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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on August 23rd, 2010 From: Anne Smiler
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on August 1st, 2010 http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/PressRelea… Not Enough Hours in the Day for Endangered Apes.
 Journal of Biogeography
ISSN: 0305-0270
July 22, 2010
A study on the effects of global warming on African ape survival suggests that a warming climate may cause apes to run ‘out of time’. The research, published today in Journal of Biogeography, reveals that rising temperatures and changes in rainfall patterns have strong effects on ape behaviour, distribution and survival, pushing them even further to the brink of extinction. The researchers, from Roehampton University, Bournemouth University and the University of Oxford used data from 20 natural populations to model the effects of climate change on ape behaviour and distribution. The results suggest that rising temperatures and shifts in rainfall patterns alone may cause chimpanzees to lose up to 50% and gorillas up to 75% of their remaining habitats. This loss of habitat, according to the researchers, is caused by the fact that apes run out of time, as with increasing environmental temperatures apes will have to spend more time resting to avoid over-heating, making some habitats uninhabitable. Lead author Julia Lehmann, from Life Sciences at Roehampton University, said: ‘In reality, the effects of climate change on African apes may be much worse, as our model does not take into account possible anthropogenic effects, such as habitat destruction by humans and the hunting of apes for bushmeat.’ ‘Our results highlight that solving the direct local threats, such as hunting and habitat loss due to human activities, may not be sufficient to prevent the extinction of African apes. Ensuring safe havens in optimal habitat must be a critical component of any conservation strategy, lest all current conservation efforts prove to be in vain.’ This research carried out by staff and students from the Centre of Research and Evolutionary Anthropology (CREA) at Roehampton features regularly in the popular and scientific media. CREA was founded in 2002 in recognition of the strengths in evolutionary aspects of biological anthropology at Roehampton. —————————— Publicity Contact
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on August 1st, 2010
by Prof. Jeffrey D. Sachs A New York Times Bestseller Penguin Books, 2008 ISBN 978-1-59420-127-1 (hc.) ISBN 978-0-14-311487-1 (pbk.) 386 p. ============================================== The obligatory textbook for any would-be policy maker in the Twenty-first Century. Don’t elect any one to Congress unless he testifies that he has read this book. ============================================== We have a crowded planet and there are common challenges – it does not matter where you live. We tried to draw a system in our own “Promptbook on Sustainable Development For The World Summit in Johannesburg August 2002,” but Professor Sachs did a much better job then I was able to do and I tip my hat before him. Professor Sachs, with his knowledge, and with the tremendous resources of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, clearly achieved a much larger scope then we could have attempted – his book is full of data and still readable – even by policy makers that are not economists. “Lucid, quietly urgent, and relentlessly logical . . . this is Big think with capital B.” says the New York Times Book Reviewer quote on front cover – and he is right. ——————————————————————————- Let us start from the realization that the 20th Century saw the end of European dominance of global politics and economics and the 21st Century will witness the decline and end of American dominance. The world is passing to new powers – China, India and Brazil. Our own estimate is that Europe could have held on for a little longer had the European Union succeeded in creating a real Union – but in the form of the present cloud of competing States it is finished. The US, had it presented a united leadership, it could also have competed for a while longer, but as we heard today, from Senator Kerry on the Fareed Zakaria show, with the ongoing obstructionism in US Senate, we just watch how China has moved from 5% of the global production of solar panels – just two years ago, to the global production in 2010 of 60% of those panels, and this week’s announcement that the US Senate is incapable of gathering 60 votes for a Climate & Energy Bill this year – and hearing just one day after that the Chinese say that they are going to cap carbon emissions – this means that “WE WILL BE RIPPED OUT OF THE MARKET PLACE – WE ARE CUTTING OUR OWN THROAT HERE,” concluded Senator Kerry. And why does this happen? The established economies grow fat and complacent – the world turns to new ideas from large and hungry Nations that are ready to learn fast and innovate and grow. They push the old mush to the sideways. Can the obfuscating politicians understand this? —————————————————————————— The mush starts from the refusal to recognize that resources are scarce, there are environmental stresses, and there will be large areas that become eventually uninhabitable leading again to great mass migration, clashes of civilization, warfare and mayhem. The above will be reinforced by the human created climate change, that gets super imposed on the power change to new Mega-Nations of more then a billion people each, and we must note that the world population has risen by 4 billion people in the span of just 60 years since 1950 – the Korea War – that came after what was thought to be the start of a post WWII peace. For the world to save itself we must recognize the Anthropocene, when human activity became the dominant driver of the natural environment, and look for Global Solutions to Climate Change and Water Needs – to start a new strategy of Economic Development, end poverty traps, and create economic security in this changing Globalized World. Our leaders must rethink Foreign Policy in the light of Global Goals which Prof. Sachs ends up as defining as “The Power of One.” He points out that we are not only the subjects of history, carried along by blind forces, but agents of history. Further, we have to gird ourselves against the unholy trinity of reactionary rhetoric identified by the great development economist Albert Hirschman. He noted that every new idea for constructive change is met with three attacks. The first is futility: the course of reform cannot work because the problem is unsolvable. The second is perversity: any attempt at solution will actually make matters worse. The third is jeopardy: attempting to solve the problem will take attention and resources away from something even more important. This negativism is a state of mind, not a view based on facts. Relentless acceptance of the status quo is not acceptable in the face of the challenges we confront. Permalink |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on July 30th, 2010 C2C Launch Conference! Building a Climate Network, Williams College 9/24/10. |
C2C/The National Climate Seminar Dear friends and colleagues, Amidst the wreckage of climate legislation in DC, one thing is clear. This is not the fight of a day, of a year or of a decade. Even had the Senate acted, changing the future would still have required a vibrant, engaged global citizenry, pushing every day of every year, for the next 40 years, to decarbonize the planet. American social movements—from abolition to civil rights—crest in legislation that changes the direction of the nation, and the world. We hoped this would be the year. We were wrong.
So let’s get back to it. C2C is launching this fall, with a mini-conference at the Williams College Center for Environmental Studies on 9/24, from 3 pm-9 pm. 1. Every year, engage educators at 1,000 colleges, universities and high schools, and 2. Every year, involve 50,000 students in direct video and conference-call dialogue with Congress, with Corporations and with Cities, on clean energy solutions to global warming. Economist Juliet Schor, author of Plentitude, will keynote. To register for the conference, please contact jofrench@bard.edu. There is no charge to attend. Following the launch conference, on 9/29 at 3 PM Eastern, join us for a National C2C Webinar. We need your ideas on how we can build a permanent and growing national network, including tens of thousands of faculty, students and staff, in regular dialogue with key decision-makers on climate. This is the fight of our lives. Thanks for the work you are doing. Eban Goodstein
Director, Bard Center for Environmental Policy
************** The National Climate Seminar, a twice-monthly discussion featuring top scientists, political leaders and policy analysts, is sponsored by The Bard Center for Environmental Policy, and made possible by a grant from The Clif Bar Family Foundation.
The Clif Bar Foundation is our longest-standing National Teach-in partner. Forty Percent of Car Trips are within two miles of your home: Take Clif Bar’s Two-Mile Challenge and ride or walk instead!
Books & Videos For the National Teach-In
Recent books of note: Auden Schendler’s Getting Green Done; Gary Braasch’s Earth Under Fire; and Gary and Lynne Cherry’s How We Know What We Know About Our Changing Climate: Scientists and Kids Explore Global Warming, Michael Mann and Lee Kump’s Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming, Amy Seidl’s Early Spring: An Ecologist and Her Children Wake to a Warming World, Eban Goodstein’s Fighting for Love in the Century of Extinction, and Ignition (Isham and Waage)
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C2C is the e-bulletin of the public policy initiatives of the Bard Center for Environmental Policy. Permalink |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on July 13th, 2010
Just released new book ”The Architecture of Green Economic Policies” by P. K. Rao (Berlin: Springer Verlag) argues that some of the neoclassical economic tools are often being misapplied in dealing with climate change issues, seeks reform of economic mechanisms and methods and emphasizes greater role of transaction cost economics and institutional economics in the design and implementation of policies. Detailed Contents given below:
Contents
1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.1 Why Green Economic Policies and What Are These? . . . . . 1 1.1.1 Objectives ofGEP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.2 Global Climate Change and Environmental Features . . . . . . 3 1.2.1 Global Warming-Historical Background . . . . . . . 3 1.2.2 Effects of Climate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 1.3 The IPCC Reports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 1.4 More Recent Assessments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 1.5 Recent Trends in Emissions and Contributing Factors . . . . . 7 1.5.1 Progress inRemedialActions . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 1.6 Greening of Economics – Why and How . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 1.6.1 Green Economics and the Economics of Greening Economics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 1.6.2 Demand for and Supply of Green Economic Policies . 13 1.6.3 About the Rest of the Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 2 Basic Elements of Green Economics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 2.1 Role of New Institutional Economics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 2.1 Box 2.1ResourceRegimes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 2.2 Economic and Environmental Externalities . . . . . . . . . . . 19 2.2 Box 2.2 Classification of Externalities . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 2.3 Classification ofEnvironmentalDimensions . . . . . . . . . . 21 2.4 Sustainability Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 2.4.1 Sustainable Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 2.5 Poverty andSD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 2.6 Inclusive Sustainable Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 2.6.1 Sustainable Economic Growth and SD . . . . . . . . 26 2.6.2 Resilience and Vulnerability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 2.6.3 Health andEnvironment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 2.7 Synergies and Conflicts in Economy and Environment . . . . . 29 2.8 Ecological Economics: Adoption of Ecosystems Approach . . 30 2.8.1 LandUse,DeforestationandCC . . . . . . . . . . . 32 ix x Contents 2.9 Eco-Effectiveness and Carbon Footprint . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 2.10 Limitations ofComparativeAdvantagePrinciple . . . . . . . . 33 2.11 Economics of Prevention, Adaptation, and Mitigation . . . . . 34 2.12 Sustainable Consumption and Production (SCP) . . . . . . . . 37 2.13 Economics of Green Taxes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 2.13 Box 2.3 Sustainable Development – Principles and Other Instruments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 2.14 How Not to Use Economics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 3 Analytical Methods of Green Economics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 3.1 Institutional Analytics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 3.1.1 Adaptive and Allocative Efficiencies . . . . . . . . . 44 3.2 Net National Product and Environmental Accounting . . . . . 45 3.3 Economic and Environmental Externalities . . . . . . . . . . . 47 3.4 Benefit-Cost Analysis Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 3.5 Economics of Valuation and Time-Discounting . . . . . . . . 49 3.6 TheSternReview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 3.6.1 Revised Benefit-Cost Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 3.6.2 Climate Change Mitigation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 4 Formulation of Green Economic Policies: Optimality, Efficiency and Equity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 4.1 What Is theProblem? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 4.2 Efficiency and Optimality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 4.2 Box 4.1 Forms of Capital and Sustainability Assessment . . . 57 4.3 Basic Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 4.4 Equity Aspects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 4.4.1 TheRole ofTrusteeship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 4.4.2 Recognition of the Needs of Future Generations . . . 60 4.4 Box 4.2 Recognition of Future Generations’ Interests . . . . . 61 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 5 Institutions and Policy Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 5.1 Markets and Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 5.2 Design of Institutions and Policies: Sequential Presentation . . 66 5.3 Global Economic Coordination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 5.4 Role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) . . . . . . . . 67 5.5 What About the World Bank Policy? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 5.5 Box 5.1 World Bank Loans Exacerbate Climate Change? . . . 69 5.6 Globalization and theEnvironment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 5.7 Multilateral Environmental Agreements . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 5.7.1 Ozone Protection and Synergistic Policy Measures . . 73 5.8 ComplementaryMeasures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 5.8 Box 5.2 NGOs in International Environmental Treaties . . . . 74 Contents xi 5.9 Institutions, Policies and Cost-Effective Mechanisms . . . . . 75 5.10 Agricultural Production Affected by Food Consumption? . . . 77 5.10 Box 5.3 Focus Targets for Conservation . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 5.11 Cost-EffectivePolicyDesign and Implementation . . . . . . . 79 5.11.1 Removal of Energy Subsidies – As Part of GEP? . . . 79 5.12 WhereAreGEPinCC? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 5.13 TheNeed for aWorldEnvironmentOrganization . . . . . . . 81 5.14 Proposed WEO Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 6 Reform of Policies of Global Institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 6.1 MDBs and Climate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 6.2 TheWorldBank and theEnvironment . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 6.2.1 World Bank Evaluation Report Findings . . . . . . . 89 6.2.2 BasicProblems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 6.2 Box 6.1 Governing the Environment by Abstaining at the World Bank? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 6.3 WTOand theEnvironment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 6.3.1 WTO Jurisprudence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 6.4 Adoption of Ecosystems Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 6.5 Relevant International Laws . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 6.5.1 Research andDevelopment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 6.5.2 ESTTransfer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 6.6 Cost-EffectiveCoordination ofPolicies . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 7 Green Economic Policies: Corporate, Local and National Levels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 7.1 Design and Implementation of Emissions Trading Policies . . 103 7.2 CoaseanBargaining andETS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 7.3 Sectoral Policy Priorities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 7.3.1 Energy Sector Policies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 7.3 Box 7.1 Improved Energy Management . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 7.3.2 Employment Expansion and Green Economy . . . . . 107 7.3 Box 7.2 Creating Opportunity – Low-Carbon Jobs . . . . . . . 108 7.4 Energy Efficiency: Illustrations of Corporate Successes Cases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 7.4.1 VolvoEuropaTruckCompanyCase . . . . . . . . . . 110 7.4 Box 7.3 Zero Net CO2 Emissions: GDF Suez/Electrabel/Volvo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 7.4.2 Osaka Gas Case: Combined Heat and Power Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 7.4 Box 7.4CombinedHeat andPowerSystems . . . . . . . . . . 112 7.5 Consumption and Environmental Impacts: Livestock Sector and Meat Consumption . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 xii Contents 7.5 Box 7.5 The Impact of Animal Agriculture on Climate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 7.6 Procurement and Supply Chain Management . . . . . . . . . . 116 7.7 Internalization ofEnvironmentalCosts . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 7.8 InefficientUseofResources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 7.9 A Synthesis of Policy Options . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 8 Green Economic Policies: Regional and Global Levels . . . . . . . 123 8.1 Adaptation Funding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124 8.1 Box 8.1 Adaptation Funds (Budget, Expenditure – in Bracket, $ Million) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 8.2 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) . . . . . . . . . . . 125 8.2 Box 8.2 MDG 7 Environmental Sustainability Targets List . . 128 8.2.1 Debt-for-NatureSwaps (DNS) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 8.2.2 Transboundary Environmental Impact Assessment . . 130 8.2.3 Ozone Depleting Substances and GHG Reduction Synergy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130 8.3 Regional Trade and Environmental Agreements . . . . . . . . 131 8.3 Box 8.3 Select Cases of Regional Trade and EnvironmentAgreements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 8.4 Agriculture Sector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132 8.5 Forests Sector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134 8.6 Costs and Benefits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 8.7 Law and Institutional Infrastructure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 8.8 Common Heritage of Mankind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 8.8 Box 8.4 The Role of jus cogens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 8.8.1 The Polluter Pays Principle (PPP) . . . . . . . . . . . 139 8.8.2 The Precautionary Principle (PP) . . . . . . . . . . . 139 8.9 PositiveEnvironmentalMeasures (PEMs) . . . . . . . . . . . 141 8.9.1 State Responsibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 9 Policy Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 9.1 Environment, Economy and Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 9.2 Systems Need Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 9.3 Economic Approaches Must Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 9.4 Climate Change Policies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 9.5 Measuring Economic Progress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148 9.6 International Trade and Global Environment . . . . . . . . . . 148 9.7 Energy Sector and Greenhouse Gases . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 9.8 Production and Consumption Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 9.9 Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) . . . . . . . . . . . 150 9.10 Markets,Taxes andRegulations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150 9.11 Organizations Versus Institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150 Contents xiii 9.12 Priority Policy Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 10 Concluding Observations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 http://www.springer.com/978-3-642-05107-4 Permalink |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on July 5th, 2010 We have received the following Earth Conscious Magazine File from our UNEP – Caribbean Contacts and thought this is a worthwhile Magazine that will be liked by our readers. This posting is intended so that we transmit the link to the Magazine File.
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on June 11th, 2010 Steve Kinzer’s Reset is a bold exercise in re-imagining the United States’ big links in the Middle East. His essential question is: what if Turkey and Iran, of all nations, are to be Americas critical partners in stabilizing the region — not Saudi Arabia and Israel? He says that Iran to the Middle East is what Germany is to Europe. Without Germany there is no peace in Europe – without Iran there is no Peace in the Middle East. What about a Brazil-Turkey-Iran triangle on a nuclear-fuel deal? What does actually Turkey want? What about these last two weeks and Turkey having established itself as leader of the Islamic world pro-tempore – because of the vacuum in Arab leadership? The full name of the newly released book is: “RESET: IRAN, TURKEY AND AMERICA’S FUTURE” and its author presented it at the Baruch College of the City University of New York. The evening was co-sponsored by the Light Millennium organization and The American Turkish Society and my feeling was that both those organizations were just as bewildered as anyone else of the changes in Turkey these last few years. www.lightmillennium.org is connected to the Department of Public Information (DPI) at the UN. Also a puzzlement. The US has quite neglected Turkey besides pushing for its incorporation into the EU; the truth is that in the last two weeks there was more attention paid to Turkey in the US then in all of the history of the US. Kinzer says that in both, Turkey and Iran, there is an understanding among the people of elections and parliament, as they had years time to assimilate the concept of democracy, this as an internal matter, and not as the result of an imposition by a foreign army. He sees opportunities to work with the UN when looking at the situation on the ground, and understanding the shift of Turkey away from its previous cooperation with Israel and Saudi Arabia and the sometimes half-legal activities when these countries were used by a US Administration to effect something that they could not get through US Congress. In the Q&A time I was able to help try to focus the attention on the latest upheavals and my feeling that these can actually lead to the Reset not so much for Washington but actually for Turkey and the Middle East in General. As we pointed out in the past, Turkey’s attempt to enter the EU was unrealistic for many reasons – not the least from a position that looks at what are the real interests and the forte of Turkey itself. Turkey was trying to join what it thought were the Lions of Europe, but neither does Europe have lions anymore, nor did they want Turkey in their midst. While chasing after Europe, Turkey missed out on becoming the natural leader of the newly independent five, mainly Turkic States of Central Asia. Now Turkey is RESETTING by stretching out hands to the Arab World, to Iran and even Pakistan and Afghanistan. But Turkey is a late-comer so it thought to do some pyrotechnics in order to create the credibility for its move. I mentioned my having come to Baruch College after viewing the movie that was supposed to convince people at the UN that slingshots, crow bars and batons used in face-to-face battle, as used on the Mari Marmara ship of the coast of Gaza, are regular equipment of civilians. So, this was a Turkish organized effort for Turkish policy reasons. Having established through this flotilla business its in-good-standing credentials with the Muslim world, the real question is to what purpose they will be using these credentials now. To turn this into a question to Mr. Kinzer, I asked him what does he wish Turkey to do in two weeks from now. His answer was as I expected – Turkey can deescalate now, get off the wrong horse as winner, and start lead in positive directions as the Arab countries of the Middle East and also Iran, could now let them handle the path of search for solutions. Permalink |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on June 1st, 2010
June 1, 2010
Dear Colleagues,
We are pleased to announce a new website for the Journey of the Universe project which we have been working on with cosmologist Brian Swimme. This project involves a film, a book, and an educational DVD series, which will be available in 2011.
To visit the new website go to:
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The goal of the Journey of the Universe is to tell the story of cosmic and Earth evolution drawing on the latest scientific knowledge. It aims to inspire a new and closer relationship with Earth in a period of growing environmental and social crisis. The film evokes a shared sense of wonder as we find ourselves in the presence of the immense, complex, and self-organizing creativity of the universe and Earth.
The film was inspired by the New Story of Thomas Berry, a cultural historian who wrote The Universe Story with Brian Swimme.
If you would like to share the news about the project, please add the URL as a link to your website. On THURSDAY JUNE 17th at 6 PM, the Forum on Religion and Ecology is sponsoring a panel discussion on Journey of the Universe at GRACE CATHEDRAL in SAN FRANCISCO, CA. Address: 1100 California Street. Room: Wilsey Conference Center.
It is free and open to the public. Discussants:
Brian Swimme, California Institute of Integral Studies Mary Evelyn Tucker, Yale University
Paula Gonzalez, Sisters of Earth
Scott Sampson, University of Utah
Introduction: Rt. Rev. Marc Andrus, Bishop of California from: Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim Permalink |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on May 26th, 2010 Quite strange this gallant effort.
Shelby Hodge, May 24th, 2010 wrote: “While the Deepwater Horizon oil spill has proved to be a disaster for off-shore drilling, it has been something of a public relations boon for Houstonian John Hofmeister, retired Shell Oil president. In recent weeks, the long-time outspoken critic of U.S. energy policy has been the darling of the talk show world with appearances on Good Morning America, the Today Show, CNN and more.”
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Hofmeister is in New York all week on a media blitz for the book.
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Hofmeister says that his goals are to educate everyday Americans on what stands between them and affordable energy in the long term. And there are three obstacles: The industry itself, the special interests, but most of all the politics of the U.S. government and how the U.S. government has for the last 40 years failed to address our future energy security or our energy needs.
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Like every good oil industry PR, it has a lot of truth in it swimming in chocolate sauce as thick as the the Deepwater plume in the Gulf. and surely, we heard from him “flying solutions” that really did not take off so far as we were concerned.
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For the launching he corralled the friendly US Foreign Policy Association. And the location is a Barclays Bank affiliate that surely has deep investments in Shell and BP. You listen to him and if you did not realize this before – you surely walk away now with clear disgust at the oil industry honey.
———————————————————— John Hofmeister from Schell Oil, now of the Citizens for Affordable Energy, rides to the defense of BP. The Houston “THE CULTUREMAP INTERVIEW” says for him: ———————————————————- It will continue to focus on the importance of energy security, availability and of course affordability. We invite you to register, or re-register, to make sure that you will receive information and new insights as we grow and expand Citizens for Affordable Energy. The new web site construction is taking place to make the most of the upcoming book launch, May 25, 2010, of Why We Hate the Oil Companies: Straight Talk from an Energy Insider so that Citizens for Affordable Energy takes full advantage of the attention the book will bring to the topic of our affordable energy and environmental future. Learn more by following this link: http://www.whywehatetheoilcompanies.com . We apologize for any inconvenience and look forward to our upcoming re-launch. With your help we will ensure that affordable and sustainable energy strengthens our economy and supports our lifestyles. Best wishes, John Hofmeister ——————————————————— The “4 Mores” of Oilman John Hoffmeister: - - - - - http://www.citizensforaffordableenergy.o… ————————————————————– Why We Hate Oil Companies: Straight Talk from an Energy Insider. THE US FOREIGN POLICY ASSOCIATION at Barclays Capital 745 Seventh Avenue, 32nd Floor (between 49th & 50th Streets) The book launch of : “Why We Hate Oil Companies: Straight Talk from an Energy Insider,” the newest book by Mr. John Hofmeister, former President of Shell Oil Company and Founder and Chief Executive of Citizens for Affordable Energy. ——— Some of the Hoffmeister main points are: In regard to the solution to an oil spill, he says that some years back in Saudi Arabia, the problem was dealt with by bringing super tankers to clean it up – you just suck up the mess and then separate the oil from the water – you bet at these quantities and at this depth. He jocked that there are no tankers available – they must all be full with oil waiting for a better price. “I’m trying to put it forward as much as I can. I’m trying to give it the attention it deserves. For the main purpose of getting a thumbs up or a thumbs down on ‘Should we do this?’ It’s been done before, not in this part of the world. But you know we certainly ought to consider it. BP ought to be listening. The Coast Guard ought to be listening to see whether this can actually be an idea that works.” He also said that actually BP never intended to operate that well. They have enough oil now and wanted just to find the oil and cap the well for future use. I asked Hoffmeister later – if they intended to close it, why can they not close it now maybe they do not have the technology indeed? His answer was that we do not know – they did not yet apply the capping technology – it is only to be tried later this week. So the obvious is – why was Hoffmeister so sure that they never intended to tap the oil now and had the knowledge to close a working well at -5,ooo feet? Is he serious or tries just to sell a book? Nevertheless, there was one point I tend to agree with him – that is in the elaborate display of his feelings that foreign companies Shell and BP were dealt at a disadvantage when compared to Purely US based multinationals. Yes – I can see this in that cattle of worms of the oil industry and their Washington stand-ins, and in his case, leading up to the Palin State of Alaska. He said It is ironic that the book is published now and the title was chosen more than 18 months ago . . . and so the irony of today. But any day, as we know, there could be an incident in a risk-based industry — whether it’s the airlines, coal mining, whether it’s truckers driving down the highway, we live in a risk-based society. The book will help more and more Americans understand the energy issue, he contends, which is being addressed by Citizens for Affordable Energy, the foundation that Karen (his wife) and I started. And that foundation is intended to give everyday Americans a comfortable working knowledge of energy and what it takes to have affordable energy and available energy through the 21st century and well beyond. And so we’ll keep working on communicating that to everyday Americans. Today, the American public suffers from misinformation, disinformation and lack of information, a lot of it perpetrated by their elected officials. They need to know as much if not more than their elected officials so they can’t get snookered into the election process of supporting someone who is working in their personal interests but not in the interests of society. And what is this future? In a nut-shell – let the oil companies supply oil as long as it is available and work on extending energy production by other means when it becomes needed as measured by the economy. first stops will be Canada’s tar sands, Colorado oil shales, Venezuela heavy crudes, coal liquids and gases – not a word about the environment. That one is the domain of read-hot environmental mosquitos … He believes the government is needed in order to serve the oil industry: ” Well, I think there are several controversial stories in the book which will cause a reaction. I primarily deal with, in terms of controversy, the ugliness of political partisanship and how it is frustrating the good will of this nation and it is setting this nation back in terms of its relations with other nations. It’s an embarrassment. And we should all be ashamed that our elected officials are such partisans. Secondly, the selfish interests of both the special interests and the industry will probably be taken exception to. But most of all, I attack the structural disfunction of the executive branch, the legislative branch, and the judicial branch of our national government. Our founders may have been brilliant but they did not appreciate or understand what it would take for 21st century energy to be set forward in public policy. And the mechanisms, the structures, the processes we have in government today cannot get the job done. I’m sure that will be debated by many people. My solution will also be controversial because at a time when many people are challenging the credibility of the Fed, (the Federal Reserve Bank) I’m proposing that a Fed-like solution is the only way that we will get our energy future sorted out. I call it the Federal Energy Resources Board and if we’re unwilling to put energy under the auspices and the governance of an independent regulatory commission, the likelihood that we will fall into an energy abyss in this nation is simply guaranteed.” —– He is not afraid of government that is good for the industry – even though he did not get his way easily in the last years at Schell – specially under Presidents Bush and Obama. He thinks that the folks at the MMS feel it a privilege to work in their office because they have Presidential appointments – be they Democrats or Republicans. Even that as a Dutch Company they were checked many-fold above their competitors. (Very generous indeed.) The present mishap will show a lot of smoke but no fire – take it straight from the insider, he said. He needed in Alaska 60 ice free days because they could not build on ice, but was interferred with, so they did not have the needed 60 days and the leases expire in 5 or 10 years – so leases were lost by the slow bureaucracy. He kept saying that hydrocarbons, wether oil or coal, are dangerous and we must learn to live with risk, he said. He expects that no new drilling will happen before the end of 2012, and then only when the price is right! He sees money from the oil industry flow to the Democratic Party. Is this an accepted fact? On foreign relations – itis not just about oil – it brought us close to war – people cannot judge. He sees an unemployed and uninvolved electorate not going to vote1 He saw a Houston election for Mayor in 2009 with only 16% participation. He wants people more aware and going out to fight for the energy cause. Q from the audience: How can the electorate push the oil industry to do the right thing? He wants a 50 years transition. The 10-25 years are the medium term. By 2060 we will have diminished the dependence on oil and coal he says. Until then we will have used one trillion barrels each of the Athabasca oil sands, the US oil shales and the Venezuelan heavies. Colorado could provide us with 300 million bbl/day. Solar and wind will come in starting 30 years from now. First solar not wind. Coal is economic now wit a 25 Cents subsidy per MWh – but now it takes a $23.30 cents subsidy to get the equivalent power from solar, he said. Then, on top, he threw at the novices – coal is 35% efficient but solar is only 8% efficient – but he is an optimist – “molecular material” will be created by science to support solar. Hydrogen is an underestimated material – Natural Gas is another material for the future. {the future? where has he been in the last three decades? If anyone – it was the oil industry that slowed down the NG industry – they were, and some still do simply flare it and burn it away.} Then he quipped – he knows fission – fusion has great promise – and always will.
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on May 3rd, 2010
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on April 30th, 2010
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on April 29th, 2010 We posted the following advance announcement and on Wednesday April 28, 2010 we had the rewarding presentation by Professor Simon Johnson in the UN General Assembly Hall. Thursday, April 22nd, 2010 Posted in Book reviews, Future Events, Massachusetts, New York, Policy Lessons from Mad Cow Disease, Reporting From the UN Headquarters in New York, Reporting from Washington DC Professor Johnson looks back at times that a US President was ready to act when he saw internal financial powers in the US become to large for our common good.We saw the following article: “To battle Wall Street, Obama should channel Teddy Roosevelt.“ The banker wanted a deal. “If we have done anything wrong, send your man to my man and they can fix it up,” he offered. But the president was blunt: “That can’t be done.” And Knox succinctly summarized Roosevelt’s philosophy. “We don’t want to fix it up,” he told Morgan, “we want to stop it.” Just over a century later, on March 27, 2009, 13 bankers were summoned to the White House. The global financial system was verging on collapse, in no small measure because of the bankers’ concentrated power and their manifest inability to manage the risks of their “financial innovation.” Banking had to be rescued — no modern economy can function without credit, of course — and only the Obama administration had the power to save the day. But instead of specific new regulations or changes in the way they operate — or even any constraints on their power — what did these 13 bankers find waiting for them? On this day and in the months that followed, the administration provided generous expressions of unconditional financial and moral support, both explicit and implicit, along with gentle and nonbinding admonitions. Since that meeting, the country has seen no discernible changes in the financial management and incentive systems that for 30 years have given Wall Street the benefits of the upside and Main Street the costs of the downside. And politically, our financial titans have bitterly opposed the mild reforms that the Obama administration eventually proposed. Even Citi and Bank of America, which essentially spent 2009 as wards of the state, have engaged in egregious lobbying. There is no way that Teddy Roosevelt would have stood for this. He saw finance and economics through the lens of political power. In his book, it did not matter how important you were, or claimed to be, to the economy. If you were too powerful, and if your actions were hurting other people in the economy, Roosevelt wanted to take you on — and he instructed his lawyers accordingly. Of course, Roosevelt did have the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act on his side. But before 1902, that law had never been used against an industrial trust, and precedent suggested that there was no legal basis for reining in Morgan’s ventures. Roosevelt’s audacious move seemed against the odds, and it was very much against the advice of top figures in his Republican Party. In fact, the latest boom-bust-bailout cycle probably worsened matters. We can argue whether, before September 2008, the people running huge financial firms really thought they were “too big to fail.” Lehman, after all, did go bankrupt; Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs were rescued at the eleventh hour. But today, who thinks Goldman could fail? If you were exempt from paying speeding tickets, no matter how fast you drove, what would you do? Perhaps, immediately after observing a horrific crash or having a near-death experience, you would be more careful. But soon you would feel the need to get somewhere quickly. And you might even think that your special legal status merely reflected your advanced skills. How long until the next big accident? It is now time for that fight. Senate Democrats have proposed a financial overhaul that includes the Volcker Rule, and White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Tuesday that passing regulatory reform by late May is realistic. But to make progress in this legislative cycle, the president needs to go all in, as he did with health-care reform. The potential political message here is powerful: If opponents of reform think they are “too big to fail,” then we will prove them wrong. Will the administration stand up and fight now, before we have another crisis? Surely this is what Theodore Roosevelt would have done. He liked to act preemptively; when he saw excessive power, he took it on, creating his own moments of political opportunity. Of course, there is always the other Roosevelt. When FDR took power in March 1933, he took aim at the banks. As historian Arthur Schlesinger wrote in “The Coming of the New Deal” — “No business was more proud and powerful than the bankers; none was more persuaded of its own rectitude; none more accustomed to respectful consultation by government officials. To be attacked as antisocial was bewildering; to be excluded from the formation of public policy was beyond endurance.” By the mid-1930s, Franklin Roosevelt had become skeptical of powerful financiers, but he was only able to translate those feelings into policy after a major global depression. Obama shouldn’t wait for another one before pushing for the changes that matter. The bottom line of a Johnson argument is that a handful of American banks (six of them) gained unprecedented wealth and threatened the well-being of the nation. He advocates that big financial institutions should be allowed to fail. To enable this we must make sure that no bank is bigger in assets then $100 billion. If they are bigger – force them to split into smaller units in the hope they will compete and some will then be allowed to fail. ——————– Kai-Uwe
Germany
April 28th, 2010
The problem is not Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, or Ireland. The problem are greedy banks, who are doing multi-billion-dollar deals on Greece failing, causing the interest rates for Greece to grow too high, thus causing the very debt crisis in the first place. These people are making huge profits out of the problems of others, causing whole nations to go bankrupt, including all the malevolent effects for social security systems etc. People will actually die because of the greed of others. And these are the very same people who asked for taxpayer’s bailout money just a few months ago. – — – HotelAnexoRialto,Madrid
April 28th, 2010
The typical advice in a lot of posts of “let’um go bankrupt” seems like the right thing to do (even though I am living in the last of the PIGS (Spain).
The bankruptcy advice always looks easy from the outside, but then the devil is in the detail. A third of Greek debt is owned by German banks. Another big pile of debt is in the hands of French banks (plus banking subsidiaries in Greece). It’s the too big to fail problem again. If you let Greece fail, the knock-on effects will be felt everywhere else. US experts always stated that the only solution was bankruptcy when Asia got into trouble. “Got to clean the system.” Good advice until US banks and corporations got into trouble and then the bail out machine went into overdrive. California is on the brink. I understand that the correct approach would be to let it go bankrupt and fire all the teachers, police, etc. since there would be no money to pay them? – — –
Ed
West Chester, PA
April 27th, 2010
S&P reduces its rating on Greece’s bonds. How is it they are right on top of this situation but could not manage to accurately rate the sub prime products leading up to the financial crisis from 2007 until now? Amazing
– — –
Australia
April 28th, 2010
Cutting taxes will always limit a government’s ability to adequately fund essential services. Politicians need to be held accountable for the financial viability of their electoral areas of responsibility.
Always be suspicious of a politician who promises to cut taxes to buy votes. Ask “Where will the funds come from to provide essential services?” and name them. The silence will be deafening.
– — –
The above are comments to a New York Times article in today’s on-line version.
readers’ comments
I.M.F. Promises More Aid for Greece as European Crisis GrowsBack to Article »By LANDON THOMAS Jr. and NICHOLAS KULISH
The International Monetary Fund is preparing a bailout of as much as $160 billion for Greece, but the promise of aid is overshadowed by concerns about Spain’s debt. We bring them up because our friend Francisco Bozzano-Barnes sent them to us, but also because before yesterday’s presentation at the coincidentally very significant location – the UN General Assembly Hall, Professor Simon Johnson started out by saying that he will not address the news in the making in Europe but will be ready to deal with that and their impact on the ongoing in Washington, as part of the Q&A time.
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Profile of Professor Simon Johnson:
Simon Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT Sloan School of Management. He is also a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C., a co-founder of BaselineScenario.com (a widely cited website on the global economy), and a member of the Congressional Budget Office’s Panel of Economic Advisers. Prof. Johnson is a weekly contributor to NYT.com‘s Economix, has a monthly column with Project Syndicate that runs in publications around the world, and has published high impact opinion pieces recently in The Atlantic, The New Republic, BusinessWeek, Bloomberg, and The Financial Times, among other places. In January 2010, he joined The Huffington Post as contributing business editor. Professor Johnson is the co-author, with James Kwak, of 13 Bankers, a major new assessment of the US financial sector, published by Pantheon in March 2010. Johnson and Kwak argue that the deregulation of banking since the Reagan Revolution has produced great economic danger. The financial crisis and generous government bailouts of 2008-09 only worsened the underlying problems. Unless the biggest banks are reined in – and become small enough to fail – we are headed for serious trouble. From March 2007 through the end of August 2008, Prof. Johnson was the International Monetary Fund’s Economic Counselor (chief economist) and Director of its Research Department. He is a co-director of the NBER Africa Project, and works with non-profits and think tanks around the world. Professor Johnson is an expert on financial and economic crises. As an academic, in policy roles, and with the private sector, he has worked for over 20 years on crisis prevention and economic recovery around the world. – — – Watch the video of *Bankers and the Next Financial Meltdown* event About the event
In this timely event, renowned economist Simon Johnson will talk about his new book, 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown, and offer bold solutions to policymakers on how to restructure the financial system. 13 Bankers charts the meteoric rise of the banking sector over the last three decades. It argues that power and prestige became increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few, and locates the cause of the financial crisis in the excessive risk-taking which became standard practice on Wall Street in the last decade. The book also directs blame at the Bush and Obama administrations for rescuing the megabanks without securing meaningful financial reform. However, Johnson and Kwak are convinced there is still time to restructure the banking sector and introduce the necessary regulations before the next financial meltdown. Praise for the book ‘Simon Johnson was the first to point out that this was and is a crisis of political economy. His and James Kwak’s analysis…is essential reading.’ - Niall Ferguson, Professor of History at Harvard University, ———————– Parts of the presentation: Permalink |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on April 28th, 2010 Greg Peterson and Urban Farm Press - www.UrbanFarmPress.com – present a new and unique series of mini-books designed for the busy, fast-paced life we live. The series, called The Urban Farm’s Simple Sustainability Series, feature palm-size, single topic, and well-researched mini books that are concise and to the point with each book exploring a different aspect of living a green (sustainable) lifestyle. Topics are addressed in a guilt-free, action-oriented and upbeat manner. Designed as a quick study, the books bridge the gap between facts and action and are written in an inspirational manner for anyone with an interest in green lifestyle changes and sustainably oriented processes. The mini-book format features: Each book contains helpful, factual and interesting information designed to inspire readers into action. Permalink |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on April 27th, 2010 We met Israeli Retired Judge Shlomo Shoham in the corridors of the UN Headquarters in New York, about a dozen years ago. I learned from him how he was trying to enact in the Israeli Parliament – The Knesset – a system where the legislature will have to test every proposed law for its effect on future generations – or read it simply – its effect on sustainability. The essence of this is the implementation of the concepts of Sustainable Development. I was so taken by these ideas that I actually raised the question to a panel from the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, that is the UN grouping of the Asian Arab States from which Israel is excluded, at a meeting of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development – what would be if every State in the region would have a provision that requires the implementation that comes with National Responsibility for the Future Generations, in matters of the environment and general well-being? The Syrian Chair of the grouping, and the Iranian UN employee who was in charge of ESCWA responded that many of the countries had their Agenda 21 – specifically Syria had one – and they were bound to implement such goals. Clearly, they did not take my bait of collaborative work with Israel in the attainment of regional goals. But this is not the topic of this posting. This posting is about my having found out that in May there will appear a volume by Shlomo Shoham that depicts the Israeli experiment with rational sustainable law-making, and I wanted to bring this before our readers, specifically these days of attempts at legislating in the energy and climate, and even on financial institutions and debt, as an ultimate goal for the Washington US Congress, and any law making institution. Let us simply conclude that if an activity does not pass the sustainability test, we probably should desist from bringing it about. Now, please let Shlomo Shoham speak for himself: A NEW BOOK:” Shlomo Shoham – FUTURE INTELLIGENCE, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE STORY OF 2010, Verlag Bertelsmann Stiftung (Bertelsmann Foundation is the publisher). ————— Shlomo Shoham says: “I pray that this book—bringing in the call of our preferred future will encourage us in creating our desired reality of life and well being for our planet earth.” Shlomo Shoham, 2010 - Creating a desired future as intelligent behavior: In 1995, I left the judge’s bench to work in Israel’s parliament as the legal advisor to the Constitution, Law and Justice Committee. Many of my friends and acquaintances did not understand my intent in taking this unusual step. At that time, most of Israel’s judges served in the judiciary not only until their first opportunity to retire, but for as long as they were allowed to sit on the bench—that is, until they were 70 years old. I, on the other hand, was appointed to the bench at a very early age and left it at age 45, after only 12 years. I explain to anyone who asks, that beyond personal and professional reasons, the force that drove me was the desire to stop dealing with traumas of the past and to be part of a team that had an impact on the future. ——————- In its mere 60 years of existence, Israel has achieved much. It is considered to be a developed western state with a flourishing economy and impressive development momentum. Yet these considerable achievements, in one of the most crowded states in the world, have taken a heavy toll in terms of a problematic view of the future and considerable environmental costs. ————– The Commission for Future Generations was born out of a great vision of the future. Lapid’s intention, subsequently adopted by the members of the Knesset, was to establish an honorable position for the Israeli parliament among the nations of the developed world. Indeed, the Commission was established in 2002 out of the conviction that those who formulate the legislation shaping Israeli society ought to consider the consequences of that legislation, and that the various interests informing legislation should remain beholden to an overriding principle: protecting the interests of our children and grandchildren—of future generations and preserving a broad scope of choices for them. In short, the Commission was to help the Knesset to take seriously the goals of intergenerational justice. From a legal perspective, the Commission for Future Generations is defined in Chapter 8 of the Knesset Law. The idea was to establish an intra-parliamentary body with the resources to develop a comprehensive picture of Knesset legislation, and carry out an audit of ramifications that could affect coming generations. The statute provides the Commissioner for Future Generations with the power to examine bills that, in his opinion, hold the potential for future harm, and to bring concrete data and recommendations to parliament. The commissioner can expresses his opinion during the deliberation of legislative committees, or submit it as an attachment to bills being discussed in committee or voted on by the parliament in plenum. The commissioner also has the authority to express his opinion and make recommendations on various topics unrelated to specific bills, as well as on secondary legislation brought to vote in the Knesset. He has the authority to advise members of the Knesset on any topic that has special relevance to future generations. During my five years of activity on the Commission 20012 -2006, every bill tabled in parliament was also presented to us. This included private bills, government bills and secondary legislation. As commissioner, I had the statutory authority to announce our involvement in a particular bill; when this happened, I was invited to the meetings of the relevant committee to offer a written and oral opinion. ———- One of our first steps in establishing the Commission for Future Generations was the significant need to explain and define what constitutes “of particular interest to future generations,” as stipulated in the wording of the law. In the beginning, we defined this in terms of our understanding of the term sustainability, which expressed the values on which responsibility to future generations is based. Surprisingly, though the concept of sustainability—to the best of my knowledge—was not a concept the initiators of the law were aware of, the 12 areas which legally fell within the Commission’s authority matched the principle components that make up the concept, as it is described in scholarly literature. The Commission had been authorized to act in policy areas falling within three broader areas that often involve interrelated issues: society, economics and the environment. And indeed, one of the Commission’s successes was to raise public awareness of sustainability in a way that encompassed all three, in a period when the idea of sustainability was associated almost exclusively with environmental issues. Soon after the Commission’s formation, Israel began intense preparation for the United Nations’ World Summit on Sustainable ———— To some extent, these questions had already become part of Israel’s public discourse. A 2002 shadow report on Israel’s progress toward environmental sustainability released by environmental organizations found a pattern of development underway which contradicted the principles of sustainability, in certain cases irreversibly (Friends of the Earth Middle East 2002). From examples like this, it was clear that the process of embedding the principles of sustainability and building a strategy unique to Israel was unavoidable. At the Commission, we began to see legislation focusing on sustainability as a critical tool to help implant futures thinking and long-term thinking in Israel’s decision-making processes and governmental policy design. After the Johannesburg summit, the Commission drew up a proposed government bill to create a strategic plan for sustainable development, which was presented to the government on January 30, 2003. In the Knesset, we pressed for the advancement of a basic law on the topic, since this would raise the issue to the status of constitutional law.2 As such, it would serve as a counterweight against the interests that opposed sustainable development. The bill was intended to establish—at least as a goal—that all economic, societal and environmental development be conducted in a sustainable manner. Indeed, the U.N. Plan of Implementation signed at the Johannesburg summit spoke specifically of an institutional framework as the proper way to embed and advance sustainable development at all levels of government. The plan called for the use of all means available to the government to embed these principles, and specifically mentioned the use of legislation and the rule of law alongside the activity of governmental institutions (United Nations 2000). It is worth noting that following the Commission’s initiative, the right to sustainability found its way into the map of rights contained in the proposed bill for the Israeli constitution. It is my hope that the transition from a legal system based on basic laws to a legal system based on a written constitution will take place quickly, and that with it the rights to sustainability will be anchored in the constitution. ———— And now let’s read the following quotes. Let these sayings seep into our consciousness and see if our images of the future change as a result, and if so, how. Let’s allow ourselves to release our hold on the ideas we have about education, and read the following material as a clean slate. Even if these quotations are familiar to us, it is still very important to let ourselves see how reading them anew influences our perceptions: - “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.” (Khalil Gibran 1996) - “In such a world, the most valued attributes of the industrial era “Finally, unless we capture control of the accelerative thrust… - “The aim (of education) must be the training of independently - “Know that each person is unique in the world… And he would do well to bring his uniqueness to perfection.” - “Know yourself before you attempt to get to know children. Become - “In Waldorf education, we aspire to enable our children to become - “The rapid obsolescence of knowledge and the extension of life …places an enormous premium on learning efficiency. Tomorrow’s - “The changes and uncertainty that characterize the society of our - “I didn’t teach Anna to do things the right and proper way. There First of all, I myself wasn’t sure what the right way was. So Anna - “The primary aim of our education must be the cultivation of - When you are finished reading—and make sure to take time to think, and —————– I have just returned from a twilight stroll with two of my When I look at them, I feel the confidence they place in me, the In my imagination, I see them as 20 years old, happy, beautiful and In this vision, we have listened to calls coming from the future, the —————— Watching my grandchildren, I imagine what would happen if someone —————– Epilogue It’s 3 a.m. in India, where I am, on the beach. The sound of waves lapping upon the beach—soothing and embedding The sensation of being one with the universe enfolds me. In my imagination, I hear Mother Earth’s voice calling us to create, This book tells the story, one of several kinds, of the human This is the story of the era in which the awakening consciousness of This is a period in which the human species is beginning to free The fabric that joins all of the creatures living on this planet is The story of the Commission for Future Generations in Israel’s While it cannot be said that the Commission brought about all of the I am pleased to see that the idea is already being imitated in other And now from the general to the personal: my term as Commissioner of Every morning, I anticipate with great eagerness the way in which I am the founder of the Centre for Sustainable Global Leadership at I invite anyone who sees herself as a partner in mind with the ideas We who are alive today have a great privilege—to experience and to Permalink |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on April 22nd, 2010 UNU Current Affairs Series Bankers and the Next Financial Meltdown – with Simon Johnson. Date: Wednesday, April 28th, 2010, 3:00 p.m. – 5:30 p.m. Speaker: Simon Johnson, Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT Sloan School of Management and former Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) In this timely event, renowned economist Simon Johnson will talk about his new book, 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown. 13 Bankers charts the meteoric rise of the banking sector over the last three decades. It argues that power and prestige became increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few, and locates the cause of the financial crisis in the excessive risk-taking which became standard practice on Wall Street in the last decade. The book also directs blame at the Bush and Obama administrations for rescuing the megabanks without securing meaningful financial reform. However, Johnson and Kwak are convinced there is still time to restructure the banking sector and introduce the necessary regulations before the next financial meltdown. ———– Praise for the book ‘A beautifully written and powerful story…Required reading for the President, and anyone else who cares for this Republic.’ ‘Simon Johnson was the first to point out that this was and is a crisis of political economy. His and James Kwak’s analysis…is essential reading.’ ———- ENRON hails to New York from London – the Headlong Theatre, Chichester Festival Theatre and Royal Court Theatre Production by Lucy Prebble. The Director is Rupert Goold. The play is about real life events that took part from 1992 to the present days.
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on April 15th, 2010  Freedom for Sale: Why the World Is Trading Democracy for Security
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Western commentators were quick to assert that liberal democracy and capitalism had won the day. The truth was more complex. Authoritarian governments in China, Singapore, and later, Russia, deftly separated democracy from capitalism, offering their citizens a choice. They could embrace all the comforts of a consumerist society, so long as they surrendered their civil liberties. Freedom for Sale (Basic Books) is a portrait of a new paradigm of authoritarian capitalism, which is making inroads not just in the East, but in America as well. At this Open Society Institute event, author John Kampfner discusses his argument that this model represents a “pact” between governments and their middle class subjects. As long as citizens consent to stay out of politics and keep to themselves, in return they receive all the creature comforts they desire. The cost is small, insofar as the average citizen is concerned—but as soon as activists and journalists get involved, the pact has swift, deadly consequences. Crackdowns on journalists in China, detentions of political dissidents in Singapore, and thuggish intimidation and assassinations in Russia are all part and parcel of this system, but even so, the pact seems more popular, and more successful than ever. Speakers
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on April 4th, 2010 OFF THE SHELF – NEW BOOK: ‘Green Gone Wrong’: Can Capitalism Save the Planet? IT may seem quaint to recall this now, but on the eve of the financial crisis, one of the biggest business stories was how large corporations were going to save the planet and make billions of dollars for their shareholders at the same time. USA Today wrote glowingly about Wal-Mart’s push to sell environmentally friendly light bulbs. Fortune gushed that Goldman Sachs, Continental Airlines and DuPont had jumped on the ecological bandwagon. The global economic collapse pushed the rise of green capitalism off business magazine covers, but it will surely resurface. After all, Wal-Mart and G.E. are still pushing it. In a recession, they need all the good publicity they can get. Now, along comes Heather Rogers, who warns about the dangers of buying into this mind-set with “Green Gone Wrong: How Our Economy Is Undermining the Environmental Revolution” (Scribner, 272 pages, $26). She says green capitalism is actually undermining ecological progress. Ms. Rogers is a muckraking investigative reporter who is also the author of “Gone Tomorrow: the Hidden Life of Garbage.” She says corporate America has led us into thinking that we can save the earth mainly by buying things like compact fluorescent light bulbs, hybrid gas-electric cars and carbon offsets. “The new green wave, typified by the phrase ‘lazy environmentalism,’ is geared toward the masses that aren’t willing to sacrifice,” Ms. Rogers complains. “This brand of armchair activism actualizes itself most fully in the realm of consumer goods; through buying the right products we can usher our economic system into the environmental age.” Ms. Rogers offers plenty of evidence that consumers who load up their shopping carts with organic food, for instance, may be unwittingly subsidizing big farm companies that are eradicating forests and defiling the soil in some developing countries. She says their governments aren’t as concerned about the environment, and well-intentioned nongovernmental organizations don’t have much clout. “Green Gone Wrong,” to be released later this month, doesn’t just go after easy targets like big corporations that she says are clearly more interested in making money than saving the earth. She is also critical of fashionably green rock bands like Coldplay, whose members fly around the world and think they can erase their sizable carbon footprints by planting trees in developing countries. In Coldplay’s case, many of the trees died. Indeed, Ms. Rogers is so scornful of the mainstream environmental movement that a lot of her points could be used by its enemies, like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, who are always looking for ammunition. Even if you don’t agree with all of Ms. Rogers’ assertions — and I don’t — they are not so easily dismissed. “Green Gone Wrong” is well-written and exhaustively reported. The author went to places like Uruguay, Borneo and India to show problems she says the green movement has inadvertently created. But some of the most poignant moments come when Ms. Rogers visits organic farmers in upstate New York. She laments that they can’t make a living because it is so expensive for them to comply with the federal certification requirements for organic foods. “What isn’t being talked about is that many of the small organic producers who are expected to lead the reinvention of the food system can barely make ends meet,” she says. Like many books that depict a crisis, “Green Gone Wrong” falls short when it comes to offering solutions. All too predictably, Ms. Rogers calls for higher taxes and government spending. That sounds like wishful thinking after the Democratic majority on Capitol Hill struggled to pass health care reform. It would have been better had Ms. Rogers delved more deeply into another of her suggestions: instead of buying green, we simply need to buy less stuff. She seems reluctant to push this too hard because it’s a truly radical idea that flies in the face of capitalism — green or not. “Around the world, many politicians, the conventional energy sector and manufacturers of all kinds oppose any major reduction in consumption,” Ms. Rogers writes. “If people start using less, then economies based on consumption — such as that of the United States, where buying goods and services comprises 70 percent of all economic activity — will be forced to undergo a colossal transformation.” At first, her muted call for a new frugality sounds almost as far-fetched as a carbon tax in the United States anytime soon. But it isn’t. This is something individuals could do on their own instead of waiting for reluctant politicians to act. If there was ever a time to ponder the long-term consequences of our spending habits, it’s in the wake of the worst economic crisis in decades, which was fueled by rampant consumer borrowing. Is it possible that we could save the planet and restore the economy at the same time? Permalink |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on March 22nd, 2010  March 2, 2010, at the 92nd Street “Y” – the former Secretary of the Treasury, and co-incidentally co-chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, was on stage in a friendly chat with Sebastian Mallaby, director of the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geo-economic Studies and the Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council of Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Above took place in relation to the release of Rubin’s volume: “In an Uncertain World: Tough Choices from Wall Street to Washington.” The book is a clear best seller and Business Week includes it as one of the 10 Best Business Books of the Year.”
My problem with that debate was that it really was not convincing at all – it was very much a softball game. Even in the Q&A part there were no real questions to Mr. Rubin. It is inconceivable that a man like him did not see the several crises rushing to meet him in frontal collision. In effect he was a main leader in the uphill climb to the bubbles that when they burst did nearly flatten the globe. There were people that cried out – look where you are going, but then the Goldman-Sachs culture which he was one of his creators – just was gorging from the feast in plain sight. The Lehman Brothers people did not behave any nicer, but not having been Goldman-Sachs graduates, but rather competitors had to pay instead of the other brothers. Then, to top it all, it was the saving operation by the Goldman-Sachs graduates of the banks and Wall Street that made sure nothing really serious happened to Goldman-Sachs. The whole system stinks and one will not reform it if we listen to Robert Rubin’s fairy tales. I bet that in the 92nd Street auditorium were enough retirees that lost heavily in those games having taken the wrong bets, as they believed Business Week and Wall Street advisers.
We did not post these impressions of ours earlier, simply because we saw President Obama burdened with the Healthcare mess and having done the best he could as he was joggling several balls in the air at the same time.
Now we believe time has come to look at the financial institutions and pursue the break-up of “too-big-to-fail” because if they are too big they will fail the rest of us with 100% certainty. People like Mr. Rubin, and the whole class of Goldman-Sachs graduates should not be among those giving advice to the President in his effort to establish a financial sustainable system based on economic principles, rather then the gimmicks of derivatives. We suggest once more that the right people will be those that did not train with Goldman-Sachs and perhaps even come from outside the profession. Lately came to our attention last year’s Nobel Prize award winner Prof. Elinor Ostrom. She got the prize for economics without even being originally an economist – she got it for looking at sustainability. Professor Joseph Stiglitz is an economist that never run a bank. These are the ideal people to get us out of the hole that Robert Rubin put us there.
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So we do not look as if we just beat on Goldman-Sachs – let us see what recently The financial Times editorial said about Lehman’s failure – we guess this was a safer target and in the news.
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The lesson from Lehman’s failure.
Published, The Financial Times Editorial, March 12 2010 The report into Lehman’s failure will no doubt prompt much snorting about swindling investment bankers. Some may be tempted to draw parallels with past financial frauds, such as Enron or Madoff. But to do so would miss the wider point about Lehman’s collapse.
Lehman was a poorly-managed bank that operated an irresponsible business model. But it was no Enron or Ponzi scheme. Indeed it behaved much as any bank would, if allowed, in a similar situation. It is worth looking back to the months before Lehman’s collapse. After the rescue of Bear Stearns in March 2008, it was clear that investors were losing faith in highly-leveraged investment banks that relied on wholesale funding. This was Lehman in excelsis. As such, it was the next domino in line. Bosses of banks that are in clear danger of failing have three courses open to them. They can wind the bank up; sell it; or keep trading in the hope of resurrection. Given the crystallisation of losses involved in the first option, only a manager who put integrity above either his own reputation or the shareholders’ interest would ever take it. The board of Lehman was stuffed with major shareholders. Unsurprisingly, it opted for option three (only later seeking an outright sale of the bank). A barely-alive bank is an extremely dangerous thing. The temptation to fudge the figures or lie to prolong life becomes overwhelming. This is why regulators seize banks that are close to failure. But, as a broker-dealer, Lehman was not subject to such regulation: the SEC did not have the tools. In this situation, it is scarcely surprising that Lehman’s managers resorted to fudging. The report details how they used a repo transaction to artificially reduce the bank’s leverage, knowing the importance that investors placed on this figure. Lehman also misled investors about its access to liquid funds. If there are lessons to be learned from Lehman, it is not simply that its management succumbed to temptation. The authorities were excessively sanguine about the existence of such a vast and undercapitalised organisation. None of this excuses the conduct of individuals or professional service firms that may have failed in their duties. Anyone who did wrong should be held to account. But the real lesson is that institutions with bank-like characteristics should all be treated like banks and be subject to proper oversight. Whatever the future regulatory world is to be, it should not contain loopholes for another Lehman to exploit. ————
The New York Times of March 11, 2010 had an interesting insert in its front page of Business Day:
Goldman Deal-Maker Now Advocates Regulation.
By GRAHAM BOWLEY Published The New York Times: March 10, 2010 For 18 years, Gary G. Gensler worked on Wall Street, striking merger deals at the venerable Goldman Sachs. Then in the late 1990s, he moved to the Treasury Department, joining a Washington establishment that celebrated the power of markets and fought off regulation at almost every turn. Gary Gensler, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, made partner at Goldman by age 30, then worked at Treasury under Robert Rubin. Today, he is emerging as one of the nation’s archreformers, pushing to impose some of the most stringent new financial regulations in history. And as the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the leading contender to oversee the complex derivatives contracts that played a central role in the financial crisis and, in turn, the Great Recession, he is in a position to influence the outcome. It may seem an unlikely conversion, but it is one that has won the approval of Brooksley E. Born, of all people, a former outspoken head of the commission. She sounded alarms more than a decade ago about the dangers hiding in the poorly understood derivatives market and was silenced by the same Washington power brokers that counted Mr. Gensler as a member. There is more to the article but see it please at – http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/business/11cftc.html
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History of the TreasuryRobert E. Rubin
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Sec. Robert E. Rubin |
which coordinated economic policy throughout the Clinton Administration. With his vast experience in financial markets and collegial temperament, he helped President Clinton and his economic team develop an economic policy based on vigorous deficit reduction, global open markets, and investments in education, training and the environment. This program helped to spark and sustain the longest economic expansion in the Nation’s history to date, transforming the Nation’s budgetary position from deficit to surplus, and producing the lowest national rates of unemployment in decades.After succeeding Lloyd Bentsen as Treasury Secretary, Secretary Rubin faced threats to the Nation’s creditworthiness and to the stability of the global financial system. Secretary Rubin used his statutory authority to safeguard the Federal Government’s finances and make timely payments of the federal debt when Congress did not raise the debt limit during an extensive budgetary confrontation. During his tenure financial crises flared in Mexico and Asia, posing real risks to global financial stability. Secretary Rubin led efforts with the IMF, the Federal Reserve and others to stop both crises from overwhelming the global financial system, thereby protecting the American economic expansion and spurring Mexico and Asia towards economic recovery.
Secretary Rubin’s tenure at Treasury was extraordinarily varied. He spoke out about growing “interdependence” among nations and urged Americans to appreciate the benefits of increasing economic integration in the post-Cold War era. He worked forcefully throughout his tenure for fiscal discipline and open trade, while strongly advocating policies to provide greater skills and support for workers and low income Americans, particularly those in the inner city. Rubin strongly supported aid for developing nations and acted to reform the architecture of the global financial system. He worked to reform the IRS and for financial modernization. He also championed the priorities of Treasury’s law enforcement agencies, including policies to redesign the Nation’s currency to thwart counterfeiting, decrease the accessibility of guns to former felons and to minors, enhance Presidential security, interdict drugs at U.S. borders, and combat money laundering. Upon Secretary Rubin’s retirement, President Clinton called him the “greatest Secretary of the Treasury since Alexander Hamilton.”
About the Artist
Aaron Shikler was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1922, studied at the Barnes Foundation in Marion, Pennsylvania and earned a B.A. and a M.A. from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia. He received additional instruction at the American University, Shrivenham, England and the Hans Hoffman School, New York. A nationally acclaimed artist, Shilkler is represented in the White House Collection by the portrait of President John F. Kennedy and the official First Lady portraits of Mrs. John F. Kennedy and Mrs. Ronald Reagan. The portrait of Secretary Rubin was painted in 1999.
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Chief Architect of the Financial Crash Is Still Treated as a Credible Economic Expert
Robert Rubin put in place all the pieces that set up the economy for the disaster that we are now living through. Why can’t he get off the stage?
As Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin put in place all the pieces that set up the economy for the disaster that we are now living through. He pushed legislation that weakened regulation of the financial sector; he cheered on a stock bubble that eventually grew to $10 trillion and he established an over-valued dollar as a matter of official policy.
He then left to take a top job at Citigroup where he was able to enjoy the fruits of his labor. He earned well over $100 million in the decade after he left the Clinton administration. In the fall of 2008, when Citigroup was saved from bankruptcy with a taxpayer bailout, Rubin quietly slipped out the back door (with his money), resigning from his position at Citigroup.
It may not seem just that someone like Rubin would be allowed to live out his life in luxury after the policies that he promoted and personally profited from led to so much suffering for so many people. But that is the way things work in the United States these days. However, what is even more infuriating is that he doesn’t seem to have any intention of going away. He is still pontificating on the economy and desperately trying to rewrite history to exonerate himself.
In a recent public talk, Rubin told his audience that “virtually nobody” saw the financial meltdown. Therefore, he excused himself for missing it along with everyone else. While it may be true that the top people in policy circles and among the Wall Street crew with whom Rubin associates really are clueless about the economy, it was, in fact, very easy for a competent economist to see the crisis coming.
House prices diverged from a 100-year long trend in the mid-90s, just as the stock bubble began to pick up steam. By 2002, nationwide house prices had risen by more than 30 percent after adjusting for inflation. This followed a 100-year period in which they had just kept even with the overall rate of inflation.
There was no plausible explanation for this run-up in house prices based on the fundamentals of either the demand or supply side of the housing market. Income and population growth were relatively slow by historical standards. In addition, we were building homes at a near record pace, so there clearly were no major obstacles on the supply side. Furthermore, there was no remotely comparable increase in rents, so there was no evidence of an undersupply of housing; a fact that was also borne out by the record vacancy rate of this era.
So, it should have been clear to Robert Rubin and every other economic analyst that the housing market was in a bubble. When I first began writing about the bubble in 2002, it had already created more than $2 trillion in housing-bubble wealth. By its peak in 2006, the bubble had grown to more than $8 trillion. Could anyone believe that $8 trillion in housing wealth could disappear without serious consequences for the economy? This was the most predictable disaster imaginable. There was no excuse for the people in policy positions having missed it.
This is why it is infuriating to see Rubin still running around with his stories about “virtually nobody.” The response is that anyone who had a clue could not miss the housing bubble and they should have done everything in their power to try to deflate it before it reached ever more dangerous proportions. Rubin did the opposite – he put in place bubble friendly policies as Treasury secretary, then profited enormously from these policies after his return to Wall Street.
Reading Rubin’s comments, it is hard not to think of George Wallace. The former governor of Alabama made his name on the national stage as an ardent supporter of segregation, famously blocking the schoolhouse in front of young black children trying to attend a previously segregated school.
Later in his life, Wallace had a change of heart and regretted his earlier actions. He went around to commemorations of major events in the civil rights era and begged for forgiveness. Wallace’s presence at these events was no doubt painful for many of those who had to confront the brutality of the racist system in which Wallace had played such a key role. He could have served the world much better with more private expressions of contrition.
Having inflicted enormous damage on tens of millions of families who have lost their jobs, their homes and/or their life’s savings, it would be nice if Rubin could have the decency to fade from the public scene. At least Wallace had the integrity to acknowledge that he was wrong.
Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and author of the new book, False Profits: Recovering from the Bubble Economy (PoliPointPress, 2010).
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on March 13th, 2010 from: Marco Grasso <marco.grasso@unimib.it> I am writing to announce a new book series on the ethical aspects of adaptation funding, published by Springer: http://www.springer.com/environment/glob…) Covering the ethical dimensions of international-level adaptation funding, a subject of growing interest in the climate change debate, this book provides a theoretical analysis of the ethical foundations of the UNFCCC regime on adaptation funding, one that culminates in the definition of a framework of justice. The text features an interpretative analysis of the ethical contents of the UNFCCC funding architecture by applying the framework of justice proposed to different areas of empirical investigation. The book offers scholars working on climate change, international relations, and environmental politics an analysis characterized by both theoretical soundness and empirical richness. The comprehensiveness of the book’s approach should make it possible to plan and implement international adaptation funding more effectively, and eventually to define more just funding policies and practices. Permalink |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on February 18th, 2010 Climate Change and Business Success Tuesday 23rd February 2010
This Earthcast will examine the challenges posed by measuring, reducing, and offsetting emissions and the innovative solutions to common challenges currently being employed by businesses across the world. Practical tips will cover everything from the easy actions that will cut waste of materials, water and energy and save you money, to the big changes in processes, products and business models. Join the authors of The Three Secrets of Green Business and Doing Business in a New Climate for an event focusing on the challenges and opportunities that climate change poses for businesses of all sizes. Gareth Kane, an environmental consultant, has worked with hundreds of organizations to improve their environmental performance. He has appeared as a media pundit on sustainability issues on the BBC Six O’Clock News, Countryfile and The Politics Show. In 2008 The Journal newspaper named Gareth as a ‘Rising Star, Future Leader’ for his work on sustainability. Paul Lingl and Deborah Carlson both work for The David Suzuki Foundation, developing climate change solutions and greenhouse gas management strategies for businesses and other organizations. 20% Discount by typing EARTHCAST when ordering any book at www.earthscan.co.uk. Praise for the Earthcasts Series: “Earthscan is performing a really valuable public service by enabling us all to listen to some the world’s best sustainability consultants and to be able to ask them questions.” “Brilliant! I found the session to be informative and very relevant to current events. Keep up the good work.” “Well timed, well chaired, well presented – smoothest webcast I’ve seen!” “An excellent way of hearing about recent developments from leading thinkers in the field.” Further information To view an archived version of all previous events, visit www.earthscan.co.uk/earthcasts The slides used in each presentation are also available. Permalink |
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