Quotation of the Day…

by Don Boudreaux on December 28, 2014

in Cleaned by Capitalism, Energy, Environment, Myths and Fallacies, Risk and Safety, Seen and Unseen

… is from pages 24-25 of Alex Epstein’s superb 2014 book, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels; (original emphasis; footnote deleted; link added):

In the last eighty years, as CO2 emissions have most rapidly escalated, the annual rate of climate-related deaths worldwide fell by an incredible 98 percent.  This means the incidence of death from climate is fifty times lower than it was eighty years ago….

Once again, the leading experts we were told to rely on were 100 percent wrong.  It’s not that they predicted disaster and got half a disaster – it’s that they predicted disaster and got dramatic improvement.  Clearly there was something wrong with their thinking and we need to understand what it is because they are once again telling us to stop using the most important energy source in our civilization.

(A few years ago, in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, I offered to put a substantial chunk of my own money where my mouth is in support of the proposition that climate change will in fact not lead to increasing lethality of the climate.)

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