Green Futures

Collapse, Renewal and the Rope of History

2022-09-20T17:09:06Z

“In Indonesia, one of the world’s biggest palm oil growers has announced a plan to rehabilitate an area half the size of New York to atone for its past clearing of rainforests and peatlands. In Bolivia, a massive new two million acre reserve has been established on the Amazon’s deforestation frontier, thanks to a partnership between indigenous communities and private donors. Last month, the United States restored protections for the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world, home to thousands of watersheds and fjords, and more than a thousand forested islands. The new protections will end large-scale old growth logging and support restoration, climate resilience, and recreation.”

Collapse, Renewal and the Rope of History
https://futurecrunch.com/collapse-renewal/
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An interview with Paul Polman - Project Syndicate

2021-10-13T21:11:01Z

“Ultimately, we are moving toward “extended producer responsibility,” which forces companies to cover the costs of their activities’ negative impacts. But, of course, we need to go further.”

An interview with Paul Polman - Project Syndicate
https://www.project-syndicate.org/say-more/an-interview-with-paul-polman-2021-10
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Decarbonisation

2021-10-05T21:38:58Z

https://www.exponentialview.co/ev-342p

While scientists have recently warned about worsening global warming, the goals are still in place, and we must find creative ways to meet them. The Energy Transitions Commission has just released a list of actionsthat can be taken on a large scale to keep the 1.5°C target alive. These include rapid reductions in methane emissions, halting deforestation, beginning reforestation, decarbonising the power sector and phasing out coal. What’s remarkable about the report is how clearly it identifies the steps that need to be taken to safeguard the planet. We have the road map; we need capital and governments to follow it.

Gerd Leonhard
www.futuristgerd.com
www.gerdtube.com

2021-10-05T21:29:10Z

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/the-age-of-fossil-fuel-abundance-is-dead/21805253

The potentially inflationary upheaval will not be good for a world that still gets most of its energy from fossil fuels. But it may at least accelerate the shift to greener—and cheaper—sources of energy.

Gerd Leonhard
www.futuristgerd.com
www.gerdtube.com

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Economics and climate change

2021-09-28T21:08:46Z

https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/what-climate-change-requires-of-economics-by-daron-acemoglu-2021-09

When we account for endogenous technology, we find that the transition to cleaner energy is much more important than simply reducing energy consumption, and that technological interventionsneed to be redirected far more aggressively than they have been. Similarly, when one incorporates more realistic assumptions about the costs of global warming – including the possibility of climate tipping points – one’s conclusions about how to approach the problem tend to change substantially.

Gerd Leonhard
www.futuristgerd.com
www.gerdtube.com

Airlines and CO2

2021-09-20T21:34:50Z

https://www.forbes.com/sites/prakashdolsak/2021/09/19/pew-reports-widespread-support-for-low-emission-lifestyles-will-individuals-then-cut-down-on-air-travel/?sh=319a551b6d6d

Aviation accounts for about 2.5% of global carbon emissions. This is a big deal because it would make the aviation sector the world’s 7th largest carbon emitter if it were a country. Airlinesaccount for roughly about 1 billion tons of carbon emissions. Sweden, Greta Thunberg’s home country, contributes 40 million tons. California, the leader in US climate policy, accounts for about 250 million tons. Thus, aviation accounts for 25 times Sweden’s emissions and four times California’s emissions.

Gerd Leonhard
www.futuristgerd.com
www.gerdtube.com

The future is frightening

2021-09-15T10:40:59Z

https://view.newsletters.time.com/?qs=fd07c0c2f24dd23455f3842c28204a37cf17682551a27200290227f481109296b2e63e5a9457e7be93a409ccf0d9e6978d60f35c8140fe212e90f3b5960f82c2ea62865d62292b559b3be0969b1dd9c6

Gerd Leonhard
www.futuristgerd.com
www.gerdtube.com

Why Economics Says Our Civilization is Going to Collapse - Umair Haque

2021-09-11T15:27:45Z

“The first is that we’re consuming more than we invest. How much more? Three times as much. We invest at 25%, and consume at 75%. Those are ruinous economics. They are why three to five decadesgg of unprecedented catastrophe are now headed our way. The 2030s — the decade when climate change goes catastrophic. The 2040s — the era when mass extinction goes unclear. And the 2050s — the Final Goodbye, when the earth’s great ecosystems finally begin to irreversibly die off. All that will take our civilization’s systems — from secondary ones, like finance, employment, and shopping, to primary ones, like food, air, water, and medicine — with it. Bang! The lights go out.”

Why Economics Says Our Civilization is Going to Collapse
https://eand.co/why-economics-says-our-civilization-is-going-to-collapse-b3bc6fc8973e
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ESG futures

2021-09-02T20:42:40Z

https://medium.com/volans/where-will-the-esg-backlash-lead-3db42f0c7c63

The most egregious example of the ESG industry’s self-serving vagueness — its ‘cloudy linguistics’ and ‘marketing gobbledegook’, in Fancy’s words — is the blurring of the distinction between risk and impact. As Fancy writes, ‘protecting an investment portfolio from the disastrous effects of climate change is not the same thing as preventing those disastrous effects from occurring in the first place.’One salutary effect of the ESG backlash will be to make it much harder to dress up ESG risk management as being about making the world a better place.

Gerd Leonhard
www.futuristgerd.com

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GPT3 realism

2021-08-30T21:49:35Z

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/22/1007539/gpt3-openai-language-generator-artificial-intelligence-ai-opinion/

To understand why, it helps to think about what systems like GPT-3 do. They don’t learn about the world—they learn about text and how people use words in relation to other words. What it does is something like a massive act of cutting and pasting, stitching variations on text that it has seen, rather than digging deeply for the concepts that underlie those texts.

Gerd Leonhard
www.futuristgerd.com
www.gerdtube.com

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Climate change and capitalism

2021-08-30T20:51:56Z

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/08/capitalism-climate-crisis-global-green-new-deal-clean-energy-fossil-fuel-industry

But whether we deal with climate change or not can’t be held hostage to executives’ ability to turn a profit. To handle this crisis, capitalism will have to be replaced as society’s operating system, setting out goals other than the boundless accumulation of private wealth.

Gerd Leonhard
www.futuristgerd.com
www.gerdtube.com

Billions are pouring into the business of decarbonisation

2021-08-23T20:22:17Z

“Climate tech now makes up about a tenth of new investments made by Sequoia Capital, a legendary Silicon Valley VC firm. This month Chris Sacca of Lowercase Capital, a high-flying internet investor known for early bets on Uber, Instagram and Twitter, said he would launch climate-tech VC funds worth $800m. Nancy Pfund of DBL Partners, another VC veteran, reports that whereas in 2004 she barely scraped together $75m for a clean-tech fund, her new climate-tech vehicle raised $600m—and was oversubscribed.”

Billions are pouring into the business of decarbonisation
https://www.economist.com/business/billions-are-pouring-into-the-business-of-decarbonisation/21803649
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Billions are pouring into the business of decarbonisation

2021-08-23T20:21:03Z

“If you walked into a VC boardroom and said you are working on clean tech, the senior partners left the room”

Billions are pouring into the business of decarbonisation
https://www.economist.com/business/billions-are-pouring-into-the-business-of-decarbonisation/21803649
via Instapaper

Absolute Decoupling of Economic Growth… | The Breakthrough Institute

2021-08-08T07:13:32Z

https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/absolute-decoupling-of-economic-growth-and-emissions-in-32-countries

Gerd Leonhard
www.futuristgerd.com
www.gerdtube.com

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DeGrowth?

2021-08-06T06:48:50Z

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/10/can-we-have-prosperity-without-growth

Once confined to the margins, the ecological critique of economic growth has gained widespread attention. At a United Nations climate-change summit in September, the teen-age Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg declared, “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!” The degrowth movement has its own academic journals and conferences. Some of its adherents favor dismantling the entirety of global capitalism, not just the fossil-fuel industry. Others envisage “post-growth capitalism,” in which production for profit would continue, but the economy would be reorganized along very different lines. In the influential book “Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow,” Tim Jackson, a professor of sustainable development at the University of Surrey, in England, calls on Western countries to shift their economies from mass-market production to local services—such as nursing, teaching, and handicrafts—that could be less resource-intensive. Jackson doesn’t underestimate the scale of the changes, in social values as well as in production patterns, that such a transformation would entail, but he sounds an optimistic note: “People can flourish without endlessly accumulating more stuff. Another world is possible.”

Gerd Leonhard
www.futuristgerd.com
www.gerdtube.com

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Charging a price for pollution

2021-07-26T15:09:52Z

https://www.politico.eu/article/fit-for-55-eu-5-things-to-know/

The main vehicle for putting a price on pollution is the Emissions Trading System (ETS), which sets prices for emissions permits needed by over 11,000 power plants and industrial installations, as well as airlines, covering around 40 percent of the bloc’s greenhouse gases. After years of very low prices, a mix of reforms and the pressure of tougher climate legislation has driven prices to more than €50 per ton of emitted carbon.

Gerd Leonhard
www.futuristgerd.com
www.gerdtube.com

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Cities are key to the green future

2021-07-25T09:29:52Z

https://www.exponentialview.co/ev-332p/

Cities are the key to achieving net-zero emissions targets by 2050, argues the IEA (and me!). According to the International Energy Agency, cities account for more than 50% of the globe’s population, 80% of its economic output, two-thirds of global energy consumption and more than 70% of annual global carbon emissions. For cities to lead, they will need to emphasise smart city digitalisation efforts along with ambitious local leadership so they can scale investment in urban net-zero projects.

Gerd Leonhard
www.futuristgerd.com
www.gerdtube.com

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The global carbon incentive idea

2021-06-12T17:11:28Z

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/global-carbon-incentive-for-reducing-emissions-by-raghuram-rajan-2021-05

The economic solution is simple: a global carbon incentive (GCI). Every country that emits more than the global average of around five tons per capita would pay annually into a global incentive fund, with the amount calculated by multiplying the excess emissions per capita by the population and the GCI. If the GCI started at $10 per ton, the US would pay around $36 billion, and Saudi Arabia would pay $4.6 billion.

Gerd Leonhard
www.futuristgerd.com
www.gerdtube.com
gerd@hey.com (personal)
gerd@thefuturesagency.com (business)
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Kim Stanley Robinson on Cities as a Climate Survival Mechanism

2021-04-23T20:50:58Z

“To see the climate city, look to planning texts from Holland that describe “vertical farms,” which are skyscrapers that include agriculture, aquaculture, chickens, pigs, and recycling of all waste within towers of food production. Hydroponics and vat-based food production using yeast, algae, and even meats will also be integrated into these towers. This kind of concentrated agriculture will free up land for other purposes while reducing the transport costs of goods from where they’re grown to where they get eaten.”

Kim Stanley Robinson on Cities as a Climate Survival Mechanism
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-17/the-city-as-a-survival-mechanism-kim-stanley-robinson
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Algoritmos não podem aprender sentimentos, diz futurólogo Gerd Leonhard | Suplementos | Valor Econômico

2021-04-16T21:55:36Z

https://valor.globo.com/publicacoes/suplementos/noticia/2021/04/14/algoritmos-nao-podem-aprender-sentimentos-diz-futurologo-gerd-leonhard.ghtml

Valor: A inteligência artificial faz frente à inteligência humana?

Gerd Leonhard: As máquinas, essencialmente, usam zeros e uns, encontrando padrões e respondendo a eles. Isso é chamado de “machine learning” ou “deep learning”. Os humanos, na verdade, não aprendem a partir de padrões, porque são inteligentes de dez diferentes formas. Há questões como felicidade e consciência que são difíceis de ser definidas. Quando se fala de inteligência humana, muitas vezes nos referimos a um só tipo de inteligência, mas há a inteligência criativa, musical e cinestésica, entre outras. As máquinas só têm uma inteligência, que é a computação, o processamento. Um computador pode ler todos os livros de filosofia em todos os idiomas em poucos minutos, mas isso não fará dele um filósofo. Os computadores têm os dados e nada mais.

Sustainability is the new digital revolution

2021-01-21T22:44:56Z

“Reinvent products

Sustainable innovation is creating new products that can be produced with fewer carbon emissions, less waste and an emphasis on enhancing wellness. For instance, Unilever makes toothpaste tablets in reusable containers, and Procter & Gamble sells soap swatches that become cleaning products (hand soap, shampoo, laundry detergent) when you add water.”

Sustainability is the new digital revolution
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/01/davos-agenda-sustainability-digital-revolution/
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How Germany and Costa Rica are putting nature at the heart of their recoveries: a balanced relationship with nature

2021-01-03T14:49:56Z

“First we need to understand the direct relationship between pandemics and zoonosis (transmission of animal-human diseases),” says Rodriguez. “Only by establishing a balanced relationship with nature can we see key benefits such as improved quality of jobs, food and water security, as well as improved human health.””

How Germany and Costa Rica are putting nature at the heart of their recoveries
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/costa-rica-germany-nature-based-policy/
via Instapaper

September was the world's hottest on record

2020-10-11T09:06:33Z

The last five calendar years were the world’s warmest on record. Average global temperatures have already climbed to roughly 1 degree Celsius above pre-industrial times.

Full story here.

This department store in Berlin sells only recycled and second-hand goods

2020-10-11T08:58:51Z

B-Wa(h)renhaus forms part of the city’s Zero Waste policy, endorsed by Berlin’s senate. Tidow’s initial plan is to open four more "department stores of the future", selling good-quality second-hand goods at attractive prices.

Full story here.

4 ways our COVID-19 recovery can tackle climate change and global inequality

2020-09-19T20:15:47Z

In the second quarter of 2020, the world lost the equivalent of about 400 million fulltime jobs, a devastating drop that has damaged the livelihoods of families everywhere. Investment in green, resilient activities like sustainable infrastructure, clean energy and ecosystem restoration is fundamental to sustainably bring jobs back in the wake of the pandemic. The International Energy Agency has proposed a Sustainable Recovery Plan for energy sectors that would save or create 9 million jobs a year over the next three years.

Full article here.

Climate change is a choice

2020-09-12T19:48:58Z

“Climate change is a choice, not some unstoppable disaster we just have to accept will happen. Our biggest enemy might very well be apathy – us not caring while millions of species are going extinct.”

Apocalypse never: why climate catastrophe won’t make us change
https://thecorrespondent.com/329/apocalypse-never-why-climate-catastrophe-wont-make-us-change/43555204231-a33f6054
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Tackling pollution and climate change in Europe will improve health and well-being

2020-09-09T20:27:00Z

COVID-19 has been yet another wake-up call, making us acutely aware of the relationship between our ecosystems and our health and the need to face the facts – the way we live, consume and produce is detrimental to the climate and impacts negatively on our health.

Full article here.

1 in 8 deaths in Europe are linked to pollution, says EU

2020-09-09T20:21:14Z

Environmental factors such as air pollution and heatwaves exacerbated by climate change contribute to around 13% of all deaths in Europe, according to the European Environment Agency (EEA).

Full article here.

How do we move around in a zero-carbon world?

2020-08-26T14:45:12Z

“So, how exactly do we fuel our need to move around without emitting greenhouse gases? The answer is simple, even if making it happen won’t be: use clean electricity to run all the vehicles we can, and get cheap alternative fuels for everything else.”

How do we move around in a zero-carbon world?
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/Moving-around-in-a-zero-carbon-world
via Instapaper

COVID-19 lockdowns will have a negligible effect on climate change, study finds

2020-08-25T21:24:25Z

While the COVID-19 restrictions on travel and work did lead to a sudden reduction of both greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and air pollutants, this brief spell will have little impact on the wider climate crisis, according to a new study. However, a post-lockdown economic recovery plan that incorporates and emphasises an environmentally friendly future could help significantly in the fight against global warming.

https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/421940-covid-19-lockdowns-will-have-a-negligible-effect-on-climate-change-study-finds