“”The Colorado study has caused a stir in the soil world… accompanied by a sobering analysis … that we are repeating the mistakes of past civilisations, over-exploiting the land until it goes beyond the point of no return, and leads to a vicious circle of famine, and then social disintegration.”” Dust to Dust: a man-made …
Continue reading “Dust to Dust: a man-made Malthusian crisis”
Following yesterday’s post on the MD of Accenture’s statement of the urgent need to reduce carbon intensity and the need for systems thinking to achieve this, it seems appropriate to ask ourselves “What would it take to create a sustainable system, for business and the economy?” The first step to that is having a life-supporting …
Continue reading “The doughnut economy — A comprehensive innovation map for the next 40 years”
A very interesting interview here with Peter Lacey, Managing Director (Asia Pacific) at Accenture Consulting Services. We particularly notice two things that he says: First, carbon reduction in every product and service in the world needs to be of the order of seven to eight times what it is today. That means that for in …
As an addendum to the earlier story about the need for all businesses to be carbon neutral (or better) in the next 20 or so years, Swedish retailer IKEA announced last week (14 Nov) the purchase of a 46 MW wind farm in Pincher Creek, Alberta. The 20 turbine wind farm is expected to generate 161 GWh of …
Continue reading “IKEA on track to be energy-independent by 2020”
French utility giant EDF this week set a new high in the market for corporate ‘green bonds’, issuing £1.2 billion (euros 1.4 bn) worth of bonds tied to returns from its renewable assets. Although the bond is only a small fraction of the total market, the fact that the issue was two-times over-subscribed suggests there is …
Continue reading “Increasing issuance of corporate green bonds”
This four minute video shows the latest scientific (fact-based) consensus on some of the major impacts of climate change. It demonstrates the near-certainty of what is already expected, and introduces the idea of a ‘carbon budget’: the maximum amount of carbon equivalents we can consume, and the short remaining time before that budget will be …
Continue reading “The clock is ticking to create the no-carbon business”
There are now hundreds of thousands of local currencies operating around the world. They serve their local economies, and all are small in scale (even in comparison with alternatives such as Bitcoin). But one of the largest and most successful examples of a local currency, ‘Berkshares‘, just got bigger — with a $500,000 grant to …
The future is going to be more complex, fast-changing, and unpredictable. There are two ways of handling this. The first is to centralise: to bring all the relevant information to one central leader, so that she can take decisions. The other is to decentralise: to make everyone a leader; give everyone in the organisation the same …
Switzerland is a country with a strong brand: renowned for its chocolate, its clocks, its banks, the wealth of its citizens, and the efficiency of its public transport system. But Switzerland, like the rest of us, is a country with limited resources, limited land, different populations, speaking different languages, in different cantons, and surrounded by …
Even ‘The Economist’ is saying it: “America’s income inequality is growing again. Time to cut subsidies to the rich and invest in the young.” “Although some degree of inequality is good for an economy, …the recent concentration of income gains among the most affluent is both politically dangerous and economically damaging. (The implicit subsidy provided …