In case you’ve wondered where I’ve been, I’ve been helping to organize 350.org’s 10/10/10 Global Work Party right here in my local burg of Georgetown, Texas.
We’ll have a living wall and a sustainability expo, and a PARTY – all at the legendary, iconic Monument Cafe.
It’s all day Sunday, October 10th.
Show up for the party and to schmooze. We’ll have a LOT of high-grade agricultural knowledge there – if you can bring some green building knowledge, bring it, and mix it in. Bring all your sustainability interests.
From an analysis by the Center for American Progress on agriculture’s future:
U.S. agriculture is a critical bridge between global warming challenges and solutions. Our agricultural and forest lands sequester 246 million metric tons of carbon annually, absorbing 13 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. And the Congressional Budget Office has suggested that this number could rise to 50 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions with the appropriate incentives.
The analysis shows how clean energy will add income to U.S. farms, through carbon offests, power co-generation, and next-generation bio-fuels. While of course climate change will take income away through all the obvious dynamics such as drought, water shortages, season dysfunction, and unremitting fossil-fuel price increases.
We know that the information stream is poisoned – now Greenpeace brings to the surface some of the corporate poisoners who are pouring $millions into the think tanks, legislators, TV networks and talking heads who deny climate change. Nice interactive map of the conspiracies too.
Greenpeace has released the report “Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine” to expose the connections between these climate denial front groups and the secretive billionaires who are funding their efforts. The Koch brothers, their family members, and their employees direct a web of financing that supports conservative special interest groups and think-tanks, with a strong focus on fighting environmental regulation, opposing clean energy legislation, and easing limits on industrial pollution.
Use the interactive map to trace out the linkages between payments made and assertions published, and see how deliberate the lies are.
Today is a good day to ask, what would be so bad with voting green? I think the only reason a lot of people placed their climate anxiety on hold was to join the swell that supplied a Democrat majority. Now one has to wonder if this was worth foregoing the green message.
If the Democrats can’t use the majority that a number of different interests joined together to give them – if they can’t even pass desirable legislation at the national level – then what good are they to the environmental cause?
Here’s a simple story told well, about a tiny piece of the new economy. Laid-off steelworkers find good jobs making windwills for renewable energy.
I sometimes wonder what’s so hard to grasp about the trillions of dollars in revenues waiting for the smart entrepreneurs in our new, sustainable economy.
It’s really pretty simple: there is great bounty given to us in our original world. We only need to learn how to spend creatively, contributing back to the bounty, and we can live here forever.
The uncaring way we treat the place, do we humans even really belong here, on this Earth?
I recall another good point Ray Anderson made in his book, Mid-Course Correction. He cited the case of the Fraser firs of eastern Tennessee, heritage forests from the last ice age, ravaged and reduced to almost nothing now by a species of insect accidentally introduced from Europe, against which the trees have no defense.
Anderson’s chilling point quotes the Forest Service report that as an exotic species, the parasite has no natural balance developed for its new ecological niche, and thus will kill its own host, and then die.
To me this sounds a lot like us, here.
Maybe those theories are correct: we ARE descended from aliens after all. If so, they were probably fleeing a ruined home planet.
Ray Anderson reflects on the 15 years passed in his effort to transform a billion-dollar carpet manufacturing operation, from a petro-intensive resource “plunderer” into a zero-footprint, eternally sustainable company.
It’s looking good – he’s 60 percent of the way up that mountain he talks about, and he and his people can now see the top. They know they’re going to get there.
With “only” 11,000 workers fired last month, the job-loss slide may be easing, or it may be a seasonal stall in shedding employees. The new year will tell.
Much may depend on fiscal policy. Economists agree that most of the 2.8% growth in the third quarter is a result of the stimulus. As I’ve said before, more stimulus would work wonders right now.
Meanwhile, where is reasonable security of tenure, and strategic job-holding for willing workers? Only in sustainability – that third economy I mentioned the other day.
Others agree that green job creation is a miracle profit center waiting to explode.
Nouriel Roubini paints a stark picture of our economic prospects and tells a tale of two economies, one rich, one poor. Personally, I’m heading for the third economy, the one being newly created right now all around us as a sustainable economy.
We’re losing jobs, credit is unavailable, small businesses and householders are being forced to bankruptcy, and this will continue for some time yet.
On the basis that the old economy was wrongly constructed to begin with, what’s actually to preserve here? The old jobs are never coming back. Time for new jobs.
If your own research persuades you that the Earth truly is warming, then watch a sadly beautiful and terrifying thing: time-lapse photography recording glaciers melting around the world.
This is a film presented at TED by photographer James Balog with the Extreme Ice Survey, a network of time-lapse cameras aimed at vast bodies of ice, all now receding at a fearsome pace.
BBC News upset a good many people on Friday by claiming that the oceans are cooling and that global warming has stopped happening – this during the hottest decade in recorded history. The story, What happened to global warming?, was completely discredited yesterday by no less an expert than Joe Romm at Climate Progress.
Paul Hudson, a weather presenter writing under the byline of climate correspondent for BBC News, claimed that “for the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.” He cited Britain’s Met Office for this claim.
Obama at Notre Dame on May 17th talked a lot about climate change. Ezra Klein wrote about it, and I’m just copying him verbatim here. You should click through to his post – which is short and to the point – if only to see the maps he included: they show graphically which parts of the world have primarily caused climate change, versus which parts of the world will suffer most from its effects. Very sad. And Obama seems to get this.
A sustainable economy is one in which all business models rigorously internalize all costs into themselves. This is the opposite of the way capitalism and industrialism have developed, where the object is to externalize the greatest number of costs onto others, often unwitting stakeholders. Sustainability demands a true accounting of costs, and this has to mean the end of corruption in politics.
The Washington Postreported recently on a new study that finds the return on political corruption – lobbying, to use the airbrushed word – can yield as much as a 22,000 percent rate of return on the investment of companies who are successful. The newspaper makes this crucial point: “The study by researchers at the University of Kansas underscores the central reason that lobbying has become a $3 billion-a-year industry in Washington: It pays.”
I had always guessed the formula would go like this: buy a politician for $3 million, and reap a return of $300 million, by creating an unnecessary process that costs the commonwealth $3 billion. I always thought that it would be much more efficient to pay the politician $5 million, in return for rigorous transparency and scrutiny, and make corruption an offense very close to treason: after all, sovereign money is at stake.
Nobody in the financial discussion seems to have grasped the urgency of the planet’s message to us. We’re thinking that we just need to get back to the same consumerism we’ve built into our culture as a way of life, and I have the feeling that something will happen to interrupt this thinking. Some event on a planetary scale will occur, and change the game forever, and redirect attention permanently to the key fundamental of our broken economy, which is this: based as it is on the destruction and non-replacement of finite materials, this economy could never last, and always had to end, probably in pain.
Our economy is in the meltdown it is precisely because there are no cheap ways to re-energize it. We are out of resources to take from the planet. The economy of plunder is running into its most obvious limit: there’s nothing left to take for free. See how Ray Anderson explains to us the economy of plunder.
Can you solve global warming without talking about global warming? « Climate Progress tags: Sustainability We are engaged in a multi-year messaging struggle here. The planet is going to get hotter and hotter, the weather is going to get more extreme. One of the reasons to be clear and blunt in your messaging about this [...] […]
Big Oil’s Fairy Tale « Climate Progress tags: Sustainability Coming late to the discussion, but Joe that’s a nice piece of writing. I went over to Salon just to admire it. This thread turned to BP and the plug but your piece was originally about Obama and his realpolitik. He IS a mystery though, don’t [...] […]
biofuels and their tradeoffs tags: Sustainability Well biofuels, including algae: Compete with food security, energy security, and water security; a World Bank 2008 report estimates that biofuels have increased food prices by 75%; increasing AGW-related temperatures expected to decrease crop yields (recent US national assessment) and increase irrigation requ […]
political future tags: policy, Sustainability, economics y’know, ALL the economists have embraced the notion of limits to growth at the limits of natural resources. I think that the only future left to us – if any future is left to us – is steady-state economics: sustainable enterprises working in stable cycles unto the nth generation [...] […]
political future tags: policy, Sustainability, economics y’know, ALL the economists have embraced the notion of limits to growth at the limits of natural resources. I think that the only future left to us – if any future is left to us – is steady-state economics: sustainable enterprises working in stable cycles unto the nth generation [...] […]
political future tags: policy, Sustainability, economics y’know, ALL the economists have embraced the notion of limits to growth at the limits of natural resources. I think that the only future left to us – if any future is left to us – is steady-state economics: sustainable enterprises working in stable cycles unto the nth generation [...] […]
Bill Black: economic meltdown caused by fraud tags: economics Bill Moyers with Bill Black, bank investigator during the Savings & Loan mop-up of the eighties, and national expert on financial crime. Black says every bank we’ve investigated involved in the meltdown has revealed deliberate fraud, and we’ve only investigated six! No one’s pushing forward ca […]
Break up the Banks tags: economics I think the undoing of Goldman will be that its execs, just like those at Morgan Stanley, or GE, or GM, have failed to understand that their own personal wealth can only last as long as the “lower classes” have at least a decent life. A chance to feed [...] […]
Facebook tags: Sustainability Ross Hunter “like a syrupy muffin, connecting socially online may be like eating empty calories. The circuitry activated when you connect online is the ‘seeking’ circuitry of dopamine. Yet when we connect with people online, we don’t tend to get the calming effect of oxytocin or seratonin that happens when we bond [...] […]
veggie, vegan or local? tags: Sustainability Ross Hunter try to remember we have a permeable administration, unlike the rock-hard one before. Count blessings briefly, get to work and understand that our example will permeate an administration that is willing to be influenced by groundswell. All Obama has ever asked for is for the forces in [...] […]
In case you’ve wondered where I’ve been, I’ve been helping to organize 350.org’s 10/10/10 Global Work Party right here in my local burg of Georgetown, Texas.
From an analysis by the Center for American Progress on agriculture’s future:
We know that the information stream is poisoned – now Greenpeace brings to the surface some of the corporate poisoners who are pouring $millions into the think tanks, legislators, TV networks and talking heads who deny climate change. Nice interactive map of the conspiracies too.
Today is a good day to ask, what would be so bad with voting green? I think the only reason a lot of people placed their climate anxiety on hold was to join the swell that supplied a Democrat majority. Now one has to wonder if this was worth foregoing the green message.
The uncaring way we treat the place, do we humans even really belong here, on this Earth?
With “only” 11,000 workers fired last month, the job-loss slide may be easing, or it may be a seasonal stall in shedding employees. The new year will tell.
Nouriel Roubini paints a stark picture of our economic prospects and tells a tale of two economies, one rich, one poor. Personally, I’m heading for the third economy, the one being newly created right now all around us as a sustainable economy.
BBC News upset a good many people on Friday by claiming that the oceans are cooling and that global warming has stopped happening – this during the hottest decade in recorded history. The story, 
A sustainable economy is one in which all business models rigorously internalize all costs into themselves. This is the opposite of the way capitalism and industrialism have developed, where the object is to externalize the greatest number of costs onto others, often unwitting stakeholders. Sustainability demands a true accounting of costs, and this has to mean the end of corruption in politics.
