The push for commodification of carbon and the establishment of carbon markets has warped our understanding of investment and workable solutions to climate change. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Carbon Capture and Storage discussion.
Population growth has been a focus of economic policy folks and right-wing pundits in major industrialized countries since the pandemic. The focus in the USA has been on so called 'illegal immigration' and endemic birth rate. In Canada, the focus has been on immigration and the temporary foreign worker program. Population growth is compared to economic growth (GDP), but the lack of short-term correlation between these two metrics has many questioning the popular rhetoric from liberal governments who promised economic growth. The left's answer is not so obvious. Liberal immigration policy was not driven by the desire for growing GDP, but was part of a suite of policies designed to increase unemployment and drive down wage growth to control short-term inflation. To no one's surprise, these policies drove support for far-right, anti-immigration parties.
Productivity is dependent on not just the investment in research, but the implementation of new technologies that increase profitability. A new report from the Dallas Fed points out that there is a way a state can foster increases in productivity from new technological investment, which is funding federal industrial research programs. In Canada, we have not done this in a way to foster actual productivity gains.
The classical economic concept of profit on transfer helps to explain why the redistribution of wealth that has occurred because of imperialism is rather difficult to address via the protocols constructed to deal with climate change. International agreements are going to have to go beyond simply supporting direct foreign investment as a solution to developing country energy transition to lower carbon energy solutions. A process that does this fairly is near impossible under the current economic model.
In the war against climate change, the main issue continue to be resource allocation. It is not so much that we do not know how to solve the problems we have created for ourselves, it is that we cannot agree on how to spend the money or even if we have the money to spend. These questions are political, but the facts are rooted in our understanding of the economy and the processes that drive value creation. The politics tend to come out of how you answer the economic question of resource allocation and how you think those resources are created in the first place.
Believing Canadian pension plans can lead us out of this housing affordability crisis would be a fool’s errand. The irony is that a main cause of the housing affordability crisis is that Canada’s inadequate public pension system forces people to rely on private real estate markets to fund their retirement income.
Just Transition is a concept of the state intervening when the private market fails at a scale that it cannot possibly respond in a reasonable time frame. That kind of thing happens all the time and it isn't just when climate policies are implemented.
Bank operations set real interest rates.
As price inflation stays above the previous 30 year average, concerns about general price increases continue to shift from one consumer good to another. Right now, people are focused on food prices as food is so obviously getting more expensive month to month.
Canada, after 40 years of neoliberal policies privatizing most of our Crown corporations, we now think about services instead of production when it comes to public ownership. There are still many publicly owned production facilities in Canada and around the word. Energy, media, telecommunications, water/waste-water, and transport sectors have moved in and out of public ownership.
