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Category: Economics/Business

Jeff Bezos offers absurd and hypocritical reason for his massive space plan

Jeff Bezos offers absurd and hypocritical reason for his massive space plan

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Joe Romm writes: Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos recently announced a wildly ambitious plan to ultimately put up to 1 trillion humans in vast cylindrical space colonies near the Earth. But while the goal is over-the-top, the justification is both absurd and hypocritical. Bezos argued at length on Thursday in a major presentation at the Washington, D.C. Convention Center that we need such a future to save the Earth “if the world economy and population is to keep expanding.”…

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U.S. fossil fuel subsidies exceed Pentagon spending, says IMF

U.S. fossil fuel subsidies exceed Pentagon spending, says IMF

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Rolling Stone reports: The United States has spent more subsidizing fossil fuels in recent years than it has on defense spending, according to a new report from the International Monetary Fund. The IMF found that direct and indirect subsidies for coal, oil and gas in the U.S. reached $649 billion in 2015. Pentagon spending that same year was $599 billion. The study defines “subsidy” very broadly, as many economists do. It accounts for the “differences between actual consumer fuel prices…

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Global wealth gap would be smaller today without climate change, study finds

Global wealth gap would be smaller today without climate change, study finds

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The New York Times reports: Climate change creates winners and losers. Norway is among the winners; Nigeria among the losers. Those are the stark findings of a peer-reviewed paper by two Stanford University professors who have tried to quantify the impact of rising greenhouse gas emissions on global inequality. It was published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Global temperatures have risen nearly 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, since the start of the industrial age,…

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Trump’s attacks on the Fed aren’t unique. Central banks worldwide are under attack

Trump’s attacks on the Fed aren’t unique. Central banks worldwide are under attack

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Fareed Zakaria writes: Around the democratic world, there is a power struggle taking place that might end up being the most damaging and long-lasting consequence of this era of populism. Elected leaders — from President Trump to Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan to India’s Narendra Modi — have been steadily attacking the independence of their nations’ central banks. This could end very badly. A brief history of modern central banking. As the Economist points out, politicians in the 1970s would routinely…

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The financial sector must be at the heart of tackling climate change

The financial sector must be at the heart of tackling climate change

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Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, François Villeroy de Galhau, governor of Banque de France, and Frank Elderson, chair of the Network for Greening the Financial System, write: The catastrophic effects of climate change are already visible around the world. From blistering heatwaves in North America to typhoons in south-east Asia and droughts in Africa and Australia, no country or community is immune. These events damage infrastructure and private property, negatively affect health, decrease productivity and destroy wealth….

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Federal Reserve official: Climate change is an ‘international market failure’

Federal Reserve official: Climate change is an ‘international market failure’

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Eric Holthaus writes: Climate change was already worrying enough — now a report from the U.S. central bank cautions that rising temperatures and extreme storms could eventually trigger a financial collapse. A Federal Reserve researcher warned in a report on Monday that “climate-based risk could threaten the stability of the financial system as a whole.” But possible fixes — using the Fed’s buying power to green the economy — are currently against the law. Glenn Rudebusch, the San Francisco Fed’s…

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‘Reduced consumption is going to have to be a part of the equation’ for climate action, J.P. Morgan executive warns

‘Reduced consumption is going to have to be a part of the equation’ for climate action, J.P. Morgan executive warns

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Bloomberg reports: The world isn’t cutting carbon emissions anywhere near quickly enough, a senior executive at J.P. Morgan Asset Management told clients this week — and changing that will require far harder choices than most people realize. In his annual “Energy Outlook” report, Michael Cembalest, chairman of market investment and strategy for the asset management group, wrote that the U.S. needs to reduce its use of carbon much faster — a view he shares with the authors of the Green…

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As costs skyrocket, more U.S. cities stop recycling

As costs skyrocket, more U.S. cities stop recycling

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The New York Times reports: Recycling, for decades an almost reflexive effort by American households and businesses to reduce waste and help the environment, is collapsing in many parts of the country. Philadelphia is now burning about half of its 1.5 million residents’ recycling material in an incinerator that converts waste to energy. In Memphis, the international airport still has recycling bins around the terminals, but every collected can, bottle and newspaper is sent to a landfill. And last month,…

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Imagine an economic system in which people come first

Imagine an economic system in which people come first

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The Verge reports: New York congressional representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez believes that people should welcome robots taking their jobs — but not the economic system that can make it financially devastating. During a talk at SXSW, an audience member asked Ocasio-Cortez about the threat of automated labor. “We should not be haunted by the specter of being automated out of work,” she said in response. “We should be excited by that. But the reason we’re not excited by it is because…

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Smaller countries are becoming the healthiest

Smaller countries are becoming the healthiest

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Bloomberg reports: There’s more to life than money, and economists know it. As new assessments of global living standards proliferate, attempting to gauge how healthy, happy and successful humans are depending on where they live, a pattern is slowly emerging. While slight variations in data can throw up different winners, smaller countries are increasingly dominating the top of the lists while big countries with booming economies fall behind. A new analysis, the Global Wellness Index published by investment firm LetterOne,…

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Surge in U.S. economists’ support for carbon tax to tackle climate change

Surge in U.S. economists’ support for carbon tax to tackle climate change

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The Financial Times reports: US economists led by former US Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen are uniting in record numbers to back the idea of a carbon tax as the most effective and immediate way of tackling climate change. At a time when Democrats including New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are pushing a sweeping “Green New Deal” programme to reduce greenhouse emissions, climate change is shaping up to be a major 2020 election issue. The US is the world’s second-biggest…

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Can sustainable agriculture survive under capitalism?

Can sustainable agriculture survive under capitalism?

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Sophie Yeo writes: It was one of the most beautiful—and one of the most sustainable—farms that Ryanne Pilgeram had ever seen. When she arrived, Penny, the farmer, was sorting through vegetables in the shed. Her husband Jeff, who had a full-time job as a doctor, was hauling flakes of alfalfa to feed the draft horses that they used in place of tractors. Pilgeram, a sociologist at the University of Idaho, was touring the farm as part of her research into…

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The age of surveillance capitalism

The age of surveillance capitalism

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John Naughton writes: We’re living through the most profound transformation in our information environment since Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of printing in circa 1439. And the problem with living through a revolution is that it’s impossible to take the long view of what’s happening. Hindsight is the only exact science in this business, and in that long run we’re all dead. Printing shaped and transformed societies over the next four centuries, but nobody in Mainz (Gutenberg’s home town) in, say, 1495…

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Luxembourg makes all public transport free

Luxembourg makes all public transport free

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CNN reports: With a population of 602,000, Luxembourg is one of Europe’s smallest countries — yet it suffers from major traffic jams. But that could be about to change. Last month, it announced plans to make all public transport — trains, trams and buses — free from March 2020. The government hopes the move will alleviate heavy congestion and bring environmental benefits, according to Dany Frank, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Mobility and Public Works. Landlocked Luxembourg is one…

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U.S. carbon emissions surged in 2018 even as coal plants closed

U.S. carbon emissions surged in 2018 even as coal plants closed

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The New York Times reports: America’s carbon dioxide emissions rose by 3.4 percent in 2018, the biggest increase in eight years, according to a preliminary estimate published Tuesday. Strikingly, the sharp uptick in emissions occurred even as a near-record number of coal plants around the United States retired last year, illustrating how difficult it could be for the country to make further progress on climate change in the years to come, particularly as the Trump administration pushes to roll back…

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