Chicago Political Economy Group

04/25/2024

Dear Friends,

As it took a while for ESS to moderate and publish this preprint, it’s a bit late for Earth Day but I think this revised and resubmitted version of our paper is substantially more developed and improved: https://essopenarchive.org/users/673263/articles/716465-addressing-the-urgent-need-for-direct-climate-cooling-rationale-and-options

We are of course focused on the horrific war and crimes in Gaza and many other pressing world issues, but hanging over all of this is the future of human civilization.

Best,
Ron

• Climate change and impacts will continue to accelerate until the warming influences are reduced or offset by direct cooling approaches. • Direct climate cooling approaches have the potential to reduce local to global portions of human-induced warmin

10/01/2023

A CPEG Tribute to Mel Rothenberg 1934-2023

https://www.cpegonline.org/post/a-cpeg-tribute-to-mel-rothenberg-1934-2023

A CPEG Tribute to Mel Rothenberg 1934-2023

Dear Comrades,

As many of you know our dear comrade Mel Rothenberg, and his wife and good friend and supporter of CPEG, Marcia Rothenberg, both died this year.

Above is a short tribute to Mel including links to some of the many CPEG papers, reports, and activities that he participated in over the years.

In Love and Sadness,

Ron Baiman
For the Chicago Political Economy Group

02/28/2023

The Political Economy of Geoengineering or Direct Climate Cooling

The Political Economy of Geoengineering or Direct Climate Cooling

By Ron Baiman and Andrew Lockley

Reviewer 2 does Geoengineering Podcast on Local cooling, Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) and Carbon Direct Removal (CDR)

Some of the topics talked about in the podcast:

1)US Climate policy,

2) Radical or heterodox economics, Neoclassical or orthodox economics, and the DICE model,

3)The need for urgent direct climate cooling to have any impact on reducing climate harm in the short-run (at least) the next few decades,

4) Discussions of local versus global, high leverage versus low leverage, with economic costs or benefits, direct climate cooling methods,

5) Discussion of net-zero warming plateau even as ocean uptake of carbon continues, to the disconnect between climate scientists and activists like us who are “screaming hair on fire” that only direct climate cooling can reduce climate harm now and the earlier “marching orders” that politicians and general public received that doing something about climate means “checking the box” on emissions cuts or net-zero,

6)How the long-run GHG reduction and removal coupled with natural regeneration is not going to happen (at least not expeditiously at scale) without massive transfers of funding and technology from rich to poor countries of well above $4 T per year,

7)How this expeditious transfer will not occur without a mandatory global cap and trade regime like Kyoto that transferred $303 B in mandatory CDM offset funding mostly to China, compared to the purely voluntary Paris Accord GCF voluntary donation efforts that have raised only $ 18 B,

8)How the EU that continued the Kyoto mandatory regime is only major region in the world to actually reduce GHG emissions since 1990,

9)Why focusing on and debating SAI as a single binary yes or no choice on climate cooling is ill informed and counterproductive to the cause of urgently focusing on and prioritizing direct climate cooling now,

10)As we work on GHG removal and natural regeneration so that we can emerge from our current energy and material “hunter gatherer” industrial civilization “Sinai” to the sustainable and potentially much more equitable renewable energy and materials “farmer cultivator” industrial civilization “promised land” in the long-run.

Podcast and links to reference papers here:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/local-cooling-sai-cdr-baiman/id1529459393?i=1000598002442

10/29/2022

Dear Friends,

For the record, just because the Trumpies have turned election fraud into a big lie doesn't mean that all is well with US elections!

We wanted to get this out before the 2022 election to show that no matter who wins the election, this pattern persists and strongly suggests consistent political interference in US election vote counting benefiting Republicans for almost two decades.

2020 Federal elections Unadjusted exit poll (UEP) data (publicly gathered from publicly available UEP election night screenshots), as in past US elections going back to 2004, displayed a inexplicable "red shift" concentrated in battle ground states that cannot be explained as radom statistical or inadvertent general methodological exit polling error.

Data and analysis here:

By Ron Baiman, Peter Peckarsky, and Jonathan Simon Oct. 24, 2022 For the record, just because the Trumpies have turned election fraud into a big lie doesn't mean that all is well with US elections! We wanted to get this out before the 2022 election to show that no matter who wins the election, this....

03/27/2022

Our Two Climate Crises Challenge: Urgent Cooling and Long-Run GHG Removal & Ecological Regeneration

We are facing both a short-term emergency cooling crisis and a long-term Green House Gas (GHG) drawdown planetary ecological crisis. We must address both. The first requires emergency direct cooling, or temporary “triage” or a “tourniquet, for our bleeding planet”. The second requires rapid GHG emissions reductions and drawdown and natural planetary regeneration that realistically will take at least a few decades and may take a century or more. Conflating the challenge and opportunity of the second crisis with a response to the first crisis will not produce a rapid and credible global response to the second crisis because of structural economic inequity and fossil fuel dependency that is deeply embedded in the current global economy. Realistically, we need emergency direct cooling to address the first crisis and a long-term binding global cap and trade “emissions trading system” (ETS) to address the second. The Florin proposal that conditions Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) direct cooling on credible GHG emissions and drawdown is a step in the right direction, but omits other direct cooling methods and effectively makes the deployment of SAI contingent on a global ETS that may not be possible before the deployment of SAI becomes necessary. Rather than conflating our two climate crises, or conditioning the solution of the first on a solution to the second, we need to address both on an emergency basis by putting all options on the table as called for in the Healthy Planet Action Coalition (HPAC) proposal.



Draft paper forthcoming in the Review of Radical Political Economics can be accessed here: https://www.cpegonline.org/post/our-two-climate-crises-challenge

01/04/2022

Kuttner on Thomas Piketty_The Making of a Socialist

Comrades,

In case you didn't catch this. Piketty's theory was Neoclassical but his empirical work on inequality was/is outstanding. Kuttner does a nice review of the implications in this piece: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/books/review/time-for-socialism-thomas-piketty.html

Wyden, Bernie, Warren were/are absolutely right - without a robust wealth tax and more (as Kuttner/Piketty who is no longer just left of center but apparently a strident democratic socialist) it's going to be hard/impossible to keep inequality from continuing to grow (and destroy democracy) under capitalism!

Happy New Year!

Ron Baiman
Chicago DSA

Piketty’s “Time for Socialism” is a collection of recent pieces criticizing the maldistribution of wealth in the West and tracing his own political evolution.