Economic Growth, Climate Change and the G20: A View from Civil Society
A summary of the proceedings from the APCSE conference on Economic Growth, Climate Change and the G20 is now available on Medium.com
A summary of the proceedings from the APCSE conference on Economic Growth, Climate Change and the G20 is now available on Medium.com
This is the slide deck I presented at the Asia Pacific Centre for Social Enterprise (APCSE), Griffith University, Open Lecture Series this week.
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.
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.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4itfAVq19U]
The article, Gulf oil spill: A hole in the world, written by Naomi Klein in today’s Guardian is by far and away the most cogent piece of analysis I’ve come across to date on the Deepwater Horizon disaster. To summarise the piece in a few hundred words would do Ms Klein a great disservice because the article needs to be read in its entirety. The Fault Lines film (see above) for which she served as consultant is also an eye-opener. The article (and the film) sift through events surrounding the disaster before, during (right now), and in the future, at different levels and in all its multiple dimensions, and one is inexorably led to the conclusion that — as a social-ecological system — the Gulf of Mexico could well be playing out its final act. The system has been under strain for some considerable time but, as resilience theorists will tell you, there comes a point where Gaia 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. The scary thing is that the collapse of the Gulf of Mexico social-ecological system would not necessarily end there. It is not an isolated system, but one that is inextricably linked to many more.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPgIfT5mGVc]
Source: http://www.youtube.com/user/CBSNewsOnline; 02-02-09
It is 20 years ago today that the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska when en route from Valdez, Alaska to Los Angeles, California. The ship was travelling outside normal shipping lanes at the time in an attempt to avoid ice. Six hours after grounding, it had spilled almost 11 million gallons of crude oil, which would eventually cause ecological devastation to more than 1100 miles of the Alaskan coastline. The Exxon Valdez oil spill remains the largest in US waters to date and — even after two decades — the legacy remains environmentally, economically and socially. As the video clip above records, the time it has taken for ExxonMobil to compensate people for the loss of their livelihoods has been unconscionably long and, to add insult to injury, a US Supreme Court decision in 2008 dramatically decreased the amount to be paid to local people in punitive damages from $2.5 billion to $507.5 million.
Image source: exxonmobil.com
The Rockefeller family are taking on Rex Tillerson the Chair and Chief Executive of Exxon-Mobil. It was John D. Rockefeller who started it all with Standard Oil, and now his descendants are campaigning for a new strategic focus on renewable energy. Exxon has the reputation for being unapologetically ungreen, and has only recently acknowledged the existence of the threat of global warming. There are a number of resolutions coming up at the next shareholders’ meeting proposed by members of the Rockefeller family, the most significant of which is the separation of the roles of Chair and Chief Executive. Tillerson currently occupies both positions. With their separation, there is the prospect of greater accountability. Whether this will be sufficient to appease shareholders disgruntled by Exxon’s intransigence on climate change remains to be seen.
Following on from Friedman’s op-ed the other day, another editorial in the New York Times has expressed its disbelief at the short-sightedness and poor leadership of the Bush administration in terms of energy policy. Everybody and their dog appears to pointing out just how ludicrous it is to continue pumping money into a carbon-based economy, yet the US Congress continues to be quite pig-headed about the whole thing, happily passing laws to dig holes for oil in national parks in Alaska (among other things). As the editorial concludes, it appears as though special interests come before the national interest (… and most certainly before global interest!).
After a longish break — as a consequence of a 5-week sojourn of India-England-Wales-Ireland-France, and the problem of dealing with a massive spam attack on all my blog sites’ comments boxes offering readers, inter alia, instant debt relief, online casino services, and hand jobs — I’d like to return to one of my favourite topics – the price of oil. This, in fact, was the very first topic I ever blogged about, and it has cropped up once or twice since. An article in The Guardian a week or so ago, The real reasons Bush went to war, written by retired civil servant John Chapman jogged my memory about something I’ve been meaning to make a note about for a while; viz. why pricing oil in euros would be bad news for the US.
An article published in the New York Times last week has caused quite a stir. The Oil Crunch by Paul Krugman (reproduced below) makes reference to real reason for the Iraq war; viz. control over oil prices, and how things have backfired somewhat in that there is less security over the supply of oil than ever. The more important point he makes is that attempts to keep oil prices low would have only been temporary anyway because of the rapidly increasing demand for oil in the face of dwindling supplies. The Saudis might argue otherwise, but Krugman concludes that it’s time to stop drilling and look for alternatives. (Access to the NYT is password controlled, but registration is free.)