The Guardian invited me along with a few other folks to scribble some predictions for 2012. It must been a bad day when I finally hit the keys, but here is what I wrote.
2012 is going to be an unreasonably difficult year. We must be equally unreasonable in our ambitions for advancing sustainability.
The ‘sustainable biz’ circle’s golden rule is to keep one’s chin up, point out the good news, and duck the hard questions by appealing to an unknowable future.…
The climate negotiations in Durban has delivered a deal. As we return exhausted to our Xmas preparations, can we celebrate a breakthrough securing the future of our children, or should we condemn the outcome as a sham. The truth is that our futures depend less on the effectiveness of the Durban deal, but on what nations, communities and businesses do over the next decade, largely in their own economic interests.…
This upcoming Monday (December 19th) at 11am EST, I will be participating in a webinar hosted by the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment Inititative on the implementation of a Financial Transactions Tax. The debate will feature four very practical thinkers from different sides of the issue including Tjerk Kroes (APG Asset Management), John Fullerton (Capital Institute), and Roger Exwood (BlackRock).…
Optimism in the face of repetitive failure is a sure sign of madness, I wrote in the article, Time for Progressive Companies to Deal with the Climate Bad Guys, published two weeks ago in The Guardian. Progressive CEOs need to apply their corporate muscle effectively, and that means challenging those businesses preventing a timely transition to the sustainable economy.
Heated responses to my argument were, shall we say, ‘racy’, in fact in the main dismissive and ridiculing.…
You’ve got to laugh, an animated cartoon of myself and The Guardian’s George Monbiot debating the motion at the Royal Society in London that ‘London’s Climate Policy Should Start in Beijing’. Its unclear whether the cartoonist saw me as a priest or a used-car salesman, perhaps some blend of the two. But here it is.
In summarizing the debate, I argued that China has a long-term economic and industrial policy, not a climate policy per se, whereas the UK has a well-defined climate policy, but not a serious economic policy, even for the short term.…
President Zuma today endorsed the South African Renewables Initiative as a South African-led, international, lighthouse initiative designed to enable the scaling up of renewables in South Africa by reducing the incremental cost burden to South Africa’s citizens, economy and jobs…the relevant part of his speech is below:
“Ladies and gentlemen,
As we noted, the biggest barriers to developing renewable energy in Africa to date are not technological, but financial.…
