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Notable/Quotable: Climate change causes inflation

2/2/2022, 9:57 pm
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Excerpt from The Atlantic:

The Rise of Greenflation
Extreme weather and energy uncertainty are already sending prices soaring.
By Robinson Meyer

Now, Biden is not a king, nor does he have an alchemist on staff. But some economists believe that he accidentally did something similar last year when he passed a $1.9 trillion relief bill into an economy still constrained by the pandemic. Flush with $1,400 stimulus checks but stuck at home, consumer spending on durable goods surged. But where was all that stuff supposed to come from? America’s overeager excess of dollars leapt into the world, chasing goos from factories shut down by the Delta variant and ports clogged with shipping containers.

But it also went chasing after … scarce lumber from Canadian forests. Some of the biggest causes of today’s inflation do not seem related to the sudden surfeit of dollars. The surge in dollars can’t explain why gas prices are so high or why coffee prices are spiking. Something else is going on.

For years, scientists and economists have warned that climate change could cause massive shortages of major commodities, such as wine, chocolate, and cereals. Financial regulators have cautioned against a “disorderly transition,” in which the world commits only haphazardly to leaving fossil fuels, so it does not invest enough in their zero-carbon replacements. In an economy as prosperous and powerful as America’s, those problems are likely to show up—at least at first—not as empty grocery shelves or bankrupt gas stations but as price increases.

That phenomenon, long hypothesized, may be starting to actually arrive. Over the past year, unprecedented weather disasters have caused the price of key commodities to spike, and a volatile oil-and-gas market has allowed Russia and Saudi Arabia to exert geopolitical force.

“This climate-change risk to the supply chain—it’s actually real. It is happening now,” Mohamed Kande, the U.S. and global advisory leader at the accounting firm PwC, told me.

I wonder if this is going to be the official narrative of the Biden administration. The official line will be inflation isn't their fault, they're doing everything to can to fight climate change!
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2/5/2022, 1:01 pm
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2/5/2022, 4:37 pm
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Who knew that the government printing presses employed by the Federal Reserve caused the climate to change? That's some astounding Scientific™ conclusion. But we must trust the Science™.

I'm not sure about how scarce lumber is in Canada but it's certainly not scarce here in Oregon.

Of course, we must trust the Science™. Anything else is an Insurrection™.
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