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Sustainability and Resource Depletion: Survival Challenge for the 21st Century (YouTube)
Richard Heinberg, Post Carbon Institute
Richard Heinberg identifies the essential axioms of sustainability and ties them to current economic trends such as the high and volatile prices of oil and other commodities. Species survival will require more than "Sustainability Lite," a vague commitment to more environmentally benign practices, but instead an all-encompassing effort to live within the ultimate resource limits of the planet. (One hour lecture)
(2 October 2008)

Transforming the Global Economy: Solutions for a Sustainable World
Susan George, Transnational Institute

The Schumacher lecture

... I’d like to talk now about the most obvious crises we face collectively today, why they are all linked and why the solutions to them must be linked as well.

The first of these crises is social—the crisis of mass poverty and growing inequality within individual countries and between the rich and poor countries. The second is the financial crisis that Wall Street, the City and the public authorities refused to see coming because they were living in bubble-land. It began with the subprime affair in the United States but has spread inexorably like a lava flow in the US and elsewhere, threatening to plunge the global economy into a prolonged period of stagnation as severe as the Great Depression. Every day while I was writing this lecture at home, a new financial institution went down the drain or on the block and the end is not yet in sight. The third crisis, most ominous of all, is that of climate change and species destruction. It is accelerating faster than most scientists, much less governments, thought possible, causing many to ask if we have not already entered the era of the runaway greenhouse effect.

Each of these crises—social, financial, environmental--is negatively linked to the others, they intensify each other with negative feedback; they lead to worst-case scenarios. Let us take just a few examples of these perverse interactions.

... Now that the bailouts are coming thick and fast, we have before us a singular example of socialism for the rich, the well-connected and Wall Street, in which the profits are grabbed by the usual suspects and the losses, tremendous losses, are billed to taxpayers. The United States has in effect nationalised these institutions and their debts--without getting anything from the financial industry in exchange.

As the sub-prime crisis has continued to ooze like a giant oil spill over the whole economy, speculators have searched for alternative profitable areas and created the food-price bubble trouble in which we now find ourselves. What happens then? The resource-poor, the world’s hungry, grab whatever they can, they chop down trees, kill animals and overexploit what little land they may have. Poverty is bad news for nature. But so is wealth. Even though there are far fewer of them, the rich cause much greater environmental damage with their dinosaurian ecological footprints. People who use the population argument to explain the multiple crises and who see in population control the solution are missing a crucial point—it’s not so much the number of people, although numbers are important, as their relative weight.

Furthermore, as we have repeatedly witnessed, the frequency and the fury of storms provoked by global warming hit the poor and the poorer regions of the globe hardest. There is worse to come.

... Knowing that I will doubtless offend a great many people here, let me say straight away that there is an exit strategy, a genuine solution exists, but it is not in my view the one that many well-meaning environmentalists have long advocated. I’m sorry, but the time has passed for telling people to change their behaviour and their lightbulbs; that if enough people do this, then together “we” can save the planet. I’m sorry, but “we” can’t. Obviously I’m not suggesting that people shouldn’t change their behaviour and their lightbulbs—but even if the entire population of Europe does so—a most unlikely scenario—it’s not going to be enough. I agree as well with proposals for localisation and scaling down, but we have also got to scale up.

We need large-scale solutions, sophisticated, industrial solutions and huge involvement of governments in order to cut greenhouse gas emissions drastically enough to save our future. In other words, we must have the courage to challenge not just our political leadership but the entire neo-liberal, unregulated, privatised, capitalist economic system in place in order to provoke and promote a quantitative and qualitative leap in the scale of environmental action. Dare I say it here? Sometimes big can be beautiful and right now is one of those times.

... I can see only one way out: the coming together of people, business and government in a new incarnation of the Keynesian war economy strategy. I was born in the United States in 1934 and I remember well when the US switched massively to a war economy, converting all the rubber plants in my native city [Akron, Ohio] to production not for private cars and trucks but for the military. There was huge citizen involvement and support. Thousands of factories, research labs, housing projects, military bases, day care centres, and schools were built or expanded during the war. Public transport was improved and worked overtime to move millions of men and women to Army bases or new defence jobs.

Yes, there were still worker-management conflicts and yes, big corporations rather than small business got most of the government contracts but on the whole the workers were well paid, African-Americans and women began making a few modest gains and the whole war effort finally pulled the United States out of the Depression—it was Keynesianism on a huge scale. There was also an elite group of businessmen called “Dollar-a-Year Men” on loan from their companies to the government, who were charged with making sure that military production and quality targets were met. They had enormous prestige—my godfather was one and I was doubtless insufferable bragging to my little school friends about him.

Why am I going back over this ancient history? Because I think we have a similar opportunity today. The US and the world economy are heading downhill fast and the fallout for ordinary people in terms of jobs, housing, consumption and future welfare is going to be grave. If this diagnosis is right, then some new economic tools will have to be used to combat recession and stagnation, simply because the old ones have already been pushed to their limits and have little or nothing left to give.

... Since the traditional tools are worn out, the only new tool I can think of to pull the world out economic ruin and social chaos is a new Keynesianism, not military this time, but environmental; a push for massive investment in energy conversion, eco-friendly industry, new materials, efficient public transport; the green construction industry and so on.

Susan George is Chair of the Board of the Transnational Institute. Her latest books are Hijacking America: How the religious and secular right changed what Americans think , and We the peoples of Europe.
(6 October 2008)



Thomas Friedman: Hope For A Hot, Flat and Crowded World
Elizabeth Kolbert, Yale Environment 360
In his new, best-selling book, Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution — and How It Can Renew America, New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman describes a world in trouble. With climate change, globalization, and overpopulation, he argues, the central challenge to humanity has now become “to manage what is already unavoidable and avoid what will truly be unmanageable.”

In an exclusive interview for Yale Environment 360, Friedman spoke with New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert about the need for an energy technology revolution — a revolution he believes should be led by the United States. The three-time Pulitzer Prize winner told Kolbert that energy technology must be the next great global industry and that “the country that leads that industry is going to have the most national security, economic security, innovative companies and global respect.”

During the 40-minute interview, Friedman talked about everything from Washington and China to E.O. Wilson and Barack Obama, and he dismissed calls for the U.S. to develop more fossil fuels (“drill, baby, drill”) by noting, “There’s only one mantra for America, and that’s ‘Innovate, baby, innovate.’”
(10 October 2008)
Also at the Guardian.