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.
Trump’s (fairly successful) attempts to divide America are just a means to the end of staying in power so as to be able to continue to loot the U.S. treasury.
At this point, there are three essential factions in the United States:
- A small number of extremely powerful billionaires
- The MAGA base of white nationalist / hateful morons who believe that only Trump can save us from communism, racial impurity, and godlessness
- Decent, educated people
People have been dancing around the faith/reason duality for more than 2000 years. Aristotle worked out the rules of logic around 350 BCE, and Thomas Aquinas assumed the task of using them to prove the existence of God in the 13th Century CE. Descartes came along a couple of hundred years later, and made some improvements on all this, but we’re still left with very little.
As I told my nephew once when he was assigned a college paper on this, “You can’t have your metaphysical cake and eat it too. You either believe in things for which there is evidence, or you don’t.”
Moreover, as shown at left, faith runs headlong into logical inconsistencies.
Wonder who this “patriot” voted for.
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