Good afternoon. We're still covering the environmental beat for this Cato daily

podcast for Wednesday, February 28th. I'm your host Anastasia Glova. Today's guest is

Indirko Klani who will be talking about his new book, The Improving State of the World,

why we're living longer, healthier, more comfortable lives on a cleaner planet.

Indoor has worked with federal and state governments, think tanks, and the private sector for over 30 years.

He's represented the United States at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and in the

negotiations that established the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

After Al Gore's documentary on Global Warming, an inconvenient truth

took home an Oscar this past weekend,

it's a good time to talk to Indoor about what's really happening to the world around us.

Please tell me how you measure well-being in your book.

I measure it by a variety of objective measures. I do that because I think it's really useful to have measures

that can be verified. I use measures like life expectancy, infant mortality,

prevalence of malnutrition, level of education per capita income, and things like that.

Using these measures, what were your findings?

Essentially, I find that the state of the world has improved quite a bit.

Initially, when industrialization... the state of the world has improved quite a bit.

Initially, when industrialization started 200 years ago

in the United Kingdom, there was a period of time

when things became worse because of urbanization which brought with it things like

unsafe water, poor sanitation and all kinds of diseases that were spread because of the overcrowding

that used to occur in big cities. that was

...