This reminds mo of the silent reflection practiced by people connected to Initiatives of Change (Moral Rearmament). For me, I never fill three pages, three lines more like, but just to let what will come up, come up is valuable.
My interpretation of what a pivot is: a cap on resource withdrawal followed by a rapid reduction. A pivot can happen before or after the breach of capacity. When the pivot happens greatly affects how much resources will be needed to rectify the situation, as well as the costs of the negative impacts of overshoot. Societies have seldom pivoted in time to avert disaster. Fiddling while Rome burns. This article lays out the basic concepts of pivot in the wild hope we can pivot before it is too late.
Anyone growing up when times just get worse will expect that…
Anyone growing up when times just get worse will expect that they will continue to get worse. Growing up in a time when things just get better you will expect them to continue to get better. The worst are when things have been getting better but you know they are going to get a lot worse. That is where we are. It’s uncomfortable to say the least.
We are waking up the realisation that progress since the 1950s has actually been at the expense of earth systems and natural resources. …
Can we reorganise the way we run things and create a stable core of the economy that will see us through a crisis at least with the very basics and help us out of the other side? This article presents a solution — hoping that it will spark a discussion.
The current crisis has illustrated the disconnect between the way we organise production via private-owned producers on one hand and the need for basic services and employment on the other. It has also highlighted an important role for the nation-state: a duty of care to all living in the nation.
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As I write this, COP 25 is going on. Children activists interviewed on stage, including Greta Thunberg, are stating simply that they represent the younger generation who want a chance to be able to live on the Earth in future and they see no action that is going to offer them more than a 50% chance of an inhabitable planet. No change since their last COP, only increasing CO2 levels. They, like most people cannot understand why they, their needs and the voices of scientists and ordinary people have no agency. …
The Sankey diagram below covers Sweden but could probably apply to most of Europe and the US. It shows the total energy input into the country and what it is used on. It tells us an inconvenient truth that no-one seems to be talking about: domestic CO2 emissions come largely from use of passenger cars. If we are serious about killing CO2 we have to look at killing the car as we know it. We have hardly started to even dare have that conversation. The other inconvenient corollary is that our transport system is oil-dependent. And oil is finite. We…
The Sankey diagram below covers Sweden but could probably apply to most of Europe and the US. It shows the total energy input into the country and what it is used on. It tells us an inconvenient truth that no-one seems to be talking about: domestic CO2 emissions come largely from use of passenger cars. If we are serious about killing CO2 we have to look at killing the car as we know it. We have hardly started to even dare have that conversation. The other inconvenient corollary is that our transport system is oil-dependent. And oil is finite. We…
I am a citizen of a new country — let’s call it Interwebland. It is a country of 1 to 2 billion. (Over one in four of everyone on Earth.) In this new country we can say what we like within reasonable limits, talk to each other, find out what is going on, share information, even meet and cooperate virtually — and this new country has its own marketplaces. But it does not feel real. Not really real.
It is a place to indulge yourself — plenty of sex, porno, shopping, film, games, gambling…. you name it! What is really…
Many want a fast transition away from fossil fuels. Are you one of them?Indeed, scientists are calling for it, the new green deal is all about it and the IMF even are talking of it. The question here is how can economists contribute to help make it happen? First question: Can just making fossil fuels more expensive work without economic disruption and disadvantaging the poorest even more than they are now?
The Swedish Sustainable Economy Foundation (TSSEF.se) thinks it can — if you use the power of price in the right way. Their proposal is to introduce an ever- increasing…
My recent article on how come capitalism is an extractive practice, and the later explainer of how it degrades real capital got, for me at least, a lot of interest. Very few, however, asked what could be done about it. Once you know the problem you are a long way to solving it. There are several ways to turn the extractive nature of capitalism around, and they are surprisingly simple. Read on!
Just in case you are like me and don’t bother to go back to earlier articles here is a short summary of the earlier articles. Not crony capitalism…
Stephen Hinton
Sustainability visionary, Co-founder of Invest in Peace, consultant, author of “Inventing for the Sustainable Planet”.
