Re: Global Warming
The only way of cutting world greenhouse emissions that does not rely on technologies that don't exist yet is to cut productivity. Cutting productivity lowers standards of living. Lowering standards of living in much of the world means lowering it below subsistence level. That means people die, and lots of them. A 2% decrease in the planet's population is 120 million people dead.
Government environmental interventions have already killed of order a hundred million people in the DDT/malaria case alone.
Poverty kills. Stossel has an excellent point in his book where he shows how many days are taken off the average American life by various risks. So many days for car accidents, so many months for alcoholism, 4 years or something for smoking. The largest, by far and not even close, was being poor. Which took a whopping decade off the average poor American's life. Can you imagine how many decades are lost annually to poverty in the third world where there is no capitalism to raise the standard of living?
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