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
Choosing Extinction
By Paul Gilding, Cockatoo Chronicles
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.
The Extinction Rebellion: A Tipping Point for the Climate Emergency?
By Paul Gilding, The Cockatoo Chronicles
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?
When We Look at the Crisis Rationally, the Only Logical Response is to Declare a Climate Emergency
By Paul Gilding, Climate Code Red
People engaged in the climate debate are often bewildered by society’s lack of response. How can we ignore such overwhelming evidence of an existential threat to social and economic stability?
Why Incumbents Fail – And What That Means for Sustainability
By Paul Gilding, The Cockatoo Chronicles
Can incumbents transform? The question can’t be answered in theory or conceptual potential, but in practice – in the reality of how markets work, and how businesses are run.
Disruptive Markets: What Sustainability Really Means for Business
By Paul Gilding, Cockatoo Chronicles
As a campaigner who has spent 40+ years on these issues, I’m not satisfied with just a problem diagnosis, I need a way forward, a credible path to success. When talking about risks to the future of civilisation, accepting failure is not really a strategic option.
The Walking Dead in Washington
By Paul Gilding, The Cockatoo Chronicles
How can a Trump Presidency be positive? Surely this is a major setback – to action on climate change, to addressing inequality, to human rights and global security.
The Climate Mobilization Victory Plan: Foreword
By Paul Gilding, The Climate Mobilization
For many years, a small number of scientists, scholars and activists have called for a WWII-scale mobilization to save civilization from climate catastrophe — an all-out effort far beyond anything proposed in today’s polite debates.
Don’t be Fossil Fooled – It’s time to say goodbye.
By Paul Gilding, Resilience.org
We’ve reached a tipping point where fossil fuels will enter terminal decline, independently of climate policy action. Given climate policy action is also now accelerating, fossil fuels are double dead. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, “So long and thanks for all the energy”.