Fiddling while Rome burns - climate edition

"So why are we behaving like this?" asks Martin Wolfe of the Financial Times.
"A second reason is opposition to any interventions in the free market. Some of this, no doubt, is driven by narrowly economic interests. But do not underestimate the power of ideas. To admit that a free economy generates a vast global external cost is to admit that the large-scale government regulation so often proposed by hated environmentalists is justified. For many libertarians or classical liberals, the very idea is unsupportable. It is far easier to deny the relevance of the science."
It will be interesting to see the reaction to a commentary that really hits the nail on the head.
HT to Gravity's Rainbow.

Quinoa the international commodity

Quinoa, a pseudocereal native to Bolivia, is growing in popularity, although TPP still thinks it has a grassy sort of non-descript taste that he can’t get excited about.   However its popularity in North America is driving up demand and prices such that growers in the Andes make more money selling it as an export crop.  This means the price is too expensive for farm workers who would be harvesting this crop and eating it as a staple food.  Until this situation has improved, TPP resolves not to buy any more quinoa.  If a variety that grows well in North America is found that may solve this problem, and since it was probably domesticated from a weed, this might not be too tough.  Years ago TPP found a similar situation in southern India, a region where cashews were grown.  Oh, yes, cashews at the local producers price!  But cashews were such a valuable export crop you could not find any for sale anywhere right where they were being grown!  This gives you some idea of how the global commodities market doesn’t work for people at the low end of the economic scale. 

Ecologically we're all living a Ponzi scheme

In terms of sustainability, David Barash, a psychologist at U. Washington, argues that we're all Bernard Madoffs. Ecologically "you simply cannot keep moving and growing and developing and mining your capital, assuming infinitely available resources and a natural environment of such unfailing elasticity that it will swallow our effluent forever and continue to provide a steady supply of resources into the bargain." And it's true. Yes, old Malthus was right, and yet an economist at our university expressed surprise that biologists still believed in Malthus because he'd been so thoroughly disproven. And that may be part of the problem, economists don't want to deal with ecoogical reality. A story circulated a few years ago about an interdisciplinary conference on energy, and after one of the economists got done speaking, a physicist said, "that won't work because it violates the laws of physics." And the economist said, "Well, who knows what the laws of physics will be in 50 years." But it will be a challenge to live sustainably because our economic system has been built on exploitation of resources and people.

Let the Phactor know what you think.