Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…You mentioned earlier the fact that particulate matter from coal and cars kills way more people than we imagine — or that most people think — and causes all kinds of other health issues. My view is that the US should be racing to eliminate coal, even setting aside climate change, just because of the public health gains. Why doesn’t that happen? Why aren’t people shouting in the streets about this? Most people don’t care. Most people don’t know about it. It’s not a politically divisive issue where there’s one side motivated to do a great deal for it. But also, where most of the deaths come are in poor economies, and it’s hard to substitute away from coal. And a lot of it is indoor burning of fuels. There is a great amount of low-hanging fruit there, limiting that. But it’s not easy for anyone to get their paws into manipulating those decisions. So I don’t think it’s an easy problem. If it were an easy problem, we would have a much stronger movement to fix it now, the way you do with some of the public health issues like, “Let’s stamp our malaria, polio. ” Polio’s gone further than malaria, but I think malaria will come about, as well. I wouldn’t say it’s an easy target, but it’s easy to identify. You more or less know what you have to do. We’re mostly doing it. Uber ran roughshod over laws all over the place, but in the process, increased GDP a lot. On balance, should we think that Uber is good or bad?…

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