The State of the World
The UK’s The Guardian is drawing attention to the latest Worldwatch Institute’s ‘The State of the World 2009‘ report in an article Emission impossible.
The much-respected Washington DC-based Worldwatch Institute has just published The State of the World 2009, the 26th edition of its annual status report into the planet’s environmental health. You won’t be surprised to hear that the prognosis isn’t exactly rosy. In fact, having pored over the institute’s previous reports in recent years, I was a little shocked to see just how bleak the institute now sees it.
The report’s focus this year is envisioning how climate change will pan out over the coming century. One of the most arresting discussions within the report is the chapter written by Dr Bill Hare, a scientist based at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, entitled ‘A Safe Landing for the Climate’. Hare argues that, in effect, we will have to achieve negative carbon emissions – “neg-emissions”, if you like – by 2050 to avoid catastrophic climate change.
2009 has to be the year that climate change is taken seriously. There are no more excuses. The global economic slowdown is slowing consumption rates, and thus slowing emissions rates, which is an excellent thing, but not exactly the ideal way to go. Ideally our global economy would unhitch itself from the death-spiral of consumption and find sustainable ways to grow through real work, creating genuine value and freeing the majority of humanity from wage slavery and other forms of social bondage.
Green jobs, knowledge work, cradle-to-cradle design, closed loop manufacturing; these should be the growth areas for the carbon constrained economy. It sure beats wars, plasma tvs and a million tonnes of disposable, and disposed of plastic rubbish. — DS