Tuesday, September 20, 2005

WorldChanging with Jamais A brilliant Jamais Cascio of the exceptional WorldChanging held forth tonight, at Global Business Network on the usual WorldChanging theme: a better world is here. After setting some context with the bad news about the depth of the challenges that global humanity faces - like the cascading impacts of the melting Siberian permafrost (that could release the equivalent of 100 years of US greenhouse gas enmissions in 'just a few years'), he went long with the good news, from classic WorldChanging themes like Leapfrogging Nations, Open Source Biology, Making the Invisible Visible (a theme close to my heart) and more. 'I know for a fact,' he concluded, 'that we have the tools now to solve these problems.' Now THAT'S a fact worth knowing. Too much to recount here, just as it's often too much to read at WorldChanging -- but read it anyway. 10:14:23 PM    comment []  trackback []

Corporations Demanding Regulation 'The corporations are demanding regulation,' George Monbiot reports, 'and the government is refusing to give it to them.' For the first time on record, the permafrost of western Siberia is melting. As it does so, it releases the methane stored in the peat. Methane has 20 times the greenhouse warming effect of carbon dioxide. The more gas the peat releases, the warmer the world becomes, and the more the permafrost melts.... So much for the perpetual demand of the think tanks to 'get government off the backs of business'. Any firm which wants to develop the new technologies wants tough new rules. It is regulation that creates the market.... So why won[base ']t the government act? Because it is siding with the dirty companies against the clean ones. Deregulation has become the test of its manhood: the sign that it has put the bad old days of economic planning behind it... [I]t has now become clear to me that the obstacle is not the market but the government, waving a dog-eared treatise which proves some point in a debate the rest of the world has forgotten. Unfortunately siding with the dirty companies against the clean ones will turn out to be lousy macroeconomic policy, as well as bad environmental policy. 9:30:38 PM    comment []  trackback []