“Warming is happening faster than anyone predicted.”
And in today’s bad news corner the UK’s The Guardian has a story Millions of jobs at risk from climate change – U.N.. Clearly they don’t mean jobs at the UN. They point out what is fairly obvious, that climate change is impacting tourism and fisheries, but then acknowledge that;
At the same time, U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) Executive Director Achim Steiner said scores of new jobs would be created in the environment technology sector as countries work to avoid and lessen the effects of climate change.
In the United States, there are already more environmental workers than those in the pharmaceutical industry, and in Germany environmental employment will eclipse the auto sector by 2020, Steiner said.
This is then countered by the less up-beat announcement in the same story that;
World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) Secretary-General Michel Jarraud told the session at the ILO’s Geneva headquarters.
“Warming is taking place even faster than the models predicted,” he said, signalling major adjustments ahead for both businesses and workers whose livelihoods may be at risk.
Matthew Farrow of the Confederation of British Industry cited a recent poll saying that global warming concerns were having a “fairly” or “very” big impact on the operations of more than 70 percent of businesses.
The article finishes with a call to revolution;
“The problem is the jobs that will be created will not be created at the same time, or in the same place, as the ones that are lost,” said Joaquin Nieto, president of Sustainlabour, an international foundation for sustainable development.
“We are talking about a major change, as substantial as what resulted in the industrial revolution,” he told the forum.
This argument was corectly also put when computers started becoming more ubiquitous in the workplace, and of course when machines where introduced at all. Now of course he’s not literally calling for a revolution, but by directly referencing the Industrial Revolution, and thus by association the Liddites, he’s saying he wants and expects one. And he’s right too I think but not in the way he thinks.
I predict we’ll see the movement of carbon onto the standard corporate chart of accounts. Carbon is a cross-cutting concern for business and its price varies according to how the carbon is actually removed from the air. So it makes sense to add a new column to measure and manage it. But following the clever cow theory, I expect a stampede of externalities coming in from the cold to line up on the balance sheet.
In the year 2000 people who in hindsight should have known better were saying we were witness to the birth of Business2.0 – but they were only half right. The dot-gone boom had many casualties but saw the rise of Google, and iTunes and iPods and Blogs and Wikis and Facebook and Secondlife and linux and Java and Ruby and so forth. Much of the funding for the Internet bubble was stimulated and amplified by the Y2K scare. It got a growth spurt when all this money that had been set aside for Y2K contingancies was un-needed as by and large the software community had siezed the day and upgraded the world’s IT in one fell swoop.
Maybe the changes being forced upon us now, fix this issue or die sort of untilatums being made by our environment, are actually forging Capitalism 2.0 – Featuring the re-imagined, non-malevolant global mega-corp.
I believe we can solve these problems we face and humanity will survive to face more, as yet unimagined challenges. — DS
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