Tag Archives: climate change

Head in the sand, so far. Massive denial."Capitalize the gains, socialize the losses" is becoming an unsustainable business model.Tax Research UKThe world’s companies should be forced to account for Global Heating Richard Murphy | Professor of Practice in International Political Economy at City University, London; Director of Tax Research UK; non-executive director of Cambridge Econometrics, and a member of the Progressive Economy Forum

When remembered at all, Edward Abbey is mostly thought of as an environmentalist and anarchist but there is no gainsaying the racism and xenophobia on display in his 1983 essay, “Immigration and Liberal Taboos.” The opinion piece was originally solicited by the New York Times, which ultimately declined to publish it — or to pay him the customary kill fee. It was subsequently rejected by Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Rolling Stone, Newsweek,...

Control of oil has long been a key aim of U.S. foreign policy. The Paris climate agreements and any other Green programs to reduce the pace of global warming are viewed as threatening the aim of dominating world energy markets by keeping economies dependent on oil under U.S. control. Also blocking U.S. willingness to help stem global warming is the oil industry’s economic and hence political power. Its product is not only energy but also global warming, along with plastic pollution.......

Climate Equity: What Is It? While action against climate change languishes, the rhetoric keeps getting more intense.  For several years now it hasn’t been enough to demand climate policy; we need climate justice.  We will not only eliminate fossil fuels in a decade or three, we will solve the problems of poverty and discrimination, and all in a single political package.  It sounds good, but what does it mean? You might look for an answer in new...

...Bringing science into economics must necessarily entail measurements in the scientific units above (plus the utilization of taxonomic schemes for biota). Thus if we assess by scientific studies and measurements that we are causing the 6th mass extinction and forcing dangerous climate change by releasing CO2 from our fossil fuels, then we have assessed that we should stop using fossil fuels. How we stop is the next matter for consideration and then we must examine energy transitions,...

Pledging Zero Carbon Emissions by 2030 or 2050: Does it Matter? We now have two responses to the climate emergency battling it out among House Democrats, the “aggressive” 2030 target for net zero emissions folded into the Green New Deal and a more “moderate” 2050 target for the same, just announced by a group of mainstream legislators.  How significant is this difference?  Does where you stand on climate policy depend on whether your policy has a 2030...

Dan here.  You will be reading more of him soon…David Zetland has contributed here on water issues via Aguanomics. He now publishes his blog The one-handed economist.  He is a native Californian who moved to Amsterdam several years ago. David is an assistant professor of political economy at Leiden University College, a liberal arts school located in The Hague. He teaches courses in social and business entrepreneurship, cooperation in the commons, and...

I use a simple rule. If you want to have an idea of what we will be facing by the middle of this century absent concerted action on climate change, then what we think of today, what we perceive, what we describe as record heat or a record heat wave— in a few decades, we will simply call that summer. The typical summer day will be like the most extreme day that we have seen in our lifetimes at this point. And what unusual heat, record heat, will look like at that point, we don’t even have...

Via Evonomics, Steve Keen critiques Norhaus’s model for predicting economic damage per degree of average temperature rise….nerdy, and includes graphs and math, but worth a look. By Steve Keen This piece is part of a series from Steve Keen, Climate Change and the Nobel Prize in Economics: The Age of Rebellion. In the previous post, Keen noted the contrast between the urgency that Extinction Rebellion sees about limiting global warming to no more than 1.5...

When the governments in the advanced nations abandoned full employment as an overarching macroeconomic objective, and instead, starting pursuing what I have called full employability, they stopped seeing unemployment as a policy target (to be minimised) and began using it as a policy tool to suppress inflation. As mass unemployment rose, the politics were massaged by the mainstream of my profession who claimed that the level of unemployment that constituted full employment had risen (this...