Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
If Italy is an example, it may be that in case of a truly serious climate emergency, governments may finally decide to react and do something serious. At the same time, the same people who are now thundering against “climate alarmism” would fall in line and ask for national unity against the climate threat.
Sometimes, my American friends tell me how lucky I am because I live in a country where the top politicians haven’t embraced climate science denial as they did in the US. But things are changing: climate is becoming a politically explosive issue in Italy.
Even if you don’t follow Italian politics, the recent upset in the elections is significant. Italy’s Berlusconi was the first of the right populists to win power, and now Italy seems to have developed an immunity toward their propaganda strategy: “The idea is to target the lowest cultural level of the population. Use scare tactics, find enemies of all sorts, demonize them, then promise safety in the hands of a right-wing government.”
In the end, Italians seem to have reasoned that their political system is so deeply corrupt to be unrecoverable, at least in terms of the traditional political forces (e.g. the left). So, they rewarded a force claiming to be composed of honest citizens – in a way amateurs rather than professional politicians.
The Italian government is doing something that challenges our ideas about the nature of government debt and taxation. What if governments don’t need to borrow or tax to pay their bills? In my blog post for this week read why a sovereign currency makes this possible and even desirable:
