The Economy and Global Warming in a Nutshell

It seems to me that the capital of our planet is the total of its resources maintained by the energy received from our sun. A balance is kept among these resources by the laws of nature. If an imbalance, for example, overpopulation occurs, it is culled by nature. Over time, a balance is maintained in all species of plants and animals (including the human animal) in this manner. And, since the pictures from the moon show our planet in a vast sea of emptiness—it is obvious that its resources are finite.

Whether by intuition or conscious design, some earlier societies, the Native American Indian for example, lived in renewable harmony with nature. Our present-day society, on the other hand, is living on mined resources. We are not in balance and without major changes to our systems, we can never be. If we, on a planet wide basis, do not cure our imbalances and get in renewable step with our worlds’ resources, nature will do it for us—and I am sure we won’t enjoy her methods. The laws of nature and physics do not compromise, they are what they are and our wants and desires will not be considered.

I have written before that unrestrained capitalism only works because of an expansion of itself. How often have you heard the refrain—”to create jobs and get out of this recession we must expand (or grow) the economy”.

Speculation in an economy is expansion on the cuff: If it is introduced and balanced out in the near term, you have expanded the economy. If it causes a retraction, you have created a recession or, if severe and prolonged, a depression.

The bursting of the debt bubble built up by the manic speculation in the 1920’s brought The Great Depression because, as people attempted to reduce their debt there was less spending in the general day-to-day economy and therefore, jobs were lost and unemployment rose.

Neoclassical economists of that day said, to increase employment you need to cut money wages. But that, of course, would just make it harder for an, in debt, worker to pay off their debt and increase the time before they could begin to consume more in the day-to-day economy. And, if their wages were cut to zero (unemployed), how could they do either.

Sadly, the conservatives of today espouse the same failed policy—cut programs and pay off the debt. (I wonder how many of the ones saying this are unemployed—conservatives in congress we know are not. And the Tea Party puppets who are having their strings pulled—do they want their government benefits cut, their Social Security and Medicare perhaps).

The Neoclassical method does not work, history has shown that. What does work is the Keynesian Model, inflationary government spending (either by borrowing or printing) to create aggregate demand in the economy and thereby create jobs—it ended the Great Depression and it would have ended the current deep recession if the conservatives had allowed enough spending—but, of course, they didn’t. I have written about this in a previous E-pamphlet: “Empirical Evidence for Keynesian Model”.

Now comes the big caveat: as I said above, unrestrained capitalism only works if it can expand.

Is there room for more expansion?—maybe, in an economic sense, if the developed nations keep taking more and more of the world’s resources unto themselves. But, this, business-as-usual path, the path that the conservatives insist on taking, will only bring on the dire consequences of runaway global warming and in the end we will all perish.

The other path, the one I hope we travel down, is the one where we phase out, very quickly, the use of fossil fuels (unless and until we are able to capture and sequester the pollutants in them) and switch to all nonpolluting renewable sources.

I realize that a world running on renewable sources may not support the existing population, if and when we get there, but if our species and millions of others are to survive, there doesn’t seem to be another choice—nature will do the culling.

There is a ray of hope though, if humanity is able to pull this off, it will be by stringent government regulations, ones that will change the way unregulated capitalism now operates. And, instead of the few having such a large claim on the world’s resources, more will be made available to others and nature will have less culling to do.

Young people! please get actively involved in all elections, you are the ones who will suffer the most if there is not massive change in the way we treat our environment.

Support only progressive Democrats, they are the ones who try to make the changes in regulations that are needed if the United States is to do its part in saving the planet from dire global warming consequences.

And join 350.org in their worldwide effort to save our planet.

Young People Beware

Young people beware of becoming or accepting the rhetoric of global warming deniers. I’m guessing that when a climate scientist such as Dr. Heidi Cullen says that most of the carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere today comes from natural sources, as she does in her book: The Weather of the Future, you would accept it at face value.

Why then—if you are a denier of global warming—can you not accept her further conclusion that most of the additional CO2 that’s been placed in the atmosphere over the last 250 years (years since the beginning of the industrial revolution) comes from us (human beings); especially since you are not asked to accept it at face value but are given scientific evidence to support that conclusion.

Even if you are not trained in the sciences—I will say that you would probably agree that science is testable knowledge used to explain and make predictions about the real world.

For example, it explains the greenhouse effect—that property of a planetary atmosphere that causes a planet’s surface temperature to be higher than it would be without that atmosphere.

Any gas that absorbs sunlight causes greenhouse effect—on earth the important ones are water vapor, CO2, and methane, of these CO2 is the most long lasting.

Dr. Cullen explains how empirical evidence from mass spectrometer measurements show that most of the additional CO2 in the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution has the chemical fingerprint of coal, oil, natural gas, and deforestation because these are the only sources that produce CO2 depleted in carbon13 and carbon14 isotopes.

The planet is getting hotter: arctic ice is melting, glaciers are melting, Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are melting and the only major climate forcing change over the last 10,000 years is the addition of CO2 (from approximately 280ppm in 1750 to 390ppm today) all in just 250 years—a blink of the eye in geological terms. Humans caused this and humans are the only ones who can lessen the dire effects of too much global warming.

You young people must get actively involved; you are the ones who will suffer most. I am seventy-three years old and probably will have died by the time the real bad effects of global warming are here. It is my generation and generations before me who are at fault, but mostly my generation because we have the needed scientific information that shows what has to be done to avert a catastrophe.

As a group, however, we won’t act on this information for any number of reasons—the two main ones are greed and self interests. The backbone of this self interest, unbridled capitalism based on fossil fuel use, is severally flawed; it is set up to benefit the minority of the rich and powerful. It only works at all because of an expansion of itself, and there is no more room for expansion; global warming consequences will see to that.

So, you young people must force change on us by voting. You must vote for progressive legislators, ones who will set up government regulations that will deal with global warming. This will require regulation of our capitalistic system to insure a very large middle class, a very small, if any, upper class, and no very poor class—so different from our present system that it might require a new name.

This means you should not vote for Republicans—their very definition, that of being conservative, calls for little or no change—and there must be massive change if young people are to have a planet they can survive on. And you should not vote for any conservative Democrats for the same reason. Also, any Independent candidates, you might want to vote for, should prove they are for progressive change—but then, of course, they are not really Independents, so they should probably get off of the fence they have been sitting on and become progressive Democrats.

I believe the, somewhat natural, rebellion toward authority by young people should be encouraged in this instance. Don’t be influenced by conservative dogma, they want to leave things as they are, to keep the riches they acquired by depriving others—they are not your friends and never have been.

Did the founders of our country mean, in the Declaration of Independence, that all humans are created equal? They didn’t say that. They said all men, didn’t even mention women. They certainly didn’t mean black slaves; they weren’t even counted as a full whole person. They really only meant propertied men, not poor unpropertied men. And it has remained mostly that way ever since, the rich and powerful giving only enough to the next lower class to keep them from becoming too rebellious.

They have, so far, been able to do this by controlling communication with the voting public. At one time even controlling the voting, e.g., women couldn’t vote, unpropertied men couldn’t vote, blacks couldn’t vote, and there were polling rules that denied some others the vote.

The rich and powerful still control much of the communication through well paid “talking-heads” on T.V. and radio and legislators in government though well paid lobbyists in Congress.

But, young people, you still have a chance, the courts have solved the legal issues of voting—the only, but really important, impediment there is apathy; you must get to the voting booth every election.

And the other problem, that of controlling communication, the internet is still open; the rich haven’t been able to control that yet, but they will keep trying—they already use it themselves very effectively.


The scientific evidence says that these global warming consequences will come about if we continue to use fossil fuels as usual. At some point it will become evident to all that the conservative deniers were dead wrong and they will be pariah but by then it will be too late for all of us. There will be too much warming inertia in the climate change pipeline, it will be humanly impossible to stop.

So, beware young people—my generation and those before have inherited a climate-stable planet to live on but unless you act now and repeatedly at every election, you will only inherit a hell on earth.