Reply To: Climate, the science, politics, economics and anything else


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#78595
Clark
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Pigeon English, you don’t need to convince me that money is concocted; it quite clearly has no basis in physical reality, and can be shaped to any ends by whoever controls its creation and distribution – primarily by the issuing of loans, under the control of private companies.

On the positivemoney.org page you linked, I have trouble with this:

“all investment in new fossil fuel projects must end this year.”

This is probably impossible without killing lots of people. Humanity is dependent upon fossil fuel, and it will take time to replace infrastructure. For instance, right now, much fertiliser production has stopped due to the shortage of natural gas.

Transition to sustainable systems has been left far too late, and consequently we now have a crisis. I don’t know how to minimise the death and suffering that will result; near-term deaths from fuel shortages will need to be traded against deaths over a longer term from damage to climate and biosphere; a morbid calculation fraught with uncertainties.

What is abundantly clear is that the total, the sum of fuel shortage deaths and planetary damage deaths, would be reduced by conserving energy and reducing emissions, starting immediately and continuing until greenhouse gas concentrations are low enough and new infrastructure can keep them low enough.

There is massive scope to do this. Swathes of human activity is unnecessary, and swathes more is hugely inefficient. But the pandemic has just demonstrated that governments and people lack the necessary will and coordination. The situation looks extremely bad.