>> We've been dealing with pandemics from the earliest recorded history.

Thucydides writes about a pandemic in the "History of the Peloponnesian War."

So the last thing 2020 was was unprecedented.

♪♪ >> Hello and welcome to "GZERO World."

I'm Ian Bremmer, and today we are looking at the geopolitics of catastrophe from earthquakes and hurricanes to famines and pandemics, the inevitable meteor strike.

Where do we draw the line between what we consider natural disasters and those caused by humans?

And as some parts of the world, try to put COVID-19 behind them, how do we stop it from happening again?

I'm talking to Stanford historian and best-selling author Niall Ferguson -- he also has a mean Scottish brogue -- whose new book is about the history of disasters.

And later, a look at how one young Ugandan activist was literally cropped out of the global climate fight.

Don't worry.

I've also got your "Puppet Regime."

>> Joe Biden isn't just a press conference whisperer.

He's now the whisperer of everything.

>> But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

>> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth-management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by... ...and by... >> It was around noon on August 24, 79 A.D. Where were you?

Hopefully not Pompeii.

Mount Vesuvius erupted after centuries of dormancy, shooting a 10-mile mushroom cloud of ash and pumice into the sky over the ancient Roman city.

In a matter of moments, a thriving metropolis of 20,000 merchants, manufacturers and farmers were running for their lives.

Those who managed to dodge the fire and brimstone falling from the heavens were done in the following morning when a cloud of toxic gas rolled into the city, suffocating all in its path.

Then came a tide of rock and ash, crushing buildings, entombing the dead.

It's easy to judge the Pompeians for building a city on the foothills of a volcano.

But ask yourself.

Are we any smarter today?

I mean, if you live along the San Andreas Fault in San Francisco or Los Angeles, geologists are pretty confident you're going to experience a magnitude eight or larger earthquake in the next 25 years.

It's about the same size as the 1906 San Francisco quake that killed an estimated 3,000 people, destroyed nearly 30,000 buildings.

Why don't you move?

Don't feel like it.

Or if you're one of the 10 million residents of Jakarta, Indonesia, you might have noticed that parts of the ground are sinking by as much as 10 inches a year, with about 40% of the city now below sea level.

Try and move the capital.

The fact is, human beings just aren't all that great at learning from past disasters, and that includes the ones we can see coming, like those caused by climate change.

>> German Chancellor Angela Merkel says that she's been shocked by the devastation left by flooding in parts of western Germany.

>> Firefighters in the American West are bracing right now for the worst wildfire season in recorded history, thanks to the protracted drought and record-high temperatures.

And yet a June report this year found that California state and local officials are encouraging rebuilding in areas destroyed by wildfires.

Last year was also the busiest Atlantic hurricane season on record, with 30 named storms.

For only the second time in history, forecasters had to turn to the Greek alphabet to name hurricanes.

Hey, just like COVID variants.

They reached the ninth name on the list, Iota.

An iota is also the amount of faith that many experts have in America's long-term disaster preparedness because of the sorry state of this country's infrastructure.

Earlier this year, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the U.S. a C-minus in its infrastructure report card, which comes out every four years.

And while the perpetual promise of an infrastructure week became a running joke doing the Trump administration, the country's failure to invest in its basic building blocks can have tragic implications.

We don't yet know, for example, what caused the June 24th condo collapse in Surfside, Florida.

It is clear, however, that there is no good reason for those horrific images to come out of the richest country on Earth.

It remains to be seen if President Biden's ambitious multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure package will make it through a divided Congress and into law.

But after more than a year of enduring the greatest calamity of our lifetimes, it's time we learned a lesson or two from the disasters of the past.

And we don't need to go back all the way to ancient Rome to do so.

I'm breaking all this down with Stanford historian Niall Ferguson.

He's the author of the new book "Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe."

Here's our conversation.

Niall Ferguson, global historian of some repute.

How are you doing, my friend?

>> Very well, Ian.

Great to see you.

>> So the new book is "Doom" -- all capital letters.

Did this come purely out of the pandemic or had you been planning this kind of a topic beforehand?

>> I spent 2019 thinking about a book on disasters and dystopias and spent a lot of that year reading science fiction because as a historian, I started to worry that I wasn't thinking enough about discontinuities of the sort that science fiction writers are good at thinking about.

So I had actually been plotting a book about the history of future disasters when one arrived, and that meant the book could shift its emphasis from science fiction to reality.

From my vantage point, history is one disaster after another, and it's extraordinary the extent to which human history is shaped by these enormous interruptions, which often nearly always take people by surprise.

What I wanted to do was to write a book that would put this disaster, the one we've been living through, in some kind of historical perspective, because I got a bit sick of journalists saying it was unprecedented or "a year like no other," because from a historian's point of view, it was quite the opposite.

We've been dealing with pandemics from the earliest recorded history.

Thucydides writes about a pandemic in the "History of the Peloponnesian War."

So the last thing, 2020 was was unprecedented.

In fact, it was very familiar to a historian, just surprising to most of us because we don't really remember anything like this.

It's been a while since this kind of pandemic struck.

>> And the Spanish flu epidemic.

I mean, when I hear people talk about it, I would say the thing I hear most frequently is that the basic guidance that was being provided by.

political leaders at that point -- "stay away from people, wear a mask" -- I mean, these are the same sorts of guidance that we're giving people a hundred years later.

The technology around vaccines has improved, but not so much how to deal with a pandemic.

>> It's actually quite remarkable when you read accounts of the 1918-'19 pandemic, which was called the Spanish influenza for no very good reason.

It just happened that the Spanish papers were reporting accurately.

>> Well, they're writing about it, yeah.

>> Everybody else had censorship because they were involved in World War I.

If you look at how the U.S. handled it, it's actually very strikingly familiar, this extraordinary decentralization.

Some cities do significant amounts of social distancing, what we would probably call lockdowns today and others do a lot less.

And the outcomes therefore vary hugely from city to city and state to state.

But you get familiar reactions too.

In San Francisco, there was an anti-mask league which objected to mask wearing in the city as a violation of civil liberties.

Throughout the 20th century, influenza posed a problem.

It struck again in the '30s.

It struck globally in 1957, '58.

And the story was pretty much the same in the sense that there was a scramble to find a vaccine.

They failed in 1918, '19.

Science still really hadn't got to the point that you could figure this out, certainly not rapidly.

By 1957, they were able to put a vaccine together for the then Asian flu in just a matter of months.

And it's interesting that in '57, '58, they didn't do much in the way of social distancing and nothing in the way of lockdowns.

In fact, they left schools and pretty much everything else open and just focused on the vaccine.

It's worth adding one thing, which I think was often lost in last year's discussions.

1918, '19 was a lot worse than COVID-19, even if you accept the very highest estimate for deaths.

And you may have seen some pretty eye-popping figures in The Economist recently.

>> Yeah, well into the single millions, yeah.

>> COVID is still going to be an order of magnitude smaller in its impact than the Spanish influenza of 1918-'19.

And it's worth also adding that that killed young people and people in the prime of life.

This is a very unusual pandemic in the sense that it's ageist and we really haven't had an ageist pandemic before.

Nearly all the pandemics in history have been equal opportunity, killing the very young as much as the very old and, in 1918-'19, killing people in the prime of life.

>> Now, one thing I thought was really interesting about the book and actually quite counter conventional wisdom is you say that the political leaders, the top of the pyramid, are typically not the ones to blame for response to catastrophes when they go amiss.

It's usually inside the system.

It's usually mid-level technocrats and bureaucrats.

Explain that because that's certainly not the way we've been pointing the finger in response to coronavirus over the past year and a half.

>> Well, of course, it's very easy, tempting and perhaps irresistible to blame the person at the top when a disaster strikes.

And last year, it was pretty much the default setting for most journalists, certainly liberal journalists, to blame Donald Trump, and their counterparts in Britain blame Boris Johnson, and their counterparts in Brazil blame Jair Bolsonaro.

It was the simplest way to tell the story that you had a populist in power, and that was why there was excess mortality.

But there are a few problems wrong with this theory.

I mean, one is that there were plenty of countries that didn't have populist leaders that did just as bad or worse.

And that, I think, was often overlooked in some of the coverage.

But the most important argument, Ian, that the book makes is that in most disasters, when people are inclined to blame the person at the top, on closer inspection, the point of failure is not there.

When the space shuttle Challenger blew up, initially the press wanted to somehow pin it on Ronald Reagan, who was then president.

It was 1986, and they wanted to say, "Oh, the thing blew up because they rushed the launch because Reagan wanted to reference it in the State of the Union."

And this was total nonsense.

There was no such story.

It turned out that the real problem was that the NASA engineers knew there was a 1% probability the thing would blow up on launch, but that had been turned by the NASA bureaucrats into one in 100,000.

And that was the point of failure in reality.

The engineers knew how dangerous the shuttle was.

I tried to show in the book that that's often the case, that although the buck stops with the president, in reality, when a disaster occurs, it's not really the president who's the key person or the key institution.

In the case of COVID, if you ask the thing -- what the things were that caused excess mortality north of half a million in the U.S., presidential decisions don't come near the top of the list.

CDC's failure to ramp up testing was very little to do with President Trump's decision making.

The failure to develop any kind of contact tracing that works didn't happen because the president vetoed it.

It was Big Tech that decided not to do it.

We were terrible at protecting the elderly and care homes, as they were in Europe.

That wasn't presidential.

And then, of course, quarantines just weren't enforced in any efficient or effective way.

That's not got to do with the president.

So in the book, I argue the president said a whole range of very dumb things.

He misunderstood, he miscalculated, he misled the public.

He became more and more reckless as 2020 went on and the election got nearer, but that's not really why.

>> He wasted time, though, no?

I mean, you were asking before.

You said, you know, "What was happening in February and March?"

I mean, the Americans, especially compared to Europe, the Americans had time.

That time was wasted.

Was that a systemic issue or was that a presidential issue?

>> Well, oddly enough, if one goes back to January, Trump understood and some of his advisers understood that there were things that could be done.

And it was Trump who argued for a ban on travel from China in January for which he was roundly criticized in the media for overreaction and, of course, xenophobia.

And I think Trump's instincts as a populist were, in fact, to do travel restrictions and to close the borders.

>> But to tell the American people that there was nothing to worry about, it was going to go away magically, let's keep them on the cruise ship, because that will keep the numbers down.

I mean, come on, you have to admit those things, Niall.

>> Absolutely.

And I make the point repeatedly that Trump went worse and worse off track.

But the initial impulse I don't think was completely wrong.

What happened was that other people in the administration said, "Oh, but hang on, we've got an election coming up.

You can't do anything to derail the economy."

And Trump knew that this was bad.

I mean, at least we understand this from some of the people who talked to him last year, but was persuaded by some people in the administration who won the argument that it was better to gamble that it was just the seasonal influenza, rather than to risk the election by derailing the economic recovery, which was what he was going to run on.

>> On this point, at least, that decision of whether or not to gamble the economy because the election is coming up or to say "Heavy on, this isn't a big deal," that decision ultimately is made by the President of the United States.

>> Oh, absolutely.

But remember the key failures that led to the excess mortality -- As I said earlier, if you're trying to ask what really caused the excess mortality, those weren't presidential decisions.

And it's hard to say what percentage of the deaths you can attribute to presidential decision making, but it's certainly not as high as say, oh, this is like pilot error when a light aircraft crashes.

Being president of the United States is not like flying a light aircraft.

And the decision making process in an emergency isn't at all like that process.

So I think the point of failure really doesn't lie at the top.

It lies with the people whose one job it was to do pandemic preparedness, who did it on paper, but suspected rightly that in practice the pandemic preparedness plan would be of very little use at all.

And I think there's a certain myopia that has crept in that I think we both experienced in January last year at the World Economic Forum, when the entire agenda was dominated by climate change, even in the first inning of a global pandemic, and pandemics had fallen out of the risk report that the World Economic Forum publishes each year.

So one of the arguments of "Doom" is sure, worry about climate change.

But remember, it's a relatively slow-moving threat to humanity compared with some of the other threats that we face.

And a contagious coronavirus was just one of those.

A lot can happen much faster than climate change.

>> Having said that, you just said that the impact of coronavirus of COVID has been much, much lower, much more limited than all of these other crises we're talking about.

I mean, if you want to take the long view and that's what the risk report from the WEF, for example, is trying to do, wasn't it correct that they should be focusing much more on climate change than a pandemic?

>> Well, I thought it was a bit surreal to be talking about climate change when a pandemic was just getting underway and to have forgotten about that threat.

But let me not downplay the significance of this disaster.

Although it's not one of history's big, disastrous pandemics -- it's nowhere close to the Black Death of the mid-14th century -- the economic consequences of this pandemic have been much greater than of past pandemics because of the way that we chose to deal with it.

And we administered the huge shock to the global economy, which really has no precedent, by imposing lockdowns on major economies.

And then we sought to offset those with massive fiscal and monetary expansion.

What's interesting to me about COVID is that its public health impact, which will probably kill, let's see, .1% of the world's population, tops, by the time this is done, is going to be a lot less than its global economic impact, which was to cause a huge shock.

So I don't want to downplay COVID.

It's not the Black Death.

It's not the Spanish flu.

But it was a really big shock and we'd taken our eye off that ball despite numerous warnings because global climate change had become the issue that Greta Thunberg said would bring the end of the world.

But the point I make in "Doom" is that we can end the world in a lot of other ways much faster.

A nuclear war still would be a way of causing massive, massive damage to humanity in a really short time frame.

And it's not as if that risk has evaporated.

In fact, it's conceivably going up.

>> So, before we close, you just mentioned China.

And I did find it very interesting in the book when you talked about the fact that the United States emerges in a better power position coming out of coronavirus not only than its allies, but even than China and, of course, China, despite its cover-up of coronavirus for the first weeks, responded quite quickly after that.

Their supply chain was back up and running well over a year ago.

They were one of the only major economies in the world to have significant growth in 2020.

The United States certainly did not.

In the context of China, given all of that, why would you say the U.S. emerges in better position?

>> Well, I was writing this and finishing this book around a year ago, when it was conventional to argue that the U.S. had really screwed it up and China had sort of won 2020.

But I think it was overlooked by most commentators firstly that the Chinese economy had suffered some quite severe damage.

Whether you look at the demographics or consumer demand, the way they kept the show on the road was the old model of fixed asset investment, more coal-burning power stations, more debt.

And you can see already in recent easing by the Chinese government that they're aware that it's softening.

So I don't think the economic story was ever going to be that great and I never bought the 9% growth in 2021 projections.

But I think more important, Ian, was the loss of reputation that China suffered.

If you looked at the Pew surveys from late last year and again, the most recent ones, the world has turned against China.

It's not just the U.S. that has done this.

All across the developed world, as well as in countries such as India and the emerging world, China has suffered massive reputational damage and wolf warrior diplomacy, far from improving matters, has made it worse.

So I think that's the reason that China is actually in a worse position than it was 18 months ago, despite having apparently weathered the public health storm.

>> Niall Ferguson.

The book is "Doom," and he's the right person to be talking about it.

Niall, thanks for joining today.

>> Thanks so much, Ian.

♪♪ >> When it comes to climate activists, everyone knows Greta Thunberg, but she's not the only young crusader fighting against a warming planet.

24-year-old Ugandan activist Vanessa Nakate made news in 2020.

Here's a look at what climate change means to her.

>> What do we want?!

>> Climate justice!

>> When do we want it!

>> Now!

>> If we don't get it... >> Shut it down!

>> My name is Vanessa Nakate.

I am a climate justice activist from Kampala, Uganda.

Last year, while I was in Davos, I attended a press conference with other activists from Europe.

And later on, when I saw the article from the AP and the picture, my photo was cropped from the picture and not even a bit of my message was included in the article.

It made me realize that my voice wasn't actually listened to.

It felt like I was totally excluded from the conversation.

To me, it really raised a conversation of who is being listened to in the climate movement.

What does the media really want to portray in the climate movement?

There is no climate justice without racial justice.

If communities that are facing the worst impacts of climate change are being erased from conversations, then we won't be able to have climate justice.

And it's also important to note that I come from a continent that is responsible for only 3% of global emissions.

And yet Africans are already suffering some of the most brutal impacts fueled by the climate crisis.

The global conversation around climate change needs to change because climate change is more than weather.

Climate change is more than statistics.

Climate change is about the people, the people in my community and in my country at large.

We have seen impacts of the climate crisis unfold because of the rising global temperatures.

There are many people in my community who have faced the worst of this crisis.

Because of the droughts, because of the floods and because of the landslides, many people in the western part of Uganda have been affected by extreme rainfall in areas like Kasese that have led to massive flooding, massive destruction of people's property, people's farms and people's businesses.

As we speak right now, there are people who are still sleeping in camps in Kasese as a result of the heavy rainfall that was experienced last year.

We may be facing the same storm right now, but we are definitely in different boats, and the conversations that I see countries in the global north having about the climate crisis is like it is something that is coming in the future.

And yet our communities are facing the realities of the climate crisis right now.

One point two degrees is already hell for us.

And any more increase on that will mean catastrophic changes of weather patterns in our communities.

So I want leaders, governments in the global north to start talking about the climate crisis like it is something that is happening right now.

It doesn't make sense to set targets of 2030 or 2050.

Climate justice is only justice if it includes everyone and it's only justice if the voices, if the people from the most affected areas are listened to and are given the action that they need for a world that is livable, a world that is sustainable, a world that is healthy.

>> And now your "Puppet Regime," where we ask, what's Joe Biden whispering?

Hmm.

>> Employers can't find workers.

[ Whispering ] Pay them more.

$1.9 trillion of relief so far.

I wrote the bill.

>> Joe Biden isn't just a press conference whisperer.

He's now the whisperer of everything.

Let's have a look.

♪♪ >> [ Whispering ] Hey.

You got four legs, pal.

Four of them.

Ain't it amazing?

You can run just like Mr. Ed.

Hey, Lexi, play some more Frankie Valli.

More Frankie Valli.

[ Whispering in Spanish gibberish ] You won't be deport-ix.

I promise.

[ Normal voice ] Wait, what?

We just lost more of them to the GOP?

Damn.

[ Whispering ] Vladimir, stop hacking.

>> Or?

>> Or else I'm gonna raise my voice.

Joe, let's end the filibuster, pal.

>> No!

>> It'll be your legacy, Joe.

>> Not gonna do it!

>> Come -- >> No.

Never.

Go away!

>> [ Normal voice ] Come on, damn it!

Come on, Joe!

>> "Puppet Regime"!

>> That's our show this week.

Come back next week, and if you like what you see or you enjoy hearing about catastrophes and who doesn't?

Come on, it's 2021.

Check us out at gzeromedia.com.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth-management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by... ...and by...