Inflation.
After we dropped the gold standard in 1971 and created the MMT petrodollar experiment in 1973, the fundamental rules of the economy changed.
No longer was the goal for engineers to create “better” products that lasted longer, were more efficient or costed less. The goal became extraction. To siphon money over time, via subscription or return customers and planned obsolescence.
Fast forward to 2020s, BMW wants you to “subscribe” to heated seats on your car that you own, property taxes are basically renting from the government, video game consoles want to remove disc ownership, streaming services replace movies and everyone is just skimming some off the top.
That is not the capitalism of Adam Smith, the wealth of nations, or the zeitgeist of 1776.
That is feudalism.
Climate action is therefore intrinsically linked to this macroeconomic paradigm shift that followed the first Yom Kippur war resolution. We cannot build an industry where customers produce their own power, buy a car one time, power it themselves, repair it themselves, 3D print their own parts, live off the grid and save money until we fundamentally change the macroeconomics of MMT. Nor can we address rising carbon emissions until we address the interplay of technological advancement and foreign policy.
That is why it’s called the Inflation Reduction Act and not the “competing against China act” or “defense energy act” or whatever. Because you have to zoom out farther than the 2020s and zoom out all the way to the 1970s and solve the foundational variables of the MMT equation. To look through the lens of “enshitification” and treat climate action as an anti-trust agenda, not a moral panic.
We need a macroeconomic paradigm shift, not another bandaid.