#1896 - Bjørn Lomborg

Joe Rogan (0:17)

Oh, boy.

I like a man who prepares for his podcasts. All right, we're rolling. We're up. Did you get that part? This dude drinks Mountain Dew diet. That is like the anti-environmentalist beverage of choice. Aluminum is actually good, right? Because aluminum does get recycled. It does get recycled.

We were so heartbroken reading this article recently about plastics, about how it's like 5%, right?

Bjørn Lomborg (0:41)

5%?

Joe Rogan (0:41)

Single-use plastics get recycled? Yeah. Every time you throw your bottle in the right bin, you feel like you're a good person.

I'm like, I'm a good person. I put it in the blue bin. I'm a good person.

Bjørn Lomborg (0:53)

The right way to probably handle that, that's a whole different conversation, is just simply to burn it and reuse the energy.

Joe Rogan (1:00)

How would you do that, though, and not pollute the air?

Bjørn Lomborg (1:03)

We do that all over the world, especially in Europe. You just put a scrub on the smokestack.

Joe Rogan (1:10)

That's all you do? That simple?

Bjørn Lomborg (1:13)

It really is.

Joe Rogan (1:13)

It doesn't have any? Come on, it must have some emissions.

Bjørn Lomborg (1:16)

Sure. Nothing is zero.

Joe Rogan (1:19)

Right. But it's very, very low. Is it like a car or is it like a million cars?

Bjørn Lomborg (1:23)

No, no. I think it's probably less than a car. Sorry, it's not something I've looked.

Joe Rogan (1:28)

A million cars sounds gross, but that's our city.

Yes. Every day in Austin you get a million cars.

Bjørn Lomborg (1:33)

The emissions from waste burning, very, very low.

So I remember people worried a lot about dioxins and that kind of stuff. Turns out we can get rid of virtually all of it.

Joe Rogan (1:46)

So is that the trade off? Is the trade off you have some emissions from the burning of the plastics, but you're getting rid of the plastics, which is a real, is it a net gain for the environment because the plastics are a real, real problem, particularly in the ocean and in landfills and just, it's a real issue.

Bjørn Lomborg (2:04)

So the real issue here is once you decide to say you have to switch it into all these different bins, you have everyone sit, I was just at a conference in Stanford and you could just see everyone and I did the same thing. You're sort of like, oh my God, what am I going to do? And you feel like you did the wrong thing no matter what you do and you probably did.

And most of it, as you just said, won't get recycled. Why? Because back in five, ten years ago, we just took all of this and sent it to China and had them recycle it. And this is why there's so much plastic in the oceans. It's not because anybody just throw it out. It's because we shipped it away to feel good about ourselves, but we didn't want to pay. And then of course, when you get this barge with all this crap plastic, you either say, should we recycle it and spend a lot of money or maybe just happen to lose it on the ocean? That's where most of this plastic actually comes from. So the idea is...

Joe Rogan (2:58)

Really? They just dump it out?

Bjørn Lomborg (3:00)

Yeah. So if you burn it instead, it's no problem. You just throw everything in one bucket. You recycle the energy and it's very, very cheap for everyone. Nobody has to sit and stand there and worry. And you'll actually do what you just pointed out, 95% gets done anyway.

Joe Rogan (3:17)

So if we just do that, it will have a net gain on the environment. We'll remove plastics, like particularly from the ocean. Who's that young gentleman that we've had on the podcast that developed that machine to extract the plastic from the ocean?

Yeah, tip of your tongue, son. Very, very, I mean, he was, I believe he was 19 years old when he came up with the idea and implemented it, you know, had like a few different models. Boy on slot. Boy on slot. Thank you. Sorry, Boy on. My memory is shit in the morning.

But he figured out how to extract some of it and then they took that plastic and then converted it into things you could buy, like sunglasses and things on those lines.

Bjørn Lomborg (4:03)

And all of this is nice.

And look, we should definitely try to clean up the ocean. But again, I tend to think that we try to make it too hard. You know, if you actually want this to work for a population of about 8 billion, you need to have simple, municipal waste recycling. And that's very often just that you recycle glass, you recycle paper, you burn most of the other stuff. And then you recycle some of the really valuable stuff.