Without commenting on the rest of your post, I am extremely suspicious of your climate change argument.
When the 2008 crisis led to an extended recession, I do not recall many people saying ‘actually this is good, as reduced economic activity due to recession will improve the climate’. When Haiti got hit by natural disasters, lots of people died, and society and the economy collapsed, I again recall very few people saying this.
If you are a single-issue climate change voter, and genuinely do consider everything via a lens of ‘good things are actually bad because they will hurt the environment, and bad things are actually good because they will help the environment’, I withdraw this criticism.
But if your first thought when you read a newspaper report about falling murder rates is not ‘oh no, all those people continuing to live First World lives, think of the environment’, it seems disingenuous to expect Caplan to do the same.
Without commenting on the rest of your post, I am extremely suspicious of your climate change argument.
When the 2008 crisis led to an extended recession, I do not recall many people saying ‘actually this is good, as reduced economic activity due to recession will improve the climate’. When Haiti got hit by natural disasters, lots of people died, and society and the economy collapsed, I again recall very few people saying this.
If you are a single-issue climate change voter, and genuinely do consider everything via a lens of ‘good things are actually bad because they will hurt the environment, and bad things are actually good because they will help the environment’, I withdraw this criticism.
But if your first thought when you read a newspaper report about falling murder rates is not ‘oh no, all those people continuing to live First World lives, think of the environment’, it seems disingenuous to expect Caplan to do the same.