The Guardian reported yesterday:
England has suffered its second worst harvest on record – with fears growing for next year – after heavy rain last winter hit production of key crops including wheat and oats.
On staple crops, England's wheat haul is estimated to be 10m tonnes, or 21%, down on 2023, according to analysis of the latest government data by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU).
Whilst the Treasury obsesses about its spreadsheets and the City confuses economic activity with private equity exploitation, in the real world on which we all actually depend there is a crisis going on as a result of climate change.
The UK's environment is in crisis. And it won't be better next year. I can tell you, living as I do in a deeply agricultural area, that rainfall over the last weeks is playing havoc with planting for next year in waterlogged soils. The flood overflow systems are already very high around here: another metre or so and I will have never seen them higher, and this is October, not March.
I took this picture at Welney wildlife reserve in. the fens last weekend - that signpost should be three metres above water levels right now - and is not. No one is going to walk alongside that 'drain', as it is called, for some time:
For decades, the demand for financial returns has meant that we have ignored economic reality. We will not be able to do so f0r much longer: it is coming back to bite us very hard.
And, for the record, there is a real inflation risk in this - and changing the interest rate will do absolutely nothing to alter that fact, whatever Andrew Bailey might think. People need to be fed. They have to be fed. They cannot live off higher interest rates that will only make the lives of the most impacted harder still.
It really is time that economists started walking about and noticing that there is a world beyond their numbers, and that's where the real issues are.
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Whats the punch line of the joke about 3 people stuck with only a tin of food to eat and no tin opener.
the economist then says ‘first imagine a tin opener’
Very much agree.
And it is what MMT says. It’s real resources that matter, not the human construct of money.
Neoliberalism deliberately ignores the world beyond economics, claiming that the “invisible hand” of the market is what naturally controls them. It’s nonsense, and is designed to stop people from interfering in “free market” economics. Neoliberalism as no conscience. Profits before people.
Hmm – and whats with this change in the Northern lights – my brother sent me pictures of them from Tipperary yesterday night?
Economists just help reinforce bubbles that those who rule insulate themselves with.
Massive sun activity this past week combined with different solar conditions being extant as we move around in the solar system which itself moves around in broader space. Earth, sun, moon, stars, all are in a state of flux and not fixed. Often we simply don’t notice any changes but recent ones are prolonged and severe enough for them to be increasingly impossible to ignore. Although not universally popular, Suspicious Observers can be good for info on auroras etc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYyZdiRGwak
We are heading into a solar maximum that looks to be significantly stronger than expected, with several strong (X class) solar flares this year and coronal mass ejections. The solar cycles has been gradually weakening since the 1960s.
The aurora in the south of the UK and similar latitudes is pretty rare and often fleeting. Part of it is I think social media quickly alerting people to it when it happens (I saw several neighbours out last night as I was walking home, alerted by a WhatsApp group) and mobile phones with improved cameras producing spectacular images, much better than the naked eye.
Just for the avoidance of doubt, variations in the solar cycle on a timescale of 11 years or so has next to no impact on global warming in the last century or so.
The solar cycle is approaching it’s maximum as part of the usual ~10 year cycle, hence the bright auroras.
I have to wonder if there will be a winter at all at the end of 2025 — a combination of El Niño, the solar maximum, and the predicted Blue Ocean Events should be quite spectacular…
I would also note that global wheat prices are still where they were 5 years ago… but the costs to grow that wheat have not stood still; hard times on the farm.
Looking back a decade, wheat prices are largely unchanged, gas prices unchanged, oil down 20%. It does make you wonder where all this inflation has come from? Well, US stock prices are up almost 3-fold…. that tells us that higher prices that we are paying are being captured by corporations – so much for “competition” delivering value for consumers.
Agreed
An economic world that is built on the foundation of homo economicus, an invisible hand, without externalities, is hardly going to provide any real world picture.
It’s not even through a glass darkly.
As for a system predicated on perpetual growth on a finite planet, which idiot thought that one up ?
Whatever happened to the Mile end economists?
One is looking for the remains of his house right now
I think we need to talk more about the balance of payments as the undiscussed elephant in the room. I would like to explore why it is this issue, which used to be considered crucial, is now a matter of indifference. One reason, I surmise is significant is that in the US, the balance of payments is dismissed, and we simply follow their conventional wisdom. But the US is a special case, as the world reserve currency. The Us is in a position to be indifferent to the issue (although to remain securely untroubled it had to start fracking at scale). The Us is a special case. We aren’t. I propose that the way you don’t tackle this problem is the British way; stake your future on the City. That is a big, big mistake. I would be very interested to hear viewson this hypothesis.
As an economist I agree wholeheartedly!
Thank you to John S and John.
This City bankster agrees.
I remember growing up in the 1970s and 1980s how the balance of payments and trade figures made the headlines. That seem to disappear from the news from the 1990s.
We got used to floating rates
I was not yet 10 when Labiour devalued in ’67 (as I recall) and I can still remember the media shock now
I hypothesise that Floating rates do not fix an open-ended reliance on imports from across the world, in almost everything.
There is no such thing as a Post Agricultural economy
I noticed this at the start of February this year, when I was enroute from London on a bus, back up to Scotland. I was absolutely horrified at the amount of destruction I saw all the way up the east coast side. Rivers wildly overrunning their banks, mud-coloured and miserable, farmers’ field still underwater, several weeks AFTER the big rainstorms had come and gone …although it WAS still raining the day I traveled. The bus crossed the Tweed back into Scotland, and it seemed to take ages because the river was basically bankless. Just a sea of mud. I thought to myself at the time: we are in trouble here.
We are in trouble