]]>Please vote 'NO' on Senator Lisa Murkowski's efforts to weaken the Clean Air Act.
Her self-interest-serving resolution would fatally compromise the US's public interest and the lightening-fast transition to a clean renewable energy economy, which is the only foundation for sustainable prosperity.
The resoluton would gut the EPA's authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate global warming pollution and crack down on dirty coal power plants, a key tool in the transition to a clean, renewable energy economy.
It would strip away one of the strongest tools we have to limit carbon pollution, transition to a clean energy economy that will create millions of jobs, and tackle climate change--setting the stage for an economy capable of sustainable prosperity.
Please protect our chance to build a clean renewable energy future of sustainable prosperity by voting 'NO' on Murkowski.
Bill Baue answers, What’s next for corporate sustainability ranking? Bill Baue discusses the next phase for corporate sustainability. Corporate Sustainability Ranking Gets a Face Lift at Davos. Last week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, saw a major upgrade in the quantification of corporate sustainability with the unveiling of what I’ll call the “second generation” of the Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World. When the Canadian corporate social responsibility magazine Corporate Knights teamed with the sustainable investing research firm Innovest to launch the list five years ago in Davos, the Global 100 turned heads by asserting the business relevance of sustainability while simultaneously meeting harsh criticism from the likes of sustainability guru Paul Hawken. Read more about what Bill Baue has to say about the Challenge Question: What’s next for corporate sustainability ranking? Click here to continue reading his answer and give us your comments!
]]>]]>3. Antibiotic-resistance genes in environment are increasing. The number of genes for antibiotic resistance in soil microbes has significantly increased over the past 70 years. A team of British scientists tested samples of benign and disease-causing bacteria from a soil archive in the Netherlands that dates back to 1940, the era when antibiotic use became common. Genes that confer resistance significantly increased over time, for every antibiotic drug class they tested. Genes that confer resistance to tetracycline antibiotics are 15 times more abundant in current-day soil samples than in samples even from the 1970s. Levels of resistance rose in spite of improved waste management practices and the Dutch policy restricting nontherapeutic antibiotic use in agriculture, which is tougher than that of many other countries including the United States. The team concluded that environmental levels of antibiotic-resistance genes are probably still increasing in similar locations worldwide. Read the study abstract in Environmental Science and Technology.
1% for the Planet is a growing global movement of companies that donate 1% of their sales to a network of environmental organizations world wide.
Corporate philanthropy in America averages somewhere around one-tenth of 1% of sales. It represents only 4% of total charitable giving. While Americans gave a record $306 billion to charity in 2007, the environment received significantly lower funding than any other sector—less than 2% of the total. Some estimate that there are more than 1,000,000 public charities around the world focused on issues of sustainability. Unfortunately, that’s where we stand: facing an increasing array of challenges without ample resources to address them. 1% for the Planet is helping to tilt the scales of giving toward the thousands of under-funded nonprofits dedicated to the pursuit of sustainability, to preserving and restoring our natural environment. We’re inspiring members of the business community to contribute 1% of their sales to these groups around the world—to become part of the solution.
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The BHT offers a variety of residence and distance-learning educational opportunities. One of them is the first class of the resdence Master's Programme in Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability (MSLS). I took the Fall of 2009 distance class--Introduction to Strategic Sustainable Development--and found it exceptional. However, it is real school, repleat with reading, lectures, assignments, and a final exam delivered via web technology. It requires 10-20 hours per week to get the full benefit. The class consisted of about 50 students spanning the four corners of the globe and ranging from recent college grads through senior professionals. They were engaged and the experience was inspiring.
The class provides training in a unique and robust whole systems strategic planning methodology focused on achieving global sustainability. It is based on the content and method developed by Karl-Henrick Robert and The Natural Step over the past 20 years. The integration of multiple disciplines and practces is truly one of humanity's important, but as yet, under appreciated innovations. It holds the potential to develop the strategic focus, alignment, and context required for the myriad of tactical sustainbility impulses exploding onto the world stage recenlty to lead to global sustainability successs. My prognostication is that if humanity is successful, we will look back on the invention as a miraculous phenomonenon of just-in-time social innvoation. If we fail, it will still be the same phenomenon, it's just that there may not be as many of us looking back. Powerful. Valuable. Well worth your time if you're interested in the larger challenge of sustainability and the requirements for an effective response.
The BHT describes their sustainbility efforts as follows.
Sustainable development - striving for human progress and well-being within ecological limits - is a global pursuit of the utmost importance. By necessity it is a transdisciplinary field that calls for input, interpretation and application from and within all disciplines. At BTH, sustainable development is part of our profile Applied IT and Sustainable Development of Industry and Society. We are striving to integrate it seamlessly in everything we do. There are various specialized programmes where sustainability education and research are studied directly. Other programmes study the consequences of unsustainability and look for mitigation strategies and new and better ways of meeting society's needs. Many of our programmes also specialize on the enabling technologies that can be developed and harnessed in support of sustainable development objectives.
Distance learning Options http://www.bth.se/site/sustainability.nsf/pages/sustainability-distance-learning
Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability (Master's Level)
http://www.bth.se/site/sustainability.nsf/pages/mi2407_distance
THE COURSE WILL COVER 2 MODULES:
Module 1: Core Concepts of Strategic Sustainable Development (SSD). Today's environmental problems from a systems perspective. The cyclical processes in nature vs. the traditional linear use of materials in today's society. How to use a systems view and strategic planning for sustainable development. Principles of sustainability stemming from basic science: thermodynamics, energy, biological systems and social systems
Module 2: Applications of SSD understanding. Various tools and concepts currently in use for sustainable development, and their individual strengths and limitations.
AIMS AND LEARNING OUTCOMES
On completion of the course the student will:
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- Be able to discuss key sustainability challenges facing today's society, including some of the causes of both environmental and society problems.
- Be able to describe the major components of a framework for strategic sustainable development.
- Be able to independently apply the strategic planning tool (the ABCD analysis) to an organization.
- Be able to describe different tools and concepts relevant to sustainable development and demonstrate the ability to apply the SSD framework to describe how these tools and concepts are best utilised.
Jan 21st 2010 From The Economist print edition
THE idea that the Himalaya could lose its glaciers by 2035—glaciers which feed rivers across South and East Asia—is a dramatic and apocalyptic one. After the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said such an outcome was very likely in the assessment of the state of climate science that it made in 2007, onlookers (including this newspaper) repeated the claim with alarm. In fact, there is no reason to believe it to be true. This is good news (within limits) for Indian farmers—and bad news for the IPCC. . . .
S-2030 Comment:
The generation of knowledge is not a perfect process. This article clearly illustrates the magnitude of the undertaking of the IPCC process, and some of the cracks through which errors can fall. Given the extensiveness of the IPCC effort, errors such as this could be expected in limited quantity and should not undermine the value and path-breaking effort of the larger program.
An error in a point estimate like this should not lead to dismissivness over the particluar issue or the larger import of global warming (read burning) for future generations. If the issue is simply when the glaciers will melt, or when existing water regimes in asia will change dramatically enough to extensively undermine local economies (some would say they already have), then the larger, apocalyptic issue remains. There is no substitute for the water regime of the himalyas--at least for the populations that depend on it (including humans!).
It does not really matter when it happens for the generations that will suffer. If the date is further out, that just adds more pressure to act now, when costs are less and probabilities for success are higher.
There is no alternative to a lightening-fast transition to a sustainble economy and society (non-carbon, renewable energy, organic agriculture, compact vibrant cities, etc.) that will produce durable economic prosperity and security at higher levels than our business-as-usual, 7+ degree global burning societal suicide scenario ever has or could--whether the date for himalya glacier melt is 2035 or 2350.
Even if we can orchestrate a soft landing on a 2-degree or less global warming scenario, reversing those effects is a 200-300 year mitigation program assuming peak CO2 by 2015-2020, dramatic decreases in CO2 levels ASAP, going negative with high-tech solutions out in 2050, and maintaining the lower levels for the 200-300 years it will take for the lagged effects to restore pre-1990 clmiate conditions of 350 ppm CO2 or less to the normal range of historical variation.
Whining about an error, even of this magnitude, or expecting perfect knowledge from path-breaking work on events at the frontier of human experience and history is a ridiculous unhelpful cheap shot. Identifying the error and fixing the process that generated it, as illuminated by the Economist article, is exceptionally important work, the role of the press, etc. Thank you for your work on this point.
]]>More troubling though, was global leaderships' complete lack of understanding that the natural deadlines for CO2-equivalent tipping points are independent of human difficulties, that a business-as-usual (BAU) scenario is global societal-suicide (likely irreversible within10-20 years), and that the sustainable development scenario is actually a scenario of the last long wave of economic innovation capable of producing durable economic prosperity and security at higher levels than BAU ever would. It should be jumped on post-haste Benefits for the developing world would exceed many fold in value the climate mitigation related aid the developing world is seeking from the developed world. Further, the developed world's reticence to provide aid is a missed opportunity for global economic stimulation that would produce real wealth and a real needed jump start on the path to the needed economic transformation to sustainability. The word needs to get beyond a solution that simply mitigates one problem (reduces its severity but not its ultimae effect) and shift directions to economic transfomation to sustainability
]]>Oppose Murkowski Amendment to ignore climate science and bailout big polluters
Dear Senator,
On January 20th the Senate will vote on an amendment from Senator Murkowski of Alaska to block the ability of the Environmental Protection Agency and President Obama to protect the public's health and safety by enforcing limits on global warming pollution under the Clean Air Act--limits reaffirmed by the Supreme Court almost three years ago.
Senator Murkowski's amendment would disregard decades of research, scientific debate, court cases, public hearings and comments that state that global warming is happening and that it will be dangerous to human health and welfare. Last month more than 400,000 Americans submitted comments in favor of EPA's proposal to limit pollution from the biggest global warming polluters. We cannot afford to ignore that global warming pollution will endanger public health in the U.S. and around the world. Furthermore, action to fight global warming will build a clean energy economy that will not only mean less pollution, but more jobs and greater security as well. If successful, Senator Murkowski's amendment would bail out big polluters and stop progress towards clean energy future dead in its tracks.
Please join me in opposing this amendment that ignores the serious threat of global warming to health and welfare.
<<Personalized Addition:>> In addition, please note that such bail outs create the perverse incentive of moving away from durable future economic prosperity and security by reducing the cost of fossil fuel addiction and relatively increasing the cost of of the transition to a non-carbon, renewable energy sustainable economy. We already subsidize big oil and coal, thereby artificially decreasing the financial cost of our fossil fuel addiction. Add to this the artificially low, market-failure prices from the social and environmental externalities of our oil addicted society, and we have the recipe for a perfect storm of impotency in the face of the largest crisis humanity has yet to face -- global warming as the visible tip of the larger invisible sustainability crisis ice berg. The human economy systematically and continually increases a range of pollutants, uses up non-renewable resources, and destroys a range of nonsubstitutable natural capital eco- goods and service flow until society will soon fall over the edge of environmental toxicity and resource scarcity in the largest collapse of the natural economy humanity has ever seen. The resulting seizure of our economy and lack of substitutable inputs will put humanity out of business. This is humanity's present business as usual scenario, and the one to which the big oil and coal bail outs increase humanity's commitment. Please do not contribute to this short-sighted idiocy, for our sakes, for the sakes of our kids and theirs, and for the earth itself. Shifting the a sustainable economy transition is the only real scenario for a last, on-going, long wave of economic innovation and value production. We can catch this wave if we try, but it will take intentional choices, commitments, and action. Please do your part in shifting society to the path towards durable economic prosperity and security at levels higher than yet seen. Vote no on the big oil and gas bail outs.
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