Climate

Thursday

Joel Kotkin

The battle of the oligarchs

Money and power have rarely been strangers; often nations are made to shudder when the ruling elites battle each other. Britain’s late empire was divided between liberal manufacturers and aristocratic interests, whose conflicts hastened the rise of the Labour Party and the end of empire. In the United States, opposition to powerful trusts defined progressive politics for decades, ultimately laying the basis for the New Deal and a greater scope for government. In the West today we are witnessing a similar divide among the uber-rich class — epitomized by Elon Musk’s embrace of Donald Trump — that is already reshaping politics. Until 2016 the US establishment, both Republican and Democratic, embraced similar views on national security, global trade and multilateral institutions.

oligarchs

Thursday

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The climate ‘calamity’

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” George Santayana wrote in The Life of Reason, published in 1905. The philosopher’s aphorism, somewhat hackneyed after nearly a century and a quarter, and always true only in a limited way, assumes that men are capable of directing history to a certain end, while diverting it from other ones. Santayana was a very wise man and certainly no ideologue. Nevertheless, his maxim shares something with ideological thinking. Both assume that men are collectively aware of the realities of the present time and their possibilities, capable of determining where they wish their societies to go in future and in what shape or form, and then — with varying degrees of success — guiding them there.

climate

Friday

Ben Judah

Europe is not a museum

The temperature, at last, is starting to drop — and for Europeans that only means one thing: peak season is over. The crowds in the piazzas and on the beaches are starting to thin. And in the tavernas that were TikTokked you can finally think about getting a table. It’s time. Like the clockwork of migrating swallows — the Americans are going home. And knowing you can finally count on a breeze and far fewer strong-dollar spenders than a few weeks earlier, a stingier tipping class of European grande bourgeoisie in West London or the 8ème arrondissement — that has long since given up on July and August for the Mediterranean — is now contemplating a holiday. It’s still, however, at least conversationally, Europe season in the United States for a few more weeks.

europe museum america

Tuesday

Rupert Darwall

China, not America, has the real emissions problem

Hailed as America’s first comprehensive climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act was signed by President Biden earlier this summer. It had been thirty years and sixty-five days since President George H.W. Bush signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Rio de Janeiro. The UNFCCC’s objective was to stabilize concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere “at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system,” a threshold that the convention left undefined. In 1992, the average concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 356.54 parts per million by volume (ppmv).