This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, July 3rd, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown. You probably won't see this in the news, but the world is getting greener and the more we earn the easier

it will be to avert the negative effects of climate change. So says Matt Ridley, author of

the Rational Optimist, we spoke last month.

There's this big disconnect that seems to consume your work in the rational optimist and more

recently you're talking about the greening of the planet Earth, the disconnect

between popular perception of where we're headed in terms of our likely prospects for continuing to get to live on Earth, the

human species and data that you've looked at.

So can you draw some of that out?

Yes, it's not just that over the past 50 years, despite predictions of many, many gloomy,

do-me scenarios that were going to happen.

None of them happened.

In fact, human welfare improved dramatically,

but so did most of the environmental measures.

The air got cleaner, the water got cleaner,

forests expanded, wildlife recovered,

the amount of farmland

needed went down compared with the amount of crop being produced, etc.

So not only has the past proved much better than predicted for the last 50 years. But looking at the future,

there's every reason to think that we're heading in the right direction

and that we're actually going to be able to live much more comfortably on the earth

and leave much more for nature and have much more wildlife around us in 50 or 100 years

...