Jason Hickel — To Save The Economy, We Have To Break Its One Sacred Rule

We must stop worshiping the false god of GDP growth [because "trickle down].

As Joseph Stiglitz has put it, "What we measure informs what we do. And if we’re measuring the wrong thing, we’re going to do the wrong thing."

co.exist
To Save The Economy, We Have To Break Its One Sacred Rule
Jason Hickel

ht Don Quijones at Raging Bull-Shit

DH Garrett — The Red Line

The Red Line has been crossed. It is a dangerous time. As it is, prospects are grim; the world is shifting to a climate from hell, and the powers that be are mostly just accelerating that demise; but if all of us, most of us, even many of us reach out, and grasp each other's hands, we just might make it across.

"An alternative, sustainable world is, of course, where resource regeneration is at least as great as resource depletion. It's a world where emissions are no greater than the ability of the planet to absorb and process those emissions. Of course it's a world where the population is stable or maybe even decreasing; where prices internalize all costs; a place where no one is hungry or desperately poor; a place where there is true enduring democracy."

Truthout
The Red Line
DH Garrett, Truthout | Op-Ed

Audrey Clark — Biologist Paul Ehrlich gives dire prediction for global civilization

“I believe and all of my colleagues believe that we are on a straightforward course to a collapse of our civilization.”

VTDigger
Biologist Paul Ehrlich gives dire prediction for global civilization
Audrey Clark

Technology running ahead of our ability as a species to adapt to emerging challenges arising from it.

After an hour-long talk about all the reasons why a collapse of civilization is likely and how hard it will be to prevent, Ehrlich offered one iota of hope: “If there’s any reason for hope, it’s that we do have a history of showing that human beings, human societies, in relatively recent times can change extremely dramatically, extremely rapidly.” 

Ehrlich went on, “For some reason — we don’t fully understand it — when the time is right, you can get dramatic, dramatic changes, which indicates to me that there’s a chance that when the time is right, we can change the way we behave towards each other and towards our environment and it can happen very very rapidly. I think … your main challenge is to find a way to ripen the time.”

Joe Romm — Global Ponzi Scheme Revisited: How Climate Inaction Betrays Our Children And Future Generations

We need to combine the critique of financial Ponzi with resource and environmental Ponzi, and see them as related. Both involve negative externalities based on rent-seeking behavior. They are directly related to MMT in the MMT is concerned with both availability of real resources and monetary economics, which includes finance.

“We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children,” said Joe Romm, a physicist and climate expert who writes the indispensable blog climateprogress.org. We have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks — water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land — and not by generating renewable flows.

“You can get this burst of wealth that we have created from this rapacious behavior,” added Romm. “But it has to collapse, unless adults stand up and say, ‘This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate …’ Real wealth is something you can pass on in a way that others can enjoy.” [from an interview of Joe Romm by Thomas Friedman]

There are two related issues here. The first is climate change, which the overwhelming evidence suggests artificial warming resulting from carbon-based fuels as a significant causal factor if not the chief cause.

The second is environmental pollution, which is a health and quality of life issue in addition to an economic one, along with resource depletion which is not renewable in a timely way, costing the future.

Climate Science
Global Ponzi Scheme Revisited: How Climate Inaction Betrays Our Children And Future Generations
Joe Romm