The climate-smart finance ‘race to the top’ is underway and accelerating. Writing for Bloomberg News, Naureen Malik has cited Resilience Intel’s climate-smart finance aggregation work, noting: The money being committed to address climate change has jumped 54% this year in response to efforts to check global warming, according to a study. The Resilience Intel working … Continue reading Funding for Climate Action Jumps 54% in One Year
Our collective response to climate disruption will shape the future of finance, innovation, and everyday wellbeing. The Pre-COP meetings in Costa Rica made clear that stakeholders and major institutions are looking forward to new and more ambitious commitments from nation-states at COP25 in Chile in December. Chile’s COP25 Presidency has called for integration of ocean … Continue reading Trillions Await Signal to Fund Clean Economy
When we scan the solar system for signs of life, we look for water. Earth life requires water. The whereabouts and availability of water on Earth are determined by geology, life, and activity in the climate system, which is made up of thermal energy flows moving between the atmosphere and the ocean. Biodiversity is driven … Continue reading WEAVE GKG: Visualizing Earth Systems Value
Unsustainable business models will not secure future freedom; we need to account for nonlinear threats and impacts on natural systems. The COP24 opens amid reports of dangerous climate disruption. Major scientific reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the US Global Change Research Program find the human cause is clear, and impacts are … Continue reading COP24: The Smarter Path to Human Freedom
Wildfires, floods, storms, and droughts, are putting unprecedented pressure on food crops, threatening to destabilize commodities markets that determine food prices, across the world. This is a major climate impact on market signals and a sign of emerging pervasive risk to the global economy. Bloomberg is reporting: A heatwave across swathes of North America, Europe … Continue reading Food Price Shocks Signal Need for Macro-Resilient Finance
The world’s wealthiest 42 individuals now hold as much wealth as the poorest 3.7 billion. This corrosive market failure is driving a perversion of the whole economic landscape, where capital feeds capital, without necessarily providing what makes healthy societies, which should be the basis for market success. With extreme wealth abstracted at this level from … Continue reading Income Inequality puts Everything We Value at Risk
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE — Bonn, 13 November 2017, 16:30 Today, the COP22 Presidency, Citizens’ Climate Education, and the Geoversiv Foundation introduced Resilience Intel: a first-of-its-kind Climate-Smart Finance Aggregator. The Aggregator will use a light-touch analysis to parse any investment or spending into good / bad / neutral and then add up all of the good, … Continue reading Scaling up climate finance at all levels
We’re entering a new age for the Earth’s climate and for the way we conceive of finance “Macrocritical resilience” may be the most mystifying two-word phrase you need to know. Though you may never have heard these two words together before, what they describe affects everything you live and strive for. Wonky as it sounds, … Continue reading Finance for Deep-Rooted Prosperity is Coming
America’s banks have, over the last decade, entered into a dangerous fictional world of projected automatic wealth in which they expect that all payments they might receive will without fail materialize, regardless of circumstance. They treat the human beings with whom they have major financial relationships as if they were nothing more than endless fonts … Continue reading The Fiction of Automatic Wealth is Bankrupting the U.S.
Whether you are an avid supporter of Barack Obama, a perennial political skeptic, a critic, or a staunchly ideological opponent, it is clear that there must be some sort of vast, perhaps unprecedented economic stimulus put into effect in order to slow or reverse a now spiraling economic downturn. And, all have to admit as well, it is a very risky thing to gamble one’s political capital, at such a crucial moment in American history, on a huge spending package that might not have a very visible effect in the immediate short term.
Stimulus means spending, and that’s why it’s a gamble. It can mean spending by issuing cash tax-credit payouts, which consumers can then use as they please (this will likely lead only to the paying of already existing bills, which tends to be less stimulative, especially when banks are not issuing new credit freely). It can mean spending on public works, which will spur industrial output and is likely the most serious motivator of job-creation.
Continue reading “Stimulus is Needed & Will Mean Big Spending”
The Poet Economist 