Traditional economics doesn't tend to take a long-range view of anthropogenic climate changes. If the 3.41 million sq km minimal Arctic icepack of 2012 was radically below that of even 2007-the previous record year, it seems on its way to be nearly gone in summers sooner than we think. That will bring continuing instability to economic models based on stable, predictable weather.
There are several economic paradigms today of which a synthesis of all is requisite for meaningful human social adaptation to demographic, climate and political challenges. Global warming bringing desiccation to productive agricultural areas in temperate regions requires intelligent political responses that would work to reverse the anthropogenic causality. Yet the political will to encourage free enterprise adaptations in support of global warming reduction doesn't exist in the Obama administration and that is bad for U.S. leadership prospects.
U.S. led political transformation of economic incentives to reverse global warming would need to develop within a classical economic paradigm that for Americans is a very leaky boat creating perennial down-sizing of the middle class and bringing high unemployment, vast public debt, outsourcing of industry and protracted foreign conflicts for national security and resource reasons. Many are disinterested in transforming industry and public policy including zoning with an anti-government bias. A basic free market paradigm leaning toward libertarianism tends in the modern, non-18th century context to generate corporatism and corporgovernment with all of the networking, table of ranks, neo-network ad hoc monopolization that entails.
Beyond the problems of classical economics and global warming challenges there are the plain limits-to-growth Malthusian problems based in global demographics and resource depletion. A comparatively recent academic field of ecological economics examines resources from the point of view of entropy. Basically the resources of the world are less disordered before humans use them in economic processes. An example is a tree. When one cuts it down and burns it for firewood it is an increase in entropy producing ash. Entropy is not reversible and human use of resources takes a well-ordered planet and converts it into the most disordered condition irreversible.
Probably there is an actual quantity of resource entropy level for the entire planet. The challenge is to use the resources most efficiently with the lowest possible increase of entropy. Maybe that would be in some theoretical new technology something like fusion with anything made in to anything else done by using the most disordered, highest entropy state materials for recombination into something well ordered. Of course hydrogen fusion is just .007% efficient so that isn't so excellent.
One hopes that some future President of the United States will comprehend the need of synthesizing the 3 or 4 primary economic paradigms into one outstanding domestic U.S. economic policy. The last few Presidents might have qualified for stories about drug use or alcohol binges in college so though they may be chummy and collegial they aren't necessarily thinking much about economic philosophy.
The human body temperature of 98.6 degrees is common to mammals. It is the temperature most efficient for releasing heat from the body, staying alive and keeping the brain cool enough to function. With increasing global warming driven by automobiles, ships and aircraft burning fossil fuels the demand for electricity to cool the body with air-conditioning increases driving up the burning of more fossil fuels. Recent progress in making oil from algae may keep the cost of gasoline down low enough that fossil fuel burning will continue and reinforce present global warming policy in the United States and elsewhere.
If American leadership isn't bright enough to lead to world ecospheric adaptive economic health before a crisis, it cannot be reasonable to expect the poor of the U.S. and of the second and third world to lead. National policy that advocates 19th century forms of capitalism are badly out of touch with Adam Smith and David Hume's paradigm for improving the economic prospects of the masses. It is something like ecospheric economic drunk driving to bull ahead explaining that religion or the grace of capitalism requires only blind faith in absolute economic advantage and social leverage to produce the best of all possible worlds through evolution.
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