The Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal

UMass Amherst professor and PERI Co-Director Robert Pollin discusses his latest book that he co-authored with Noam Chomsky, about the Global Green New Deal and the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead in addressing the climate crisis

[jerryjones]

Thank you gentlemen. We must all co-operate rationally to provide for the common good. The enemies of democracy use the tactic of Gerasimov to divide, divert, and demoralize.

[TheMaddav]

Excellent show, I wish people could see that in the mainstream media.

[Herbwise]

Applied Econometrics is linear thinking and misses that we are talking about non-linear matters.

[Herbwise]

MMT is neither left nor right. It is an accounting lens.

[rudlzavedno]

You can theoreticize all you want, but the engineering fact remains you can't hit 95% CO2 emissions reduction without 40% drop in energy consumption over the short term. We have to quadruple national electricity grid capacity so that it can support 80% of energy sector moving to electricity. Building such infrastructure alone will take 10-20 years. We need a combination of reduction in energy consumption and changing our energy infrastructure simultaneously in order to buy us enough time to do it. Excuse me for saying this but the fact remains that our children and grandchildren will be "dead men walking" living on borrowed time (climate systems time lag) if we FU the next 10 years and we'll be powerless to do anything about it, because of climate system's positive feedback loops dominos will start falling. Hothouse Earth scenario is a very real threat. According to PIKs study Earth's nearest new temperature equilibrium lies somewhere between +5 and 9C with possible temperature spike up to 16C before stabilization, not +3, 5C as stated by conservative IPCC. even +3, 5C means massive die-off but 5-9C is death sentence for all complex life on Earth for millions of years to come.

[Herbwise]

Central to the MMT understanding and one of their proposals was the Job Guarantee funded by the federal govt.

[giordanofranchetti]

Few know that Germany is the 4th greatest consumer of coal (produced with love in Poland)

[nblumer]

Implementation of the transition may not occur overnight but strong action can be done immediately as Pollin suggests. It is not so much the pain of transition that prevents action - because as Pollin points out it is largely a hyperbolic myth. I've been hearing and seeing the "we can't do it overnight argument" for 35 years but after a 30-year disinformation campaign by the fossil fuel industry that there was no problem, the "it takes time" retort is now the predominant mantra. It's become the unifying neo-liberal PR bond between fossil fuel CEOs and corporate centrist 'progressives'. Pointing our knives only at the lunatic neo-fascist deniers of the Republican Party is exactly what the fossil fuel industry wants - however, the corporate pseudo-greenwashers are far more dangerous. They assure us they are working on the problem, when in truth, they do the opposite, meanwhile sapping our energy and resolve to fight. We need to battle them both with equal vehemence.

[andreasbimba]

The US Treasury does not need to buy Indian Green bonds so that the poor in India can get access to renewably sourced electricity. A more rational path is India manufactures the renewable energy hardware for its own use, and export, and uses national government deficit financing to fund the establishing of renewable energy infrastructure and local electricity users pay a low rate for that electricity. Professor Pollin has still not grasped the MMT reality that there is considerable unused fiscal capacity between current circumstances and the level of national government spending that would result in full employment in the US, India and most other countries. This unused fiscal capacity can fund the proposed GND in the US and most other countries even without cuts to defence spending, and without incurring any debt. Those very small nations where manufacturing renewable energy hardware and any associated materials is not likely to be viable can still afford the local labour needed to establish renewable energy infrastructure through national government deficit financing which would cover most of the investment needed but would in most cases require access to subsidised hardware and materials. Note the US government ran a fiscal deficit of 26% of GDP in 1943 and inflation reached about 14% but with price controls and war bond sales.

Professor Pollins' comment that it was OK for the US Federal Reserve to buy some of the US debt but not all possibly reflects a misunderstanding that the total outstanding value of US Treasury bonds and similar securities is not even debt in the case of the US which has a currency issuing government federal government/central bank and that these Treasuries are a liquid asset in the hands of commercial banks, financial institutions and other central banks so there is no one the US federal government needs to repay. The MMT academics recommend that the sale of Treasuries end reflecting the logical reality that currency issuance by the Federal Reserve has in effect 'funded' all US government spending ever since the US dollar was unpegged from gold and floated by the Nixon Administration in 1971 and that the cash rate become the low rate of interest as offered by the Federal Reserve for reserve accounts held by each commercial bank and other relevant financial institutions at the Federal Reserve.

[TheMaddav]

Germany has decided it wants to burn coal until 2038 and plans to raze villages and forests to expand coal pits. It tells you all you need to know about the EU's climate change policies.

[Nhoj]

'We' have ten years?

“ . . . our best estimate is that the net energy
33:33 per barrel available for the global
33:36 economy was about eight percent
33:38 and that in over the next few years it
33:42 will go down to zero percent
33:44 uh best estimate at the moment is that
33:46 actually the
33:47 per average barrel of sweet crude
33:51 uh we had the zero percent around 2022
33:56 but there are ways and means of
33:58 extending that so to be on the safe side
34:00 here on our diagram
34:02 we say that zero percent is definitely
34:05 around 2030 . . .
we
34:43 need net energy from oil and [if] it goes
34:46 down to zero
34:48 uh well we have collapsed not just
34:50 collapse of the oil industry
34:52 we have collapsed globally of the global
34:54 industrial civilization this is what we
34:56 are looking at at the moment . . . “