Women and Workers Lose

In two 5 to 4 Supreme Court decisions, "closely held" for-profit corporations were granted the "religious liberty" to discriminate against their female employees, and home care aides are "partial-public employees" who can't be required to pay agency fees if they choose not to join a union.

Although the decisions are presumably construed narrowly, they potentially lead to further damage down the line.  What other laws could be ignored on religious grounds?  Could public sector unions end up taking a huge financial hit?

Update (July 1):  There's going to be a lot of reaction to these decisions.  It's as strong a reason as any to vote out the Republicans and make sure Democrats are appointing Supreme Court justices.

Update (July 13):  Leonard Pitts calls out some Supreme hypocrisy.

Update (July 14):  Does the Hobby Lobby ruling mean Sarah Ruden doesn't have to pay for war?

Avoiding Pitchforks

Nick Hanauer has a message for his fellow "zillionaires"--something must be done about rising inequality before it's too late.

[T]he fundamental law of capitalism must be: If workers have more money, businesses have more customers. Which makes middle-class consumers, not rich businesspeople like us, the true job creators. Which means a thriving middle class is the source of American prosperity, not a consequence of it. The middle class creates us rich people, not the other way around.

Hanauer's attitude seems to be in contrast to an article by Michael Shermer who argues that the inequality and immobility are not as bad as we "perceive" it.  Hanauer wants a $15 per hour minimum wage because it will promote economic growth by reducing inequality.  He wants to save capitalism from itself.

[M]any of our fellow citizens are starting to believe that capitalism itself is the problem. I disagree, and I’m sure you do too. Capitalism, when well managed, is the greatest social technology ever invented to create prosperity in human societies. But capitalism left unchecked tends toward concentration and collapse. It can be managed either to benefit the few in the near term or the many in the long term. The work of democracies is to bend it to the latter.

Do many of his peers think he's anything but a kook?  And in the U.S., severe repression actually seems more likely than anything like this:

Down on our knees we're begging you please
We're sorry for the way you were driven
There's no need to taunt just take what you want
And we'll make amends, if we're living
But away from the grounds the flames told the town
That only the dead are forgiven
As they vanished inside
The ringing of revolution

Update (September 15):  Hanauer talks about pitchforks.

Update (April 22, 2019):  Matthew Chapman refers to a Washington Post article:

U.S. billionaires themselves are acutely aware of [a deep public distrust in how the political and economic system has failed average people] — and are fearful that it could bring about the end, or at least the radical transformation, of American capitalism itself.

Climate Change Business

A project co-chaired by Michael Bloomberg, Henry Paulson, and Thomas Steyer has produced a report called Risky Business: The Economic Risks of Climate Change in the United States.  It seems to geared toward some people that need to hear the message the most--business leaders and Republicans who tend to downplay any negative impact.

This ties in nicely with a report commissioned by the Citizens Climate Lobby called The Economic, Climate, Fiscal, Power, and Demographic Impact of a National Fee-and-Dividend Carbon Tax. The benefits include large carbon dioxide emissions reductions, employment gains, greater real per capita income, and fewer premature deaths.

The World Bank also has a report called Climate-Smart Development: Adding Up the Benefits of Actions that Help Build Prosperity, End Poverty and Combat Climate Change that shows how transportation and energy efficiency policies could boost the world economy by $2.6 trillion per year.

Maybe we need to be inundated every day with reports about the benefits of taking action along with the risks of inaction.

Update (July 6):  Fred Pearce describes a study by lead author David McCollum of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis that shows investment in low-carbon energy needs to be boosted by $1 trillion per year to have a 70 percent chance of avoiding 2 degrees Celsius of warming.  But energy investment is already $1 trillion per year with half of that in the form of fossil fuel subsidies.

Update (July 26):  Maybe mockery is all we have left.

In a worrying development that could have dire implications for the health of the planet, a report published Wednesday by the Environmental Protection Agency suggests that the number of climate change skeptics could reach catastrophic levels by the year 2020.

New Hope

Al Gore doesn't sugarcoat the impacts of climate change (economist Nicholas Stern says that current models "grossly underestimate" the damage from unmitigated warming).  And Gore is a fan of democratic capitalism, yet recognizes that democracy has been hacked by corporate "persons" who use vast financial resources as "free speech" to influence policy.  He acknowledges that unaccounted external costs and growing inequality are major failures of market capitalism.

But Gore seeks to combat the pessimism.  He says there needs to be a price on carbon and a political cost for denialism.  He notes that the renewable energy sector is booming and lauds President Obama's initiatives. But there still needs to be international agreement.  Gore sees momentum for decarbonizing the economy and notes that piecemeal efforts around the world build pressure for a broader agreement.

Gore knows damage has been done.  He insists that there is time to avoid the worst.  Maybe the quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. is over the top, but is the urgency any less?

Update (June 20):  James Murray also writes about the risks of climate change and energy security.  He refers to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy to point out that carbon dioxide emissions are back up and that BP expects emissions to rise by 29 percent by 2035.  Further, fossil fuels are still overwhelmingly dominant.

Murray also calls for a big push in renewable energy.  Oil production hasn't moved very much despite real prices at the highest level since the 1860s.

Warmest Spring

The Japan Meteorological Agency reports that global mean surface temperature from March to May this year was the highest since 1891.  The anomaly for 2014 is 0.28 degrees Celsius above the 1981 to 2010 average--compared to 0.26 for 2010.

Infrastructure and Social Change

Richard Heinberg writes about social change based on Marvin Harris's principle of "probabilistic infrastructural determinism".  When our physical environment changes, then social relations are forced to adapt.  And it's clear that climate change and resource depletion are going to drive infrastructural changes.

When the basic relationship between a society and its ecosystem alters, people must reconfigure their political systems, economies, and ideology accordingly, even if they were perfectly happy with the previous state of affairs.

As the availability of cheap fossil fuel comes to an end, it's replacement is unlikely to maintain our current lifestyles.

With less useful energy available, the global economy will fail to grow, and will likely enter a sustained period of contraction. Increased energy efficiency may cushion the impact but cannot avert it. With economies no longer growing, our current globally dominant neoliberal political-economic ideology may increasingly be called into question and eventually overthrown.

Heinberg argues that new ideas for organizing society will need to fit in with the emerging infrastructure.  He points out that European-style industrial socialism has been just as dependent on cheap energy as our consumerist/corporatist culture.

Heinberg wants to encourage world-changing ideas.  There may not be much room for error.

Once useful fossil energy supply rates begin to falter, this could trigger an unwinding of the global financial system as well as international conflict. It is also possible that the relationship between carbon emissions and atmospheric temperatures is non-linear, with Earth’s climate system subject to self-reinforcing feedbacks that could result in a massive die-off of species, our own included.

Public Goods

A study published in Global Environmental Change by lead author Robert Costanza updates work from 1997.  It estimates the value of global ecosystem services at around US$ 142 trillion per year--about twice the value of world Gross Domestic Product.  But the loss of services from practices such as deforestation and draining wetlands could be as much US$ 20 trillion per year.

And Our Ghosts May Be Heard

There's a haunting scene in the movie On the Beach, as fallout from a nuclear war completes it's global spread, when amidst a raucous party a song lyric suddenly breaks through:  "You'll never take me alive said he."  Defiant, and yet a moment of clarity that the end has come.

Erza Klein offers seven reasons to be a pessimist on climate change.  Basically, we've waited too long, we're not the most vulnerable, festering makes things worse, Republicans are crazy, we're focused on the short-term, international cooperation is too hard, and technology can't fix it.

And so, although the study isn't new, a reference to "An adaptability limit to climate change due to heat stress" serves as a reminder that some lethal mutations don't manifest themselves for quite a while.

Update (June 7):  Joe Romm responds to Klein.

Update (June 8):  Further reaction to Klein.

Update (June 9):  Paul Krugman argues that economic interests don't play as big a role as ideology in climate change denial.

So the real obstacle, as we try to confront global warming, is economic ideology reinforced by hostility to science. In some ways this makes the task easier: we do not, in fact, have to force people to accept large monetary losses. But we do have to overcome pride and willful ignorance, which is hard indeed.

Update (June 14):  The National Review tries to claim that the cost of climate change will be small.

Update (June 28):  A paper by Dan Kahan seems to support Krugman's "willful ignorance" contention.