I'm circling economics like a cat would a venomous snake. This bit ticks one item off the looming list of "To Be Urgently Understood": Modern Money Theory MMT.
€-zone can't use it.
Phew. Should I stop circling and just read @SchickGerhard's new book then? #Econobscene
Schick in 2011 on Greens' GND, proposed in 2009 election campaign vimeo.com/31075090 Applicable 1:1 today. Eerie. And Merkel's CDU didn't tackle any of it. Like, fix 1 crisis but amplifying crises 2 and 3? Or insurers don't know where to invest in light of rising inequality?
The 3 crises Schick identifies in the short talk in 2011 are of course
the banking crisis
climate change
rising inequality.
Paraphrasing 'A person today should rather be investing in insulation of his home and a heat pump than wondering whether to buy bonds or company shares'
Stephanie is okay with state debts
But Schick warns about €-zone's mounting state debts due to Covid in context of the, by now failed🇫🇷🇩🇪proposal ? (German).
So he opposes debts and believes borrowed money has to be paid back?
Does he oppose debts bc of the €-zone states' non-sovereignty? Or bc of EU's willy-nilly 3% rule? Or bc of rating agencies, eg Moody's who dictate the value and credit worthiness of nations as if they were working in the interest of peoples' wellbeing while conspiring against it
IMO, if Schick opposes rising state deficits (for whatever reason)
then he can't actually be working toward timely shrinking human activity back into planetary boundaries.
...
Does he WANT to keep World Tyrant Larry Fink, Aladdin and Moody's in power, just a tad less harmful? Oy!
Hmmm... I feel like this debt-thingy makes reading his book a dangerous springboard for hitting the venomous snake #Econobscene. Maybe later.
But I'll have to pick a poison....
Alright then.
Starting with "No Capitalism is No Solution Either".
Next "Repairing the Market Economy"
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Even renaissance societies relied on extraction, international trade and specialisation.
But rekindled societies after the collapse only have non-useful know-how at first, resulting in caveman-level of useful sophistication
– *and* again rely on fossil and wood fuel for even the most basic tasks.
I agree with Robert Harris' "Second Sleep" where only population outside metropolitan areas survive the famine and violence. How could we today help the survivors to rekindle a *sustainable* organisation?
Which cultures r likely to rekindle societal organisation beyond tribes? IMO non-urban S-America. How to bolster those future attempts today, paper knowledge caches? How to curate that knowledge for its likely usefulness? "When there's no pharma industry: medicine for dummies"...
The soft-sci troubadours sing about degrowth and doughnuts. Ballads of soft "transitions" to utopia. Risk awareness can't grow because these ballads are about a far-away time, not heeding the requirements of today's breeched planetary boundaries/budget.
I spent lotsa time deciphering the climate of the Pliocene or MIS11 and listening to ballads of "transitions" to utopia.
Assuming that this surely was what I need to know.
But neither physicists nor troubadours cover what would have raised my risk-awareness to reality-levels.
Intriguing.
A long drought prevailed AD 500ff in East Mediterranean & Arab Peninsula. Might've been in more regions but these I know of.
The 1st plague epidemic from rat fleas began in Kush/Egypt 541-549 and culled MENA & Europe.
Long droughts cause (death, war and) migration..
Did (the aftermath of) the drought fuel epidemic spread? Likely. Drought weakens states, workers flee, wars ensue, armies carry🪲everywhere.
Did Kush experience drought, too? Was the (onset of the) pandemic even caused by rats' or human behaviour that was influenced by drought?
What human or rat behaviour would trigger rat fleas to jump and infect humans?
I'd imagine you need lots of rats to increase the chances of a few infected fleas to jump. These rats need food and also be brave enough to run around in the immediate vicinity of humans.
Hm.
Intriguing is that Chile's citizens turned out to be the most risk-aware in this international Facebook survey. Of its 19mio citizens, 1094 took part in the survey and 60-70% know they'll be harmed personally by climate change.
This is the level of awareness we need!
The survey was conducted in Mar-Apr 2022, ~6 months after election and 1 month after inauguration of new left govt. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Chil…
I don't know anything of the talking points during their election. The only thing I know is, they now have a cli-sci as new EP secretary.
It might be that election campaigns were based on climate by all candidates and that this has in turn heightened the climate-awareness and the so important risk-awareness so much so that 60-70% rightly assume personal harm from climate change.
2 more awareness-factors could be
Impressive.
...
I think.
Really.
But if you're like me & want to know the underlying "model narratives", (that's how modellers call their policy recommendations buried in their models) that reduce demand, it's disappointing. Meaning I can't gauge sufficiency nor practicability
The authors do say in their "conclusions" that future research is needed to put the naked numbers into policy practice – but ask yourself: if they didn't decide which policies should be enacted (the "model narratives"), then how could they calculate energy requirements at all?
Anyway. So the authors did enact policies and then calculated that their best scenario of 4 can reduce end energy demand from 2020 lvl by 52% for UK.
Same reduction potential is named in German & global studies just by moving to RE, tho.
Also: 8% nature NET is unacceptable.