Climate Technology

Envisioning possible green futures helps create a greener future

Peter Madden, chief executive of Forum for the Future, writes a monthly column for Gristmill on sustainability in the U.K. and Europe.

There has been much discussion lately of the need to turn the green agenda from a negative to a positive one. I think that an important part of this is developing some more positive visions of what living in a sustainable future might be like. My organization, Forum for the Future, has set itself this task. Partly because we think the green movement needs more credible and aspirational stories of the future if we are to take people with us. And partly because we become the future that we imagine -- it is to an extent a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So, we are trying to take different parts of the future and imagine what they might look like. We now have a series of projects looking at different aspects of future living.

Our recent report, "Low Carbon Living 2022," asks how might our lives be better if we get the response to climate change right. A low-carbon Britain doesn't have to mean cutbacks and sacrifice. Low Carbon Living 2022 looks forward 15 years and shows ways in which a low-carbon future could deliver: stronger communities, a cleaner local environment, more money, better transport, a healthier lifestyle, and a thriving economy.

A new company offers relief from unwanted mail

Perhaps the only great thing about having moved four times in the past year is that I get virtually no junk mail, at least yet. At my permanent residence in Tennessee, however, where my parents have lived for over twenty years; the catalogs, credit card offers, and sweepstakes offers cram the mailbox on a daily basis. Just yesterday my mother was telling me how bad it's gotten -- and how bad she feels trekking straight from the post box to the recycling bin with armfuls of glossy glut.

Last year I posted about Greendimes, an agency that, for a dime a day, will do pesky work of unsubscribing you from mailing lists. It was, and still is, a great idea, but unfortunately $36 a year is just above what most people will dish out in order to avoid junk. So I was thrilled to read about a new unsubscribe service that is absolutely free. Called Catalog Choice, it's a site that was developed by three nonprofit environmental groups -- the National Wildlife Federation, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Ecology Center. According to the Times, since it was introduced last Wednesday, more than 20,000 people have registered.

Since it targets catalogs only, it may not be as comprehensive as paid services like Greendimes, but who knows? Maybe the feeling of a junk-free mailbox will spawn more support for legislation to enact do-not-mail lists.

Reports bring various doomy and gloomy predictions

Indeed, the depressing reports come fast and furious. German-based Energy Watch Group says the world has already reached peak oil, and predicts that production will now fall by 7 percent a year. The Worldwatch Institute suggests that 21 cities that will have populations of 8 million or more by 2015 are highly vulnerable to havoc […]

Water loss in Great Lakes reduces shipping revenue

Water loss in the Great Lakes is creating a dilemma for shipping companies. Allow Jonathan Daniels, director of a public port agency, to explain: “The more we lose water, the less cargo the ships that travel in the Great Lakes can carry, and each time that happens, shipping companies lose money. Ultimately, it’s people like […]

Web company announces selection of offset projects

Back in April, Yahoo! announced that it will be going carbon neutral in 2007, and pledged to be entirely transparent about the process. They acknowledged the controversy around offsets: We know carbon neutrality isn’t without controversy. And it’s honestly deserved if companies and individuals don’t first make an effort to find direct ways to reduce […]

Nobel winner explains why markets can’t replace public goods

From Reuters:

Societies should not rely on market forces to protect the environment or provide quality health care for all citizens, a winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for economics said on Monday. ... "The market doesn't work very well when it comes to public goods," said [Professor Eric] Maskin ...

Mechanism Design Theory is one explanation for why even a well-regulated market with external costs priced via Pigovian or green taxes is inadequate in areas like environmental performance or health care.

Certain types of goods -- public goods -- simply cannot be allocated efficiently through market mechanisms alone. This was known long before Mechanism Design Theory came along.

For example, the U.S. spends more on healthcare than any other nation, and gets worse results. There are various reasons for this, but one is that a competitive market in health insurance tends to provide more insurance and less healthcare than public insurance mechanisms.

Activists threaten to sue Apple over chemicals in iPhone

Greenpeace claimed recently that Apple’s much-hyped iPhone contains dangerous levels of phthalates, chlorine, and bromine, and now another environmental group, the Center for Environmental Health in Oakland, Calif., has sent the company a formal warning claiming that Apple violated California’s Proposition 65, which requires companies to warn consumers of the risk of toxic exposure. “There […]

From black to white: An argument for green-collar jobs

"Spiritually fulfilling, ecologically sustainable, and socially just" is the title of a recent speech by Van Jones, who has been appearing in strategic places for a few years now. As cofounder of the Ella Baker Center in Oakland, he has been attempting to fight environmental pollution that has been poisoning the residents of inner-city areas in Oakland and all over the country. As such, he is in a unique position to bridge a rather wide chasm: the African-American community and the environmental community.

In my previous post, I put forward a utopian realist agenda that, I hypothesized, would solve many of our global environmental problems -- that was the realist part -- but that was completely utopian politically. But another definition of utopian is envisioning a better place -- and I want to pursue the possibility in this post that such an agenda would create a basis for a widespread coalition, of the sort that Van Jones has been pursuing.

For instance, he has been lobbying for green-collar jobs legislation that could be used to increase employment in poor areas while helping to decrease greenhouse-gas emissions. Jones shows up in another interesting place: in a critical section of Nordhaus and Shellenberger's essay, "The Death of Environmentalism" (p.26):

Van Jones, the up-and-coming civil rights leader and co-founder of the California Apollo Project, likens [labor unions, civil rights groups, businesses, and environmentalists] ] to the four wheels on the car needed to make "an ecological U-turn." Van has extended the metaphor elegantly: "We need all four wheels to be turning at the same time and at the same speed. Otherwise the car won't go anywhere."

Largest U.S. garbage hauler greens operations

Strange but true: Our trash is going green. The nation’s largest garbage hauler and landfill operator, Waste Management Inc., has announced plans to make its operations more eco-friendly. The company hopes to double its landfill methane-to-electricity production by 2020, boost the fuel efficiency of its fleet by 15 percent by 2020, process more recyclables, and […]

Raising a ruckus about agrofuels at the Chicago Board of Trade

From the The Chicago Tribune: Police this morning arrested five people who scaled the Chicago Board of Trade building in the Loop and unfurled a banner to protest the destruction of the world’s rain forests. The demonstrators, members of the Rainforest Action Network … displayed a 50-foot banner protesting three U.S. agriculture companies. The protest […]