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Category: Economics

Overuse is draining and damaging aquifers nationwide

Overuse is draining and damaging aquifers nationwide

The New York Times reports: Groundwater loss is hurting breadbasket states like Kansas, where the major aquifer beneath 2.6 million acres of land can no longer support industrial-scale agriculture. Corn yields have plummeted. If that decline were to spread, it could threaten America’s status as a food superpower. Fifteen hundred miles to the east, in New York State, overpumping is threatening drinking-water wells on Long Island, birthplace of the modern American suburb and home to working class towns as well…

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What your insurer is trying to tell you about climate change

What your insurer is trying to tell you about climate change

Juliette Kayyem writes: Having worked for decades in conservation nonprofits, Beth Pratt, who lives high in the Sierra Foothills in Midpines, California, understands how climate change is putting her home at ever greater risk. Her community is experiencing what she calls “climate whiplash”: forest fires, record heat, massive snow dumps, mudslides, rockslides, and even a tornado. When Pratt, now 54, bought her 1,400-square-foot house in 1999, she thought the setting was ideal: on a big lot near Yosemite National Park….

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How the ‘urban doom loop’ could pose the next economic threat

How the ‘urban doom loop’ could pose the next economic threat

The Washington Post reports: In Indianapolis, the technology giant Salesforce is paring back a quarter of its office space in the tallest building in Indiana, where it has been a key tenant for the past six years. In Atlanta, the private investment giant Starwood Capital defaulted on a $212 million mortgage on a 29-story office tower. And in Baltimore, a landmark building sold for $24 million last month, roughly $42 million less than it fetched in 2015. All across the…

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Carbon credit speculators could lose billions as offsets deemed ‘worthless’

Carbon credit speculators could lose billions as offsets deemed ‘worthless’

The Guardian reports: Carbon credit speculators could lose billions as scientific evidence shows many offsets they have bought have no environmental worth and have become stranded assets. Amid growing evidence that huge numbers of carbon credits do nothing to mitigate global heating and can sometimes be linked to alleged human rights concerns, there is a growing pile of carbon credits equivalent to the annual emissions of Japan, the world’s fifth largest polluter, that are unused in the unregulated voluntary market,…

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Trump vows massive new tariffs if elected, risking global economic war

Trump vows massive new tariffs if elected, risking global economic war

The Washington Post reports: Even in the face of growing personal legal peril, Donald Trump summoned his top economic advisers to his private golf club in New Jersey for a two-hour dinner last Wednesday night to map out a trade-focused economic plan for his presidential bid. Trump and top aides, including former senior White House officials Larry Kudlow and Brooke Rollins, as well as outside advisers Stephen Moore and former House speaker Newt Gingrich, spent the dinner discussing how Trump…

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Critics of ‘degrowth’ economics say it’s unworkable – but from an ecologist’s perspective, it’s inevitable

Critics of ‘degrowth’ economics say it’s unworkable – but from an ecologist’s perspective, it’s inevitable

Shutterstock/Matt Sheumack By Mike Joy, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington You may not have noticed, but earlier this month we passed Earth overshoot day, when humanity’s demands for ecological resources and services exceeded what our planet can regenerate annually. Many economists criticising the developing degrowth movement fail to appreciate this critical point of Earth’s biophysical limits. Ecologists on the other hand see the human economy as a subset of the biosphere. Their perspective highlights the urgency with…

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Fitch highlighted Jan. 6 insurrection with Treasury ahead of U.S. downgraded credit rating

Fitch highlighted Jan. 6 insurrection with Treasury ahead of U.S. downgraded credit rating

Reuters reports: Fitch downgraded the U.S. credit rating due to fiscal concerns, a deterioration in U.S governance, as well as political polarization reflected partly by the Jan. 6 insurrection, Richard Francis, a senior director at Fitch Ratings, told Reuters on Wednesday. In a move that took investors by surprise, Fitch downgraded the United States to AA+ from AAA on Tuesday, citing fiscal deterioration over the next three years and repeated down-to-the-wire debt ceiling negotiations that threaten the government’s ability to…

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Migrant workers flee Florida as new immigration law takes effect

Migrant workers flee Florida as new immigration law takes effect

The Wall Street Journal reports: Florida’s agricultural and construction industries say they are experiencing a labor shortage because a new immigration law that took effect July 1 is leading migrant workers to leave the state. The law, signed in May by Florida Gov. and GOP presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, seeks to further criminalize undocumented immigration in the state. It makes it a third-degree felony for unauthorized people to knowingly use a false identification to obtain employment. Businesses that knowingly employ…

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More than two dozen cities and states are suing Big Oil over climate change – they just got a boost from the US Supreme Court

More than two dozen cities and states are suing Big Oil over climate change – they just got a boost from the US Supreme Court

By Patrick Parenteau, Vermont Law & Graduate School and John Dernbach, Widener University Honolulu has lost more than 5 miles of its famous beaches to sea level rise and storm surges. Sunny-day flooding during high tides makes many city roads impassable, and water mains for the public drinking water system are corroding from saltwater because of sea level rise. The damage has left the city and county spending millions of dollars on repairs and infrastructure to try to adapt to…

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State Farm stops offering insurance in California because of ‘rapidly growing catastrophe exposure’

State Farm stops offering insurance in California because of ‘rapidly growing catastrophe exposure’

The New York Times reports: The climate crisis is becoming a financial crisis. This month, the largest homeowner insurance company in California, State Farm, announced that it would stop selling coverage to homeowners. That’s not just in wildfire zones, but everywhere in the state. Insurance companies, tired of losing money, are raising rates, restricting coverage or pulling out of some areas altogether — making it more expensive for people to live in their homes. “Risk has a price,” said Roy…

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Pandemic-era policies reversed the trend toward a widening income gap. Now those gains are under threat

Pandemic-era policies reversed the trend toward a widening income gap. Now those gains are under threat

Politico reports: For the past three years, low-income workers have made historic gains in wages even after inflation, reversing the trend of advances for upper-income workers and stagnating pay for laborers that dominated the previous four decades, according to a POLITICO analysis of data from the U.S. Labor Department. The gains were the product of a series of dramatic changes in the structure of the labor market and government policies to aid the economy during the pandemic. Fueled by the…

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Drastic climate action is the best course for economic growth, study finds

Drastic climate action is the best course for economic growth, study finds

Yale Climate Connections reports: For decades, many economists’ analyses seemed to justify inaction on weaning the economy from fossil fuels, saying the astronomical cost of such rapid transformation would strangle economic growth. These experts were heeded over scientists who warned that acting too slowly would court climate catastrophe. But in recent years, more economists have begun to agree that the short-term costs of aggressive action are not as high as once thought, while the long-term costs of inaction are much…

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The man in charge of knowing when the U.S. runs out of money

The man in charge of knowing when the U.S. runs out of money

The Washington Post reports: At the beginning of every workday, from his second-floor office in the U.S. Treasury Department, Dave Lebryk starts his morning looking at a color-coded dashboard tracking the most critical operations of the largest payment system in the world. More than $6 trillion flows out of the Treasury every year in payments, salaries and purchase orders, and more than $5 trillion flows in, mostly through tax collections and fees. Lebryk’s job is to make sure that these…

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Why Trump wants the U.S. to default on debt

Why Trump wants the U.S. to default on debt

Dennis Aftergut writes: Lest you have any doubt, the three exclamation points are Trump’s. You could be excused for thinking he wants a default. He loves chaos. But he also has a purely self-serving reason to seek an economic catastrophe. You don’t need to be a stable genius to know that a bad economy typically hurts the incumbent in a presidential race. And Trump is desperate to get the immunity from prosecution that being elected president would provide him. He’s…

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The war on poverty is over. Rich people won

The war on poverty is over. Rich people won

Annie Lowrey writes: Why do so many Americans live in poverty? Because so many rich people benefit from it. This is the thesis of the lauded sociologist Matthew Desmond’s new book, Poverty, by America. The best seller is at once a careful exploration of poverty statistics; a deeply reported depiction of the lived experiences of the poor; an examination of the ways America’s wealthy exploit the masses; and a case for ending poverty. Desmond shows how the country’s employers, financial…

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Declaring the debt ceiling unconstitutional is risky, Biden aides fear

Declaring the debt ceiling unconstitutional is risky, Biden aides fear

The Washington Post reports: Senior White House officials see enormous risks in trying to resolve the debt ceiling impasse without Congress, viewing the unilateral measures floated by some academics only as emergency measures of last resort, according to three people with knowledge of internal conversations. As they have for months, Biden aides have recently been evaluating a wide range of proposals for acting on the debt limit without the consent of Congress — particularly by invoking the 14th Amendment of…

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