Femicide and fossil fuels
Ever Osorio and Martin Weiner on the policies failing to protect us
This week, the UN Climate Change Conference gathered in Azerbaijan—a major oil and gas exporter—and Donald Trump picked former congressman Lee Zeldin to head an Environmental Protection Agency primed to roll back its own regulations. Our response to the climate emergency, Martin Weiner writes, “combines frantic activity with sclerotic inaction.” How did it get this bad?
Meanwhile, another president-elect is now a month in office. More than 52 million Mexicans voted for Claudia Sheinbaum, writes Ever Osorio. But how will the country’s first woman president confront the social roots of a femicide crisis?
We have plenty of bright ideas. But as Weiner and Osorio point out, policies don’t mean much without compliance.
Petro-Capitalist Status Quo
Martin Weiner
In his 1991 paper “To Slow or Not to Slow: The Economics of the Greenhouse Effect,” the neoclassical economist William Nordhaus weighed the relative monetary benefits of greenhouse gas reductions (“crop yields, land lost to ocean, and so forth”) against its cost—a conceptual aggregate of the financial “pain” that a too drastic, sudden transition would impose. Rushing headlong to restrict fossil fuel production would cause more harm than the small percentage of reductions was worth, Nordhaus argued; moreover, the miracle of perpetual economic growth meant that future generations could be expected to more easily afford the extensive infrastructure and technology needed to reduce emissions.
Despite criticism that his model failed to incorporate data from the burgeoning field of climate modeling, Nordhaus won the Nobel prize for economics in 2018, and his position came to replace climate denialism as the prevailing argument against delaying the phase out of fossil fuels. “Programmatic overshoot” had been unleashed.
Mexico’s First Woman President Inherits a Crisis of Femicide
Ever Osorio
This July, two of the three party-backed candidates in the Mexican presidential elections were women. Claudia Sheinbaum, the candidate of the ruling left-wing party, MORENA (an acronym for “Movement for National Regeneration”) won with between 58.3 and 60.7 percent of the vote, the highest percentage in Mexico’s democratic history. As Adriana Piatti-Crocker has recently argued in this forum, her triumph is not a fluke but the result of gender parity constitutional reforms implemented in the last decades. However, a paradox marks this historical triumph: while more than 52 million Mexicans voted for their first woman president, on average, 10 girls and women are murdered in Mexico every day. How to reconcile these coexisting realities?