This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, August 1st, 2014. I'm Caleb Brown.

Whatever costs climate change will impose on the world, they'll be easier to

mitigate and adapt to if the world is wealthier. So says Chip Knappenberger, assistant

director of the Cato Institute's Center for the Study of Science.

I spoke with Matt Ridley recently about some of the work that he's been doing on sort of the greening of planet Earth and how that data sort of contradicts conventional wisdom about the planet.

But the thing that really stuck with me was this idea that in the scenario that the

panel on climate change recently published,

the ones in which the earth warms the least are the same scenarios in which

GDP has grown the fastest and vice versa which means poorer humans are associated with

more climate change richer humans are associated with less.

And for most people who are big true believers in the disaster consequences of climate change, that would seem to be a result

that you wouldn't want to see.

You probably don't want to see that result, but that's the way of the world, I think. I think it's pretty easily demonstrated that the

richer countries are the more environmentally friendly countries. And so as the world becomes

richer in the future, that richness is going to be built on the back of new technologies,

and those technologies will probably lead to an overall cleaner planet and so it's a perfectly

logical scenario. So a wealthy China, a wealthier Africa would mean new investments in technology that would either sequester

carbon or just use a different energy source altogether.

Exactly. I mean there might be some bumps along the way because getting to a richer China you're probably

going to use a lot of fossil fuels to get there because that's sort of a fuel of choice and not

of choice but of convenience of security of reliability that sort of fueling the world now

so we're going to use fossil fuels going into the future and those technologies that are supported from using

...