Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
•Giant investment bank taken over by hippie alarmists •Fossil Fuels Divestment Fever: Canadian Students, Doctors Launch New Campaign •Republican Mayor Leads City To First-Ever Solar Energy Mandate •New Research Confirms Global Warming Has Accelerated •Why Russian doomsday climate predictions may prove prophetic •Carbon in Worst Quarter Since 2011 Set for Rescue Vote
This is a blog about carbon, and by extension climate change mitigation, but there’s another big job that’s rising fast on a lot of people’s To Do lists. It’s called adaptation, and suddenly everyone’s talking about it – for good reason as I learned last week. And the reason is this: the future is now. Climate-related changes are bearing down on us faster than many scientists expected, requiring action by individuals, communities, cities, and nations to reduce their effects. Inaction (like so much else connected to climate change) will only magnify the challenges, making them much harder to solve later. In other words, our collective To Do list just got a lot longer.
Last October, a group of seventeen commons activists from throughout Asia – India, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, New Zealand and other countries – met in Bangkok to have a wide-ranging discussion about the future of the commons, especially in fighting neoliberal economics and policy. The primary goal was to discuss economics and the commons from an on-the-ground perspective, and to help identify promising avenues for future research, writing and political action.
•Study: Shale Gas Fracking Taints Rivers in Pennsylvania •Fracking ‘linked to biggest Oklahoma earthquake’ •Fracking communities should get incentives, says minister •US shale gas to heat British homes within five years
•You’ll Never Guess Which U.S. State Could Be Fossil-Fuel-Free by 2050 •Can we shift to renewable energy? Yes. As to how… •Los Angeles set to ditch coal power •The Worst Way to Measure Energy Efficiency
Abstract. This post attempts to describe succinctly the relevant intellectual territory with respect to both macro and micro types of policies and strategies at both the national and the organizational levels. It also highlights similarities and differences between "policies" and "strategies". It does this to encourage those who are environmentally engaged to consider how their own environmental agendas could be advanced through the range of macro and micro policies and strategies identified, and their many variables. It also brings attention to some of the generic political and political economy obstacles which both policy-making and "strategy-making" actors and stakeholders typically face in the course of the complex and ongoing multi-actor processes of policy (or strategy) formulation, adoption, implementation and evaluation. An additional related objective is to provide an introduction and cursory review of the website "Cognitive Policy Works", identify some of the novel ways it works with policy-making actors and stakeholders, and bring attention to its excellent work on the "framing" of issues and the tacit "mental models" which may be in use.
Wednesday 20th March 2013 was a historic day for global wellbeing, because the United Nations declared it the first ever International Day of Happiness. This signifies recognition of the relevance of happiness and wellbeing as universal goals in people’s lives around the world, and acknowledgement of the importance of these goals in public policy objectives.
•Greedy Lying Bastards, New Film Pulls No Punches To Expose Climate Denial Machine •Climate Change Denying Congressman to Head Subcommittee on Climate Change •Distribution of Carbon Emissions in the UK: Implications for Domestic Energy Policy •How Many Gigatons of Carbon Dioxide…? •Nations urged to combine environmental and development goals
A handful of dramatic targets — set and met — seems to have also emboldened the global community with a sense that “Yes, We Really Can”. These include, for example, the eradication of smallpox and hopefully the imminent eradication of polio and Guinea worm. Such successes are a remarkable tribute to cooperation and sustained commitment, and perhaps it is these indisputably admirable qualities that have led the international community to set an ever-increasing range of ambitious targets, including the Millennium Development Goals, Kyoto Protocol Emission Targets, the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, the Pearson Target, etc.
The writer Thomas Berry described as the ecozoic the “reintegration of human endeavours into a larger ecological consciousness”. The ecozoic, Berry believed, would supplant the Anthropocene age, that we live in now, in which human needs take precedence over the health of the earth’s forests, oceans, and other living systems. Our species will only begin to make true progress, Berry believed, when we learn to cherish the vitality of all life-forms equally – not just our own.
A great place is something that everybody can create. If vibrancy is people, as we argued two weeks ago, the only way to make a city vibrant again is to make room for more of them. Today, in the first of a two-part follow up, we will explore how Placemaking, by positioning public spaces at the heart of action-oriented community dialog, makes room both physically and philosophically by re-framing citizenship as an on-going, creative collaboration between neighbors. The result is not merely vibrancy, but equity.
The great James T. Kirk once said (or is it ‘will say’ since it takes place about 270 years from now?) “I don’t believe in the no-win scenario.” My much less quotable version of this might be “I don’t believe in the zero-sum scenario” — at least not in the case of environmentalism, where I like to point out the many win-win and win-win-win scenarios.
