The Paris Agreement brings trillions in new investment and provides President Trump with his best opportunity to build a new American economy of durable prosperity. In his Inaugural Address, Trump pledged that the forgotten will no longer be forgotten. Resource curse: Withdrawing from the Paris Agreement will do nothing to create jobs or raise incomes … Continue reading Paris: What is at Stake?
Living Future Strategies for Ocean Neutrality The Geoversiv Commitment to Ocean Stewardship is intended as both an institutional action agenda and a process of exploration and discovery, generating roadmaps for others to follow. It operates through five areas of action: Information support Stakeholder participation Technical capacity Catalytic convening Institutional practice 1) Information Support The Geoversiv … Continue reading Geoversiv Commitment to Ocean Stewardship
Full-spectrum financial sector transition to low-emissions business models is possible. In fact, it is already underway. Resilience-focused finance enhances the health and longevity of investments and expands the capability of any given dollar to generate added value in the world. The why is both simple and complex: simple, because it is simply better to avoid … Continue reading The Irrestible Efficiency of Climate-Smart Finance
There is only one part of President Trump’s agenda with real opportunity for a big win, right now, and that is infrastructure. And the Paris Agreement—the strongest ever signal pointing toward transformational infrastructure investment—is the only way to mobilize the capital necessary to get to that big win. The common misunderstanding about the Paris accord … Continue reading Future of American Infrastructure Hinges on Paris Agreement
In Marrakech, the work of implementing the Paris Agreement moved forward in important ways. The Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition and the World Bank are supporting a new High-Level Economic Commission chaired by Lord Nicholas Stern and by Nobel Economics Laureate Joseph Stiglitz. The commission will study critical questions relating to innovation and deployment of optimal carbon … Continue reading 4 Ways to Accelerate Carbon Pricing
A Talk on Climate Geopolitics, hosted by Global Minnesota, based on the Great Decisions Program of the Foreign Policy Association
Continue reading “Global Minnesota Talk: Climate Geopolitics”
A New Blueprint for Human Liberty
We want a future characterized by freedom from tyranny and deprivation. We want a future characterized by open access to education and empowerment. These wants are also needs, if we are to build a human civilization capable of the flexibility and resilience required to outlast the risks that flow from our own frailties. The metaphysical structures we call institutions have developed over long centuries fraught with scarcity, conflict, injustice and the reaction to injustice. We know this, and we let ourselves forget it. So, it is worth remembering: we are always, in subtle and deliberate ways, striving to free ourselves from the inefficiency of rigid institutions that ignore human need and the nuance of life as it happens at the human scale.
We can design the future we want. We can design institutions that “know” how to receive, to sift through, to leverage, and to be enhanced by waves of change. Knowledge is a constellation. The knowledge in your own mind is a constellation, but the constellation of all that is known extends to all human minds, and to all that we use to document what we perceive and comprehend. That constellation of knowledge relationships is also a map of the future, though we don’t yet know with perfect clarity which elements we will inhabit and which we will escape. Continue reading “Freedom from Tyranny: Redefined”
by Joseph Robertson and David Thoreson
Published in The Guardian, June 6, 2016
The climate system is a unifying ethical field that extends from the physical to the metaphysical and connects your actions to my well-being, and vice-versa, no matter how remote your life is from mine. The Golden Rule we have always treated as an abstract moral recommendation is now visibly playing out its logic in the physical world.
This period in history must be about useful innovations that rescue Earth systems from collapse and dignify human beings everywhere. We must dare to imagine, explore, and remake the limits of our experience, together.
by Joseph Robertson
Published in The Guardian on April 25, 2016
Would it surprise you to learn that governments, oil companies, NGOs and major investors are coming together to map—and to motivate—the decarbonization of the global economy?
The Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition (CPLC) is a policy-focused alliance of national and subnational governments, intergovernmental agencies, businesses and institutional investors, nonprofits and stakeholder networks. It was launched on the first day of the Paris climate negotiations, and its mission is simple: to collaborate across borders, across sectors, sharing information, know-how and capacity, to build the most economically efficient tools for decarbonization into every nation’s climate plan as soon as possible.
Continue reading “A global coalition mapping and motivating decarbonization”
The ACCESS to GOOD Project is an open, collaborative, ongoing reporting process, aiming to identify observable levers of action for adding value, momentum, and scope to investments in climate action and resilient human development.
ACCESS is a framework for analyzing the level of progress on comprehensive climate action. The axis standard aims to measure six qualifications of public policy, investment prioritization and business action:
GOOD is a framework for analyzing the generative tendencies, inclucing community-building reinforcements and local value added of day to day economic activity, at the human scale. This analysis operates on the premise that all economic behavior has at its roots a basic and specific demand for generative optimizing capabilities operating organically through routine human behavior.
The Poet Economist 