Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
What would the bank-bail out money buy for the environment?
John Vidal, Guardian
Up to $4 trillion has been committed to rescue the global economy. How could that money be spent on the environment?
—
Countries could protect nature, help halt climate change, and provide food and clean water for a billion people for little more than has been pledged to bail out the world’s banks in the last week, according to a series of authoritative economic reports from the UN, world bodies, major charities and banks.
Estimates of the sum committed this week by governments to rescue the world’s financial system range between $2-4 trillion. Investment on this scale to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and protect nature would not only be repaid up to 100 times over, say the studies, but would also save trillions of dollars having to be spent later.
So what could investment on the scale of the the bank bail-out money buy?
Climate change: Lord Nicholas Stern, who led the UK government’s study of the economic costs and benefits of climate change said it would cost 1% of global GDP, or $540bn (£313bn) a year, to hold greenhouse gas emissions at a level to avoid the worst effects of global climate change. But his review for the Treasury in 2006 said that if countries did not act, the overall costs and risks of climate change would soar into trillions of dollars a year.
(17 October 2008)
A Green New Deal is essential
Geoffrey Lean, Independent
Green energy is not so much a middle-class conceit, more the only way forward
—
So that’s it, then, choruses the commentariat. Collapsing confidence, crashing stock markets and credit-starved banks spell doom not just for the economy, but for environmental concerns. Saving the planet may be all very well in the good times, but is an unaffordable luxury when things turn bad.
The argument is pervasive, persuasive and gaining ground. Even some environmentalists half-accept it, believing they should mute their message. But it is plain wrong. Never have green concerns and measures been more important.
How so? The second best reason is that this financial crisis is mild compared with the environmentally driven ones ahead.
… But the most important reason is wholly positive. Developing a new green economy is our most promising path out of the present crisis. It is the best available new engine of growth, with the best chance of creating the tens of millions of jobs that will soon be desperately needed.
This Wednesday, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) will be making precisely this point, when it launches a new campaign in London. Its multi-million-dollar Green Economy Initiative – already being funded by the German and Norwegian governments and the European Commission – aims to convince the world, that, far from restricting growth, tackling the growing planetary environmental crisis would accelerate it.
(19 October 2008)
The Long Term Solution to Our Financial Crisis: The Other Forms of Capital
Robert Costanza, The Oil Drum
TOD editor Nate Hatens writes:
As the world slowly awakens to the concept that all wealth perhaps can’t be measured by digits in the bank, the global economic and political elite have been meeting to potentially form a “new Bretton Woods,” kick started by global guarantees of banking deposits, direct government investment in banks, and global rate cuts. Though the markets have so far reacted with glee (or short covering), pumping fiat money into the system with no biophysical linkage to the real economy has (at least) two major problems.
First, it accelerates the growing gap between financial capital and real capital, and second, it tacitly acknowledges our current “ends” as acceptable, and that all forms of capital can and should continue to be directed towards the positional consumption of “stuff” that our culture currently advocates (perhaps via momentum alone). In crisis times such as these, our leaders would do well to recognize that the human economy is a subset of a larger, finite system, and is subject to the natural laws forthwith.
Furthermore, a plethora of new economic, psycholgic, and neuroscience research also suggests that “more” does not equate with “better”.
Below the fold is a guest commentary explaining these themes written by my thesis co-advisor, Robert Costanza, director of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont.
The current financial meltdown is the result of under-regulated markets built on an ideology of free market capitalism and unlimited economic growth. The fundamental problem is that the underlying assumptions of this ideology are not consistent with what we now know about the real state of the world. The financial world is, in essence, a set of markers for goods, services, and risks in the real world and when those markers are allowed to deviate too far from reality, “adjustments” must ultimately follow and crisis and panic can ensue. To solve this and future financial crisis requires that we reconnect the markers with reality. What are our real assets and how valuable are they? To do this requires both a new vision of what the economy is and what it is for, proper and comprehensive accounting of real assets, and new institutions that use the market in its proper role of servant rather than master.
The mainstream vision of the economy is based on a number of assumptions that were created during a period when the world was still relatively empty of humans and their built infrastructure. In this “empty world” context, built capital was the limiting factor, while natural capital and social capital were abundant. It made sense, in that context, not to worry too much about environmental and social “externalities” since they could be assumed to be relatively small and ultimately solvable. It made sense to focus on the growth of the market economy, as measured by GDP, as a primary means to improve human welfare. It made sense, in that context, to think of the economy as only marketed goods and services and to think of the goal as increasing the amount of these goods and services produced and consumed.
But the world has changed dramatically. We now live in a world relatively full of humans and their built capital infrastructure. In this new context, we have to reconceptualize what the economy is and what it is for.
(14 October 2008)
Weaving the Magic Number, 350, into Transition
Rob Hopkins, Transition Culture
I had the great pleasure over the weekend of attending the 2008 Schumacher Lectures in Bristol. I will write more about it tomorrow, but one of the highlights for me was a talk by Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature (one of the most distressing books I ever read) and Deep Economy (one of the most exhilarating). Bill’s current project is 350.org, which aims to press politicians to acknowledge that 350ppm was the climate change tipping point, and the level we should commit in policy to moving back to over time. Bill’s rousing closing speech argued that we ought not focus on building the new post-oil, low carbon world, rather we must focus all our energy on tackling climate change first. His analogy was if your house is on fire you tackle the fire, you don’t start designing the new house to replace it. It is not an analogy I agree with, but clearly the 350 figure is key.
Here is the film from 350.org that communicates the campaign’s basic message…
And here is a talk by Bill, setting out the reason why 350 is “the most important number in the world”…
…Clearly the need to communicate 350 is key, and I agree entirely about its importance as a target, James Hansen has argued this entirely convincingly elsewhere. Where I disagree though, is on the question of the need for purely symbolic actions. I think that with the peak oil question, and the economic implosion issue woven in too, the need to think forward, to vision the future, is key…
(14 October 2008)
