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.

03/07/2021

Eight “Dems” voting against gradual minimum wage increase to $15 an hour! Hartmann is now using the term “corrupt Dems” rather than the MSM preferred “moderate Dems” - as though doing the bidding of your donors instead what a vast majority of voters want is somehow “moderate”. Alternatively, they’ve been brainwashed by Neoclassical (standard) economics to really believe that raising the minimum wage would cost jobs. But this is really hard to believe at this point with so much evidence to the contrary, including an IL IN study that Joe Persky and I did back in 2010.

Eight dems in the US Senate just voted against even allowing a subsequent vote on the $15 minimum wage.

Shameful, embarrassing and disgusting. A party that can't maintain discipline on an issue this important isn't the party for working people.

To quote their own platform:

"Democrats will fight to raise wages for working people and improve job quality and security, including by raising the federal minimum wage so it reaches $15 an hour by 2026..."

02/19/2021

Yes!

Ms Bush added that healthcare, housing, food, clean water, and internet access, are all necessities that also ‘must be guaranteed to all’

12/08/2020

Ongoing. Solidarity with comrades in India!

Despite repression, a joint general strike by workers and farmers has shut down India. Over 250 million workers took part in the 26 November strike.

11/29/2020

Here’s another good one! “People assume that achieving a certain goal or winning the lottery will bring lasting happiness, he said, but it rarely does. “Most of the frameworks for happiness conclude that there are four things required: perceived control, perceived progress, connectedness (meaning the depths of relationships) and being part of something bigger than yourself.” and: “In 2013, he announced that the company would eliminate all titles and managers to embrace a “holacratic” structure. A world without bosses had an appeal, but not to everyone. A few hundred employees, or 14 percent of the work force, uncomfortable in that structure, accepted a buyout and left.”

In the early days of online retailing, he realized that the key to success was making people feel comfortable and secure shopping on the internet.

11/29/2020

❤️ this! More accurately Rentierism.

Socialist-minded millennial heirs are trying to live their values by getting rid of their money.

11/27/2020

Wow!

Did you know Diego Maradona tried to form a union of professional footballers for years? The idea goes hand in hand with his decision to get faces of Leftwing leaders Che Guevara and Castro tattooed on his body. A staunch critic of US capitalism and the Catholic Church, the Argentine football legend...

11/22/2020

Picketing starts Tuesday 11/24/2020!

11/17/2020

Comment to a friend on 2020 Unadjusted Exit Polls (real exit polls before they're adjusted to match vote totals).
My friend posted meme below and asked: "From the Union of Concerned Scientists: the REAL Voter Suppression wasn't aimed at the Right. The direct target was the Left, with a special focus on minority voters. Why don't we hear more about this? Do you think these issues might impact on the down ballot races as well?"
My response: Yes, Unadjusted Exit Polls show (as usual) massive "red shift" (this has been the case at least since 2004, when I stated d**g this. Only time UEPs have random error (as they should) is in Rep primaries and such - not Dem primary in 2016 when inexplicable shift was against Bernie). Again, this time as in 2016 pre-polls were supposedly also way off - only this time more. UEPs were actually a bit closer but still Biden according to UEPS would have won a landslide not a squeaker. Wrong UEP weighting doesn't explain this as if this was the case deviation for Trump would have been matched by deviation against Biden - but for-Trump deviation is almost twice anti-Biden deviation. Could there have been some other systemic methodological error (seems like there is in US UEPs - not in other countries - every election), sure, but then you'd have to explain the huge outsize discrepancies in major swing states. These are not random or accidental errors. We're waiting to publicize as don't want to feed into Trump craziness - though our data appears to definitely disprove outlandish claims of massive ANTI-Trump irregularities!

10/30/2020

Yup

The real looting in America is 644 billionaires becoming much, much richer during the pandemic, while working families lost their jobs, health care and homes.

10/26/2020

Opening schools without extreme precautions
like daily testing and group tests of waste water and detailed tracking and isolation, is dangerous!

Tranmissions rise by 24 per cent within a month of children returning to classrooms, models using data from 131 countries show

10/20/2020

A nationwide operation of 1,300 local sites publishes coverage that is ordered up by Republican groups and corporate P.R. firms.