"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." The problem is that accepting reality would mean ending the financial sector. No growth = no capital income = no capitalism. We need more than an apology. We need the world economy to write off some $22 trillion (or roughly 25%).
While this is an excellent and important report on crucial history, it is vital that we use terms like Climate Crisis, Climate Emergency Climate Disruption, Climate Destabilization, Global Warming, and Global Heating (not the Republican PR spin term "Climate Change").
Widespread use of the term "Climate Change" originated in 2003 with Republican PR flack Frank Luntz (a brilliant corporate propagandist) who circulated a memo that got the Bush Administration to replace the properly alarming and accurate term "Global Warming" with the much more benign sounding term "Climate Change" in order to essentially disappear the problem in the public mind. Once Bush started using the term in speeches, all of mainstream media adopted it. This insidious shift in the narrative proved to be a master stroke by Luntz.
Very shortly after Bush started using the term, activists like myself and Ralph Nader, immediately began countering Luntz's bullshit spin by pointing out that "Climate Crisis" was a far better term which fit the gravity of the emergency we are facing. But as noted above, Luntz's gambit was pretty effective, and far too many people still fall into using the weaker term that he popularized.
Continued constant use of the term (even by many environmentalists and scientists) drives a milquetoast corporate media narrative, which enables fossil fuel industry funded climate skeptics and deniers to more easily deceive the public.
Here is the link to a 2004 interview in Sierra Magazine with lefty messaging guru George Lakoff, in which he specifically recommends using the far better term "Climate Crisis" to describe the problem, in order to deflect Luntz's deceptive messaging.
"Winning Words: George Lakoff says environmentalists need to watch their language" link:
I sometimes think this stuff about framing language is overplayed. Deniers also point to the change from "global warming (AGW)" to "climate change (CC)" as evidence that it's all made up and hysterical nonsense. Scientifically speaking, CC is a much broader topic of science than AGW, which is just the greenhouse aspect of it, not all the consequences in ecological and climate systems, and that's why the move from AGW to CC took place in the science community. I always use climate crisis or climate emergency or emergency response BTW, but its not the main game IMHO.
I'm not saying framing and language and framing are not important considerations to be making, and revising, but there's a much deeper, institutional and ideological level of resistance to climate emergence response.
I'm going to post some comments starting a separation thread below about what I call the "tag-team" act of neoliberalism and Neoclassical economics in not only preventing a climate emergency response to the global heating crisis but a raft of issues like inequity within nations, rich and poor, neo-colonialism impoverishing the economies of the Global South, corporate/elite capture of state and grey corruption etc etc.
I don't really disagree that there are more important factors than language and framing. I'm just pointing out that poor terms and framing hamstring us unnecessarily and we need to stop making that mistake.
it's a kind of mass psychosis to be so focussed on one metric that reality can be ignored as externalities, immaterial to the abstract model. How do we get a psychotic delusional to see what is in front of them? Can we isolate them? Or can we protect ourselves from the inevitable collapse by "breaking together" as Jem Bendell has written. (If you haven't interviewed him, you should.
Thank you so much Rachel for your clear-eyed criticism of orthodox economist William Nordhaus, and showing the Nobel Committee to be willfully ignorant and arrogant in awarding him the Prize. As I have repeatedly shared since that flagrant display of stupidity, the cost-benefit analysis (CBA) used by Nordhaus and 90% of other economists is a totally wrong, highly inappropriate modeling tool. The Nobel committee could have awakened the world's legislators, lawmakers, regulators, investors and citizenry if they had, instead, awarded the economics prize to the two leading U.S. heterodox economists who have demonstrably eviscerated dependence on CBAs in addressing long-term climate damages - Harvard Mathematical Economics Professor Martin Weitzman (Nordhaus' brilliant long-time nemesis) and Tufts Economics Professor Frank Ackerman. The Nobel committee made an especially egregious error in awarding Nordhaus and not Weitzman.
Weitzman is widely recognized as the economists' economist. Weitzman has taken the economics profession to task over the past two decades for blindly using CBA which, as they all know, only makes sense for well-defined, relatively short time-span problems in determining investment preferences, and for priority ranking a range of investment options. It does terribly in dealing with investments offering different mixes of multiple benefits (e.g., energy efficiency gains can deliver up to a dozen values, solar & wind power a half dozen values, yet utility CBAs only recognize 1 or 2 of those values). And most importantly, CBA's collapse in making any sense whatsoever when looking at damage costs that could continue (not just for decades or a century) but for ten millennia!! The most appropriate economic tool that should be used, Weitzman & Ackerman both spell out, is insurance!! Because insurance is all about coping with and minimizing intrinsic uncertainties of catastrophic disasters resulting - in the case of climate chaos - collapse of the global economy, die-off of over half the world's species, including very long-term threat to the human species. In economic speak it is dealing with fat-tail uncertainties (Weitzman,
Fat-Tailed Uncertainty in the Economics of Catastrophic Climate Change, Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, volume 5, issue 2, summer 2011, pp. 275–292 doi:10.1093/reep/rer006 ).
As Ackerman repeatedly pointed out, the probability of a fire destroying a building is 1 in 200 years - what seems like an inconsequential risk of half a percent. Yet, property owners typically have insurance coverage. Likewise, the probability of global-scale climate catastrophes if the business-as-usual level of CO2 emissions go unchecked (half a trillion tons released each decade) is more than an order of magnitude greater than home fires. Frank Ackerman's 2008 short book, Can We Afford the Future? provides an excellent overview of the problem. Martin Weitzman's numerous publications are more dense with mathematical proofs which, unfortunately, are impenetrable to even many economists. One final tragic note. Martin Weitzman committed suicide on Aug. 27, 2019, eight months after Nordaus received the Nobel prize. Many economists believe Weitzman should have received the prize for his brilliant work, and one can only speculate of this was a triggering effect to his action. We lost a shining star that day.
So, I couldn't agree more, and haven't since the jerk got a Nobel Prize. but what's up with your not including a link to the talk you're advertising? Was that accidental?
An example of the ruling class and the system being selective in the type of information it takes seriously and takes into account in their policy-making and long-term planning.
following on from my precious comment in more detail:
I'm sure you're aware of this, Rachel — so putting this here for others: your fellow Brit, Kevin Anderson has been scathing in the past of the WG3 literature and points out it's often sponsored by the Chancellor of the Exchequer and "a cigarette paper's width apparent from representing those views about economic growth at all costs".
I'd add to that Michael Hudson's views about finance capitalism gutting out the industrial base of rich counties to create a *rentier* class ruling over a multitude of "consumers" in the finance capitalist economy. Here consumer brands are the new religion(s) and the actual manufactured goods and services for these brands are outsource production to much less advantaged nations. This impoverishes the working classes of the society who don't participate in equities and the finance industry (most of London's non-retail sector it must be said is now finance and shadow banking).
The total resistance this so-called scientific profession of mainstream economics has to other schools of thought (SoT) within economics that are evidence based as opposed to fantasy-level deductive logic based is why we've made so little progress fighting for an emergency response to the CC crisis.
Neoclassical economics works hand in glove with the neoliberal political project that came of age under Thatcher and Reagan. What we call Neoliberalism today started many years earlier that the Thatcher/Reagan era as a direct reaction from elites/owners-of-capital to the (perceived) socialism of the New Deal and reconstruction Europe delivering unprecedented equity and opportunity for (material) wealth creation. Somewhat ironically this had a precursor during WW2 for women and POC who were called on to do jobs that had been the exclusive domain of white men.
It can't be underestimated the role Neoclassical economics has played and still today plays as what I refer to as a "tag-team partner" with neoliberal ideology to "lock" regional, national and global political-economies into a rigidly capitalist anti-government-for-public-purpose way of seeing the world. Neoliberals reflexly use neoclassical economics as their "evidence base" for justification for say lifting interest rates and running austerity budgets only to hurt the economy and transfer wealth to from the poor (and the rest of the ecosphere) to the wealthy. While Neoclassical economists internalise neoliberal ideology to a laughable extent every time they describe one of their simplifying or reducing assumptions assumptions as "natural"
Heterodox economists like Steve Keen to name one of 100s of others who Steve stands on the shoulders of (he tips his hat to Minsky and Godley by naming part of his system dynamics for economic modelling software after them), Modern Monetary Theorists like Bill Mitchell, Randall Wray, Warren Mosler, Stephanie Kelton (I didn't want to single one of them out, all have been huge in MMT scholarship), Institutionalist like Thorstein Veblen, Gregory Hayden), Feminist like Marylin Waring, Ecological like Herman Daly, Behavioralists like Daniel Kahneman all are blissfully ignored when they completely undermine the foundations of neoclassical economics from a new perspective.
Hi Rachel. thanks for writing this brief note. it prompted me to pull the trigger and subscribe for a few months, even though I'm a self-funded climate activist/energy transition report writer/volunteer lobbyist. and my first substack subscription even sub, even though I read at least 10 regularly.
I do hope you and Steve Keen have time to do an in depth interview on the garbage of not just the Nordhaus et al DICE and damage function, but the institutional "lock" that neoclassical economists have on Government policy and especially on their treasury departments right around the world. (And by owing Treasury, neoclassical economists prescribe austerity and neoliberalism in for every other department, nixing all sensible policy initiatives that might involve some measure of public spending).
I'd also point to the work of David Spratt, who points out that even before you get to erroneous cost functions, it's the risk analysis of mainstream climate scientists themselves that was deeply problematic and contributed to a "take the average as most likely outcome" approach by the (mostly) economists of IPCC WG3. It was main stream climate scientists who decided in the face of uncertainty you take an uncontroversial approach by splitting the difference and looking at median model results as more representative than outliers. (petro-states and FF exporters like Australia, Saudi Arabia, Russia, USA etc must approve lead scientists for IPCC it should be noted). Public health scientists, pandemic experts, space mission engineers etc and even insurance underwriters and business people more generally know that when you do risk analysis you don't just take median modelling results as your roadmap — you multiple damages against risk. The higher the damage the higher cause for concern. Existential risk must be mitigated down to a likelihood of 1 to 1 million in aircraft design and manufacturing and 1 to 100 million in space missions for all mission-critical components. IPCC and UNFCCC have been content to mitigate to "the flip of a coin" as Kevin Anderson has put it in the past.
I'd love for you to interview David Spratt. You can check out his to latest papers here:
#1 this one is quite short "Betting against worst-case climate scenarios is risky business", David Spratt, September 2023, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
#2 documents the failures of institutions, neoclassical economics, capital, markets and the global capitalist enterprise (basically!) to:
comprehend;
accept;
act appropriately.
as we descend into an ever deeper level of climate emergency.
*Reclaiming “Climate Emergency”* , Daivd Spratt, March 2023, Filozofski vestnik (Published by The Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU))>
David also co-authored "Climate, Code Red" with the late Philip Sutton in 2008 which was a groundbreaking book for a general audience and received a "must read" recommendation from James Hansen on the back cover.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." The problem is that accepting reality would mean ending the financial sector. No growth = no capital income = no capitalism. We need more than an apology. We need the world economy to write off some $22 trillion (or roughly 25%).
While this is an excellent and important report on crucial history, it is vital that we use terms like Climate Crisis, Climate Emergency Climate Disruption, Climate Destabilization, Global Warming, and Global Heating (not the Republican PR spin term "Climate Change").
Widespread use of the term "Climate Change" originated in 2003 with Republican PR flack Frank Luntz (a brilliant corporate propagandist) who circulated a memo that got the Bush Administration to replace the properly alarming and accurate term "Global Warming" with the much more benign sounding term "Climate Change" in order to essentially disappear the problem in the public mind. Once Bush started using the term in speeches, all of mainstream media adopted it. This insidious shift in the narrative proved to be a master stroke by Luntz.
Here is a link to an important 2003 report about that very memo, in the UK Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2003/mar/04/usnews.climatechange
Very shortly after Bush started using the term, activists like myself and Ralph Nader, immediately began countering Luntz's bullshit spin by pointing out that "Climate Crisis" was a far better term which fit the gravity of the emergency we are facing. But as noted above, Luntz's gambit was pretty effective, and far too many people still fall into using the weaker term that he popularized.
Continued constant use of the term (even by many environmentalists and scientists) drives a milquetoast corporate media narrative, which enables fossil fuel industry funded climate skeptics and deniers to more easily deceive the public.
Here is the link to a 2004 interview in Sierra Magazine with lefty messaging guru George Lakoff, in which he specifically recommends using the far better term "Climate Crisis" to describe the problem, in order to deflect Luntz's deceptive messaging.
"Winning Words: George Lakoff says environmentalists need to watch their language" link:
https://vault.sierraclub.org/sierra/200407/words.asp
To sum it up, it's a crisis, not 'change' and we need to say so.
I sometimes think this stuff about framing language is overplayed. Deniers also point to the change from "global warming (AGW)" to "climate change (CC)" as evidence that it's all made up and hysterical nonsense. Scientifically speaking, CC is a much broader topic of science than AGW, which is just the greenhouse aspect of it, not all the consequences in ecological and climate systems, and that's why the move from AGW to CC took place in the science community. I always use climate crisis or climate emergency or emergency response BTW, but its not the main game IMHO.
I'm not saying framing and language and framing are not important considerations to be making, and revising, but there's a much deeper, institutional and ideological level of resistance to climate emergence response.
I'm going to post some comments starting a separation thread below about what I call the "tag-team" act of neoliberalism and Neoclassical economics in not only preventing a climate emergency response to the global heating crisis but a raft of issues like inequity within nations, rich and poor, neo-colonialism impoverishing the economies of the Global South, corporate/elite capture of state and grey corruption etc etc.
I don't really disagree that there are more important factors than language and framing. I'm just pointing out that poor terms and framing hamstring us unnecessarily and we need to stop making that mistake.
Here's a just published substack that can be shared to make the point..
It's A Climate & Extinction Crisis, Not 'Change'
https://ericbrooks.substack.com/p/its-a-climate-and-extinction-crisis
it's a kind of mass psychosis to be so focussed on one metric that reality can be ignored as externalities, immaterial to the abstract model. How do we get a psychotic delusional to see what is in front of them? Can we isolate them? Or can we protect ourselves from the inevitable collapse by "breaking together" as Jem Bendell has written. (If you haven't interviewed him, you should.
Given capitalism is a shared, imaginary human delusion, writing off 22 trillion should be just as easy!
Notably, Nordhaus attached essentially zero cost to mass extinctions.
On a side note, John Horowitz and I picked him up in a howling error here
Quiggin, J. & Horowitz, J. (1999) The impact of global warming on agriculture: a Ricardian analysis: comment. American Economic Review, 89, 1044-1045,
Thank you so much Rachel for your clear-eyed criticism of orthodox economist William Nordhaus, and showing the Nobel Committee to be willfully ignorant and arrogant in awarding him the Prize. As I have repeatedly shared since that flagrant display of stupidity, the cost-benefit analysis (CBA) used by Nordhaus and 90% of other economists is a totally wrong, highly inappropriate modeling tool. The Nobel committee could have awakened the world's legislators, lawmakers, regulators, investors and citizenry if they had, instead, awarded the economics prize to the two leading U.S. heterodox economists who have demonstrably eviscerated dependence on CBAs in addressing long-term climate damages - Harvard Mathematical Economics Professor Martin Weitzman (Nordhaus' brilliant long-time nemesis) and Tufts Economics Professor Frank Ackerman. The Nobel committee made an especially egregious error in awarding Nordhaus and not Weitzman.
Weitzman is widely recognized as the economists' economist. Weitzman has taken the economics profession to task over the past two decades for blindly using CBA which, as they all know, only makes sense for well-defined, relatively short time-span problems in determining investment preferences, and for priority ranking a range of investment options. It does terribly in dealing with investments offering different mixes of multiple benefits (e.g., energy efficiency gains can deliver up to a dozen values, solar & wind power a half dozen values, yet utility CBAs only recognize 1 or 2 of those values). And most importantly, CBA's collapse in making any sense whatsoever when looking at damage costs that could continue (not just for decades or a century) but for ten millennia!! The most appropriate economic tool that should be used, Weitzman & Ackerman both spell out, is insurance!! Because insurance is all about coping with and minimizing intrinsic uncertainties of catastrophic disasters resulting - in the case of climate chaos - collapse of the global economy, die-off of over half the world's species, including very long-term threat to the human species. In economic speak it is dealing with fat-tail uncertainties (Weitzman,
Fat-Tailed Uncertainty in the Economics of Catastrophic Climate Change, Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, volume 5, issue 2, summer 2011, pp. 275–292 doi:10.1093/reep/rer006 ).
As Ackerman repeatedly pointed out, the probability of a fire destroying a building is 1 in 200 years - what seems like an inconsequential risk of half a percent. Yet, property owners typically have insurance coverage. Likewise, the probability of global-scale climate catastrophes if the business-as-usual level of CO2 emissions go unchecked (half a trillion tons released each decade) is more than an order of magnitude greater than home fires. Frank Ackerman's 2008 short book, Can We Afford the Future? provides an excellent overview of the problem. Martin Weitzman's numerous publications are more dense with mathematical proofs which, unfortunately, are impenetrable to even many economists. One final tragic note. Martin Weitzman committed suicide on Aug. 27, 2019, eight months after Nordaus received the Nobel prize. Many economists believe Weitzman should have received the prize for his brilliant work, and one can only speculate of this was a triggering effect to his action. We lost a shining star that day.
Clear and fundamental, thank you!
To spread it further I translated this article into German, hoping you don‘t mind 🤓.
So, I couldn't agree more, and haven't since the jerk got a Nobel Prize. but what's up with your not including a link to the talk you're advertising? Was that accidental?
You've read Steve Keen:s scathing critique of Nordhaus? https://bit.ly/3zlea5y
An example of the ruling class and the system being selective in the type of information it takes seriously and takes into account in their policy-making and long-term planning.
Thanks for sharing.
following on from my precious comment in more detail:
I'm sure you're aware of this, Rachel — so putting this here for others: your fellow Brit, Kevin Anderson has been scathing in the past of the WG3 literature and points out it's often sponsored by the Chancellor of the Exchequer and "a cigarette paper's width apparent from representing those views about economic growth at all costs".
I'd add to that Michael Hudson's views about finance capitalism gutting out the industrial base of rich counties to create a *rentier* class ruling over a multitude of "consumers" in the finance capitalist economy. Here consumer brands are the new religion(s) and the actual manufactured goods and services for these brands are outsource production to much less advantaged nations. This impoverishes the working classes of the society who don't participate in equities and the finance industry (most of London's non-retail sector it must be said is now finance and shadow banking).
The total resistance this so-called scientific profession of mainstream economics has to other schools of thought (SoT) within economics that are evidence based as opposed to fantasy-level deductive logic based is why we've made so little progress fighting for an emergency response to the CC crisis.
Neoclassical economics works hand in glove with the neoliberal political project that came of age under Thatcher and Reagan. What we call Neoliberalism today started many years earlier that the Thatcher/Reagan era as a direct reaction from elites/owners-of-capital to the (perceived) socialism of the New Deal and reconstruction Europe delivering unprecedented equity and opportunity for (material) wealth creation. Somewhat ironically this had a precursor during WW2 for women and POC who were called on to do jobs that had been the exclusive domain of white men.
It can't be underestimated the role Neoclassical economics has played and still today plays as what I refer to as a "tag-team partner" with neoliberal ideology to "lock" regional, national and global political-economies into a rigidly capitalist anti-government-for-public-purpose way of seeing the world. Neoliberals reflexly use neoclassical economics as their "evidence base" for justification for say lifting interest rates and running austerity budgets only to hurt the economy and transfer wealth to from the poor (and the rest of the ecosphere) to the wealthy. While Neoclassical economists internalise neoliberal ideology to a laughable extent every time they describe one of their simplifying or reducing assumptions assumptions as "natural"
Heterodox economists like Steve Keen to name one of 100s of others who Steve stands on the shoulders of (he tips his hat to Minsky and Godley by naming part of his system dynamics for economic modelling software after them), Modern Monetary Theorists like Bill Mitchell, Randall Wray, Warren Mosler, Stephanie Kelton (I didn't want to single one of them out, all have been huge in MMT scholarship), Institutionalist like Thorstein Veblen, Gregory Hayden), Feminist like Marylin Waring, Ecological like Herman Daly, Behavioralists like Daniel Kahneman all are blissfully ignored when they completely undermine the foundations of neoclassical economics from a new perspective.
Hi Rachel. thanks for writing this brief note. it prompted me to pull the trigger and subscribe for a few months, even though I'm a self-funded climate activist/energy transition report writer/volunteer lobbyist. and my first substack subscription even sub, even though I read at least 10 regularly.
I do hope you and Steve Keen have time to do an in depth interview on the garbage of not just the Nordhaus et al DICE and damage function, but the institutional "lock" that neoclassical economists have on Government policy and especially on their treasury departments right around the world. (And by owing Treasury, neoclassical economists prescribe austerity and neoliberalism in for every other department, nixing all sensible policy initiatives that might involve some measure of public spending).
I'd also point to the work of David Spratt, who points out that even before you get to erroneous cost functions, it's the risk analysis of mainstream climate scientists themselves that was deeply problematic and contributed to a "take the average as most likely outcome" approach by the (mostly) economists of IPCC WG3. It was main stream climate scientists who decided in the face of uncertainty you take an uncontroversial approach by splitting the difference and looking at median model results as more representative than outliers. (petro-states and FF exporters like Australia, Saudi Arabia, Russia, USA etc must approve lead scientists for IPCC it should be noted). Public health scientists, pandemic experts, space mission engineers etc and even insurance underwriters and business people more generally know that when you do risk analysis you don't just take median modelling results as your roadmap — you multiple damages against risk. The higher the damage the higher cause for concern. Existential risk must be mitigated down to a likelihood of 1 to 1 million in aircraft design and manufacturing and 1 to 100 million in space missions for all mission-critical components. IPCC and UNFCCC have been content to mitigate to "the flip of a coin" as Kevin Anderson has put it in the past.
I'd love for you to interview David Spratt. You can check out his to latest papers here:
#1 this one is quite short "Betting against worst-case climate scenarios is risky business", David Spratt, September 2023, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
#2 documents the failures of institutions, neoclassical economics, capital, markets and the global capitalist enterprise (basically!) to:
comprehend;
accept;
act appropriately.
as we descend into an ever deeper level of climate emergency.
*Reclaiming “Climate Emergency”* , Daivd Spratt, March 2023, Filozofski vestnik (Published by The Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU))>
David also co-authored "Climate, Code Red" with the late Philip Sutton in 2008 which was a groundbreaking book for a general audience and received a "must read" recommendation from James Hansen on the back cover.