{"id":65552,"date":"2023-07-24T05:32:52","date_gmt":"2023-07-24T10:32:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=65552"},"modified":"2023-07-24T05:32:52","modified_gmt":"2023-07-24T10:32:52","slug":"259-the-way-we-live-next","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=65552","title":{"rendered":"#259: The way we live\u00a0next"},"content":{"rendered":"
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#259: The way we live\u00a0next<\/a><\/h3>\n

REFLECTIONS ON THE REAL ECONOMY<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/header>\n

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\u201cSimultaneous harvest failures across major crop-producing regions are a threat to global food security\u201d, according to a\u00a0new report<\/a>\u00a0published by\u00a0Nature<\/em>. The technical jargon here references a \u201cmeandering jet stream\u201d but, for non-specialists, what this means is that we can no longer rely on worse-than-average crop conditions in some places being cancelled out by better-than-average conditions in others.<\/p>\n

Commenting on this in\u00a0The Guardian<\/em>, George Monbiot\u00a0says<\/a>\u00a0that only five stories about this have appeared in the global media, which he contrasts with \u201cmore than 10,000 stories this year about Phillip Schofield, the British television presenter who resigned over an affair with a younger colleague\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn mediaworld, a place that should never be confused with the real world, celebrity gossip is thousands of times more important than existential risk\u201d, says Monbiot.<\/p>\n

This is a conundrum that affects issues beyond climate change, critically important though this obviously is. We can imagine busy people, with lives to lead and issues to confront, switching off in droves when the media turns to economics.<\/p>\n

Moreover, they\u2019re right to do this, if all that\u2019s being presented to them is an outdated, fallacious doctrine which promises infinite growth on a finite planet, and claims that there\u2019s a financial fix for every economic ill.<\/p>\n

If it\u2019s difficult for people to find time to think about a real issue like climate change, how can we expect them to take an interest in nonsense about infinite growth and the cure-all characteristics of money?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m writing this as the\u00a0Surplus Energy Economics<\/a>\u00a0project closes in on its tenth anniversary.<\/p>\n

To be candid about it, I don\u2019t know exactly what I\u2019m going to do next, but I can tell you my immediate plan.<\/p>\n

This is the first of two planned articles to appear here. The second will try to sum up what I think we now know about the economy, understood as an energy system.<\/p>\n

Here, I\u2019m going to reflect on some of the implications that we can draw from what we know about the economy.<\/p>\n

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Of reality and perception<\/strong><\/p>\n

There are, of course, two ways in which we might explain the disparity of coverage between hard and important scientific news and the doings of people in the \u201cmediaworld\u201d. One is that \u2018the powers that be\u2019 who control the world\u2019s media don\u2019t want us to hear about \u2013 or worry and get angry about \u2013 threats to global food security.<\/p>\n

The other is that the general public is simply more interested in stories about \u2018slebs\u2019 than in the complicated science and gloomy prognostications of the experts, and the media have a commercial interest in covering those stories which attract the greatest attention.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

#259: The way we live\u00a0next REFLECTIONS ON THE REAL ECONOMY \u201cSimultaneous harvest failures across major crop-producing regions are a threat to global food security\u201d, according to a\u00a0new report\u00a0published by\u00a0Nature. The technical jargon here references a \u201cmeandering jet stream\u201d but, for non-specialists, what this means is that we can no longer rely on worse-than-average crop conditions […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[33228,323,6112,512,31315,31314],"class_list":["post-65552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-dr-tim-morgan","tag-food-security","tag-george-monbiot","tag-media","tag-surplus-energy-economics","tag-tim-morgan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=65552"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65552\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65553,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65552\/revisions\/65553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=65552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=65552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=65552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}