Last week, Glenn D. Rudebusch of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco released a short report describing how “the consequences of climate change are relevant for the Fed’s monetary and financial policy.” The report describes the “fundamental market failure” of fossil fuel prices not including climate costs and the fiscal risks associated with climate impacts, like loan losses at banks due to extreme weather-caused bankruptcies, stranded fossil fuel assets, and the loss of coastal real estate. Together, the report says, these risks “could threaten the stability of the financial system as a whole.”
In other words, climate change could collapse the entire economy. In a sane world, this would be a pretty clear indication that it’s not climate action that’s economically risky, but inaction.
Of course, that isn’t the preferred position of the Trump administration, which is perhaps one reason why the president announced he’s going to nominate Stephen Moore for a seat on the Federal Reserve. You may remember Moore as one of the many deniers named Steve, or for his recent (sarcastic) admission that private funding biases research.
Moore is a long-time Koch crony, having founded the Club For Growth, and did a decade-long stint at CATO before moving to the Heritage Foundation. But a career spent lobbying for the interests of the super-rich is only the first on a long list of reasons why Moore is less than qualified for a position on the Federal Reserve board.
For starters, the board supposed to be an independent body, free from political interference, because our economy isn’t the kind of thing you want to put in the hands of ideologically-driven idiots. Stephen Moore, by contrast, wrote a book called “Trumponomics,” and once called Trump the “Mick Jagger of politics.” He also has suggested that Trump, whose expertise on economics includes confusing tariffs with interest rates and believing he coined the phrase “priming the pump,” should be awarded a Nobel Prize in economics.
Being a sycophant is one thing. The important question is: Does Moore have a good track record with monetary policy? He owes over $75,000 in back taxes, but just because he’s bad at economics on the personal level doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be trusted with the nation’s finances right?
Well, when it comes to macroeconomics, Moore is no better. He was a major proponent of the failed “Kansas Experiment,” to drastically cut taxes, which ended with the state losing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues while also lagging in economic growth. Shocker!
Moore can’t manage his own finances, and his economics cost Kansas millions. So what does Trump see in him? Apparently, Trump was smitten with an op-ed Moore wrote for the WSJ that claimed the country is in the midst of deflation, and the answer is a “commodity-price rule used successfully by the former Fed chief Paul Volker.”
The problem is that neither of those things are remotely true. As Catherine Rampell at the Washington Post explained, we’re not experiencing deflation, and even Paul Volker himself has no idea what supposed rule Moore ascribes to him. It’s that kind of blatantly dishonest writing that’s earned Moore the distinction of being banned from the pages of the Kansas City Star.
What might Moore think about climate change’s risk to the economy? Well, he co-wrote a book praising fossil fuels with another failed Trump nominee, in which they claim that fracking is so good for the economy it’s like discovering a cure for cancer.
Here in reality, though, fracking uses dozens of carcinogenic chemicals, making it more like a cause of cancer than a cure. But that sort of exactly-backwards thinking seems to be what Trump looks for in a nominee. Because while most of us have to live a life tethered to facts and reality, Trump obviously prefers those who are unMoored.
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