28 February 2017, Climate News Network, Inequalities fuel human impacts on climate. For the second time this year, a group of climate scientists has called for a new approach to climate change research to produce a better and more precise idea of how the world will change as global average temperatures rise. The call comes only weeks after a distinguished international team reminded researchers that some details of the planetary climate machine are still unresolved – such as what happens to all the carbon released by fossil fuel combustion, and how rainfall patterns will change in the decades to follow. Neither group is challenging the general climate models, which broadly predict that, unless action is taken, global average temperatures could rise by 4°C and global sea levels by a metre or so. What each wants is more detailed answers. The latest call comes from a team of US and Japanese scientists, who argue in their report in National Science Review journal that the human dimension is missing. What people do over the next decades will feed back into the mechanics of climate change. Missing dimensions The missing dimensions of the human impacts and contribution, they say, are threefold: the economic inequalities that stoke conflict and drive migration; the levels and patterns of consumption of resources that fuel these inequalities; and the numbers of people consuming these resources and demanding energy to improve their lives over the next two generations. For instance, the scientists say, human choices make a difference. The rate of atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide increased 700-fold, 1,000-fold and 300-fold respectively after the “green revolution” of the 1960s, compared with pre-industrial levels. Population growth was a factor. So was economic growth. And this corresponded to a doubling of human impacts every 17 years. “The doubling of this impact is shockingly rapid,” says the study leader, Safa Motesharri, a systems scientist at the University of Maryland’s National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Centre. Read More here
Tag Archives: Economy
4 January 2017, The Conversation, How and why we are moving beyond GDP as a measure of human progress. How we track our economy influences everything from government spending and taxes to home lending and business investment. In our series The Way We Measure, we’re taking a close look at economic indicators to better understand what’s going on. Ever since 1944, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has been a primary measure of economic growth. It’s in the news regularly and, even though few can define what it means, there is general acceptance that when GDP is growing, things are good. There are problems with this simplistic formulation. GDP measures production only. It does not capture collapsing fish stocks, increasing obesity and diabetes, or new types of synthetic drugs. When people choose to work part-time to have a better work-life balance, GDP actually goes down. This narrow focus distorts our perception of progress. It guides our representatives to focus only on certain things – what is measured – and allows them to ignore what isn’t quantified and regularly reported. But a new set of measures is slowly being established, which aims to capture a wider range of human experiences and reset our idea of “success”. Called the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), these aim to include all the main pillars of a progressive society, from physical safety through to economic opportunity and good health. SDGs will force action by highlighting what is currently covered up by the narrow measures of how our economy and society are faring. A new way of framing progress The SDGs arose out of the expiration of the Millennium Development Goals in 2015 (which focused primarily on poverty reduction). Out of a growing awareness of the ecological limits of the planet, and a desire to ensure that progress is fair and accessible to all people, attempts were made at creating a comprehensive set of national goals for all nations. Read More here
3 January Jeremy Leggett Blog, State of The Transition: As fossil fuel diehards take over The White House, the evidence of a fast-moving global energy transition has never been clearer. As captains of the fossil fuel industries and their lobbyists prepare to take over the White House – appointed by a President elected by a minority, claiming to represent the people on an anti-elite ticket yet possessing by far the highest cumulative wealth of any cabinet ever – they will face evidence breaking out all around them of a fast-moving global energy transition threatening to strand the fossil fuels they seek to boost. “World energy hits a turning point”, a Bloomberg headline read on 16th December. “Solar power, for the first time, is becoming the cheapest form of new electricity,” the article marvelled. Analysis of the average cost of new wind and solar in 58 emerging-market economies – including China, India, and Brazil – showed solar at $1.65 million per megawatt and wind at $1.66. Google leads the giant corporations eagerly going with this flow. The largest corporate buyer of renewable energy announced on 6th December that it expects to hit its target of 100% renewable power in, wait for it, 2017. Google is a huge consumer of power, and going solar means deep emissions cuts, especially when solar infrastructure is hooked up with all the digital efficiency-enhancement fandangoes that Silicon Valley giants are zeroing in on in the fast emerging era of artificial intelligence in an internet of things. Read More here
27 December 2016, The Conversation, Universal basic income: the dangerous idea of 2016. The resurrection of universal basic income (UBI) proposals in the developed world this year gained support from some prominent Australians. But while good in theory, it’s no panacea for the challenges of our modern economy. UBI proposals centre on the idea that the government would pay a flat fee to every adult citizen, regardless of his or her engagement in skill-building activities or the paid labour market, as a partial or complete substitute for existing social security and welfare programs. Of the schemes run in developing places like Kenya, Uganda, and India, some have been evaluated statistically, delivering some evidence of positive impacts on educational investments, entrepreneurship, and earnings. In the developed world, Canada is trialling a UBI scheme. Finland also just rolled out a UBI trial, involving about 10,000 recipients for two years and costing about A$40 million. While Switzerland’s voters just rejected a UBI proposal via referendum, a similar proposal is presently looking like a goer for Utrecht in the Netherlands. Here in Australia, it has been suggested the government might hand out somewhere between A$10,000 and A$25,000 a year to every man and woman. Can we afford it? There are two big questions to ask before taking a UBI proposal seriously, and the first is the most obvious one: where would the money come from to pay for it? The present Australian welfare system (excluding the Medicare bill of A$25 billion) costs around A$170 billion per annum. Our GDP is around A$1.7 trillion per year, so this welfare bill is about 10% of annual GDP. Read More here