JBW » Ruminations Blog

2012: the year we did least to safeguard the future

2nd January 2013

The world did not end in 2012 as the Mayans predicted, but as George Monbiot documents in a superbly authored piece in The Guardian the other day, humankind is certainly doing its best to engineer such an outcome. The article is a superb summary of my feelings about 2012, and why it is likely to be remembered as the year we did least at the time we needed to do most.

It is probably a little harsh to lay the entire blame with humankind in the broad sense. It is our political representatives that are most at fault, as inaction has come to characterise discourse at both national and international levels.

To talk of keeping the average temperature increase to 2 degrees or less by the end of the century now appears to be sheer folly. Meanwhile, biodiversity loss is intensifying at an alarming rate with some quite profound consequences for human survival on the planet.

Where will the leadership come from in 2013?

Our finest or darkest hour?

20th July 2012

Paul Gilding tells us it is the end of economic growth. Not only is the earth full, but we have gone beyond its carrying capacity. In other words, we are over the credit limit on the ecological ‘credit card’ and now we are starting to experience the consequences. The question is, do we restructure to get back within our ‘ecological budget constraint’, or are we intent on becoming extras in a Mad Max type world?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_Ou1A9F9y4&feature=plcp]

This clip is a mashup of Paul Gilding’s TED talk The Earth is Full. I stumbled across it when searching for an engaging summary of the key messages in Gilding’s The Great Disruption for my MBA class at the Reims Management School in France.

Gilding’s TED talk is fine, but a little wordy, and TheSustainableMan does a great job of editing the speech, picking out key sound bytes and matching them with appropriate imagery from The 11th Hour and a host of other clips advocating sustainability.

The Carbon Rush

24th June 2012

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiwgXGDsXPU]

A disturbing new film premiered recently at the Green Nation Film Festival in Rio de Janeiro in the run up to the Rio+20 Summit.

Entitled The Carbon Rush, the film reveals the unsavoury side of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which allows countries that are signatories to the Kyoto Protocol to implement emission-reduction projects in developing countries to earn carbon credits that can be counted towards meeting their national emission reduction targets.

According to the CDM website, there are currently 4259 registered projects, and there are a number of video clips that extol the virtues of such projects (see below). I shall reserve judgement until I get to see The Carbon Rush in full, but it seems to indicate that the CDM is susceptible to ‘market failure’ (to put it mildly).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0As6PHGJVFw&list=UUEBv6L0UIcPOrqMqGAOO69g&index=0&feature=plcp]

Tipping points and social-ecological systems

10th June 2012

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueJ0E-H7hkk]

There has been a fair bit of commentary of late with respect to a looming tipping point, whereupon some social-ecological systems will collapse because they will no longer be able to withstand the pressure placed upon them by humankind. A recent article published in Nature is certainly generating some interest, and it occurred to me that it may be sooner rather than later that the resilience theorists will have their moment in the sun (if you will excuse the pun).

In essence, what this group tells us is that nature is pretty resilient, but there comes a point where it will simply not take any more abuse, a threshold is crossed, and the social-ecological system enters a new regime, where there is no going back to the old regime; e.g. once land becomes desertified it is a process that is difficult to reverse. If — as the Nature piece documents — by 2025, humans will have modified half of all the land on Earth, and by 2060, 70 percent of the earth’s surface could be covered with human development, then clearly if we are to sustain ourselves and coexist with other species with the natural capital we have at our disposal, we need to think far more strategically about the management of social-ecological systems.

For a prime example of legislators doing the exact opposite, read this article on the measurement of sea level rises in North Carolina. Extraordinary as this may sound, while scientists are predicting that the sea level along the coast of North Carolina could rise by about a metre by the end of the century, policymakers plan to deal with the issue by writing a law requiring projections only be based on historical data, appeasing business interests in the state that are worried gloomy predictions about climate-induced sea level rise will make it harder for them to develop the coast line.

The generation of waste in Singapore

9th April 2012

The latest statistics from the Singapore National Environment Agency (NEA) show that the recycling rate in Singapore continues to grow, to the extent that the net generation of waste is about the same as it was in 2000. This is not a bad result but, in a country the size of Singapore, with a growing population, it is critical that people are aware of the importance of managing their ecological footprint.

The high proportion of construction debris that is recycled in Singapore is perhaps the most stunning statistic; a sign, perhaps, that raw materials are becoming more expensive. The recycling of construction materials is certainly becoming a very lucrative business. National performance in the recycling of plastics is less impressive, and in the consumer society of Singapore where plastic packaging is so rife, this is definitely an area for improvement.

Image source: zerowastesg.com

The Earth is Full

2nd April 2012

This TED talk is a useful summary of Paul Gilding’s book, The Great DIsruption. Listening to the first half of his presentation, one could be forgiven for thinking that Gilding has thrown in the towel, based on his projected level of doom and gloom. This is not entirely the case. Yes, things do look grim, but Gilding is not nearly as pessimistic as James Lovelock or Clive Hamilton. The book goes into great detail as why he (and his collaborator Jorgen Randers) believe there is a future for humanity with their One Degree War Plan.

“Respect your descendents … Get it done.”

10th December 2011

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko3e6G_7GY4]

A young woman named Anjali Appadurai representing Earth in Brackets stole the show at COP17 yesterday.

She was the final speaker.

How ironic that the world’s youth, the people who will be most affected by climate change, are relegated to the bottom of the agenda.

The climate refugee controversy (not)

29th September 2011

I was trying to find some recent data on climate refugees just now because of the controversy (in some quarters) over inaccurate UN projections (which, it seems, did not emanate from the UN at all). A Wikipedia site is of considerable assistance in this regard in that, while noting the conceptual problems, it does not dismiss the issue of ‘environmental migrants’. I’m reminded of an anonymous quotation on the definition of an economist I came across once, that read something along the lines of ‘someone who sees something in practice as asks whether it works in theory’. Does it really matter if there are 50 million climate refugees in 2010, 2020 or 2030? Is it somehow acceptable if it is an event that occurs 10 or 20 years from now? Or is it less of an issue because we are not sure whether a person can or cannot be counted because it is not possible to prove conclusively whether they were displaced because of environmental factors or war that may or may not have been caused by deteriorating environmental resources?

My challenge to the skeptics would be to watch this movie and then present a convincing argument that displaced persons arising from environmental factors is decreasing or not deviating from any historical trend. Furthermore, maybe if some of the climate change skeptics within government circles could bring themselves to watch it, they would spend less time trying to argue against the science and recognise that, whether they believe in the science or not, the consequences of climate change are sitting on their door step right now in the shape of a ‘national security problem’.

Irene is good news for GDP

30th August 2011

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77IdKFqXbUY&list=FLqVEcYXalJ6vy86WdtV2WaQ&index=1&feature=plpp]
As the clean up after Hurricane Irene commences, not too many people will realise that this is actually ‘good for the economy’ — at least in terms of GDP growth. The problem is that all expenditure on goods and services — even if it is cleaning up after a ‘natural’ disaster (sic) — ends up on the plus side of the ledger. Continuing with this logic, it actually makes sense to urge BP to have more oil spills, and to encourage crime because we spend more on burglar alarms. Robert F. Kennedy was making this same point more than four decades ago and yet GDP remains the primary macroeconomic variable shaping government policies around the world (with the notable exception of Bhutan!)

The biggest irony of all, is that even Simon Kuznets, (the man who invented GDP) in his very first report to the US Congress in 1934 went on record as saying: “… the welfare of a nation can, therefore, scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income”, and then again in 1962: “Distinctions must be kept in mind between quantity and quality of growth, between costs and returns, and between the short and long run. Goals for more growth should specify more growth of what and for what.”

I don’t think Professor Kuznets would have argued in favour of extreme weather events as a means of growing GDP somehow.

Ray Anderson on the Take-Make-Waste model

13th August 2011

There have been numerous tributes to Ray Anderson who passed away this week. This one from Paul Hawken — the man who inspired him through his book The Ecology of Commerce — is the eulogy he read out at Ray’s memorial service on Thursday. He sums up by describing Anderson as ‘the greatest man of industrial ecology’. I think few people who are familiar with his work would argue with this evaluation.