By Michael Hoexter
On July 10, the National Day of Climate Mobilization declared by The Climate Mobilization, I gave a talk about the role of money and morality in effective climate action. The setting was the gymnasium of the St. Robert Catholic School in Sacramento, California. A parishioner at the adjoining St. Robert Church, Vince Valdez, has been spearheading the development of a Climate Mobilization group in Sacramento, in part inspired by Pope Francis’s “Laudatio Si” encyclical.
Though these are really lecture notes and very simple (no graphics), I think this is one possible way to explain the role of morality, politics, and modern money to a non-technical audience. I am careful not to say that morality exactly dictates fiat money creation and destruction but the political representatives of powerful interest groups (like the military industrial complex) need to wrap their various giveaways to defense contractors in terms of the shared moral value of “national defense”. I made this clearer in some of my remarks.
A shift in the hierarchy of moral values as expressed in US politics would need to occur for the return to a full-employment economy in the process of refashioning the energy and land-use basis of our societies. Both the values of full employment for the current generation and climate protection for future generations would need to be expressed more explicitly in the budgeting of the Federal Government and, before then, in the political agitation of groups such as The Climate Mobilization and others.
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