Class 12: Post Carbon World CofC Fall 2011

 “But it’s not necessary, or probably even very useful, to design the perfect size or shape of a community; it’s enough to say that, for reasons of ecological sustainability and human satisfaction, our systems and economies have gotten too large, and that we need to start building them back down. What we need is a new trajectory, toward the smaller and more local.”  Rethink our relationship to commodities, and community property  Local communication, local energy production, and renewed economic production (and local currency??)  Decentralizing governance and minimizing econ interference and subsidies  “could it be that this modernity, this hyper-individuality is a phase through which humans need to pass before they can figure out its limitations?”

 Comparison of China (unfettered growth) with other counter models.  Movement from rural spaces of relative autonomy to urban shanty towns  Can the world live like Americans and be built on China’s model for unfettered growth?  Europeans are more communitarian…use half US energy, live smaller scales and are generally happier.  Move to local economies, with local communications, and farmer’s markets

 McKibben: Deep EconomyDeep Economy

 Problem: resource extraction/use, using nature as a limitless resource, and externalizing waste and pollution  We have a “broken economic compass” (market is chalk full of distortions and perverse incentives)  Result: leads to environmental degradation and depletion of resource that ultimately negatively affects social/human systems  Solution: Reverse logic  Nature is scarce, people are abundant (away from limitless nature and scarce labor)  How?: Change system of production to address production- consumption cycle (away from cradle to grave) and address waste at all stages of the process. Engage a “Whole Systems Approach.” Do this by mimicking ecological system.  Result: “Abundance by design”  replenishing nature’s reserves

 1. Increase resource productivity  “radically reduce the throughput in the system”  2. Biomimicry – mirror ecological systems in design  Change what is in the throughput (i.e. the materials themselves)  3. Shift away from production of goods to flow of service and value (using #1 and #2)  Key: synergistic incentives between production and consumption (not perverse)  Keep your stuff and sell the service  4. Reinvest in environment (natural capital streams)

 Berkeley Lecture: Trade and Natural CapitalismTrade and Natural Capitalism  Roundtable Rocky Mtn Inst: Natural CapitalismNatural Capitalism  Visions of Sustainable Future (10m) Visions of Sustainable Future

 “The question of whether technology, politics and economic muscle can sort out the problem is the small question. The big question is about sorting out the human condition. It is the question of who we can deepen our humanity to cope with possible waves of war, famine, disease and refugees.”

 Financial: short-term problems around money, credit and institutions  Impermanent and repairable (in a few years)  Fisher: Don’t agree. It’s about power and increasing marginalization of the middle.  Ecological: more permanent and irreparable.  Daly: Biosphere is a subsystem of the economy now  Climate Change  Economics was developed for industrialization, not for the damage to ecosystems, and certainly not for climate destablization.  Politics (democracy) doesn’t account future gens or species ▪ Fisher: Doesn’t account for disconnection of governance

 Need transformation of governance – much like that of 1776 – 1800  We need “systemic calibration of governance with how the world works as a physical system.”  Need to:  1. as matter of public policy, stablize emissions  2. Pres Obama must launch a pub process to consider long-term changes to systems of governance, law, and politics. ▪ Rights: of people vs. Corps vs. nature ▪ Bully Pulpit: to “help build our civic intelligence…and extend our notions of citizenship…to wider community”

1. Create a practical vision of post-carbon prosperity 2. Develop the financial means to pay for the transition 3. Actually building a new energy system 4. Structure private choices so that people have a clear incentive to choose efficiency and renewables and buy local