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The media is awash with second, third round effects of Trump’s tariffs, from higher yields on US gilts, fire sales of US bonds, the SNP500 being down then up overnight to how Americans have been shot in the foot, whether it be impacts of tariff retaliation on US agriculture, or pushing up costs for the
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Economic giants like US, China have been buying up mining rights for minerals, rare earth metals to manufacture ‘renewable’ energy requiring batteries, turbines and solar panels; expropriating and siphoning natural wealth from the natural resource-rich income-poor South to the resource-poor income-rich North; cheapening earth’s resources by exploiting its monopsony (buying) power over South nations. The
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The machine science of 17th-18th century still dominates the world views that form and inform our education, economics and policy, and thus influence our wellbeing and planet. It draws from classical Newtonian physics and is based on linear models of inputs and outputs. For more on this read Fritjof Capra’s ‘Tao of Physics’ on linearity
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I want to big up Rachel Carson who began raising flags in 1940s about the false economy of synthetic chemical solutions and monoculture crop, versus sustainable practice. She wrote prolifically about it in 60s and was met with fierce opposition from chemical corporations. In 1960s a number of scholars were challenging world views and their
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‘Unjust transitions and false prophets’At ‘Resisting Green Imperialism: fighting for a socially just transition’ hosted by London Mining Network in November, it was clearer than day from a range of stakeholder voices (indigenous, groups, women weavers, food sovereignty advocates, NGOs, researchers): the current plans for transition to green energy are neither just or ‘green’: they
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Carbon credits and tradable pollution permits are in effect markets for the right to pollute. Carbon markets purport to reduce emissions by setting a physical cap on the volume of emissions for a region e.g EU, divided into tradable permits and allocated to firms to be traded on a secondary market; in theory it incentivises
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The technological solutions put forward address the symptoms not the system; the solutions derived at COP29 are being designed by those with the levers, of the system that cause the problems in the first place. And based in the same incentive structure: profit, whose internal logic is extraction. Carbon offsetting and capture do not address
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Or in modern times ‘the Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate’ The observation that increased energy efficiency, paradoxically, tends to lead to increased energy use and extraction of natural resources. In the long term, an increase in efficiency in resource use will generate an increase in resource consumption rather than a decline. The paradox is named after William Jevons
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Labour’s core policy focus in the last budget is economic growth (rise in GDP). GDP will rise when there’s ‘new output’ regardless of creating new well-being. GDP rises for every tree cut down, oil spill cleaned up, weapon exported despite destruction to life, ecosystems, climate. GDP ignores the essential value of the care economy; the
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On a school trip to the Bank of England Museum, we noticed this pledge (below) by the BofE to reduce emissions ‘to net zero by 2040 in all physical operations.’ Limiting targets to physical operations for e.g. electricity use of its building at Threadneedle Street through transition to renewables and energy efficiency in relative terms
Elevate Economics 