Interview with Oren Cass

Featuring Oren Cass, Senior Fellow at The Manhattan Institute

Politicians and activists frustrated by slow progress on climate change blame what they say are intractable characteristics of the issue: collective-action problems, long timeframes, nor do any of them explain why progress has been slow. Indeed, focus on the domestic policy debate is entirely misplaced. The question that matters is what infrastructure trajectory the developing world will follow, and on that point the U.S. government has woefully little influence. A better analog for climate change is world hunger; obsessing over carbon footprints is this generation's version of eating our vegetables because children in Africa are starving. Mr. Cass discusses how far the popular conception of climate change has drifted from its underlying physical and economic realities, how that disconnect has skewed the political and policy debates, and what a more constructive approach might look like as hopes for global action fade away.