As permafrost rapidly thaws in northern regions from abrupt climate system change caused Arctic Temperature Amplification, we reach local tipping points that greatly accelerate warming and more permafrost thawing.
This video discusses recent science examining these localized tipping points.
Please donate at http://PaulBeckwith.net to support my research and videos as I connect the dots on abrupt climate system change and bring you the most recent cutting edge scientific findings on climate change in a jargon free, easily digestible video format.
Carcinogen chemical trichloroethylene was detected in Grézieu-La-Varenne in 2019. The discovery came after a resident found a viscous, foul-smelling liquid in her backyard. A search discovered that traces of the chemical were 800 times the legally acceptable limit.
People who love money over the environment will be thrilled to learn that Republicans are axing Joe Biden’s protections that would have saved the largest in tact temperate rain forest in the world.
Everyone else who is more concerned with climate change should start worrying.
In this first episode, Professor Katharina Pistor (@ColumbiaLawSchool1) introduces the concept of the legal “coding” of capital.
Prof. Pistor explains how the law selectively “codes” certain assets, endowing them with the capacity to protect and produce private wealth. She illustrates this process with the historical example of how land became legally coded as property during the enclosure movement in England. She compares it with more recent attempts to code traditional indigenous land use rights in Belize.
Prof. Pistor goes on to explain how even ideas (which are not natural property, in the traditional rivalrous sense of the term) can nonetheless be made property according to the law. The institutionalization of copyright and patent law has created an entire new class of property. How far can it go? She looks at the coding intellectual property in the medical industry, most notably recent attempts to patent human genes.
In the wake of World War II, much of the western world, particularly the United States, adopted a new form of capitalism called “managerial welfare-state capitalism.”
The system by design constrained financial institutions with significant social welfare reforms and large oligopolistic corporations that financed investment primarily out of retained earnings. Private sector debt was small, but government debt left over from financing the War was large, providing safe assets for households, firms, and banks. The structure of this system was financially robust and unlikely to generate a deep recession. However, the constraints within the system didn’t hold.
The relative stability of the first few decades after WWII encouraged ever-greater risk-taking, and over time the financial system was transformed into our modern overly financialized economy. Today, the dominant financial players are “managed money”—lightly regulated “shadow banks” like pension funds, hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds, and university endowments—with huge pools of capital in search of the highest returns. In turn, innovations by financial engineers have encouraged the growth of private debt relative to income and the increased reliance on volatile short-term finance and massive uses of leverage.
What are the implications of this financialization on the modern global economy? According to Adair Lord Turner, a Senior Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking and a former head of the United Kingdom’s Financial Services Authority, it means that finance has become central to the daily operations of the economic system. More precisely, the private nonfinancial sectors of the economy have become more dependent on the smooth functioning of the financial sector in order to maintain the liquidity and solvency of their balance sheets and to improve and maintain their economic welfare. For example, households have increased their use of debt to fund education, healthcare, housing, transportation, and leisure. And at the same time, they have become more dependent on interest, dividends, and capital gains as a means to maintain and improve their standard of living. Another major consequence of financialized economies is that they typically generate repeated financial bubbles and major debt overhangs, the aftermath of which tends to exacerbate inequality and retard economic growth. Booms turn to busts, distressed sellers sell their assets to the beneficiaries of the previous bubble, and income inequality expands.
In the view of Lord Turner, we have yet to come up with a sufficiently robust policy response to deal with the consequences of our new “money manager capitalism.” The result likely will be years more of economic stagnation and deteriorating living standards for many people around the world.
Recent events are teaching us a lot of hard lessons about inequality, but how did we get here? Branko Milanovic & Arjun Jayadev are helping pull back the curtain with our series #Inequality101.
Inequality, in many ways, may be the biggest question of our times. And yet it is a topic that is still underexplored in conventional economics curricula. In this five-part lecture series, economists Arjun Jayadev (@AzimPremjiUniversity) and Branko Milanovic (@GradCenterCUNY) break down what inequality is, how we measure it, why it exists, and how to address it.
Till van Treeck (@unidue & @thenewschool) shares his insightful research on how Conspicuous Consumption, Working Hours, and Veblen Effects impacts income inequality in Advanced Economies.
“We don’t look after each other at all,” says Jeffrey Sachs on America today Jeffrey Sachs sits down with Rob Johnson to discuss his new book, A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism (Columbia University Press, 2018).
Welcome to Transition Studies. To prosper for very much longer on the changing Earth humankind will need to move beyond its current fossil-fueled civilization toward one that is sustained on recycled materials and renewable energy. This is not a trivial shift. It will require a major transition in all aspects of our lives.
This weblog explores the transition to a sustainable future on our finite planet. It provides links to current news, key documents from government sources and non-governmental organizations, as well as video documentaries about climate change, environmental ethics and environmental justice concerns.
The links are listed here to be used in whatever manner they may be helpful in public information campaigns, course preparation, teaching, letter-writing, lectures, class presentations, policy discussions, article writing, civic or Congressional hearings and citizen action campaigns, etc. For further information on this blog see: About this weblog. and How to use this weblog.
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