Physical Attraction

In this episode of our Climate 201 series, we continue discussing the practical emissions-reduction solutions from Project Drawdown - talking about regenerative agriculture, managing refridgerants, and why we abandoned electric cars which were the majority of automobiles in the 1880s!

This episode, we have a guest on the show that I'm very excited about. Professor Steve Keen is an economist and author who has been a longstanding critic of neoclassical economics, which has included writing the bestselling Debunking Economics book and hosting the podcast of the same name, as well as developing several alternative models of the macroeconomy. In recent years, he has turned his attention to how neoclassical economics has tried to deal with the issue of climate change... and, well, the fact that his paper is called "The appallingly bad neoclassical economics of climate change" probably tells you something of how he has responded to it.

I was lucky enough to detain him for quite a while, so I've split the interview into two parts. They complement each other, but they can be listened to independently, depending on what you're interested in.

The first part deals with Professor Keen's background, his critique of neoclassical economics, the parallels - and differences - between economics and physics, and a little about financial crises and possible steps we could take to deal with the economic fallout of COVID-19.

The second part dives deep into the critique of the neoclassical economics of climate change: specifically, how economists have consistently been overconfident in their projections of climate damages and arguably helped lead us towards weak climate policies, and how we might hope to change this in the future. I think this is an incredibly important message and subject to discuss and debate, because unfortunately this stuff has been extremely influential - to the point where one of the main culprits has the so-called Nobel Prize in Economics - so I really urge everyone to listen to that.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Physical Attraction, and thank you to Steve Keen for being so generous with his time and agreeing to be interviewed. You can find Steve on Patreon at www.patreon.com/ProfSteveKeen where you will have access to a good number of podcasts and posts on economics for free, and where you can subscribe for further access to more shows. He's also on Twitter @ProfSteveKeen where you can keep up with the latest news on this work.

You can find us online at physicspodcast.com. There, you'll find the episode guide on the About page, where you can find all of the episodes we've done on subjects ranging from the birth of stars to the end of the world, and the episodes in the ongoing Climate 201 series which talk about the science, economics, and policy of climate change in much, much greater depth. There you can also get in touch with me with any comments, questions or concerns you might have through the contact form, and you'll also find links to support the show on Paypal for a one-time donation or Patreon for longer-term subscriptions. Thanks very much to everyone who has done that already. Until next time then, please do - take care.

In this Climate 201 episode, we look at some of the climate change mitigation solutions proposed by Project Drawdown, in an effort to be more quantiative about what needs to be done to address our greenhouse gas emissions.

In this episode, we discuss the Kaya decomposition - splitting CO2 emissions into CO2/energy, Energy/GDP, GDP/person, and population. We'll talk about its usefulness and limitations in tracking what drives carbon emissions.

I sat down with Paul Johnston (@PaulDJohnston), cloud computing expert and tech/climate scholar, to talk about how the tech sector should tackle climate change, as well as his experiences discussing climate change with businesses and helping to run a community energy company. => How should technology companies approach climate change? => Can we trust the pledges made by big tech companies?

Sometimes in this game you get to do an interview where you genuinely can say: "the person I'm about to interview needs no introduction." This is one of those occasions. But if I were to do that, it would wreck the fun of getting to introduce the interview, and why would I deprive myself of that?

So, this episode, we are interviewing Lord Martin Rees. Martin Rees is one of the foremost cosmologists and astrophysicists of our time. He was made the Astronomer Royal in 1995, has been Master of Trinity College Cambridge, and President of the Royal Society. He has written more than 500 research papers across various areas of astrophysics and cosmology, including contributions to the origin of the cosmic microwave background radiation, the final proofs of the Big Bang theory, quasars, and gamma ray bursts.

In the latter part of his career, he has been an immensely influential populariser of science, writing books on Cosmology such as Just Six Numbers and Our Cosmic Habitat. And he has also devoted himself to considering grand problems of the future of humanity and the existential risks that we face: his book, Our Final Century, helped to kick off the field of existential risk studies, and he co-founded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risks at the University of Cambridge in 2012.

It is no exaggeration to say that a great many of the ideas that we've discussed on this show - and my own personal inspiration to study physics in the first place - owes to the work of Lord Rees, both in discovering much of the science in the first place and then again in popularising and explaining the ideas so wonderfully.

I was extremely grateful that he was willing to be so generous with his time and respond to such a large range of my questions. Our interview touches on existential risks, the current pandemic, extraterrestrial life, cosmology in general, and the nature of fundamental physics.

A bumper episode with a crop of interesting news stories to round out the year: -> Uber sells its self-driving car section, and Softbank sells robot company Boston Dynamics. What can we infer from these moves about the state of the tech sector? -> Reports show income inequality rising since 1975 has resulted in $47 trillion additional income accruing to the top 10%, and that trickle-down economics doesn't work as intended -> Global emissions fall by 7% this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic: could we do this with a positive shift to decarbonisation? And a new study suggests that the land sink of CO2 may be weakening. Take a listen!

It's a bonus news episode, in which I ramble on about the COVID-19 vaccines and the possibility of defending against future pandemics.

In this episode of Climate 201, we deconstruct the jargon around climate scenarios. What's the difference between RCP2.6 and RCP8.5? What purpose do the scenarios serve? How should we think about them?

This week, taking a break from climate, we have a special guest on the show - Tim Hwang. Tim Hwang is a writer and researcher, and he's the author of Subprime Attention Crisis, a book about how online advertising may have become a bubble. He is currently a research fellow at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) at Georgetown University.

He is the former director of the Harvard-MIT Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative, $26M philanthropic fund and research effort working to advance the development of machine learning in the public interest. He previously served as the global public policy lead for artificial intelligence and machine learning at Google.

We had a fascinating conversation that starts with a little word on deepfakes and misinformation, and then gets into the heart of the Subprime Attention Crisis thesis - is online advertising a bubble, and, if so, what does that mean for the internet that depends on it so much? I hope you enjoy.