Here’s Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman’s recent column in the New York Times addressing the oft-discussed issue: Are efforts to achieve environmental sustainability necessarily damaging to the strength of the economy?
As usual, as we dig deeper into subjects like this, we learn that there are important complexities.
In this case, some efforts to decarbonize open up huge economic opportunities.
Krugman uses the “carrot and stick” metaphor and points out that carrots like financial bonanzas tends to work better than sticks, like taxes. Yet, in reality, our society is too far from where it was a few decades ago, where the consumption of fossil fuels becomes extremely unattractive the moment someone is asked to cover the costs of the environmental damage associated with climate change, ocean acidification, and loss of biodiversity.
I’m not a financial pro, but here’s some advice:
Don’t live on a budget. Make a lot of money and live far beneath your means. What value does luxury actually bring to your life, especially if it makes you nervous about running out of cash?
As I told my kids when they were growing up, “Unless you’re completely shallow, showing off your money is an idiotic thing to do. You make false friends and have people glomming onto you to sell you stuff you really don’t need.”
Warren Buffett still lives in a modest house in Nebraska, a state in which he could buy an entire country. Maybe there is something about him and his values that could benefit you.
I see.
There’s not enough land in Spain to support rooftop and ground-mounted solar at a fraction of the cost.
LOL.
It’s possible that right now, there are other civilizations observing the human race, studying us from afar, and noticing our decline into savagery and eventual extinction by turning billionaires into trillionaires.
People say that the principal weakness of human beings is that we can’t plan for the future as a species. Dogs are arguably even worse, though they aren’t consumed with greed. They don’t plot the starvation of millions of other dogs so they themselves can have enough food to last a billion years.
As an elderly man, I’ll be leaving this planet soon, but I won’t cease pondering this until my heart stops beating.
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