Wednesday, January 9th, 2013
JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ, Nobel Laureate Economist - Project Syndicate
Stephan: You would think all this was obvious. In fact it is so obvious one has to ask why aren't we doing it?
NEW YORK — In the shadow of the euro crisis and America’s fiscal cliff, it is easy to ignore the global economy’s long-term problems. But, while we focus on immediate concerns, they continue to fester, and we overlook them at our peril.
The most serious is global warming. While the global economy’s weak performance has led to a corresponding slowdown in the increase in carbon emissions, it amounts to only a short respite. And we are far behind the curve: Because we have been so slow to respond to climate change, achieving the targeted limit of a two-degree (centigrade) rise in global temperature, will require sharp reductions in emissions in the future.
Some suggest that, given the economic slowdown, we should put global warming on the backburner. On the contrary, retrofitting the global economy for climate change would help to restore aggregate demand and growth.
At the same time, the pace of technological progress and globalization necessitates rapid structural changes in both developed and developing countries alike. Such changes can be traumatic, and markets often do not handle them well.
Just as the Great Depression arose in part from the difficulties in moving from a rural, agrarian economy to an urban, manufacturing one, so […]
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Wednesday, January 9th, 2013
Stephan: The Australians are not alone in facing rising heat. Yet spend an evening listening to news shows. Do you hear a lot of conversation about climate change? You do not.
It’s official: 2012 marked the warmest year on record for the USA, scientists from the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., announced Tuesday. The past year smashed the previous record for the warmest year, which was 1998.
The average temperature for 2012 was 55.3 degrees, 3.2 degrees above the 20th-century average, and 1 degree above 1998.
U.S. weather records date to 1895.
‘We had the warmest spring on record, the warmest July on record, and the third-warmest summer on record,’ said Deke Arndt, chief of the climate monitoring branch of the climate center, late last year.
Every state had a warmer-than-average year. A total of 19 states, stretching from Utah to Massachusetts, had record warmth in 2012 and an additional 26 states had a Top 10 warm year.
‘These records do not occur like this in an unchanging climate,’ said Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. ‘And they are costing many billions of dollars.’
‘What was truly astonishing,’ added Weather Underground weather historian Christopher Burt, ‘was the ratio of heat records vs. cold records that were established over the course of the year.’ Burt says that in 2012, there were 362 all-time record-high temperatures set […]
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Wednesday, January 9th, 2013
BAILEY JOHNSON, - CBS News
Stephan: Eighteen readers sent me various takes reporting this development. I thank you all. Australians are facing a dangerous future, and they are not alone, as the next story makes clear.
Click through to see the chart.
Off the charts’ is a phrase that gets thrown around liberally when it comes to temperature. But in the case of Australia’s current heat wave and raging wildfires, temperatures are literally higher than the government’s charts were designed to go. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has had to introduce a new color — deep purple — to account for the record-breaking heat.
The bureau’s interactive weather forecasting chart previously capped at 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit.) The model now goes all the way to 54 degrees (129 degrees F), higher than Australia’s all-time record temperature of 50.7 degrees (123 degrees F) from 1960.
‘The scale has just been increased today and I would anticipate it is because the forecast coming from the bureau’s model is showing temperatures in excess of 50 degrees,’ David Jones, head of the bureau’s monitoring and prediction unit, told Australian newspaper The Age.
The scorching heat over central Australia has yet to cross the 50 degree barrier, but Dr. Jones believes it is only a matter of time.
‘The air mass over the inland is still heating up — it hasn’t peaked,’ he told The Age.
Monday saw the highest average temperatures ever recorded in the country at 104.59 degrees Fahrenheit. […]
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Wednesday, January 9th, 2013
Stephan: The story of the Kulluk drilling rig that ran aground in Alaska has mostly passed from the media's attention. A shame because this story has many aspects that deserve close attention. Here's one example of what I mean.
On New Year’s Eve, in the middle of a storm, Shell was trying to tow its Kulluk drilling rig from Alaska to Seattle. Why then? Why risk the bad weather, which, as it turned out, caused the rig to break free from its tugboats and run aground on Kodiak Island?
To avoid paying state taxes, of course. From Alaska Dispatch:
A Shell spokesman last week confirmed an Unalaska elected official’s claim that the Dec. 21 departure of the Kulluk from Unalaska/Dutch Harbor involved taxation.
City councilor David Gregory said Shell would pay between $6 million and $7 million in state taxes if the Kulluk was still in Alaska on Jan. 1.
Ah, but the weather had other plans, sorry to say. Shell will end up having to pay that money after all, and then some.
Gregory said the departure of the Kulluk took money away from local small businesses servicing the rig. He predicted the maritime mishap will prove very costly to the oil company.
‘It will cost them more than that $6 million in taxes. Maybe they should have just stayed here,
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Tuesday, January 8th, 2013
PAUL KRUGMAN, Nobel Laureate - Op-Ed Columnist - The New York Times
Stephan: I confess I do not understand why any economist thinks, or ever thought, that austerity was a good idea. Obviously it destroys the middle class everywhere it is tried. When people have less money, they spend less money. Rich people put extra money in the bank; they have plenty. Middle class and poor people always have to spend the majority of their income, thus creating demand, markets, jobs etc.
But that doesn't seem to penetrate some quarters and, thus, I don't think we are out of the financial crisis that began in 2008. This year could, not will but could, get very painful.
It’s that time again: the annual meeting of the American Economic Association and affiliates, a sort of medieval fair that serves as a marketplace for bodies (newly minted Ph.D.’s in search of jobs), books and ideas. And this year, as in past meetings, there is one theme dominating discussion: the ongoing economic crisis.
This isn’t how things were supposed to be. If you had polled the economists attending this meeting three years ago, most of them would surely have predicted that by now we’d be talking about how the great slump ended, not why it still continues.
So what went wrong? The answer, mainly, is the triumph of bad ideas.
It’s tempting to argue that the economic failures of recent years prove that economists don’t have the answers. But the truth is actually worse: in reality, standard economics offered good answers, but political leaders – and all too many economists – chose to forget or ignore what they should have known.
The story, at this point, is fairly straightforward. The financial crisis led, through several channels, to a sharp fall in private spending: residential investment plunged as the housing bubble burst; consumers began saving more as the illusory wealth created by the bubble […]
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