President Obama’s embrace of nuclear power as a “clean energy” source – coupled with his announcement last month of $8.3 billion in federal loan guarantees for the first nuclear reactors to be built in the United States since the 1970s – has been met with dismay by many of the president’s supporters as well as his usual critics.
For environmentalists, who generally back the president’s climate policy goals, the rebirth of nuclear power is a nightmare come true. They point to the risk of accidents, remembering the partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania in 1979 and the Soviet Union’s Chernobyl disaster seven years later. They draw attention to the serious environmental and health costs of uranium mining. Above all, they point to the unsolved problem of what to do with high-level radioactive waste generated by nuclear power plants.
What will the US do about climate policy? The ongoing paralysis in Congress makes it clear that failure actually is an option. For those who long for success, the best hope may be EPA regulation of carbon emissions. Yet far from setting an ambitious new course, EPA may be following the worst of traditional economics – effectively arguing, in opaquely technical language, that climate change isn’t such a big deal, so the right policy is to do almost nothing.
Nobody was surprised by the February 19 announcement of the resignation of Yvo de Boer as head of the UN’s climate talks. In Copenhagen, De Boer presided over the most chaotic, costly and in the end, fruitless attempt to negotiate a multilateral treaty in the history of global environmental governance.
In the wake of Copenhagen, climate activists, experts and leaders alike are asking “what way forward”? Some, like the South Centre’s Martin Khor, are gearing up for the next round of global talks, which will be held in Mexico in July. Others are refocusing energies on national or state level climate policy, including key states like California. Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, is hosting an alternative climate conference in April to build political support for the concept of “climate debt” and to press for a “declaration of the rights of mother nature.” De Boer himself has thrown in his lot with business—he will join KPMG as an advisor on global climate and sustainability.
Despite scepticism about its sustainability, attention is focused on evidence that the crisis of 2008-09 is behind us, because of the fiscal stimulus put in place by governments across the world. But figures from the International Labour Organization (ILO) indicate that the impact of the stimulus on employment is uneven. In its January 2010 update, the ILO estimates global unemployment at 212 million in 2009, or around 34 million above its 2007 level, with most of the increase having occurred during 2009. In sum, the impact of the fiscal stimuli delivered by many governments does not seem to be, as yet, adequate to stall, let alone reverse the employment decline resulting from the crisis. This increase in unemployment was unevenly distributed, with Developed Economies and the European Union, Central and South-Eastern Europe and former Soviet states, and Latin America and the Caribbean accounting for more than two-thirds of the increase in the number of unemployed during 2009. In other words, Asia and the Pacific were much less affected.
The Brazilian expression “Greek Present” (Presente de Grego) means unwelcome gift, an obvious reference to the infamous Trojan Horse. The current crisis in Greece might show that the euro was just one of those presents. If the European Union (EU) does not provide sufficient resources to preclude not just a default, but also and more importantly a profound recession, then the advantages of the euro for Greece and other countries in the periphery of Europe should be seriously questioned.
The Greek financial crisis is an exemplar case of the perils of macroeconomic orthodoxy, and of the exceedingly narrow measure of the changes that have taken place since the global financial crisis started. The same conventional ideas about fiscal adjustment are repeated, no matter that their record in the past has been dismal. The price tag of learning, once again, about the limitations of conventional wisdom is the staggering human suffering, in this case of the people in Greece, that European authorities are demanding.
President Obama’s decision to support what is now called the “Volcker rule” has opened up a Pandora’s box of difficult issues—and may yet force policymakers to face some hard truths. It is unlikely the president fully understood that this would happen. What’s less likely is that some on his economics team didn’t understand. Increasingly, there is a sense that the combination of the old Clinton guard, most of them deeply linked at one time or other to the banking community and the deregulation movement itself, and a somewhat conservative University of Chicago group of Washington newcomers, led by Austan Goolsbee and Cass Sunstein, are not providing the president a full plate of options or adequate analyses of those he does get.
A number of the TripleCrisis contributors have joined an international coalition calling for the institution of an international financial transaction tax. The proposed tax, dubbed the “Robin Hood Tax,” would levy a small charge on trades in financial assets in order to potentially reduce speculation in financial markets, and generate significant revenue that could be invested in public projects or deficit reduction.