The Atlantic: Forget President Biden, Climate Change is Causing Inflation

Guest essay by Eric Worrall

According to The Atlantic, Biden didn’t cause inflation by dumping crazy amounts of money into the economy, the inflation occurred because climate change prevented the economy from responding the way it was supposed to.

The World Isn’t Ready for Climate-Change-Driven Inflation

Extreme weather and energy uncertainty are already sending prices soaring.

By Robinson Meyer

…

Over the past year, U.S. consumer prices have risen 7 percent, their fastest rate in nearly four decades, frustrating households and tanking President Joe Biden’s approval rating. And no wonder. High inflation corrodes the basic machinery of the economy, unsettling consumers, troubling companies, and preventing everyone from making sturdy plans for the future.

…

Now, Biden is not a king, nor does he have an alchemist on staff. But some economists believe that he accidentally did something similar last year when he passed a $1.9 trillion relief bill into an economy still constrained by the pandemic. Flush with $1,400 stimulus checks but stuck at home, consumer spending on durable goods surged. But where was all that stuff supposed to come from? America’s overeager excess of dollars leapt into the world, chasing goos from factories shut down by the Delta variant and ports clogged with shipping containers.

But it also went chasing after … scarce lumber from Canadian forests. Some of the biggest causes of today’s inflation do not seem related to the sudden surfeit of dollars. The surge in dollars can’t explain why gas prices are so high or why coffee prices are spiking. Something else is going on.

For years, scientists and economists have warned that climate change could cause massive shortages of major commodities, such as wine, chocolate, and cereals. Financial regulators have cautioned against a “disorderly transition,” in which the world commits only haphazardly to leaving fossil fuels, so it does not invest enough in their zero-carbon replacements. In an economy as prosperous and powerful as America’s, those problems are likely to show up—at least at first—not as empty grocery shelves or bankrupt gas stations but as price increases.

That phenomenon, long hypothesized, may be starting to actually arrive. Over the past year, unprecedented weather disasters have caused the price of key commodities to spike, and a volatile oil-and-gas market has allowed Russia and Saudi Arabia to exert geopolitical force.

…

Read more: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/02/greenflation-prices-inflation-climate-change-coffee-lumber/621456/

Obviously the solution is for President Biden to keep shutting down pipelines and mining leases and dump even more money into the economy, until the supply chain magically heals itself and inflation eases.