You're listening to the Libertarian podcast from the Hoover Institution.

I'm your host Tom Church and the Libertarian is of course Professor Richard Epstein.

Richard is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow here at the Hoover

Institution, the Lawrence A Tish Professor of Law over at

NYU, and a senior lecturer of the University of Chicago.

And today we're talking climate change and the IPCC, that is the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate

Change because last week the IPCC released its sixth assessment report and

Richard in your column this week you have taken a few issues with how they've presented their information.

So first, I'd like to ask you this.

If climate change is an existential threat, what's so wrong with bringing people's attention to the worst case

scenarios in order to motivate action? That's a great question and let me first say

there are five separate scenarios that are put forward on this and there's a very nice

graph by Ron Bailey and Reason magazine which shows them and they differ by

five or six orders of magnitude. Now if you thought it was an existential threat you would say that the most serious scenario was the one that you had to follow and if you did that then you would take precautions which you thought were commensurate with respect to the peril at hand.

But in fact the one that they're talking about commensurate with respect to the peril at hand.

But in fact, the one that they're talking about

as existential is one which assumes that the intensification

of coal usage and the like will take place.

So there'll be more rather than less notwithstanding the fact that if you

actually look at the pattern of resource utilization, dematerialization decarbonization turns

out to be the dominant pattern and so the trend lines are

certainly moving in the opposite direction. Then if you want to figure out how this

...