Five months in, five months up
Global boiling as the context for political economy analysis
Since this blog's debut in March I have been aiming to publish posts on a weekly basis, usually on Sunday mornings. Given several medical issues, I cannot guarantee to adhere to a weekly schedule in producing this Substack blog over the next month-and-a-half. So in today's post I'd like to take an overview of what we've seen over the past five months and provide a context for what we're likely to see in the last five months of 2023.
The Blog's Purpose
The blog's purpose remains unchanged from what I wrote in the first post: "to help us better understand the political economy of the United States."
"We will try to understand the economy better, but -- of equal importance -- we will try to understand how the political economy is discussed in the media and on the internet. We will read news articles, analytic pieces and opinion columns critically, exposing the ideological perspectives lying underneath them."
The Geophysical Context
The context in which I write this blog has, however, changed somewhat from the first post. The impact of global warming on day-to-day weather has become dramatically more obvious. To wit:
Simultaneous "heat domes" over China, North America, Europe and the Middle East, reflected in weeks of 100-F or even 110-F degrees temperatures in places as far apart as Arizona, Texas and Iran.
Smoke from Canadian wildfires has wiped out fifty years of progress in reducing air pollution in the U.S. Northeast and Midwest. There is no reason to believe that these wildfires will not reoccur in 2024.
The average temperature of water in the oceans is at an all-time high. This heat can both fuel tropical storms and melt the ice shelves in Greenland and the Antarctic.
When I first heard of the concept of "global warming" around 1989, it was presented as a phenomenon whose impact would appear gradually over time and not get seriously threatening until the second half of the twenty-first century. My reaction was, "Après moi, le déluge", as I would certainly be dead by 2050, at which time I would be approaching 100 years of age.
Then, two things happened. First, the pace of global warming picked up, as did the occurrence of catastrophic events attributable to global warming, such as the California wildfires. So the timeline for climatic catastrophe moved forward by forty years.
Second, my father lived to just shy of 102 years of age. That meant that I had to seriously consider the possibility that I might live to that age as well, which would put me as living into the age of climate catastrophe by anyone's reckoning.
We have just barely begun to take baby steps toward addressing the problem. Remember Al Gore's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth? That appeared back in 2006. Has any subsequent U.S. administration taken that movie's message to heart? Doubtful. We had eight years of Obama neoliberal half-steps, four years of Trump climate denial, have had three years of Biden somewhat-less-neoliberal half-steps frustrated by Joe Manchin and the fossil fuel industry -- and Republicans are preparing to reverse the Biden administration's climate change program should they win the presidency back in 2024.
Global warming is clearly an existential threat. I anticipate that in the next few years we will see either weather events or political events (i.e., wars) attributable to global warming -- events that will see death tolls at the 1000, 10,000 and 100,000 levels. We will start to see parts of the United States that have seen rapid population growth in recent decades start to have people fleeing due to the heat. (See fellow Substack blogger Hamilton Nolan, "The Heat Death of the American Frontier", as well as his 2015 Gawker post, "There Are Only Two Issues", that reads as if it were written just yesterday.)
The Political-Economic Context
Anything that keeps us from facing up to the existential threat posed by what should now be called "Global Boiling" is an obstacle that we must overcome. While there are many things that could be characterized as such obstacles, in the field of political economy the biggest is the notion that we can't afford to face up to climate change because "we just don't have the money." So when the editorial board of The New York Times and the editorial board of The Washington Post insist that the size of the U.S. national debt is our biggest problem, they are, at best, distracting us from facing up to climate change or, at worse, actually blocking us from facing that challenge.
These self-consciously ruling-class media outlets are more worried about the "sustainability" of the Treasury's account at the Fed than they are about the sustainability of life on this planet.
In contrast, we recognize that money is a tool created by the government for the mobilization of resources in pursuit of the public purpose. Getting the money to deal with global warming is not the problem. As John Maynard Keynes said in 1942, "Anything we can actually do, we can afford." We now have most of the technology we need to address the problem; we just have to apply it. What we lack is the political will. Fortifying that political will is the challenge we now face.