Buy local food or eat less meat? Solid lifecycle data to the rescue…
How the media (mis)handled the Obama citizenship “debate” seems awfully familiar to those in the sustainability world.
2010 was the hottest year ever, tying 2005. Will that convince any skeptics?
Right before the big election last week, I found myself thinking about beliefs and what people are absolutely sure they know, regardless of the facts. Two stories that appeared on the front page of the New York Times on the same day, demonstrated Americans’ remarkable ability to kid ourselves. But a program in Kansas is showing how you can get people to tackle climate change even if they don’t believe in it.
Obviously some things have changed in Washington and around the country in the last 24 hours. But what will this shift in power mean for the green business movement and for the sustainability agenda in general? It may not change as much as you think, and I see a number of reasons to maintain hope.
In the heated discussions about climate change and the clean tech economy, it’s hard to avoid arguing about whether green jobs are “real” or if they can replace traditional fossil-fuel jobs. But this debate is moot on two counts.
The world faces some big shocks in the realms of sustainability and climate change, and the ways of thinking about the future described in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book, The Black Swan, will come in handy. But two competing black swans — climate change itself or worldwide action to pursue sustainability — both of which seem unlikely, are competing. Let’s hope the second one wins.
The New York Times’ Ross Douthat relies on a set of arguments against the pursuit of a clean economy that have little basis in fact and mainly defend the untenable status quo. The overall pitch has two main parts: (a) promoting a clean economy through the use of market mechanisms like cap-and-trade is a perversion of free markets…(b) going green will cost jobs and hurt the economy. Let’s look at both ideas.
I know it’s difficult for the average person to believe, but how we use energy and what we drive actually connects directly to the price of bread. And it doesn’t really take that many “degrees of Kevin Bacon” to connect the dots.
Al Gore wrote an article in the New Republic this week making an interesting connection between the oil spill and the continuing polluting of our
‘Is the World Better Off Because Your Company Is In It?’: Examining Corporate Climate Responsibility
