing and still doing the same thing.

Asked which U.S. president moved climate, Revkin sees a 150-year background decarbonization from wood to coal to oil and gas. Treaties in 1992 and Paris barely show on the long curves; China’s growth was a recarbonization blip that also pulled people out of poverty. Presidents do not change much on timescales you can parse. The coal-to-gas shift Obama took credit for was set in motion by federal fracking research, George Mitchell in Texas, and Cheney’s 2001 energy task force. UNEP’s 2019 look at the 2010s, Lomborg says, concluded that if you imagine a world that had not cared about climate since 2005, you cannot tell it from the world we live in. The UK’s celebrated emissions drop is largely deindustrialization: be the bankers, let others make the stuff. China became the workshop and lifted on the order of half a billion people out of poverty. Feeling virtuous about a rich-country decline does not solve how the whole world decarbonizes. Innovation that underprices fossils would. Cutting vulnerability buys time.

The biggest pockets of vulnerability are where people live and what they can afford. Affordable urban housing can keep households out of wildfire country. Durban’s flood killed people settled on a stream bed. Typhoon Haiyan hit Tacloban after the city had quadrupled in 30 years, poor arrivals on marginal land; a storm of similar strength a century earlier had killed on the order of half the city. Bangladesh’s 1970s cyclones killed hundreds of thousands; comparable storms now kill on the order of 123, because of wealth, phones, and raised platforms. The remaining problem, Lomborg was told there, is cattle. Farmers switching from chickens to ducks keep an income when the water comes. Revkin’s line: there is a vulnerability emergency hiding behind the climate-emergency label.

Advice to the young starts with taking catastrophism out of the climate conversation. “You’re going to die from old age,” Lomborg says, to the poster that claims otherwise, and likely much older. Then pick a solvable problem: fourth-generation nuclear, a social innovation in Kenya, a TB regimen people will finish so multi-drug resistance does not spread. Revkin wants adaptability, media literacy, and Renee Hobbs’s propaganda literacy; urgency and patience at once, because the gas is cumulative and energy transitions are slow. Usable science, not only new knowledge that gets you tenure, is under-incentivized. On meaning, Lomborg’s unsexy answer is to make the world better with scarce resources—friends, TB, climate done smart. Revkin’s is betterment plus the Serenity Prayer: know what you can change (vulnerability), know what you cannot (a sudden precise ice-sheet date), and find the wisdom, and a less-bad Anthropocene, in the difference.