It’s interesting to think about how economics isn’t just some sort of a tool that we use to measure value but something that produces it, along with deciding who gets to be in power (aka colonialism, capitalism, the main fossil fuel consumers, etc etc). Because I was one of the presenters of week 12, I thought a lot about the Rikard Warlenius piece since it talks about climate debt. That is something that Gathii also mentions in his piece on climate credits as he notes that the Climate crisis provides the global finance industry with an opportunity to make money off of black and brown countries in the global south (heavily indebted countries. Walrenius’s study shows us how climate debt is not just centered around unequal emissions but is also something that shows just how much the Global North takes advantage of the Global South. Wennerlind and Johnson sort of add to this idea of enlightenment era ideas of scarcity since it continues to define how we look at problems/solutions. We live in a world where consumption = economic success. Malm mentions how intertwined inequality is with our understanding of economics, stating that the term Anthropocene can be misleading because inequality and capital accumulation should be in focus when studying the historical dynamics of a warming world. Malm mentions a study of colonial India and the british empire, which demonstrates how the imperial agents introduced large scale extraction and combustion of coal but Indigenous peoples HATED IT. All in all, understanding what on Earth is going on in the world means looking back at history and recognizing that yeah, things have always been super bad and we gotta learn from it all.