A new generation of unscrupulous political leaders and Wall Street hucksters has come up with a brilliant plan to outwit the populist revolt: pretending to be critics of capitalism
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink tells Fox Business host Liz Claman how climate change killed the Iguanodon
Raise your hand if you saw this headline from the New York Times last week coming:
The name of Bret Stephens may be the one most associated with “markets” in media. Even his struggle-sessionish “I was wrong about climate change” piece in 2022 came with a caveat that witnessing melting glaciers in Greenland just reinforced “my belief that markets, not government, provide the cure.” Seeing an article about capitalism failing the middle class above his byline is like reading “Grammer is Overrayted” by William Safire, or “Globalism: It Doesn’t Float My Plane” by Thomas Friedman. In the end Stephens tried to say something in defense of markets, but in a bizarre reversal from 15 years ago, such protestations now need to be couched as indictments of the profit motive, especially in papers like the Times, whose upscale readers are continuing their preposterous pose of socialist chic.
The mainstream press was once home to reflexive, often hysterical defenses of the free-market system. Op-ed pages saw even the CEOs of firms caught trading against their own clients defended as “wealth creators” who did “God’s work” for a “social purpose.” No more. Now, even the very wealthy give performative speeches about the pitfalls of capitalism, corporate-funded think-tanks routinely decry its failures, and polls on sites like Fast Company even show that 35% of “C-suite executives” react negatively to the word, “capitalism.” What gives? The only headline I recall in recent years that unironically cheered the capitalist idea was a Washington Post op-ed from last summer: “Elon Musk’s Twitter Failure Shows Capitalism is Working.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Some weeks ago, I was sitting on stage with an economist from the World Trade Organisation and a banker from UBS. We were opening a small, one-day conference for the private aviation industry, and I had been invited to challenge the prevailing macro-economic forecast. I had been surprised to receive the invitation, to say the least, and asked the woman organising the event if she was sure she wanted me there. She laughed: “Hell yeah!” So off I went to the Swiss Alps—by train, of course—to calmly and assuredly explain to a hostile audience that the excellent economic forecast provided was awfully narrow in scope when you factor in resource scarcity, geopolitical instability, nuclear war, climate tipping points and the illusion of material decoupling. In sum, we’re heading for economic collapse by 2050, I said.
The banker disagreed. I told him perhaps he should look at the data before forming an opinion. He recoiled as if I had slapped him, and I wondered how often he is around people who disagree with him. The economist from the WTO offered a middle ground, focusing on the necessity of economic development, and using it as a reason to warn against the injustice of degrowth. I smiled wanly and gave the correct definition of degrowth as a redistribution mechanism to develop the majority world whilst reducing the output of the global north.
Then someone from the audience, fed up with my negative outlook, shouted out that he didn’t necessarily disagree with everything I was saying but he wanted solutions! He’s a capitalist, for god’s sake! What, did I just want to throw away capitalism?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Today’s contemplation is prompted by an article posted recently in a Degrowth Facebook group I am a member of. The author presents the argument that capitalism and the greed it inspires is the root of our inability to address climate change appropriately. While I don’t agree fully with the perspective presented, it is a great article that goes into much detail far beyond climate concerns and I recommend reading it.
Where I found myself reflecting on its content were the assertions that it is primarily, if not solely, the fault of capitalism for our existential crisis of climate change and the suggestion that it’s possible through degrowth strategies to achieve a utopian-like world with “…universal education and healthcare, and at least 5,000–15,000 km of mobility in various modes per person per year. It offers fairer and better lives for the vast majority of people…” (perhaps up to 10 billion) should the world have the wherewithal to ensure the ‘right’ things be done — particularly the idea that we need to avoid elite panic in responding to our crises (that leads to leveraging of situations to protect their ‘booty’) and adopt the non-elite tendency to ‘sacrifice’ for one’s community.
While I have great respect for the degrowth movement and its underlying philosophy that holds humanity needs to live within the biophysical limits of a finite planet[1], the bargaining/denial I sense from many that support it is where I diverge a tad in my thinking about our plight and future ‘potential’.
While I have come to the firm belief that our ruling elite are primarily driven by a desire to control/expand the wealth-generating/-extracting systems that provide their revenue streams and thus wealth/power/prestige/privilege (leading them to encourage/cheerlead the chasing of the perpetual growth chalice that supports the power/wealth structures inherent in any complex society, and certainly leverage crises to their advantage to help meet their motivation), I’m not so convinced that capitalism’s role in our predicament (ecological overshoot) is much more than a leverage-point (of several) in perhaps speeding up the pre/historical and biological/ecological processes which will eventually bring our global, industrial society to its knees.
Long before ‘capitalism’ took hold of our elite, there were complex societies that ‘collapsed’ due to what archaeologist Joseph Tainter argues are diminishing returns on investments in complexity[2]. Our human societies’ problem-solving proclivity to exploit/extract the easy-to-retrieve and cheap-to-access resources first leads to eventual ‘cost’ increases (particularly in terms of energy) that require the use of society’s surpluses/reserves to maintain/sustain political, economic, and organisational structures (as well as technologies) that serve as our ‘solutions’ to perceived ‘problems’.
Once these surpluses/reserves are unavailable due to their exhaustion and ‘society’ can no longer provide the benefits of participation in it, people ‘opt out’ and withdraw their support — usually by packing up and leaving. This ‘abandonment’ by increasing numbers of people undermines the necessary human, and thus material, inputs that support the structures that hold a complex society together and it eventually ‘collapses’.
Obviously, such a withdrawal of support is virtually impossible in today’s world for a variety of reasons; not least of which are the inability to ‘escape’ the elite’s reach in most nation states — at least for the time being — and a lack of skills/knowledge to survive for very long without the energy slaves/conveniences of ‘modern’ society, keeping people virtually trapped and incapable of opting out. In addition, the ruling elite need their citizens for labour and/or taxes and will go to virtually any length to prevent such withdrawal from the various entrapments of today’s world.
This is not to ignore the knock-on effects of ways in which ‘support’ is being undermined by political, social, and economic policies of the ruling elite. More and more people are questioning the directives issued from upon high and challenging them.
For example, there seems to be growing concern that the gargantuan expansion of credit/debt is quite problematic. For some this is an approach that expedites the drawing down of fundamental resources (especially energy) — ‘stealing from the future’ for lack of a better term. A good argument can also be made that much (most?) of this debt/credit is being created to fund geopolitical competition and siphon wealth from national treasuries into the ‘holdings’ of the elite. This is not to dismiss that a portion is being directed to the population, but I would contend that this is to help provide cover for the inequity that is resulting from the massive expansion of fiat currency — particularly in that ‘hidden tax’ of price inflation that always impacts the disadvantaged disproportionately to the wealthy elite — and to sustain the Ponzi scheme that our economic/financial/monetary systems have become.
I sense we are likely to experience (already are experiencing?) a doubling-down of efforts to control the hoi polloi by our ‘leaders’ as our systems begin to decline in perceived benefits. Tyranny comes in many guises, from narrative management and mass surveillance to incarceration and violence.
Our fundamental predicament is unfortunately overlooked in the somewhat reductionist approach that focuses exclusively on capitalism and climate change/carbon emissions. The following graphic illustrates this perspective with respect to the simplification that can occur when one focuses upon a single variable when complex systems necessarily consist of many intertwined ones with nonlinear feedback loops and emergent phenomena.
Carbon Tunnel Vision
Eliminating capitalism has become the clarion call for many but I’m viewing this increasingly as part of the denial/bargaining that is expanding in our ‘hope’ to find a ‘solution’ to our various crises. In relatively simplistic terms, the view holds that if we eliminate the greed inherent in capitalism and the waste it leads to, humanity can continue to have a technological, global-spanning society where everyone can live happily-ever-after — for example, we could direct our ‘wealth’ to the ‘right’ technology (think ‘green/clean’ energy production and electrified gadgets) and thus sustain our complexities with nary a hiccup.
Unfortunately, I would argue, such rhetoric is not only dividing some very well-intentioned groups/individuals, but causing our fundamental predicament to be overlooked and thus any possible mitigation of it to be mostly dismissed — primarily because the issue is exceedingly complex and in all likelihood has no simple and all-encompassing ‘solution’, but rather a difficult and unnerving shift in thinking and approaches where perhaps just a handful of humans carry on in a ‘sustainable’ fashion[3].
This appears to be even worse than a ‘wicked problem’[4], for these still hold out ‘hope’ for a ‘solution’ should every variable line up ‘correctly’ to help ‘solve’ it. This possibility, as remote as it is for wicked problems, opens the door to all sorts of denial and bargaining — a strong human tendency to help avoid anxiety-provoking thoughts.
I’m increasingly leaning towards the conclusion that the ecological bottleneck our human experiment has created by its vast overshooting of the planet’s natural carrying capacity is far too small for the growing number of us to get through. No amount of denial or bargaining (elimination of capitalism; wealth redistribution; ‘green/clean’ energy) is likely to change that[5].
And then there’s the issue of peak resources, most problematic being that of oil. The ideas promulgated in the article and by supporters of degrowth seem to be somewhat energy/resource blind[6]. The significant (and I mean VERY significant) role played by oil and other fossil fuels in creating an explosion in human resource exploitation and population cannot be stressed enough. It has not only allowed us to access previously inaccessible resources to support our growth but has done so to the point where many of these supportive materials have now encountered significant diminishing returns and, for some, begun to encounter increasing scarcity placing continued use more in the rear-view mirror than some techno-cornucopian future[7].
I continue to believe that personal/group attempts to relocalise as much as possible the fundamentals of living can increase the probability of a region getting through to the other side of the coming transition. Potable water, food production, and shelter needs for the climate should be a focus; not bargaining with our sociopolitical and socioeconomic systems since this can unnecessarily divert energy and resources from the actions that will probably foster greater self-sufficiency and -resiliency — perhaps enough to get through the impending ecological bottleneck.
I believe we have never lived in an ideal world, nor ever will. The constant and repetitive rise and fall of complex societies has demonstrated our experimentations have failed, despite having the best technologies and thinkers of the time. We cannot help ourselves, it would seem. We keep making the same mistakes again and again and again…only this time we have leveraged a one-time cache of ancient carbon energy to create a globalised, industrial world and put the entire species into ecological overshoot while destroying many of any competing species and much of the planet in the process.
The likelihood of everything going ‘just right’ for us, as the ‘bargainers’ hope, is probably even more remote than this Canadian senior ending up playing in the National Hockey League (a childhood fantasy[8]) in the not too distant future.
This article was brought to my attention yesterday and is also well worth the read. It echoes many of my own thoughts about our plight.
[2] Tainter, J.. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge University Press, 1988. (ISBN 978–0–521–38673–9). There are competing theories as to why and how complex societies decline/collapse, but I have found Tainter’s to be the most compelling.
[3] In no way am I advocating a sudden ‘die-off’ to achieve this; such an event is increasingly looking to happen via the ‘natural’ collapse that accompanies a species overshooting its environmental carrying capacity, regardless of our wishes otherwise.
[5] I realise that stating ‘likely’ also opens the door to such bargaining but I attempt to be careful in declarations that suggest certitude. Few, if any, of our stories about our understanding of the world and prognostications about its future are certain — some just more probable than others.
[8] As a Canadian born at the start of the 1960s in a relatively smallish city (182,000 the year I was born), I was introduced to playing hockey at age four. I have played almost every year since (took a few years off when my children were young) and continue to play regularly. I have played alongside some who have been drafted by NHL teams but never made the next step, and I can attest to the fact that despite my wishes my skill set has never been even close to being capable of playing professionally. I am still struggling to pull off a ‘saucer pass’ or ‘toe drag’ regularly and continue to practise them almost every time I play.
The history of capitalism has an arc of its own. It has a beginning, a high point, and yes, an end — with or without revolutions, climate change or ecological destruction. Capitalism follows a trajectory of natural evolution culminating in a Orwellian dystopia, right before its quick demise. Join me in this short review on the origins of capitalism to understand why every attempt made at dismantling it has failed — and will continue to do so — until the authoritarian technologies making it possible disappear in the not so distant future.
According to Investopedia“Capitalism is an economic system characterized by private ownership of the means of production, with labor solely paid wages. Capitalism depends on the enforcement of private property rights, which provide incentives for investment in and productive use of capital.” What is sorely missing from this definition — as always when it comes to economics — is the role of technology and energy. Both factors have played a crucial role in the conception of this idea, let alone its growth into the hydra it has become. Contrary to common wisdom, I argue, neither of these critical inputs — energy and technology — were brought about by capitalism itself, it was completely the other way around. It was the use of technology and an ever growing availability of energy which has made capitalism possible, and thus the loss of these will be the cause which will eventually bring it to its knees.
Capitalism can never hoped to be dismantled without abandoning technology.
I know that is a harsh statement, perhaps prompting some of my readers to point out how anti-technology I am, and how a socialist revolution / green technologies / Bitcoin / gold / or fill in the blank could turn things around overnight. Well, all I ask is this: bear with me for a few more minutes.
The following is an exert from Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World,by Jonathon Crary. [Verso, 2022]
Any effective imagination of a post-capitalist material culture must confront the inseparability of modern technology from the institutional formations of modern science. We are currently overwhelmed from all sides by reverential exaltations of “science” and of the unimpeachable authority of “the scientists” who will deliver us from the climate crisis. The absurdity of this sanctification of one of the primary agents of biosphere destruction—including global warming—is evident to many, but there is a strict prohibition on openly acknowledging it. Science, in its many powerful institutional manifestations, is now essentialized as an a priori source of truth, existing above economic interests or social determinations and exempt from historical or ideological evaluation. It is the one remaining mirage of legitimacy behind which global capital continues its rampage of planetary looting and destruction. The marginal figures of the altruistic climatologist or oceanographer are foregrounded as camouflage for the structural complicity of most scientific research with corporate and military priorities. In the face of reactionary attacks on all forms of knowledge and learning, our response should not be a mindless celebration of a fairytale account of “science.” Such cowardly obsequiousness is an anti-intellectualism as damaging as the rightwing embrace of ignorance. The voluminous and many-sided critique of the limits and failings of Western science has been rendered invisible and unmentionable. Contributors to this essential body of thought include some of the most discerning philosophers, scientists, feminists, activists, and social thinkers of the last hundred or more years. We’re at a moment when the survival of life on our planet depends on reanimating this critique, and recovering an unequivocal awareness of how most of the foundational paradigms of Western science have brought us to our current disastrous, possibly terminal, situation.
Ed Yourdon from New York City via Wikimedia Commons
None of us are ready for the chaos of the we are stoking, caused by the rapacious growth of what Kurt Vonnegut Jr. referred to as “thermodynamic whoopee”. You might know it as Global Industrial Civilization-GIC. This is the beginning of how the world will sort itself out for the next 20 years.
An energy conversion from fossil fuels will not be possible to an equal extent in all world regions before peak oil occurs. It is likely that a large number of countries will not be able to make the necessary investments in good time and to the required extent.
The communities that live around those festering wounds and the toxic pools know this. And their anger and disquiet is growing as is their numbers. From sanitation employees in Paris to farmers in Punjab.
Even under the threat of our mighty military the other economies and nations of the world will make alliances, some out of necessity and some out of short-term gain, but the harder we push the more defined the battle lines will be. Our ruling class wants us to believe we can win this energy transition war. By any humanitarian definition of “winning” they are lying. They think THEY can win this war. They are wrong.
The contemporary financial system is at severe and worsening risk because of the gargantuan scale of the ‘excess claims overhang’ that has been created on the false assumption that the creation of money and credit in their various forms (known to conventional economics as “demand”) can somehow expand the real economy of goods and services. Demand can raise prices but demand can not create more oil in the ground.
American elites want magical technological fixes to climate change because they refuse to confront the truth that seriously addressing the problem would require limits to their own power and luxury.
Few of us want to face the climate mess. The numbers are scary and confusing, and the facts have never been reported in a way that actually generates public understanding. “The media are complacent while the world burns,” Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope declare in theColumbia Journalism Review. There’s plenty of data to back up this bold assertion: based on an analysis of 600 New York Times articles on climate change, a UC Berkeley report states that “the vast majority contained none of the five basic climate facts,” meaning that readers are left uneducated about the truth and scope of the problem. (The five criteria the researchers used are that global warming is happening, that burning fossil fuels produces greenhouse gases that create warming, that 90%+ of climate scientists agree on the human causes of warming, that there is now more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there has been for hundreds of thousands of years, and that warming is permanent.)
It’s not just a lack of effective information: many media movers and shakers claim that climate coverage is “a palpable ratings killer” in the first place, and so they tend to curtail or water down their coverage. Of course there are exceptions—an article in New York by David Wallace-Wells beat the supposed “traffic Kryptonite” curse (over 6 million hits, which led to his book The Uninhabitable Earth). Wallace-Wells has stated that “being alarmed is what the facts demand.” …
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
World-renowned Greek economist, author, and politician Yanis Varoufakis argues that global capitalism as we know it is dying—and something much worse is taking its place.
Yanis Varoufakis speaks with This Is Revolution co-hosts Jason Myles and Pascal Robert. Screenshot/TRNN
From the push to turn more of the workforce into precarious “gig workers” to the ways profit-seeking digital platforms condition how we act and think while extracting free data from us, we can see and feel everyday the creeping evidence that we are living in a new reality. As world-renowned Greek economist, author, and politician Yanis Varoufakis argues, “This is how capitalism ends: not with a revolutionary bang, but with an evolutionary whimper. Just as it displaced feudalism gradually, surreptitiously, until one day the bulk of human relations were market-based and feudalism was swept away, so capitalism today is being toppled by a new economic mode: techno-feudalism.”
In their latest interview for TRNN, co-hosts of THIS IS REVOLUTION Jason Myles and Pascal Robert speak with Varoufakis about how this “techno-feudalist” system emerged, what sets it apart from the global capitalist system that preceded it, and what it will mean for humanity if we don’t stop it. Yanis Varoufakis formerly served as the finance minister of Greece and is currently the secretary general of MeRA25, a left-wing political party in Greece that he founded in 2018. He is a professor of economics at the University of Athens and the author of numerous books, including The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy and Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present.
Pre-Production/Studio: Jason Myles
Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
TRANSCRIPT
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I have embarked on quite the journey over the past year. I stepped out of my comfort zone and decided to begin writing this blog. I do enjoy discussing energy and resource decline and climate change, because of the stark implications they present. I’m less comfortable talking about extinction due to the uncertainty of a timeline and the controversy surrounding it. Despite my knowledge in this field, I never feel like I know enough; so I’m always digging for more information. The studies, articles, videos, and other media I have discovered are sometimes difficult to digest. I often have to step back to think about what I am writing and how it will be received for those few who are reading it. I am ever mindful of how I felt upon first discovering where we are as a species and precisely how we continue chopping off the limb we are perched upon. It is quite difficult at times, understanding not only where we are but where we are headed; also comprehending the inertia behind us pushing us into new realms and sending us beyond tipping points. Today’s article combines an eclectic mix of both recent events and stories with new material from Tom Murphy, William Rees, Jeff Masters, Alice Friedemann, and many others. Those of you familiar with my posts will be unfazed; new readers may be horrified.
The way some of my articles are received by a few point to anger and denial. I understand this because I was also there for a while, although I quickly progressed beyond those stages of grief. Despite my knowledge regarding human denial of reality and then the accompanying optimism bias which often typically lead to overshoot, I am still surprised by the sheer scale of this denial..
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
“A People’s Green New Deal” demands a different kind of impossible
Over the past two decades, a proliferation of “Green New Deal” literature has promoted various strategies for changing the structure of the global energy system to combat climate change. While the term was first coined by the neoliberal economist Thomas Friedman, it has since been taken up by more progressive voices, from Keynesian social democrats to eco-socialists. Sadly, despite the promise of a new wave of climate-conscious legislation, from the European Green Deal and the UN Climate Agreement to the AOC-Markey legislation of 2019, each seems as unlikely as its predecessors to enact substantive change. At the recent COP 26 Climate Summit, for example, the United States failed to join 30 other nations in pledging to phase out sales of new gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles by 2040 worldwide. With the US federal government dominated by fossil-fuel friendly Democrats and climate-change denying Republicans, the chances of passing ambitious climate legislationappear bleak. In the absence of real political force, GND proposals often serve as blueprints that respond to a largely speculative question: what would we do if we were in a position of power to create meaningful, lasting, and necessary change?
Instead of offering another blueprint for an impossible future, Max Ajl’s A People’s Green New Deal levels a critique at the genre itself, raising significant questions about the way that plans are proffered, and how most green futures implicitly accept the ongoing violence of capitalist imperialism. Ajl’s work engages critically with a wide spectrum of GND proposals, from policy documents like the European Commission and European Environmental Agency’s “European Green Deal” and Senator Ed Markey and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s House Resolution 109…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Capitalism has allowed us to throw a two-century party – We trashed the place, drank the booze, burned the furniture — It’s time to wake up, act like adults, and behave responsibly. —
Nate Hagens
“Here in America when bad shit happens, we immediately perceive it as an injustice — it’s not fair or right – and then we logically have to blame someone or something. …. If capitalism is to blame, what is capitalism? Here’s a definition from the IMF [International Monetary Fund]. ‘Capitalism. is an economic system in which private actors own and control property in accord with their interests and supply freely set prices in markets in a way that can serve the best interests of society. The essential feature of capitalism in the motive to make a profit.’…. Capitalism, on the backs of fossil armies, brought billions of people out of poverty, allowed hundreds of millions of humans to live like kings and queens, and enabled billions of people to be born and live lives on earth by turbo-charging the food supply. It is too weighty and complex of an issue to label as simply ‘bad’ or ‘good. In some ways, complaining about capitalism is a luxury enabled by capitalism. Capitalism itself isn’t bad – the effects are bad. Many of the bad effects aren’t about wealth itself, but wealth inequality, which has ebbed and flowed over thousands of years, but naturally will spike during the highest surplus or monetary surplus representations. …. Any ‘ism’ linked to a culture that extracts carbon 10 million times faster than it was sequestered by nature us going to have disastrous long-term effects. Relative to other ‘isms’, capitalism did it faster…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Overcoming the climate crisis will require a shift away from our growth-based, corporate-dominated global system
General view during the Global Climate Strike March on October 02, 2020 in Durban, South Africa. According to media reports, the group demanded that individuals and governments must take stronger action against the effects of climate change and the emittance of the greenhouse gas. (Darren Stewart/Gallo Images via Getty Images)
The global conversation regarding climate change has, for the most part, ignored the elephant in the room. That’s strange, because this particular elephant is so large, obvious, and all-encompassing that politicians and executives must contort themselves to avoid naming it publicly. That elephant is called capitalism, and it is high time to face the fact that, as long as capitalism remains the dominant economic system of our globalized world, the climate crisis won’t be resolved.
As the crucial UN climate talks known as COP26 (short for “Conference of the Parties”) approach in early November, the public has grown increasingly aware that the stakes have never been higher. What were once ominous warnings of future climate shocks wrought by wildfires, floods, and droughts have now become a staple of the daily news. Yet governments are failing to meet their own emissions pledges from the Paris agreement six years ago, which were themselves acknowledged to be inadequate. Increasingly, respected Earth scientists are warning, not just about the devastating effects of climate breakdown on our daily lives, but about the potential collapse of civilization itself unless we drastically change direction.
The elephant in the room
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You’d think the revelation that the CIA planned to assassinate an award-winning journalist for journalistic activity would have been a bigger deal.
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Capitalism hinders progress because it ensures that all mass-scale human behavior will be driven by the pursuit of profit. For example, a huge global issue we have right now is cleaning up the pollution in our oceans. That is an easily solved issue if you take out the profit motive; you don’t wait for market forces to find some way to make it profitable, you just get in there and clean it up. But with the profit motive it’s almost impossible to conceive of it ever being solved.
How often have you been excited by a great idea only to feel that familiar disappointment wash over you as you realize that it will never happen because it won’t make anyone any money? That’s how the profit motive stunts innovation.
The profit motive will never find a way to leave a forest alone or minerals in the ground. There’s no business plan that makes money out of moms being paid to bring up healthy, happy, secure children. You can’t find a way to make money out of people driving less or buying less. There is no money in curing an illness, only treating it. There is no money in solving poverty, only in setting up a multi-million dollar “charity” that never actually intends to solve poverty because it’s a business and a business requires endless expansion.
People who proffer the market as a solution to our massive problems have either never really thought about the restrictions of the profit motive, or they are heavily invested in pretending those restrictions don’t exist. I don’t respect either of those positions.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Western capitalist economies don’t really do shortages. There are a few stand alone exceptions such as a music festival or a sporting event, where demand so outstrips supply that queues form. But for the most part – as we saw last week with the eye-watering rise in wholesale gas prices – when something is in short supply the price increases; and when the price increases enough, the queues disappear.
In economics, this is the difference between demand and desire. I might, for example, desire a new sports car or a country mansion. But since I do not have anything like the discretionary income to buy these things, I do not contribute to the economic demand for them. And unless someone is going to offer them for sale at a ridiculously low price, I doubt that we are going to see queues forming any time soon. As Tom Chivers at UnHerd puts it:
“Over the long run, the market normally solves coordination problems like this, reasonably effectively. If lots of people want some resource, then the people selling that resource realise they can make more money if they raise the price. At the higher price, fewer people are willing to buy it, but the seller makes more money per unit sold. And, in theory, they can keep raising the price until the lost sales start to outweigh the gain per unit.”
When we witness queues piling up outside filling stations across the UK then, we might be correct in assuming that something – or most likely some things – are being done to artificially generate a shortage where none previously existed…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The second draft of the IPCC Group III report, focused on mitigation strategies, states that we must move away from the current capitalist model to avoid surpassing planetary boundaries and climate and ecological catastrophe). It also confirms our previous reports, covered by CTXT and The Guardian, that “greenhouse gas emissions must peak in the next four years”. The new leak acknowledges that there is little or no room for further economic growth.
The undersigned scientists and journalists have analyzed a new part of the Sixth Assessment Report, which has been leaked to us by the same sources as last time—Scientist Rebellion and Extinction Rebellion Spain. In this leak the usual more timid positions can be found, but also prominent statements that would have been unthinkable not long ago.
To contextualize, let’s just remember: In 1990, the First IPCC Report stated that, “the observed increase [in temperature] could be largely due to natural variability”, and although subsequent reports put this position to rest, this Sixth Report eliminates any possibility of doubt, and leaves no room for the climate denial arguments which have been historically and amply financed by those who had the most to benefit from maintaining this narrative: the fossil fuel lobbies.
The leaked report mentions that indefinite growth must be renounced. Since radical transition is required, the key question is how can a shift away from models of perpetual growth be understood as a benefit and not merely relinquishment? …
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
