A Year for the Record Books | Planet3.0
A Year for the Record Books | Planet3.0:
This to us from MacDonald from GreenDistrict…
It is one of several places to start rounding up the status of sustainability (gain &) loss for 2011 and start to plan for 2012.
As we start to organize the (un)balanced scorecard for an unsustainable year of horrific sustainability numbers…
?What would be a good summary for the year, even if the summary has a lot of bad news in it?
Non-Decisions might sum it up. Economically, you have the dysfunction of the US and EU. Efforts are on to eliminate the EPA from federal and state governments. Imagine a budget bill to keep the federal government running for the first two months of 2012 that contains efforts to stop energy efficient light bulbs.
(Light bulbs will have to be 25% more efficient is basically the law. The obvious replacement could be — but doesn’t have to be — compact florescent lights that save about $20 to $35 over the life of each bulb, PLUS a huge savings in electric energy which is currently being produced 50% from ain’t-no-such-thing-as-clean coal. Europe did it a couple years ago. The arguments against the new law use obsolete and unfounded facts.)
Globally, climate response talks have been pretty pathetic since Copenhagen (Dec 2010) and there’s been a lot of talks on several continents since then. Without the biggest polluters in the world on board — China, USA & India — the whole thing disintegrates. Now with Canada jumping off the bandwagon that means about 50% of the world’s pollution and emissions will go on with little or no impediments. Apparently, the idea now is to proceed with the old Kyoto protocol while a permanent agreement is being reached.
But, what’s almost as scary as the global-warming/climate-change metrics that came in this year, is the development of yet another massive UN organization. But this one would, by its very nature, have to have a long reach into the countries who are members. Big bucks to help countries that will be most impacted by droughts, floods, etc. This would include island countries that are about to become much smaller as the sea levels rise. I wonder if Key West will qualify. (By century end, the Keys should be 25% to 50%+ under water.)
At this point, Nuclear (ouch!) and NatGas looking a whole lot better than they probably should. NatGas is sooo much cleaner than (dirty or relatively dirty) coal, and it’s not destabilizing to the world economies (wars, trade balances and shifts of wealth to less-than stable countries).
For some reason, you would think that the “sustainability” measure would provide self-evident solutions. If fuel is not renewable… then it can’t be used forever… then you should make plans now to replace it… and continue to do so… until that fuel is no longer needed and totally replaced by renewable sources.
Bloomberg puts it well for the whole of a business (or any organization): “If you don’t have a sustainability plan, you don’t have a business plan.” See http://www.bloomberg.com/sustainability/
Now, if only there were good private sector solutions to some of these problems of sustainability!… Hmmm…