Tag Archives: climate change

David Zetland writes in his news letter for The one-handed economist: “What if we stopped pretending the climate apocalypse can be stopped?”  lines up almost exactly with what I’ve been thinking in recent years, i.e., that we’re not making any serious dent in GHG emissions and that it’s better to focus on local community and resiliency. One ironic manifestation of this thinking is that property values in Amsterdam (a city in a region that will be...

Definitely a should-read that advances the debate. While not an MMT-based view it does illuminate the  symbiotic relationship of technology, engineering, innovation, real resources, "money," culture and ideas in the present world system, which is ecologically unstable and is becoming unsustainable. Alf Hormborg argues that this is not simply a matter of tweaking the system through scaling technological innovation. The problem is the design of the system. The ConversationA globalised...

Is Doing Environmental Economics Especially Depressing? We have now learned that on Aug. 27 last week Matin Weitzman hanged himself, leaving a note citing his failure to share in last year’s Nobel Prize as well as his apparently declining mental acuity.  That prize he did not share included William Nordhaus as a recipient for his work on climate economics issues, a topic that Weitzman also worked on, arguably more deeply and originally than did...

Figure 1 Via mashable: Alaska’s exceptional summer continues. The most rapidly changing state in the U.S. has no sea ice within some 150 miles of its shores, according to high-resolution sea ice analysis from the National Weather Service. The big picture is clear: After an Arctic summer with well above-average temperatures, warmer seas, and a historic July heat wave, sea ice has vanished in Alaskan waters. “Alaska waters are ice free,” said Rick Thoman, a...

The Hurricane/Picture of Dorian Gray: A Perfect Moral Storm in Three Texts Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The temporal aspect is particularly striking,’ writes philosopher Stephen Gardiner, who has done perhaps more than anyone to foreground it, in A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change: it catches us in a bind. Given that global warming is ‘seriously backloaded’ (every moment experiencing a higher temperature posted from the past)...

Presidential contender Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Monday released a plan to protect independent news outlets and journalists from the effects of widespread media consolidation.Sanders, decrying the mega-mergers he says have led to a handful of large corporations acting as gatekeepers for the information most Americans receive, calls for concrete steps “to rebuild and protect a diverse and truly independent press so that real journalists can do the critical jobs that they love” in an...

As policymakers, academics, and activists prepare for next month's United Nations climate summit in New York, they should consider precisely what it will take to build a truly sustainable global economy. First and foremost, the world needs a new multidisciplinary approach that is broad enough to tackle the challenge.... Project SyndicatePlanetary Thinking Eric Berglöf

California is facing yet another real estate-related crisis, but we’re not talking about its sky-high home prices. According to newly released data, it’s simply become too risky to insure houses in big swaths of the wildfire-prone state. Last winter when we wrote about home insurance rates possibly going up in the wake of California’s massive, deadly fires, the insurance industry representatives we interviewed were skeptical. They noted that the stories circulating in the media about...

Researchers found that PV systems could produce electricity at a lower price than the grid in 344 cities. Good news for air quality and climate. China has been relying on coal-fired plants (72% in 2016). Two anecdotes. I have a friend that teaches for six-weeks in Beijing on occasion. I once said to him that it must be a great experience. He answered that it was terrible, the pollution was so bad. I have another acquaintance that is Chinese, now living in the US. He's been here about 20...

Cost is the reason that climate change is putting many people in deep denial, and even some people most committed to addressing this emerging challenge have not come to grips with what it will take engineering-wise, which determines the cost. Nor is the engineering solution always readily evident. Engineering solutions to design problems on this scale are enormously expensive in any case.  But the challenge is identifying the proper case, and getting the assumptions right.  Recall New...