Johanna Faust, a mixed race Jew, prefers to publish pseudonymously. She is committed: first, to preventing war, ecological disaster, and nuclear apocalypse; last to not only fighting for personal privacy & the freedom of information, but, by representing herself as a soldier in that fight, to exhorting others to do the same. She is a poet, always. All these efforts find representation here: "ah, Mephistophelis" is so named after the last line of Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, whose heretical success flouted the censor for a time.

Leading Economists Aren't Worried About Climate Change.
Here's Why.


Pigeon River Country State Forest, home of the Bluesource/DNR Big Wild Forest Carbon Project. 

Photo by the Department of Natural Resources Creative Commons license.


I have always been baffled by the glaring discrepancy between the policy changes that would seem, to this citizen at least, to be obviously necessitated — and quickly! — by the overtly dire predictions (if true) of those considered experts in the field of climate science, and the policy changes —merely theoretical, in the planning stages, or already implemented — undertaken, often apparently purposefully halfheartedly it seems, by world leaders in the international community.


After all, we presume that these are (mostly) intelligent adults; that they are seeking advice from the most renowned experts; that they know they are tasked with nothing less than safeguarding the future health, and wealth of mankind and, by extension, the possibility and extent of human happiness.  Why don’t they take more definitive action in response to the threat of climate change?


Global Warming's Six Americas,
as seen on Grist.  
Creative Commons license.

Call me naïve, but I find this confusing. Is there something I am missing?  Do they know something I don’t?


Since I think it a good bet there are others out there similarly confused, when I came upon information that shed some, uh, sunlight, if you will, I thought I would share.  


What follows is a rather surprising, and surprisingly dense, trove of information on the issue, in the form of an interview with economist Steve Keen by Colin Bruce Anthes of The Analysis.  I have not only embedded the video, below, but also have taken the liberty of appending the (machine generated) YouTube transcript.  


Enjoy, and feel free to leave a comment.



TRANSCRIPT 

0:00

Colin Bruce Anthes Welcome to theAnalysis.news.   I'm Colin Bruce Anthes.

0:10

You may have noticed that while natural scientists  are focused on the ecological costs of climate   change, social scientists and politicians seem  much less concerned with the economic costs.  

0:20

According to renowned Australian economist  Steve Keen, the reason is terrifying.

0:25

Dr. Keen has been going through the works of the  most mainstream neoclassical economists on whom   our politicians base their projections and looking  at how they're arriving at their numbers regarding  

0:34

climate change. He has found that they repeatedly  confuse climate, the foundation of our energy and   food, with the weather, with some of the biggest  names even stating that 87% of the economy won't  

0:44

really be affected by climate change because  the jobs are primarily indoors. This is such  

0:49

a fundamental and apocalyptic mistake that it  leaves little room for reform. Dr. Keen argues  

0:55

that we must simply abandon these economists and  their framework, saying it's us or them. Steve Keen has a history of calling out junk  economics. He correctly and famously predicted  

1:04

the 2008 recession and spent the years leading  up to the subprime mortgage crisis berating   mainstream economists for failing to account for  the role of private debt and credit. If he says  

1:14

we need to sound the alarm, we should probably pay  attention. Steve Keen, welcome to theAnalysis. Steve Keen Thank you. That was a very good  

1:22

introduction, very thorough. Colin Bruce Anthes   I want to make sure that I'm framing your position  correctly because I'm familiar with the pernicious  

1:29

influence of big money on politics and economics.  But you're saying the problem runs much deeper   than just corruption, and that's why we can't  swap out the good neoclassical economists for  

1:38

the bad ones. Steve Keen   It is simply what they believe. People who  are critical of economics from outside of  

1:46

the profession often think that economists are  shills for the capitalist, that sort of thing.   I've seen that quite regularly on Twitter, of  course, and that's getting the horse before the  

1:56

cart. Because, in fact, training in neoclassical  economics, if you accept it, if you believe it,  

2:02

ends up making you effectively a zealot for your  vision of what capitalism is. You really have a  

2:11

belief in capitalism as the ideal social system.  Therefore, if you see anything which challenges  

2:17

the sustainability of capitalism, it's an  automatic tendency to reject it. Of course,  

2:23

that can benefit the capitalist class,  but it's not why they do it.  

2:28

This is what happened in this particular  case. No one paid William Nordhaus to assume   that 87% of the economy would be unaffected by  climate change because it happens in carefully  

2:39

controlled environments. That's his own attitude  to capitalism. Given their model of how capitalism  

2:46

functions, it's an infinitely flexible system,  therefore, it can cope with anything, therefore,  

2:52

climate change can't be a problem. And  that mindset is what has determined the  

2:58

predictions they have made, which are so badly  based that they should simply be thrown in the   garbage bin. That's, of course, what I'm trying  to explain to policymakers, media, and so on.  

3:08

Colin Bruce Anthes Let's take a look at   what they mean by climate within these models  and what, say, a natural scientist would call  

3:15

climate. Let's make sure we're not making  the same mistake that they're making.   Steve Keen To some extent,   I think we can blame how climate is defined in  conventional organizations, like, for example,  

3:25

NOAA, the National Office of Oceanic [Atmospheric]  Administration-- I think it stands for. A   wonderful acronym. I may have got the actual title  there wrong. They say that weather is what you  

3:34

experience on a day-by-day basis. Climate is the  average of weather over a long period of time. And  

3:39

that really makes it seem that climate and weather  are statistically different distributions but the  

3:48

same basic data sets. Weather is particularly the  day, and climate is over a range of days. That's  

3:54

fundamentally misleading when it comes down  to what climate change actually means.   To me, I think about climate as the actual  structure of the fluid flows in the oceans  

4:05

and the atmosphere of planet Earth. And to me,  climate change, for example, would mean going from  

4:12

the three circulation cells that currently set the  weather patterns in each of the two hemispheres  

4:17

of the planet, the North and South Hemispheres.  So you have a cell where there's rising air at   zero degrees and falling at 30; that's the Hadley  cell. Then you have what's called the Ferrel cell,  

4:28

which has falling and rising at 30 and 60, and  then the polar is 60 to 90. That's why you have  

4:36

such substantial temperature differences  between the tropics, the temperate zone,   and the polar zone. It's relatively consistent  temperatures inside each of those zones.  

4:45

Now, if that flips over, and it has flipped  over frequently in the Earth's past due to  

4:50

natural factors, of course, if that flips over to  a single cell, then what you'll have is rising air  

4:56

at the poles, at the equator, and falling air at  the poles. In the middle, effectively, generally  

5:04

speaking, a drought, a desert. Now, that's  climate change. So that is a structural change  

5:13

to the patterns of fluid flows in both the  oceans and the air that generate the weather  

5:20

we feel on a daily basis. There's no way that  there is-- it is not average anymore. It's a  

5:26

complete change of the system that generates  the weather. That's what climate change is.   Colin Bruce Anthes Can you go through the disparity  

5:33

between the kind of description you've just given,  the kind of description we might expect from a   natural scientist, and the projections that  these neoclassical economists are making?  

5:41

Steve Keen Well, the description   that science is giving is existential. If we  exceed, and they're giving vague numbers because,  

5:50

of course, this has never been done before,  not only in the history of humanity but also   in the history of the planet, we've never  had as rapid a change in the carbon dioxide  

5:59

levels as we're forcing on the planet right  now. Of course, there are various structures  

6:05

that have evolved over time in our current  climate, the Holocene climate, such as the  

6:13

Arctic having summer sea ice. So the Arctic  reflects 90% of the energy that falls on it during  

6:18

summer. Greenland, a similar reflector of energy,  and the Antarctic are the same in the Southern  

6:25

Hemisphere. The circulation patterns of the  integrated ocean thermohaline circulation, which  

6:32

is an oceanic river, hundreds of times the volume  of all the rivers, the continental rivers on the  

6:38

planet. So all those huge structural elements,  that's the defining nature of the climate.  

6:45

What they're saying, what scientists are saying,  is that if we increase the temperature by as   little as one degree, we could trigger a breakdown  in many of those characteristics of the current  

6:56

climate, and that would then cause a cascade.  Scientists have been saying numbers like don't let  

7:02

it increase more than two or three degrees. The most recent paper by Kemp and Co, I think   in 2021 or 2022, came out saying three  degrees is their limit for an absolutely  

7:13

unsustainable temperature increase. You'll see  figures as low as 1%; we've already exceeded 1%.  

7:18

So the scientists are speculating, but all of the  speculations say anything above that level you're  

7:24

talking about, such a change in the climate  that we could no longer sustain the sedentary  

7:30

human civilization we've had for the last 12,000  years. Our agricultural system could be destroyed,  

7:36

and therefore the carrying populist, the carrying  capacity of the planet could fall from the area   of 8 billion, as we currently have, down  to 1 billion if we're lucky. You know,  

7:45

that means 7 billion people die. Colin Bruce Anthes   Wow. Steve Keen   So that's the scale the scientists are talking  about. Economists, on the other hand, are saying,  

7:51

and this is quoting Nordhaus, "a six-degree  increase in temperature will cause an 8.9%  

7:56

fall in GDP compared to what it would be in the  complete absence of climate change." If you look  

8:02

at the most recent IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel  on Climate Change] report, Working Group Two,   Chapter 16, as the economics chapter inside  there, that chapter said that "a four-degree  

8:10

increase in temperature by 2100 four degrees  Celsius could cause between a 10-23% fall in  

8:18

GDP compared to what it would be in the absence  of climate change." Therefore, they're assuming  

8:24

growth for the next 80 years, which would  increase per capita incomes by a factor   of five. They're saying rather than being five  times as large, they'll be four times as large,  

8:34

which is trivial. Colin Bruce Anthes   Wow. Steve Keen   So that's the difference. One is that they're  saying a minor decline in overall productive  

8:41

capacity while it still grows over time,  whereas the other side is saying we won't  

8:46

have a civilization past, certainly past four  degrees; most of us don't even suggest four  

8:52

degrees level of warming. They're saying forget  it. Human civilization is over at that level.  

8:58

Colin Bruce Anthes Wow. Yeah, that's a disparity, alright.   Steve Keen Huge.  

9:03

Colin Bruce Anthes It's enormous. I think for   those who do not know who Nordhaus is and who some  of these figures are, this is not a case of, say,  

9:12

big tobacco finding some fringe person somewhere  who will accept a bribe to say something crazy.  

9:18

These are the most mainstream figures. Steve Keen   Nordhaus, first of all, has taken over the  mantle of publishing one of the dominant  

9:28

textbooks, the Paul Samuelson textbook. He is now  the continuing editor of the Samuelson textbook   on economics. He was elected president of the  Economic Association sometime in the last few  

9:39

years-- I forgot when he actually was-- and he  got the Nobel Prize, the so-called Nobel Prize   for Economics, in 2018. So he's high status in  the profession. He and a group of economists--  

9:53

it's only a very small band of economists, by  the way. This is one thing I try to emphasize   to the profession. I say, for God's sake, ditch  Nordhaus because if you don't ditch Nordhaus,  

10:02

you will be responsible for-- when the shit hits  the fan and the shit is coming, you will be,  

10:08

economics, in general, will be responsible for  letting this garbage and, frankly, that's the   only way I can describe it, this garbage get  published. If you had decent refereeing of  

10:19

papers on the basis of the science of climate  change being applied to these economic papers,   none of them would have been published. Colin Bruce Anthes  

10:26

I want to delve a little further into some  of the examples that you talk about as you   go through the papers that these people have  published and the statements that they made.  

10:35

The 87% number that's given, one of them is  about the Gulf Stream, which is absolutely  

10:41

terrifying. Can you go through some of the extreme  falsities that are being published on a very wide  

10:48

scale right now? Steve Keen   They have about four methods they've used to make  up, and I emphasize make-up numbers, not generate  

10:55

data, but make-up numbers that then they say  are related to climate change. So the very   first is what they call the enumerative method.  The enumerative method, the way they describe it,  

11:04

is that they take data from science papers and add  up the damages that science papers say, and then  

11:11

you are adding up from the bottom up. So that's  what they call the enumerative method.   Now, when you take a look at Nordhaus, 1991, To  Slow or Not to Slow: The Economics of Climate  

11:20

Change, published in the Economic Journal,  which is published by Oxford University,   and certainly one of the top three or top  five journals in economics in 1991. Here  

11:30

he said that "there are some activities, such as  microprocessor fabrication or open heart surgery,  

11:36

which occur in carefully controlled environments,"  that's literally a quote, "which will not be  

11:41

particularly subject to climate change. On the  other hand, there are other activities which are   exposed to the weather and therefore exposed  to climate change." He said, "our estimate,"  

11:50

meaning his estimate, "our estimate is that 87% of  the American economy will be negligibly affected  

11:58

by climate change because it takes place in  carefully controlled environments."   Now, when you look at the table here, which  is table 15 in that particular paper, I think  

12:07

it was all of manufacturing, all of wholesale  and retail services, all of the finance sector,  

12:13

most of real estate, except for a small amount of  coastal real estate, and he even included mining,  

12:18

apparently not being aware that a lot of mining  is open cut and therefore exposed to the weather.   So that is the scale of it. You would hope that  it would just be an aberration that got through,  

12:29

but later papers fixed it up. Instead, that  was being maintained all the way through. They  

12:34

don't use that method anymore, but they haven't  rejected the numbers they got out of that.   Now, when Nordhaus did his calculations, he  had 3% of the economy being seriously exposed,  

12:46

which was largely agriculture and forestry,  and 10% marginally exposed. When he added up  

12:52

his numbers, he got a total of 0.26% change  in the reduction in GDP for a three-degree  

13:02

increase in temperature. Colin Bruce Anthes   Wow. Steve Keen   Now, the reason he got that [inaudible 00:13:06]  when it came to the section he said would be  

13:09

exposed, which is agriculture and forestry, he  said he had taken into account the fertilizer  

13:15

effect of carbon dioxide. He had somewhere  between a plus 9.7 and -10.5 and, therefore,  

13:24

the average of the two was what he put in as the  major source of damages; that's where the 0.26%  

13:30

of GDP fall came from. Then he said, "there may be  other factors that aren't included here. I might  

13:37

bump it up to 1%. But my hunch," and literally  the word hunch in a so-called scientific paper,  

13:42

"my hunch is that the damages will be and no more  than 2% of GDP from three degrees of warming."  

13:48

Colin Bruce Anthes Wow.   Steve Keen A lot of those  

13:53

enumerative method ones come out with damages  between, positive, actually, some of them think  

13:59

fertilizer effects are really good, with positive  effects of up to 1% -- Richard Tol published one  

14:04

of those papers-- down to about 2 or 3% fall  in GDP; that's the range that they get.  

14:12

Colin Bruce Anthes Wow.   Steve Keen The second method   they call the statistical method. This is the  very first paper that I actually saw, and I  

14:20

realized just how deluded they were on climate  change. This is by Richard Tol in 2009 called  

14:26

The Economics of Climate Change. In that paper, he  described what he called the statistical approach,   which is used by [Robert O.] Mendelsohn, who's one  of the research colleagues of Nordhaus, who said,  

14:36

"Mendelsohn assumes that the variation of GDP with  climate over space will hold over time."  

14:46

Now, what that means is Nordhaus-- Mendelsohn, in  this particular case, said it first and initially  

14:52

just with America; they then generalized a global  distribution of income. But looking at, say, gross  

14:59

state products and average state temperature, you  can then get this, and I've done this myself; it's  

15:06

just a simple exercise to show how stupid this  is. If you take a look at the average temperature  

15:12

for every state in mainland America, continental  America, and the gross state product per capita,  

15:21

which is the state version of GDP, then you get a  scatter plot. If you then graph the temperature on  

15:28

the horizontal and the income on the vertical,  you get a scatter plot, which is a huge, wide  

15:34

scatter plot. But if you do a quadratic regression  on that, and they almost always use quadratics,   what they call their damage functions,  that quadratic will tell you that each  

15:45

degree increase in temperature reduces your GDP by  about 0.3% times the temperature change squared.  

15:53

Now, that therefore means that a ten-degree  increase in temperature will cause about a   15% fall in GDP. Ironically, that's a bigger  number than Nordhaus himself uses.  

16:04

So his damage function is that the damage to GDP  from temperature increase will be zero 0.227% X  

16:14

the temperature change. And that's where you  get this six-degree increase in temperature,   about an 8% fall in GDP. But it's literally using  the geographic nature of climate. So obviously,  

16:25

the climate of Florida is different to the  climate of North Dakota, but that's sitting  

16:32

inside exactly the same temperature distribution  of global temperature. There's no change in global  

16:37

temperature between Dakota and Florida because  they're on the same globe. They simply assume  

16:44

that very light variation, relatively trivial  role of temperature in determining GDP will be  

16:51

what climate change does over time. The craziness of this is that if you-- and   I've made this case for a research project I'm  working on right now-- the reason that you can  

17:02

have a successful economy in Florida and have  a successful one in Dakota is they trade with  

17:08

each other. There is stuff that North Dakota can't  produce that Florida can, and there is stuff that   Florida can't produce that North Dakota can. Part  of the income is because North Dakota is selling  

17:16

products to Florida. Now, you can't sell through  time, okay. You can't sell wheat produced in 2020  

17:23

to people in 2100. So the whole idea that you can  use what happens over space as an anagram of what  

17:30

happens over time is just nonsense. Again,  it's showing they simply don't understand   what climate change actually means. The third method that has come along after that,  

17:39

and that is that acknowledging that mistake,  some economists have said, "well, we need to  

17:46

have data where there's a change in temperature,  change in global average temperature, and we   then compare that to the GDP or change in GDP.  That's been done by a number of people.  

17:57

There's a paper by [Matthew  E.] Kahn, [Kamiar] Mohaddes,   and a few others coming out of the International  Monetary Fund, and they have said, "well,  

18:04

there's a nonlinear relationship at the geographic  level between temperature and GDP." So they've  

18:12

worked out what that nonlinear relationship is  for change in temperature over the period 1960   to 2014. I think that's the dataset they used.  They then extrapolated that forward 80 years.  

18:25

Now that only works if there's no structural  change to the climate over the next 80 years,   which is nonsense because they're talking about--  they said that there is a 0.125 degrees Celsius  

18:36

change in temperature per year, which mounts up  to 3.2 degrees over the next 80 years, will cause  

18:43

about, as I think, a 0.05 decline in GDP for  each year. Therefore they're saying that there  

18:52

will be a seven-- and I love the false precision  they give. This is supposed to be statisticians.  

18:58

This sort of false precision says you're a child.  You don't know really what you're doing. They've   said that there will be a 7.22% fall in GDP by  2100 from a 3.2-degree increase in Celsius and  

19:11

temperature. Now they can't even get today's GDP  accurate to one-tenth of 1%. Here they're trying  

19:17

to predict GDP in 80 years' time to two decimal  places of accuracy. It's just nonsense. So  

19:23

that's the sort of thing there. There are basically three methods.   What they're doing is really saying you can find  the footprint for global warming in current data,  

19:34

and that's just nonsense because it's a cascading  effect, and it's the runaway process that we are  

19:41

now very, very close to triggering. That  is the really scary thing. The complete   structural breakdown of our climate will occur  over the next 80 years, and all these predictions  

19:51

are just nonsense. Colin Bruce Anthes   I'm not a particularly religious person myself,  but there's a church in my community, and it's   a good actor. For several years I volunteered  on its committee as a community partner, and  

20:02

they were getting hit with thousands of dollars  of new insurance costs because of the increased  

20:07

risk of the world. Steve Keen   Absolutely. The climate instability we're seeing  right now, the crazy cold temperatures in America,  

20:14

crazy hot temperatures in Europe, drought in  California, now it's flooding in California; that  

20:21

volatility is being generated by the extra energy  that we've trapped in the atmosphere courtesy of  

20:26

carbon dioxide. So we're already seeing that  real-world couldn't give a damn about what   economists think. The real world will do what the  real world climate does under the energy pressure  

20:37

that we're putting on the biosphere, and that is  going to make a laughing stock of the predictions   of the economists probably in this decade. At  some point, it'll be blatantly obvious that their  

20:47

damage estimates have got absolutely nothing to do  with what's actually going on, and the damages are   far, far higher. In that situation, anybody who's  trusted economists either directly or indirectly  

20:58

by accepting their damage assessments and then  putting that through insurance contracts and  

21:04

so on, they're going to be forced to pay out an  absolute fortune, and they'll be bankrupted by the   cost of climate change damages. Colin Bruce Anthes  

21:10

If we want to be able to think about this  critically and productively and not make   the same mistake as them, what is a good starting  point for us to think about? What is the role of  

21:21

climate in the economy? Steve Keen   First of all, just get a handle on what sort of  changes are being spoken about. What is feasible   to happen if the temperature rises any further?  I'll give one of my favorite examples because  

21:34

it's terrifying, and the person who's making  it has impeccable credentials. The professor  

21:40

of Chemistry at Harvard University, James  G. Anderson, was the person who discovered   the hole in the ozone layer in the last century  and led the campaign to close the hole. So his  

21:50

argument in a paper published in 2017 is that  with the decline in the Arctic summer sea ice,  

21:56

that will trigger a breakdown of those three  circulation cells. That means that storms that   currently develop over the plains of America,  central plains of America, which are enormous  

22:07

storms, will penetrate the stratosphere. So at  the moment, those storms are restricted to the  

22:13

troposphere, which is below 20 km where we live  and work. If it gets into the stratosphere,  

22:20

it will take moisture into the stratosphere. The  current of the stratosphere has very, very low   levels of H2O, so it's a very dry stratosphere.  When that water passes in, it will also carry  

22:29

in chlorine and bromide, partially from our own  industrial processes but also even from volcanoes.  

22:36

That chlorine and bromide will increase, according  to Anderson's paper, increase the rate of  

22:41

destruction of ozone by a factor of 100. What that  would mean is it's no longer safe to go outdoors  

22:48

for humans, in particular. Other animals with  fur have slightly better chances than us. Plants  

22:55

apparently have got a fair bit of protection  against high levels of UV. But we won't be   able to go outdoors. I'm sorry, that's the end  of human civilization. If we can't go outdoors  

23:07

during daylight hours, then what happens to  our civilization? It breaks down. Of course,  

23:12

people will die of skin cancer. So  it's an appalling potential.   Now, in that situation, if that's happening,  you haven't got an economy. And so that the  

23:23

existential stuff that I want people to realize is  what we're playing with here. So that's the real  

23:30

danger. It's not a case of a bit of damage here, a  few more percent insurance claims, and stuff like  

23:35

that. It's you can no longer manage a human  civilization, and you couldn't even manage  

23:42

hunting and gathering in that situation because  you couldn't afford to hunt during the day.   It's existential. That's what I prefer people  to look at rather than we're working in terms of  

23:52

percentages of GDP and damages and so on. That's  the game the economists have played, and also,  

23:59

it's a game of correlation, not causation. They  have no theory as to how temperature causes GDP.  

24:05

They simply say, here's this correlation we're  found in current data, and that's what we're going   to use to predict the damages of climate change.  It's completely irrelevant to what climate change  

24:13

will actually do to human civilization. Colin Bruce Anthes   I'm going to ask you a tough question.  Maybe it's too much for this interview,  

24:19

but my generation has never experienced a real  recovery from 2008. COVID has caused more economic  

24:27

distress. Major companies like Goldman Sachs  are already laying people off in anticipation  

24:32

of another downturn. We're having a conversation  about how economists have wildly overestimated  

24:38

how good things are going to be. So do we throw  out these neoclassical economists who are making  

24:45

these terrible projections? If we put them aside  and start to put a different theory in place,   is there some feasible glimmer of sunlight that  we can put in front of people to rally behind?  

24:55

Steve Keen Well, the main thing   is we have to drastically reduce the load we  put on the planet in terms of the biosphere. So  

25:00

carbon dioxide is the most obvious damage we're  doing, but everything else we do as well. We're   dumping plastics which are damaging food chains  throughout the world. We're intruding on what  

25:12

used to be virgin territory. We're hitting up  against-- that's where the pandemic came from.  

25:19

The fact that we're intruding into areas which  used to be off-limits for humans. Now we're the  

25:26

best possible host for any pandemic. Why attack  any other animal when humans are so prolific and  

25:33

distribute the diseases so well? So we're making  ourselves a target for all these hostile elements  

25:42

of the environment in which we live. So the only glimmer would be   to say, and I don't think it's going to happen. I  think we're going to have to go into a catastrophe  

25:50

before we reverse direction. But what we have to  say is we have to drastically reduce our load on   the planet now, and that means a drastic fall  in the consumption levels of the rich that can  

25:59

be both global rich but also rich within each  nation-state. So it's not the poor who have to  

26:07

consume less because even in the case of America,  something like about 30% of people are living on  

26:14

the breadline. So you can't force them to consume  less, but you have to make the rich consume less,  

26:19

and you have to radically and rapidly decarbonize  the economy. Then you've also got to reduce our  

26:25

load on the planet so that we reserve at least  half the planet for nonhuman life. At the moment,  

26:34

we're using 97% of the planet. The only  parts we're not using are the ones that   are simply impossible to use, such as Greenland,  Antarctica, and the Tundra regions. Everything  

26:45

else we're exploiting to the hilt, and we have  to say that no longer can be allowed.   Now I simply don't believe we're going to do it in  time. Even if people in policy listen to me, which  

26:57

they won't do, they know how hard it would be to  sell the sort of message I've got to the public.  

27:04

If they try to sell that message before  it becomes obvious and necessary, they'll   lose their positions. So we won't do anything  until we get absolutely obvious catastrophes  

27:15

that have to be blamed on climate change,  and nothing else can be considered.  

27:20

For example, something like the breakdown of  the ozone layer of the Northern Hemisphere,   that could be a wake-up call. Now, in that  situation, if you don't have any chance  

27:31

of maintaining human civilization through  this process, you have to have measures in  

27:36

place that give you a chance to react to whatever  catastrophe will come along. So if the catastrophe   happens to be a collapse in wheat production, and  that's quite a feasible one from climate change,  

27:46

then you have to have reserves of grain already  stored in case there's a collapse in the crops,  

27:53

and you have to have a rationing system. So if  everybody gets the same ration, you don't have   people starving to death because they can't afford  to buy the grain. You've got to go from a monetary  

28:02

capitalist economy to a ration-based, war-based  economy effectively. But all these things are so  

28:09

gigantic that you have to be prepared to throw a  level of our energy, our activity at the planet  

28:18

that will draw from what we did during World  War II. These are going to happen. The question  

28:24

is, are they going to be enforced upon us,  or are we going to try to manage it?   Colin Bruce Anthes That's not an optimistic note to end on,  

28:30

but perhaps it's the kind of bluntness  that we need to deal with a real world   with a real climate and not the imagined  world of these neoclassical economists.  

28:38

Steve Keen, this has been a very insightful  interview. Thank you so much for being here.   Steve Keen Thank you, Colin.


Originally at TheAnalysis.news 

Transcript machine generated via YouTube.



 By RCraig09.  No changes were made.
Various sources listed in detail, and links to downloadable interactive spreadsheets by the same author,
at 
Wikimedia Commons.  (licenseristaimer.)



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