The Guardian reported on Sunday:
Eight people have drowned in Austria, Poland and Romania and four others are missing in the Czech Republic as Storm Boris continues to lash central and eastern Europe, bringing torrential rain and floods that have forced the evacuation of thousands of people from their homes.
Swathes of Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia have been battered by high winds and unusually fierce rains since Thursday.
Austria’s vice-chancellor, Werner Kogler, said on Sunday that a firefighter had died tackling flooding in Lower Austria, as authorities declared the province, which surrounds the capital, Vienna, a disaster area. (2)
Climate change moves right along. We collectively know the basic causes of it – e.g., fossil fuel consumption – and the basic directions of a solution: phasing out carbon-based fuels, lots more batteries, windmills, and solar panels.
One upside of the grim news from the Russia-Ukraine War is that it has reminded anyone willing to pay attention that nuclear power plants are no magic solution, though the nuclear power industry will never stop insisting that it is. Nuclear-fusion-produced energy could be a major game-changer. But not yet. Hydrogen-based energy is also promising, but a long way still from being a major contributor to solutions.
Pro-pollution lobbies have always promoted the notion that Technology will one day produce the magic solution so that we can all live in a Star Trek world. Techno-utopians have been around for a long time. And that outlook is very amenable to various forms of neoliberal economic theory, from opponents of business regulation to crackpot anarcho-capitalists to Silicon Valley TechBros promoting their latest energy-guzzling investment fads like cryptocurrency or AI chatbots.
The EU countries face a couple of particular self-inflicted problems in pursuing the kind of public investments and regulatory policies needed for Europe to do what needs to be done or to catch up with China’s progress in green-economy measures.
One is the broad neoliberal assumptions that are dominant in EU economic policies. More particularly, the euro currency still has structural problems that the ad hoc policies of the eurozone during the euro crisis particularly repaired. But the lack of common eurozone debt instruments, i.e., national debt instruments backed collectively by the eurozone countries, is a serious self-imposed limitation. And very much an ideological one.
The 60%-of-GDP deficit limit in the eurozone is also arbitrary and ideological It’s based on the dominant neoliberal assumption that government spending that benefits the common good has to be restricted. The 60% limit is purely arbitrary, not founded on any coherent economic theory. The US and Japan have run far bigger deficits in relation to GDP fore decades with no obvious damaging effects, much less catastrophic ones.
The earth’s climate systems are physical ones. They don’t care about arbitrary economic ideologies promoted by billionaires who want the government to do whatever they want, including promoting vacuous economic theories, and all without the billionaires being required to pay taxes to support the governments whose functioning is essential to their wealth-accumulation projects.
Notes:
(1) Central Europe in grips of worst flooding in decades. DW News YouTube channel 09/15/2024.
(2) Jones, Sam (2024): ‘Catastrophe of epic proportions’: eight drown in Europe amid heavy floods. The Guardian 09/15/2024.
No comments:
Post a Comment