Climate Change Will Benefit Some Countries and Destroy Others | Joe Rogan

You live in New York where you live in in New York when Tribeca flooded a few years ago. Yeah, what was that like? Well, I mean I think in a situation like that Most people emerge from a particular disaster and think my god since this is so awful it must be an anomaly and you know, I think New York was really horrified as a city by Sandy, but There's gonna be Sandy's I remember the exact stat like once every five years But it was category storm was Sandy. I think it made landfall as a category three So it's not even a five. Yeah, so if a five hit me, is it possible for five to hit New York? Yes, it's too far north. No, it's possible. Totally possible I was talking to a really prominent climate scientist a few months ago Who is like one of the he was one of the lead authors on the UN report? Lives in New York does a lot of consulting with the city and I said So we're gonna build a seawall to protect New York from flooding and he was like, oh absolutely, you know, Manhattan real estate's way too expensive to let flood So we'll definitely build a seawall but an infrastructure project like that Takes at least 30 years to build and if we started right now We wouldn't be able to finish in time to save Howard Beach and parts of Brooklyn and Queens If we started right now, he said he said the city knows this and You'll see in the next few years. They'll stop doing repairs on infrastructure. They'll stop Attending to the subway lines in those neighborhoods and even a few years after that They'll start staying explicitly to the people who live there You might be able to continue living in these homes for a couple decades But you're not gonna be able to live them leave them to your kids. Whoa, this is in New York City it's like the richest country in the richest city in the world and and Yeah, huge parts of huge parts of southern Brooklyn and Queens are going to be underwater So for the people that live there right now, what parts are you talking about? Well, the one that the one that he mentioned most explicitly was Howard Beach But which is it's kind of an inch. It's like a mob neighborhood and you know, it's still yeah, really? Well, yeah Yeah, see because that was like the gaudy neighborhood, right? Yeah, that's where they buried all the dead bodies Wow I didn't know that was still a mob neighborhood. Well, you know to the extent that there is a mob. Yeah and Yeah, I mean that's true everywhere on the coast everywhere. It's not just New York New York's not exceptional, right? You know, they're projections that like 30 billion dollars of New Jersey real estate could be underwater by 2030 2030 Why is that not as alarming? I Was born in New Jersey It's not as alarming and then you know, Miami Beach is you know, Miami Beach is done for yeah, Miami Beach is Almost inevitable correct. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know, they could they could build a seawall But that those that's gonna help because of the ground right and it's just so expensive. So you really have to You really have to pick your poison and then when you look around the world, you know It's like Bangladesh that country is gonna be almost entirely underwater That's hundreds of millions of people if we wanted to build a seawall they can't afford that Who's gonna afford who's gonna pay for that? And this is all because of the raising sea level because of the melting ice because of the temperature and all this is happening And I think you know, we think of sea level is really a thing that happens on the coastline which it is primarily But it also increases flooding on rivers because the water is all connected So flooding in the UK is expected to grow 50 folds by the end of the century what? Well, the life D fold London is already like underwater a couple times a year. I mean not the whole city But is this jammy? This is Bangladesh. I just went to Oh Underwater, Jesus like a video that pops up. Oh my god. These people are fucked. Yeah, says 18 million residents live here That's a stop. Yeah, that looks crazy Like it like if you're a real estate projector and you're flying over that like yeah. Yeah, we can't build here Yeah, Jakarta will be totally underwater those apartment buildings like you could see the water level look back up a little bit This is just a running little oh, but if you see look at like doesn't that look like a water level on the apartment buildings on The right hand side near where your cursor is. Yeah, like like that's gonna go up to where that orange level is Fucking Christ. Well, I mean over millennia We're they're gonna rise hundreds of feet. Oh god. I mean, it's gonna take a long time So you can adjust that a little bit but but that's always been the case, right? the the I mean They're still fine. They find these Artifacts and things in the middle of the ocean. Yeah areas where people used to be able to live and now they can't live anymore Yeah, I think that'll be we have to move people have to move. So what's a good spot Alberta? Anywhere anywhere north anywhere off the continent? Yeah, that's the spot now I mean, I think I would like to ask me that all the time and I say, you know honestly the place that I would move to is somewhere in Scandinavia really because you know, I talked about the impacts of economic growth before but There are gonna be parts of the world to benefit economically from this anywhere in the north so Canada Russia and Scandinavia will benefit because But why don't go to Scandinavia go to Canada. It's right there. Well, that's gonna be some nice people I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I can a v is nice but Canada's like our neighbors although they also owns. Yeah, they have wildfires there to Canada And do in the Arctic Circle in Finland bears. Yeah Outlines, but so, you know these guys the economists who study this stuff say that there is actually an optimal temperature for human productivity It's 13 degrees Celsius, which is the historical median temperature of the US. It's also the historical median temperature of Germany What is 13 Celsius was that 60 degrees or something? Yeah, I think it's like in the high 50s What we got Jamie Google doesn't give it to you Whenever I'm in Canada, I'm always like I don't know what you're saying. Yeah, they're like, holy shit. It's 22 degrees 55 point four and so for every degree North of that you lose about a percentage point of GDP. So the the US is now at about 13 and a half Degrees Celsius at our median temperature. That means that we're losing about a half percentage point of GDP every year from it But there are parts of the US that were cooler than 13 and are now brought up to this optimal level Silicon Valley is like exactly at 13 degrees right now Which is you know notable because they're like super productive. Yeah And that's gonna be so that'll be true for Scandinavia generally and it may be part of the explanation why there's been so much economic productivity in Scandinavia of the last generation is that they have already Started doing better with temperature crops are gonna be more bountiful in Russia like Russia will have better agriculture because of global warming, which is why they make such a you know, they're such a Complicated Figure in the geopolitical story about climate. So they are a petro state They have almost all their economic activity activity has to do with burning oil, but they're also poised to benefit from warming So they're doubly motivated to produce more global warming Wow, and they have such a fuck the rest of the world perspective that they're not gonna stop whereas Canada Probably they're like likely to even though they'd benefit from more warming. They'll probably get on board with any program to Avert warming but that is a that's a dilemma that faces every nation You know, like Justin Trudeau Gets, you know talks a lot of shit about Donald Trump and his climate policy But he Justin Trudeau is also approving new pipelines Angela Merkel does the same but she's retiring Nuclear so quickly in Germany that they're having to use dirty energy And even though they've had this incredible green energy revolution there their emissions are going up and every country in the world is It's a collective action problem. Every country in the world is Incentivized to behave badly and let the rest of the world clean up the mess So I was talking to this guy yesterday about wildfires and he was like, you know, California is doing so great You know with all of the emission standards, they're basically, you know Holding themselves to the Paris Accords even though the country as a whole isn't but That impact isn't local. It's global. So it's dissipated The temperature impact on California wildfires will be determined by it. Like I said earlier, basically what China does so in terms of you know What any individual area what any any individual nation is doing the motivations are really really complicated there and in California in particular This is a bit of a tangent, but You know, the state has done incredible stuff with emission standards fuel efficiency green energy And yet all of those gains now are wiped out every year by the fires because fires are trees trees are burning Trees are basically coal in the sense that they are stored carbon when they burn they release carbon into the atmosphere So every time there are wildfires like they were last year in California It literally wipes out all of the progress that the state made in all of its green initiatives that year Yeah And you know about in in Brazil the The president Brazil wants to like basically the forest the Amazon the Amazon is responsible for something like 30% of the world's oxygen And is a huge of all plants obviously absorb carbon and produce oxygen So plant life is really good for fighting climate change when you say he wants to deforest the Amazon like at what scale? What does he what is he talking about doing? So the scientists who've studied his proposal say that his plans Would be the equivalent of adding? Over a 10-year period adding a second China to the world's global footprint