Views from Crestmont Drive

It’s a basic provisional conclusion on this blog that conservatives deal with short-term matters, corporate profits and so on, without concern for long-term effects, like climate change. They’re concerned about their children — but not enough concerned about how climate change will affect the lives of their grandchild. People with science-fictional perspectives do understand that long-term effects occur; our own society is a blip in a larger scheme of things; and we do worry about long-term effects, like climate change. As do all the scientists, and others who have a firm grip upon reality.

The US Berkeley economist Robert Reich has been doing a series on his Substack about economic myths. His tenth one appeared yesterday. (I should compile them all.)

Robert Reich, 2 Aug 2024: Debunking Myth #10: Economic growth is always good, subtitled “BUNK! The Earth is a finite resource — and infinite growth will destroy it”

To me this should be *obvious* –the continued expansion of humanity cannot go on forever. Would the world be covered in suburbs? But most people simply do not think long-term. Especially not conservatives, who are very concerned with the here and now, about how many women are having how many babies, for example, as if the species is under threat of extinction; and making this long-term problem worse.

Unconstrained economic growth is causing such grave harm to the climate that its costs are likely to be greater than the gains.

Mainstream economists don’t measure the costs of growth. They talk about climate change as a so-called “externality,” as if it were just incidental to growth.

But if you consider the deaths and injuries caused by chemical pollution, wildfires, and more intense hurricanes and storms, the costs of growth are huge.

It’s possible to shift from an economy organized around growth to one organized around sustainability. How? Dramatically reduce the use of fossil fuels. Limit what can be mined and extracted.

Probably not.

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It’s also a provisional conclusion on this blog that people perceive the present as being worse than the past. It’s the essence of MAGA, and the conservative mindset — that the world needs to return to a glorious past. Despite all the evidence that indicates such a past never existed; the perception is a mental bias.

Still, there’s this:

OnlySky, Jonathan MS Pearce, 29 Jul 2024: This clusterf*** is bigger than you think, subtitled “Enjoying a morsel of good news in one corner of the world? Snap out of it.”

Most people seem unaware of how dangerous the entire world is right now, the scale of the precipice we are on and how precariously we are perched.

Momentary victories aside, we have a growing far-right electorate across Europe. Many of these countries are increasingly dancing to the tune of Vladimir Putin. And the possible next president of the US and his choice for VP are eager to join the dance. All of Ukraine’s allies and all of Russia’s allies are actively involved in a cross-domain World War III. The US, UK, and Germany provide weapons, ammunition, training, military intelligence, satellite imagery, military advice, special forces, medical equipment, logistics support—everything you would expect if we ourselves were embroiled in a conventional war.

We are involved in an economic war of sanctions and hydrocarbons, energy and commodities, financial institutions and components. We are involved in a political war of treaties and organization, alliances of friends and axes of enemies, all involved in games of influence peddling. We are involved in a cyber war with attacks on critical infrastructure throughout the world, where ransomware debilitates hospitals, hacktivists expose data, and nefarious entities under the protection of plausible deniability render pipelines and water treatment facilities unusable.

Well…. yes…. OK, but alarmists have been saying these things since the 1960s, at least. And we’re still here.

But that doesn’t mean that any one of these threats might still appear. Since there are so many of them, the likelihood of one appearing soon is still relatively high…