This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, November 3rd, 2015. I'm Caleb Brown.

Should the United States participate in regimes to compel developing countries to reduce their emissions?

Or rather, should we focus on the kinds of economic... developing countries to reduce their emissions?

Or rather should we focus on the kinds of economic development to help those countries

better deal with the problems of pollution, including climate change.

Richard Toll is a professor of economics at the University of Sussex.

We spoke last week.

So many of the issues related to climate change

seem to deal with just getting an accurate measure of what kind of emissions are being put out there.

So where does the data get muddy when it comes to trying to figure out how much various countries

are emitting.

The problem with CO2 emissions is that we don't measure them or we don't monitor them.

These are all measures that are imputed basically from energy use.

So if your energy records are not accurate,

then your emission records won't be accurate either.

Energy use is measured in different ways.

We of course know how much energy is dug out of the ground,

or at least in most countries, we know, not in all countries we know.

And there's of course many countries that are big on energy

directly fairly secretive. There's a lot of smuggling of energy for instance.

So that is one source of data and then there are these surveys that essentially the National Statistical

Office send out to all the companies and ask them, so how much energy did you use?

...