Seventeen years ago, on this day, November 5th, 2008,
On 5 November 2008, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II was opening a new building at the London School of Economics. Speaking of the credit crunch, she turned to some of the economists present and said, ‘It’s awful. Why did no one see it coming?’ Journalists, not constrained to be diplomatic, were more forthright in condemning economists. For Anatol Kaletsky, one-time economics editor of the Times, ‘Economists are the guilty men’ (the Times 5 February 2009). The economics editor of the Guardian, Larry Elliott, claimed that ‘as a profession, economics not only has nothing to say about what caused the world to come to the brink of financial collapse … but also a supreme lack of interest’ (the Guardian 1 June 2009). Writing in the same newspaper, Simon Jenkins attributed this failure to the fact that ‘Economists regard it as their duty fearlessly to offer government what it wants to hear. … Don’t rock the boat, says the modern profession, and the indexed pension is secure.’ The whole economics profession, he contended, had ‘suffered a collapse’ (12 November 2008). https://strangematters.coop/frederic-s-lee-profile-part-one
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 386ppm. As of 2025, when this post was published, it is 430ppm. This matters because the more carbon dioxide in the air, the more heat gets trapped. The more heat, the more extreme weather events. You can make it more complicated than that if you want, but really, it’s not. Fwiw, I have a tattoo of the Keeling Curve on my left forearm.
The broader context was that climate change had burst onto public awareness again in 2006. The Queen had lobbied Prime Minister Tony Blair to do more in 2004. And then in late 2008 the Global Financial Crisis had kicked in.
The specific context was that by now everyone was talking about the COP to be held in Copenhagen in December 2009, as the last chance to save the earth. But everything was complicated by the banking near death experience and the bail outs…
What I think we can learn from this is that smart questions come from the most unexpected quarters.
What happened next – the Queen kept banging on (well, it’s all relative) about climate change. We’re so screwed.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
See also
October 31 2004 report in the Observer that the Queen had lobbied Blair on the Bush administration’s stance on climate.
Also on this day:
November 5, 1969 – House of Lords question about the greenhouse effect
November 5, 1992 – Jeremy Leggett calls Australian petrol price cuts “insane”
November 5, 1997 – Global Climate Coalition co-ordinates an anti-Kyoto conference
November 5, 2014 – Vince Cable and the Energy Trilemma – All Our Yesterdays