George Monbiot and Ross Gittins, an environmentalist and an economist, both have two related and compelling reveiws of 2012 trends.
Ross writes about Jeffrey Sachs’ evidence for “the four business gangs that run the US“. Sachs’s highlights how:
”corporate wealth translates into political power … into further wealth … Wealth begets power, and power begets wealth,” Part of this power “has played a notorious role in the fight to keep climate change off the US agenda” underwriting “a generation of anti-scientific propaganda to confuse the American people.”
George covers 2012 as “the year we did our best to abandon the natural world“:
Governments have now begun to concede, without evincing any great concern, that they will miss their target of no more than 2C of global warming this century. Instead we’re on track for between four and six degrees. To prevent climate breakdown, coal burning should be in steep decline. Far from it: the International Energy Agency reports that global use of the most carbon-dense fossil fuel is climbing by about 200m tonnes a year. This helps to explain why global emissions are rising so fast.
Australia however may have bucked some these trends (ironically as the world’s leading coal exporter). Australia’s Environment Minister Tony Burke, perhaps a little optimistically, points out “in 2012 we returned the Murray Darling to health, became the world leader on protecting the oceans…“. Australia also introduced a carbon price in 2012 and, within the context of what Sachs and Monbiot outline, this is genuine progress.
What is different? Leadership perhaps? A more civil society? An economy that still supports a broader environmental debate? Regardless of the fact that we are clearly far from a successful sustainbility shift on the scales needed (e.g. see Beyond Denial: managing the uncertainties of global change) are there some pointers to come from Australia’s 2012? It’s not easy to generalise from such trends so comments welcome!
Image: Giant fish made entirely from discarded plastic bottles. Rio, UN Conference on Sustainable Development.