The World’s Sustainable Development Goals Aren’t Sustainable
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/09/30/the-worlds-sustainable-development-goals-arent-sustainable/
(via Instapaper)
Why so many companies are pushing for the metaverse
https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/microsoft-facebook-and-everyone-else-are-building-the-metaverse-but-will-you-want-to-live-there/
Metaverses are perhaps the clearest admission yet that the future of tech doesn't lie just in VR or AR, but in a mix of many devices accessing a shared online world, which may be more immersive and 3D than the internet you're currently using to read this story.
“The central banks have been creating money out of nothing with quantitative easing, but what if that was directed not to private banks to do their usual stupid thing of profit-making but to do useful work that the central banks designate by some simple rubric of carbon sequestration. When I read it, I thought, maybe that’s a way forward: using an existing system but more intelligently, a long-term biosphere, survivalist-type method.”
Kim Stanley Robinson Bears Witness to Our Climate Futures https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/qa-kim-stanley-robinson/ via Instapaper
https://time.com/6088531/ipcc-climate-report-hockey-stick-curve/
The new IPCC report shows that we can prevent many of the worst impacts of climate change and keep warming below 1.5°C about preindustrial levels—the target of the global Paris Agreement. While some impacts—like more flooding in coastal areas, continued glacial melt and sea level rise—are now baked in, we can still take steps to ensure they don’t get much more severe. If we can reduce carbon emissions dramatically, and keep warming below 1.5°C, we could, for example, hold sea level rise to just a couple feet over the next century. If we fail, the report shows we could ultimately be facing 20 feet or more of global sea level rise, a scenario where we’d be forced to say farewell to the major coastal cities of the world.
The new IPCC report shows that we can prevent many of the worst impacts of climate change and keep warming below 1.5°C about preindustrial levels—the target of the global Paris Agreement. While some impacts—like more flooding in coastal areas, continued glacial melt and sea level rise—are now baked in, we can still take steps to ensure they don’t get much more severe. If we can reduce carbon emissions dramatically, and keep warming below 1.5°C, we could, for example, hold sea level rise to just a couple feet over the next century. If we fail, the report shows we could ultimately be facing 20 feet or more of global sea level rise, a scenario where we’d be forced to say farewell to the major coastal cities of the world.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22408556/save-planet-shrink-economy-degrowth
We live on an abundant planet and we can all flourish on it together, but to do so we have to share it more fairly, and build economies that are designed around meeting human needs rather than around perpetual growth.”
We live on an abundant planet and we can all flourish on it together, but to do so we have to share it more fairly, and build economies that are designed around meeting human needs rather than around perpetual growth.”
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22408556/save-planet-shrink-economy-degrowth
Most of the world is very poor. Billions of people go hungry, can’t afford a doctor when they get sick, don’t have adequate shelter and sanitation, and struggle to exercise the freedoms essential to a good life because of material deprivation.
Most of the world is very poor. Billions of people go hungry, can’t afford a doctor when they get sick, don’t have adequate shelter and sanitation, and struggle to exercise the freedoms essential to a good life because of material deprivation.
But for all the immiseration around us, one thing is undeniable: For the past several centuries — and especially for the past 70 years, since the end of World War II — the world has been getting much richer.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/10/can-we-have-prosperity-without-growth
Once confined to the margins, the ecological critique of economic growth has gained widespread attention. At a United Nations climate-change summit in September, the teen-age Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg declared, “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!” The degrowth movement has its own academic journals and conferences. Some of its adherents favor dismantling the entirety of global capitalism, not just the fossil-fuel industry. Others envisage “post-growth capitalism,” in which production for profit would continue, but the economy would be reorganized along very different lines. In the influential book “Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow,” Tim Jackson, a professor of sustainable development at the University of Surrey, in England, calls on Western countries to shift their economies from mass-market production to local services—such as nursing, teaching, and handicrafts—that could be less resource-intensive. Jackson doesn’t underestimate the scale of the changes, in social values as well as in production patterns, that such a transformation would entail, but he sounds an optimistic note: “People can flourish without endlessly accumulating more stuff. Another world is possible.”
Once confined to the margins, the ecological critique of economic growth has gained widespread attention. At a United Nations climate-change summit in September, the teen-age Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg declared, “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!” The degrowth movement has its own academic journals and conferences. Some of its adherents favor dismantling the entirety of global capitalism, not just the fossil-fuel industry. Others envisage “post-growth capitalism,” in which production for profit would continue, but the economy would be reorganized along very different lines. In the influential book “Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow,” Tim Jackson, a professor of sustainable development at the University of Surrey, in England, calls on Western countries to shift their economies from mass-market production to local services—such as nursing, teaching, and handicrafts—that could be less resource-intensive. Jackson doesn’t underestimate the scale of the changes, in social values as well as in production patterns, that such a transformation would entail, but he sounds an optimistic note: “People can flourish without endlessly accumulating more stuff. Another world is possible.”
https://www.exponentialview.co/ev-333p/
That, ultimately, for degrowth to work, 86% of people living in the richer world would need to see their standard of living decline for a decade or more. This would be politically unacceptable or as Milanovic says “now, the relevance of moral preaching of abstinence is close to zero.” It is a thought-provoking essay. (See also: An exemplary overview of the degrowth movement, read John Cassidy in The New Yorker.)
That, ultimately, for degrowth to work, 86% of people living in the richer world would need to see their standard of living decline for a decade or more. This would be politically unacceptable or as Milanovic says “now, the relevance of moral preaching of abstinence is close to zero.” It is a thought-provoking essay. (See also: An exemplary overview of the degrowth movement, read John Cassidy in The New Yorker.)
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/eu-multilateralism-corporate-taxation-by-josep-borell-and-paolo-gentiloni-2021-07
BRUSSELS – Multilateralism has been on the defensive in recent years. In a global setting that is more multipolar than multilateral, competition between states seems to prevail over cooperation nowadays. However, the recent global agreement to reform international corporate taxation is welcome proof that multilateralism is not dead.
BRUSSELS – Multilateralism has been on the defensive in recent years. In a global setting that is more multipolar than multilateral, competition between states seems to prevail over cooperation nowadays. However, the recent global agreement to reform international corporate taxation is welcome proof that multilateralism is not dead.