Paul Ehrlich on The Population Bomb, Climate Change, and the Ethics of Extinction
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the hatchback that took you cross-country and back, and the minivan that tackles the weekly carpool. For the cars you couldn't live without, trust Amica Auto Insurance. Amica. Empathy is our best policy. You're listening to The Michael Shermer Show. Well, Paul, you just turned 92 years old. I don't get a chance to talk to people who have had so much life experience as you. So before we delve into Extinctions and your new book,

Just give us a sense of what you've lived through, and if you are feeling optimistic or still pessimistic or maybe neutral or waiting to see, what is your sense of how things are going? I like to think of myself as objective as possible, knowing full well, and I've actually worked in some of these areas that scientists...

always bring to their work, their personalities, their background, their prejudices, the prejudices of their society, and so on. I think the main thing that separates scientists from most other scholars is that they always insist on their work being reviewed by other scientists. And we set up the system pretty much so other scientists can make points by showing other scientists are wrong.

The guy who got the Nobel Prize for finding out how your semicircular canals, as I recall, helped your balance. Another guy got a Nobel Prize for showing that he didn't have the system right. So we're used to being reviewed heavily and you get used to it, but never totally. I mean...

When my mistakes are pointed out to me, I don't thrill at it, but I do try and learn from it. Let's put it that way. And what would be the biggest mistake you feel you've made? The biggest mistake I ever made was putting scenarios in the population bomb.

That was because even though I stated these are just little stories about the future to help you think about it, at least, I don't know, maybe several hundred people made livings pointing out that my scenarios didn't come true. I wish that I was a perfect predictor. I wish that everything I predicted about what was going to happen to the world had happened. If that was the case, I would have worked the...

Stock market very well. And you and I wouldn't be wasting time here. We'd be sitting on the beach at Bora Bora near my mansion, having drinks and admiring the other bathers. But no such luck.

Okay, fair enough. That shows you have intellectual character to admit that. Yeah, because I've read all those critiques of you and how you were wrong about population bombs exploding and so on, and a lot of that didn't happen.

But still, in a way, one of the critiques I have of the environmental movement is they don't take enough credit for the progress that we've made. In other words, a lot of environmentalists warned us about these things, and we did a lot of good things to bring about some solutions. One of the things...

that we covered, of course, not being able to read my own book. I've got to listen to it, which is really hard. But one of the things we covered is all the things we are doing and trying to do, and many people are concerned. One of the things that makes me a pessimist, however, is that we see now a very large group of politicians who are determined to end most of those efforts. The most

The classic example is that a recent president of the United States completely ended the programs that had been established to warn us about pandemics. And you talk about, I mean, I have thought a lot and have mixed views on how governments should and don't work.

But one of the things that's clear is that you and I can't predict whether we're going to have a pandemic. That's something that requires a lot of care over a lot of people. And we had started to develop mechanisms, not me. It's an area I've been involved in only very marginally talking about how global change is increasing the probability of pandemics. But

Lots of other people are worried about that, and they had established ways of dealing, of trying to deal with it better. And those were just discarded by a presidential administration. So that doesn't make me optimistic. Yeah.

But on the other hand, we have 8 billion people now, and it looks like we're going to top out at maybe 9 or 10 and then go back down to around 8, 7, 6, maybe even lower by the end of the century. Oh, I think we'll go down way below. The most thorough estimate recently of where we'll go down to if we persist, if we survive as a society.

civilization was done by the top economist in the world. Now that my friend Ken Arrow is dead at Sir Partha, Tascuta in England and the British government

basically gave him a large crew and money to look at the issue of the economics of biodiversity, which in a sense is the topic of the new book, Before They Vanish. And Dasgupta looked at it very carefully and came as an economist and with economists and came to the conclusion that

humanity might be able to support a little over 3 billion people if everybody agreed to live at a Mexican standard of living. Right now, we have over about 8 billion people, and even the Mexicans want to increase their standard of living. And my two closest colleagues in writing this book are both Mexican, so I'm very familiar with Mexican standards.

uh, attitudes on things. They're both by the way, members of the U S national Academy. Uh, and one of the pleasures of my life has been while I've gotten huge amounts of criticism, basically none at all from any group of natural scientists who look at ecological, environmental, economic, and so on issues. In other words, uh,

I can easily stand all the insults in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times by the people they hired and published nonsense because I too am a member of the U.S. National Academies. I've gotten the equivalent of the Nobel Prize and about 25 other prizes. I'm a member of the British Royal Society, and all that stuff really doesn't mean that much.

except it means that I'm not getting criticized by my fellow scientists. I'm getting criticized by people who have a stake in how many people there are in the world. And the main beneficiaries, one of my colleagues said just the other day, Larry Goulder, who's in our economics department here, and he said the only people who benefit from more and more people is the already morbidly rich.

And they're going to pay the price eventually. I mean, what can I say? Criticize me? Fine. I'm not going to change my views.

Because some people say, just assert that I'm wrong. Yeah, I have been wrong about the details of the collapse that we're now in. Just like the economists are always wrong about the details of what's going to happen with the interest rates, with the number of unemployed, etc., etc. But they try and look at the general trends.

And so do scientists. And anytime human beings started predicting

Our ancestors, our distant, distant ancestors, hundreds of millions of years ago, started predicting when they came out of the water and got on the land. That was when there was enough of an ozone layer to let animals live on land, and therefore they could see in the distance. When you were swimming around in the tropical oceans,

When you came up to a, you saw things close to you. And when you came up to a coral reef, you couldn't tell how distant it was and where you could get through it. But on land, when you were walking along and you saw a mountain ahead of you, you could plan on going one side or the other. And you might be right or you might be wrong. And everybody plans all the time. And everybody knows they can't predict everything.

exactly what's going to be the trajectory they're going to follow, but they make a guess, and then they find out whether they're right or wrong. And a huge benefit and penalty of living too long like I have is that you find out when you were right and when you were wrong, and then you pay the price for them, or people attempt to get you to pay the price for it.

As I read it, first of all, responding to what you said, you know, I live in Santa Barbara, you live in Palo Alto. You know, I want you to live at the level of a Californian, not a Mexican. I want everybody to live at that level. It seems to me that that's actually good for the environment. That is to say, when you get people wealthy and healthy and educated, they have fewer babies, they care about the environment, they care about species, right?

And they want to do good things. If you're poor and starving and you don't know where your next meal is coming from and you don't have a roof over your head, you can't really care about, you know, the environment a thousand years from now or whether species are going extinct in some other part of the globe. So it seems to me part of the solution is just make everybody wealthier and healthier and educated. I'm in total agreement with you. The issue is, can we?

And is there any real attempt to do it? And are people any happier? One of the things the economists have studied is whether the increase, say, over the last 30 years of measures like GDP have made people any happier. And the general answer, regardless of country, the study's been done, I believe, in Europe and North America and Japan. And there hasn't been any increase in happiness anywhere.

except maybe among those few people who are the incredibly wealthy, although I even doubt it there. So I think one of the problems is that the things that you mentioned, which you and I would share as goals, have not been the goals of the system. The goals of the system have been to transfer wealth, certainly for the last 40 years, and in the United States, it's

It's been to transfer wealth from the poor and the middle class to, as you know from the details, incredible wealth for a few, very few individuals. But if we could do it, I mean, the way I would say from the data I can see,

that we could do it, we might have one or two billion people living the kind of life that you just described.

But the attempt to get there is wrecking our life support systems. That's what Before They Vanish is talking about. The only kind of capital that human beings can survive and civilization can survive, can't survive without. That is the capital we're utterly dependent on is the living capital, the biodiversity that runs the systems we evolved in

and the systems we must continue on. And my basic solution until somebody shows me it's wrong has to be redistribution. You know, we can make everybody happy if we have fewer bodies and we are a lot better at taking care of the people who are on the shorter end of the economic stick. But what you said is, I think, perfectly correct.

The issue is what are the costs and benefits and possibilities of getting there? Northern European countries have a much wider distribution of wealth and lower income inequality. Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Germany, France, and so on. They care about the environment. So are you more hopeful that those countries are doing the right thing and that we should use them as a model? Well, one of the most hopeful things is, of course, that their total fertility rates

have dropped. And if you want, if you believe as I and all of my, every last one of my colleagues, I'm talking here for hundreds and hundreds of scientists and actually 15,000 scientists said it about a decade or two ago, if you believe there are too many people in the world, that's a major cause of our problems, then the best news is

is that in Europe, to a degree in North America, in Japan, in some parts of East Asia, total fertility rates have dropped.

And the size of the populations in a few places is actually declining. And that is wonderful news because they, of course, the problem isn't the number of people as a number. It's what each one consumes, how much plastics each one demands, how much chemicals that are mimicking our hormones each one demands, etc.

And so there are too many rich people, not too many poor people in the world, although in the sense there's too many poor people because there should be none. We should be able, as a very intelligent, cooperative primate, be able to take care of everyone.

That ought to be our goal, not to have people sleeping on the streets, not to have people malnourished or importantly, as we have so much today, micronutrient malnourished. So I'm ranting at you.

Well, that's that that's fine. But it seems to me that, you know, the statement is just too many people. Well, then who's who's going to do the culling? Right. In other words, there's a there's a little bit of a sense of anti-humanism in parts of the environmental movement that I don't like.

You know, why not treat people as human capital, as all worthy, you know, in a Kantian sense. Everybody is valuable in and of themselves. And so our goal should be to make everybody wealthy, get everybody out of poverty. So we're in agreement there. But what's wrong with being wealthy? Nothing. In fact, it's good. It makes people care about the environment. You're confusing two things. First of all, you're defining wealth as having lots of money.

No, no, the resources. Well, what we're doing now, of course, is trying to extract more and more from less and less. We got to remember, first of all, the present time is extraordinarily abnormal. Human beings, modern human beings, that is physically modern human beings, have been around for about 300,000 years. The current

situation has developed over the last, since the development of agriculture, but more than that, which agriculture allowed industrialization and allowed science and allowed podcasts and so on. And all of that is just a few, basically a few hundred years now, even less than that. We have moved into an extraordinarily unusual situation

based on a one-time bonanza of fossil fuels that are killing us. And the fact that wealth, in some sense, can provide what you're talking about, that is, the great life and so on, it's only provided it to a tiny fraction of the modern human beings that have lived only recently and only still to a tiny fraction. Even the very rich

who care about the world, don't give up their 8,000 square foot houses or their huge yachts and so on and so forth. Whereas people in our country are going hungry still, who don't have one of the reasons for the political mess today for the rise

of the American Nazi Party, the GOP, has been that so many people have been left behind by the standard of wealth that our society tells us is so incredibly important. Well, that's pretty strong words there, Paul. Yeah, I would not call the GOP a Nazi party, for sure. But in any case, you know, I was just in South Korea. Do you know the history of how the Nazi Party...

Do you know the history of how the Nazi party got in power? I know the whole story in great detail. Not quite. But in any case, I was just in South Korea. Their replacement level is 0.7. The normal replacement level is 2.1 to maintain a population. So their population will be shrinking dramatically, and they're worried.

Not just economically, but also who's going to take care of the retired elderly when the workforce, labor force is way down because there's not enough people. Do you ever worry about populations dropping too much, too rapidly? We worried a lot about it over the last 50 years. And the answer is complex, but in a sense, very simple.

If we had started making the adjustments back when it was first clear to the scientific community, certainly by the time of the scientific community getting together and protesting around 1990, then we could have been planning for the changes that are going to come because it's strictly mathematics. It tells you when you have a

population and you stop the growth, you're going to change the age composition. You can't, there's nothing you can do about that because it's straight math. It's, you can't just like you can't do anything about one and one being equal to two, even though Trump thinks it's five. And

And we have not taken the opportunities to make the changes, but they are trivial changes compared to what the changes are going to be in places which are already starting to be places where people can't even work outside because the temperatures are too high, where we no longer can have Winter Olympic Games for some places or summer for others because the dramatic changes in the climate that are occurring

much faster than the climate scientists originally thought. You know, we've known about climate change and the inevitability of it since the 1800s, but we've not done anything about it, and we're still not doing anything about it. And so the Koreans have got to make all kinds of changes. One of the problems, of course, is that the resources of the planet are not evenly distributed.

And therefore, one of the things that people are going to do and are already doing is leaving areas that are suffering more and more from various shortages and forming great migratory waves, some of them boosted along by wars, which also have been connected with climate change and so on. So it's a really complicated picture, but believe me, solving the problems of age distribution

Finding out that you have to find new jobs for kindergarten teachers and so on are trivial. Trying to find a way to keep your air conditioning going when you can no longer burn coal or oil. It's, again, two bad problems, one much worse than the other, and most of the attention being played...

by a really totally unconnected, uneducated press and elite. I mean, I could give you a long lecture on my university and its continual failure to do anything sensible with its curriculum.

Okay. Two other on that. With the problem of fossil fuels, are you encouraged by the rise of electric vehicles on one hand? And are you pro-nuclear power like your friend and colleague Stuart Brand became when he saw how efficient and carbon-free nuclear power is? I'll go to nuclear power first. I'm neither. I...

My best friend is John Holdren, arguably the best scientist in the world. He was Clinton's Sub Rosa science advisor, Obama's open science advisor, the head of the Office of Technology, OFI.

God, I'm getting old. I can't remember. OSTP, Office of Science and Technology, policy for the Obama administration. He wrote the Coney study on nuclear and other energy sources. And when I want to know something about nuclear power, I pick up the phone and I ask John. That's one of the advantages. I have similar advantages in other places. But what John says, it should be kept in the mix that we...

It's not just a problem in physics. It's a problem in psychology.

It's clear that in some ways and some places you ought to be able to use nuclear. If you could guarantee that you wouldn't have any nuts bombing nuclear plants or shelling them or using them as political tools in your local war, they'd be a lot safer. What John says about fusion power, that's I'm talking there about fission power, fusion power.

has been 30 years off us since about 1960.

It's still said to be 30 years off. John thinks that's a joke, too, that it might be eventually possible. But as he and I published decades ago, giving humanity a infinite source of cheap energy would be like giving an idiot child a machine gun. It would just finish paving the earth forever.

with asphalt and covering them with electric cars whose electricity would be miraculously generated on Mars. It's just the illusions. There is a person, I won't mention his name, who thinks we're going to terraform Mars and move there. You can read about it on the web if you want to.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I like what Elon's done. I like what Elon's done with electric vehicles. I mean, I think this is a great idea, don't you? What he's... First of all... Attention, parents and grandparents. Are you searching for the perfect gift for your kids this holiday season? Give the gift of adventure that will last all year long. A Guardian bike. The easiest, safest, and quickest bikes for kids to learn on.

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They need roads to run on. They need all kinds of materials to make them and so on. And it's not I'm against electric vehicles. It's I'm against having too many of them. I'm against giving them only to really rich people. I'm actually against everybody owning a separate vehicle.

electric vehicle, because if we had a sensible society, we would have developed it differently. We would have more sharing of private vehicles and put the money and effort there and other things to make people happy. It's again,

A very complex area, which we've put a lot of thought into, but there's still a lot of thought that's needed. And most of it isn't even being considered in the education system. What's research going into? Yeah. Well, I do think... The scariest...

Sorry. Yeah, I do think you go. You're the boss. OK, the idea of ride sharing is becoming more popular. I think that's a matter of both culture and technology, like how Ubers and Lyfts took over from taxis much more efficient.

And there are plenty of entrepreneurs who are trying to bring about this idea of sharing private vehicles or bicycles or whatever, so we'd have less stuff. That could happen. Maybe not in Southern California, maybe in New York City or something like that. Sometimes you and I often have a discussion or a debate about one of the... There are a number of issues that I think are really important to all of this, but one of them is, is there an optimal level of...

differentiation. That is, do we do better by having some people better off than others? And what should be the minimum standard of living and so on? Another one is, are borders ethical?

You know, if you have all kinds of good stuff and then their neighbor country starts suffering because of climate change, is it ethical for you to keep them out? And there is a whole series of moral and ethical issues that underlie all of this and that I think never should be ignored. But finding the answers to them is really, really difficult.

Yeah.

that the best thing you could do for the environment is to have one less child. And they calculated that that was equivalent to persuading 23 of your buddies to stop driving entirely and get rid of their cars. It's

You got to do the numbers on a lot of this stuff. That's where Elon just doesn't get it when he talks about Terra forming Mars, when actually he and his buddies are Martian forming Earth. That's what, again, the book, Before They Vanish, talks about reducing the number of living organisms in the universe, particularly on Earth. And of course, Mars has none.

And that's what he's trying to fix Earth to be just like Mars. He talks about terraforming Mars, but actually he's Martian-forming Earth. I haven't heard that. That's funny. Okay, so let's talk about the sixth max extinction. How do you know when a species has really gone extinct? Just give us a little sense of how biologists keep track of these things, and how do you know there isn't one last whatever? Yeah.

Out there somewhere. And we mentioned some of the cases in the book where scientists thought something was extinct and they popped up again. The most dramatic case from my point of view is the fish that the scientific community thought went extinct more than 60 million years ago.

And in 19, I think it was about 38. Again, since I can't read, I can't read my book and tell you what it says. But it's something in there, something like 1938, one turned up off the coast of Africa. And that was a thing called Latimeria. This was not a tiny little thing that people could easily miss. It was something that turned out to be fishable. And some of them were big, big fish.

And so that was a surprise. And when I was an undergraduate, I heard about that in my evolution course and so on. And that was really interesting. And then it turned up somewhere in Southeast Asia. I don't remember. There's another population. So some things may be thought to be extinct and come back. I would still, if I were in the Southeastern United States,

I occasionally wander out if I could still see and bird watch. I can only bird here now, see if I could run into a Bachmann's warbler, which is unlike Latimeria. They were about this big, and the last ones were seen with all the bird watchers there are about 20 or 30, 40 years ago. I don't remember.

Exactly. So you can't ever be super sure. But what you can be sure of is that many organisms have declined to the point where they never can do the services for us we want, even if the service is the pleasure of seeing a rare bird.

um, the, uh, the big fuss over the ivory billed woodpecker, which often, which was recently, maybe 20 years ago, uh, claimed to be cited again in the Southeast. I think most people think it doesn't exist there anymore, but people keep an eye out for it. So, uh, as populations get smaller and smaller, the odds of having one go extinct and, um,

and not be noticed are smaller and smaller, but the cases do occur, and they'll continue to occur. But so many things have had their population size shrunk. But we'll know probably when the last elephant dies. We'll know. I won't know, but somebody will know. The most dramatic way to see what's happening is to look at distribution maps.

And you see that the lion once covered virtually all of Africa, some, I believe, some of southern Europe, parts of India. And now there are very few lion populations thriving, elephants even more so, and so on. The really big things that tourists pay attention to, you keep track of. But the insects, which are much more critical to you and me than the elephants? No way, I got colleagues of mine

at a lab in Colorado where I worked

for four or five, four decades, five decades, tracked the amount of insects in the area. And I worked on insects there using traps, which just simply collected the flying insects. And in the last 35 years, the insect fauna in this relatively undisturbed area has been cut in half. And that's exactly what's been found in Germany,

and other places, the insects are disappearing, and who gives a shit, you know? Well, first of all, if you like birds, the bird populations are shrinking too, so we are headed towards another silent spring. But of course, the insects are crucial to our lives in many ways, and we're seeing all kinds of effects from extinction there affecting humanity. Let me read the opening paragraph from your book. There's, by the way, hundreds of references in the

Sure. I got it. Human beings are the only animals that speak about morals, about right and wrong. Morals differ among communities and individuals as well as over time. In this book, we deal with a widespread sense that it is right to preserve the only living beings known to exist, as well as the civilization of Homo sapiens.

So I'm glad to hear you say that because a lot of environmentalists are kind of antinatal. They don't think people should have babies. They don't even like humans. They're anti-human. And, you know, or you see these extremists that are blocking roads or they throw tomato soup on a canvas, you know, a painting in a museum and so on. And this tends to turn people off and make people less...

likely to support those kind of causes. So I gather you're not in that extremist category, and if not, then what can we do?

are utterly dependent on the natural systems of this planet, basically. Now, it may be that there are thriving civilizations on a million other planets. That is possible. All kinds of things are possible. But what we know is possible is that we have a life support system here, and we have developed one kind of organism, that's us, that

Most of us like various things, even though there are cultural differences. I think it's fair to say that most adult human beings like having shelter, having food, getting laid, and so on. You have a list of things that we all enjoy and would like to continue. And therefore, my and I and the other thing is,

That's as far as we know, unique with human beings is we're the only organism that has developed ideas of ethics and morals, what's right and what's wrong. They also can vary from group to group.

But they share certain characteristics, like not generally being against killing on a one-to-one basis, but in favor of doing it if you can do it in huge mobs. And therefore, with our moral system, one of the things we shouldn't do is beat up on people who

are making their take people who are doing lumbering

and the kind of things that people have done, like driving nails into trees to discourage timbering. There are a lot of reasons to preserve forests as well as we can and to use them in ways that are better ecologically, let's put it that way. But putting people who have to work there at risk is just immoral as far as I'm concerned.

The same thing goes, all of us have to make that kind of decision, but beating up on other people to prove your point is something I'm just against. And so, just like I'm against, for instance, I've written, I was a co-founder of desegregation by using mixed groups in Lawrence, Kansas. We desegregated

the restaurants, and I've written books and many papers on trying to point out that unlike what William Shockley said at Stanford, human beings are not color-coded for quality. And that, in fact, what somebody's skin color is has virtually nothing to do with their basic abilities, attitudes, etc., etc. While it can change their attitudes because of the cultural factors

connections that people make falsely with skin color or with gender for that matter and so on. So no, I'm not in favor. I'm in favor of protests. I'm in favor of being loud, I guess is the way to put it. Jim Hansen,

Maybe the top climatologist in the world, you may have seen some of his stuff. Yeah, I know. Published an article not long ago about how scientists had to stop being so reticent. You know, he turned in a paper to a journal with the title of which was, At What Level Does the Climate Disruption Become Really Dangerous? And the editor said, we shouldn't use a word like dangerous.

How dangerous? Seems to me that being unable for human beings to function at the temperature is a pretty damn good word to use in that context. But there's somehow the idea that scientists give up their positions as citizens when they try and warn about what's going on. And I obviously don't take that position, although...

You know, in science or outside of science, in our system, other people can have different views and criticize you, and you have to deal with the criticism if you want to or ignore it if you don't. Okay. Well, I'm pro-human. You must have gone through a lot of issues. Oh, I have, yes. And I want everybody to live at the level of a Western person.

civilization, but I'm also pro-elephant. I love elephants. I don't want lions to go extinct and so on. Can I have both? Okay, let's play this out for a second. You can have both. Okay, how? Walk us through how we can do this. Well, the main way to get everybody

to start thinking about these things and putting their effort not into how we can all grow more, that is the poor, the rich, and so on, but how we can switch gradually to a smaller population where everybody can have all the things you and I think are desirable.

without making it less likely that our children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren will be able to have the same thing. The understanding that we're on a finite planet, that we are the dominant animal on that planet, but our dominance is maintained by all the other organisms, and if we give them up, we give ourselves up. And I think that, for example,

We talked a little bit, we talk a lot in the book about ecosystem services, the things that the natural systems provide us with and how they're slowly disappearing. How many schools do you think actually teach a course in ecosystem services? I'll give you an even better example. I'm having dinner tonight with Bill Perry, who was once our Secretary of Defense.

And Bill is even older than I am and has used the last part of his career trying to get rid of nuclear weapons. And I've done much the same.

And I think, and I believe I can speak for Bill and a lot of my colleagues, that the biggest threat we have today is not climate warming, not the loss of biodiversity per se, and so on, but for immediate, for what might happen to me and you and our kids is the chance of having a large-scale nuclear war.

And you now, of course, get a lot of discussion of it. Is Putin crazy enough to do it? Is etc. etc. Should we give longer range missiles to Ukraine? What really that's those are really scary questions. But even more scary is in the present situation, what's happening to the odds of a near miss, a close miss?

encounter. And they should be teaching in every American school the history of Proud Prophet and the Russian submarine captain and so on and so forth. Everybody would be scared out of their minds about the existence of nuclear weapons. But I don't think at Stanford, 95% of the students or faculty ever heard of Proud Prophet, ever heard of

the Norwegian missile launch that was mistaken for a full-scale attack. Never hear about the

The guy who loaded the wrong thing into the computer and it was a test thing to practice what it would look like at a full-scale attack, but it came across as a full-scale attack. And instance after instance, the safety systems haven't saved us. It's been single individual, you probably know these single individuals who said, no, I'm not going to blow up the world, even though they say the system says we should.

I don't know how I got on that rant, but it really worries me. Stanislav Petrov is the man who saved the world.

And, yeah, I've done half a dozen episodes of the show. Yeah, he's the Russian guy. Yeah, yeah. No, no, not that. No, no. He was in charge of the radar screen where he saw five blips on the screen. He was supposed to call his boss and report an incoming missile attack from the United States. And he correctly reasoned that if the United States was launching a full attack to eliminate all Russian nuclear missiles, it wouldn't be five.

And so he correctly deduced it was a false positive. About 50, 60 years ago, John, when we were doing the nuclear winter studies, John Holden and I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation. And it turned out that the number of Hiroshima-sized bombs, that's 15 kilotons, necessary to destroy the United States permanently was roughly a dozen.

And that fewer would do Russia. And the reason is, of course, all you have to do is hit the transport centers and bring down the electric grid. Everybody starves. You can't pump gas and you can't run trains.

That's it, because almost nobody is actually in. And Russia had fewer nodes than we did, so it wouldn't take as many bombs. And, of course, both the countries have thousands now, much huger bombs than the Hiroshima site. Although far fewer than in the late 1980s, when there were about 70,000 nuclear weapons, we're down to about 12,500 now.

Yeah, I would agree with you, Paul, on the problem of nuclear weapons.

And certainly the loss of biodiversity is another concern, although it won't necessarily lead to the extinction of our species. It is a big concern. So two controversial issues there that you bring up in the book. Give us your thoughts on cloning extinct species. Can we bring back the woolly mammoth and the Tasmanian tiger and so on? Would that be ethical? Is it technologically even possible? Well, as I think we say in the book, and I'm not sure, but the...

It would be silly for any scientist to say that it's impossible. And of course, the question of whether the simulation you produced was really the thing again and how close it had to be and so on.

There's no question at the moment where my molecular biology friends tell me that it would be extraordinarily expensive to even make a reasonable simulation by, say, taking a wood pigeon and turning it into a passenger pigeon. The second big barrier there is what the hell do you do with them after you get them? For instance, they often talk about

on recreating the passenger pigeon. But we know that at least as they went extinct, they required huge attention. Parents and grandparents, are you searching for the perfect gift for your kids this holiday season? Give the gift of adventure that will last all year long.

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million bird flocks to persist and be able to breed so the issue then becomes how do you produce a million birds uh in order to get them well suppose maybe you can figure out how to breed and reproduce them how to get them reproduced and you now have a

Cages in your house with a million passenger pigeons in them. Where the hell do you put them? Because the plants they fed on and the masts and so on no longer exist. So all of those things make it seem unlikely that we're going to get there. And I think I've said many times the biggest problem is moral hazard.

That is, if people think we can just reproduce organisms we make extinct, then we don't have to worry about making them extinct. Moral hazard is an economist's idea that if you can get flood insurance, then you might as well just build in a floodplain. What the hell? If you're going to get somebody else to pay or some future group to pay the price, then you are more likely to do it.

And I think moral hazard's a big thing with de-extinction. On the other hand, I'd love to see a velociraptor or two. I don't know about that. As a matter of fact, I know some attorneys. Oh, my God. You are too funny. Obviously.

If you're going to put effort in when you have limited resources, either building back populations of things that have almost gone extinct or protecting relatively common things is a better way to go. And we know that can work. I suspect that many listeners to this or viewers of this podcast will have seen outdoors an American bison.

There are herds now in various places of American bison, but they almost went extinct. In fact, the U.S. government tried to make them extinct because they were the food of the Native Americans. And as you know, we wanted to make Native Americans extinct. We still probably do, considering the way things are going. But anyway.

So you can restore if you have something, but remaking a bison out of a cow may well be possible, but it isn't the way I would suggest putting our resources. Okay, another controversial idea. This gets back to your colleague Garrett Hardin's famous paper about the tragedy of the commons.

If nobody owns the land, then no one cares about it and takes care of it. So what about privatizing, I don't know, say reserves where there's elephants, where the owner of the land cares about the elephants? Maybe they sell a hunting license or you get to bag one elephant a year or something and you have to pay a huge amount of money. There at least somebody cares about the land. How about that as a solution? I got nothing against. I have nothing against those things if they're done right.

But it goes back to very, very basic questions, which only came up again. We're in a very unusual time for our species, 300,000 years of our species. And only since agriculture could anybody possess any land or anything at all. In other words, once people could produce

produce in your family enough food to feed your family plus some more, then you could have division of labor and so on. Some people could be richer and poorer. People could lay claim to land and so on. And now that we have that system, I see nothing horrible about trying to use it to enhance the preservation of biodiversity. It's the system we've got. It's like

to talk about really controversial stuff, the arguments we face in the Middle East over who owns what and why. And at one level, I thought it was a very silly idea to establish Israel because I was already thinking about those things back in the 1940s. I thought it would be better to bring the

the refugees from Hitler to the United States. But anti-Semitism in the State Department didn't prevent it. If we had them here, then they would not be fighting with the Palestinians. On the other hand, now that we have it, we have the problem, which hopefully we both agree on, of finding a way for those people to live together independently.

happily and prospering because they're all, among other things, they're the local people who are most like us in terms of intellectual interest and so on and so forth. So the problem of dealing with our unusual situation has not been solved. Agriculture, Robert Sapolsky, who is, I don't know if you ever read anything of his books or anything, but Sapolsky and I agree, the big mistake

You got determined? Oh, yeah. I read determined. Anyway. Yeah, yeah. But we don't know yet. If we have the large-scale nuclear war and either civilization or humanity disappears, then our big mistake was learning agriculture.

You know, if you're a, I mean, we had a system where we didn't have to have governments per se because we had small enough groups that everybody knew each other. And I remember when I lived with the Eskimos, with the Inuit, Tommy Bruce telling me, I asked him, how do you deal with people who are not behaving properly?

And he basically said, I'll spare you the accent because my Inuktitut is now very old. But he said, we either ostracize them

Or I'll take him out on a seal hunt. And just as I'm about to shoot the seal, his head gets in my way. He says, Iornamut, which Iornamut is my Inuktitut word that I think is one I'd bring into English. It means that's the way the bagel breaks. But, you know, in those days, the people who did the leading were the good people at it.

The one who led the hunts was the best hunter. The woman who was in charge of curing was the one who knew all the plants that were their medicinal properties. And now we've moved to a so many having so many people, we've got to have governments. And I don't have to draw you a diagram for what that can do. Right. But we're not going back to hunter gatherer day. So we have to move forward in some positive way. So how can we improve governments? All right, let's get back to your, let's get back to your book.

A lot of these stressed out species that are on the brink of going extinct are in countries where the government is unable to protect them because they're so poor that the people have to use those resources or they have to tear down the forest to make basic products and so on. So isn't part of the problem corrupt governments and poverty of the people? Oh, there's absolutely no question.

that a huge part of the problem is corrupt government and property rights. And one of the first books I ever wrote was on this topic. I called it Arc 2. The ideas weren't very good, but the most basic idea was that government activities should be saved for the things that, as far as possible, for the things that individuals could not do for themselves.

That is, you and I are against nuclear war, but neither of us can shoot down the incoming missiles if necessary. That's something our government has to be able to do. And that's...

When I wrote my memoir, I said journey through science and politics because the two are totally intermixed. If you don't try and think hard about how governments can function better and so on,

And, of course, as a pedant, I always get back to improving the education system. But it's not crystal clear. I mean, my favorite historian, I think, at the moment is Naomi Oreskes. And she's the one who wrote the book about climate change, about the, I can't remember the title, but her big book. Merchants of Doubt.

merchants of doubt, but she wrote a book on the big myth about basically saying the way to run the world is with unregulated corporations.

And it just is the sort of thing that I thought everybody should read. We had a little contest, some of us, about whether Stanford or Harvard was stupider as great universities.

Harvard eventually won when their business school, discovering that their faculty were getting malnourished, their junior faculty, because their salaries were too low. Harvard Business School gave them advice on how to get food stamps. And so they won. But when the argument was still going on, I was saying Stanford,

wins because we produced Josh Hawley and she came back immediately with Ted Cruz. So there's, it takes more than the education system.

Hey, you're going to have to help and your children help figure out how we can do it so people behave better by our standards. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know Naomi. She's been on the show a couple of times, both for the merchants of doubt and the the big myth. And as has Paul for several of these. I'm glad you had the big myth. Yeah. No, she's right. It's really. Yeah. Yeah.

It's an important tension there between, again, private property, private industry, markets, and so on, and government. Obviously, corporations need regulation or else they'll cheat the system if they can. As we've seen, the big pharma does...

capture the regulatory state as we saw in the opioid crisis. They just bought them off. You know, so it happens. And so obviously, you know, we need better government. Okay, fine. Do you support then foreign aid to some of these poor countries from the United States to solve this problem? Oh, I'm... John Holdren had his...

appointment to the head of OSTP, if I recall correctly, I don't, you can broadcast it, but don't quote me, because he and I had written with Ann in Ecoscience, a big textbook of environmental things, the need for de-development. What that basically was, was redistribution. That the way to, that that's

First of all, the loss of biodiversity is a global issue. We can't say it's your job to do it, but you could say we're too poor. No, we've got to arrange the world so that everybody can deal with those problems and where everybody can eat well and so on. That's, in my view, a redistribution problem, but that's poison. I mean, then I would be called a communist or a socialist.

by people who have no idea what communism or socialism is or have never read anything about it. But the problems of governance are much tougher than the problems of biology. In other words, we wrote an entire book

where we say whether we're right or wrong, we have confidence that we know what's happening and we know what kinds of things could help. But in the government area, the guys that I read, I was thinking the

the Yale historian who's written so much on tyranny lately. Oh, have you had him on? No, but I know who you mean. Yes. On tyranny. You lose the nouns first. That's what's happening to me. But anyway, yeah, yeah. They're less sure, usually less sure about what exactly to do. And I'm a history buff and I,

One of my favorite recent books was by Eric Larson. It's called The Demon of, I think, Uncertainty, but it talks about what happened between the election of Lincoln and the start of the Civil War.

And you can see the parallels. It's the same human beings we have today. We haven't solved the problem yet. Let's put it that way. All right, Paul. Let me ask a couple of last questions.

Big questions here since you've been politically active for so long. Are we really living in the most polarized, controversial, political violence era in our history? Or was 1968, let's say, at Watergate and Vietnam and all that, is it just too distant and we forget that and it was actually just as violent and polarizing? What are your thoughts on putting today into perspective? I have an easy answer to that question. It was just as far as I can tell,

where it's obviously very difficult to measure, particularly since our statistics only go back with computers a certain distance, that it was just or even more violent before the Civil War and the battle over slavery. I mean, there was fistfights in the...

Congress. And one senator was almost killed by another senator bashing him repeatedly with a bludgeon. I mean, this wasn't minor stuff, but

It wasn't somebody, you know, throwing a spitball. Okay. Last question, Paul. Can you see a time, let's say, I don't know, a thousand years from now when there's no more nation states? We don't need that anymore. We're back to city states where there's no solid borders. People can travel and trade and marry each other. And, you know, there's a lot of these obstacles, moral, ideological, political are dissolved now.

and we're down to, I don't know, a billion people living very healthy, wealthy lives. I won't go down the path of multi-planetary species because I know that's not your favorite topic, but something like that, at least on Earth, sustainable. Yeah, at least on Earth, I can easily, again, if we get the right changes, I don't see any huge barriers to that, but the right changes...

are the critical thing, are willing. We've got to do so much now to make up for what we haven't done in the last thousand years or so.

And just think of the change we've been through. I would rather think of it as a change in 2,000 years, or say 1,000 years, if we stop doing the things we're doing now to make it impossible. If there are no other organisms, we'll be gone. If there's a large-scale nuclear war, we'll be gone. If we don't do something serious about climate change, we're likely gone.

I mean, again, talking about the politics, I'm worried when people realize how bad the climate disruption can be, that there'll be political consequences there that could easily lead to nuclear war. You know, if China starts modifying the atmosphere in one direction, then we in another in order to try and spare us or them. Just think about it.

So we keep bouncing back to the political issues. We get the will for everybody to get together and try and fix things. We've done it in groups and even as nations before. We could do it again. Yeah, that's a nice way to put it there. I do think that physics isn't the hard science. Political science is the hard science. There's just so many problems that are difficult to solve. But we'll save that for another episode. Here it is.

Before They Vanish, Saving Nature's Population and Ourselves. That's the pro-human part. So, Paul, thank you for your work. Thanks for this book and for all your work and for admitting you were wrong about some things. A lot of people can't say that, so that's good on you. Well, I'm glad you continue to be skeptical. Keep it up. Music