I remember sitting through an entry level l, very neoclassically focused economics class in college thinking "this is a set of assumptions being taught like scientific theory." We need guys like Steve to write the textbooks!
I was studying for my MBA and asked the economics professor how the assumption of 2-3% annual grow could be possible on a finite planet. He wasn’t able to answer and I realised the whole of neoliberal economics was based on bullshit.
@@pwollerman , Professors are airheads. They make useless life coaches. You need people who can change flat tyres in your orbit. The Club of Rome assumes no discovery, or invention. We keep stretching carrying capacity, using just that - invention. I'm not saying a financial system based on deflation of value has anywhere to go but where you'd expect.
@@pwollerman uhh.. because we are able to find new ways to access things we couldn't. More efficient ways to get, transport, communicate, produce and consume things. Because as our productive processes and consumption demands change over time and so do the raw materials we rely on... Just to name a few. I feel like you are bullshitting your real experience such as revising/rationalizing your intellectual journey now you are at the position you currently take, or you were searching for evidence to fit your predefined conclusion. Bad.
@@pwollerman the "finite" limits of our planet may be sufficiently large enough that your 2-3% growth will never exhaust them in any practical time frame.
wow Steve has such a deep understanding of energy and economy, he has tied together so many scattered ideas I've encountered over the years into a cohesive narrative. I am truly impressed and grateful to have found him on this channel.
Great great interview, Chris. Steve deserves a Nobel, and likely he'll get it... When it's too late. Again, a nice Christmas gift for your listeners, thanks a lot! Merry Christmas & all thé best in 2025!
25:19 One of the earliest manufacting industries was spinning cotten and wool into yarn, weaving it into fabric and sowing into clothing. All this was achieved by labour and hand operated machines. Many thousands of years passed before the first water and wind powered mills were invented. The energy needed for labour comes from eating vegetables or meat. Human and animal energy is not from eating coal, or drinking crude oil.
Exponential growth in a finite world cannot go on forever therefore we all need to live in a Net Zero world within the next 10 years. = modern Globalist / neo-Malthusian / Leftist economic logic.
@@bélalugrisi There is always potential for economic growth but agree growth in material wealth is ultimately finite. The trick is to decouple economic growth from materialism.
Happy to see economists challenging climate change only due to human actions. Also, talking about human actions, you don't need to be an economist to talk about economics. Ludwig von Mises in this book "Human Action" (1949) said ""Economics must not be relegated to classrooms and statistical offices, nor left to esoteric circles. It is the philosophy of human life and action and concerns everybody and everything. It is the pith of civilization and of man's existence."
Yeah he’s all for it, that or Stalinism, crank that he’s become. He’s now another Shockley, once brilliant inventor of the transistor who ended up walking around w a sign arguing for eugenics. WTH? No filter in podcast land for these cranks
As marxism inevitably does. It's in the system. Some seem really 'keen' on holding the whip. They will end up being in power after the nice, goodwilling people have been pushed to the side..
1:24:35 ouch. We just went through a similar money printing thing with Covid. What did we get, inflation, a decrease in the standard of living for the average citizen.
The problem with authoritarian solutions, of course, is they are always themselves short sighted, tend to depend on mendacity, and they tend to lose control of the scale of their mendacity, and thus of management that was the object of the authoritarianism. I think going back to the proposed limits to growth solutions is the only real option. Given we are committed to a crash now does not mean the 1975 solution is not an option, but rather that our short term objective needs to focus on preserving knowledge, and attempting transparency through the horrors of the crash to whatever extent is possible.
“We have a finite environment - the planet. Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist.“
@@gabrielrodriguez821 ???? "Yea, well, technological progress says overwise" No, it doesn't. Because our environment is "not infinite", as you correctly said. "this variable can change the definition of what is finite over time" No, it just makes a few things more plentiful than we thought. The important bit is the 'few' bit... Only a few things can be addressed... There's a few things which are rock-solid, non negotiable, and others that we just don't know about yet. If we address one deficiency, push it back, then we make progress, but then bump up against 2 more... Address these 2, push them back, make progress, then we bump into 4 more... We've done a LOT with the low hanging fruit, and have gotten to 8.1 billion of us... But now we have 8.1 billion of us dependant on us fixing the next deficiency, or more like 8, that will pop up. The price of raw materials famously is not driven by scarcity, but by demand. Our progress has been made possible due to 10s of thousands of years of relative stability of our environment... That all changed about 200 years ago, and is changing exponentially, accelerating... One thing this means is that things that were 'plentiful', even with 8.1 billion of us, suddenly aren't, as climate change is gradually taking some of it away. So in effect, our environment is not just finite, but it's actually shrinking, when we consider it in human habitability, human supportability terms. But anyhoo, what do we actually want to grow? We don't want pollution to grow... We don't want deforestation to grow... We don't want extinctions to grow... We don't want ocean dead-zones to grow... We don't want traffic on our drive to work to grow... What we do want to is our individual, family, community affluence to grow, our health to grow, our freedoms to grow, our happiness to grow... Therefore, we're left with one solid reality... Our population size. It has to reduce. And the ONLY nice way to reduce it, is by choosing to have fewer kids, by being able to choose to have fewer kids, by having the knowledge & understanding why, by having free and easy access to all the tools, means to have smaller families. If you think this might not be correct, then mathematics is gonna give you a hard time.
@@gabrielrodriguez821 When you multiply a rising curve by a declining curve, you get an inverted-U shaped curve. Now think about Economy = Resource Base X Applied Technology. Even if "technology" can go to infinity, the resource base is declining.
@@gabrielrodriguez821 ??? "Yea, well, technological progress says overwise." No, it doesn't. It just moves the problem slightly into the future. Good ol' Norman Borlaug, who gave us the Green Revolution, and has saved 1 billion lives from hunger, he made a point of telling us how not to blow our future during his acceptance speech for his Nobel Prize.. He told us that yes, we do now have lots of food (thanks to technological progress), but unless we deal with our population growth, size, we'll just get back to the same place, with humans starving to death. Well, we ignored him. And we have the likes of Elmo threatening his followers into pumping out kids for him... The growth we do want to increase is that of happiness, wellbeing, health, prosperity, stability, etc. etc. And not just for us humans, but also for the environment, the poor little animals, too. The only way we can do this is by reducing the number of us. Reducing our population size. And the only nice way we can do that, is by choice. Being able to, having the rights to, the knowledge why, the means to choose to have smaller families. And wow, is supplying every human on the planet the full range of family planning cheap! Compared to all the other things we'd have to do to deal with the fallout of everything crumbling around us! It's pretty cool to realise that choosing to have smaller families addresses every single big issue we face today!!! AND it will result in our wages going up, our worker rights improving, our families getting richer, and our kids having a much, much better outlook.
I read all of Zeihan and watched his videos in fascination, until I realized he told Americans, the petrochemical industry, and climate deniers that it will all just be great -- for them. Meanwhile, moving from metropolitan Texas to a retreat high in the Front Range.
I came to the same conclusion from watching him. Drought in KwaZulu Natal? Great for the US! Economic turmoil amongst the Inuit in Siberia? Great the the US! Deccan traps erupt and cover the entire globe in dust? Great for the US!
A model simply reflects the assumptions of the model maker but then it takes on an authority of independence. Bit like people have authority if they write a book.
Thank you for your comment about Peter Zeihan! I think you were spot on. He has insight in some areas and a lot of over confident bullshit in many other areas as well.
@ Good for you! It took me longer, but once I realized his general stick which is to assemble a relatively randomcollection of facts, claim that they’re related without really showing how and then drawing sweeping conclusions from them and making wild prophecies, I didn’t need to listen again to know what he was going to say. I think the thing that irks me the most about him is that he loves to do videos in very scenic, beautiful spots in the mountains while he’s hiking or on the seashore, etc. I think the message of his videos is that he is so much smarter than his audience That he can wander around spouting broad generalizations and he’s obviously making a lot more money than anyone who listens to him and always will.
@ You might be right. However, whether or not he is right or wrong, it is interesting to hear a different view of the development of economic theory. Also, if he is right about the very heroic simplifications that economist making about the effects of climate change, that is a cause for concern.
roads are repaired daily, rebuilt after decades, bridges after decades to a century, many modern buildings are rebuilt after decades. why would a climatic change that occurs over a century not be accommodated for in the constant renewal and replacement of our infrastructure? most of the buildings that people use and live in did not exist 100 years ago.
Dude. You think its this simple? Houses are the least of our problems. Although a lot of people living in the tropics are very poor, and cant afford AC.
@@Jensth even better. as the worlds poor get richer their energy consumption is likely to quadruple. cold areas heat up much faster than warm areas. the areas closest to the equator are not experiencing and are not projected to warm significantly. there is no credibility to RCP8.5 we will not see that degree of warming. whatever you believe is happening there is no cause for alarm.
The warmest places on the planet are at the equator... There ain't a whole lot of deserts there. Turns out deserts come from a lack of humidity not from heat
1:12:03 Global Circulation Models (GCMs) are still only that - mathematical models in which it is assumed there is a good understanding of physical processes involved in the Earth’s climate and that they can be expressed mathematically! This is no different to the economic models criticised throughout this interview. As to their predictive ability, GCMs fail the only test that really matters, namely how well they fit actual records (even the ones they themselves predicted a decade or two ago). So far the models are running significantly hotter, driven by extremely bullish feedback loops from water vapour, ignoring carbon dioxide saturation levels and seemingly purposefully failing to acknowledge low-frequency oscillations (centennial and millennial) and their slightly chaotic interplay with decadal and multi-decadal variations. ANN’s and AI have been shown to be far superior in their predictions vs actual records. Trained using historical records and proxy data only, their predictions carry no bias from the ego’s of institutional “science” and their political puppet masters.
You need to show the sources of your knowledge, because directly looking at the output of the models shows the opposite of what you are saying. Reality is actual warmer than predicted, the track record of the models was spot on the last half century, long term cycles are of course modelled and the saturation is ignored, because absorptive satuaration has near to nothing to do with the greenhouse effect. To the first, second and third look your comment is a compact summary of popular falsehoods. You need to clarify, how you gained your knowledge. Says a humble physicist.
Gcms do not have a good track record at producing regional or near term, 10 15 year, temperature predictions but miraculously always nail 30 to 100 year trends. Look back at earlier ipcc model runs. The world continues on a. 15 deg c trend even as we are a quarter of the way through the 21st century. The massive acceleration that will take us to 5 deg c by the end of the century is always 10 years away.
@@kurtschroeder2243 GCMs are not deesigned for regional predictions and they aren‘t designed for yearly temperatur predictions. The shorter you make the time span, the harder natural variability kicks in which is the oscillation around the trendline. This trendline however is the aim of prediction from the beginning. However, you get a much better trendline fit if you do not assume a linear trend the last half century, but two lnear trends with a steeper slope the last ten years. Why you talk about 5 degrees as some aim (3 degrees would be bad enough and models do not aim somewhere but works regarding to the beforehand unknown emission pathway) is yet to be clarified.
@@kurtschroeder2243it took 34 years for global temperature average to rise from +0,5 to +1,0 above preindustrial times (1980-2014). It only took 10 years to rise from +1,0 to +1,5 (2014-2024). Temperature is rising VERY sharply. We're on course for +5 well before 2100 if this exponential trend continues.
So climate science is not based on models? CO2 isn't a sole lever of temperature, like self-interest is a lever of action in economics? And temperature growth isn't a sole measure of climactic well-being, like GDP is a measure of economic success?
According to Wikipedia H2O has the largest greenhouse effect with 60% followed by CO2 with 26% followed by troposheric ozone with 8% followed by N2O plus CH4 with 6%. Water vapour would not increase in the atmosphere without another forcing factor such as a change in one of the other greenhouse gases This is due to equilibrium. There is a natural equilibrium between water in the surface of seas, oceans, lakes and the atmosphere. If you have another factor increasing temperature you can shift the hydrosphere equilibrium a bit to being able to hold more moisture due to the increase in temperature. I have a pH.D in Chemistry so this is simple stuff me. The same would apply to anyone with advanced Physics, Chemical Engineering etc. Changes in the Earth's axis tilt wrt the orbit around the sun is a forcing factor that causes ice ages and warm ages as well. This acts on a scale of millennia. Changes in the orbit are also a factor. Google Milankovitch cycles if you want to know more about this. Another factor that could cause major warming or cooling are massive asteroid or cometary impacts. I did my pHD on this topic. Some folks will benefit form climate waming some will be disadvantaged. If you live in Canada, or Russia, or Sweden you make benefit ... as long as you don't have climate refugees!
@@sstachura You would be one of the very few non-climatologists knowing how the greenhouse effect really works by knowing its qunatitative mechanism rather than just its qualitative description. That is just emphasized by the fact you then would know by what calculation one comes to the values you are sceptical on. On the other hand its not about the greenhouse effect as such, but how it increases by adding CO2, what makes water vapor a positive feedback due to the law of Clausius-Clayperon, which you as chemist do know well.
@@sstachura You can conduct experiments. The 60% was for water vapor contribution to greenhouse effect. If water vapor had no greenhouse effect we would have snowball earth and complex life might not have evolved. One can conduct experiments. For example, have a chamber with typical air constituents at a given latitude and altitude and a source of light mimicking the solar spectrum at that altitude and latitude and measure the temperature changes with change of atmosphere due to altitude and many other inputs. One can have a vast amount of experimental data mimicking conditions at a vast variety of atmos. conditions. Ultimately you put that into a model. Yes a model. Wiki sites science journal articles.
WAIT THE Steve Keen who met Doomberg one year ago (here on UA-cam!) THE Steve Keen who proudly voiced malthusian view points in this encounter? Steve Keen ... My answer to those who dictate the lower standard of living to all others in the name of the climate "You first"
His views on energy are very interesting and is an idea I learned (and agree with) from a sci-fi book I read where tokens of energy were a currency! However, it seems to me he completely misrepresents the effect of governments living beyond their means - or running on deficits. First, he completely ignores the devaluation in buying power on money with the increase in its creation. This doesn’t take money from people in nominal terms but does in terms of its value. Secondly, I don’t think his conception takes account of the inflationary nature of money printing on the reserves - unless the reserves are untouched and denominated in non-domestic currency or, dare I say it, gold! The devaluation therefore results in increasing leverage of the country as it creates aka prints ever more money. This, it seems to me, is how countries ultimately fail. Finally, he has faith in the GCMs is quaint - he glosses over the omission of cloud implications which, as anyone can tell who goes outside at all, will have a massive impact on the models outcome - if they manage to incorporate it. Just ask any farmer how impactful clouds are on their crops
imho, orthodox economics is probably way less cohesive than heterodox economists give it credit for. monetary policy as practiced by central banks doesn't even seem to make sense under a loanable funds model which is purported by some prominent academics. orthodox economists seem to be in denial about these incoherencies also and come across as gaslighting when defending their profession as a whole.
This was a fascinating interview, great interviewer. With a fascinating conclusion: "Because economists with different views are ineffectual at convincing people we need fascism to have their views enforced."
I would like to talk with Mr. Keen directly and follow up some of his assertions with specific questions on extrapolation. I suspect he is right on much of what he says, but I wonder if he has thought of all the important side effects as am thinking right now. I thank you both for this presentation, and hope more of this kind of thinking can become popular and investigated.
We need to be equally skeptical of both economic and climate models. We really don't know what the future holds. Careful middle ground is the best policy. Nuclear power fits neatly into that approach.
@@jinnantonix4570 We don't know what the future holds, but we kind of know what the past looked like. Until now there were no irreversible tipping-points. It has both been cooler than today and warmer than today and nothing horrible irreversible happened. Even the IPCC is extremely careful about tipping-points.
He ignores his own bias and shows no evidence of to support his alarmist views. His criticisms of economics are sound but that does not mean his d beliefs in climate change are correct!
I understood, the government can spend whatever it likes, cause it issues treasuries, which suffice the balance requirements in the books? Seems to be an incomplete theory.
Not correct. Most governments are constrained by the tax base and the amounts they can raise by bond sales. The US is somewhat less constrained than most because around the world US government bonds are readily traded and considered very safe. In effect much of the world showers money on the US because their own economies are crap😮.
@jimgraham6722 Well, you can try what the Germans did before the election of Hitler. Or ,Zimbabwe... print more and more money, which seems like what mmt says.
@@jimgraham6722 That's entirely wrong and exactly the stuff that MMT clearly shows to be wrong by looking at the double entry book keeping. Savers in the economy can not and do not "fund" the government by buying bonds its quite the opposite way around. The government spends and then sells bonds to offer a risk free asset. Bonds are sold for central bank money, usually in an auction to a selected group of banks, in the US they are called primary dealers. Those banks pay with central bank reserves which they borrow at the central bank and which can only come from the central bank. Only on the secondary market (when the government already got the reserves to spend) private entities can buy those bonds. There is no "financing" by the public and there can't be something like that to begin with, as the savings of the private sector are created in the first place by government spending. The private sector does not have any net savings which it could use to buy those bonds before the government didn't deficit spend. Also what the US does is quite the opposite of what you said. It's not foreigners who shower the money on the US, it is the US showering the foreign sector with Dollars. The US has a consistent export deficit which means the US spends more money into the world than it gets back. This is not by accident as this is basically required if you want to provide the world reserve currency. The foreign sector wants to save Dollars and someone needs to provide them.
Consider bringing on an economist from the Austrian school of thought, if you haven’t already. Someone like Saifedean Ammous, Tom Woods, Robert Murphy, Mark Thornton, Thomas DiLorenzo, Patrick Newman etc. Thanks
Considering that economists cannot even come particularly close to predicting current economics predicticting something so catastrophic as large scale climate change is ridiculous. All that can be said is that changes that effect codes for building all infastructure and buildings that have temperature varients in them will require large modification or replacement, when climate seriously effects crop growing, and when it will cause large scale migration the consequences will be extremely serious and not beneficial except for perhaps the northern countries.
Before I stated on CS I was thinking about joining the LSE - being danish I have to get the access papers from the UK embassy- passed it - my better half at the time wanted to study law - so she could not move - I through let me read the 1st year text books and did - coming from a computer science background - so many things was ludicrous - I dropped it as a hot potato ❤
This is an excellent review of the history of economics. But it doesn't come to any real conclusion about climate change other than all models aren't correct. And everything is going to get really bad. But no reasonable substitute was offered. Growth limitations seem to be built into the system. As countries move off the farms and into the cities, their birthrates go into steep declines. A theory of climate change needs to be more than a proclamation that everything is going to get very bad. Greta has been telling us that for years.
Why would 7C warming (which wont happen) drive us into extinction? More people migrate to warmer locations every year than the other way around. Humans live in regions from -50C to 50C. Plenty of places will become more habitable at +7C.
Can you find anyone who can go deep on climate tipping points. "TIPPING POINTS" seem to be the new catch all term for climate change alarmism. I want more info on it both the arguments for and against.
Drive a car 80 miles an hour for one mile with no seat belt.. Never slow down. In fact, like humanity, speed up. You hit a speed bump two feet before the end of the mile. Two feet after the speed bump is the brick wall. Congratulations on never slowing down. Bonus points if at some point you realized it was all a bad idea, although it probably got you labelled "Doomer."
@@AlanDavidDoane As an argument that does not work. All you have done is provide an analogy that may or may not apply but without any discussion of the actual issue.
Great conversation, and great sound quality! I don't know why a lot of these videos have trouble with horrible vocal coloration that makes for difficult listening.
Can I just put a shout out for those chairs. Labour and energy pulled together to create maximum comfort and beauty, for a 3 hour podcast. inside a building sheltered from climate! 😂
I really appreciate that he is REAL about the inevitable breakdown of our system. I agree 100%, the only chance for change is authoritarian. I don't like it, but our "democracies" are not capable of handling this.
I think it was the Black Death that did away with feudalism in England. Half the population died, so the peasants could look for a good deal from another landlord. In Walsham Le WIllows here in Suffolk, the best plague records exist, including private letters between the local abbott and a wealthy landowning lady. Both complain that it costed twice as much to reap the harvest as it did in previous years. There were laws in the aftermath of the BD that tried to restrict what sort of clothes a persons wife could wear so the class distinctions remained. It failed.
Very interesting discussion. Especially the review of historical models. However, since all models only give us a look into the biases of the modelers, the conclusions he makes are somewhat muted by the fact that the CC models fail in the same manner.
Appreciate Prof. Keens economic contributions but believe his concerns on climate change are overblown. What hapens 100 years plus from now is completely out of our control and we have no idea what the energy sources will be by then. The cost of enegy determines how that energy is used and the vitality of the economy. I also believe the financial sector has become a burden on the economy in the same way as excessive government. From a societal perspective prosperity Lombard is correct on many if not all points.
I don't think we should talk about the future 100 years from now with the assumption that the global technological industrial civilization still exists. It will likely collapse much earlier, probably when we run out of affordable oil in the coming decades.
@@Pasandeeros dark thoughts indeed. Personally I am very confident if we make the right decisions there is a bright future ahead. I am not worried about the democracies, they are all on the right track. I think the large developing countries, China, Indonesia, India, Brazil and even Nigeria are OK. Russia is a basket case and seems likely to deindustrialise. The US is a bit of a worry but is nearly always late to the party. The worry is it seems determined to revert economically and environmentally. However, provided the rest of the world gets its act together, in the big scheme of things, what happens in the US may not matter much.
If the current debt based fiat system isn't scrapped asap nothing matters. When that is fixed, all in nuclear or humanity is facing extinction living out the last days in caves again. That's the reality right now; dictating if there's going to be another 100 years at all
That an eminent professor of economics published that the laws of thermodynamics do not apply to economics displays both the hubris and lack of real world understanding of many economists.
To be fair, the reason physical systems move always towards equilibrium or steady state which is the 2nd law does not count for economic modelling. There is no reasons markets must behave the same way - in fact they don‘t. Problem arises from economists nonetheless modelling under the delusion of some equilibrium of markets, using the physical way of thinking.
But "Markets" aren't an economic system so that's a Straw Man. They aren't even complex dynamical systems, but simple organised rule based systems. Each participant agrees up front to the market rules in order to partake, and those who break the rules are subject to punishment.
@@TheUAoB That is the wrongest description of markets I have seen so far. Thx for the laugh. First of all markets indeed *are* a complex and highly dynamic system, for they include feedback mechanisms. For expamle the labour market does not follow the simple rule of supply and demand, but produces its own demand by giving income to people. That is a simple to describe but hard to quantify feedback. The only thing you know is that you just cannot save an economy by lowering wages. Second, the markets are not independent from one another, making the entirek market system highly complex. The market for labour is not the same as the one for goods/services. The market for financial products is not the same as the system (market would be inaccurate here) for interest rates. Still both depends on one another highly. And then those two couples I described are coupled altogether in causes and effects that are many and, complex and change over time with high dynamics. And none of this shows the slightest sign of a need for equilibrium or any inner mechanism that always seeks equilibrium, whatever equlilibrium means here.
@@chrisa.4937 The "labour market" isn't a market - that's why. You don't understand that markets have existed for millennia and operate with arbitrary rules govened by the market authority and agreed to by market participants. Simply calling everything that happens in an Economy a market transaction is insane. The Economy is the human part of the "Earth ecological system". Markets are discrete "locations" where buyers and sellers engage in price discovery under market rules. Yes market behaviour can be relatively complex and result in emergent phenomena just like a game of chess. But is is infinitely less complex than the Economy or the larger ecological system in which it operates.
@@chrisa.4937 I think you misunderstand the concepts of both equilibrium and thermodynamics at the same time and how they interact (that being said I tend to agree with your characterization of your interlocutor arguing economies/markets aren't complex dynamic systems). You might want to go to control theory for a deeper understanding of equilibrium. The economy can be thought of as a mix of interdependent systems the same way a control loop would work to control the speed of your car. Variables will tend to vary depending on dynamic inputs and the ''equilibrium'' is the state for which variables will tend towards when input variables are kept static (google a settling curve for more visuals). If I keep my foot pressed on the gas pedal at the exact same spot for long enough and with no variation in the road or car machinery, then I will reach an equilibrium speed. That is, my speed will have reached dynamic stability at a finite value. The same is true for all variables in any given economy (although some variables are more stochastic than the car example), in fact, every dynamic system can be thought of mathematically as a control problem and that's one of the big propositions of control theory. It is in fact possible to prove this axiomatically. Thermodynamics and its involvements are at the input level of the system. Energy is finite, you can never break even when using it and the ways you are using it impacts the economy by capping the activities the economy is capable of handling as a whole. I cannot produce metals requiring 100MJ of energy if I only have 50MJ of energy available in the entire economy, it would break the energy conservation law. What this means is the settling (or equilibrium) values in a given economy will tend towards more goods and services available given more energy. The same is true of materials as their availability is related to energy and their physical availability.
I watched as much as I could stand, but your guest does not possess a serious critique of economics, as it has evolved and continues to evolve. Economists have developed dynamic models and sophisticated theories of the roles of money in a market economy. The subjective theory of value is not in conflict with theories of production, but rather is complementary to those ideas. And whatever Adam Smith's blindspots may have been, neoclassical economists certainly accounted for natural resources as a critical determinant of productivity. Just read the Wikipedia article on the concept of the production function to get a sense of how much your guest is leaving out of his stylized account of history. Economics has much more breadth of thought and debate than he is acknowledging.
Look I agree with you on tipping points and the unravelling of society. But @stevekeen what are your thoughts on permaculture and its role in building resilience in unpredictable systems. My personal experience has shown me that biodiverse dynamic food systems can be incredibly resilient and provide nutrition and productivity in the most hyperarid of climates. Look at the work of greening the desert. Time to be a little more positive
22:40 - Wikipedia - Richard Cantillon (1680s - May 1734) an Irish-French economist & author of Essai Sur La Nature Du Commerce En Général (Essay on the Nature of Trade in General), a book considered by William Stanley Jevons to be the "cradle of political economy". Although little information exists on Cantillon's life, it is known that he became a successful banker and merchant at an early age.
Well that was great though I need to understand more about governments creating money and balancing this off against reserves - what are these reserves? Do they exist in economies where public debt exceeds GDP significantly. We need to hear more about how France financed their 58 reactor programme. What did Ontario do with its CANDU programme? Great stuff but I hope we can get a more targeted Round 2
The US Treasury still has about 8,000 tons of gold bullion. Some film flam merchants want to swap it out for bitcoin. My advice would be stick to gold.
Historically, government's will use up a currency, building and developing a currency until all wealth is extracted from a population and faith is lost in the currency (it takes about 50 years at 2% annual growth for mathematical and human lifespan reasons - nobody notices a 2% increase on a 5c candy bar) and like in the film _The Matrix,_ the system gets reset and the cycle starts again. This is described in the Bible as the jubilee. All debts are forgiven and all money is returned to the king.
Yes, but: what if the climate alarmists are wrong? What if Lomborg et al are wrong? The whole issue is the uncertainty in regards to what the climate will be. You cannot equate your way out of this. If you really, and i mean REALLY dig into the climate system you cannot come to the conclusion it is going this way or that. The main problem is that we cannot separate the signals and know the exact causal relationship. Not even proximal. So all we get is models, often linear, and projections. Most of it is based on the assumed effect of Co2. I say assumed because there is overwhelming evidence that it cannot do what it is assumed to do, not even from a physics point of view. Then there is the assumption that warmer temperatures are bad. That they will lead to more extreme weather which is false. And to finish off: natural cycles will trump anything humans can possibly do to the climate. We should adapt and correct landuse, clean air and waters, protect endangered species. Climate alarmism will likely be gone by 2030. Certainly by 2035. The road Keen proposes will lead to disaster and is purely driven by an asserted certainty. Being a marxist this does not come as a surprise..
Reserves are nothing else than the net balances on the accounts of the banks and the government at the central bank. They are created when the central bank buys assets (usually government bonds) or lends money to banks and they are destroyed when the CB sells assets again or when the loans are paid back. Reserves can only be held by banks (and the government) that have an account at the central bank. The central bank is the "house bank" of the government and it provides the clearing system for the banking sector through which the government spends and taxes an through which banks clear payments between each other. All that happens in reserves. The money you got at your bank is technically speaking NOT government money, it rather is private bank money that the private banks create and they promise to pay you actual Dollar or make a payment in Dollar on your behalf. People do not realize that those two "monies" are not the same because there is deposit insurance and banks have a fixed exchange rate between the money they issue and goverment money, which is always 1:1 so at par. But as soon as a bank is actually bankrupt you can clearly see that their money is not government money when they can't keep their promise to pay government money.
@@trixn4285 Thank you for your detailed explanation. So, if a retail bank loans people money against assets that are significantly over valued or where the people have no reasonable chance of paying is that the same as creating money. Further, in that instance are the reserves non-existent? When Steve Keen spoke about governments creating money I sensed that he meant money that had no reserve backing. This is normally thought of as inflationary. Do you have any thoughts on this?
Do you have evidence that disproves climate change? You know there's a ton of evidence which supports climate science right? Just because you don't "believe it" doesn't mean it's incorrect. It means you don't understand why you're wrong
Anyone who isn't alarmed by catastrophic climate change isn't paying attention. But since there's nothing eight billions humans will do to stop it, enjoy the few years you have left while you still can.
Great stuff! Steve is a long term hero of mine, who introduced me to system dynamics. I discovered him in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, when he was the only economist who made any sense to me. Would be great if you talked to his colleague physicist Tim Garrett who is one of my favourite big picture thinkers and a Jevon's paradox specialist.
Hi Dr. Chris Keefer As a follow up episode with a heavy dose of a very different view I would welcome MARIAN L.TUPY and/or GALE L. POOLEY who wrote SUPERABUNDNCE.
24:20 Respect you two gents immensely, thanks and gratitude. Though on a minor point of pedantism (sp), A Smith's opening salvo " Labour is the source of wealth ...", if one were to transpose to our time line we could consider labour as work, thus being equal to energy over a span of time ie. W = E/t [Sorry, the physic teacher in me took over]. I realise Smith's focus was human labour, but it may indicate he was on the right track.
Definitely the best example WYSIWYG recognition, and the explanation for why pseudo random magical-functional judgement requires continuous re-evolution recognition relative-timing reiteration. Ie the practical equivalent of temporal thermodynamical superposition focus on 0-1-2-3ness 3D-T line-of-sight holography-quantization nucleation. It's always NOW everywhere-when logical superposition identification of probabilistic correlations shaping WYSIWYG QM-TIME resonance Completeness, (it's the Absolute Zero-infinity Aether of reference-framing stupid, economics by any other name.., if you will)
@ThatonedudeCR12956 Not at all. Other than when there was only one mega continent, to big for rain to penetrate. Every other warm period had much more biomass than now in the ice age.
I'm with you on the immediate future of the world Steve, in our lifetimes. That's why I bought a slice of mountainous Tasmania with river frontage 25 years ago. Can not understand why the majority of humanity cannot see this. How can they be so short-sighted?
I'm only stating the obvious, for the audience, because I'm certain you have thought of this. Your Escape Plan 100% depends upon the societal resilience of Tasmania itself continuing in order to respect those property rights
Have been an avid follower of Steve's for many years, and Mr Dec.Med. [sorry, don't know your name, and can't find it mentioned anywhere], you are one of the most exciting minds in current media. Thanks for the post, guys.
Why do we always assume that climate change arrives like a meteor? We maintain infrastructure as the climate changes, we've always and will continue to do this. This alarmism is pathetic
Some disasters are slow, others are fast. Floods, uninhabitable temperatures, hell flames, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, Godzilla. Pick your poison.
In some ways you're not wrong, it will just be experienced as increased costs in many ways. There's a rule in finance, that people experience a loss twice as painfully as they perceive a foregone gain The regular increased costs of maintenance will mostly be seen as a foregone gain. And then the increased disasters will be perceived as a loss. So when we see extrapolations like climate change hurting the economy by -12 percent, a reasonable fraction of that is because crops fail or because homes need to be rebuilt, or people have to move
I have been wondering how Nordhaus and Lomborg reached their conclusions about the lack of economic effects of climate change and your discussion with Keen provided some insight. Increased droughts - grow crops elsewhere. Floods - seawalls, levees, move to higher ground or effects overstated. High temps - better air conditioning and genetically modified plants. Other species impacts - as long as humans can continue their lifestyle, they don't care about other species or zoos can show us the remaining examples and genetic banks could bring them back in the future. They think the economy is resilient and will easily adapt to climate change effects. Keen and others think that collapse could happen at any time and in multiple ways. I lean toward some form of the great simplification happening in next decade or two. I hope it doesn't, but stock market crashes, financial collapses, simultaneous droughts in the worst possible places for food production, wars, etc. could happen at any time and head us down that road. Thanks for the podcast.
Have you heard of weathering? The idea is that you could grind up a single mountain dump it in a lake and take out all human contributed CO2 from the last century. I think there's so many ways for us to adapt, we tend to have our vision to narrow
or move to regenerative and wholistic agriculture. Big Ag has literally fed us lies for 50 years. overuse of salt based fertilizers and glyphosate has drastically reduced our soils micro biomes. using corn for ethanol and canola / soy oil for human consumption was not a good idea for the long term. As mentioned in the video, one can't have a climate model without looking at land based carbon sequestration, which is proven to mitigate weather pattern disruption ( alpha lo - origin of rain substack) - nature does the work in our economy , the voluntary carbon credit markets is the expression of this. ai and digitalization will mature this market. as for net zero, i agree with the interviewer, perhaps a club of rome project.............
@@dkiresearch4423 yeah there are multiple ways. We could fertilize the Ocean back to having fish stocks where they used to be and in the meantime take out 12 gigatons of carbon out of hte atmosphere. We'd only have to do it once because the Ocean's would sustain once the whale populations recover because they're actuall ythe Ocean's fertilizer
Nice conversation Mark. I am very pro nuclear and I think it is an essential part of our future. I appreciate the advocacy you do. Understanding money is not easy - especially since we have been told a certain story all our lives. It is hard to wrap the head around the fact that spending came first (thats where we get the money to pay the taxes). Bond issuance has a purpose, but its not because we need the money. Why would we borrow something we are free to create. I see lots of comments that don't think we have an issue with the climate and/or there is an easy technical solution just around the corner (just like fusion). We ate most of the fish in the sea and ate most of the animals on the planet and temperatures are up. About 10K years ago a 4 degree change meant we had an ice sheet that covered all of Canada and most of Europe. People can believe what they want, but I've seen enough credible evidence that there is something to worry about. We can choose to act or be forced to react. I have a preference, but I fear I am the minority. Party on!
I can't believe that after all his work on modelling economics with double-entry ledgers that Keen has fallen hook, line and sinker into this MMT nonsense. It's as misguided a take on economics as Marx's labor theory of value. He's fallen in love with his analysis and fails to see what money actually is, nor where the model falls over
Interesting that Keen finishes with Mad Max. I watched this the other day and it kind of helps explain the original movie without resorting to the climate catastrophe causation: ua-cam.com/video/FnD50llAkP4/v-deo.html
I find that most criticism of mmt is including false presumptions of what they mean. But I will criticize some of the education! When people look at mmt at the 101 level, the Educators tend to suggest that taxation is what retains the value for the currency. Not really true in most of our cases, where it is the issued household and corporate debt that backs the currency
I think it evolved from a backed currency. It was first backed by taxes, then by gold, then by debt. I chase dollars because they're the cheapest thing I can pay my mortgage with. The bank would happily accept one tonne of gold, but I'd be better off selling it and clearing my debt. And other people want dollars cuz they know I'm chasing dollars.
@@qjsharing2408 I think the whole gold-backing thing is confusing units with the thing being measured. As though the six feet of lumber you bought from the hardware store should be made entirely of rulers and tape measures.
Yeah, I enjoyed the part where government spending creates money because it's not a loan, it's a form of loan called a bond. And he says if a bond is a loan as the dummy neo-liberals think then the world will go entirely off the rails with deficit spending from his plan. Wonderful, tremendously convincing performance that he is not a reasonable source of information!
He's supposedly a "Marxist thinker" but has criticised Marx in his career as an economist? He comes off as more of a neo-con sceptic and a bit of a eco/accelerationist nutter to be honest. With differing views in the centre left and right wings of politics, but nothing "Marxist".
He ignores his own bias and shows no evidence of to support his alarmist views. His criticisms of economics are sound but that does not mean his d beliefs in climate change are correct!
Yes this is a great episode and dialogue and some of the stuff Steve Keen tells us about describes individuals who are beyond normal crimes and are committing Ecocide, full-on.
1:02:32 👍🏻 Jaw dropping. Like I was when I finally understood how we keep getting the mantra of each summer being hotter than ever. Been running now, for two summers, going into the third, down here for this subtle flavour of the propaganda. Turns out, models say temperature is such and such, when the concentration of CO² in air is xyz ppm. Never mind the thermometer.
We are funding civilisation now through taxation. Nordic countries are doing ok. It comes down to people playing the game fairly, and that's a cultural rather than a financial theory issue.
I've been a huge fan of Steve Keen since the Great Financial Crisis. The problem with Nordhaus and Lombord is they only consider the direct effects of temperature change, but do not take into account the costs due to second-order effects dues to shifting biomes, rising sea levels and increased rates of extreme weather events. All of these second order effects require investment in infrastructure and other investments in order to adapt to the changes, or if adaptation is not cost-effective, land that is presently economically productive will have to be abandoned, or may be much less productive. Maybe a few areas where productivity is severely limited by cold (Russia, Canada, Scandinavia & the northernmost part of the USA) will benefit, but only about 5% of the world's population live in cold climate areas. The cost of these second-order effects are far, far greater than the direct costs of a simple increase in temperatures.
Wow! Started out very reasonable and then took a sharp turn towards “we need authoritarianism.” Rough. The climate religion is melting people’s brains.
Have you read the documents from the 1970s where the oil industry was leading the charge to fight climate change? Are you familiar with why they changed their minds? It wasn't because of the science. There's actually memos where they stated they are going to discredit climate change and how they will do it. You may as well say you don't believe in diabetes because coca cola funded research that said it's a fake disease. You believe in Diabetes right?
Great rehash and evalutations of economic theories, however what all these theories fail to account is the difference of focus and sense of urgencies in population caused mainly be what are described as evolutionary alarm sounds within languages, to understand this see for instance a comparison between China and South America ua-cam.com/video/fWKCRJW0olk/v-deo.html
I used to somewhat follow Steve Keen and pretty familiar with the way he thinks. The whole idea of an economic model in relation to climate change is based on a series of assumptions. Those two should be decoupled. I take none of it seriously. Climate alarm skeptics like myself see the whole coupling as a gigantic futile exercise. Two points to make: 1:nobody knows the trajectory of future temperature and the assumed coupling w Co2 is both wrong and unproven/ non scientific, and 2: any model of economics is also based on losely assumptions of reality ie both are a construct that can be steered one way or the other. Economists have the habit of treating the world as a series of equations. Keen's worldview is marxist based. Nordhaus's quite another. How Keen knows that we underestimate the effects of climate change should give pause to anyone taking him seriously. To me, his assertiveness simply irritates me. He clearly doesnt know anything about the actual climate science, the uncertainties the system contains and just directs, or i should say biases his ideas towards a goal he insists are certain. The discrepancy between the two are so glaringly obvious that i watch this video with some amusement. Interesting he is on Decouple. Has Nate Hagan and Simon Michaux been on? I like their coherency much more, even though i think they are at least 75% mistaken.
Steve kind of likes to dance at everybody's wedding. From cozying up to degrowthers to cheering for space x in its early days, throwing his support behind movements like ubi and positive money, while also coasting along the ride with MMT which could not be more opposed to these things.
The problem of this guy is that he might be an economics contrarian, he is not intellectual curious enough to be sceptical about the climate change narrative and its more subtle different between the natural variability of climate and the contribution of human to global warming i.e., AGW. The Narrative welcomes any theory that fits their strategy for their ambition of political domination. Much more is needed to be understood by this guy and he needs to be more reflexive of his own limitation re climate models and climate empiricism. Beware of persons could talk fast. Their knowledge tend to be limited.
Just one problem.... The data that shows warming is flawed. It does not take into account stations that have become surrounded by cities and estimates areas that dont have stations based on the models of the warming. If you correct for these errors the warming completely disappears. Instead of warming causing issues its actually solar energy influx to the earth's magnetosphere that is driving the storms, earthquakes, and climate patterns.
The city heat island effect is well known. But it will also aggravate any global warming, as far as city folk are concerned! Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. The climate is complex, and it's sometimes hard to find where the heat went. But it's not a hoax. glaciers are receding and the ocean is warming, and it's not because they are too close to cities
@ it isnt, ive been studying this topic for over 20 years. Ive seen the data tampering happen. You can still find accurate historic data but its much harder now since biden hid all the raw data in 2021.
@@chrisa.4937 No it is not corrected for. Instead of removing the data from corrupted stations, they mix it with the uncorrupted stations, causing it all to be corrupted.
1:14:54 Backing up your view of the absurdity of those economists, drop the temperature by 10 deg C [global average] and we enter an ice-age, raise the temp. by 10 deg C [global average] and we enter a scorched-scape hell-on-Earth. Good luck living for every organism on the planet for the second scenario, barring at Antarctica, Greenland or very high-altitude fastnesses [and likely also underground]. Competition for standing space might become heated (boom-boom).
Great interview. I agree that you cannot detach energy use from economic growth. He knows all the problems with economic theories, but accepts virtually without question the doomsday scenarios of climate alarmists. He’d do well to examine those with the same skepticism, but he can’t because his personal religion won’t allow it. We have upset the balance of our delicate nurturer and now we must pay.
We know a lot about climate based on ice cores from Greenland and analyzing the little bubbles of atmosphere trapped in them. The oldest ice cores in Greenland only go back about 150,000 years. That's because most of the Greenland ice sheet didn't exist 150,000 years ago. It had melted. And every species of animal that was on the earth then including human beings is still in the earth now. We all survived the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. What's that tell you.?
It tells me you can choose to admit being incompetent or a liar. Greenland was not ice free 150000 years ago and of course many species went extinct since then, as we know for sure from fossils.
The climate costs topic is certainly in my wheelhouse. The main argument presented against the DICE model is that it is "totally absurd" and "the roads will be gone". This is not great persuasion. Luckily other better arguments are also made! Before considering the better critiques it makes sense to compare DICE to PAGE. ChatGPT alleges that PAGE does not use a geographical temperature comparison for its warming costs and that it includes a much steeper and more dynamic consideration of tipping points, as well as more non temperature costs. Nevertheless DICE and PAGE are almost identical up to 4 degrees of warming, with a significant difference clear by 8 degrees. Since PAGE includes all the things DICE is alleged to completely lack, a better critique of DICE would need to explain this with more than rhetoric I find it reasonably persuasive for Keen to allege that Nordhaus has a bias to assuming the world will not end because he likes its current system. Unfortunately this turns into a clear cut case of projection. Why? Keen proposes that the only possible solution to warming is dictatorship. Except the already cost effective solution of reflective particles in the stratosphere is a much more likely and desirable answer to actual catastrophic warming. It seems safe to say that he believes the world will end because he thinks the system is fundamentally broken and needs to be replaced (rather than Eastern European defensive pessimism like Chris). Always do a gut check as to whether someone's claim about someone else might apply to them! Ok, lets go straight to the great argument made against IAM discounted warming cost models. Frontier economies have been growing at 2% for 300 years, but that's not actually a very long time. It is reasonable to consider what we should do if that breaks down and future generations experience rising warming costs without rising economic growth to adapt to it. In that case we should do everything we can to decarbonize. I don't know how to weight this possibility. Should it be a 25% possibility and therefore maybe justify cutting the discount rate in half? It's a really interesting question and a genuine and major objection to a cost model that uses a 3% discount as I believe Nordhaus does. There are two possibilities with this, and I think both of them don't go Keen's way One is that the economy stops growing endogenously. In this case I would expect that the resources to fully decarbonize will not exist. Remember that Keen believes that global dictatorship is necessary to stop warming. Because it's very very hard. Without economic growth I propose that it would be near impossible, and certainly require dictatorships. However, again, stratospheric reflective particles would be a better solution than that. This is the absolute critical error with every catastrophic warming claim. If it's a catastrophe you do stratospheric particles. If it's a potential tipping point that is an unacceptable risk you do stratospheric particles at your chosen tipping point temperature. You can do other things, but nothing much more extreme than that makes sense because that is available The second possibility for the end of economic growth is that extreme non-linear multi-factorial processes cause all the roads to be gone. Again, however, this is a case where you either produce a global alliance of climate policy dictatorships, or you do reflective particles in the stratosphere. I also believe that excellently designed regulatory processes for nuclear could allow it to compete directly with coal There are some other points I could make about DICE, but I expect no one has the interest to go into them, or let me know. Points would include the two ways that DICE includes other costs than the geographically normed warming cost, and the observation that calling it linear when it is quadratic may be technically right in some way but is obviously wrong when you look at the cost curve on a graph. I would also point out that Keen alleges that Neoclassical economics have doomed the world by making people think 3 or 4 degrees of warming is fine, yet nearly every nation on earth has signed on to a proposed 2 degree limit. This again goes back to the projection bit. Looks like he expects everything to go wrong because of Neoclassical economics, not the climate! That's not why we're already at 1.5 degrees, it's because signing pledges does nothing to make actual transition a real probability by 2050. I think that is fundamentally impossible but I would suggest in particular Lomborg's proposal of massively increasing funding into green innovation to the tune of $200-300 billion a year, based on work by others suggesting it's around 10x more effective in the long run than short time horizon direct CO2 cuts Cheers
I don't think you're calculating the geo-political implications of a country dumping sun reflective spray in the atmosphere. Imagine if a country that hates the country that implements this ends up with a negative outcome and forces you to stop by the barrel of a gun. Do you continue? If you stop and the climate rebounds violently and some insignificant islanders get wiped out, but at least you avoided a war, is that okay? Or should you take the, "I'm sorry the solar shade program destroyed your ability to create food ( it doesn't matter if it's your fault cause you will be blamed anyway) but this is for the betterment of mankind" route
I remember sitting through an entry level l, very neoclassically focused economics class in college thinking "this is a set of assumptions being taught like scientific theory." We need guys like Steve to write the textbooks!
I was studying for my MBA and asked the economics professor how the assumption of 2-3% annual grow could be possible on a finite planet.
He wasn’t able to answer and I realised the whole of neoliberal economics was based on bullshit.
@@pwollerman ,
Professors are airheads. They make useless life coaches. You need people who can change flat tyres in your orbit.
The Club of Rome assumes no discovery, or invention. We keep stretching carrying capacity, using just that - invention.
I'm not saying a financial system based on deflation of value has anywhere to go but where you'd expect.
@@pwollerman uhh.. because we are able to find new ways to access things we couldn't. More efficient ways to get, transport, communicate, produce and consume things. Because as our productive processes and consumption demands change over time and so do the raw materials we rely on... Just to name a few.
I feel like you are bullshitting your real experience such as revising/rationalizing your intellectual journey now you are at the position you currently take, or you were searching for evidence to fit your predefined conclusion. Bad.
@@pwollerman the "finite" limits of our planet may be sufficiently large enough that your 2-3% growth will never exhaust them in any practical time frame.
@@yt.damian that is obviously not the case. We're pillaging the earth and in only 10-20 years we'll start to run out of crucial resources.
wow Steve has such a deep understanding of energy and economy, he has tied together so many scattered ideas I've encountered over the years into a cohesive narrative. I am truly impressed and grateful to have found him on this channel.
Steve Keen on Decouple. Take my upvote.
I wish I could vote more than once to promote this.
Perfect union. 👍🌅
Great great interview, Chris. Steve deserves a Nobel, and likely he'll get it... When it's too late.
Again, a nice Christmas gift for your listeners, thanks a lot!
Merry Christmas & all thé best in 2025!
25:19 One of the earliest manufacting industries was spinning cotten and wool into yarn, weaving it into fabric and sowing into clothing. All this was achieved by labour and hand operated machines. Many thousands of years passed before the first water and wind powered mills were invented. The energy needed for labour comes from eating vegetables or meat. Human and animal energy is not from eating coal, or drinking crude oil.
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.
- Kenneth Boulding
Exponential growth in a finite world cannot go on forever therefore we all need to live in a Net Zero world within the next 10 years.
= modern Globalist / neo-Malthusian / Leftist economic logic.
@@bélalugrisi There is always potential for economic growth but agree growth in material wealth is ultimately finite. The trick is to decouple economic growth from materialism.
Yah, I had a good time. Thanks!
Happy to see economists challenging climate change only due to human actions. Also, talking about human actions, you don't need to be an economist to talk about economics. Ludwig von Mises in this book "Human Action" (1949) said ""Economics must not be relegated to classrooms and statistical offices, nor left to esoteric circles. It is the philosophy of human life and action and concerns everybody and everything. It is the pith of civilization and of man's existence."
Austrian Economics is the commonsense vaccine to extreme government intervention.
Sadly, his model ends in fascism.
Yeah he’s all for it, that or Stalinism, crank that he’s become. He’s now another Shockley, once brilliant inventor of the transistor who ended up walking around w a sign arguing for eugenics.
WTH? No filter in podcast land for these cranks
As marxism inevitably does. It's in the system. Some seem really 'keen' on holding the whip. They will end up being in power after the nice, goodwilling people have been pushed to the side..
@@MrBallynally2 And now we have it in the US
@@mr.makeit4037no we do not. We are still a constitutional Republic with a mixed economy.
@@warlock64cmixed economy? I think that you are confused. Just my opinion
1:24:35 ouch. We just went through a similar money printing thing with Covid. What did we get, inflation, a decrease in the standard of living for the average citizen.
The problem with authoritarian solutions, of course, is they are always themselves short sighted, tend to depend on mendacity, and they tend to lose control of the scale of their mendacity, and thus of management that was the object of the authoritarianism. I think going back to the proposed limits to growth solutions is the only real option. Given we are committed to a crash now does not mean the 1975 solution is not an option, but rather that our short term objective needs to focus on preserving knowledge, and attempting transparency through the horrors of the crash to whatever extent is possible.
“We have a finite environment - the planet. Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist.“
Yea, well, technological progress says overwise. While not infinite, this variable can change the definition of what is finite over time.
@@gabrielrodriguez821 ????
"Yea, well, technological progress says overwise"
No, it doesn't.
Because our environment is "not infinite", as you correctly said.
"this variable can change the definition of what is finite over time"
No, it just makes a few things more plentiful than we thought. The important bit is the 'few' bit... Only a few things can be addressed... There's a few things which are rock-solid, non negotiable, and others that we just don't know about yet.
If we address one deficiency, push it back, then we make progress, but then bump up against 2 more... Address these 2, push them back, make progress, then we bump into 4 more... We've done a LOT with the low hanging fruit, and have gotten to 8.1 billion of us... But now we have 8.1 billion of us dependant on us fixing the next deficiency, or more like 8, that will pop up.
The price of raw materials famously is not driven by scarcity, but by demand.
Our progress has been made possible due to 10s of thousands of years of relative stability of our environment... That all changed about 200 years ago, and is changing exponentially, accelerating... One thing this means is that things that were 'plentiful', even with 8.1 billion of us, suddenly aren't, as climate change is gradually taking some of it away.
So in effect, our environment is not just finite, but it's actually shrinking, when we consider it in human habitability, human supportability terms.
But anyhoo, what do we actually want to grow?
We don't want pollution to grow...
We don't want deforestation to grow...
We don't want extinctions to grow...
We don't want ocean dead-zones to grow...
We don't want traffic on our drive to work to grow...
What we do want to is our individual, family, community affluence to grow, our health to grow, our freedoms to grow, our happiness to grow...
Therefore, we're left with one solid reality... Our population size. It has to reduce.
And the ONLY nice way to reduce it, is by choosing to have fewer kids, by being able to choose to have fewer kids, by having the knowledge & understanding why, by having free and easy access to all the tools, means to have smaller families.
If you think this might not be correct, then mathematics is gonna give you a hard time.
@@gabrielrodriguez821 When you multiply a rising curve by a declining curve, you get an inverted-U shaped curve. Now think about Economy = Resource Base X Applied Technology. Even if "technology" can go to infinity, the resource base is declining.
@@gabrielrodriguez821 ???
"Yea, well, technological progress says overwise." No, it doesn't. It just moves the problem slightly into the future.
Good ol' Norman Borlaug, who gave us the Green Revolution, and has saved 1 billion lives from hunger, he made a point of telling us how not to blow our future during his acceptance speech for his Nobel Prize.. He told us that yes, we do now have lots of food (thanks to technological progress), but unless we deal with our population growth, size, we'll just get back to the same place, with humans starving to death. Well, we ignored him. And we have the likes of Elmo threatening his followers into pumping out kids for him...
The growth we do want to increase is that of happiness, wellbeing, health, prosperity, stability, etc. etc. And not just for us humans, but also for the environment, the poor little animals, too.
The only way we can do this is by reducing the number of us. Reducing our population size.
And the only nice way we can do that, is by choice. Being able to, having the rights to, the knowledge why, the means to choose to have smaller families.
And wow, is supplying every human on the planet the full range of family planning cheap! Compared to all the other things we'd have to do to deal with the fallout of everything crumbling around us!
It's pretty cool to realise that choosing to have smaller families addresses every single big issue we face today!!!
AND it will result in our wages going up, our worker rights improving, our families getting richer, and our kids having a much, much better outlook.
For now. If we can mine space or colonize we good. Stop being so pessimistic. Life will go on
I read all of Zeihan and watched his videos in fascination, until I realized he told Americans, the petrochemical industry, and climate deniers that it will all just be great -- for them. Meanwhile, moving from metropolitan Texas to a retreat high in the Front Range.
I came to the same conclusion from watching him. Drought in KwaZulu Natal? Great for the US! Economic turmoil amongst the Inuit in Siberia? Great the the US! Deccan traps erupt and cover the entire globe in dust? Great for the US!
I wish I had a dollar for every time I've been mislead by a model.
My model says you'd get 100000000 dollars.
A model simply reflects the assumptions of the model maker but then it takes on an authority of independence. Bit like people have authority if they write a book.
@alanrobertson9790
That's the boring kind of model.
@alanrobertson9790
Man, you're way too serious. Lighten up. 😁
@@the_Kurgan Took it seriously by mistake.😁
Thank you for your comment about Peter Zeihan! I think you were spot on. He has insight in some areas and a lot of over confident bullshit in many other areas as well.
I've only listened to Zeihan twice and that was exactly my take as well!
@
Good for you! It took me longer, but once I realized his general stick which is to assemble a relatively randomcollection of facts, claim that they’re related without really showing how and then drawing sweeping conclusions from them and making wild prophecies, I didn’t need to listen again to know what he was going to say. I think the thing that irks me the most about him is that he loves to do videos in very scenic, beautiful spots in the mountains while he’s hiking or on the seashore, etc. I think the message of his videos is that he is so much smarter than his audience That he can wander around spouting broad generalizations and he’s obviously making a lot more money than anyone who listens to him and always will.
I think Keen is just about as assertive as Zeihan...and equally mistaken.
He’s been very wrong about Bitcoin.
@
You might be right. However, whether or not he is right or wrong, it is interesting to hear a different view of the development of economic theory. Also, if he is right about the very heroic simplifications that economist making about the effects of climate change, that is a cause for concern.
roads are repaired daily, rebuilt after decades, bridges after decades to a century, many modern buildings are rebuilt after decades. why would a climatic change that occurs over a century not be accommodated for in the constant renewal and replacement of our infrastructure? most of the buildings that people use and live in did not exist 100 years ago.
Dude. You think its this simple? Houses are the least of our problems. Although a lot of people living in the tropics are very poor, and cant afford AC.
@@Jensth even better. as the worlds poor get richer their energy consumption is likely to quadruple. cold areas heat up much faster than warm areas. the areas closest to the equator are not experiencing and are not projected to warm significantly. there is no credibility to RCP8.5 we will not see that degree of warming. whatever you believe is happening there is no cause for alarm.
The warmest places on the planet are at the equator... There ain't a whole lot of deserts there. Turns out deserts come from a lack of humidity not from heat
Yep and the warmer the air the more water vapour can be held so that holds up.
I live in the high desert, and I earn my comfortable short summers.
1:12:03 Global Circulation Models (GCMs) are still only that - mathematical models in which it is assumed there is a good understanding of physical processes involved in the Earth’s climate and that they can be expressed mathematically! This is no different to the economic models criticised throughout this interview. As to their predictive ability, GCMs fail the only test that really matters, namely how well they fit actual records (even the ones they themselves predicted a decade or two ago). So far the models are running significantly hotter, driven by extremely bullish feedback loops from water vapour, ignoring carbon dioxide saturation levels and seemingly purposefully failing to acknowledge low-frequency oscillations (centennial and millennial) and their slightly chaotic interplay with decadal and multi-decadal variations. ANN’s and AI have been shown to be far superior in their predictions vs actual records. Trained using historical records and proxy data only, their predictions carry no bias from the ego’s of institutional “science” and their political puppet masters.
You need to show the sources of your knowledge, because directly looking at the output of the models shows the opposite of what you are saying. Reality is actual warmer than predicted, the track record of the models was spot on the last half century, long term cycles are of course modelled and the saturation is ignored, because absorptive satuaration has near to nothing to do with the greenhouse effect. To the first, second and third look your comment is a compact summary of popular falsehoods. You need to clarify, how you gained your knowledge. Says a humble physicist.
Gcms do not have a good track record at producing regional or near term, 10 15 year, temperature predictions but miraculously always nail 30 to 100 year trends. Look back at earlier ipcc model runs. The world continues on a. 15 deg c trend even as we are a quarter of the way through the 21st century. The massive acceleration that will take us to 5 deg c by the end of the century is always 10 years away.
@@kurtschroeder2243 GCMs are not deesigned for regional predictions and they aren‘t designed for yearly temperatur predictions. The shorter you make the time span, the harder natural variability kicks in which is the oscillation around the trendline. This trendline however is the aim of prediction from the beginning. However, you get a much better trendline fit if you do not assume a linear trend the last half century, but two lnear trends with a steeper slope the last ten years. Why you talk about 5 degrees as some aim (3 degrees would be bad enough and models do not aim somewhere but works regarding to the beforehand unknown emission pathway) is yet to be clarified.
@@kurtschroeder2243it took 34 years for global temperature average to rise from +0,5 to +1,0 above preindustrial times (1980-2014). It only took 10 years to rise from +1,0 to +1,5 (2014-2024). Temperature is rising VERY sharply. We're on course for +5 well before 2100 if this exponential trend continues.
So climate science is not based on models? CO2 isn't a sole lever of temperature, like self-interest is a lever of action in economics? And temperature growth isn't a sole measure of climactic well-being, like GDP is a measure of economic success?
According to Wikipedia H2O has the largest greenhouse effect with 60% followed by CO2 with 26% followed by troposheric ozone with 8% followed by N2O plus CH4 with 6%. Water vapour would not increase in the atmosphere without another forcing factor such as a change in one of the other greenhouse gases This is due to equilibrium. There is a natural equilibrium between water in the surface of seas, oceans, lakes and the atmosphere. If you have another factor increasing temperature you can shift the hydrosphere equilibrium a bit to being able to hold more moisture due to the increase in temperature. I have a pH.D in Chemistry so this is simple stuff me. The same would apply to anyone with advanced Physics, Chemical Engineering etc. Changes in the Earth's axis tilt wrt the orbit around the sun is a forcing factor that causes ice ages and warm ages as well. This acts on a scale of millennia. Changes in the orbit are also a factor. Google Milankovitch cycles if you want to know more about this. Another factor that could cause major warming or cooling are massive asteroid or cometary impacts. I did my pHD on this topic. Some folks will benefit form climate waming some will be disadvantaged. If you live in Canada, or Russia, or Sweden you make benefit ... as long as you don't have climate refugees!
@shanewilson2484 I know how greenhouse effect works. I don't know how has Wikipedia estimated that 60% impact. Was it, per chance, a model?
@@shanewilson2484 water doesn't have as much of an effect as CO2 because it's not stable in the atmosphere while CO2 is
@@sstachura You would be one of the very few non-climatologists knowing how the greenhouse effect really works by knowing its qunatitative mechanism rather than just its qualitative description.
That is just emphasized by the fact you then would know by what calculation one comes to the values you are sceptical on.
On the other hand its not about the greenhouse effect as such, but how it increases by adding CO2, what makes water vapor a positive feedback due to the law of Clausius-Clayperon, which you as chemist do know well.
@@sstachura You can conduct experiments. The 60% was for water vapor contribution to greenhouse effect. If water vapor had no greenhouse effect we would have snowball earth and complex life might not have evolved. One can conduct experiments. For example, have a chamber with typical air constituents at a given latitude and altitude and a source of light mimicking the solar spectrum at that altitude and latitude and measure the temperature changes with change of atmosphere due to altitude and many other inputs. One can have a vast amount of experimental data mimicking conditions at a vast variety of atmos. conditions. Ultimately you put that into a model. Yes a model. Wiki sites science journal articles.
WAIT
THE Steve Keen who met Doomberg one year ago (here on UA-cam!)
THE Steve Keen who proudly voiced malthusian view points in this encounter?
Steve Keen ... My answer to those who dictate the lower standard of living to all others in the name of the climate "You first"
His views on energy are very interesting and is an idea I learned (and agree with) from a sci-fi book I read where tokens of energy were a currency!
However, it seems to me he completely misrepresents the effect of governments living beyond their means - or running on deficits. First, he completely ignores the devaluation in buying power on money with the increase in its creation. This doesn’t take money from people in nominal terms but does in terms of its value.
Secondly, I don’t think his conception takes account of the inflationary nature of money printing on the reserves - unless the reserves are untouched and denominated in non-domestic currency or, dare I say it, gold! The devaluation therefore results in increasing leverage of the country as it creates aka prints ever more money. This, it seems to me, is how countries ultimately fail.
Finally, he has faith in the GCMs is quaint - he glosses over the omission of cloud implications which, as anyone can tell who goes outside at all, will have a massive impact on the models outcome - if they manage to incorporate it. Just ask any farmer how impactful clouds are on their crops
Bitcoins are tokens of energy. "Proof of work". Wasted energy, but energy nonetheless... 😊
imho, orthodox economics is probably way less cohesive than heterodox economists give it credit for. monetary policy as practiced by central banks doesn't even seem to make sense under a loanable funds model which is purported by some prominent academics. orthodox economists seem to be in denial about these incoherencies also and come across as gaslighting when defending their profession as a whole.
"they have everything in them" and the GCMs are still more wrong than right
This was a fascinating interview, great interviewer. With a fascinating conclusion: "Because economists with different views are ineffectual at convincing people we need fascism to have their views enforced."
Yep, that's the playbook. Always has been..
I would like to talk with Mr. Keen directly and follow up some of his assertions with specific questions on extrapolation. I suspect he is right on much of what he says, but I wonder if he has thought of all the important side effects as am thinking right now. I thank you both for this presentation, and hope more of this kind of thinking can become popular and investigated.
Hugely confident in alarmist climate models but dismissive of economic models. Maybe he's half right.
We need to be equally skeptical of both economic and climate models. We really don't know what the future holds. Careful middle ground is the best policy. Nuclear power fits neatly into that approach.
@@jinnantonix4570 We don't know what the future holds, but we kind of know what the past looked like. Until now there were no irreversible tipping-points. It has both been cooler than today and warmer than today and nothing horrible irreversible happened. Even the IPCC is extremely careful about tipping-points.
He ignores his own bias and shows no evidence of to support his alarmist views. His criticisms of economics are sound but that does not mean his d beliefs in climate change are correct!
@@shaunbooth1836you weaken your argument by calling it “alarmist”. If what science tells us is true we have every reason to be alarmed.
@@pwollerman ,
$cience ha$ lo$t all credibility. We can $ee where $cience get$ it$ $teering from.
How many more failed predictions do we need?
I understood, the government can spend whatever it likes, cause it issues treasuries, which suffice the balance requirements in the books? Seems to be an incomplete theory.
It is charges for services, taxes, levies of all kinds ... I've seen a presentation on this stuff before.
Sounds like Nero throwing himself another party with your children as collateral.
Everything the government has is stolen.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Not correct. Most governments are constrained by the tax base and the amounts they can raise by bond sales.
The US is somewhat less constrained than most because around the world US government bonds are readily traded and considered very safe.
In effect much of the world showers money on the US because their own economies are crap😮.
@jimgraham6722 Well, you can try what the Germans did before the election of Hitler. Or ,Zimbabwe... print more and more money, which seems like what mmt says.
@@jimgraham6722 That's entirely wrong and exactly the stuff that MMT clearly shows to be wrong by looking at the double entry book keeping. Savers in the economy can not and do not "fund" the government by buying bonds its quite the opposite way around. The government spends and then sells bonds to offer a risk free asset. Bonds are sold for central bank money, usually in an auction to a selected group of banks, in the US they are called primary dealers. Those banks pay with central bank reserves which they borrow at the central bank and which can only come from the central bank. Only on the secondary market (when the government already got the reserves to spend) private entities can buy those bonds. There is no "financing" by the public and there can't be something like that to begin with, as the savings of the private sector are created in the first place by government spending. The private sector does not have any net savings which it could use to buy those bonds before the government didn't deficit spend.
Also what the US does is quite the opposite of what you said. It's not foreigners who shower the money on the US, it is the US showering the foreign sector with Dollars. The US has a consistent export deficit which means the US spends more money into the world than it gets back. This is not by accident as this is basically required if you want to provide the world reserve currency. The foreign sector wants to save Dollars and someone needs to provide them.
Its harder to work when its 40 ,crops will die
Africa has tens of millions of people in "acute food insecurity" (starving) already from abrupt global warming.
Syrian civil war was caused by climate change too!
they were also starving a century ago so thanks but you can stop playing.
@@pietersteenkamp5241 They did have more than enough water to sustain themselves. But nowadays droughts are becoming frequent.
Well, follow the graph trajectory for people dying of starvation and diseases in the last 100 years. It is down, down, even for Africa..
Consider bringing on an economist from the Austrian school of thought, if you haven’t already. Someone like Saifedean Ammous, Tom Woods, Robert Murphy, Mark Thornton, Thomas DiLorenzo, Patrick Newman etc.
Thanks
Please don't . Thet have contributed what little they could a long time ago. Just dont need them now.
Fantastic podcast. Thank you Chris
Many smiles for taking the time for this important interview. I'm saving it to listen uninterrupted. 💯💯👌
Considering that economists cannot even come particularly close to predicting current economics predicticting something so catastrophic as large scale climate change is ridiculous. All that can be said is that changes that effect codes for building all infastructure and buildings that have temperature varients in them will require large modification or replacement, when climate seriously effects crop growing, and when it will cause large scale migration the consequences will be extremely serious and not beneficial except for perhaps the northern countries.
Before I stated on CS I was thinking about joining the LSE - being danish I have to get the access papers from the UK embassy- passed it - my better half at the time wanted to study law - so she could not move - I through let me read the 1st year text books and did - coming from a computer science background - so many things was ludicrous - I dropped it as a hot potato ❤
This is an excellent review of the history of economics. But it doesn't come to any real conclusion about climate change other than all models aren't correct. And everything is going to get really bad. But no reasonable substitute was offered.
Growth limitations seem to be built into the system. As countries move off the farms and into the cities, their birthrates go into steep declines.
A theory of climate change needs to be more than a proclamation that everything is going to get very bad. Greta has been telling us that for years.
Why would 7C warming (which wont happen) drive us into extinction? More people migrate to warmer locations every year than the other way around. Humans live in regions from -50C to 50C. Plenty of places will become more habitable at +7C.
Oh dear.
Can you find anyone who can go deep on climate tipping points. "TIPPING POINTS" seem to be the new catch all term for climate change alarmism. I want more info on it both the arguments for and against.
One thing for sure: a 'tipping point' is always some time in the future. Nobody is ever held accountable for stating one..
Climate tipping points, section 12 of IPCC report is based on expert opinion.
Drive a car 80 miles an hour for one mile with no seat belt.. Never slow down. In fact, like humanity, speed up. You hit a speed bump two feet before the end of the mile. Two feet after the speed bump is the brick wall. Congratulations on never slowing down. Bonus points if at some point you realized it was all a bad idea, although it probably got you labelled "Doomer."
@@AlanDavidDoane As an argument that does not work. All you have done is provide an analogy that may or may not apply but without any discussion of the actual issue.
@@AlanDavidDoane How do we know your analogy has any validity to the topic under discussion?
Great conversation, and great sound quality! I don't know why a lot of these videos have trouble with horrible vocal coloration that makes for difficult listening.
Can I just put a shout out for those chairs. Labour and energy pulled together to create maximum comfort and beauty, for a 3 hour podcast.
inside a building sheltered from climate! 😂
I really appreciate that he is REAL about the inevitable breakdown of our system. I agree 100%, the only chance for change is authoritarian. I don't like it, but our "democracies" are not capable of handling this.
I think it was the Black Death that did away with feudalism in England. Half the population died, so the peasants could look for a good deal from another landlord. In Walsham Le WIllows here in Suffolk, the best plague records exist, including private letters between the local abbott and a wealthy landowning lady. Both complain that it costed twice as much to reap the harvest as it did in previous years. There were laws in the aftermath of the BD that tried to restrict what sort of clothes a persons wife could wear so the class distinctions remained. It failed.
Very interesting discussion. Especially the review of historical models. However, since all models only give us a look into the biases of the modelers, the conclusions he makes are somewhat muted by the fact that the CC models fail in the same manner.
Appreciate Prof. Keens economic contributions but believe his concerns on climate change are overblown. What hapens 100 years plus from now is completely out of our control and we have no idea what the energy sources will be by then.
The cost of enegy determines how that energy is used and the vitality of the economy.
I also believe the financial sector has become a burden on the economy in the same way as excessive government.
From a societal perspective prosperity Lombard is correct on many if not all points.
"and we have no idea what the energy sources will be by then."
@@TheDanEdwardsabsolutely correct
I don't think we should talk about the future 100 years from now with the assumption that the global technological industrial civilization still exists. It will likely collapse much earlier, probably when we run out of affordable oil in the coming decades.
@@Pasandeeros dark thoughts indeed. Personally I am very confident if we make the right decisions there is a bright future ahead. I am not worried about the democracies, they are all on the right track. I think the large developing countries, China, Indonesia, India, Brazil and even Nigeria are OK. Russia is a basket case and seems likely to deindustrialise. The US is a bit of a worry but is nearly always late to the party. The worry is it seems determined to revert economically and environmentally. However, provided the rest of the world gets its act together, in the big scheme of things, what happens in the US may not matter much.
If the current debt based fiat system isn't scrapped asap nothing matters. When that is fixed, all in nuclear or humanity is facing extinction living out the last days in caves again. That's the reality right now; dictating if there's going to be another 100 years at all
Intriguing exchange. A bit more alarming on the climate side than most of your guests.
You think? 😄
Roughly 1:18:30 - 1:19:00
That is definitely the best description of Peter Zeihan
Absolutely brilliant episode of decouple! Keen and Keefer had a great discussion
That an eminent professor of economics published that the laws of thermodynamics do not apply to economics displays both the hubris and lack of real world understanding of many economists.
To be fair, the reason physical systems move always towards equilibrium or steady state which is the 2nd law does not count for economic modelling. There is no reasons markets must behave the same way - in fact they don‘t. Problem arises from economists nonetheless modelling under the delusion of some equilibrium of markets, using the physical way of thinking.
But "Markets" aren't an economic system so that's a Straw Man. They aren't even complex dynamical systems, but simple organised rule based systems. Each participant agrees up front to the market rules in order to partake, and those who break the rules are subject to punishment.
@@TheUAoB That is the wrongest description of markets I have seen so far. Thx for the laugh.
First of all markets indeed *are* a complex and highly dynamic system, for they include feedback mechanisms. For expamle the labour market does not follow the simple rule of supply and demand, but produces its own demand by giving income to people. That is a simple to describe but hard to quantify feedback. The only thing you know is that you just cannot save an economy by lowering wages.
Second, the markets are not independent from one another, making the entirek market system highly complex. The market for labour is not the same as the one for goods/services. The market for financial products is not the same as the system (market would be inaccurate here) for interest rates. Still both depends on one another highly. And then those two couples I described are coupled altogether in causes and effects that are many and, complex and change over time with high dynamics.
And none of this shows the slightest sign of a need for equilibrium or any inner mechanism that always seeks equilibrium, whatever equlilibrium means here.
@@chrisa.4937 The "labour market" isn't a market - that's why. You don't understand that markets have existed for millennia and operate with arbitrary rules govened by the market authority and agreed to by market participants.
Simply calling everything that happens in an Economy a market transaction is insane. The Economy is the human part of the "Earth ecological system". Markets are discrete "locations" where buyers and sellers engage in price discovery under market rules. Yes market behaviour can be relatively complex and result in emergent phenomena just like a game of chess. But is is infinitely less complex than the Economy or the larger ecological system in which it operates.
@@chrisa.4937 I think you misunderstand the concepts of both equilibrium and thermodynamics at the same time and how they interact (that being said I tend to agree with your characterization of your interlocutor arguing economies/markets aren't complex dynamic systems). You might want to go to control theory for a deeper understanding of equilibrium. The economy can be thought of as a mix of interdependent systems the same way a control loop would work to control the speed of your car. Variables will tend to vary depending on dynamic inputs and the ''equilibrium'' is the state for which variables will tend towards when input variables are kept static (google a settling curve for more visuals). If I keep my foot pressed on the gas pedal at the exact same spot for long enough and with no variation in the road or car machinery, then I will reach an equilibrium speed. That is, my speed will have reached dynamic stability at a finite value. The same is true for all variables in any given economy (although some variables are more stochastic than the car example), in fact, every dynamic system can be thought of mathematically as a control problem and that's one of the big propositions of control theory. It is in fact possible to prove this axiomatically.
Thermodynamics and its involvements are at the input level of the system. Energy is finite, you can never break even when using it and the ways you are using it impacts the economy by capping the activities the economy is capable of handling as a whole. I cannot produce metals requiring 100MJ of energy if I only have 50MJ of energy available in the entire economy, it would break the energy conservation law. What this means is the settling (or equilibrium) values in a given economy will tend towards more goods and services available given more energy. The same is true of materials as their availability is related to energy and their physical availability.
I watched as much as I could stand, but your guest does not possess a serious critique of economics, as it has evolved and continues to evolve. Economists have developed dynamic models and sophisticated theories of the roles of money in a market economy. The subjective theory of value is not in conflict with theories of production, but rather is complementary to those ideas. And whatever Adam Smith's blindspots may have been, neoclassical economists certainly accounted for natural resources as a critical determinant of productivity. Just read the Wikipedia article on the concept of the production function to get a sense of how much your guest is leaving out of his stylized account of history. Economics has much more breadth of thought and debate than he is acknowledging.
Coz = 😊😊😊😊😊😊😊
1:43:30 These views on climate change certainly do not overstate the problems caused by market fundamentalism.
Look I agree with you on tipping points and the unravelling of society. But @stevekeen what are your thoughts on permaculture and its role in building resilience in unpredictable systems. My personal experience has shown me that biodiverse dynamic food systems can be incredibly resilient and provide nutrition and productivity in the most hyperarid of climates. Look at the work of greening the desert. Time to be a little more positive
If permaculture did all that, we'd be using it everywhere.
22:40 - Wikipedia - Richard Cantillon (1680s - May 1734) an Irish-French economist & author of Essai Sur La Nature Du Commerce En Général (Essay on the Nature of Trade in General), a book considered by William Stanley Jevons to be the "cradle of political economy". Although little information exists on Cantillon's life, it is known that he became a successful banker and merchant at an early age.
Well that was great though I need to understand more about governments creating money and balancing this off against reserves - what are these reserves? Do they exist in economies where public debt exceeds GDP significantly.
We need to hear more about how France financed their 58 reactor programme. What did Ontario do with its CANDU programme? Great stuff but I hope we can get a more targeted Round 2
The US Treasury still has about 8,000 tons of gold bullion. Some film flam merchants want to swap it out for bitcoin. My advice would be stick to gold.
Historically, government's will use up a currency, building and developing a currency until all wealth is extracted from a population and faith is lost in the currency (it takes about 50 years at 2% annual growth for mathematical and human lifespan reasons - nobody notices a 2% increase on a 5c candy bar) and like in the film _The Matrix,_ the system gets reset and the cycle starts again. This is described in the Bible as the jubilee. All debts are forgiven and all money is returned to the king.
Yes, but: what if the climate alarmists are wrong? What if Lomborg et al are wrong? The whole issue is the uncertainty in regards to what the climate will be. You cannot equate your way out of this. If you really, and i mean REALLY dig into the climate system you cannot come to the conclusion it is going this way or that. The main problem is that we cannot separate the signals and know the exact causal relationship. Not even proximal. So all we get is models, often linear, and projections. Most of it is based on the assumed effect of Co2. I say assumed because there is overwhelming evidence that it cannot do what it is assumed to do, not even from a physics point of view.
Then there is the assumption that warmer temperatures are bad. That they will lead to more extreme weather which is false.
And to finish off: natural cycles will trump anything humans can possibly do to the climate. We should adapt and correct landuse, clean air and waters, protect endangered species.
Climate alarmism will likely be gone by 2030. Certainly by 2035.
The road Keen proposes will lead to disaster and is purely driven by an asserted certainty. Being a marxist this does not come as a surprise..
Reserves are nothing else than the net balances on the accounts of the banks and the government at the central bank. They are created when the central bank buys assets (usually government bonds) or lends money to banks and they are destroyed when the CB sells assets again or when the loans are paid back. Reserves can only be held by banks (and the government) that have an account at the central bank. The central bank is the "house bank" of the government and it provides the clearing system for the banking sector through which the government spends and taxes an through which banks clear payments between each other. All that happens in reserves. The money you got at your bank is technically speaking NOT government money, it rather is private bank money that the private banks create and they promise to pay you actual Dollar or make a payment in Dollar on your behalf. People do not realize that those two "monies" are not the same because there is deposit insurance and banks have a fixed exchange rate between the money they issue and goverment money, which is always 1:1 so at par. But as soon as a bank is actually bankrupt you can clearly see that their money is not government money when they can't keep their promise to pay government money.
@@trixn4285 Thank you for your detailed explanation.
So, if a retail bank loans people money against assets that are significantly over valued or where the people have no reasonable chance of paying is that the same as creating money. Further, in that instance are the reserves non-existent?
When Steve Keen spoke about governments creating money I sensed that he meant money that had no reserve backing. This is normally thought of as inflationary. Do you have any thoughts on this?
1:24:33 this something we need to do now, as it’s the debt that will be crippling our countries especially as rates rise to curb inflation.
Very valid criticisms of economics, but he’s swallowed climate alarmism hook, line, and sinker.
Do you have evidence that disproves climate change? You know there's a ton of evidence which supports climate science right? Just because you don't "believe it" doesn't mean it's incorrect. It means you don't understand why you're wrong
@ nowhere in that sentence did he say he didn’t “believe” in climate change.
Anyone who isn't alarmed by catastrophic climate change isn't paying attention. But since there's nothing eight billions humans will do to stop it, enjoy the few years you have left while you still can.
Great stuff! Steve is a long term hero of mine, who introduced me to system dynamics. I discovered him in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, when he was the only economist who made any sense to me. Would be great if you talked to his colleague physicist Tim Garrett who is one of my favourite big picture thinkers and a Jevon's paradox specialist.
Interesting interview, notably the history of economic theory
Hi Dr. Chris Keefer
As a follow up episode with a heavy dose of a very different view I would welcome MARIAN L.TUPY and/or GALE L. POOLEY who wrote SUPERABUNDNCE.
22:07 - That's where Adam Smith comes in
1:31:07 but of a broken window fallacy going on. What they fail to mention is that which isn’t calculated in.
24:20 Respect you two gents immensely, thanks and gratitude.
Though on a minor point of pedantism (sp), A Smith's opening salvo " Labour is the source of wealth ...", if one were to transpose to our time line we could consider labour as work, thus being equal to energy over a span of time ie. W = E/t [Sorry, the physic teacher in me took over].
I realise Smith's focus was human labour, but it may indicate he was on the right track.
And you fold it in to the story anyway, cheers
Definitely the best example WYSIWYG recognition, and the explanation for why pseudo random magical-functional judgement requires continuous re-evolution recognition relative-timing reiteration.
Ie the practical equivalent of temporal thermodynamical superposition focus on 0-1-2-3ness 3D-T line-of-sight holography-quantization nucleation.
It's always NOW everywhere-when logical superposition identification of probabilistic correlations shaping WYSIWYG QM-TIME resonance Completeness, (it's the Absolute Zero-infinity Aether of reference-framing stupid, economics by any other name.., if you will)
Climate change is not trivial. It's awesome. A warmer wetter climate will create abundance.
That's not what will happen. I seriously hope you're being sarcastic
@ThatonedudeCR12956
Not at all. Other than when there was only one mega continent, to big for rain to penetrate. Every other warm period had much more biomass than now in the ice age.
@@ThatonedudeCR12956 Someone who presents no reason requires no reason to refute. You should stick to cheering for your football team.
Everyone forgets this thing called the sun when making climate predictions.
I'm with you on the immediate future of the world Steve, in our lifetimes. That's why I bought a slice of mountainous Tasmania with river frontage 25 years ago. Can not understand why the majority of humanity cannot see this. How can they be so short-sighted?
I'm only stating the obvious, for the audience, because I'm certain you have thought of this. Your Escape Plan 100% depends upon the societal resilience of Tasmania itself continuing in order to respect those property rights
@@qjsharing2408
If Tassie has already broken to mob rule, I would say that the rest of the world broke down before them.
Have been an avid follower of Steve's for many years, and Mr Dec.Med. [sorry, don't know your name, and can't find it mentioned anywhere], you are one of the most exciting minds in current media. Thanks for the post, guys.
Dr. Chris Keefer : )
Why do we always assume that climate change arrives like a meteor? We maintain infrastructure as the climate changes, we've always and will continue to do this. This alarmism is pathetic
Some disasters are slow, others are fast.
Floods, uninhabitable temperatures, hell flames, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, Godzilla.
Pick your poison.
Infrastructure is expensive, and Nordhaus & Lomborg do not consider the cost of building new infrastructure.
In some ways you're not wrong, it will just be experienced as increased costs in many ways. There's a rule in finance, that people experience a loss twice as painfully as they perceive a foregone gain
The regular increased costs of maintenance will mostly be seen as a foregone gain. And then the increased disasters will be perceived as a loss. So when we see extrapolations like climate change hurting the economy by -12 percent, a reasonable fraction of that is because crops fail or because homes need to be rebuilt, or people have to move
dosnt make sense, gov. pay interest on the bond, interest is getting to be a very high % of tax income.
I have been wondering how Nordhaus and Lomborg reached their conclusions about the lack of economic effects of climate change and your discussion with Keen provided some insight. Increased droughts - grow crops elsewhere. Floods - seawalls, levees, move to higher ground or effects overstated. High temps - better air conditioning and genetically modified plants. Other species impacts - as long as humans can continue their lifestyle, they don't care about other species or zoos can show us the remaining examples and genetic banks could bring them back in the future. They think the economy is resilient and will easily adapt to climate change effects. Keen and others think that collapse could happen at any time and in multiple ways. I lean toward some form of the great simplification happening in next decade or two. I hope it doesn't, but stock market crashes, financial collapses, simultaneous droughts in the worst possible places for food production, wars, etc. could happen at any time and head us down that road. Thanks for the podcast.
Keen should read George Selgin on free banking.
Money is what you must pay taxes with.
Have you heard of weathering? The idea is that you could grind up a single mountain dump it in a lake and take out all human contributed CO2 from the last century. I think there's so many ways for us to adapt, we tend to have our vision to narrow
Link?
or move to regenerative and wholistic agriculture. Big Ag has literally fed us lies for 50 years. overuse of salt based fertilizers and glyphosate has drastically reduced our soils micro biomes. using corn for ethanol and canola / soy oil for human consumption was not a good idea for the long term. As mentioned in the video, one can't have a climate model without looking at land based carbon sequestration, which is proven to mitigate weather pattern disruption ( alpha lo - origin of rain substack) - nature does the work in our economy , the voluntary carbon credit markets is the expression of this. ai and digitalization will mature this market. as for net zero, i agree with the interviewer, perhaps a club of rome project.............
@@jkelly11785 caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/06/06/we-should-not-let-the-earth-overheat/
and worksinprogress.co/issue/olivine-weathering/
@@dkiresearch4423 yeah there are multiple ways. We could fertilize the Ocean back to having fish stocks where they used to be and in the meantime take out 12 gigatons of carbon out of hte atmosphere. We'd only have to do it once because the Ocean's would sustain once the whale populations recover because they're actuall ythe Ocean's fertilizer
I've literally tried twice to post the links and won't do it
Nice conversation Mark. I am very pro nuclear and I think it is an essential part of our future. I appreciate the advocacy you do. Understanding money is not easy - especially since we have been told a certain story all our lives. It is hard to wrap the head around the fact that spending came first (thats where we get the money to pay the taxes). Bond issuance has a purpose, but its not because we need the money. Why would we borrow something we are free to create. I see lots of comments that don't think we have an issue with the climate and/or there is an easy technical solution just around the corner (just like fusion). We ate most of the fish in the sea and ate most of the animals on the planet and temperatures are up. About 10K years ago a 4 degree change meant we had an ice sheet that covered all of Canada and most of Europe. People can believe what they want, but I've seen enough credible evidence that there is something to worry about. We can choose to act or be forced to react. I have a preference, but I fear I am the minority. Party on!
I can't believe that after all his work on modelling economics with double-entry ledgers that Keen has fallen hook, line and sinker into this MMT nonsense. It's as misguided a take on economics as Marx's labor theory of value. He's fallen in love with his analysis and fails to see what money actually is, nor where the model falls over
Interesting that Keen finishes with Mad Max. I watched this the other day and it kind of helps explain the original movie without resorting to the climate catastrophe causation: ua-cam.com/video/FnD50llAkP4/v-deo.html
I find that most criticism of mmt is including false presumptions of what they mean. But I will criticize some of the education! When people look at mmt at the 101 level, the Educators tend to suggest that taxation is what retains the value for the currency. Not really true in most of our cases, where it is the issued household and corporate debt that backs the currency
@@qjsharing2408 Agreed. The necessity to repay commercial credit is indeed what creates the value and the motivation of the borrower to hustle.
I think it evolved from a backed currency. It was first backed by taxes, then by gold, then by debt.
I chase dollars because they're the cheapest thing I can pay my mortgage with. The bank would happily accept one tonne of gold, but I'd be better off selling it and clearing my debt.
And other people want dollars cuz they know I'm chasing dollars.
@@qjsharing2408 I think the whole gold-backing thing is confusing units with the thing being measured. As though the six feet of lumber you bought from the hardware store should be made entirely of rulers and tape measures.
Thanks for exposing Mr keen , a true Marxist thinker , we now know who not to pay attention to.
Pointless drivel and he useless in his understanding of modeling, programming and ocean chemistry.
As if you are someone to which to pay attention?
@TheDanEdwards back at ya .
Yeah, I enjoyed the part where government spending creates money because it's not a loan, it's a form of loan called a bond. And he says if a bond is a loan as the dummy neo-liberals think then the world will go entirely off the rails with deficit spending from his plan. Wonderful, tremendously convincing performance that he is not a reasonable source of information!
He's supposedly a "Marxist thinker" but has criticised Marx in his career as an economist?
He comes off as more of a neo-con sceptic and a bit of a eco/accelerationist nutter to be honest. With differing views in the centre left and right wings of politics, but nothing "Marxist".
He ignores his own bias and shows no evidence of to support his alarmist views. His criticisms of economics are sound but that does not mean his d beliefs in climate change are correct!
You want evidence? Watch any interview with Prof. Bill Rees.
Who would have thought there are definitely limits to growth? We don’t live in utopia. Great conversation thank you
There's plenty of room at the bottom. -Feynman
We are not even close. 1% of the population of arth consumes more than DOUBLE 1/2 of the population
1:18:18 which #Bengal #famine there bud?
Economics is a religion. Never include economics and science in the same discussion.
Yes this is a great episode and dialogue and some of the stuff Steve Keen tells us about describes individuals who are beyond normal crimes and are committing Ecocide, full-on.
1:02:32 👍🏻
Jaw dropping. Like I was when I finally understood how we keep getting the mantra of each summer being hotter than ever. Been running now, for two summers, going into the third, down here for this subtle flavour of the propaganda.
Turns out, models say temperature is such and such, when the concentration of CO² in air is xyz ppm. Never mind the thermometer.
I can't see why his modern monetary theory is so wonderful or radical when it involves taxing people, just like everything else.
By what method do you believe should be funded then? Do you think civilization is free?
We are funding civilisation now through taxation. Nordic countries are doing ok.
It comes down to people playing the game fairly, and that's a cultural rather than a financial theory issue.
@@chrisruss9861
In what way are the Nordic countries supposedly doing ok? Because they are not by any stretch of any imagination
@@pietersteenkamp5241
It is dictated by the economic system. Change the system and the outcome will be different. It's not the if, it's the how
I've been a huge fan of Steve Keen since the Great Financial Crisis.
The problem with Nordhaus and Lombord is they only consider the direct effects of temperature change, but do not take into account the costs due to second-order effects dues to shifting biomes, rising sea levels and increased rates of extreme weather events.
All of these second order effects require investment in infrastructure and other investments in order to adapt to the changes, or if adaptation is not cost-effective, land that is presently economically productive will have to be abandoned, or may be much less productive. Maybe a few areas where productivity is severely limited by cold (Russia, Canada, Scandinavia & the northernmost part of the USA) will benefit, but only about 5% of the world's population live in cold climate areas.
The cost of these second-order effects are far, far greater than the direct costs of a simple increase in temperatures.
Trump’s answer to climate change: drill baby drill.
Which is the right answer. Gas to nuclear is the right path.
It's certainly an answer to population overshoot.
sounds like robert pindyck is compensating for something
Wow! Started out very reasonable and then took a sharp turn towards “we need authoritarianism.” Rough. The climate religion is melting people’s brains.
Have you read the documents from the 1970s where the oil industry was leading the charge to fight climate change? Are you familiar with why they changed their minds? It wasn't because of the science. There's actually memos where they stated they are going to discredit climate change and how they will do it. You may as well say you don't believe in diabetes because coca cola funded research that said it's a fake disease. You believe in Diabetes right?
@ WTH does any of that have do with what Keen said calling for authoritarianism?
Why is there is a compulsory link to the United Nations alarmist propaganda view on this?
Great rehash and evalutations of economic theories, however what all these theories fail to account is the difference of focus and sense of urgencies in population caused mainly be what are described as evolutionary alarm sounds within languages, to understand this see for instance a comparison between China and South America ua-cam.com/video/fWKCRJW0olk/v-deo.html
I used to somewhat follow Steve Keen and pretty familiar with the way he thinks. The whole idea of an economic model in relation to climate change is based on a series of assumptions. Those two should be decoupled. I take none of it seriously. Climate alarm skeptics like myself see the whole coupling as a gigantic futile exercise. Two points to make: 1:nobody knows the trajectory of future temperature and the assumed coupling w Co2 is both wrong and unproven/ non scientific, and 2: any model of economics is also based on losely assumptions of reality ie both are a construct that can be steered one way or the other. Economists have the habit of treating the world as a series of equations. Keen's worldview is marxist based. Nordhaus's quite another. How Keen knows that we underestimate the effects of climate change should give pause to anyone taking him seriously. To me, his assertiveness simply irritates me. He clearly doesnt know anything about the actual climate science, the uncertainties the system contains and just directs, or i should say biases his ideas
towards a goal he insists are certain. The discrepancy between the two are so glaringly obvious that i watch this video with some amusement.
Interesting he is on Decouple. Has Nate Hagan and Simon Michaux been on? I like their coherency much more, even though i think they are at least 75% mistaken.
"1:nobody knows the trajectory of future temperature and the assumed coupling w Co2 is both wrong and unproven/ non scientific,"
Steve kind of likes to dance at everybody's wedding. From cozying up to degrowthers to cheering for space x in its early days, throwing his support behind movements like ubi and positive money, while also coasting along the ride with MMT which could not be more opposed to these things.
He got more invites after he shed his leather jacket. Maybe it doesnt fit anymore by the looks of him..
He is truely left on centre. 🙂
Oh dear... oh deary dear...
The problem of this guy is that he might be an economics contrarian, he is not intellectual curious enough to be sceptical about the climate change narrative and its more subtle different between the natural variability of climate and the contribution of human to global warming i.e., AGW. The Narrative welcomes any theory that fits their strategy for their ambition of political domination. Much more is needed to be understood by this guy and he needs to be more reflexive of his own limitation re climate models and climate empiricism. Beware of persons could talk fast. Their knowledge tend to be limited.
Just one problem.... The data that shows warming is flawed. It does not take into account stations that have become surrounded by cities and estimates areas that dont have stations based on the models of the warming. If you correct for these errors the warming completely disappears. Instead of warming causing issues its actually solar energy influx to the earth's magnetosphere that is driving the storms, earthquakes, and climate patterns.
For those errors is and always was corrected. Where did you get the wrong knowledge that it is otherwise?
The city heat island effect is well known. But it will also aggravate any global warming, as far as city folk are concerned!
Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. The climate is complex, and it's sometimes hard to find where the heat went. But it's not a hoax. glaciers are receding and the ocean is warming, and it's not because they are too close to cities
@ it isnt, ive been studying this topic for over 20 years. Ive seen the data tampering happen. You can still find accurate historic data but its much harder now since biden hid all the raw data in 2021.
@@chrisa.4937 No it is not corrected for. Instead of removing the data from corrupted stations, they mix it with the uncorrupted stations, causing it all to be corrupted.
1:14:54 Backing up your view of the absurdity of those economists, drop the temperature by 10 deg C [global average] and we enter an ice-age, raise the temp. by 10 deg C [global average] and we enter a scorched-scape hell-on-Earth.
Good luck living for every organism on the planet for the second scenario, barring at Antarctica, Greenland or very high-altitude fastnesses [and likely also underground]. Competition for standing space might become heated (boom-boom).
The worst temperature increase in IPCC report was 8.5 degC and regarded as unlikely so why you are talking about 10 degC requires an explanation.
@@alanrobertson9790
That's the scenario example they talk about in the video, even though that amount is way overshoot on both sides of the scale
this dudes funny as hell
Now do Vox Day and see if you can play chicken with YT monetization.
When is Vox Day this year? I can never remember when it is.
Great interview. I agree that you cannot detach energy use from economic growth.
He knows all the problems with economic theories, but accepts virtually without question the doomsday scenarios of climate alarmists. He’d do well to examine those with the same skepticism, but he can’t because his personal religion won’t allow it. We have upset the balance of our delicate nurturer and now we must pay.
We know a lot about climate based on ice cores from Greenland and analyzing the little bubbles of atmosphere trapped in them. The oldest ice cores in Greenland only go back about 150,000 years. That's because most of the Greenland ice sheet didn't exist 150,000 years ago. It had melted. And every species of animal that was on the earth then including human beings is still in the earth now. We all survived the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. What's that tell you.?
@@JeffHoldenWS-NC stop being so logical; you're supposed to smile and nod at their story.
It tells me you can choose to admit being incompetent or a liar. Greenland was not ice free 150000 years ago and of course many species went extinct since then, as we know for sure from fossils.
Antarctica has had ice for millions of years. We can also look at multiple different other factors to model carbon dioxide levels.
The climate costs topic is certainly in my wheelhouse. The main argument presented against the DICE model is that it is "totally absurd" and "the roads will be gone". This is not great persuasion. Luckily other better arguments are also made!
Before considering the better critiques it makes sense to compare DICE to PAGE. ChatGPT alleges that PAGE does not use a geographical temperature comparison for its warming costs and that it includes a much steeper and more dynamic consideration of tipping points, as well as more non temperature costs. Nevertheless DICE and PAGE are almost identical up to 4 degrees of warming, with a significant difference clear by 8 degrees. Since PAGE includes all the things DICE is alleged to completely lack, a better critique of DICE would need to explain this with more than rhetoric
I find it reasonably persuasive for Keen to allege that Nordhaus has a bias to assuming the world will not end because he likes its current system. Unfortunately this turns into a clear cut case of projection. Why? Keen proposes that the only possible solution to warming is dictatorship. Except the already cost effective solution of reflective particles in the stratosphere is a much more likely and desirable answer to actual catastrophic warming. It seems safe to say that he believes the world will end because he thinks the system is fundamentally broken and needs to be replaced (rather than Eastern European defensive pessimism like Chris). Always do a gut check as to whether someone's claim about someone else might apply to them!
Ok, lets go straight to the great argument made against IAM discounted warming cost models. Frontier economies have been growing at 2% for 300 years, but that's not actually a very long time. It is reasonable to consider what we should do if that breaks down and future generations experience rising warming costs without rising economic growth to adapt to it. In that case we should do everything we can to decarbonize. I don't know how to weight this possibility. Should it be a 25% possibility and therefore maybe justify cutting the discount rate in half? It's a really interesting question and a genuine and major objection to a cost model that uses a 3% discount as I believe Nordhaus does. There are two possibilities with this, and I think both of them don't go Keen's way
One is that the economy stops growing endogenously. In this case I would expect that the resources to fully decarbonize will not exist. Remember that Keen believes that global dictatorship is necessary to stop warming. Because it's very very hard. Without economic growth I propose that it would be near impossible, and certainly require dictatorships. However, again, stratospheric reflective particles would be a better solution than that. This is the absolute critical error with every catastrophic warming claim. If it's a catastrophe you do stratospheric particles. If it's a potential tipping point that is an unacceptable risk you do stratospheric particles at your chosen tipping point temperature. You can do other things, but nothing much more extreme than that makes sense because that is available
The second possibility for the end of economic growth is that extreme non-linear multi-factorial processes cause all the roads to be gone. Again, however, this is a case where you either produce a global alliance of climate policy dictatorships, or you do reflective particles in the stratosphere. I also believe that excellently designed regulatory processes for nuclear could allow it to compete directly with coal
There are some other points I could make about DICE, but I expect no one has the interest to go into them, or let me know. Points would include the two ways that DICE includes other costs than the geographically normed warming cost, and the observation that calling it linear when it is quadratic may be technically right in some way but is obviously wrong when you look at the cost curve on a graph. I would also point out that Keen alleges that Neoclassical economics have doomed the world by making people think 3 or 4 degrees of warming is fine, yet nearly every nation on earth has signed on to a proposed 2 degree limit. This again goes back to the projection bit. Looks like he expects everything to go wrong because of Neoclassical economics, not the climate! That's not why we're already at 1.5 degrees, it's because signing pledges does nothing to make actual transition a real probability by 2050. I think that is fundamentally impossible but I would suggest in particular Lomborg's proposal of massively increasing funding into green innovation to the tune of $200-300 billion a year, based on work by others suggesting it's around 10x more effective in the long run than short time horizon direct CO2 cuts
Cheers
I don't think you're calculating the geo-political implications of a country dumping sun reflective spray in the atmosphere. Imagine if a country that hates the country that implements this ends up with a negative outcome and forces you to stop by the barrel of a gun. Do you continue? If you stop and the climate rebounds violently and some insignificant islanders get wiped out, but at least you avoided a war, is that okay? Or should you take the, "I'm sorry the solar shade program destroyed your ability to create food ( it doesn't matter if it's your fault cause you will be blamed anyway) but this is for the betterment of mankind" route
Amazing analysis and 100% correct on how terrible the current mainstream economist paradigm is
The ignorance of this "expert" on historical matters is so appalling I had to turn off the whole thing. What a waste of an opportunity, really.
You don’t know what you’re talking about. Pathetic!
Steve sounds like a cranky old man with his use of swearing - wrong approach, be a gentleman.
that's just what aussies talk like.
Steve Keen has a massive iq. He’s way up here with with the big guns. Genius.
I suppose we have to listen to an alarmist now and then. 🙄
Yes, just to remind ourselves they are in essense fascists, as Keen here clearly has indicated.