Oh. My. God. The danger is EXTREME - ooh hold everything, what's THAT? Even in the face of imminent runaway climate change, we are still like cats distracted by a toy. We just can't focus on the actual problem.
The full title of the latest IPCC Special Report on Global Warming, the one that warns that we have 12 years to prevent unstoppable catastrophe, is 'Global Warming of 1.5°C, an IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty.' What has poverty to do with climate change?! Wake up, climate people! Climate change is NOT a poverty problem! It is a problem of physics now. It is also a problem of economic growth, but not the lack of it in the poor world. It's because of the resource extraction, the fossil fuel combustion, the massive material processing and production all feverishly clunking and whirring to keep economic growth going that is causing climate change. Poverty has nothing to do with Europe burning this summer. Poverty has nothing to do with California and Canada in flames or record storms in Hong Kong. Stop fiddling about pretending that we can stop climate change by bringing Western-style free market economics to sub-Saharan Africa (and that every dirty-faced, sad-eyed little girl will have her prayers answered if only her country can compete in the money economy). The problem is global addiction to fossil fuel combustion and psychotic obsession with economic growth at all costs. And nothing is going to send the poor deeper into misery than runaway climate change.
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When is the modern world going to learn that wealth doesn't roll down hill? Okay I know, coins are round (a lot of them are. Some are frilly like the 20¢ and 2 dollar pieces in Hong Kong and they don't roll anywhere). But notes definitely don't roll down to us at the bottom of the hill. And get with it, economists: the analogy doesn't work.
Trickle-down economics is dead. Not dead like the TV remote or my phone when I forget to charge it and all that's needed are new batteries or the right charger cable. Properly dead, no heartbeat, no brainwaves. Unfortunately, like other things that are dead, the idea of it lives on. The idea of the trickle-down principle in capitalism is that rich and powerful individuals, families, and companies should be free to make as much money as they please, because if money is whirling like a hot spa at the top, inevitably it will splash over the sides and dribble down to everyone else, through the naturally-functioning processes of the free-market economy. Jobs will be created to produce, process, and sell the gold taps, bubble bath, and champagne flutes which accessorise the hot-tubs of the rich, generating incomes and cash flows for every level from top to bottom. Nice. But, sadly, it's just not true. What actually happens is that money concentrates at the top. Rich people don't get rich by spending lots of money - they get and stay rich by NOT spending, and by getting other people to pay (just ask Joseph Stiglitz who pays his first class flights to his money-spinning speaking engagements. Clue: it's not Joseph Stiglitz). Wealth flows uphill too, from us down below, to them up there, every time we pay rent to a landlord, or monthly fees to a mobile phone company, or tuition fees to a university, or interest to a bank because we can't get by every month without getting deeper and deeper into debt. But like the tooth fairy, the Easter bunny, and Santa Claus, the fantasy of trickle-down economics lives on, even though in reality it is lying in the gutter, stone dead, and smelling really quite bad. |
AuthorHow to identify myself... a deeply concerned citizen of a fucked-up world, swinging with circadian regularity between esprit de vie and deep, black despair. PhD, entrepreneur, author, international experience, woman (should I add chromosomes to my list of qualifications....?) Archives
May 2020
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