Tag: UNEP

UN Report: Green Growth is Better, Safer Growth

I just caught this a short while ago and just in time to stream most of the press conference, without even finishing my first pot of coffee.

Did some searching and found a couple of reports, more are being added as I type this, as well as the UNEP site page with the full report broken down in sections to download, read and study.

One doesn’t need to believe in ‘Climate Change’, using the label ‘global warming’ in a simplistic way to feed the detraction of the obvious, detractors of advancing technologies and individual advancements and dreams have always been around. Developing, long over due and argued about, the technologies and finding the possible new means to the goals of a cleaner planet and cleaner living are just the same as any advancements man has made as we’ve evolved.

Greening should help bring about cleaner living. Greening should stop many of mans conflicts {think national securities and the continued growth of hatreds} on his fellow man, who will go to war to try and control anothers sun or wind,or what other possibilities can be found to cleaner energy needs through other advancing technologies and not with fossil fuels or anothers mineral assets.

Advancing to green economies brings growth, everywhere, as well as the needed trades and expertise to be able to carry out the advancement needs. Developing and growing towards cleaner living, cleaner manufacturing, cleaner air, cleaner water and much more, a cleaner and possibly less hostile planet.

Who can put a Price on the Environment?

EcoEconomics in a Nutshell

Our free market economy is nothing more than a huge auction called ‘Supply and Demand’, which – very efficiently – puts a price on on everything.

The problem is that it allows us to sell everything – the last drop of oil, the last tree, the last fish, the last of everything. It’s called growth – but it is, obviously, growth into oblivion – the exact opposite of EcoEconomics. It is a fatal flaw of our present economic system.

Or, as Greenpeace puts it: “When the last tree is cut, the last river poisoned, and the last fish dead, we will discover that we can’t eat money…”

[…]

The eco-economic price for a natural resource is, therefore, the price you would have to pay if our planet were to release that resource only at a sustainable level.

Who can put a Price on the Environment?  … We all should.

Afterall if we end up decimating the planet’s EcoSystems —  trying to sell off their once abundant natural resources — We can’t eat the money … or gold either, can we?

The Most Terrifying Halloween Story Ever Told

Imagine there was a beautiful planet.

Imagine it was inhabited by billions of sentient beings.

Imagine the most technologically advanced of those beings was in the process of poisoning that planet for everyone.

Imagine that all life was at risk.

Imagine that those most technologically advanced beings were, as T.S. Eliot once put it, too

distracted from distraction by distraction

to do anything about it.

Imagine those most technologically advanced beings were even putting the survival of their own species at risk.

Imagine time was running out.

Imagine those most technologically advanced beings were actually making things worse, not better.

Imagine.

The horror.

Global Warming: From the Great Dying to humanity at risk

On this Halloween, who needs ghosts and goblins? The real spooky stuff is in the science.

First, from Science Daily:

The greatest mass extinction in Earth’s history also may have been one of the slowest, according to a study that casts further doubt on the extinction-by-meteor theory.

Creeping environmental stress fueled by volcanic eruptions and global warming was the likely cause of the Great Dying 250 million years ago, said USC doctoral student Catherine Powers.

Writing in the November issue of the journal Geology, Powers and her adviser David Bottjer, professor of earth sciences at USC, describe a slow decline in the diversity of some common marine organisms.

Obviously, this wasn’t a human-caused event, but it demonstrates just how catastrophic such a catastrophe can be. As this NASA article explains, in the Great Dying, up to 90% of marine species and up to 70% of land species were wiped out. All life on Earth almost ended, even as it was still beginning, and global warming seems to have been one of the reasons why.

There is such a steady stream of stories on the current era of global warming, but here are just two new examples…

UN Environment Programme: The future of humanity is at risk

It’s more than global warming and climate change.

From the Guardian:

The future of humanity has been put at risk by a failure to address environmental problems including climate change, species extinction and a growing human population, according to a new UN report.

In a sweeping audit of the world’s environmental wellbeing, the study by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) warns that governments are still failing to recognise the seriousness of major environmental issues.

It doesn’t get much more blunt, although don’t expect to hear much about it from the corporate media.

The study, involving more than 1,400 scientists, found that human consumption had far outstripped available resources. Each person on Earth now requires a third more land to supply his or her needs than the planet can supply, it finds.

Meanwhile, biodiversity is seriously threatened by the impact of human activities: 30% of amphibians, 23% of mammals and 12% of birds are under threat of extinction, while one in 10 of the world’s large rivers runs dry every year before it reaches the sea.

This is a follow-up to a similar study, made in 1987. It’s a progress report.

As the UNEP press release explains:

GEO-4, the latest in UNEP’s series of flagship reports, assesses the current state of the global atmosphere, land, water and biodiversity, describes the changes since 1987, and identifies priorities for action. GEO-4 is the most comprehensive UN report on the environment, prepared by about 390 experts and reviewed by more than 1 000 others across the world.

It salutes the world’s progress in tackling some relatively straightforward problems, with the environment now much closer to mainstream politics everywhere. But despite these advances, there remain the harder-to-manage issues, the “persistent” problems. Here, GEO-4 says: “There are no major issues raised in Our Common Future for which the foreseeable trends are favourable.”