Free Republic

Climate change is widening the world’s gap between the haves and have-nots, worsening economic inequality between rich and poor countries, according to a new analysis by Stanford scientists.

In the May 2000 issue of Reason Magazine, award-winning science correspondent Ronald Bailey wrote an excellent article titled “Earth Day, Then and Now” to provide some historical perspective on the 30th anniversary of Earth Day. In that article, Bailey noted that around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, and in the years following, there was a “torrent of apocalyptic predictions” and many of those predictions were featured in his Reason article.

"Donald Trump issued on Monday an Earth Day proclamation that omitted any mention of climate change or the cavalcade of environmental threats posed by deforestation, species loss and plastic pollution. The president chose instead to praise the benefits of a “strong market economy”. "In response, one leading climate scientist said Trump’s environmental policy was “in many cases the antithesis of protection”. The executive director of the Sierra Club said Trump was “the worst president for the environment our nation has ever had”. .....

Nature’s gifts to our planet are the millions of species that we know and love, and many more that remain to be discovered. Unfortunately, human beings have irrevocably upset the balance of nature and, as a result, the world is facing the greatest rate of extinction since we lost the dinosaurs more than 60 million years ago. But unlike the fate of the dinosaurs, the rapid extinction of species in our world today is the result of human activity. The unprecedented global destruction and rapid reduction of plant and wildlife populations are directly linked to causes driven by human activity:...

Global warming may be making income inequality worse across the world. This Earth Day, Stanford University researchers said gradual temperature increases over almost five decades have helped created financial disparities between poorer, typically warm countries and richer, typically cooler countries. Without climate change, the divide between nations with the largest economic output per person and nations with the smallest output per person would be 25% smaller, says the new study. Instead, climate change has been a drag on growth for many poorer countries and enriched many wealthy countries. “Countries that are very warm tended to exhibit slower economic growth whereas...