Oh Gosh. Love your work Mark, but the glaring blindspot here is business. The underlying premise of business is what informs investment banking and frankly, creates the rivers of money that has corrupted nearly every government in the world. That comes from an enterprise paradigm that assumes the economy can keep on growing, that capital can concentrate in the hands of the few. That is what we have been doing for decades, and this is the result. See Pikkety's work in his book CAPITAL. The business as usual scenarios employed by the World Bank and IEA assume an economy that will grow 2.4X more by 2050, 7X more by 2100. Inconceivable. You can run an entire world on nuclear or renewable energy tomorrow, and we are still going right off the cliff. To dissociate global warming and the collapse of the biosphere is the "othering" thinking that suffuses the business community. It cannot "fix" "it" until it realizes it is IT.
Hi Paul. Thank you for your comments. I will consider them very carefully. I agree with you that there are reasons to be concerned about unlimited growth (I tried to note that in the article). But right now we need emission reductions and carbon removals. I think the private sector is very well-positioned to make them happen. Many of the climate strategies in the Drawdown book can and should be immediately accelerated and scaled by business, in my view. That's what I'm pushing for. I also think the private sector could play a key role in making a new kind of economic growth possible -- a less material-intensive and increasingly decarbonized and circular economic growth. Of course there is an even more important role for government - but it doesn't seem to be happening any time soon. But if private sector gets more engaged on ambitious climate strategies, I think we can get them to be allies in pushing for the government policies we need.
Oh Gosh. Love your work Mark, but the glaring blindspot here is business. The underlying premise of business is what informs investment banking and frankly, creates the rivers of money that has corrupted nearly every government in the world. That comes from an enterprise paradigm that assumes the economy can keep on growing, that capital can concentrate in the hands of the few. That is what we have been doing for decades, and this is the result. See Pikkety's work in his book CAPITAL. The business as usual scenarios employed by the World Bank and IEA assume an economy that will grow 2.4X more by 2050, 7X more by 2100. Inconceivable. You can run an entire world on nuclear or renewable energy tomorrow, and we are still going right off the cliff. To dissociate global warming and the collapse of the biosphere is the "othering" thinking that suffuses the business community. It cannot "fix" "it" until it realizes it is IT.
Hi Paul. Thank you for your comments. I will consider them very carefully. I agree with you that there are reasons to be concerned about unlimited growth (I tried to note that in the article). But right now we need emission reductions and carbon removals. I think the private sector is very well-positioned to make them happen. Many of the climate strategies in the Drawdown book can and should be immediately accelerated and scaled by business, in my view. That's what I'm pushing for. I also think the private sector could play a key role in making a new kind of economic growth possible -- a less material-intensive and increasingly decarbonized and circular economic growth. Of course there is an even more important role for government - but it doesn't seem to be happening any time soon. But if private sector gets more engaged on ambitious climate strategies, I think we can get them to be allies in pushing for the government policies we need.