THE HAMMER OF THOR… AND LIZ AND BARBRA AND GEORGE AND KAMALA
Lately, I’ve returned to my roots in investigative journalism. I’m trying to get to the bottom to a recurrent episode of collective madness where every four years a marauding posse of celebrities, media figures, and supreme court justices go rampaging through the political landscape w...
Because the collapse of Lehman in Sept. 2008 serves as such a convenient inflection point, it's easy to forget that the Great Recession started at least nine months earlier, and that the shadow banking system started to unravel more than a year earlier. This also underscores the offensiveness of the many economic and political bigwigs who protested that "Nobody saw this coming" when things really got bad in the fall of 2008. Many credible analysts saw everything that was coming. I wrote about the dire implications of the unfolding crisis at least seven times before Lehman collapsed ( here, here, here, here,here, here, and here). I suspect that many of those who proclaimed to be blindsided actually knew better, but hoped the stock market (which made a new high just two months before the recession began) wouldn't notice. It's also possible -- though terrifying -- that the Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke, who persistently described the housing crisis as "contained," was so blinkered by non-reality-based economics that he actually didn't see it coming.
A couple of predictions I made back then did not come to pass. Most notably, I predicted that the harsh economy would lead to a new appreciation of safety nets and other protections afforded by the government. Instead, we saw the rise of the Tea Party, whose members call for the dismantling of safety nets and regulations.
So here we are, six years later, with the markets once again at an all time high and the economy still mired in what might best be described as a depression. Margin debt is back to pre-collapse levels, the big banks are bigger than ever, and the rich are richer than ever. Yet the average American household remains tapped out, and struggles with a real income just a bit more than it was in 1973. So, in a few months, get ready to hear, once again, that "nobody saw this coming."
The American Meteorological Society names Fire and Flood its book of the year for 2023, awarding it the Louis J Batton Author's Award.
"Eugene Linden wrote his first story on climate change, for Time magazine, in 1988; it was just the beginning of his investigative work, exploring all ramifications of this impending disaster. Fire and Flood represents his definitive case for the prosecution as to how and why we have arrived at our current dire pass, closing with his argument that the same forces that have confused the public’s mind and slowed the policy response are poised to pivot with astonishing speed, as long-term risks have become present-day realities and the cliff’s edge is now within view.
Starting with the 1980s, Linden tells the story, decade by decade, by looking at four clocks that move at different speeds: the reality of climate change itself; the scientific consensus about it, which always lags reality; public opinion and political will, which lag farther still; and, arguably, most importantly, business and finance. Reality marches on at its own pace, but the public will and even the science are downstream from the money, and Fire and Flood shows how devilishly effective monied climate-change deniers have been at slowing and even reversing the progress of our collective awakening. When a threat means certain but future disaster, but addressing it means losing present-tense profit, capitalism's response has been sadly predictable.
Now, however, the seasons of fire and flood have crossed the threshold into plain view. Linden focuses on the insurance industry as one loud canary in the coal mine: fire and flood zones in Florida and California, among other regions, are now seeing what many call climate redlining. The whole system is teetering on the brink, and the odds of another housing collapse, for starters, are much higher than most people understand. There is a path back from the cliff, but we must pick up the pace. Fire and Flood shows us why, and how." From Catalog Copy
