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.
Recent data suggest that the oceans have cooled slightly in recent years. But this doesn’t necessarily imply that the planet is not warming. Instead, it illustrates how poorly we understand the deep oceanic thermal environment – we don’t know where the heat that should be there is going.
For a long time Antarctica has been thought to be cooling over time, and this has confounded some of the science of global warming, as well as providing easy ammunition to those who require declaratory yes/no answers to the questions of climate change.
Now, it becomes clear that Antarctica has been warming all along. Around the world the ice is melting faster than our models can account for.
Surface acidification caused by carbon dioxide interaction is rapidly killing the coral reefs, which may be gone within a few short decades. This, says the publication’s Leader summarizing the report, “would be the end of the rainforests of the seas.”
There are plenty of other ills besetting the oceans. There’s the melting ice. And the continent-sized mass of discarded plastic swirling in the Pacific. And where have all the fish gone?
The argument for agribusiness is that larger operations can produce food more efficiently, but what if part of the goodness of our food comes from the goodness of the people who grow it? What if bringing the efficiencies of modern corporate methods has poisoned the land and made the crops not worth eating?
The singer Dave Matthews spoke at Farm Aid 2008 last month, and gave a beautifully warm yet penetratingly logical description – in 3 minutes – of how the corporate approach to farming has been destroying the nutritive quality of our food as well as our ecological habitat. And he explained why this happens.
One of the frustrating things about changing to a sustainable practice model is finding ways to measure the total impact of your actions. The World Business Council for Sustainable Development, after two years of work, has just launched a framework for measuring this very thing.
The Speech For Which We Have Been Waiting « The Baseline Scenario tags: economics The problem with fixing the economy is a lot like the problem with fixing global warming. Things have reached the point of no return. It’s too late to turn the Titanic around, the iceberg is in our path and we are about to [...] […]
Way Too Big To Save « The Baseline Scenario tags: economics The biggest banks in some European countries today are already too big to save. Unless we take immediate and real action to reduce the power – and size – of our largest banks, we are heading in exactly the same direction. The great failure of the Obama [...] […]
Robert Reich (The Enthusiasm Gap) tags: policy Anyone with an ounce of sanity understands government is the only effective countervailing force against the forces that got us into this mess If there was ever a time to connect the dots and make the case for government as the singular means of protecting the public from these forces it [...] […]
Going to hell #5 – James Fallows tags: policy “The subversive influence of money on the political process is the underlying cause of most of that which ails our country. It has led to social, political, economic and international disaster for our country. It has led to unnecessary wars, the near collapse of our economy, staggering public debt, little hope […]
Greenwald – The Democratic Party’s deceitful game tags: policy The primary tactic in this game is Villain Rotation. They always have a handful of Democratic Senators announce that they will be the ones to deviate this time from the ostensible party position and impede success, but the designated Villain constantly shifts, so the Party itself can claim it […]
Banking Industry: Sicker, More Concentrated « The Baseline Scenario tags: economics Get rid of the Fed. Open 50 State Banks. North Dakota, the only state with a state bank (opened in 1919) does not have a failed bank on the FDIC list that started in Oct. 2000. It also has a budget surplus of around $1 billion. ND [...] […]
Op-Ed Columnist – The Bankruptcy Boys – NYTimes.com tags: economics In fact, conservatives have backed away from spending cuts they themselves proposed in the past. In the 1990s, for example, Republicans in Congress tried to force through sharp cuts in Medicare. But now they have made opposition to any effort to spend Medicare funds more wisely the [...] […]
Economist’s View: Tax Cuts and Government Investment tags: economics Invisible Hand, first note that Adam Smith, despite the myth, even in 1776 understood that the invisible hand did not work well in many cases without a government role. As Cornell economist Robert H. Frank notes in his New York Times Economic Scene article of May 25, 2008: ADAM [...] […]
Ezra Klein – Commented: The center cannot hold tags: policy And there’s another wrench: we’re interactive. Wonkish internetting improves the civil discourse, and looks at serious policy analysis, and faster than any politician can muster. Speedy facts plus interactive discussion. Overall, what is happening is a change in the relationship of observant […]
Elizabeth Warren Calls Out Wall Street « The Baseline Scenario tags: economics But last month, Republican political consultant Frank Luntz wrote a memo laying out how Republicans could kill financial regulatory reform. “Ordinarily, calling for a new government program ‘to protect consumers’ would be extraordinary popular,” he wrote. “But these are not ord […]