The Political Divide

“It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light.” Aristotle (died, 384 BC)

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Food for Thought: Can political realignment result in depolarization?

An August 3, 2022, opinion in Persuasion by Francis Fukuyama suggests overcoming the political divide will require a political realignment in the U.S. He says issues that face us at present like “inflation, racial and gender inequality, crime, drug use, climate change, immigration, and the like” will become “much harder if not impossible to solve if Americans fundamentally do not trust one another and seek to block any solution offered by the other side.” Fukuyama analyzes several solutions, including:

• Institutional changes, especially to our electoral laws, that would restructure the incentives under which politicians operate;
• The growth of a third, centrist party that grabs the middle ground from the extreme wings of the existing two; and
• Grassroots movements to build moderation and understanding from the bottom up.

It is a lengthy read, but worth the time.

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How long is tomorrow for you?

Ari Wallach, the author of Longpath: Becoming the Great Ancestors Our Future Needs, was quoted as saying this in the August 15, 2022, issue of CEO Daily: “I wrote the book because after being a strategic consultant and leader of a company that is helping people think about tomorrow, I found that tomorrow for most people is just six to nine months out. But the issues we are dealing with are 60-to-90-year issues. We need to change how we think about these things…break them down, understand them…so we aren’t just putting the sandbags out.”

Climate Change

“We’ve dealt with acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer, and we can deal with this (climate), too. That won’t mean a return to the climate of a couple of decades ago—it’s too late for that, and things will definitely continue to get worse from here—but there are many reasons to believe humanity can still avoid a hellscape future. It will be a hard grind, but we can do it.” David Meyer in the August 5, 2022, issue of CEO Daily.

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J.P. Morgan’s Dimon: natural gas production doesn’t conflict with emissions reduction targets

An article on August 14, 2022, in Insider quotes J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon telling wealthy clients that “U.S. natural gas production does not conflict with long-term emission reduction targets.” He argues that natural gas produces half the emissions of coal but because of high oil and gas prices “the world is turning back to coal.” The story also quotes a story in Reuters where climate scientists say “the oil and gas industry is growing at a rate incompatible with the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.” J.P. Morgan was recently ranked as the world’s top fossil fuel financier in a report published by environmental groups.

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August 16 deadline for Colorado River cuts

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has given Western states until Tuesday, August 16, to present cuts to water use totaling between 2 million and 4 million acre feet (MAF). If the cuts presented are not satisfactory, the agency will impose its own. The Colorado River allocates 15 MAF of water each year to those states plus 1.5 MAF to Mexico. California’s allocation is 4.4 MAF. The cuts are necessary to avoid reaching dead pool, the level of water where it is no longer possible to send water downstream. According to an August 13, 2022, article in Axios, “The Colorado River Basin is in the 23rd year of a historic drought. Both Lake Powell and Lake Mead — the two largest reservoirs in the United States — are at historically low levels with a combined storage capacity of 28% of capacity," Climate change is recognized as contributing to the severity of the drought.

Future of Work / The Economy

Insights from Dr. Doom on inflation and monetary policy

In an interview in the August 12, 2022, issue of CEO Daily with Dr. Doom, the 94-year-old economist Henry Kauffman, he revealed these insights:

• “Monetary policy is still behind the curve and hasn’t caught up with the need to move forcefully and decisively to curb the inflationary momentum. The inflation rate is still way above market interest rates. The market is saying, it is almost daring, the Federal Reserve to ease up. But by not moving decisively, the Fed is increasing credit creation far beyond the growth of GDP.”
• Will inflation be as bad as it was in the late 1970s? “That is difficult to project. The more debt we pile on, and the more liberal monetary policy is in an inflationary period, the higher the risk.”
• Then why are markets celebrating? Why don’t they see the risk of a 1970s-style, decade-long debacle? “The market doesn’t want to recognize what happens in the next decade. It is much more interested in what happens in the next two months, three months. It is much more near-term looking. And in the near term, it is betting the Fed will back off.”

According to a January 13, 2022, story in Bloomberg, Kauffman was nicknamed ed Dr. Doom “for his bearish views and his criticism of government policy.”

Covid-19

Monkeypox is not Covid, but precautions are prudent

According to an August 3, 2022, article in the New York Times The Morning newsletter, “monkeypox is much less contagious and much less likely to be deadly than Covid. There are also vaccines and treatments originally developed for smallpox that work on monkeypox.” However, the article also says that “while monkeypox probably will not kill you, it can be excruciating enough that you want to avoid it nonetheless: It can cause pain that some patients compare to glass shards scraping against the skin.” Most people are not currently at serious risk of catching monkeypox, with the virus concentrated among gay and bisexual men for now.