If every country committed to spending 0.05 per cent of GDP on researching non-carbon-emitting energy technologies, that would cost $25 billion a year, and it would do a lot more than massive carbon cuts to fight warming and save lives.
The fact that we’re catching more fish per person than we’ve ever done before doesn’t mean that there are not particular places where we’ve managed fisheries badly.
Across Europe, there are six times more cold-related deaths than heat-related deaths…by 2050…Warmer temperatures will save 1.4 million lives each year.
I found university a little dispiriting. I thought I would enter the great halls of Plato, but instead I entered the halls of an intellectual sausage factory. I wanted to do something not on the main course, and chose the environment.
If our starting point is to prove that Armageddon is on its way, we will not consider all of the evidence, and will not identify the smartest policy choices.
The only thing that will really change global warming in the long run is if we radically increase the speed with which we get alternative technologies to deal with climate change.
I really try to say things as they basically are and it so happens that it is a good message that things are getting better, but there are still problems.
We see many more, but the number is roughly constant, and we manage to deal much better with them over time. Globally, the death rate from catastrophes has dropped about fifty-fold over the past century.
Surely the biggest problem we have in the world is that we all die. But we don’t have a technology to solve that, right? So the point is not to prioritize problems; the point is to prioritize solutions to problems.
