6 Comments

Will we ever see something akin to what we committed to during WW II? https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/20191213_research-spending-chart_642.png

Expand full comment

powerful. question: the ww2 response created jobs and cash flow. The response to climate must reduce economic activity (on the assumption that such activity requires energy) not to increase it. Thought?

Expand full comment

So true. It requires a new economic model. Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economy comes to kind. A huge investment on the one hand, tge creation of an entirely new economy on the other.

Expand full comment

Kate is smart and communicates, but there's no politics nor institutional analysis in her work that I have seen. So her proposals are policy not acts. So she seems stuck where we all are. Like watching a tsunami from the edge of the wet sand and knowing its too late to try to run back up the beach.

Expand full comment

Her advantage over ours is that as the current system gets increasingly brittle, people will look around for what alternatives might work instead and pick up her model: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/amsterdams-doughnut-economy-puts-climate-ahead-of-gdp

Expand full comment

Or in the words of Milton Friedman: "Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around."

Expand full comment