Tag: init

Disclaimer

Dear Reader, I am glad that you dropped in. I want you to know what I do here.

No source pays me, and I do not seek remuneration. In retirement, I am busy, content, but fulfill a personal commitment in this project. The mission explains my intention, declared in 2007 as my Statement of Concern, my North Star. My principle concern: I do not wish to neglect household duties and my busy social life, nor to strain my wife’s patience.

My course-driven website supplemented my lectures and course offerings. Here they are:

These pages, perhaps over a thousand, follow the map of the course syllabus and schedule. My Public Policy Cycle offered the main text.

Fortunately, my server indicates that I receive close to one-hundred visits per day, with each visitor engaged for about four minutes. This pleases me. My work does appear in a myriad of college-level courses, parts of are apparantly being translated into Spanish, and permission has been sought for many courses. I am referenced a fair amount.

However, Dear Reader, I write as well for other purposes:

  • I fulfill a commitment that I made to progeny and, well, to Creation and to Being itself. Humanity is making a cataclysmic blunder: Wasting Life on Earth, degrading Nature, and diminishing the human Soul and stripping billions of people of their dignity. I abhor such atrocities and will speak out. This blog allows me to raise my voice, clarify my thoughts, share my words, and, hopefully, offer a unique perspective, a kind of Political Economy or even Political Ecology.
  • I heartily recommend the commonsense handbook ReWork. The book admonishes the reader to pursue their work in her unique way, to cut the falderal, and even to build your own tools. Thanks to the open-source volunteers who have built WordPress, an amazing app that has weaned me from hand-writing my own webpages or using the clunky DreamWeaver, my default editor — which won’t work on the Chromebook that I typically use.
  • My Statement of Concern laid out my mission in 2007. My sense of urgency has intensified. In the curriculum I worked within, environmental scientists handled climate change, so I obliquely referenced the impacts, but had no faith in public policy but trusted civil society, itself in crisis. Needless to say, Ramapo’s business-oriented economics faculty actively rejected the topic of climate change as they engaged their chrematistics, deluding themselves with their own capitalist ideology.
  • I appreciate that the RealPolitik that confronts the collision between capitalisms and climate catastrophe suited me and directed me to my North Star. As I explain later, Aristotle’s notion of Aporia challenged me, still does. This cataclysmic double-theme well suited me. How could I say “No.” Join me in tackling this Aporia, or Aporiae.

K2L Bulletin Board, #1

Welcome to my little project, dubbed “Capitalism to Livelihood.” I am Professor Emeritus of Sustainability from Ramapo College, having retired in July, 2015.

I have continued several themes that emerged from two specific courses, World Sustainability and Ecology, Economics and Ethics. Such daunting challenges required a lot of background, mostly in political economy, perhaps political ecology.

My commitment: Work out the systematic scenario speculation of what might occur between now (early November 2019) and 2030, even 2050 — but the further the time horizon, the vaguer the scenario.

Let me get this out of the way: This effort comes from my concern that Humanity and Nature will be degraded significantly within either time horizon in the default case of business as usual (BAU).

These concerns pertain not to some way distant future, like 2100 (when your kids may wonder where were you when this was going down). I make my point by referencing this morning’s New York Times (I haven’t peeked):

President Trump formally withdraws the US from Paris Accords on climate.

Trump formally withdraws the US from the UN Paris Agreement on climate change. See Secretary of State Pompeo’s Tweet. Thus, the largest economy in the world continues to shred the international order. Uh, neither China nor Russia nor India have joined the Paris Accord. Get the Big Picture? Ain’t happening anyway. This is what Aristotle termed an Aporia: no path through it.

Trump huffed and puffed:

President Trump had long held that the accord would cripple growth and intrude on American sovereignty.

“Environment” to “Creation”

This blog initiates a glossary around the theme that I am not an environmentalist but my concern is the defilement of Creation, a sublime gift from God. The latter reflects the influence of Laudato Si’ by Pope Francis.

OED

On Nov 2, 2019, I ventured into the OED to explore a word I find disagreeable: environment. But, wait, you say: “Aren’t you an environmentalist?.” Uh, no, as in: emphatically, “NO!”

Counterintuitively, at my personal introduction to my scores of classes, I would, with little fanfare, so indicate. My friend Larry Susskind once told me that he, too, was not an environmentalist. So, I figured I better address this in my blog post.

Let me confound this further: So when asked, “Then what are you?” My tantalizing response: “I am Pro-Life,” in the sense of an intense advocacy of all life, all of Creation (a gift from God), Nature writ-large. Thus, any and all degradation, rupture, debasement, denigration, reductionism of the dignity and sustenance of any and all life viscerally offends me. Are you listening, the occupant of the Oval Office?

Definitions

I would like to get my language straight, presented as a glossary to which I will refer throughout this project:

  • environment: The OED etymology refers to the French origin as nearby surroundings.
  • neighbor: My neighbor are the “near-dwellers” who surround me, for whom we should build reciprocal relations.
  • bio-region refers to the ecology that nestles and which I inhabit, dwell, and to which I am obliged to reciprocate
community: social capital, networks
Includes networks
See Putnam and Gordon
capitalism: thus capital itself, implies wealth, investment
See OED re capitalism:

Discussion

Gather the provisional glossary as blog here but switch to html5 page as support on website. Use definition lists and copious links, internal and external. Thus, this blog initiates a writing process after WordPress failed login and poor support from Aabaco web server.

See Guardian on environmental writing.

Costs of Climate Catastrophe

CDP foresees $1T in next five years, but partial survey.

This calculation requires close attention:

  • Stern sees substantial underestimation of damage and out-of-pocket costs. Further, will hit sooner and harder.
  • Infrastructure SOC investment will be immense and unfair, exacerbating inequality and exclusion.
  • However, a Kondratieff Cycle may be forming as public-private coalitions form and as plutocrats segregate themselves in armored enclaves.
  • The fiscal burden cannot be sustained, will distort interest rates (must be permanently low to forestall bankruptcy of sovereigns), and triage sacrifice zones of poor multitudes, who will be forcefully prevented from migration.
  • Productive investments will be crowded out by the emergencies such as fires, floods, droughts, vast unimaginable inundations.
  • Food supplies, perhaps adequate in the aggregate, will fall short regionally, producing mass famine.
  • Mortality and population will fall sharply starting perhaps in 2025 Die Off — population forecasts will have been overly optimistic.
  • Consumption expenditures will be precluded but despite deep bias against the Multitudes, demand will fall short: other than Kondratieff Cycle, private monetized economy will sharply decline.