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"Building the Green Economy"
Citizens Climate Lobby is an international non-partisan, non-profit volunteer organization, working to build political will for a livable world. To do that, they aim to find an ideologically neutral, democratically viable, market-focused way to reduce the amount of carbon trapped in Earth’s atmosphere and speed the transition to clean, renewable fuels.
Graphene is a single-layer of carbon atoms bound together in a chemical pattern. It can have 300 times the strength of steel, and significantly more conductive ability than today’s semiconductors. And, being made of carbon atoms, it can be produced from abundant resources at what may someday be very low prices.
The result: flexible, wearable, [...]
In today’s society, many workers spend more time in their offices than they do at home, especially people employed in human resource management. Everyone wants to have a comfortable workplace, and many human resources departments have noticed an increase in worker productivity if they provide their employees with a comfortable, eco-friendly office space. Keeping [...]
There is one way of steering outmoded, combustion-burdened economic systems toward a healthier state-of-the-art 21st-century energy economy, that will not entail rapidly escalating price burdens on a consumer market economy. With a carbon fee and dividend approach, we can make sure that only those interests that refuse to innovate and to improve their standards of operation for power generation pay for falling behind.
Ownership is liberating only if it liberates; the new paradigm has to be a participatory society
In order to push his 2004 bid for re-election, and his radical and untenable economic ideology, George W. Bush touted the need for an “ownership society”. In theory, this meant ordinary people could have access like never before to [...]
What do we mean when we talk about sustainability? Do we mean forging, after thousands of years of civilization, at last, a truly sustainable relationship with nature? Do we mean “net-zero” resource impact (which, by the way does not necessarily equate to being rid of practices corrosive to natural systems)? Do we mean “living within our means”, according to the metabolic limitations of our natural environment?
Global solutions to a global crisis: climate justice & the science of viability
Date: April 7, 2011 @ 2:30 pm
Location: First Floor Lounge, Falvey Memorial Library
For the third ClimateTalks roundtable event of the academic year, two faculty members will present advanced analysis of the climate crisis, from the [...]
We have the technology, right now, to power our entire national economy on clean energy. What we are lacking is the built infrastructure and the political will to accelerate the transition. This means a major policy shift is required, one that will put the power of choice back in the hands of consumers, limiting the reach of oligarchies that rely on taxpayer funding for combustible fuels and nuclear power.
This essay was presented to the second Climate Talks roundtable event, “One Environment vs. Radical Freedom”, at Villanova University, on February 17, 2011. It is an introduction to the theory of “generative economics”, an approach to measuring the value of economic activity according to its capacity for building the resource base, instead of eroding it.
Clean Energy for a Strong U.S.A. is a short film that explores clean energy economy in a new way. You’ll hear from laid-off workers given another chance by clean energy investments; veterans who know their role in the clean energy economy will make America safer; and business leaders and investors who see new ways to revitalize our economy and make the United States the global leader in clean energy.
Last night, in his 2011 State of the Union address, Pres. Barack Obama said he will commit the United States to securing 80% of its electricity from clean, renewable resources by 2035. He said the US government will support this goal with major new incentives for private-sector innovators, research and development, small business and improvements to infrastructure.
Andrew Winston, in a blog for the Harvard Business Review has asked a stunning and vital question: Is water the next carbon? Of course, the tongue-in-cheek irony is the suggestion that these are trends like any other, when they are in fact issues that determine how we interact with the underlying value structure of the global environment. The carbon footprint concept allows for assessment of whether we are over-using energy; the water footprint concept may help to show whether we are depleting the most vital natural resource for life, other than air.
Climate change means “global warming”, so how can severe winter storms and excessively cold breezes be evidence of a warming climate? The key is in the word “global”: the warming of the overall global average temperature need not manifest in all places at all times as warmer weather. Throughout the history of human civilization, the Earth’s climate has remained relatively stable, due to optimal global average temperatures; as global average temperatures slip outside that optimal range, the warmer air makes the interaction between climate systems more inconsistent and more severe.
At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, we held the first of our series of Climate Talks, to explore with more depth and more detail some of the intricacies of the climate crisis, including social, philosophical and political, dynamics, and the way we frame our perception of global-scale phenomena. It was a construtive conversation, from four points of view, each of which was able to benefit from a kinship of interest, so that whether we were discussion environmental justice, political solidarity, economics and collaborative politics or Villanova’s ongoing commitment to reducing its carbon footprint, there were ways to deepen and broaden our understanding of each facet of the problem from each of the different perspectives.
At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, in the First Floor Lounge of Villanova’s Falvey Memorial Library, Joseph Robertson (Romance Languages & Literature), Sally Scholz (Philosophy), John Olson (Biology) and Chaone Mallory (Philosophy), will participate in an interdisciplinary discussion of the most complex scientific and public-policy challenge of our times: the destabilization of global climate patterns and the means by which an entire civilization can address the mounting crisis.
As top environmental scientists and diplomats gather to discuss the rampant and accelerating depletion of plant and animal species, a top U.N. official says the current trend-lines governing human civilization are “destroying life on Earth”. As more of the world’s vital rivers (the Yangtze, the Brahmaputra, the Ganges, the Colorado, the Nile, to name a few) run dry for part of the year, tributaries and arable land are drying up, and plant and animal species are going extinct at record rates.
That’s what’s at stake in this debate. We can go back to the failed energy policies that profited the oil companies but weakened our country. We can go back to the days when promising industries got set up overseas. Or we can go after new jobs in growing industries. And we can spur innovation and help make our economy more competitive. We know the choice that’s right for America. We need to do what we’ve always done – put our ingenuity and can do spirit to work to fight for a brighter future.
The ‘One Day on Earth’ project, organized in part by the UN Development Programme, is planned to be the largest single participatory video experiment in history. People from every country in the world will be filming their community, their messages, their contributions, to a wider project that will culminate in a feature film designed to capture the scope, the reality, the local feel, of one day’s experiences, across the planet.
Whenever legislation to price carbon starts to gain traction, the fossil fuel industry trots out this talking point: “It will kill jobs and ruin the economy.” In this paper, however, HotSpring Network founder and Citizens Climate Lobby volunteer Joseph Robertson ties together numerous reports and case studies to present a different picture, one in which the transition to clean energy will produce new jobs and provide a stimulus to the economy.
Solar power is one of the most promising and unpredictable forms of clean energy, because light and heat are so diverse in their effects and so fundamental to our interactions with energy. Innovations in harvesting solar power have come fast and furious over the last decade, with miniaturization to the nanoscale of light-sensitive particles able to capture solar energy. Now, a Norwegian company has developed a system with “metal nanoparticles embedded in a transparent composite matrix that can be easily sprayed on”.
The Hot Spring connects people to brainstorm, solve problems, and build a more just, more sustainable future.
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