Summary: Relevant Reading: Detroit’s Bankruptcy and Its Painful Reforms Stephen Eide Good evening, podcast listeners! We have two excellent segments for you this week, one domestic and one very much international. First, Richard Tol, professor of economics at the University of Sussex and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and veteran of four assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, speaks about the ongoing climate summit in Lima, Peru. He outlines the problems caused by the oversimplification of climate change to include only surface-temperature warming before reminding us that change is a neutral word, and that future shifts in our climate will not be universally negative. He argues that the climate change movement has been hijacked by green groups which have a vested interest in stoking hysteria, and that this apocalyptic world view is not supported by the science. He also suggests that climate change adaptation techniques are in many cases cheaper and more practical options than efforts to mitigate it. Then, a week after the lights literally went out in Detroit, Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Stephen Eide discusses the challenges still ahead for Detroit as it emerges from Chapter 9 bankruptcy. He contrasts the recent surge of optimism within Detroit about the citys future with the more skeptical stance many outsiders are taking as they look under the hood of this bankruptcy plan. He points to pensions as the crux of Detroits problems, and looks at what might happen in struggling cities elsewhere in the country if Detroit is able to navigate these challenges successfully. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, and follow our host Richard Aldous @RJAldous and Richard Tol @RichardTol on Twitter.
