The Davos countdown has begun, as some of the world’s most powerful embark on the ritual trek up the Magic Mountain. What should be expected from this glitzy dialogue in this Year of Unreasonableness. Davos this year is titled The Great Transformation. But can Davos offer real alternatives or will it serve up a smiling, gritted-teeth espousal that ‘business as usual’ can and should be sustained…read my response to Mr Wolf’s proposed ‘seven ways to fix the system’ on OpenDemocracy @ http://bit.ly/wP96tP…
The World Economic Forum has launched its latest report on sustainable consumption in advance of its presentation and debate in Davos later this month. Entitled More with Less: Scaling Sustainable Consumption and Resource Efficiency, the report sets out the case for companies, governments and in particular plain old citizens to embrace sustainable consumption as a means of advancing the transition to a sustainable economy.…
Berlin for a new-year break was fun despite the warm rain and dangerously tossed fireworks that set fire to my child’s shoe and stocking. Positively, exploring Berlin revealed many reasons for its reputation as Europe’s most fashionable city. But watchful experiences revealed an endemic, almost casual, street-level racism that left unchecked will ultimately condemn the city to its troubling German roots rather than its aspiring cosmopolitan future.…
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.…
