Crashing the Economy for Climate Change

It's interesting that people who speak against action on climate change base their rationale on the impact doing something about climate change will have on the economy, yet the US economy crashed in 2008 in ways that were far more devastating than any carbon reducing actions would have been. Our economy crashed not because we took action to stop climate change, but because there were a bunch of greedy bankers getting rich in the absence of regulations, leading to the loss of trillions from our economy.  Poof! Trillions gone in the course of a year or so. If we had instead spent these trillions on action to prevent climate change, we probably could have made our economy nearly carbon neutral.  Instead, these trillions of dollars vaporized or ended up in the hands of the super rich while the greater part of the population suffered. Not an investment in the future, but a loss we all are still feeling the effects of now, so many years later.
 

I wonder why it's so easy to say we can't take action to stop something that will clearly devastate our society, not to mention our economy, in the near future, yet we don't bat an eye at the fact that our economy crashed because of the greed of a bunch of rich people. And what's worse is that we are allowing the same system responsible for the crash to rebuild itself so that it can do the same thing in a couple decades—provided climate change hasn't done it already by then. Why not just take the chance of doing something about climate change and risk the economic collapse?  At least then the money will have been spent for some good, and not just for the benefit of a bunch of economic leeches on society.

This just in: The US has spent $3 TRILLION on the war and reconstruction in Iraq.  We have plenty of resources to destroy a country, kill hundreds of thousands of people, and rebuild it again, leaving it in worse shape than it was before, but we don't have money for dealing with climate change.  We could have probably just handed over the $3 TRILLION to the fossil fuel industry to convert them all to alternative energy industries and been done with it.  Of course, then they would have just walked off with it like the contractors in Iraq.  But really, you don't think we could have completely changed our economy around to be carbon neutral with $3 TRILLION?  Thanks politicians!

When Science Media Abandon Science

Imagine a future where no farmer in the world can grow a crop without paying exorbitant royalties to a multinational corporation. Discover magazine doesn't seem to think there's anything wrong with that future. Like other science media that seem to embrace genetic engineering as “real scientific breakthrough” and view those opposing it as scientific neanderthals, Discover is in fact ignoring the facts and the science around this technology.

After recently reading an article on GMOs in the magazine it was obvious to me how delicately the author danced around the science on GMO crops, cherry-picking the information he wanted to convey and doing his best to paint European anti-GMO activists as science deniers. Like most media I see supporting biotechnology, there is a concerted effort to misdirect the argument towards the scientific and away from the political. In fact, they try hard to make the point that the political is trumping the scientific. But sometimes the political is more important than the scientific because there are real issues at stake.

Discover says that “As transgenic crops have spread around the world without the apocalyptic consequences activists initially foretold, objections to the technology have shifted away from science.” In other words they couldn't stop GMOs with a scientific argument, so now they are resorting to simple politics. But why this would happen is never fully explained or justified. That maybe these activists are different from the ones who initially brought up the health and safety concerns about GMOs (a very real statistical possibility) is never explored. Maybe this issue has always been part of the case against transgenic crops, or maybe early activists could not have envisioned the greater designs of biotech companies (control of the world's food systems) when they began their fight against GM crops with real fears about the unknown.

 

Capitalism: Free Market Myths

I was listening to the Freakonomics podcast a while back and they had a Harvard economist on talking about how cities are so much more sustainable than any other means of organizing people.  I have many things to say about cities, but I'll start out with a critique of his economics theories.  I have a hard time listening to hardcore market economists and their optimism about the potential of the free market given the world of examples of how it has utterly failed us, the biggest being that we are racing towards a great wall of eco-doom, and still not even taking a glance ahead. 

At one point, this economist criticized public school systems in cities, which are easy targets for critics. As market economists are wont to do, he proposed that the free market could do much better. He gave the example of restaurants to describe the flaws in how public school systems are set up. He said you wouldn't want the government to set up one restaurant and require all the people to eat there because it would taste bad and there would be no incentive to make the food better. So why would you want to set up an educational system like that? He said restaurants have to compete in the marketplace, so they have to do better than the one down the block or they will go out of business.

I was a little amazed that somehow he could draw a connection between these two very different economic sectors. For one thing, one is a luxury market that meets a finite need, the other is a program that continues throughout your childhood and teaches you information that prepares you to function better in society as an adult. You buy dinner and you get something that lasts you one meal. You aren't buying food service for the rest of your life. You aren't buying a nourishment plan that provides the most healthful food for you on a continuous basis. That kind of long term health strategy would compare better to an educational system.