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The Great Disruption
This column got a lot of feedback from New York Times readers. I am thinking of calling Chapter 18 "The Great Disruption." I am coming to the conclusion that the market and Mother Nature both hit the wall here in 2008/2009. We need growth, we need ways to raise people's standards of living, but what will be the new ways we should focus on—post-The Great Disruption—that will allow us to grow people's living standards in a more sustainable and regenerative way?
Recent Ideas from Chapter 18:
Mark M. wrote, ""Standard of living" should be explicitly defined as not related to unsustainably high consumption rates. Does not a..." in The Great Disruption Saturday, 07:02 am
Ed Kuipers wrote, "Well Tom,
We need those companies, like we needed them in 1941 when they stopped building cars and started building..." in What to Do About the Big Three? Wednesday, 06:29 am
Ed Kuipers wrote, "Sobering thought!
A car cost 20 to 50 kdollar and is a writeoff in 5 to 10 years.
A photovoltaic installation on your..." in Where's the Price Signal? Wednesday, 06:32 am
Ed Kuipers wrote, "For Neil Ashton,
Diesels are great, I'm driving a 2.0 liter TDI A3 which does about 58 miles to the gallon and on long..." in Without a Price Signal... Wednesday, 05:19 am
Ed Kuipers wrote, "Bridget and Tom,
The both of you should read Rob Hopkins's
The Transition Handbook.
Bridget should read it to confirm..." in The Great Disruption Wednesday, 05:24 am
Recent Times Articles
The Price Is Not Right
I don’t expect much from the G-20 meeting this week, but if I had my wish, the leaders of the world’s 20 top economies would commit themselves to a new standard of accounting — call it “Market to Mother Nature” accounting. Why? Because it’s now obvious that the reason we’re experiencing a simultaneous meltdown in the financial system and the climate system is because we have been mispricing risk in both arenas — producing a huge excess of both toxic assets and toxic air that now threatens the stability of the whole planet.
Just as A.I.G. sold insurance derivatives at prices that did not reflect the real costs and the real risks of massive defaults (for which we the taxpayers ended up paying the difference), oil companies, coal companies and electric utilities today are selling energy products at prices that do not reflect the real costs to the environment and real risks of disruptive climate change (so future taxpayers will end up paying the difference).
Mother Nature’s Dow
While I’m convinced that our current financial crisis is the product of both The Market and Mother Nature hitting the wall at once — telling us we need to grow in more sustainable ways — some might ask this: We know when the market hits a wall. It shows up in red numbers on the Dow. But Mother Nature doesn’t have a Dow. What makes you think she’s hitting a wall, too? And even if she is: Who cares? When my 401(k) is collapsing, it’s hard to worry about my sea level rising.
It’s true, Mother Nature doesn’t tell us with one simple number how she’s feeling. But if you follow climate science, what has been striking is how insistently some of the world’s best scientists have been warning — in just the past few months — that climate change is happening faster and will bring bigger changes quicker than we anticipated just a few years ago. Indeed, if Mother Nature had a Dow, you could say that it, too, has been breaking into new (scientific) lows.
Secrets of a Pollster
Stan Greenberg, one of America’s most experienced pollsters, sums up the key lesson he learned polling for Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela, Ehud Barak and Tony Blair: “Bold leaders in tumultuous times always have at least one crash.”
They never come out of the box and deliver the scale of progress and change they promise — not because they are cynical, but because events conspire against them and they encounter competing power centers. What distinguishes the best leaders, he says, is that they learn from their crashes, adjust, persist and succeed.
Thomas L. Friedman on Global Warming and the Environment
New York Times Articles
Thomas Friedman is the "Foreign Affairs" columnist for The New York Times. Below are links to articles and other content on their site (registration required).
Other items of interest:
Read the Wired article on Hot, Flat, and Crowded.
Read "The First Law of Petropolitics" from Foreign Policy (May/June 2006)
Visit "Tom's Journal" on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
Listen to Tom interviewed by Nayan Chanda for YaleGlobal, 30 January 2003.
With the #1 bestseller The World Is Flat, he helped millions of readers see and understand globalization in a new way. Now Thomas L. Friedman explains how America can lead the green revolution in the 21st century.
Video and Powerpoint Presentation of Thomas Friedman's Talk in Washington, D.C. created by Panopto.
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