Flaming madness

I knew I was in trouble when I read this summary of the Fed's reluctance to transform the U.S. monetary policy in preparedness for possible future climate-change shocks:
[A]ccording to the Fed, severe weather isn’t new and climate change isn’t their responsibility. The American agencies that oversee the financial system have decided to ignore climate change. . . .
nodded in relieved agreement, then noticed that it was the furious summary of a Hawaii senator who pronounced it "garbage." And noticed that it was featured in a Wall Street Journal article that seemed to agree with the honorable senator, in part because:
Research from some regional Fed banks has pointed to considerable disruption in coming years if nothing is done to mitigate rising global temperatures, which scientists broadly agree are driven by human activity.
The devil you say!  Research points to a future problem if nothing is done?  Do these awful conservatives want us to ignore research about the future now?  I realize the existing climate data don't yet support the catastrophic predictions placed before a breathless public over the last two decades, but if you research the future instead of letting yourself be distracted by the boring present and past, you can see there is some very alarming news out there.  Something's got to be done.  Each federal agency must stand by to do its part.

Fed Chairman Powell doesn't actually adopt the bare-knuckled rhetorical style of the Hawaiian senator's summary.  Instead, he seems to be trying to smooth this panic over rather than talking plain sense to spooked, irrational people who probably would only become more hysterical in the presence of declarative statements in plain English. He makes some friendly noise about how severe weather events sometimes have an impact on the economy, and the Fed stands ready to take them into account, as usual, if they happen at some point. He also "played down climate-change issues as a high-priority issue for monetary policy." What criminal lassitude! Doesn't he know that
Some regional Fed leaders have said the central bank may need to take on the issue more aggressively, as some central banks in Europe are doing. Philadelphia Fed leader Patrick Harker said last November that “there is no question we’re going to have to start factoring this more and more” into how the central bank thinks about the future of the economy.
Well, I'm second to none in my admiration for European economic policy, and I'm all for factoring things into how we think about the future of stuff, and aggressive action is always best even if you don't know quite what to do.  Nevertheless, I found the following foot-dragging approach a bit easier to understand:
Others at the Fed believe climate change isn’t something that matters much for monetary policy. “It’s hard for me to imagine the climate changing sufficiently to affect the next three to five years and how we look at the potential growth rate of the U.S. economy,” Minneapolis Fed leader Neel Kashkari said in a March interview.
It looks like we've got some virtuous, caring people who find it easy to imagine how something might have an effect on something else, even if they find it hard to let us know what they're imagining about it these days and why we should care. Then we have some bad people who are finding whatever it is rather harder to imagine, and who in any case can't see that anyone has entrusted them with the task of letting their minds wander in those regions, lost, let alone jacking with the nation's monetary policy in an effort to have an effect on something that may or may not happen according to predictive models that have failed abjectly over the last 20 years.

But . . . but . . . what about preparedness? Really, if these guys must engage in preparedness, I'd rather they geared up to combat the known, predictable, and even currently tangible effects of redistributivist socialist nonsense in aid of further nonsense.

11 comments:

Christopher B said...

According to the latest predictions by the experts, AOC and Beto, we've only got a decade before the world ends so why worry about the effects of policy 3 to 5 years in the future?

Grim said...

...aggressive action is always best even if you don't know quite what to do.

We can't be sure it's the right thing, but let's do it as hard as possible!

Texan99 said...

My favorite bleat on the crisis: We have only 12 years to transform our world fundamentally, failing which we will no longer be able to recognize the world we live in.

I don't think these people listen to the words coming out of their own mouths.

Texan99 said...

I didn't make that up, either. It was DeBlasio: "Let’s be clear, we have until 2030 to change things fundamentally, or our lives won’t be the same."

raven said...

So the "more we change things fundamentally", the more things will stay the same?

Hmmm....

remember when "the lunatics are running the asylum" was a joke?

Texan99 said...

We have to burn the village in order to save it. One thing is for sure: we are not destroying things because we hate them! Stop saying we are! We're nice people and we're only trying to help.

Grim said...

"Let’s be clear, we have until 2030 to change things fundamentally, or our lives won’t be the same."

I just have to sit here and look at that sentence for a minute.

Aggie said...

There needs to be a great big Armageddon countdown clock in Times Square starting from now. The panic as we get closer and closer to Zero Hour, with nothing disastrous unfolding, normal climate abounding, would be terrific entertainment. As we get closer, there could be a large, bubbling pot of tar with a pile of feathers waiting......

ymarsakar said...

The Federal Reserve tells the US President when he is fired, not the other way around.

I was recommended the book "None Dare Call it Conspiracy".... well none dare except for those like me recently.

ymarsakar said...

There will be some kind of climate change as the Earth transitions to the new stage of existence.

Humans think they caused it and thus can stop it. When the Sun Darkens for more than 2 days at a time... maybe people will rethink things.

The Global Warming cult is not entirely a smoke screen. Deep Underground Military Bases stands testament to that. People have already prepared. The rest... green procedures and profit margin cons, those are indeed the outer layer of the onion, a smokescreen or stalking horse.

ymarsakar said...

My sources predicted that something will happen to the sun, chemical trails are being sprayed in the air to dampen and block out the cosmic rays, and temperatures will grow a lot colder in places.

Frostpunk basically. Or perhaps even Game of Thrones Winter. The signs are there, it just usually doesn't make sense until one sees the complete picture. Humans have the ability to see the future, they just sometimes download it as art and fiction.

The difference between a normal plane contrail and weather engineered chemicals sprayed out, is very obvious. A contrail is not that long and disappears in a few minutes, progressively. A chemical trail spreads out, into a cloud, disperses, and is stationary like other clouds, unless moved by the wind.

Where are all these operations and secret combinations getting their money? Well, where is the Federal Reserve getting their money... heh.