Jonathan Schofield (@urlyman@mastodon.social)

63d

#climateDiary
COVID aside, the rate of growth in the US economy has averaged about 2.5% over the last decade.

That’s currently in the region of an annual difference of $700 billion.

Within the last 6 months, Storm Helene and the on-going LA fires are reckoned to have done a combined $220 billion worth of damage.

But I guess the perverse world of economics extremism that operates in the US will see that as a landscape of “creative destruction” and book the rebuild as ‘growth’

Edited 63d ago

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63d

…In2018, Nordhaus got the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences – run by the Swedish central bank – after concluding in 1991 that climate change won’t affect the economy too much because it mostly happens *indoors* (https://www.localfutures.org/when-idiot-savants-do-climate-science/)

And US financiers will brush off the shit that happens *outdoors* as opportunities for growth.

Easy to turn a lose lose situation into win win when money is untethered from physical reality

#climateDiary

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63d

…“To understand the gap between climate scientists and climate economists, one must first understand that most economists … have little knowledge of or interest in how things really work on planet Earth.

The problem of their ecological benightedness starts as a matter of training at university, where a typical undergraduate course in economics prepares students for a lifetime of abject ignorance about the complex underpinnings of the thing called the ‘market’.”

https://www.localfutures.org/when-idiot-savants-do-climate-science/

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