Paul Gilding

Paul Gilding has spent 35 years trying to change the world, doing everything he can think of that might help. He’s served in the Australian military, chased nuclear armed aircraft carriers in small inflatable boats, plugged up industrial waste discharge pipes, been global CEO of Greenpeace, taught at Cambridge University, started two successful companies and advised the CEOs of some the world’s largest companies.

Despite the clear lack of progress on the issues he’s focused on, the unstoppable and flexible optimist is now an author and advocate, writing his widely acclaimed book “The Great Disruption” which prompted Tom Friedman to write in the NYT “Ignore Gilding at your peril”. He now travels the world alerting people to the global economic and ecological crisis now unfolding around us, as the world economy reaches and passes the limits to growth.

He is confident we can get through what’s coming and in fact thinks we will rise to the occasion, with change on a scale and at a speed incomprehensible today. He tells us to get prepared for The Great Disruption and “the end of shopping”, as we reinvent the global economy and our model of social progress.

He lives on a farm in southern Tasmania with his wife, where they grow blueberries and raise chickens, sheep and their children.

His blog, The Cockatoo Chronicles, can be found at www.paulgilding.com

methane bubbles

Why The Climate Emergency is now The Methane Emergency

To slow warming we must keep our focus on cutting CO2 but now also focus intensely on the shorter lived, far more potent gases such as methane.

August 25, 2021

elephant stampede

It Will Get Darker Before the Dawn

COVID 19 is not a ‘black swan’ – a singular, unexpected event. It is the first in a series of what NYT’s Tom Friedman referred to as a ‘herd of stampeding black elephants’ – multiple, predictable and economically catastrophic events.  

May 27, 2020

capitalism

COVID-19 and the Death of Market Fundamentalism

COVID-19 gives us clear evidence that market fundamentalism is a failed economic strategy. Interpreting markets as an ideology or quasi-religious belief system, results in unmanageable and systemic economic risks.

April 16, 2020

The Great Disruption

2020: When the Great Disruption Began

It was always going to come to this. Whether it was a pandemic triggering a shutdown, a climate emergency bursting the carbon bubble, a populist backlash against inequality, wars over water or countless other possible triggers, this moment has long been inevitable.

April 2, 2020

Sydney climate strike

Choosing Extinction

The climate strikes over the coming weeks will focus a great deal of attention on government and the urgent need for policy action. Rightly so. But it’s also a good time to reflect on the bigger context, as this is not anything like protests of the past.  There has in fact, never been a point like this in all of human history.

September 23, 2019

Extinction Rebellion march

The Extinction Rebellion: A Tipping Point for the Climate Emergency?

That’s the point of the Extinction Rebellion. To make us all stop and think – to ask the simple question: Am I really paying attention? To what I know, to what we all now know?

November 20, 2018

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