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Late last month, the Supreme Court agreed to hear two cases about the constitutionality of race-conscious admissions policies, often called affirmative action, in institutions of higher education. What are your thoughts, positions, insights, questions, or legal opinions on the subject?

Email your answers to conor@theatlantic.com. I’ll publish a selection of answers in Friday’s newsletter.

Conversations of Note

Top of mind this week: the ongoing controversy surrounding the most popular podcast in America, The Joe Rogan Experience, currently hosted on the streaming platform Spotify. Last month, 270 public-health professionals criticized Joe Rogan, the comedian and MMA commentator, for what he and some of his guests have said about COVID-19, and urged Spotify to adopt a misinformation policy. (The streaming company later published what it called “our long-standing Platform Rules.”) More recently, two iconic Baby Boomer recording artists from Canada, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, told Spotify that they wanted their music removed from the platform.

Two bits of context are useful:

Rogan’s audience is massive––an estimated 9 million people stream each episode of his show. By way of comparison, if you combine the prime-time audiences of Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, you wind up with perhaps 5 million average monthly viewers. Unlike in other “platforming” controversies, where critics object that a media organization is irresponsibly drawing more eyeballs to someone who is unworthy of them, or lending them undeserved credibility, Rogan built his audience before he went to Spotify––indeed, Spotify imposes greater barriers to listening to his show than previously existed. And unlike, say, health information published in The Atlantic, with its fact-checkers and commitment to accuracy, no one trusts health information more because it was streamed through Spotify.

But Kevin Roose observes that unlike in other clashes between creators and tech platforms, “Spotify isn’t merely one of many apps that distribute Mr. Rogan’s podcast. The streaming service paid more than $100 million for exclusive rights to 'The Joe Rogan Experience' in 2020, making him the headline act for its growing podcast division. Critics say that deal, along with the aggressive way Spotify has promoted Mr. Rogan’s show inside its app, gives the company more responsibility for his show than others it carries."

My former colleague James Hamblin, a medical doctor, defended “It’s Joe Rogan or me”–style ultimatums and consumer boycotts as useful and necessary tools in a free-market country and culture. “As the problems of misinformation/disinformation grow, efforts to allocate capital thoughtfully are among the few tools Americans have left to minimize the impact of bad actors. Corporations respond to that above all else,” he wrote in his newsletter. “Refusing to think about it doesn’t make you apolitical, just oblivious. Like it or not, you’re voting with every click.”

In contrast, Charles C. W. Cooke criticized what he regards as the illiberalism of anti-Rogan critics at National Review:

Spotify, Apple, Joe Rogan, and Neil Young are all private actors, and they can do as they wish. That is Liberalism 101, and I would not wish to change it if I could. But there are other elements within Liberalism 101, too, and they are no less vital to our political order. I would, of course, have been firmly within my rights to refuse the book offer that Random House made me on the grounds that I find their other authors intolerable. But to have done so would have made me a stupid bigot. I would be fully within my rights if I declined to join any public debate that required me to share a stage with someone being paid to disagree with me. But, again, to do so would make me a stupid bigot. There is nothing “liberal” about regarding artistic platforms or delivery mechanisms as political creatures to be condemned. On the contrary: Such a habit is quite literally totalitarian.

Jack Shafer questioned the general effectiveness of boycotts at Politico:

Even in our times, when tolerance for speech that’s considered misinformation or offensive is reaching a new dipping point, censorious blow-ups like Young’s accomplish little. The markets for speech are too wide and too decentralized for any boycott to disturb. Rush Limbaugh easily survived an organized boycott against him in 2012 after he called a college student a “slut.” Tucker Carlson has sailed his ship of foolishness past a couple similar boycotts over the years to no lasting damage. Laura Ingraham, too, has outlasted the boycotters, as has Carlson and Ingraham’s network, the Fox News Channel.

Damon Linker casts doubt on the effectiveness of this specific boycott at The Week:

Rumors about bigger artists … joining the exodus have been swirling for days, so far with no confirmations. What’s strange about this effort to deplatform Rogan is that his popularity preceded, and made possible, his deal with Spotify. If the protest succeeds in getting him booted, he can simply go back to making his podcast available on other platforms or launch his own. A “win” would merely allow certain politically progressive artists to end their tacit association with a personality whose brand is the puncturing of liberal pieties.

In The New Statesman, Kat Rosenfield wonders whether concerns about health misinformation are really the root of this controversy. “At a time of increasing tribalism and profound loss of public trust in our mainstream media and authority,” she writes, “Joe Rogan has come to represent something more: the terrifying power of normal people to like the things they like.”

[Read: Liberation or folly? Your takes on artificial wombs]

The ​​most incisive analysis I encountered on Twitter: “Rogan is an Everyman. It is therefore apparent that those who would censor him would censor every man. Hence the intensity of the backlash.”

Joe Rogan himself addressed the matter on Instagram, where he pledged to strive for balance between guests with mainstream and heterodox opinions in an effort to arrive at the truth.

He said in part:

Many of the things we thought of as misinformation just a short while ago are now accepted as fact. For instance, 8 months ago, if you said, ‘If you get vaccinated you can still catch Covid, and you can still spread Covid,’ you would be removed from social media. They would ban you from certain platforms. Now that’s accepted as fact. If you said, ‘I don’t think cloth masks work,’ you would be banned from social media. Now that is openly and repeatedly stated on CNN. If you said, ‘I think it’s possible that Covid-19 came from a lab,’ you’d be banned from many social-media platforms. Now that’s on the cover of Newsweek. All of those theories that at one time were banned were openly discussed by those two men that I had on my podcast that have been accused of dangerous misinformation.

I do not know if they are right because I’m not a doctor and I’m not a scientist. I’m just a person who sits down and talks to people and has conversations ... Do I get things wrong? Absolutely. But I try to correct them … I’m interested in finding out what the truth is. And I’m interested in having interesting conversations with people that have differing opinions. I’m not interested in only talking to people that have one perspective.

China Prepares to Host the 2022 Winter Olympics

Nancy Armour sees this as a betrayal:

The International Olympic Committee has sold the people of China out, refusing to hold the hosts of next month’s Winter Olympics accountable for a litany of human rights abuses and, worse, providing cover for some of the atrocities. In doing so, it has sold itself and its ideals out, too.

Christine Brennan, who is already in Beijing to cover the games as a journalist, agrees––and intends to tell the world:

It will be an eternal stain on the already-dubious reputation of the International Olympic Committee that it gave the awful, repressive Chinese regime the opportunity to host its second Games in 14 years. The human rights abuses of the nation where I sit writing this column are reprehensible. My colleagues and I will report and talk about that every single day of these Games.

In The Washington Post, Melissa Chan notes that “some will argue the country’s communist foundation makes it fundamentally incompatible with fascism’s right-wing roots,” but she disagrees:

As a correspondent formerly based in China and now writing from Berlin, I find it difficult to ignore how much China’s present echoes Germany’s past. To right perceived wrongs, Xi has a clear revanchist agenda. Taiwan has become his Alsace-Lorraine, the Himalayan border with India his Polish Corridor, and Hong Kong his Sudetenland. With military or strong-arm tactics, he has made clear that moves to control these areas are not off the table. In addition, Beijing has reportedly moved into Bhutanese territory.

China also claims most of the South China Sea, where it has built military outposts marked by its own “nine-dash line” that, on a map, protrudes far beyond Chinese land borders in a Lebensraum-like expansion.

At the Cato Institute, Doug Bandow advanced many arguments against a U.S. boycott of the Olympics. Among them:

The PRC’s future will be determined by its own people, not foreigners. The best hope for positive reform is an internal demand for change. Younger Chinese don’t like government restrictions on their lives but even more dislike attacks on their country. A boycott, especially one led by the U.S. tarnishing China’s reputation, would risk driving people to support the Beijing regime. That would strengthen the position of Xi and other hardliners and make political reform more distant.

At Citizen Lab, analysts argue that the app all athletes will be forced to download on their phones is a privacy and censorship nightmare.

Provocation of the Week

In Works in Progress, Sam Bowman, John Myers, and Ben Southwood try “listing every problem the Western world has at the moment” and posit that one thing is exacerbating all of them:

Along with Covid, you might include slow growth, climate change, poor health, financial instability, economic inequality, and falling fertility. These longer-term trends contribute to a sense of malaise that many of us feel about our societies. They may seem loosely related, but there is one big thing that makes them all worse. That thing is a shortage of housing: too few homes being built where people want to live. And if we fix those shortages, we will help to solve many of the other, seemingly unrelated problems that we face as well.

As they go on to observe, “Housing is so important for the overall economy because it determines the location and supply of the most important ‘resource’ of all: people.”

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Confidence vote came amid growing anger over O'Toole strategy to push the opposition Conservatives closer to the centre.

The McMansions of the mid-2000s might be the most American form of housing, but they were not, in general, grown in America. Although the United States is home to more than 200 billion trees, the type of lumber harvested from North Carolina to Mississippi warps and twists when used as a vertical stud. Eventually it will pop your drywall. So for our home-framing needs, Americans rely on northern spruce and fir felled up north, milled into lumber, purchased by men like Stinson Dean, a Colorado-based lumber trader, and placed onto railcars bound for Dallas, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C.

In that last boom, Dean remembers, the U.S. built 2 million homes a year, and lumber prices never got much above $450 per 1,000 board feet, within the tidy range they’d stuck to since he entered the business nearly a decade ago. Now, the U.S. can’t find enough lumber to complete more than 1.3 million homes a year. Meanwhile, lumber is back up to $1,200. “The price of lumber has tripled, but we’re producing 40 percent less homes,” Dean told me. There has not been a bigger gap, in fact, between the number of homes that builders are starting and the number that they’re finishing in decades.

Since the mid-aughts boom, the North American economy actually lost productive capacity. Dean has little doubt about what is to blame. “The lumber-price story is a climate story,” he said. If a series of climate-change-aggravated disasters—including a multiyear outbreak of bark-eating beetles, back-to-back record-breaking fire seasons, and a massive November flood that washed out rail lines—had not struck British Columbia, “sawmills would be able to treat this market just like they did in 2006,” he said. “The price would never get over $500.”

“There are people who say, ‘Climate change isn’t affecting me,’” Janice Cooke, a forest-industry veteran at the University of Alberta, told me last year. “But they’re going to go to the hardware store and say, ‘Holy cow, the price of lumber has gone up.’” Taken by itself, climate change’s role in driving lumber inflation would be a fluke. But worrying signs have started to appear that these dynamics are not limited to lumber. Both climate change itself and the inevitable policy response to it—the global energy transition to low-carbon fuels—are starting to drive up prices around the world. And the world may not have the right tools to deal with it.

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

Given all that, you would think economists have a good, detailed sense of why it happens. But the profession’s “dirty little secret,” according to Seth Carpenter, the chief global economist for Morgan Stanley, is that they cannot predict it with ease. Economists understand that inflation arises from an imbalance of supply and demand at the absolute highest level of the economy. They even have a pithy phrase about it: Inflation is caused by “too many dollars chasing too few goods.” The fault almost always lies with the dollars.

To better understand this, think of a fairy-tale kingdom where the royal alchemist succeeded in turning lead into gold, and the delighted king ordered the royal mint to smelt more coins with it. Then he tossed the coins out the window to the populace, begging them to love him. Assuming nothing else changed about the kingdom, the king’s would-be generosity would cause prices to surge.

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

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

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

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

“This climate-change risk to the supply chain—it’s actually real. It is happening now,” Mohamed Kande, the U.S. and global advisory leader at the accounting firm PwC, told me.

Want to see what climate change is already doing to prices? Look to the prairie. Last year, the United States suffered through its hottest summer ever measured, finally breaking the record set during the Dust Bowl summer of 1936. In the northern Great Plains, searing heat—combined with record-setting drought—gave rise to swarms of grasshoppers that devoured the wheat crop. Those conditions helped push wheat prices to their highest level in years. Corn prices also rose 45 percent last year.

Or look to Brazil, which sagged under its worst drought in 91 years early last year. Water levels in the Paraná River, a major shipping artery, fell so low that cargo traffic was disrupted. Then in July, a surprise frost struck Brazil’s coffee belt, lacerating already drought-weakened arabica trees. Brazil produces nearly 40 percent of the world’s coffee. The cold snap damaged two years of crops at once, burning so deep into the trees that it fringed the buds that will become next year’s flowers. Coffee prices leapt on the news; today coffee is as expensive as it’s been in 10 years and double its 2020 levels. The companies behind Nescafé, Folgers, and Café Bustelo plan to raise consumer prices in response.

In Canada, the worst single-year drought since 1961 doubled pea prices, sending them to an all-time high. France’s water-logged and record-breakingly hot summer also helped push up global pea prices. (Alternative-meat products have made peas more in demand than ever.) In Germany and Belgium, days of torrential flooding killed more than 200 people and severely damaged the potato crop, contributing to last year’s price increase of 180 percent. (Climate change helped make the rainfall that caused those floods more likely, according to the World Weather Attribution initiative.)

Climate-addled droughts even affected the high-tech sector, Kande, the PwC advisory leader, said. More than half of the world’s semiconductors are made in Taiwan, most of them at a sprawling factory owned by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. TSMC, which uses 37 million gallons of water a day, faced production uncertainty last spring when Taiwan experienced its largest drought in half a century and began rationing water.

That said, even when bad weather destroys a crop, it doesn’t always lead to inflation. Russia, the world’s largest wheat exporter, produced 9 million fewer metric tons of wheat last year than it did in 2020. But Russian wheat prices fell because the country couldn’t sell enough wheat to sustain them. And even though the drought in the United States sent cattle prices crashing as ranchers culled their herds, meat prices surged. Meat-processing companies passed none of the spread along to consumers.

Given all this, you can see why Wall Street and corporate executives are more concerned about climate change than ever. But it’s not just commodity prices that are up. The economy shows evidence of a new, more inflationary regime caused not only by climate change but by the fight over how to respond to it. And as the world has begun to transition—slowly, incompletely—away from fossil fuels, it has created imbalances in the energy system.

The first mismatch is between fossil-fuel supply and demand. According to International Energy Agency data, the world has dramatically reduced its investment in oil and gas production over the past few years. This hasn’t happened only because of climate change: Yes, investors are skittish about long-term fossil-fuel demand in a decarbonizing world, but they’re also angry that oil stocks have performed so pitifully over the past decade.

Yet the world has not reduced its appetite for oil. It has continued to invest in cars, trucks, planes, ships, and plastic-dependent factories at a voracious rate, according to the IEA. Nor is it investing in zero-carbon energy fast enough to pick up the slack from declining oil investment. In 2021, the world put only $755 billion into the energy transition. By any historical measure, that was a bonanza amount—but it must more than quadruple, to $4 trillion, in the next decade for the world to avoid more than 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming while meeting its energy needs, the IEA says.

These mismatches have allowed oil producers to remind the rest of the economy of their power. Oil prices, now at their highest level since 2014, have made up 27 percent of the “excess” inflation since the pandemic began, according to the financial journalist Matthew C. Klein. Yet despite widespread Democratic agreement over its terms, Congress has not yet passed President Joe Biden’s climate and energy package, which could start to relieve this mess. If the mismatch between producers and consumers continues, higher oil prices—and higher prices for energy in general—could stick around for a long time.

That would be bad for prices. Although economists disagree over the role that fossil fuel plays in creating inflation, there’s little doubt that high oil prices trickle down to higher costs in the rest of the economy. When oil and gas prices rise, farmers need to spend more to tend their fields (because diesel prices go up), and to fertilize their crops (because synthetic fertilizer is made with natural gas), and to get their goods to market (because the packaging is made of plastic). The only way to break that cycle of cost increases is to move away from fossil fuels. But oil producers have demonstrated that they will get a veto over that transition as well.

How to respond to these problems? The U.S. government has one tool to slow down the great chase of inflation: Leash up its dollars. By raising the rate at which the federal government lends money to banks, the Federal Reserve makes it more expensive for businesses or consumers to take out loans themselves. This brings demand in the economy more in line with supply. It is like the king in our thought experiment deciding to buy back some of his gold coins.

But wait—is it always appropriate to focus on dollars? What if the problem was caused by too few goods? Worse, what if the economy lost the ability to produce goods over time, throwing off the dollars-to-goods ratio? Then what was once an adequate number of dollars will, through no fault of its own, become too many.

Imagine, now, that the kingdom’s outlying farms were destroyed by a dragon: The price of food would increase inside the castle walls, but it would be the dragon’s fault, not the royal mint’s. And the solution would be neither to raise taxes nor to slow the minting of coins from the king’s mines. In fact, if the king tried to claw back coins, then he could prolong the crisis: The townspeople would still use their meager earnings to bid up the price of food, but they would have less money to do it with, so everyone would be poorer and hungry. The king would instead need to import more grain, or ration out supplies, or plant more farms (hopefully in dragon-proof regions).

Though it might sound silly, the modern global economy is closer to that fabled realm than we might think: Yes, container ships and jumbo jets connect far-flung farms and factories to consumers, which has permitted a planetary smoothing out of prices. But ultimately globalization has stretched the castle walls as far as they can go, and the realm remains dependent on certain key and vulnerable places. A single woodland province furnishes timber for most American homes; a single highland country grows nearly half of the world’s magic beans; a single foundry on a distant island makes most of the thinking rocks that go inside American phones. Yet if something were to happen to the supply of goods from those places, we always have the same answer: The royal mint can fix it.

In truth, some combination of the two fairy tales now besets the American economy. The king probably threw too many free coins out the window last year, and some of our outlying lands are dragon-scarred. Yet if the climate scars on supply continue to grow, does the Federal Reserve have the right tools to manage? Stinson Dean, the lumber trader, is doubtful. “Raising interest rates will blunt demand for housing—no doubt. But if you blunt demand enough to bring lumber prices down, you’re destroying the economy,” Dean told me. “For us to have lower lumber prices, we can only build a million homes a year. Do you really want to do that?

“Raising rates,” he said, “doesn’t grow more trees.” Nor does it grow more coffee, end a drought, or bring certainty to the energy transition. And if our new era of climate-driven inflation takes hold, America will need more than higher interest rates to bring balance to supply and demand.