Category: Government

bookmark_borderClimate Denialism, Obfuscation, Suppression and Normalization

Posted on by admin

By Daniel Brouse

Simplified Introduction

UK Climate Security: From Suppression to the Domino Effect

Climate change is increasingly moving from the category of environmental problem into the category of systemic risk.

A recently reported UK national-security assessment warned that climate and ecological disruption can cascade across borders—affecting food security, economies, migration, and political stability.

The problem is not simply the initial climate shock.

It is what happens afterward:

Climate shock → food disruption → economic shock → migration → political instability → conflict → reduced adaptive capacity

That is the Domino Effect. Denialism has become part of the feedback loop—delaying recognition, obstructing action, weakening resilience, and ultimately amplifying the consequences and accelerating the climate crisis.

The four stages of climate information failure are also important:

Denial — “The risk isn’t real.”
Obfuscation — “The risk isn’t clear.”
Suppression — “The evidence isn’t shown.”
Normalization — “The risk is real, but nothing fundamentally changes.”

When systemic risks are fragmented, delayed, or hidden from public discussion, society loses valuable time to prepare.

Climate risk is no longer just about what happens to the climate.
It is about what climate disruption does to everything connected to it.

🌎 Climate change → systemic risk → cascading consequences

Read the full report:

From Climate Shock to Food Disruption, Economic Shock, Migration, Political Instability, and Conflict

The climate crisis is increasingly being treated not simply as an environmental problem, but as a national-security and systemic-risk problem.

On September 23, 2026, UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband briefed foreign ministers from the European Union, Kenya, and other countries at the United Nations General Assembly on the findings of a UK intelligence assessment concerning climate change, nature loss, and national security. The assessment, prepared by the Joint Intelligence Committee, had reportedly been withheld from publication under the previous government and later released only in redacted form.

The assessment warned that the degradation of natural systems could cascade across borders through food shortages, migration, economic disruption, and conflict. Miliband specifically warned that the emerging El Niño could intensify these pressures, saying that climate shocks can “compound and cascade across borders,” threatening food and water security, displacing communities, putting pressure on markets, and damaging economies.

The significance of this assessment is not simply that climate change creates individual hazards. It is that climate shocks can propagate through interconnected physical, economic, and political systems.

That is the foundation of the Domino Effect:

Climate disruption
↓
Ecosystem degradation
↓
Crop losses and food disruption
↓
Food-price shocks
↓
Economic instability
↓
Migration
↓
Political instability
↓
Conflict
↓
Reduced adaptive capacity

The critical point is that none of these systems operates independently.

Denialism Depends on Fragmentation

Climate denialism often works by fragmenting a systemic problem into isolated questions.

Someone might argue:

“Climate change isn’t going to destroy my country.”

But that is not the relevant question.

A drought in one agricultural region can reduce global commodity supplies. A crop failure can increase prices in food-importing countries. Food-price inflation can destabilize governments. Migration can create political pressure far beyond the original climate impact. Conflict can disrupt energy, food, fertilizer, and commodity markets.

The original climate shock does not have to occur everywhere to produce consequences elsewhere.

That is precisely what the UK assessment is describing when it warns that climate and nature shocks can compound and cascade across borders.

The appropriate unit of analysis is therefore not simply the individual country—or even the individual climate hazard.

It is the coupled system.

The Domino Effect

The basic sequence is straightforward:

Drought
→ lower agricultural production
→ higher food prices
→ inflation
→ economic stress
→ political instability
→ migration
→ conflict
→ infrastructure destruction
→ reduced adaptive capacity
→ greater vulnerability to the next climate shock

Each stage can amplify the consequences of the previous one.

This creates a feedback loop between the physical Earth system and the socioeconomic system.

Climate disruption damages ecosystems and infrastructure. Economic disruption reduces the resources available for adaptation. Political instability makes coordinated adaptation more difficult. Conflict destroys infrastructure and institutional capacity. Those losses increase vulnerability to subsequent climate shocks.

The result is not simply:

climate change → damage

It can become:

climate shock → socioeconomic shock → reduced resilience → greater vulnerability → larger subsequent shock.

This is the essence of the Domino Effect.

The Weakness of the “Adaptation Only” Argument

If climate change were essentially linear and locally contained, adaptation could theoretically remain local:

warming → local impact → local adaptation

But a coupled system behaves differently:

warming
→ ecological disruption
→ economic disruption
→ geopolitical disruption
→ reduced adaptive capacity
→ greater vulnerability to subsequent climate disruption

At that point, adaptation is no longer simply a matter of building a seawall, installing air conditioning, changing crops, or relocating infrastructure.

The system’s capacity to adapt is itself being affected.

A country experiencing repeated crop failures, food inflation, infrastructure damage, capital losses, migration pressures, and political instability has fewer resources with which to prepare for the next shock.

Adaptation therefore has a socioeconomic limit.

Denial, Obfuscation, Suppression, and Normalization

Denialism does not always require an explicit rejection of climate science.

It can operate through several forms of information failure:

Denial:
“The risk isn’t real.”

Obfuscation:
“The evidence isn’t sufficiently important to discuss.”

Suppression:
“The evidence exists, but it should not receive public attention.”

Normalization:
“The evidence is real, but nothing fundamental needs to change.”

These mechanisms have different forms but can produce a similar result: society fails to recognize the systemic consequences of a known risk.

Climate denialism can therefore be understood broadly as systematic rhetorical, institutional, or informational behavior that prevents scientifically supported climate risks from being accurately recognized, communicated, or acted upon.

That definition shifts attention away from whether an individual literally believes climate change exists.

The more important question is whether society is capable of recognizing the consequences of climate change as an interconnected system.

The Irony of Climate Denialism

There is an important irony in the way climate risk is often framed.

Climate policy is frequently presented as a potential threat to:

  • economic growth
  • national sovereignty
  • energy security
  • food security
  • employment
  • military strength
  • financial stability

But the emerging national-security analysis increasingly identifies climate disruption itself as a threat to those same systems.

The causal relationship is therefore reversed.

The question is no longer simply:

“Can we afford climate action?”

It becomes:

“What happens to the economic, social, and security systems we are trying to protect if climate disruption continues to intensify?”

That is the central problem exposed by the Domino Effect.

Climate change is not merely an environmental externality.

It is becoming a systemic economic, social, and security risk.

From Climate Shock to Conflict

The most important feature of the Domino Effect is that the final outcome does not have to resemble the original cause.

A climate shock may begin as a drought.

The drought becomes a crop failure.

The crop failure becomes a food-price shock.

The food-price shock becomes inflation and economic instability.

Economic instability can contribute to migration and political unrest.

Political instability can increase the risk of conflict.

Conflict then destroys infrastructure, institutions, and productive capacity—reducing the ability of affected populations to adapt to the next climate shock.

The original climate event has therefore propagated through the socioeconomic system and returned as greater vulnerability to future climate disruption.

This is why climate risk cannot be assessed solely by examining temperature, precipitation, sea level, or any other individual physical variable.

The relevant question is also:

How does the shock propagate through the systems connected to it?

Denialism and Ecofascism

Denialism attempts to preserve existing systems by denying, minimizing, delaying, or obscuring the consequences of climate disruption.

A more extreme response is ecofascism: accepting environmental or ecological crisis while responding through authoritarian, exclusionary, or coercive ideas about who should receive resources, security, or protection.

The distinction matters because the two responses can appear opposite while sharing a failure to address the underlying systems problem.

Denial says, in effect:

The crisis is not serious enough to require fundamental change.

Ecofascist responses say, in effect:

The crisis is unavoidable, so survival must be allocated unequally.

Neither addresses the central systemic challenge: climate disruption affects interconnected populations through interconnected systems.

Conclusion

Climate change is increasingly moving from the category of environmental problem into the category of systemic risk.

A climate shock can become a food shock.

A food shock can become an economic shock.

An economic shock can contribute to migration and political instability.

Political instability can contribute to conflict.

Conflict can destroy infrastructure and institutions, reducing adaptive capacity and increasing vulnerability to the next climate shock.

Climate shock → food disruption → economic shock → migration → political instability → conflict → reduced adaptive capacity.

That is the Domino Effect. Denialism has become part of the feedback loop—delaying recognition, obstructing action, weakening resilience, and ultimately amplifying the consequences and accelerating the climate crisis.

The emerging national-security response is significant because governments are beginning to recognize that climate and nature loss can propagate through the systems on which economic and political stability depend. The UK government’s September 2026 statement explicitly described climate and nature crises as security risks and emphasized the need to prevent shocks from feeding through to food prices, supply chains, and security.

The challenge for climate policy is therefore larger than reducing emissions or adapting to individual hazards.

It is preserving the capacity of interconnected human systems to absorb shocks without cascading into systemic failure.

Denialism delays recognition of that problem.

Exclusionary responses attempt to decide who survives it.

The alternative is to recognize the interconnectedness of the Earth and socioeconomic systems—and build resilience before individual shocks become cascading crises.

bookmark_borderClimate Denialism and the Domino Effect

Posted on by admin

by Daniel Brouse

From Climate Shock to Food Disruption, Economic Shock, Migration, Political Instability, and Conflict

Abstract

Climate change is often discussed as a sequence of individual environmental impacts: higher temperatures, droughts, floods, crop failures, sea-level rise, wildfires, and ecosystem degradation. This framing can obscure a more consequential property of the climate system: climate shocks propagate through interconnected socioeconomic systems.

A drought does not end when rainfall declines. It can reduce crop production, increase food prices, damage household incomes, increase inflationary pressure, weaken economic stability, contribute to displacement and migration, intensify political tensions, and, under particular conditions, increase the risk of conflict. Conflict then further reduces the capacity of societies to adapt to subsequent climate shocks.

This paper describes that process as the Climate Domino Effect:

Climate disruption → crop losses → food prices → economic instability → migration → political instability → conflict → reduced adaptive capacity → greater vulnerability to the next climate shock

That is the Domino Effect. Denialism has become part of the feedback loop—delaying recognition, obstructing action, weakening resilience, and ultimately amplifying the consequences and accelerating the climate crisis.

This is not a claim that climate change mechanically causes war. Conflict has many causes, including governance failures, inequality, poverty, institutional weakness, geopolitical competition, and historical grievances. Rather, climate change can act as a risk multiplier, adding stress to systems already operating near their limits.

The distinction is important for understanding climate denialism. Denialism often treats climate impacts as isolated, manageable, or geographically contained. A systems perspective reveals a different problem: the impacts are coupled. As individual stresses interact, the resulting socioeconomic response can become nonlinear.

This concept also connects to the framework developed in Approaching Singularity: Third Derivatives, Nonlinear Collapse, and Coupled Climate–Economic Instability, which proposes that climate and economic systems should be examined not only through their levels and rates of change, but through changing rates of acceleration and increasingly strong coupling between subsystems.

The central warning is therefore not simply that climate change produces more damage. It is that climate shocks can progressively reduce the very economic, political, and institutional capacity required to respond to the next shock.

1. Introduction: Climate Change Is a System Problem

Climate change is commonly represented as a gradual increase in global temperature. That representation is scientifically useful, but incomplete.

Temperature is only one variable in an interconnected Earth system. Climate change affects precipitation, soil moisture, agricultural productivity, water availability, ecosystems, ocean conditions, infrastructure, insurance markets, commodity prices, public finances, migration patterns, and political stability.

The consequences therefore do not remain within the physical climate system.

A climate shock can become an economic shock.

An economic shock can become a social shock.

A social shock can become a political shock.

And political instability can reduce a society’s ability to respond to the next physical shock.

The result is a feedback structure rather than a simple linear sequence.

The basic socioeconomic pathway can be represented as:

Climate disruption

↓

Crop losses

↓

Food prices

↓

Economic instability

↓

Migration

↓

Political instability

↓

Conflict

↓

Reduced adaptive capacity

↓

Greater vulnerability to subsequent climate disruption

This is the Domino Effect.

Each individual event may be understandable in isolation. The danger emerges from their interaction.

2. The Climate Domino Effect

The term “domino effect” describes a system in which one event increases the probability of subsequent events.

In a climate–economic system, the dominoes are not independent.

They are coupled.

A drought can reduce agricultural production. Reduced production can increase prices. Higher prices can reduce household purchasing power. Economic stress can increase migration. Large-scale migration can place additional pressure on housing, infrastructure, labor markets, public services, and political institutions. Political instability can contribute to civil unrest or conflict in vulnerable settings.

The IPCC has explicitly identified cascading relationships among climate impacts, food insecurity, migration, political instability, and conflict. It also emphasizes that the relationship between climate change and conflict is mediated by factors such as governance, socioeconomic development, state capacity, inequality, and existing conflict.

This distinction is essential.

The Domino Effect is not:

Climate change causes war.

It is:

Climate change can introduce or intensify stresses that propagate through already vulnerable socioeconomic systems, increasing the probability of additional destabilizing outcomes.

That is a substantially more defensible proposition.

3. First Domino: Climate Disruption

The first domino is the physical climate shock.

Examples include:

  • drought
  • extreme heat
  • flooding
  • wildfire
  • changing precipitation
  • prolonged growing-season disruption
  • tropical cyclones
  • compound heat and drought
  • water scarcity
  • ecosystem degradation

The critical feature is not simply the magnitude of an individual event.

It is the interaction between the event and the system receiving the shock.

A drought occurring in a resilient agricultural economy with abundant water reserves, strong infrastructure, functioning insurance markets, and substantial fiscal capacity may produce limited long-term disruption.

The same drought occurring in a poor region with depleted soils, limited irrigation, weak institutions, high food dependence, and existing political instability can produce cascading consequences.

Thus:

Climate risk = physical hazard × exposure × vulnerability × system connectivity

The same physical forcing can therefore produce radically different socioeconomic outcomes.

4. Second Domino: Crop Losses

Food production is particularly sensitive to climate variability.

Agriculture depends simultaneously upon temperature, precipitation, soil moisture, water availability, growing-season timing, pollination, pests, disease, and ecosystem functioning.

Climate change can therefore affect food production through multiple pathways simultaneously.

The IPCC reports that climate change can increase food insecurity through direct effects on production as well as cascading effects on food prices and household incomes. It also identifies increasing risks to food production at higher warming levels.

This is where the Domino Effect begins to move from the physical climate system into the economic system.

A failed harvest is not merely an agricultural statistic.

It represents lost income for producers, reduced supply for consumers, increased demand for imports, increased competition for remaining supplies, and potentially higher government expenditures.

A local climate shock can consequently become a regional or global market shock.

5. Third Domino: Food Prices

Food prices are a critical transmission mechanism.

When agricultural production declines while demand remains relatively stable, markets respond through price increases.

For wealthy households, a food-price increase may be inconvenient.

For households already spending a large fraction of their income on food, it can become an existential economic shock.

The IPCC identifies food-price increases associated with reduced agricultural production and global food-price shocks as an important pathway connecting climate variability with social and political instability.

The important nonlinear characteristic is that the social response to price increases is not necessarily proportional to the price increase.

A 5% increase may be absorbed.

A much larger increase may force households to:

  • reduce food consumption
  • substitute cheaper foods
  • sell productive assets
  • withdraw children from school
  • take on debt
  • migrate
  • seek informal employment
  • rely on government assistance

The economic system therefore has thresholds.

Once those thresholds are crossed, the response can change rapidly.

6. Fourth Domino: Economic Instability

Food-price shocks rarely remain confined to food.

Food is part of the broader inflation system.

Agricultural losses can affect:

  • consumer prices
  • wages
  • interest rates
  • trade balances
  • government subsidies
  • household debt
  • corporate profitability
  • currency stability
  • sovereign finances

At the same time, climate disasters impose direct costs through damaged infrastructure, lost production, insurance claims, emergency spending, and reconstruction.

The result can be a feedback loop:

Climate damage

↓

Economic losses

↓

Reduced fiscal capacity

↓

Reduced investment in resilience

↓

Greater vulnerability

↓

Larger future losses

This feedback is central to the coupled climate–economic framework developed in Approaching Singularity. That paper describes the interaction as:

increasing climate impacts → rising economic losses → reduced adaptive capacity → increased vulnerability → further impacts.

The critical concept is adaptive capacity.

A society does not merely experience climate shocks.

It can become less capable of absorbing them.

7. Fifth Domino: Migration

When livelihoods become unsustainable, people move.

Migration is not inherently a failure.

Indeed, migration can be an important adaptation mechanism.

The World Bank identifies climate change as an increasingly important driver of internal migration because of impacts on livelihoods and the livability of exposed locations. Its Groundswell analysis projected that climate change could drive as many as 216 million internal migrants across six regions by 2050 under a pessimistic scenario, while also finding that early climate action and resilient development could substantially reduce the scale.

This distinction matters.

There are at least three possible responses to climate stress:

Adaptation

People change how and where they live.

Migration

People move toward areas with better economic and environmental conditions.

Forced displacement

People move because remaining has become dangerous or economically impossible.

The socioeconomic Domino Effect becomes particularly dangerous when large populations are forced to move while destination communities are simultaneously experiencing economic stress.

Migration then becomes another source of pressure on the receiving system.

8. Sixth Domino: Political Instability

Migration does not automatically produce political instability.

Political outcomes depend upon institutions, resources, public policy, social cohesion, inequality, and the capacity of governments to manage change.

But when climate-driven migration occurs simultaneously with food inflation, unemployment, housing shortages, fiscal stress, and declining public services, political tensions can increase.

The IPCC describes social tipping processes in which climate impacts interact with economic, social, and political stressors that reduce adaptive capacity and overwhelm resilience. Once such a threshold is crossed, mutually reinforcing instability can produce livelihood insecurity, migration, food insecurity, impoverishment, political conflict, and changes in political regimes.

This is an important concept:

A climate shock can weaken the political system’s ability to manage the next climate shock.

That is feedback.

9. Seventh Domino: Conflict

Conflict is the most frequently overstated component of the climate Domino Effect.

Climate change does not have a simple causal relationship with armed conflict.

Wars have political, economic, historical, ethnic, religious, territorial, and geopolitical causes.

The scientific literature therefore generally treats climate change as one factor among many.

The IPCC reports that food-price increases associated with reduced agricultural production can be associated with conflict risk and civil unrest under certain circumstances. However, it also emphasizes that other factors—including poverty, weak governance, low state capacity, inequality, and existing conflict—can be more influential.

The correct systems interpretation is therefore:

Climate stress

Existing socioeconomic vulnerability

Weak institutions

Resource competition

Food insecurity

Political grievances

→

Increased risk of instability and conflict

Climate change can function as a risk multiplier rather than a single cause.

10. The Final Domino: Reduced Adaptive Capacity

This is the most important part of the entire sequence.

The chain does not necessarily end with conflict.

Conflict can damage the very systems needed to adapt.

War can destroy:

  • agricultural infrastructure
  • roads
  • electrical grids
  • water systems
  • hospitals
  • schools
  • housing
  • financial institutions
  • government capacity

It can also divert resources from adaptation toward emergency security spending.

The resulting feedback becomes:

Climate disruption

↓

Crop losses

↓

Food-price increases

↓

Economic instability

↓

Migration

↓

Political instability

↓

Conflict

↓

Infrastructure and institutional damage

↓

Reduced adaptive capacity

↓

Greater vulnerability

↓

Larger consequences from the next climate shock

This transforms the original sequence into a positive feedback loop.

11. From Dominoes to Feedback

The distinction between a sequence and a feedback loop is fundamental.

A simple sequence would be:

A → B → C → D

A feedback system is:

A → B → C → D → A

The second system behaves very differently.

Once the final state feeds back into the initial condition, the system can amplify itself.

The climate–economic system can therefore be represented as:

Climate shock

→ agricultural disruption

→ food-price shock

→ economic stress

→ migration

→ political instability

→ conflict

→ reduced adaptive capacity

→ increased vulnerability to climate shock

This is no longer merely a chain of events.

It is a coupled nonlinear system.

12. Connection to “Approaching Singularity”

The framework developed in Approaching Singularity: Third Derivatives, Nonlinear Collapse, and Coupled Climate–Economic Instability argues that climate and economic systems should be examined as coupled systems rather than isolated variables. The paper proposes that increasing impacts, increasing acceleration, and potentially increasing acceleration of impacts can create a regime characterized by nonlinear amplification, increasing instability, and declining predictability.

The paper expresses the conceptual progression as:

dI/dt > 0

Impacts are increasing.

d²I/dt² > 0

The rate of increase is accelerating.

d³I/dt³ > 0

The acceleration itself is increasing.

The third derivative should be understood carefully. Its existence in a particular dataset does not by itself establish that the entire climate–economic system is approaching a mathematical singularity. That stronger interpretation requires rigorous statistical testing, robust datasets, uncertainty analysis, and careful specification of the underlying variables.

But the conceptual value of the framework is substantial.

It focuses attention on a question often missed by conventional trend analysis:

Is the system merely changing faster, or is the rate at which it is changing itself changing?

That question becomes especially important when climate and socioeconomic processes are coupled.

13. Climate Shock and Economic Shock Are Not Independent

Traditional economic analysis often treats climate damage as an external shock.

A hurricane damages infrastructure.

A drought reduces agricultural output.

A flood damages property.

The economic model then calculates the resulting loss.

But a coupled system behaves differently.

Climate change can alter the economic system’s underlying conditions.

For example:

Climate warming

→ higher disaster losses

→ higher insurance costs

→ insurance withdrawal

→ falling property values

→ reduced investment

→ weaker tax base

→ reduced government capacity

→ less adaptation

→ greater future losses

This is a feedback loop rather than a one-time economic loss.

Approaching Singularity identifies several economic mechanisms that can amplify climate impacts, including infrastructure stress, insurance-market withdrawal, capital mispricing, and sovereign fiscal pressure.

14. Why Denialism Is Particularly Dangerous in a Coupled System

Denialism is often understood as simply rejecting climate science.

That is too narrow.

In a complex system, denial can also take the form of fragmentation.

One accepts:

  • droughts

but rejects their connection to food prices.

One accepts:

  • food inflation

but rejects its relationship to climate disruption.

One accepts:

  • migration

but treats it as entirely independent of environmental conditions.

One accepts:

  • political instability

but ignores the cumulative stresses preceding it.

One accepts:

  • conflict

but treats it as unrelated to the underlying resource and economic stresses.

The result is a fragmented interpretation of a coupled system.

Each domino is acknowledged individually while the chain connecting them is denied.

This is a particularly powerful form of denial because no single statement necessarily has to be false.

The denial occurs at the level of system relationships.

15. The Denialism of “It’s Only Weather”

A drought can be dismissed as weather.

A flood can be dismissed as weather.

A hurricane can be dismissed as weather.

A heat wave can be dismissed as weather.

But climate change does not require every individual event to be unprecedented.

The relevant question is whether changing climatic conditions alter the frequency, intensity, persistence, spatial distribution, or consequences of hazards.

The economic system then integrates those events over time.

One flood may be recoverable.

Repeated floods can destroy insurability.

One drought may be manageable.

Repeated droughts can exhaust groundwater and financial reserves.

One food-price shock may be absorbed.

Repeated shocks can destabilize household finances and government budgets.

Thus the relevant variable is not merely:

How bad was this event?

It is also:

How frequently are shocks occurring, how strongly are they interacting, and how much recovery capacity remains between them?

16. The Recovery-Time Problem

This introduces another important nonlinear mechanism.

Suppose a society experiences:

Shock → recovery → shock → recovery → shock

If recovery occurs completely between shocks, resilience may remain relatively stable.

But suppose:

Shock → partial recovery → shock → partial recovery → shock

Now damage accumulates.

Eventually:

Shock → insufficient recovery → shock → insufficient recovery → systemic stress

The system’s state changes even if the individual shocks do not become dramatically larger.

This produces an important climate-risk concept:

The danger may arise not only from stronger shocks, but from shorter intervals between shocks.

If the recovery time becomes longer than the interval between disturbances, cumulative vulnerability increases.

That provides another mechanism connecting climate acceleration to socioeconomic instability.

17. The Domino Effect and Adaptive Capacity

Adaptive capacity should therefore be treated as a dynamic variable.

It is not a fixed characteristic of a country.

It can increase through:

  • infrastructure investment
  • diversified food systems
  • resilient agriculture
  • stronger institutions
  • disaster preparedness
  • social safety nets
  • economic diversification
  • ecosystem restoration
  • climate mitigation

But it can also decline through:

  • repeated disasters
  • debt
  • economic contraction
  • infrastructure destruction
  • institutional breakdown
  • conflict
  • displacement
  • loss of human capital

Thus:

Adaptive capacity ↑ → vulnerability ↓

but:

Climate shocks ↑ → economic damage ↑ → adaptive capacity ↓ → vulnerability ↑

This creates the possibility of a dangerous feedback:

The more shocks a vulnerable system experiences, the less capable it may become of absorbing the next shock.

18. Why the Domino Effect Is Not Deterministic

A critical qualification must remain central.

The Domino Effect is a risk framework, not a deterministic prediction.

Climate disruption does not inevitably produce:

crop failure → famine → migration → war.

Societies can interrupt the chain.

For example:

Climate shock

→ agricultural loss

→ emergency food imports

→ targeted financial assistance

→ infrastructure investment

→ successful recovery

The dominoes stop.

That is precisely why adaptive capacity matters.

Institutions can absorb shocks.

Markets can redistribute resources.

Governments can provide assistance.

Communities can adapt.

International cooperation can reduce cascading effects.

The existence of nonlinear risk does not mean collapse is inevitable.

It means that the consequences of failing to interrupt the cascade can become disproportionately large.

19. The Strategic Implication

The most effective response to the Domino Effect is therefore not simply to address each domino independently.

It is to strengthen the connections that can stop the cascade.

Prevent crop losses

through:

  • resilient agriculture
  • water management
  • soil conservation
  • ecosystem protection
  • crop diversification

Reduce food-price shocks

through:

  • diversified supply chains
  • strategic reserves
  • social safety nets
  • reduced dependence on vulnerable production regions

Protect economic stability

through:

  • resilient infrastructure
  • appropriate insurance mechanisms
  • diversified economies
  • climate-risk disclosure
  • fiscal preparedness

Manage migration

through:

  • planned relocation
  • adaptation investment
  • housing
  • infrastructure
  • employment opportunities

Strengthen political stability

through:

  • effective institutions
  • equitable resource allocation
  • transparent governance
  • social protection

Reduce conflict risk

through:

  • diplomacy
  • resource cooperation
  • humanitarian assistance
  • conflict prevention
  • international coordination

Every intervention that prevents one domino from falling can prevent the next domino from falling.

20. Climate Denialism Versus Systems Thinking

The fundamental difference can therefore be summarized as follows.

Fragmented thinking

Drought is weather.

Food prices are economics.

Migration is politics.

Conflict is geopolitics.

Climate change is an environmental issue.

Each problem is placed into a separate category.

Systems thinking

Climate disruption can affect agriculture.

Agricultural disruption can affect food prices.

Food prices can affect household and national economies.

Economic stress can affect migration.

Migration and economic stress can affect political stability.

Political instability can increase conflict risk.

Conflict can destroy adaptive capacity.

Reduced adaptive capacity increases vulnerability to the next climate shock.

The second framework recognizes the connections between systems.

That is the essential insight of the Domino Effect.

21. Toward a Coupled Climate–Economic Risk Framework

The next generation of climate-risk analysis should therefore move beyond isolated measurements.

Instead of asking only:

How much has global temperature increased?

we should also ask:

  • How quickly are climate impacts changing?
  • How quickly are they accelerating?
  • How frequently are shocks occurring?
  • How much recovery occurs between shocks?
  • Which systems are coupled?
  • Where are thresholds emerging?
  • Is adaptive capacity increasing or decreasing?
  • Are climate shocks beginning to synchronize with economic shocks?
  • Are socioeconomic feedbacks amplifying physical climate impacts?

This is the conceptual bridge between the Domino Effect and the singularity framework.

The objective is not to predict a precise date of collapse.

It is to identify whether a system is moving from:

stable

→ stressed

→ nonlinear

→ self-amplifying

→ potentially unstable

before the final transition occurs.

22. Conclusion

Climate change is not simply a collection of environmental problems.

It is a source of systemic risk.

A climate shock can become a food shock.

A food shock can become an economic shock.

An economic shock can become a migration shock.

Migration and economic stress can contribute to political instability.

Political instability can increase the risk of conflict.

Conflict can destroy infrastructure, institutions, human capital, and financial resources.

Those losses reduce adaptive capacity.

Reduced adaptive capacity increases vulnerability to the next climate shock.

The resulting system can therefore be represented as:

Climate disruption → crop losses → food prices → economic instability → migration → political instability → conflict → reduced adaptive capacity → greater climate vulnerability

This is the Climate Domino Effect. Denialism has become part of the feedback loop—delaying recognition, obstructing action, weakening resilience, and ultimately amplifying the consequences and accelerating the climate crisis.

Its significance lies not in claiming that climate change inevitably produces any particular social outcome. Rather, it demonstrates how climate stress can propagate through interconnected systems and how those systems can feed back upon one another.

That is precisely why climate denialism is so consequential.

When the problem is treated as a collection of isolated events, each domino can be dismissed individually.

When the problem is understood as a coupled system, the relationships become impossible to ignore.

The central risk is therefore not merely that climate change produces increasingly severe individual events.

It is that the interval between shocks may shrink, the interactions among shocks may strengthen, and the capacity to recover may decline.

At that point, the climate system and socioeconomic system are no longer responding independently.

They are interacting.

And when interconnected systems begin amplifying one another, the rate of change can become as important as the amount of change itself.

That is the central question raised by the coupled climate–economic framework:

Are we approaching a regime in which climate impacts, economic instability, and declining adaptive capacity increasingly reinforce one another?

Answering that question requires moving beyond temperature alone and toward a systems-based analysis of energy, acceleration, coupling, thresholds, feedbacks, and resilience.

References

Brouse, D., & Mukherjee, S. (2026). Approaching Singularity: Third Derivatives, Nonlinear Collapse, and Coupled Climate–Economic Instability. The paper develops the third-derivative/accelerating-acceleration framework and examines nonlinear coupling between climate and economic systems.

IPCC (2022). Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability — Chapter 5: Food, Fibre and Other Ecosystem Products. The IPCC documents cascading relationships among climate impacts, food production, food prices, household incomes, food insecurity, migration, political instability, and conflict.

IPCC (2022). Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability — Figure 8.11. The IPCC describes social tipping points in which climate impacts interact with economic, social, and political stressors, reducing adaptive capacity and potentially producing cascading instability.

IPCC (2022). Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability — Chapter 7. The IPCC reviews pathways connecting climate variability, food-price shocks, civil unrest, migration, and conflict while emphasizing the importance of governance and socioeconomic conditions.

World Bank (2021). Groundswell: Acting on Internal Climate Migration. The World Bank identifies climate change as an increasingly important driver of internal migration and projects substantial climate-related population movement under higher-impact scenarios.

World Bank (2024). Country Climate and Development Reports — From Climate Crisis to a New Development Agenda. The World Bank documents the interaction among climate shocks, food insecurity, livelihoods, migration, and development vulnerability.

bookmark_borderHow Is Climate Energy Hitting You? Sea Level vs. Private Property Rights

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by Daniel Brouse

Simplified Introduction

How Is the Climate Energy Hitting You?
SoCal Coastal Armoring
Sea Level vs. Private Property Rights = Managed Retreat

🌊 Climate energy is hitting the coast.

When waves encounter a hard structure instead of dissipating their energy across a gradually sloping beach, some of that energy can be reflected back toward the ocean.

That can increase scour at the base of the structure and accelerate the loss of sand immediately in front of—and adjacent to—the armored shoreline.

A difficult feedback loop can develop:

Loss of sand → greater wave energy → erosion → emergency armoring → altered wave & sediment dynamics → further beach loss

The result is a fundamental conflict:

Protect individual properties — or preserve the beach as a public resource.

🌊 Climate Change Changes the Equation

This isn’t simply a dispute over seawalls.

It’s a preview of a much larger problem.

As sea levels rise, coastal storms and extreme-wave events interact with a progressively higher baseline ocean. More energy can reach vulnerable shorelines, while the loss of beaches and dunes removes natural buffers that once absorbed part of that energy.

The physical equation is changing.

🏖️ Managed Retreat

Managed retreat may ultimately become the long-term strategy for some coastal properties.

The fundamental physical reality is simple:

You can build a wall against the ocean.
You cannot build a wall against a changing climate.

The Beach Road conflict is therefore about much more than a temporary rock wall.

It is about what happens when accelerating climate change collides with private property rights, public resources, and the physical limits of coastal engineering.

The ocean doesn’t recognize property lines.

🌎 How Is the Climate Energy Hitting You?

Read the full report:

Sea Level vs. Private Property Rights

The Battle Over Coastal Armoring

The situation along Beach Road in Dana Point, California, illustrates an increasingly difficult collision between rising sea levels, intensifying coastal hazards, private property rights, and the public’s right to California’s beaches.

Powerful southern swells associated with Hurricane Marie, combined with an anticipated record El Niño season, have stripped away much of the protective sand buffer along the shoreline. Several multimillion-dollar beachfront homes have been severely damaged, with some collapsing directly into the Pacific Ocean.

At least 10 beachfront homes have been red-tagged, meaning they have been declared unsafe to inhabit, while another seven have been yellow-tagged, restricting their use. Facing the loss of their homes and investments, residents have taken matters into their own hands.

The Battle Over Coastal Armoring

To protect what remains of their properties, a group of homeowners pooled their own money, contributing between $50,000 and $120,000 per household, to construct a massive temporary rock barrier, or riprap wall, extending across 17 vulnerable properties.

The California Coastal Commission granted temporary emergency permits for the barrier. But the decision has opened a much larger legal, environmental, and property-rights debate.

The Homeowners’ Position

The homeowners argue that they have a constitutional right to protect their homes and private property from destruction.

Many of the affected properties were built in the 1950s, long before today’s coastal development regulations were established. Residents point out that they pay substantial property taxes and argue that government agencies have failed to provide promised or expected beach-sand replenishment and other protective measures.

From their perspective, they are being asked to absorb enormous private losses while being restricted from taking reasonable measures to protect property they legally own.

The Environmental and Regulatory Position

The Coastal Commission and coastal scientists emphasize that hard coastal armoring—including seawalls, rock revetments, and similar structures—can alter natural coastal processes and contribute to beach erosion.

When waves encounter a hard structure rather than dissipating their energy across a gradually sloping beach, wave energy can be reflected back toward the ocean. This can increase scour at the base of the structure and accelerate the loss of sand immediately in front of and adjacent to the armored shoreline.

The result can become a difficult feedback loop:

Loss of sand → greater wave energy at the shoreline → erosion → emergency armoring → altered wave and sediment dynamics → further beach loss.

That creates a fundamental conflict between protecting individual properties and preserving the beach as a public resource.

The 120-Day Problem

The emergency permits for the rock barrier are temporary, lasting only 120 days.

If the homeowners cannot obtain permanent authorization—which is highly restricted for certain coastal properties, particularly homes constructed after 1977—they could ultimately be required to remove the expensive barrier.

That creates an extraordinary dilemma: homeowners may spend hundreds of thousands of dollars attempting to save their properties, only to face the possibility that the protective structure must be dismantled just as the most damaging winter storms arrive.

State authorities are instead encouraging communities to consider longer-term adaptation strategies, including cobblestone berms, elevating structures, and, where necessary, managed retreat.

Climate Change Changes the Equation

This conflict is not simply a dispute over seawalls.

It is a preview of a much larger problem.

As sea levels rise and coastal storms and extreme-wave events interact with a progressively higher baseline ocean, the amount of energy reaching vulnerable shorelines can increase. The loss of beaches and dunes removes natural buffers that once absorbed part of that energy.

That means yesterday’s shoreline protections may not be adequate for tomorrow’s climate.

The fundamental problem is that private property rights operate within a physical system that does not recognize property boundaries. The ocean does not distinguish between private property, public beaches, or political jurisdictions.

As climate change accelerates, coastal communities will increasingly have to confront the difficult question of where—and how—private property can realistically be protected.

Managed Retreat

Managed retreat may ultimately become the only sustainable long-term strategy for coastal properties.

A fundamental physical reality:

You can build a wall against the ocean, but you cannot build a wall against a changing climate.

The Beach Road conflict is therefore about much more than a temporary rock wall.

It is about what happens when accelerating climate change collides with private property rights, public resources, and the physical limits of coastal engineering.

bookmark_borderAbout the Price of Oil: The Price You Don’t See

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What Does a Barrel of Oil Cost—and What Does It Mean to You?

When you hear the price of oil reported on the news, you are usually hearing the futures price.

But what does that number actually mean?

The futures price is essentially a “paper” price. Very little physical oil actually changes hands through the futures market. The price that matters to consumers and businesses buying and using petroleum products is the spot price—the price of physical oil being purchased today. And right now, there is a significant difference between the two.

Today, the futures price of oil is roughly $102–$107 per barrel. But the spot price—the actual price being paid for physical oil—is approximately $125–$150 per barrel.

That is the price that ultimately matters to everyone buying refined petroleum products, including gasoline, diesel, and heating oil.

The Pain at the Pump

This is why diesel has reached approximately $6 per gallon, making it the highest price in history. It is also why gasoline is currently averaging approximately $4.32 per gallon. Yes—this is the highest average gasoline price ever recorded for this time of year.

And what’s next?

Heating oil.

As we move toward the winter months, parts of the Northern Hemisphere are already seeing heating oil prices averaging between $5.15 and $5.75 per gallon. Yes. Just like gasoline, heating oil is trading at an absolute record high for the month of September.

Historically, heating oil prices have hovered around $3.50 to $4.00 per gallon during a typical winter season. The current offseason surge above $5.00 per gallon is unprecedented. And this is happening before winter has even arrived.

For millions of households that depend on heating oil, the implications are obvious. The price shock at the pump can become a much larger household energy shock when temperatures fall and heating demand rises.

Adding Fuel to the Fire

There is another problem developing in the background. Oil borrowed from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) under the 2026 emergency exchanges is scheduled to be repaid in tranches between November 1, 2026, and September 30, 2028.

Under the 2026 SPR emergency exchange program managed by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), companies are contractually required to return approximately 1.18 to 1.24 barrels for every barrel they borrowed.

In other words, oil that was taken out of the reserve during an emergency must eventually be replaced—and companies are not simply returning the same amount of oil they received. They have to return more. That creates another future demand on the physical oil market.

So when you look at the oil price reported on television, don’t assume that the futures number tells the whole story.

The price of oil isn’t just a number on a screen.

It flows directly through the economy. It becomes diesel. It becomes gasoline. It becomes heating oil. It becomes transportation costs, food costs, manufacturing costs, electricity costs, and ultimately the cost of living.

And if physical oil is already trading substantially above the futures price, while heating demand is about to increase and SPR repayment obligations are beginning to come due, the question isn’t simply:

“What does oil cost today?”

The more important question is:

“What is the price of oil going to cost you tomorrow?”

bookmark_borderHow Is Climate Energy Hitting You? Pennsylvania: When the Levee Breaks

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by Daniel Brouse

Pennsylvania: When the Levee Breaks — Crying Won’t Help You, Praying Won’t Do You No Good

Pennsylvania’s aging levees reveal a dangerous mismatch between a rapidly changing climate-energy system and infrastructure designed for a climate that no longer exists.

The problem is much larger than flooding. It is a collision between increasing hydrological energy, aging infrastructure, growing exposure, declining safety margins, and inadequate funding. Together, these forces can create nonlinear risk: conditions may deteriorate gradually for years, followed by an abrupt failure when a sufficiently powerful event exceeds the system’s remaining capacity.

Climate Energy Becomes Hydraulic Energy

A warming atmosphere does not simply produce higher temperatures. It changes the amount and distribution of energy available to the hydrological cycle.

Warmer air can hold substantially more water vapor, increasing the potential for extreme precipitation. When that moisture is released, the resulting rainfall can rapidly transfer enormous amounts of atmospheric energy into rivers, streams, drainage systems, dams, levees, roads, homes, and other infrastructure.

A levee does not care about the average temperature. It is dependent on how much water arrives, how quickly it arrives, how high the river rises, how rapidly water flows, how long the pressure persists, and whether the resulting forces exceed the structure’s design and remaining safety margin.

This creates a critical distinction:

Climate change is not merely making Pennsylvania warmer. It is increasing the energy available to produce extreme hydrological events—and that energy is ultimately transferred into the physical systems protecting human communities.

Aging Infrastructure Creates a Declining Safety Margin

Pennsylvania has more than 180 levees extending roughly 155 miles and protecting approximately 158,000 people and $26.2 billion in property. Many of these structures were constructed between the 1950s and 1970s. Much of this infrastructure is therefore now six to eight decades old.

Age alone does not mean that a levee will fail. But aging infrastructure generally requires increasing maintenance, inspection, rehabilitation, and investment to preserve its original level of protection.

At the same time, the environment in which these structures operate is changing.

That creates a fundamental systems problem:

Increasing climate energy + aging infrastructure = declining safety margin.

A levee may continue functioning normally for decades while its underlying vulnerability steadily increases. Then a sufficiently extreme event can cross a threshold and produce overtopping, erosion, seepage, internal piping, foundation failure, or structural collapse.

The failure therefore may appear sudden even though the vulnerability accumulated gradually.

The Nonlinear Risk of Threshold Failure

This is a classic threshold process.

The sequence can be represented as:

Increasing warming → more atmospheric moisture → heavier precipitation → greater runoff → greater river energy → increasing levee stress → shrinking safety margin → threshold exceedance → failure

The critical point is that the consequences do not necessarily increase proportionally with the forcing. A modest increase in flood energy may produce little visible difference when a levee has substantial reserve capacity. But once the remaining safety margin becomes small, a relatively small additional increase in flood energy can produce a disproportionately large change in outcome.

That is how a system can move from:

Protected → stressed → overtopped → breached → flooded

in a matter of hours.

Exposure Makes the Consequences Larger

The problem is compounded by what exists behind the levees. Communities have invested homes, businesses, roads, utilities, water systems, industrial facilities, transportation networks, and billions of dollars of property in areas protected by these structures. The levee therefore does more than hold back water. It establishes a boundary between climate-driven flood energy and human civilization. As development accumulates behind that boundary, the consequences of failure increase.

This produces another dangerous relationship:

More extreme flooding + more people and property at risk + aging protection = increasing consequences

The flood hazard does not have to become catastrophic for the consequences to become catastrophic.

The vulnerability of the protected system can amplify the impact.

Funding Becomes Part of the Climate Feedback

Infrastructure deterioration is not simply an engineering problem. It can become a feedback mechanism. Levees require continual maintenance. Erosion must be repaired. Vegetation and animal damage must be controlled. Drainage systems, pumps, pipes, floodwalls, foundations, and embankments must be inspected and maintained. Yet the financial responsibility for these systems is fragmented, and many communities lack the resources necessary to address increasingly expensive infrastructure requirements.

This creates a potentially self-reinforcing cycle:

More extreme weather → more infrastructure damage → greater repair costs → inadequate funding → deteriorating infrastructure → greater vulnerability → greater future damage

The result is a positive feedback loop in which climate impacts increase the cost of maintaining the very infrastructure needed to withstand those impacts. And every major flood can further reduce the resources available for preparing for the next one.

Insurance and Property Values Become Secondary Pathways

The consequences can also propagate far beyond the levee itself. When flood protection becomes questionable, communities can face increased regulatory, insurance, financing, and development pressures.

That means climate energy can travel through an unexpectedly long chain of systems:

Atmospheric warming → extreme precipitation → flooding → infrastructure stress → levee vulnerability → insurance risk → property values → household finances → municipal finances

The climate impact therefore doesn’t end when the rain stops. Its economic consequences can continue for years.

Pennsylvania Has Already Seen the Warning

Pennsylvania does not have to wait for some distant future to experience these dynamics. Extreme rainfall events have already produced extraordinary flooding throughout the state and the broader Northeast. During Hurricane Ida in 2021, portions of Southeastern Pennsylvania received several inches of rain in a matter of hours, while rivers rapidly approached or exceeded dangerous flood stages. Events like this demonstrate an important characteristic of climate risk:

The critical variable is not simply how much precipitation falls over an entire year.

It is increasingly about how much water arrives at once.

A community can survive a large amount of annual precipitation when it is distributed over time. The same amount concentrated into a few hours can overwhelm drainage systems, rivers, roads, bridges, wastewater facilities, and flood defenses.

The climate system is therefore changing not only the quantity of water but potentially its timing, intensity, concentration, and destructive power.

The Levee Is a Climate Barrier

The deeper lesson is that a levee is effectively a temporary barrier between Earth-system energy and human systems. The atmosphere stores moisture. Storm systems transport energy. Rain releases that energy. Rivers concentrate it. Floodwaters transmit it. Infrastructure absorbs it. Human communities ultimately pay the bill.

That is the meaning of How Is Climate Energy Hitting You?

Climate energy does not remain an abstract measurement in the atmosphere.

It becomes water pressure against a levee.

It becomes a flooded basement.

It becomes a destroyed road.

It becomes a damaged bridge.

It becomes an insurance claim.

It becomes a municipal repair bill.

It becomes lost property value.

And when the protective barrier finally reaches its threshold, the transition from protection to destruction can be extraordinarily rapid.

The Coming Problem Is Not Simply More Flooding

Pennsylvania’s levee problem illustrates a much larger climate phenomenon.

The danger is the interaction of multiple changing systems:

Climate energy is increasing.
Extreme precipitation is intensifying.
Infrastructure is aging.
Exposure is growing.
Safety margins are shrinking.
Maintenance costs are increasing.
Funding remains limited.

Each problem reinforces the others. This is why climate risk should not be evaluated solely through changes in average temperature.

The more important question is:

What happens when millions of interconnected physical, ecological, economic, and human systems respond simultaneously to increasing energy?

A levee failure provides a remarkably clear example. The levee may hold. Until it doesn’t. And when the levee breaks, crying won’t help you. Praying won’t do you no good.

Because the water is carrying the energy of a changing climate straight through the barrier society built to keep it out.

bookmark_borderInflation Is Moving From Diesel to the Consumer

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esterday brought the latest Producer Price Index (PPI) measure of inflation. Today, the focus shifts to consumer inflation.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released the August 2026 Consumer Price Index (CPI) report, showing headline consumer inflation rising 0.4% in August on a seasonally adjusted basis and increasing 3.4% over the past 12 months.

Core inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, rose 0.3% for the month. That was hotter than expected and is particularly important when viewed alongside yesterday’s PPI report.

The Diesel Problem

Historically, the Federal Reserve has placed considerable emphasis on core inflation because food and energy prices can be highly volatile. The logic is straightforward: temporary energy-price spikes can distort the underlying inflation trend.

But this energy shock is different.

The problem is diesel.

According to the latest BLS PPI data, the price of diesel fuel jumped an extraordinary 24.1% in August alone. BLS reported that more than one-third of the August increase in final-demand goods was attributable to diesel, while nearly two-thirds of the increase in processed goods for intermediate demand was also attributable to the 24.1% surge in diesel prices.

This is not simply a higher price at the pump for people who drive diesel vehicles. Diesel is embedded throughout the economy.

Trucks move food, consumer products, construction materials, manufactured goods, and virtually everything else through the nation’s supply chain. Diesel also powers agricultural machinery, construction equipment, mining equipment, generators, and other industrial machinery.

When diesel prices rise sharply and remain elevated, the increased cost of transportation and production eventually works its way into the prices consumers pay.

Why “Core” Inflation May Miss the Coming Shock

Energy is normally removed from core inflation because energy prices are volatile.

But removing energy from the calculation does not make its economic effects disappear.

A prolonged energy shock can become a supply-chain shock.

That distinction matters.

If gasoline or diesel prices briefly spike and then fall, businesses may absorb some of the increase. But if fuel costs remain elevated, businesses eventually have to recover those higher costs through higher prices for their products and services.

That means today’s diesel inflation can become tomorrow’s food inflation, transportation inflation, construction inflation, manufacturing inflation, and service inflation.

In other words, the energy shock can migrate into core inflation.

This is why the current situation deserves particular attention. The 24.1% monthly increase in diesel prices reported by BLS is large enough to create significant downstream pressure throughout the economy.

$6 Diesel Changes the Equation

Diesel prices have also reached extraordinary levels at the retail pump.

AAA data reported in early September showed the national diesel price approaching the $6-per-gallon threshold, with some markets already reaching or exceeding that level. In several markets, diesel prices were more than 60% above year-earlier levels.

That is a massive increase in one of the economy’s most important transportation and production inputs.

And there is another problem approaching.

Heating Oil Season Is Coming

Northern Hemisphere heating season is about to begin.

Heating oil and diesel are closely related middle-distillate petroleum products and compete for refinery capacity. BLS’s August PPI report also showed a substantial increase in home heating oil and distillates.

That means the diesel shock is arriving just as seasonal demand for heating fuel begins to increase.

For households in the Northeast and other regions that rely on heating oil, this could become a direct household expense. For everyone else, higher heating and transportation costs can still work their way through the prices of goods and services.

Yesterday’s PPI May Be Today’s Warning

The sequence of the data is important.

Yesterday’s PPI showed an enormous producer-level shock concentrated in energy, particularly diesel.

Today’s CPI shows consumer inflation remaining elevated.

The critical question is not simply whether headline CPI is 3.4% or whether core inflation is 0.3% for the month.

The bigger question is what happens when a massive energy-cost shock persists long enough to propagate through the entire economy.

Core inflation may initially appear relatively contained because energy is excluded from its calculation.

But the economy cannot exclude energy from its production and transportation costs.

Eventually, somebody pays the diesel bill.

And increasingly, that somebody is the consumer.

The current inflation story therefore may not be about an isolated spike in energy prices. It may be the beginning of an inflationary transmission process—from diesel, to producers, to transportation, to supply chains, and ultimately to consumer prices.

bookmark_borderInflation’s Fiscal Engine: How Government Spending Keeps Price Pressures Alive

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How Fiscal Policy Is Becoming a Driving Force of Inflation

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released its August 2026 Producer Price Index (PPI) report on September 10, revealing a renewed acceleration in wholesale prices. According to the report, headline PPI rose 0.4 percent month over month and climbed 5.4 percent over the year, with a significant increase in final-demand goods helping drive the advance. The PPI measures prices received by domestic producers and therefore provides an early look at price pressures moving through the production and distribution system.

The important question is not simply why did producer prices rise this month? It is a larger question:

Why does inflation continue to find fuel in an economy that has already experienced years of elevated prices?

One increasingly important answer is fiscal policy.

Inflation is not produced by a single variable. Energy prices, tariffs, supply disruptions, wages, housing costs, commodity prices, exchange rates, expectations, and monetary policy can all affect the price level. But fiscal policy determines another fundamental component of the inflation equation: how much purchasing power the government injects into the economy relative to the economy’s ability to supply goods and services.

When government spending persistently exceeds government revenues, the resulting deficit represents a substantial fiscal impulse. That impulse can support economic activity—and that is sometimes exactly what policymakers intend. But if demand is already strong, additional fiscal stimulus can also intensify competition for labor, materials, transportation, construction capacity, housing, and other scarce resources.

In other words:

Fiscal policy can become an inflation engine.

The Government Is Part of Aggregate Demand

It is easy to think of inflation as something caused primarily by consumers spending too much money.

But consumers are only one component of aggregate demand.

Businesses spend. Consumers spend. State and local governments spend. And the federal government spends.

The Federal Reserve defines aggregate demand as the combined demand for goods and services from households, businesses, and governments. Government purchases therefore enter the economy alongside private consumption and investment.

That matters because a government does not need to increase taxes to spend more money.

It can borrow.

When federal expenditures exceed federal revenues, the government finances the difference through borrowing. The resulting deficit does not automatically create inflation—particularly when the economy has substantial unused capacity. But persistent, large deficits can become inflationary when they add demand faster than the economy can expand its real supply of goods and services.

The distinction is crucial:

Deficit spending is not synonymous with inflation.

But under the right—or wrong—economic conditions, deficit spending can be an important source of inflationary pressure.

America’s Fiscal Imbalance Is Enormous

The scale of current federal deficits makes this more than an abstract theoretical issue.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated in August that the federal government had accumulated a $1.8 trillion deficit during the first ten months of fiscal year 2026. During that period, federal revenues increased by about 3 percent while outlays increased by about 5 percent. CBO subsequently estimated that the full-year 2026 deficit would reach approximately $2.1 trillion.

CBO’s longer-term projections similarly show deficits remaining historically large. Its February baseline projected a 2026 deficit of $1.9 trillion, equivalent to 5.8 percent of GDP, compared with a 50-year historical average deficit of 3.8 percent of GDP. Federal outlays were projected at 23.3 percent of GDP, substantially above their 50-year average of 21.2 percent.

That is a fiscal environment in which policymakers need to take seriously the possibility that government demand is contributing to persistent price pressure.

And there is another complication.

Fiscal Policy and Monetary Policy Can Pull in Opposite Directions

The Federal Reserve controls monetary policy. Congress and the Administration control fiscal policy.

These are different policy levers, but they interact.

The Federal Reserve explicitly notes that fiscal policy affects the economic outlook and that the Fed considers current and projected fiscal policy when determining the appropriate stance of monetary policy.

Consider the policy feedback:

Government spends more → aggregate demand increases → resource competition increases → prices rise → inflation persists → Federal Reserve faces greater pressure to maintain restrictive monetary policy.

This can create a peculiar policy conflict.

Fiscal policy may be pushing demand upward at the same time monetary policy is attempting to restrain demand.

The Fed can raise interest rates to cool borrowing, investment, housing, and consumption. But monetary policy cannot directly decide how much Congress spends or how much revenue the federal government collects.

Consequently, monetary policy can be forced to compensate for fiscal policy.

That is an important reason why blaming the Federal Reserve alone for inflation can miss half of the equation.

The Fiscal Multiplier Matters

Government spending does not necessarily have a one-for-one effect on economic activity.

Money spent by the government becomes income for someone else. That recipient spends some of it, creating income for another person or business, which can generate another round of spending.

This is the basic idea behind the fiscal multiplier.

When the economy has substantial unused capacity, that multiplier can increase real output without producing an equivalent increase in prices.

But when the economy is operating close to capacity, the same additional demand can produce a different result.

There may simply not be enough additional workers, factories, trucks, construction crews, housing, electricity, raw materials, or other productive resources available to satisfy the additional demand.

At that point, more nominal demand begins chasing a relatively constrained supply.

The result can be higher prices rather than proportionately higher real output.

That is the fiscal-inflation connection.

Deficits Can Also Keep Pressure on the Economy Longer

There is another reason persistent deficits matter.

A temporary fiscal expansion can be appropriate during a recession, emergency, war, financial crisis, or other period of severe economic weakness. The government can deliberately borrow and spend to prevent a collapse in demand.

The problem arises when emergency-style fiscal policy becomes structurally embedded after the emergency has passed.

If spending remains elevated while revenues remain insufficient to finance it, the government continues injecting fiscal demand into the economy.

The issue then becomes less about one year’s stimulus and more about the persistent fiscal stance.

That persistence matters for inflation expectations, interest rates, government borrowing costs, private investment, and the Federal Reserve’s policy response.

Government Spending Can Also Raise the Cost of Producing Things

Fiscal policy does not affect inflation only by stimulating demand.

Government policy can also affect the cost structure of the economy.

Government borrowing contributes to demand for credit. Large and persistent borrowing needs can put upward pressure on interest rates, particularly when private borrowers are competing for the same pool of financial resources.

Government spending can also increase demand for construction, engineering, defense production, transportation, technology, health care, energy, and other services.

When government becomes a very large buyer, private-sector buyers may have to compete for the same resources.

The result can be higher wages, higher input costs, higher financing costs, and higher prices.

In that sense, fiscal policy can influence both sides of the inflation equation:

More demand + constrained supply = greater price pressure.

The PPI Is an Important Warning Signal

This is why the August PPI deserves attention.

Producer prices are not consumer prices, and a single monthly PPI increase does not prove that fiscal policy caused the increase. Prices can move because of commodity markets, tariffs, energy shocks, supply disruptions, weather, transportation costs, exchange rates, or changes in margins.

But the PPI provides a useful window into the price pressures confronting businesses before those pressures are fully transmitted through the economy.

The July PPI data already showed that producer prices remained elevated: final-demand prices were up 4.7 percent over the year, while final-demand goods were up 6.5 percent and final-demand services were up 3.9 percent.

The August acceleration therefore raises a broader question about whether inflation is merely experiencing temporary disturbances—or whether the economy continues to contain structural forces capable of sustaining price increases.

Fiscal policy belongs prominently in that discussion.

Inflation Is a Policy Interaction, Not a Single-Agency Failure

It is tempting to divide economic policy into simple categories:

The Fed causes inflation.

Or:

Government spending causes inflation.

Or:

Tariffs cause inflation.

Or:

Corporations cause inflation.

Reality is considerably more complicated.

Inflation is an interaction among monetary policy, fiscal policy, supply, demand, expectations, financial conditions, international trade, energy markets, labor markets, and productivity.

But acknowledging complexity should not obscure responsibility.

If fiscal policy continually stimulates demand while monetary policy is attempting to suppress it, the two policies are working at cross-purposes.

And if the government repeatedly runs enormous deficits while the economy is operating near capacity, fiscal policy can become a persistent contributor to inflation rather than merely a temporary response to economic weakness.

The Fiscal Policy Question

The central economic question should therefore be expanded beyond:

“What is the Federal Reserve doing about inflation?”

It should also be:

“What is fiscal policy doing to inflation?”

That question is especially important when federal spending is growing faster than federal revenues and when deficits are measured in trillions of dollars.

The Federal Reserve can raise interest rates.

It can reduce them.

It can tighten.

It can ease.

But the Fed cannot balance the federal budget.

Congress and the Administration determine the government’s spending and taxation policies. As the Federal Reserve itself explains, fiscal policy is fundamentally the government’s tax-and-spending policy, while monetary policy is conducted independently by the central bank.

That division of responsibility matters.

If fiscal policy continually pushes aggregate demand upward, monetary policy may have to work harder to restrain it.

And that creates a potentially damaging cycle:

Large deficits → stronger aggregate demand → persistent inflation → tighter monetary policy → higher borrowing costs → greater federal interest expense → larger deficits.

The last step is particularly troubling because rising interest costs can themselves enlarge future deficits.

Inflation’s Fiscal Feedback Loop

This creates the possibility of a fiscal feedback loop:

Deficits increase → debt increases → interest expense increases → federal spending increases → deficits increase further.

CBO’s projections already show the importance of this mechanism. In its 2026 baseline, net federal interest costs were projected at roughly $1 trillion, or 3.3 percent of GDP. CBO projected that interest costs would continue rising as a share of the economy over the following decade.

That does not mean interest expense itself automatically creates consumer-price inflation.

It means that debt service becomes another claim on federal resources and another component of federal spending that must ultimately be financed through taxes, borrowing, or reductions elsewhere.

The larger the debt burden becomes, the less fiscal flexibility policymakers have when the next recession, financial crisis, war, pandemic, or climate disaster arrives.

The Bottom Line

The August 2026 PPI report is more than another monthly inflation statistic.

It is a reminder that inflationary pressure remains embedded in the U.S. economy.

Some of that pressure comes from supply-side forces. Some comes from international events. Some comes from tariffs, energy markets, labor costs, and other factors.

But fiscal policy should not be treated as an innocent bystander.

Government spending is demand.

Deficits finance spending that exceeds current revenues.

Persistent deficits can sustain aggregate demand even when inflation is already elevated.

And when that fiscal expansion collides with constrained productive capacity, the result can be continued upward pressure on prices.

The United States therefore faces a policy problem that cannot be solved by monetary policy alone.

If policymakers want durable price stability, they eventually have to address not only the price of money, but also the size and composition of government spending, taxation, borrowing, and deficits.

The inflation debate should consequently move beyond the familiar question of whether the Federal Reserve is tightening enough.

The harder question is:

Is fiscal policy itself helping to keep the inflation fire burning?

In 2026, the evidence says that question deserves considerably more attention.

bookmark_borderThe Economics of an Ultimatum: Trade Deficits, the Fed, and the Price of Political Pressure

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On September 4, 2026, President Donald Trump escalated his ongoing pressure campaign against the Federal Reserve following a stronger-than-expected August jobs report. The unexpectedly strong labor-market data increased market expectations that the Federal Reserve could raise interest rates as was already expected.

Trump responded with a sweeping threat on Truth Social: if the Federal Reserve does not lower interest rates, he said he would stop trading with countries with which the United States runs a trade deficit. He demanded that the Fed “get smart” and “BE PATRIOTS for a change,” while arguing that the United States should have the lowest interest rate in the world.

As one prominent economist associated with the Wharton School put it, this is insane.

The problem begins with a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of the Federal Reserve.

The Federal Reserve Must Remain Independent
The Federal Reserve’s operational independence exists for a reason. Congress established a framework that gives the Fed significant independence in conducting monetary policy while holding it accountable to its statutory objectives of maximum employment and stable prices.

This independence is not an inconvenience to be overcome by political pressure. It is one of the foundations of monetary credibility.

A central bank that is perceived as responding directly to the political demands of the president risks losing the credibility that allows it to control inflation expectations and maintain confidence in the currency. Federal Reserve officials have repeatedly emphasized that institutional credibility is essential to effective monetary policy.

That matters enormously for the United States because the dollar remains the world’s dominant reserve currency. The Federal Reserve reported in 2026 that the dollar remains the most widely used currency in foreign-exchange transactions and cross-border payments and the leading currency in official reserve holdings. That position is supported not only by the size of the American economy and the depth of U.S. financial markets, but also by confidence in U.S. institutions.

The independence of the Federal Reserve is therefore not merely an institutional technicality. It is part of the infrastructure supporting confidence in the dollar.

The Trade-Deficit Fallacy
The second problem is the premise that a U.S. trade deficit is inherently a loss for America.

It isn’t.

A trade deficit means that the United States imports more goods and services than it exports. But that is only one side of the accounting identity. The other side is the flow of foreign capital into the United States.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas explains that trade deficits are the mirror image of foreign capital inflows. They can reflect strong domestic investment, fiscal expansion, global savings flows, and the unique role of the U.S. dollar as the world’s dominant reserve currency.

In other words, foreigners do not simply “take” something from America when they sell us more goods than they buy from us. The dollars ultimately flow back into American financial assets, businesses, real estate, government securities and other investments.

That capital finances American consumption and investment.

The Congressional Research Service similarly notes that the trade deficit allows Americans to consume more goods than they produce and allows the United States to finance more investment with foreign capital. It can therefore benefit U.S. consumers and borrowers, including the federal government.

The trade deficit is not automatically a sign of economic weakness. In many circumstances, it is a consequence of America’s economic strength, investment opportunities, capital markets and the global demand for dollar-denominated assets.

Trying to eliminate a trade deficit by simply eliminating trade would therefore attack the symptom rather than the underlying economic relationships.

Threatening Higher Inflation to Force Lower Rates
The third problem is perhaps the most fundamental.

If the objective is to reduce borrowing costs, threatening policies that undermine confidence in the Federal Reserve, disrupt international trade and increase inflationary pressure is precisely the wrong direction.

The president’s demand for lower short-term interest rates does not determine long-term borrowing costs. Bond investors ultimately price Treasury securities based on their expectations for inflation, economic growth, fiscal conditions, monetary policy and institutional credibility.

If investors begin to believe that monetary policy is being subordinated to political demands, they can demand greater compensation for holding dollar-denominated debt.

That means higher—not lower—long-term interest rates.

The irony is profound: an attempt to force interest rates lower can produce the very conditions that push market rates higher.

The Market’s Immediate Message
The financial markets reacted to both the jobs report and Trump’s threat, with futures markets increasing the implied probability of a September rate increase while spot-market interest rates rose almost immediately.
The broader message from the bond market is important.

Markets do not simply obey political demands.

They price risk.

And when political pressure raises questions about the future independence of monetary policy, investors can respond by demanding higher yields and a larger risk premium.

That raises borrowing costs throughout the economy—from the federal government to corporations to households.

The Economic Contradiction
The contradiction is difficult to miss. The stated objective is lower interest rates. But forcing the Federal Reserve to cut rates through political pressure could undermine confidence in the institution.

The stated objective is to eliminate trade deficits. But eliminating trade with deficit countries would also eliminate the imports that American consumers and businesses purchase and disrupt the foreign capital flows associated with those trade relationships.

The stated objective is to strengthen the American economy. But deliberately creating uncertainty around monetary policy and international trade risks increasing inflation, raising borrowing costs and reducing investment.

The United States did not become the world’s largest economy by treating every trade deficit as a financial loss. Nor did the dollar become the world’s dominant reserve currency because American monetary policy was subordinated to short-term political demands.

The strength of the American economic system rests on something much larger: deep and liquid capital markets, open international commerce, property rights, the rule of law, institutional credibility and confidence in the stability of the dollar.

Those are assets that can take generations to build. They can be damaged much faster.

The central question is therefore not whether interest rates should be higher or lower at any particular moment.

The question is whether monetary policy will be determined by economic conditions and the Federal Reserve’s statutory mandate—or by political ultimata.

That distinction matters because the price of undermining confidence in America’s economic institutions is ultimately paid not by the Federal Reserve, but by Americans through higher inflation, higher borrowing costs, reduced investment and a less reliable dollar.

bookmark_borderHow Is Climate Energy Hitting You? Socio-Economic-Ecological Feedbacks

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by Daniel Brouse

From Biodiversity to Monoculture: The Socio-Economic-Ecological Feedback Loop

Climate change is often described as a problem of rising temperatures, but temperature is only one expression of the additional energy entering the Earth system.

That energy moves through the atmosphere, hydrologic cycle, soils, vegetation, ecosystems, agriculture, forests, and human economies. As each system responds, it can alter the conditions experienced by the others.

This creates feedback loops.

A recent investigation by the Center for Investigative Reporting found that glyphosate is being sprayed in California forests at record levels. The U.S. Forest Service, timber companies, and other land managers use glyphosate after wildfire or timber harvest to suppress competing vegetation and improve the establishment of commercially valuable conifers.

At first glance, this may appear to be a straightforward forestry practice: kill competing plants, plant trees, and accelerate forest recovery.

But viewed through the lens of climate-system dynamics, it raises a much larger question:

What happens when our response to climate disruption further simplifies the ecosystems we depend upon for resilience?

Climate Energy Is Changing the Recovery Environment

Western forests are already experiencing a combination of higher temperatures, increasing atmospheric moisture demand, changing precipitation and snowpack, declining soil moisture, drought stress, and increasingly severe wildfire.

Our earlier paper, Western U.S. Woodlands Ecosystem Conversion, examines what happens when these pressures push a forest beyond its ability to regenerate.

A forest can experience increasing stress for years without an obvious transformation. Then a threshold can be crossed.

Trees die.

Seed sources disappear.

Regeneration fails.

Shrubs and grasses occupy the landscape.

The ecosystem begins transitioning from one state to another.

As the paper explains, under moderate emissions scenarios, up to 40% of western conifer forests could convert to shrubland or grassland by 2100.

That is not simply forest damage.

It is ecosystem conversion.

And once we recognize that distinction, the economics of post-fire forest management look different.

The Economics of Reforestation

After a major wildfire, rapidly growing shrubs, grasses, ferns, and deciduous vegetation can compete with planted conifer seedlings for water, nutrients, and sunlight.

From a timber-production perspective, that competition is a problem.

Glyphosate provides an efficient way to remove it.

The Forest Service has used herbicide treatments as part of regeneration efforts because suppressing competing vegetation can improve the early survival and growth of desired seedlings. Forest research acknowledges that this is one reason herbicides have been used in reforestation.

The economic objective is therefore understandable:

reduce competition → increase seedling survival → accelerate timber production.

But that is not necessarily the same objective as:

restore biodiversity → restore ecological function → increase climate resilience.

Those two objectives can overlap.

They can also conflict.

A Forest Is Not a Tree Farm

The distinction matters because a forest is not simply a collection of trees.

A functioning forest contains an enormous biological network:

  • multiple tree species
  • shrubs
  • grasses
  • flowering plants
  • fungi and mycorrhizal networks
  • insects and pollinators
  • birds
  • mammals
  • reptiles and amphibians
  • soil organisms
  • decomposers
  • streams and wetlands
  • genetic diversity

Each component participates in the functioning of the ecosystem.

When glyphosate is applied to eliminate “competing” vegetation, those plants are competitors only from the perspective of the desired crop.

From the perspective of the ecosystem, they may be food, shelter, habitat, soil cover, pollinator resources, firebreaks, nutrient sources, or participants in water and carbon cycling.

This creates a fundamental difference between restoration and production.

Production asks:

How efficiently can we produce the desired commodity?

Ecological restoration asks:

How effectively can we restore the biological relationships that make the ecosystem resilient?

Biodiversity Is Infrastructure

Biodiversity is often treated as an aesthetic or conservation issue.

It is much more than that.

Biodiversity is a form of ecological infrastructure.

Different species respond differently to drought, heat, insects, disease, fire, and changing precipitation. A diverse ecosystem therefore contains multiple biological responses to disturbance.

If one species performs poorly, another may survive.

If one food source disappears, another may remain.

If one plant cannot regenerate under new climatic conditions, another may occupy the available ecological niche.

This is one reason biological diversity can provide resilience.

A simplified ecosystem has fewer alternatives.

A diverse ecosystem has more.

That distinction becomes increasingly important as climate variability increases.

From Biodiversity to Monoculture

The problem becomes more obvious when forestry is compared with modern industrial agriculture.

Large-scale agriculture often relies on monocultures: enormous areas devoted to a single crop or a very small number of genetically similar crops. Monoculture creates economic efficiencies. Machines can plant, fertilize, spray, harvest, and transport a standardized product at enormous scale. But biological simplification creates vulnerabilities.

A pest that specializes in the crop has an enormous continuous food supply. A disease can spread rapidly through genetically similar plants. Soil nutrients can become depleted. Pollinator and insect diversity can decline. Herbicide and pesticide dependence can increase.

The economic system becomes increasingly dependent upon external inputs to maintain productivity.

The result can be a feedback loop:

biodiversity declines → ecological resistance declines → pests and disease become more consequential → chemical inputs increase → biodiversity declines further.

This is not an argument that all monoculture agriculture inevitably fails.

It is an argument that efficiency and resilience are not the same thing.

The same distinction applies to forestry.

The Forest Monoculture

When post-fire management suppresses naturally regenerating vegetation in order to establish commercially desirable conifers, the landscape can move toward a forest plantation rather than a naturally regenerating forest.

A plantation can contain thousands of trees and still possess considerably less biodiversity than the ecosystem it replaced.

This creates a dangerous semantic trap. We see trees. We call it a forest. But ecological function depends upon far more than tree cover.

A plantation of one or a few commercially valuable species can look green from above while functioning very differently from a diverse forest.

And in a warming climate, that distinction can become critical.

Ecosystem Conversion Versus Reforestation

This is where the concept of ecosystem conversion becomes important.

Suppose a severe wildfire destroys a mature conifer forest.

The original ecosystem does not necessarily return.

Under the warmer and drier conditions described in my Western U.S. Woodlands paper, grasses and shrubs may become better adapted to the post-fire environment than the trees that previously occupied it.

The landscape may therefore transition:

forest → wildfire → shrubland/grassland

That is climate-driven ecosystem conversion.

Now introduce intensive human intervention:

forest → wildfire → herbicide → removal of natural competitors → planted conifers → managed timber plantation

This is something different.

The second pathway is not simply allowing the ecosystem to respond to its new climate. It is imposing an economic land-use objective upon that response. That distinction should be explicit in public policy.

The Carbon Question

There is another important distinction. A green landscape is not necessarily equivalent to the forest that existed before. Grasslands and shrublands photosynthesize and absorb carbon.

So do plantations.

But carbon uptake is not the same thing as carbon storage.

A mature forest contains carbon in:

  • trunks
  • branches
  • roots
  • dead wood
  • forest soils
  • long-lived biomass

The Ecosystem Conversion paper makes this distinction explicitly:

carbon uptake ≠ carbon storage capacity

and

positive carbon flux ≠ preservation of the previous carbon stock.

A plantation may therefore satisfy a narrow definition of reforestation while failing to reproduce the carbon reservoir, biodiversity, hydrology, and ecological complexity of the original forest.

The Glyphosate Feedback

This brings us back to glyphosate. The current controversy is not simply about a herbicide. It is about the interaction between climate disruption, economic incentives, land management, biodiversity, and ecosystem resilience.

The emerging feedback looks something like this:

Climate warming

↓

Heat + drought + atmospheric moisture demand

↓

More severe wildfire

↓

Loss of mature forest

↓

Economic pressure to recover timber production

↓

Herbicide use to suppress competing vegetation

↓

Reduced vegetation diversity

↓

Simplified forest structure

↓

Greater dependence on managed inputs

↓

Potentially reduced ecological resilience

↓

Greater vulnerability to future climate disturbances

This does not mean glyphosate necessarily causes every subsequent step.

The feedback is systemic.

The larger point is that a management strategy designed to optimize one component of a complex system can unintentionally weaken other components.

The Scientific Evidence Must Be Independent

There is also a legitimate question about the evidence used to evaluate glyphosate. The recent investigation found that a study heavily relied upon by the Forest Service in assessing glyphosate safety was subsequently retracted after concerns about Monsanto’s involvement in the research process.That does not establish that every use of glyphosate is unsafe. It does establish why the underlying evidence should be independently reviewed.

When government policy determines what chemicals can be sprayed across public landscapes, the scientific foundation for those decisions should be exceptionally transparent.

Public land requires public confidence. And public confidence requires independent science.

From Wildfire Recovery to a National Policy

The issue also has a national economic dimension.

On February 18, 2026, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Promoting the National Defense by Ensuring an Adequate Supply of Elemental Phosphorus and Glyphosate-Based Herbicides.”

The order invokes the Defense Production Act and directs federal action to ensure an adequate domestic supply of glyphosate-based herbicides. That places glyphosate within a much larger economic framework involving agriculture, forestry, chemical manufacturing, supply chains, and national security.

The feedback becomes:

climate disruption → increased agricultural and forestry stress → greater dependence on chemical intervention → greater economic importance of chemical production → stronger incentives to maintain chemical availability.

The system becomes self-reinforcing.

The Bigger Problem: Optimizing the Wrong Variable

Climate change forces us to rethink what we mean by efficiency. A system can be economically efficient while being ecologically fragile. A monoculture can produce enormous quantities of a commodity while containing very little biological diversity. A plantation can produce timber while failing to reproduce the ecological functions of a natural forest. A landscape can be covered in green vegetation while holding substantially less carbon than the forest it replaced. And a post-fire intervention can accelerate tree planting while simultaneously simplifying the ecosystem that must survive the next climate shock.

The central question is therefore not:

How quickly can we replace the trees we lost?

It is:

What kind of ecosystem will survive the climate that is coming?

The Resilience Test

Climate change is increasing the importance of resilience.

A resilient ecosystem does not necessarily maximize production under ideal conditions.

It maintains function when conditions become abnormal.

That means diversity matters.

Species diversity.

Genetic diversity.

Structural diversity.

Age diversity.

Habitat diversity.

Landscape diversity.

Biological diversity is effectively a portfolio of responses to uncertainty.

Industrial systems tend to reduce that diversity because standardization creates efficiency.

Climate instability does the opposite.

It increases the value of diversity.

That creates one of the central contradictions of the climate era:

The more unstable the climate becomes, the more we need ecological diversity—and the more economic pressure we may face to simplify ecosystems for efficiency.

Climate Energy Is Hitting the Whole System

This is ultimately what I mean by How Is Climate Energy Hitting You?

Climate energy does not stop with a thermometer reading or a measurement of atmospheric carbon dioxide. It moves through the entire coupled human-Earth system.

Heat changes water demand.

Water stress changes forests.

Forest stress changes wildfire.

Wildfire changes ecosystems.

Ecosystem disruption changes economic decisions.

Economic decisions change land management.

Land management changes biodiversity.

Biodiversity changes resilience.

And declining resilience feeds back into the next disturbance.

The resulting system is not a collection of unrelated environmental problems. It is a coupled socio-economic-ecological feedback system in which changes in one component propagate through the others.

Wildfire becomes an economic loss.

Economic loss creates pressure for rapid recovery.

Rapid recovery creates demand for herbicides, machinery, labor, and planted timber.

Those interventions alter ecosystems.

Altered ecosystems influence water, biodiversity, soil, carbon storage, and future fire behavior.

Government policy can then reinforce the economic system that produced the intervention in the first place.

The feedback can therefore become self-reinforcing.

The challenge is to recognize when a short-term economic solution becomes a long-term ecological feedback.

That distinction becomes especially important when an ecosystem crosses a threshold. Restoring the trees may not be the same thing as restoring the forest.

And once biodiversity has been converted into monoculture, replanting the landscape does not necessarily recreate the ecosystem that was lost.

Climate change is not simply changing the weather.

It is changing the decisions we make about the world around us—and those decisions can become feedbacks that determine how resilient that world remains.

bookmark_borderSea-Level Rise: Rubbing Salt in the Wound

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by Daniel Brouse and Sidd Mukherjee

How Is Climate Energy Hitting You?

The Jersey Shore Is Sure

Sea-Level Rise: Rubbing Salt in the Wound

Sea-level rise is not simply a matter of the ocean getting higher. Climate change is altering the physical forces that move water toward and onto the shoreline. Rising seas, changing atmospheric pressure, stronger winds, altered ocean circulation, storm surge, king tides, and saltwater intrusion can interact to turn gradual sea-level rise into a much more immediate coastal threat.

A Real-World Warning: The Wetlands Institute

The experience of The Wetlands Institute in Stone Harbor, New Jersey, provides a striking example of how quickly coastal conditions can change.

The institute’s Salt Marsh Trail reportedly flooded only a few times a year around 2000. Over the past five years, flooding has averaged nearly 70 times annually. The institute is closing its headquarters on September 7, 2026, to begin a major coastal-resilience transformation.

The response includes raising the Salt Marsh Trail by two to three feet using clean dredged material, temporarily relocating operations and educational programs, and pursuing a broader campaign to replace and elevate the existing campus buildings.

This is more than an inconvenience. Increasingly frequent inundation can fundamentally alter the coastal ecosystem itself.

The Climate Shift

  • Accelerated sea-level rise: Sea levels along parts of the New Jersey coast are rising faster than the global average.
  • Marsh degradation: Repeated inundation can overwhelm salt-marsh vegetation, converting productive marsh into mudflats and eventually open water.
  • Wildlife disruption: More frequent flooding threatens habitats used by marsh-dependent birds and can interfere with diamondback terrapin nesting.
  • Infrastructure exposure: Roads, buildings, trails, drainage systems, and utilities face increasingly frequent flooding even without a major storm.

The critical point is that the climate signal is not experienced as a smooth, uniform rise in water level. It is experienced as more frequent encounters with water.

1. The Inverse Barometer Effect: Atmospheric Pressure Pushes the Ocean

Atmospheric pressure exerts physical force on the ocean surface. When a deep low-pressure system moves over the coast, the reduced atmospheric weight allows the ocean surface to rise.

The approximate relationship is:

A 1-hectopascal (hPa) decrease in atmospheric pressure produces roughly a 1-centimeter rise in sea level.

A very deep storm can therefore raise the local ocean surface substantially before the effects of wind-driven storm surge are even considered.

This is known as the inverse barometer effect.

Climate change does not simply “raise the sea.” It can alter the atmospheric conditions that determine how that elevated ocean is distributed along the coastline at any particular moment.

Inverse Barometer Effect Examples

Storm typeApprox. pressure near coastPressure drop from 1013 hPaInverse-barometer rise
Ordinary coastal storm990–1000 hPa13–23 hPa5–9 in
Strong nor’easter970–985 hPa28–43 hPa11–17 in
Very strong coastal storm950–965 hPa48–63 hPa19–25 in
Sandy-type extreme~945 hPa~68 hPa~27 in / 2.2 ft
Exceptional low-pressure event930–940 hPa73–83 hPa29–33 in / 2.4–2.8 ft

The Combined Impact

The inverse barometer effect combines with wind stress, coastline shape, bathymetry, wave setup, tides, and storm track can produce much larger water-level changes. Hurricane Sandy’s actual coastal water levels were dramatically higher because the pressure effect was combined with enormous wind-driven surge, wave action, tide, and the storm’s exceptionally favorable track. At Sandy Hook, water reached about 8.9 feet above ground level, while the storm produced major surge throughout the central and northern Jersey Shore.

An additional 5 inches to 3 feet of sea-level rise represents a new baseline of climate energy impacting coastal communities. The inverse barometer effect then combines with wind stress, coastline shape, bathymetry, wave setup, tides, and storm track to produce much larger water-level changes. The result can be extreme coastal flooding, with observed water levels reaching roughly 9 feet above ground level along parts of the Jersey Shore and as much as 30 feet in parts of Florida during major storms.

2. Wind and Wave Energy: Turning Pressure Gradients Into Coastal Damage

Atmospheric pressure gradients—the differences between areas of high and low pressure—drive winds.

When those gradients become stronger, winds can become stronger and more persistent. Strong winds transfer energy to the ocean, generating larger waves and increasing wind setup, the piling of water against the coast.

The consequences can include:

  • Higher water levels along exposed shorelines
  • Larger and more destructive waves
  • Increased dune erosion
  • Offshore transport of beach sand
  • Overtopping of coastal defenses
  • Greater storm-surge penetration

The shoreline therefore experiences not only a higher baseline sea level but also increasingly energetic ways of moving that water around.

3. Altered Ocean Circulation: When Water Piles Up

Changes in large-scale atmospheric circulation can alter ocean currents and regional sea levels.

The relationship between the Gulf Stream, the North Atlantic circulation, winds, and coastal sea level is particularly important along the U.S. East Coast. Changes in ocean circulation can redistribute enormous volumes of water, producing dynamic sea-level changes that may differ substantially from the global average.

In simplified terms, when ocean circulation changes, water can accumulate against a coastline rather than being transported away from it.

That means a community can experience a rapid increase in local relative sea level even when the global mean is changing much more slowly.

4. Compound Coastal Flooding: When Everything Arrives Together

The most dangerous coastal flooding occurs when multiple processes reinforce one another.

Imagine a high tide occurring while:

  • Global sea level is already elevated.
  • A low-pressure storm raises the ocean through the inverse barometer effect.
  • Strong onshore winds push additional water toward land.
  • Large waves increase water levels and erode dunes.
  • Heavy rainfall overwhelms drainage systems.
  • Rivers are already elevated and cannot discharge efficiently.

These processes can combine into compound flooding.

The problem is not simply that the water is higher. The problem is that multiple pathways for moving water onto the land are operating simultaneously.

Salt marshes normally provide a natural buffer. But repeated inundation and erosion can eventually overwhelm the marsh itself. Once protective wetlands deteriorate, more wave energy reaches infrastructure, creating a feedback loop of increasing exposure and increasing damage.

Saltwater Intrusion: When the Ocean Moves Underground

Sea-level rise has another consequence that is much less visible than coastal flooding: saltwater intrusion.

Saltwater intrusion occurs when seawater moves into freshwater systems, including groundwater aquifers, rivers, wetlands, agricultural soils, and drinking-water supplies.

Two forces are especially important:

  1. Rising sea level increases the hydraulic pressure and inland reach of seawater.
  2. Drought and reduced groundwater recharge weaken the freshwater pressure pushing outward toward the sea.

Together, these forces can shift the boundary between freshwater and saltwater inland.

Research has projected that saltwater contamination could affect a very large proportion of coastal aquifers by 2100, although the extent varies substantially by geography, aquifer characteristics, groundwater use, and future climate conditions.

How the Saltwater Wedge Moves Inland

Under normal conditions, rainfall replenishes groundwater. Freshwater flows toward the coast and maintains a hydraulic gradient that helps resist seawater intrusion.

Because freshwater is less dense than seawater, a freshwater lens can exist above denser saltwater beneath coastal areas.

But the balance can shift.

1. Underground Aquifer Intrusion

As sea level rises, the hydraulic pressure exerted by seawater increases. At the same time, climate-driven drought and higher temperatures can reduce groundwater recharge in some regions.

Less freshwater flowing toward the ocean means less outward pressure resisting seawater.

The underground saltwater boundary can therefore migrate inland.

This process can occur largely out of sight until a well begins producing water with elevated salinity.

2. Surface and Vertical Infiltration

Storm surge, king tides, and coastal flooding can push seawater onto land.

If that water remains on the surface, it can infiltrate downward through soils and shallow geological formations, contaminating groundwater.

Repeated flooding is especially important because a single event may be temporary, while dozens of inundation events each year can progressively alter soil and groundwater chemistry.

3. The “Highway Effect”

Human modifications to coastal landscapes can provide pathways for seawater to travel inland.

Agricultural drainage ditches, shipping channels, tidal creeks, canals, and other engineered waterways can connect coastal waters with areas that were historically protected by natural terrain.

When sea level rises or storm surge moves inland, these channels can function as highways for saltwater.

The Ecological and Economic Consequences

Saltwater intrusion does not stop at the shoreline.

Ghost Forests

As saltwater enters coastal soils and groundwater, freshwater-dependent trees can die from prolonged salt stress. The result can be stands of dead trees known as ghost forests.

These landscapes provide visible evidence that the boundary between marine and terrestrial ecosystems is moving inland.

Agricultural Damage

Salt deposited on agricultural land can accumulate in the root zone.

Excessive soil salinity interferes with plants’ ability to absorb water and can reduce crop productivity. Persistent salinization can make valuable coastal farmland increasingly difficult—or eventually impossible—to farm without expensive remediation and freshwater management.

Infrastructure Corrosion

Saltwater and brackish groundwater are highly corrosive.

Repeated exposure can accelerate deterioration of underground pipes, electrical infrastructure, concrete, foundations, roads, and other infrastructure.

The damage can occur beneath the surface long before it becomes visually obvious.

Drinking-Water Threats

Coastal communities that depend on groundwater face a particularly serious vulnerability.

Pumping already lowers groundwater levels around wells. If the freshwater table is lowered too far, the hydraulic gradient resisting seawater intrusion weakens further.

This can create another feedback:

More pumping → lower freshwater pressure → greater saltwater intrusion → less usable freshwater.

The Larger Picture: Climate Energy Does Not Disappear

Sea-level rise is one expression of a much larger physical process.

The additional energy accumulating in the climate system does not simply produce a higher average temperature. Energy moves through the atmosphere, ocean, land, ice, and biosphere.

Along the coast, that energy can appear as:

Higher baseline sea level → more frequent tidal flooding → stronger storm impacts → erosion → wetland loss → saltwater intrusion → infrastructure damage → freshwater stress.

The critical distinction is between average conditions and actual events.

A few inches of average sea-level rise may sound modest. But those inches can determine whether a high tide remains below a road or flows across it. They can determine whether a storm surge is absorbed by a functioning marsh or reaches buildings and infrastructure.

The climate system does not deliver its additional energy evenly.

It delivers it through water, wind, waves, heat, storms, erosion, flooding, and ecological disruption.

And along the coast, the ocean is increasingly finding more ways to come ashore—and stay there.