Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Kurt Cobb As I sit in 90-degree heat typical of Washington, D.C. in midsummer and a so-called “heat dome” hovers over much of the United States, I am reading the following: “At 11 or 12 degrees [Fahrenheit] of [global] warming, more than half the world’s population, as distributed today, would die of direct heat. Things almost certainly won’t get that hot this century, though models of unabated emissions do bring us that far eventually.”
What we are witnessing as a result of this pandemic is a widespread challenge to metastable systems upon which our societies depend. The most obvious are those related to hospitals and health care products. We often read in the news that hospitals are near “the breaking point” as if the hospital walls will burst when too many patients crowd into the building.
Back in March, I wrote that the nation’s response to the coronavirus pandemic would likely
shape its economic, political, and geopolitical fortunes for years or decades to come. Four
months later, it’s time for a check-in. How’s that pandemic response going? … Keep an eye on that snow-covered mountainside.
The Cuban system demonstrates a sustainable model of medical care, providing a high level of service with low use of resources. Many greens think only in terms of reducing personal consumption, or hoping for technical advances that will enable continued affluence. Too few realise that there have to be radical changes in systems as well as in lifestyles.
As long as we think of COVID-19 as simply an implacable foe that must be vanquished, it is unlikely that we will learn to live with it or to deal effectively with the next pandemic.
The financial mindset has come to so dominate our approach to broad societal problems that it stands in the way of clear thinking about effective approaches to the challenges humanity faces.
For over half a century, worldwide growth in affluence has continuously increased resource use and pollutant emissions far more rapidly than these have been reduced through better technology.
Greed, consumerism, racism, and imperial ambition sealed our nation’s fate. If, as people, we wish to move forward, we must revert to the best of our early unifying values: hard work, thrift, generosity, fairness, honesty, ingenuity, and mutual respect. We’ll need to embody these values increasingly in local institutions, businesses, and other social arrangements of every conceivable kind if we are to minimize the human cost of national failure. It’s not too soon to start.
There are few things more insane than the terminal phase of a stock market bubble. It is worth noting that from the bottom of the Great Depression it took 20 years to reach new highs in the stock market. We may not even be at the bottom of this depression and one market index has already reached a new all-time high. Is this investor insanity or the beginning of the next glorious economic expansion?
Fortune-telling remains a mainstay among the financial elite and the lowliest retail investor on the planet alike. The U.S. Federal Reserve Bank has a sort of running fortune-telling tool called GDPNow that takes up-to-date indicators and plugs them into its formula for projecting the current direction of U.S. GDP.
If you are a chemist, you know very well how catalysts can work small miracles: you had been trying for some time to have a reaction occur, without success, then you add a little pinch of something and – suddenly – things go “bang.” In no time, the reaction is complete. Of course, as a chemist you know that catalysts don’t really work miracles: all they can do is to accelerate reaction that would occur anyway.
Coronavirus is hitting México hard and the government is in denial. México is going to have to face some difficult choices soon. It needs to remember what its indigenous ancestors did when the climate changed, civil collapse came, or invasion threatened. They dispersed and downsized… They self-isolated. And because of that, they are still here today.
