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.…
China’s criticism that the US is failing to live within its means is a little rich given that it has benefited so much by the US’s debt addicted, three decade long consumer binge. But that aside, China does have a point. And so does Standard and Poor in its historic downgrading of the US’s credit worthiness, despite the dispute over an alleged US$2 trillion maths error deemed by S&P as ‘neither here nor there’.…
There is no peace, says the Lord, for the wicked. But the wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. (Book of Isaiah 57:20). Classically, yes, but the street level meaning is more often that ‘something not very good is continuing although you might like to stop‘.
The busy-bee activities of the financial community fit this bill rather well right now.…
History will associate Egypt with the last week of January 2011 irrespective of what comes next in what could be a revolutionary moment in the region that the Chinese call ‘West Asia’. But although Davos was eclipsed by real time political transformation, that does not mean that the mountain chatter was in vain.
Davos 2011 may well not go down in history, but maybe it should.…
How much is WEF worth…well, obviously a lot given who it can draw to the table and what folks pay to get in the door and how the media covers Davos in particular…but how much?
Of course one answer is that it is a public interest organisation and cannot be thought about in that way. Trust in commercial organisations is after all painfully low, as the Edelman Trust Barometer for this year highlights.…
Start-up companies call it the Valley of Death – the arduous terrain between proof of concept and the beginning of mass production and significant sales. The business and sustainability agenda has reached its own Valley of Death. We ‘get’ what needs to be done, but we do not know how to do it at the scale needed to make a serious dent in the problem.…
Weeks before COP15 at Copenhagen, ChinaDialogue and OpenDemocracy published versions of my ‘Plan B’ blog, where I argued that national initiatives would form the base currency of climate management for the foreseeable future, and the sooner we got with this new narrative the quicker we could work out how to get it done.
In a nutshell, I argued not just that a decent deal would not be done at Copenhagen, but if my accident one was indeed cut, it might prove to be a distraction that absorbed much energy (the human kind) and money, and most of all time, until its inherent shortfalls became apparent.…
