Carbon Market Quotes

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Water: 35 liters, Carbon: 20 kg, Ammonia: 4 liters, Lime:1.5 kg, Phosphrus: 800 g, salt: 250g, saltpeter:100g, Sulfer: 80g, Fluorine: 7.5 g, iron: 5.6 g, Silicon: 3g, and 15 other elements in small quantities.... thats the total chemical makeup of the average adult body. Modern science knows all of this, but there has never been a single example of succesful human trasmutation. It's like there's some missing ingredient..... Scientists have been trying to find it for hundreds of years, pouring tons of money into research, and to this day they don't have a theory. For that matter, the elements found in a human being is all junk that you can buy in any market with a child's allowence. Humans are pretty cheaply made.
Hiromu Arakawa (Fullmetal Alchemist, Vol. 1)
Water: 35 Liters. Carbon: 20 Kg. Ammonia: 4 Liters. Lime: 1.5 Kg. Phosphorus: 800 g. Salt: 250 g. Saltpeter: 100g. Sulfur: 80g. Fluorine: 7.5 g. Iron: 5 g. Silicon: 3 g. And 15 other elements in small quantities... That's the total chemical makeup of the average adult body... For that matter, the elements found in a human being... is all junk that you can buy in any market with a child's allowance. Humans are pretty cheaply made. - Edward Elric
Hiromu Arakawa (Fullmetal Alchemist (3-in-1 Edition), Vol. 1)
So I assume that those of you who are married and thus purchased a diamond for your wife are aware of how evil and corrupt the diamond cartel is. I was not. Apparently, diamonds are almost worthless other than the value attached to them by the silly tramps that DeBeers has brainwashed into thinking 'diamond equals love.' Congratulations, ladies, your quest for the perfect princess cut not only supports terrorism and genocide, but has managed to destroy an entire continent. - speaking of blood diamonds, what the hell is going on here? Everyone is upset about African children losing their limbs? Perhaps I missed their concern about these same children during the Rwandan genocide. Here's a solution: Stop buying diamonds. No no, the avarice of the entitled whore cannot be contained. And if blood diamonds are so fucking bad, why can't I by them at a discount? Or at least get them with a death certificate or an appendage or some sort of cogent backstory that might indicate an actual meaning to this useless little cube of carbon. Clearly the diamond market is broken on multiple levels.
Tucker Max
The twin signatures of this era have been the mass export of products across vast distances (relentlessly burning carbon all the way), and the import of a uniquely wasteful model of production, consumption, and agriculture to every corner of the world (also based on the profligate burning of fossil fuels). Put differently, the liberation of world markets, a process powered by the liberation of unprecedented amounts of fossil fuels from the earth, has dramatically sped up the same process that is liberating Arctic ice from existence.
Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
Indeed the offset market has created a new class of "green" human rights abuses, wherein peasants and Indigenous people who venture into their traditional territories (reclassified as carbon sinks) in order to harvest plants, wood, or fish are harassed or worse...The added irony is that many people being sacrificed for the carbon market are living some of the most sustainable, low-carbon lifestyles on the planet.
Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
Two decades ago, however, socialism and communism died rudely, then were buried forever by the empirical demonstration of the superiority of market capitalism everywhere from Thatcher's England to Deng's Dhina, where just the partial abolition of socialism lifted more people out of poverty than ever in human history. Just as the ash heap of history beckoned, the intellectual left was handed the ultimate salvation: environmentalism. Now the experts will regular your life not in the name of the proletariat or Fabian socialism but--even better--in the name of Earth itself. Environmentalists are Gaia's priests, instructing us in her proper service and casting out those who refuse to genuflect. And having proclaimed the ultimate commandment--carbon chastity--they are preparing the supporting canonical legislation that will tell you how much you can travel, what kind of light you will read by and what temperature you may set your bedroom thermostat.
Charles Krauthammer (Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics)
For reasons I do not entirely understand, the clerisy after 1848 turned toward nationalism and socialism, and against liberalism, and came also to delight in an ever-expanding list of pessimisms about the way we live now in our approximately liberal societies, from the lack of temperance among the poor to an excess of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Antiliberal utopias believed to offset the pessimisms have been popular among the clerisy. Its pessimistic and utopian books have sold millions. But the twentieth-century experiments of nationalism and socialism, of syndicalism in factories and central planning for investment, of proliferating regulation for imagined but not factually documented imperfections in the market, did not work. And most of the pessimisms about how we live now have proven to be mistaken. It is a puzzle. Perhaps you yourself still believe in nationalism or socialism or proliferating regulation. And perhaps you are in the grip of pessimism about growth or consumerism or the environment or inequality. Please, for the good of the wretched of the earth, reconsider.
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey (Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World)
One day coming up Market he caught sight of a crowd among which the maddest man of God yet seen had appeared electrically out of the carbonic fog. He was some two thirds of a man tall and heavily set and red all over, this preacher. He had red curly hair on the back of his balding and boiled looking head and his skin was pale red and splotched with huge bloodcolored freckles and he was delivering the word in such fashion as even the oldest codgers on this street long jaded to the crop with crazed gospelarity could scarcely credit.
Cormac McCarthy (Suttree)
Probably no single event highlights the strength of Campbell’s argument (on peak oil) better than the rapid development of the Alberta tar sands. Bitumen, the world’s ugliest and most expensive hydrocarbon, can never be a reasonable substitute for light oil due to its extreme capital, energy, and carbon intensity. Bitumen looks, smells, and behaves like asphalt; running an economy on it is akin to digging up our existing road infrastructure, melting it down, and enriching the goop with hydrogen until it becomes a sulfur-rich but marketable oil.
Andrew Nikiforuk (Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent)
think of climate change as slow, but it is unnervingly fast. We think of the technological change necessary to avert it as fast-arriving, but unfortunately it is deceptively slow—especially judged by just how soon we need it. This is what Bill McKibben means when he says that winning slowly is the same as losing: “If we don’t act quickly, and on a global scale, then the problem will literally become insoluble,” he writes. “The decisions we make in 2075 won’t matter.” Innovation, in many cases, is the easy part. This is what the novelist William Gibson meant when he said, “The future is already here, it just isn’t evenly distributed.” Gadgets like the iPhone, talismanic for technologists, give a false picture of the pace of adaptation. To a wealthy American or Swede or Japanese, the market penetration may seem total, but more than a decade after its introduction, the device is used by less than 10 percent of the world; for all smartphones, even the “cheap” ones, the number is somewhere between a quarter and a third. Define the technology in even more basic terms, as “cell phones” or “the internet,” and you get a timeline to global saturation of at least decades—of which we have two or three, in which to completely eliminate carbon emissions, planetwide. According to the IPCC, we have just twelve years to cut them in half. The longer we wait, the harder it will be. If we had started global decarbonization in 2000, when Al Gore narrowly lost election to the American presidency, we would have had to cut emissions by only about 3 percent per year to stay safely under two degrees of warming. If we start today, when global emissions are still growing, the necessary rate is 10 percent. If we delay another decade, it will require us to cut emissions by 30 percent each year. This is why U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres believes we have only one year to change course and get started. The scale of the technological transformation required dwarfs any achievement that has emerged from Silicon Valley—in fact dwarfs every technological revolution ever engineered in human history, including electricity and telecommunications and even the invention of agriculture ten thousand years ago. It dwarfs them by definition, because it contains all of them—every single one needs to be replaced at the root, since every single one breathes on carbon, like a ventilator.
David Wallace-Wells (The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming)
Corporations go to great lengths to employ geniuses: technologists, designers, financial engineers, economists, artists even. I’ve seen it happen,’ he said. ‘But what have they done with them? They channel all that talent and creativity towards humanity’s destruction. Even when it is creative, Eva, capitalism is extractive. In search of shareholder profit, corporations have put these geniuses in charge of extracting the last morsel of value from humans and from the earth, from the minerals in its guts to the life in its oceans. And these brilliant minds have been used to cajole governments into accepting their raids on the planet’s resources by creating markets for them: markets for carbon dioxide and other pollutants – phoney markets controlled by their employers! Unlike the East India Company, the Technostructure does not need its own armies. It owns our states and their armies, because it controls what we think. The dirtier the industry, the richer and more despised, the more its captains have been able to tap into the rivers of debt-derived money to purchase influence and to blunt opposition. Previously they would buy newspapers and set up TV stations; now they employ armies of lobbyists, found think tanks, litter the Internet with their trolls and, of course, direct monumental campaign donations to the chief enablers of our species’ extinction, the politicians.
Yanis Varoufakis (Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present)
The reality is that Facebook has been so successful, it’s actually running out of humans on the planet. Ponder the numbers: there are about three billion people on the Internet, where the latter is broadly defined as any sort of networked data, texts, browser, social media, whatever. Of these people, six hundred million are Chinese, and therefore effectively unreachable by Facebook. In Russia, thanks to Vkontakte and other copycat social networks, Facebook’s share of the country’s ninety million Internet users is also small, though it may yet win that fight. That leaves about 2.35 billion people ripe for the Facebook plucking. While Facebook seems ubiquitous to the plugged-in, chattering classes, its usage is not universal among even entrenched Internet users. In the United States, for example, by far the company’s most established and sticky market, only three-quarters of Internet users are actively on FB. That ratio of FB to Internet user is worse in other countries, so even full FB saturation in a given market doesn’t imply total Facebook adoption. Let’s (very) optimistically assume full US-level penetration for any market. Without China and Russia, and taking a 25 percent haircut of people who’ll never join or stay (as is the case in the United States), that leaves around 1.8 billion potential Facebook users globally. That’s it. In the first quarter of 2015, Facebook announced it had 1.44 billion users. Based on its public 2014 numbers, FB is growing at around 13 percent a year, and that pace is slowing. Even assuming it maintains that growth into 2016, that means it’s got one year of user growth left in it, and then that’s it: Facebook has run out of humans on the Internet. The company can solve this by either making more humans (hard even for Facebook), or connecting what humans there are left on the planet. This is why Internet.org exists, a vaguely public-spirited, and somewhat controversial, campaign by Facebook to wire all of India with free Internet, with regions like Brazil and Africa soon to follow. In early 2014 Facebook acquired a British aerospace firm, Ascenta, which specialized in solar-powered unmanned aerial vehicles. Facebook plans on flying a Wi-Fi-enabled air force of such craft over the developing world, giving them Internet. Just picture ultralight carbon-fiber aircraft buzzing over African savannas constantly, while locals check their Facebook feeds as they watch over their herds.
Antonio García Martínez (Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley)
Bobby wrote, “the Big Tech, Big Data, Big Pharma, Big Carbon and Chemical-Industrial Food plutocrats and their allies in the Military Industrial Complex and Intelligence Apparatus now control our government. These plutocrats have twisted the language of democracy, equity and free markets to transform our exemplary democracy into a corrupt system of corporate crony capitalism. The tragic outcome for America has been a cushy socialism for the rich and a savage and bloody free market for the poor. America has devolved into a corporate kleptocracy addicted to a war economy abroad and a security and surveillance state at home. The upper echelons of the Democratic Party are now pro-censorship, pro-war neocons who wear woke bobbleheads to disguise and soften their belligerent totalitarian agendas for our country and the world.
Dick Russell (The Real RFK Jr.: Trials of a Truth Warrior)
Look,” she told me one day in a Millsport coffeehouse. “Shopping—actual, physical shopping—could have been phased out centuries ago if they’d wanted it that way.” “They who?” “People. Society.” She waved a hand impatiently. “Whoever. They had the capacity back then. Mail order, virtual supermarkets, automated debiting systems. It could have been done and it never happened. What does that tell you?” At twenty-two years old, a Marine Corps grunt via the street gangs of Newpest, it told me nothing. Carlyle took in my blank look and sighed. “It tells you that people like shopping. That it satisfies a basic, acquisitive need at a genetic level. Something we inherited from our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Oh, you’ve got automated convenience shopping for basic household items, mechanical food distribution systems for the marginalized poor. But you’ve also got a massive proliferation of commercial hives and speciality markets in food and crafts that people physically have to go to. Now why would they do that, if they didn’t enjoy it?” I probably shrugged, maintaining my youthful cool. “Shopping is physical interaction, exercise of decision-making capacity, sating of the desire to acquire, and an impulse to more acquisition, a scouting urge. It’s so basically fucking human when you think about it. You’ve got to learn to love it, Tak. I mean you can cross the whole archipelago on a hover; you never even need to get wet. But that doesn’t take the basic pleasure out of swimming, does it? Learn to shop well, Tak. Get flexible. Enjoy the uncertainty.
Richard K. Morgan (Altered Carbon (Takeshi Kovacs, #1))
This is the science behind how UPF affects the human body: • The destruction of the food matrix by physical, chemical and thermal processing means that UPF is, in general, soft. This means you eat it fast, which means you eat far more calories per minute and don’t feel full until long after you’ve finished. It also potentially reduces facial bone size and bone density, leading to dental problems. • UPF typically has a very high calorie density because it’s dry, and high in fat and sugar and low in fibre, so you get more calories per mouthful. • It displaces diverse whole foods from the diet, especially among low-income groups. And UPF itself is often micronutrient-deficient, which may also contribute to excess consumption. • The mismatch between the taste signals from the mouth and the nutrition content in some UPF alters metabolism and appetite in ways that we are only beginning to understand, but that seem to drive excess consumption. • UPF is addictive, meaning that for some people binges are unavoidable. • The emulsifiers, preservatives, modified starches and other additives damage the microbiome, which could allow inflammatory bacteria to flourish and cause the gut to leak. • The convenience, price and marketing of UPF urge us to eat constantly and without thought, which leads to more snacking, less chewing, faster eating, increased consumption and tooth decay. • The additives and physical processing mean that UPF affects our satiety system directly. Other additives may affect brain and endocrine function, and plastics from the packaging might affect fertility. • The production methods used to make UPF require expensive subsidy and drive environmental destruction, carbon emissions and plastic pollution, which harm us all.
Chris van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn't Food)
WE’RE GOOD AT WRONG SPOTTING If you’ve ever received feedback at work—or had an in-law—you are familiar with the many shapes and sizes of wrong: It’s 2 + 2 = 5 wrong: It is literally incorrect. I could not have been rude at that meeting because I was not at that meeting. And my name is not Mike. It’s different-planet wrong: Somewhere in the universe there may exist a carbon-based life form that would have taken offense at my e-mail, but here on Earth everyone knows it was a joke. It used to be right: Your critique of my marketing plan is based on how marketing worked when you were coming up. Before the Internet. And electricity. It’s right according to the wrong people: Some see me that way, but next time, talk to at least one person who is not on my Personal Enemies List. Your context is wrong: I do yell at my assistant. And he yells at me. That’s how our relationship works—key word being “works.” It’s right for you, but wrong for me: We have different body types. Armani suits flatter you. Hoodies flatter me. The feedback is right, but not right now: It’s true that I could lose a few pounds—which I will do as soon as the quintuplets are out of the house. Anyway, it’s unhelpful: Telling me to be a better mentor isn’t helping me to be a better mentor. What kind of mentor are you anyway? Why is wrong spotting so easy? Because there’s almost always something wrong—something the feedback giver is overlooking, shortchanging, or misunderstanding. About you, about the situation, about the constraints you’re under. And givers compound the problem by delivering feedback that is vague, making it easy for us to overlook, shortchange, and misunderstand what they are saying. But in the end, wrong spotting not only defeats wrong feedback, it defeats learning.
Douglas Stone (Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well)
Birch bark lends a mild wintergreen flavor to brewed sodas. Birch beer, flavored with sassafras and birch, is a classic American brew. Birch bark is usually sold in homebrew stores. Bitter Orange (Bergamot) s highly aromatic, and its dried peel is an essential part of cola flavor. The dried peel and its extract are usually available in spice shops, or any store with a good spice selection. They can be pricey. Burdock root s a traditional ingredient in American root beers. It has a mild sweet flavor similar to that of artichoke. Dried burdock root is available in most Asian groceries and homebrew stores. Cinnamon has several species, but they all fall into two types. Ceylon cinnamon is thin and mild, with a faint fragrance of allspice. Southeast Asian cinnamon, also called cassia, is both stronger and more common. The best grade comes from Vietnam and is sold as Saigon cinnamon. Use it in sticks, rather than ground. The sticks can be found in most grocery stores. Ginger, a common soda ingredient, is very aromatic, at once spicy and cooling. It is widely available fresh in the produce section of grocery stores, and it can be found whole and dried in most spice shops. Lemongrass, a perennial herb from central Asia, contains high levels of citral, the pungent aromatic component of lemon oil. It yields a rich lemon flavor without the acid of lemon juice, which can disrupt the fermentation of yeasted sodas. Lemon zest is similar in flavor and can be substituted. Lemongrass is available in most Asian markets and in the produce section of well-stocked grocery stores. Licorice root provides the well-known strong and sweet flavor of black licorice candy. Dried licorice root is sold in natural food stores and homebrew stores. Anise seed and dried star anise are suitable substitutes. Sarsaparilla s similar in flavor to sassafras, but a little milder. Many plants go by the name sarsaparilla. Southern-clime sarsaparilla (Smilax spp.) is the traditional root-beer flavoring. Most of the supply we get in North America comes from Mexico; it’s commonly sold in homebrew stores. Wild sarsaparilla (Aralia spp.) is more common in North America and is sometimes used as a substitute for true sarsaparilla. Small young sarsaparilla roots, known as “root bark” are less pungent and are usually preferred for soda making, although fully mature roots give fine results. Sassafras s the most common flavoring for root beers of all types. Its root bark is very strong and should be used with caution, especially if combined with other flavors. It is easily overpowering. Dried sassafras is available in homebrew stores. Star anise, the dried fruit of an Asian evergreen, tastes like licorice, with hints of clove and cinnamon. The flavor is strong, so use star anise with caution. It is available dried in the spice section of most grocery stores but can be found much more cheaply at Asian markets.
Andrew Schloss (Homemade Soda: 200 Recipes for Making & Using Fruit Sodas & Fizzy Juices, Sparkling Waters, Root Beers & Cola Brews, Herbal & Healing Waters, Sparkling ... & Floats, & Other Carbonated Concoctions)
This is a young wine from the Beaujolais, France region, which is produced through carbonic maceration. The grape variety used is Gamay, are known for their fruity fresh taste with very low tannins. Carbonic maceration is the vinification process through which the whole grape is crushed by its own weight, causing the grapes at the bottom of the vessel to begin the fermentation process without actually deliberately intervening in the process. The Beaujolais Nouveau is a marketing phenomenon, which on every year begins to sell on the same date worldwide, this being the third Thursday of November.
Miro Popić (The Wine Handbook)
The good news is that advances in batteries, fuel cells, lightweight cars, and charging networks are making electric vehicles look more promising than ever before. To accelerate the economies of scale necessary for the widespread adoption of electric vehicles, the government currently subsidizes the production and consumption of such cars. But in the absence of major technological improvements, these policies have proved insufficient. If policymakers took the politically unpopular step of taxing people for the carbon their cars emit, electric vehicles would capture a larger market share.
Anonymous
If the technology platforms of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions aided in the severing and enclosing of the Earth’s myriad ecological interdependencies for market exchange and personal gain, the IoT platform of the Third Industrial Revolution reverses the process. What makes the IoT a disruptive technology in the way we organize economic life is that it helps humanity reintegrate itself into the complex choreography of the biosphere, and by doing so, dramatically increases productivity without compromising the ecological relationships that govern the planet. Using less of the Earth’s resources more efficiently and productively in a circular economy and making the transition from carbon-based fuels to renewable energies are defining features of the emerging economic paradigm. In the new era, we each become a node in the nervous system of the biosphere.
Jeremy Rifkin (The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism)
In sum, the most commonly used stock and bond market benchmark indexes cause economic harm, distort pricing information, and cause financial behaviours that are inimical with the EU’s aspirations for a competitive low carbon economy.
Wayne Visser (Disrupting the Future: Great Ideas for Creating a Much Better World)
Modern economics, by which I mean the style of economics taught and practised in today's leading universities, likes to start the enquiries from the ground up: from individuals, through the household, village, district, state, country, to the whole world. In various degrees, the millions of individual decisions shape the eventualities people face; as both theory, common sense, and evidence tell us that there are enormous numbers of consequences of what we all do. Some of these consequences have been intended, but many are unintended. There is, however, a feedback, in that those consequences in turn go to shape what people subsequently can do and choose to do. When Becky's family drive their cars or use electricity, or when Desta's family create compost or burn wood for cooking, they add to global carbon emissions. Their contributions are no doubt negligible, but the millions of such tiny contributions sum to a sizeable amount, having consequences that people everywhere are likely to experience in different ways. It can be that the feedbacks are positive, so that the whole contribution is greater than the sum of the parts. Strikingly, unintended consequences can include emergent features, such as market prices, at which the demand for goods more or less equals their supply. Earlier, I gave a description of Becky's and Desta's lives. Understanding their lives involves a lot more; it requires analysis, which usually calls for further description. To conduct an analysis, we need first of all to identify the material prospects the girls' households face - now and in the future, under uncertain contingencies. Second, we need to uncover the character of their choices and the pathways by which the choices made by millions of households like Becky's and Desta's go to produce the prospects they all face. Third, and relatedly, we need to uncover the pathways by which the families came to inherit their current circumstances. These amount to a tall, even forbidding, order. Moreover, there is a thought that can haunt us: since everything probably affects everything else, how can we ever make sense of the social world? If we are weighed down by that worry, though, we won't ever make progress. Every discipline that I am familiar with draws caricatures of the world in order to make sense of it. The modern economist does this by building models, which are deliberately stripped down representations of the phenomena out there. When I say 'stripped down', I really mean stripped down. It isn't uncommon among us economists to focus on one or two causal factors, exclude everything else, hoping that this will enable us to understand how just those aspects of reality work and interact. The economist John Maynard Keynes described our subject thus: 'Economics is a science of thinking in terms of models joined to the art of choosing models which are relevant to the contemporary world.
Partha Dasgupta (Economics: A Very Short Introduction)
the Soil Carbon Challenge measures carbon levels over ten years. Someone at a university, completing a PhD or seeking publication, has incentives to do research projects of no more than a few years. In government agencies and nonprofits, soil carbon work is geared to the “so-called carbon market.” And all organizations—this is a pet peeve of his—tend toward fragmentation, so that soil conservation and climate mitigation are seen as separate, even competing, campaigns. All this means that stories that don’t fit into a short time frame, aren’t linked to profitable ventures, and/or can’t be neatly tucked into departmental divisions may not get told.
Judith D. Schwartz (Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth)
so much carbon has been allowed to accumulate in the atmosphere over the past two decades that now our only hope of keeping warming below the internationally agreed-upon target of 2 degrees Celsius is for wealthy countries to cut their emissions by somewhere in the neighborhood of 8–10 percent a year.27 The “free” market simply cannot accomplish this task. Indeed, this level of emission reduction has happened only in the context of economic collapse or deep depressions. I’ll be delving deeper into those numbers in Chapter 2, but the bottom line is what matters here: our economic system and our planetary system are now at war. Or, more accurately, our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature.
Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
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ycpipe
The term ‘democracy’ can have two kinds of meaning. It can refer to ways of making effective claims for a more just and egalitarian common world. Or it can refer to a mode of governing populations that employs popular consent as a means of limiting claims for greater equality and justice by dividing up the common world. Such limits are formed by acknowledging certain areas as matters of public concern subject to popular decision while establishing other fields to be administered under alternative methods of control. For example, governmental practice can demarcate a private sphere governed by rules of property, a natural world governed by laws of nature, or markets governed by principles of economics. Democratic struggles become a battle over the distribution of issues, attempting to establish as matters of public concern questions that others claim as private (such as the level of wages paid by employers), as belonging to nature (such as the exhaustion of natural resources or the composition of gases in the atmosphere), or as ruled by laws of the market (such as financial speculation). In the mid-twentieth century, this ‘logic of distribution’ began to designate a large new field of government whose rules set limits to alternative political claims: the field that became known as ‘the economy’.
Timothy Mitchell (Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil)
It has become increasingly popular today to say that we live in an era of what Benjamin Barber has labelled ‘Jihad vs. McWorld’. The globalising powers of capitalism (‘McWorld’) are confronted with or resisted by the forces that Barber labels ‘Jihad’ – the variety of tribal particularisms and ‘narrowly conceived faiths’ opposed to the homogenising force of capital. Even those with a critical view of the growth of American empire and the expansion of what is erroneously termed the global market usually subscribe to this interpretation. In fact it is the critics who often argue that we need a better understanding of these local forms of resistance against the ‘universal’ force of the market. The terms of this debate are quite misleading. We live in an age, to adapt Barber’s nomenclature, of ‘McJihad’. It is an age in which the mechanisms of what we call capitalism appear to operate, in certain critical instances, only by adopting the social force and moral authority of conservative Islamic movements.
Timothy Mitchell (Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil)
Emissions of carbon dioxide reasonable commercial For those who do not know each other with the phrase "carbon footprint" and its consequences or is questionable, which is headed "reasonable conversion" is a fast lens here. Statements are described by the British coal climatic believe. "..The GC installed (fuel emissions) The issue has directly or indirectly affected by a company or work activities, products," only in relation to the application, especially to introduce a special procedure for the efforts of B. fight against carbon crank function What is important? Carbon dioxide ", uh, (on screen), the main fuel emissions" and the main result of global warming, improve a process that determines the atmosphere in the air in the heat as greenhouse gases greenhouse, carbon dioxide is reduced by the environment, methane, nitrous oxide and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs more typically classified as). The consequences are disastrous in the sense of life on the planet. The exchange is described at a reasonable price in Wikipedia as "...geared a social movement and market-based procedures, especially the objectives of the development of international guidelines and improve local sustainability." The activity is for the price "reasonable effort" as well as social and environmental criteria as part of the same in the direction of production. It focuses exclusively on exports under the auspices of the acquisition of the world's nations to coffee most international destinations, cocoa, sugar, tea, vegetables, wine, specially designed, refreshing fruits, bananas, chocolate and simple. In 2007 trade, the conversion of skilled gross sales serious enough alone suffered due the supermarket was in the direction of approximately US $ 3.62 billion to improve (2.39 million), rich environment and 47% within 12 months of the calendar year. Fair trade is often providing 1-20% of gross sales in their classification of medicines in Europe and North America, the United States. ..Properly Faith in the plan ... cursed interventions towards closing in failure "vice president Cato Industries, appointed to inquire into the meaning of fair trade Brink Lindsey 2003 '. "Sensible changes direction Lindsay inaccurate provides guidance to the market in a heart that continues to change a design style and price of the unit complies without success. It is based very difficult, and you must deliver or later although costs Rule implementation and reduces the cost if you have a little time in the mirror. You'll be able to afford the really wide range plan alternatives to products and expenditures price to pay here. With the efficient configuration package offered in the interpretation question fraction "which is a collaboration with the Carbon Fund worldwide, and acceptable substitute?" In the statement, which tend to be small, and more? They allow you to search for carbon dioxide transport and delivery. All vehicles are responsible dioxide pollution, but they are the worst offenders? Aviation. Quota of the EU said that the greenhouse gas jet fuel greenhouse on the basis of 87% since 1990 years Boeing Company, Boeing said more than 5 747 liters of fuel burns kilometer. Paul Charles, spokesman for Virgin Atlantic, said flight CO² gas burned in different periods of rule. For example: (. The United Kingdom) Jorge Chavez airport to fly only in the vast world of Peru to London Heathrow with British Family Islands 6.314 miles (10162 km) works with about 31,570 liters of kerosene, which produces changes in only 358 for the incredible carbon. Delivery. John Vidal, Environment Editor parents argue that research on the oil company BP and researchers from the Department of Physics and the environment in Germany Wising said that about once a year before the transport height of 600 to 800 million tons. This is simply nothing more than twice in Colombia and more than all African nations spend together.
PointHero
AMERICAN WHEAT OR RYE BEER Refreshing wheat or rye beers can display more hop character and less yeast character than their German cousins. This is a beginner-level style that can be brewed by extract or all-grain methods. Ferments at 65° F (18° C). OG FG IBU Color Alcohol 1.040-1.055 (10-13.6 °P) 1.008-1.013 (2.1-3.3 °P) 15-30 3-6 SRM 6-12 EBC 4-5.5% ABV 3.2-4.3% ABW Keys to Brewing American Wheat or Rye Beer: This easy-drinking beer style usually has a subtly grainy wheat character, slightly reminiscent of crackers. The hop flavor and aroma are more variable, with some versions having no hop character, while others have a fairly noticeable citrus or floral flair. Even when the hops are more prominent, they should not be overwhelming, and the hop bitterness should be balanced. The rye version of this style has a slight spicy, peppery note from the addition of rye in place of some or all of the wheat. The key mistake many brewers make is in assuming that American wheat beer should be similar to German hefeweizen. However, this style should not have the clove and banana character of a hefeweizen. This beer should not be as malty (bready) as a German hefeweizen, either, so all-grain brewers will want to use a less malty American two-row malt. To get the right fermentation profile, it is important to use a fairly neutral yeast strain, one that doesn’t produce a lot of esters like the German wheat yeasts do. While you can substitute yeast like White Labs WLP001 California Ale, Wyeast 1056 American Ale, or Fermentis Safale US-05, a better choice is one that provides some crispness, such as an altbier or Kölsch yeast, and fermentation at a cool temperature. RECIPE: KENT'S HOLLOW LEG It was the dead of winter and I was in Amarillo, Texas, on a business trip with Kent, my co-worker. That evening at dinner I watched as Kent drank a liter of soda, several glasses of water, and three or four liters of American wheat beer. I had a glass of water and one liter of beer, and I went to the bathroom twice. Kent never left the table. When I asked Kent about his superhuman bladder capacity, he thought it was due to years of working as a programmer glued to his computer and to the wonderful, easy-drinking wheat beer. This recipe is named in honor of Kent’s amazing bladder capacity. This recipe has a touch more hop character than many bottled, commercial examples on the market, but a lot less than some examples you might find. If you want less hop character, feel free to drop the late hop additions. If you really love hops and want to make a beer with lots of hop flavor and aroma, increase the late hop amounts as you see fit. However, going past the amounts listed below might knock it out of consideration in many competitions for being “too hoppy for style,” no matter how well it is brewed. OG: 1.052 (12.8 °P) FG: 1.012 (3.0 °P) ADF: 77% IBU: 20 Color: 5 SRM (10 EBC) Alcohol: 5.3% ABV (4.1% ABW) Boil: 60 minutes Pre-Boil Volume: 7 gallons (26.5L) Pre-Boil Gravity: 1.044 (11.0 °P) Extract Weight Percent Wheat LME (4 °L) 8.9 lbs. (4.03kg) 100 Hops   IBU Willamette 5.0% AA, 60 min. 1.0 oz. (28g) 20.3 Willamette 5.0% AA, 0 min. 0.3 oz. (9g) 0 Centennial 9.0% AA, 0 min. 0.3 oz. (9g) 0 Yeast White Labs WLP320 American Hefeweizen, Wyeast 1010 American Wheat, or Fermentis Safale US-05 Fermentation and Conditioning Use 10 grams of properly rehydrated dry yeast, 2 liquid yeast packages, or make a starter. Ferment at 65° F (18° C). When finished, carbonate the beer to approximately 2.5 volumes. All-Grain Option Replace the wheat extract with 6 lbs. (2.72kg) American two-row malt and 6 lbs. (2.72kg) wheat malt. Mash at 152° F (67° C). Rye Option This beer can also be made with a portion of malted rye. The rye gives the beer a slightly spicy note and adds a certain creamy mouthfeel. Replace the wheat extract with 6 lbs. (2.72kg) American two-row malt, 3.75 lbs. (1.70kg) rye malt, and 3 lbs. (1.36kg) wheat malt. Mash at 152° F (67° C).
John J. Palmer (Brewing Classic Styles: 80 Winning Recipes Anyone Can Brew)
On the night that Obama clinched the Democratic nomination, he spoke passionately about climate change, vowing that Americans would look back knowing that “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Once in office, he pledged to pass a “cap and trade” bill forcing the fossil fuel industry to pay for its pollution, as other industries did, rather than treating it as someone else’s problem. Cap and trade was a market-based solution, originally backed by Republicans, requiring permits for carbon emissions. The theory was that it would give the industry a financial incentive to stop polluting. It had worked surprisingly well in previous years to reduce industrial emissions that caused acid rain. By choosing a tested, moderate, bipartisan approach, the Obama administration and many environmentalists assumed a deal would be winnable.
Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
by 2008 the arithmetic of climate change presented an almost unimaginable challenge. If the world were to stay within the range of carbon emissions that scientists deemed reasonable in order for atmospheric temperatures to remain tolerable through the mid-century, 80 percent of the fossil fuel industry’s reserves would have to stay unused in the ground. In other words, scientists estimated that the fossil fuel industry owned roughly five times more oil, gas, and coal than the planet could safely burn. If the government interfered with the “free market” in order to protect the planet, the potential losses for these companies were catastrophic. If, however, the carbon from these reserves were burned wantonly without the government applying any brakes, scientists predicted an intolerable rise in atmospheric temperatures, triggering potentially irreversible global damage to life on earth.
Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
Pussy-Men Take your ugly crocs and birkenstocks Your overpadded Thor-lo socks Your safe SPF 50 cosmetic blocks Your zero carbon cars and solar clocks Your dumb plans to save the arctic fox Your UTNE Reader and eco-stocks and FUCK OFF! I can't breathe, I need some air.. I'm bored to death, I've gotta switch To a real man who pulls my hair Who make me come and calls me bitch. P.S. And fuck your overpriced Co-op Farmer's Market too. Produce is half-price at HEB without the snotty 'I'm an artisan' attitude. For God sakes, their fucking avocados, not the Czar's Tiffany eggs.
Beryl Dov
As countries move from fossil fuel power generation to cut carbon dioxide emissions, solar power is gaining market share around the world. Germany, thanks to a decade of generous subsidies, has more installed solar power capacity than any other country. But large coal- and gas-fired plants still have at least one big advantage over solar panels — they cannot be uprooted and carted away. As German solar supply has increased, so has the theft of panels, cables and inverters. “Solar theft continues to increase, despite the measures taken to prevent it,” says Frank Fiedler, chief executive of SecondSol, an online trading platform for solar products that has documented scores of such cases on a website. “Thieves are able to escape with thousands of euros worth of equipment.” Although panels sometimes disappear from residential rooftops, large solar parks are the main target. These tend to be situated outside built-up areas where organised gangs can pull up in lorries, work unobserved overnight and then make their escape. Losses sometimes reach as much as €500,000, Germany’s federal criminal police office says. It warns that solar panels are “often insufficiently [protected] or not secured at all”.
Anonymous
Corporations have a unique role to play in creating a cleaner environment, and they also have economic incentives to use energy more efficiently as demand and costs rise globally. If every company in the S&P 500 voluntarily reported and disclosed its energy costs, clearly and explicitly as a line item on the balance sheet, there would be pressure to reduce that cost, just as there is for every other expense item. This would result in analyst and investor pressure on corporate executives to be more efficient with their energy output and to source cheaper and alternative sources, which would have a far greater impact on carbon emissions and pollution than any political treaty in history. As an added advantage, reducing costs increases profitability, which provides the appropriate incentives for corporate executives to act in their shareholders’ best interests and effect positive social change. According to PwC, 98 percent of the S&P 500 companies surveyed can link investments in emissions reduction to value creation.55 As a result, these corporations are discovering new ways to enhance efficiencies, create new markets, and build a competitive advantage.
Jeremy Balkin (Investing with Impact: Why Finance Is a Force for Good)
In order to achieve the goals of the Paris Treaty – that global warming should not exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius – CO2 emissions must be reduced to zero by 2050. In order to succeed, we will also need to invent technologies that remove CO2 from the atmosphere in quantities that are equal to all today’s emissions. This is one of the biggest challenges humankind has ever faced. What is being proposed is an unprecedented turnaround in the world’s energy mechanisms. And 2050 is exactly as far into the future as 1990 is in the past. Since 1990, emissions have increased from twenty-two gigatons to thirty-six gigatons. That’s a 60 per cent increase. To get emissions down to zero in thirty years sounds like an unmanageable task. Like constructing a time machine, thwarting gravity or inventing a pill for bringing someone back to life. No one knows whether it’s technically possible to capture thirty gigatons per year. The technology is at an early stage and no one has figured out buildings or infrastructure that could enable us to achieve our goals. Even if we reduce emissions by 50 per cent, our problems will still have increased if we do nothing to remove the carbon dioxide already in the air. If we don’t succeed in that project, the Earth will continue to warm, the glaciers will continue to melt and the sea levels will continue to rise, submerging cities and coastal areas. The market value of a 100 million barrels of oil is about $6 billion, assuming a $60/barrel price for oil. We therefore burn approximately $600 billion a day. If anyone thinks changing our sources of energy will
Andri Snær Magnason (On Time and Water)
Indigenous people from Brazil to Uganda are finding that some of the most aggressive land grabbing is being done by conservation organizations. A forest is suddenly rebranded a carbon offset and is put off-limits to its traditional inhabitants. As a result, the carbon offset market has created a whole new class of green human rights abuses, with farmers and Indigenous people being physically attacked by park rangers or private security when they try to access these lands.
Naomi Klein (On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal)
How do we arrive at a regime that is more sustainable? How do we avoid protectionism that will impoverish us all, hurting the poorest most? The United States needs to balance its budgets. China needs to open its markets. Everybody needs to emit less. And the lever to do all those things is a carbon tax that will make all fossil fuels—and therefore also all plastics—significantly more expensive than they are today.
David Frum (Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy)
In fact, given the perversities of subsidies on such things as water and carbon-based energy, or the lack of ownership of certain crucial resources such as deep-sea fisheries, markets can send exactly the wrong signals
Charles O. Holliday Jr. (Walking the Talk: The Business Case for Sustainable Development)
The fervour accompanying these events may be deceptive. If it expresses nothing more than the zeal with which the countries of the East are casting aside the bonds of ideology, or if it is a mimetic fervour - a tribute, as it were, to those liberal countries where all liberty has already been traded in for a technically easy life - then we shall have found out definitively what freedom is worth, and that it is probably never to be discovered a second time. History offers no second helpings. On the other hand, it could be that the present thaw in the East may be as disastrous in the long term as the excess of carbon dioxide in the upper atmosphere, that it may bring about a political greenhouse effect, and so overheat human relations on the planet that the melting of the Communist ice-sheet will cause Western seaboards to be submerged. Odd that we should be in such absolute fear of the melting of the polar ice, and look upon it as a climatic catastrophe, while we aspire with every democratic bone in our bodies to the occurrence of just such an event on the political plane. If in the old days the USSR had released its gold reserves onto the world market, that market would have been completely destabilized. Today, by putting back into circulation their vast accumulated store of freedom, the Eastern countries could quite easily destabilize that very fragile balance of Western values which strives to ensure that freedom no longer emerges as action but only as a virtual and consensual form of interaction; no longer as a drama but merely as the universal psychodrama of liberalism. A sudden infusion of freedom as a real currency, as violent and active transcendence, as Idea, would be in every way catastrophic for our present air-conditioned redistribution of values. Yet this is precisely what we are asking of the East: freedom, the image of freedom, in exchange for the material signs of freedom. This is an absolutely diabolical contract, by virtue of which one signatory is in danger of losing their soul, and the other of losing their creature comforts. But perhaps - who knows? - this may, after all, be the best thing for both sides. Those societies that were formerly masked - Communist societies - have been unmasked. What is their face like? As for us, we dropped the mask long ago and have for a long time been without either mask or face. We are also without memory. We have reached the point of searching the water for signs of a memory that has left no traces, hoping against hope that something might remain when even the water's molecular memory has faded away. So it goes for our freedom: we would be hard put to it to produce a single sign of it, and we have been reduced to postulating its infinitesimal, intangible, undetectable existence in a (programmatic, operational) environment so highly dilute that in truth only a spectre of freedom floats there still, in a memory every bit as evanescent as water's.
Jean Baudrillard (The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena)
In 1997, the International Monetary Fund bailed out South Korea’s crippling financial crisis with a $58 billion loan upon the agreement that the nation open up its markets to foreign investors and relax labor market reforms, making it easier to hire and fire workers and loosen carbon emission standards so that American cars can be imported.
Cathy Park Hong (Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning)
Our view is that, contrary to its popular presentation, neoliberalism differs from classical liberalism in ascribing a significant role to the state.7 A major task of neoliberalism has therefore been to take control of the state and repurpose it.8 Whereas classical liberalism advocated respect for a naturalised sphere supposedly beyond state control (the natural laws of man and the market), neoliberals understand that markets are not ‘natural’.9 Markets do not spontaneously emerge as the state backs away, but must instead be consciously constructed, sometimes from the ground up.10 For instance, there is no natural market for the commons (water, fresh air, land), or for healthcare, or for education.11 These and other markets must be built through an elaborate array of material, technical and legal constructs. Carbon markets required years to be built;12 volatility markets exist in large part as a function of abstract financial models;13 and even the most basic markets require intricate design.14 Under neoliberalism, the state therefore takes on a significant role in creating ‘natural’ markets.
Nick Srnicek (Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work)
It would distort markets. Besides, if I bought a load of gold when I thought the price was going up, then it would drive up the price at that point. When I came to sell in the future it would depress the price. Thus, I wouldn't make the killing I thought I would, would I?" "Yeah, but futures contracts." "Same thing, dear boy." "Art, then." "If I bought Constable's Hay Wain direct from the artist it wouldn't have the same cachet as it does today. The absence of that piece from the market might mean that all of his work was devalued." "Yeah, but you could bring another piece back." "Ah, then the paint and canvas wouldn't age correctly. For older objets d'art, the carbon dating would show it was younger than it should be. Sorry, Kevin. You're not going to get rich by temporal smuggling or speculation.
Mark Speed (Doctor How and the Illegal Aliens (Doctor How, #1))
From the Bridge” Celebrating “La Navidad Cubana” Before the fall of Batista, Cuba was considered to be a staunch Catholic Nation. As in other Christian countries, Christmas was considered a religious holiday. In 1962, a few years after the revolution, Cuba became an atheist country by government decree. Then In 1969, Fidel Castro thinking that Christmas was interfering with the production of sugar cane, totally removed the holiday from the official calendar. Of course Christmas was still celebrated by Cubans in exile, many of whom live in South Florida and Union City, NJ. However it was still was celebrated clandestinely in a subdued way on the island. It was said, if it is to believed, that part of the reason for this was due to the fact that Christmas trees do not grow in Cuba. Now that Christianity and Christmas have both been reestablished by the government, primarily due to the Pope’s visits to Cuba, Christmas as a holiday has been reinstated. Many Christmas traditions have been lost over the past five decades and are still not observed in Cuba, although the Cuban Christmas feast is highlighted by a festive “Pig Roast,” called the “Cena de Navidad” or Christmas dinner. Where possible, the dinner includes Roast Pork done on a spit, beans, plantains, rice and “mojo” which is a type of marinade with onions, garlic, and sour orange. Being a special event, some Cubans delight in serving the roasted pork, in fancier ways than others. Desserts like sweet potatos, “turrones” or nougats, “buñuelos” or fritters, as well as readily available tropical fruits and nuts hazelnuts, guava and coconuts, are very common at most Christmas dinners. Beverages such as the “Mojito” a drink made of rum, sugar cane juice, lime, carbonated water and mint, is the main alcoholic drink for the evening, although traditionally the Christmas dinner should be concluded by drinking wine. This grand Christmas dinner is considered a special annual occasion, for families and friends to join together. Following this glorious meal, many Cubans will attend Misa de Gallo or mass of the rooster, which is held in most Catholic churches at midnight. The real reason for Christmas in Cuba, as elsewhere, is to celebrate the birth of Christ. Churches and some Cuban families once again, display manger scenes. Traditionally, children receive presents from the Three Wise Men and not from Santa Claus or the parents. Epiphany or “Three King’s Day,” falls on January 6th. Christmas in Cuba has become more festive but is not yet the same as it used to be. Although Christmas day is again considered a legal holiday in Cuba, children still have to attend school on this holiday and stores, restaurants and markets stay open for regular business. Christmas trees and decorations are usually only displayed at upscale hotels and resorts.
Hank Bracker
It magnifies your carbon footprint. If you cut back your animal food intake, you can make a big impact on planet Earth. Each year we eat billions of pounds of meat and drink billions of gallons of dairy products from billions of animals. In doing so, we not only contribute to inhumane animal practices, but we are responsible for the use of large amounts of chemical pesticides and fertilizers to produce animal feed, as well as large volumes of water and fuel to take animals to market. Byproducts of animal food production include greenhouse gas emissions, toxic manure lagoons, deforestation, and pollution of groundwater, rivers, streams, and oceans. According to a recent analysis conducted by CleanMetrics for the Environmental Working Group, greenhouse gas emissions generated by conventionally raising lamb, beef, cheese, pork, and farmed salmon—from growing the animals’ food to disposing of the unused food—far exceed those from other food choices like lentils and beans.26
Sharon Palmer (The Plant-Powered Diet: The Lifelong Eating Plan for Achieving Optimal Health, Beginning Today)
The farther right one stood, the more likely one was to insist that the danger was overblown, and to resist any proposed actions that the government might take in the way of emissions reduction, carbon capture, and so forth. This was a losing battle, and had been for a long time, but it gave the right-wing fringe parties political currency that they could spend elsewhere. Their bitter denunciations of governments’ heavy-handed meddling in free markets got them nowhere when it came to actually influencing public policy, but it raked in votes from conservative citizens and money from like-minded donors, which they could take advantage of in other areas, such as clamping down on immigration and making everything perfect for the Netherlands’ twenty-five remaining farmers.
Neal Stephenson (Termination Shock)
[N]obody seems to have the tools, clout, or conceptual framework we need to fix it, or even to come up with a good plan to protect ourselves from the greatest dangers. [...] And while smart, dedicated, and thoughtful people fumble with political machinery that doesn't work, such as carbon-pricing markets, protests, and the United Nations, all of us in the Global North go about our business, driving, flying, leaving lights on, running heaters and air conditioners, eating meat, charging our devices, living unsustainable lives predicated on easy consumption.
Roy Scranton (Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization)
Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology. When I started out with my first company, Zip2, I thought patents were a good thing and worked hard to obtain them. And maybe they were good long ago, but too often these days they serve merely to stifle progress, entrench the positions of giant corporations and enrich those in the legal profession, rather than the actual inventors. After Zip2, when I realized that receiving a patent really just meant that you bought a lottery ticket to a lawsuit, I avoided them whenever possible. At Tesla, however, we felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The unfortunate reality is the opposite: electric car programs (or programs for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales. Given that annual new vehicle production is approaching 100 million per year and the global fleet is approximately 2 billion cars, it is impossible for Tesla to build electric cars fast enough to address the carbon crisis. By the same token, it means the market is enormous. Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day. We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform. Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers. We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard.[431]
Charles Morris (Tesla: How Elon Musk and Company Made Electric Cars Cool, and Remade the Automotive and Energy Industries)
We have increased our population to the level of 7 billion and beyond. We are well on our way toward 9 billion before our growth trend is likely to flatten. We live at high densities in many cities. We have penetrated, and we continue to penetrate, the last great forests and other wild ecosystems of the planet, disrupting the physical structures and the ecological communities of such places. We cut our way through the Congo. We cut our way through the Amazon. We cut our way through Borneo. We cut our way through Madagascar. We cut our way through New Guinea and northeastern Australia. We shake the trees, figuratively and literally, and things fall out. We kill and butcher and eat many of the wild animals found there. We settle in those places, creating villages, work camps, towns, extractive industries, new cities. We bring in our domesticated animals, replacing the wild herbivores with livestock. We multiply our livestock as we've multiplied ourselves, operating huge factory-scale operations involving thousands of cattle, pigs, chickens, ducks, sheep, and goats, not to mention hundreds of bamboo rats and palm civets, all confined en masse within pens and corrals, under conditions that allow those domestics and semidomestics to acquire infectious pathogens from external sources (such as bats roosting over the pig pens), to share those infections with one another, and to provide abundant opportunities for the pathogens to evolve new forms, some of which are capable of infecting a human as well as a cow or a duck. We treat many of those stock animals with prophylactic doses of antibiotics and other drugs, intended not to cure them but to foster their weight gain and maintain their health just sufficiently for profitable sale and slaughter, and in doing that we encourage the evolution of resistant bacteria. We export and import livestock across great distances and at high speeds. We export and import other live animals, especially primates, for medical research. We export and import wild animals as exotic pets. We export and import animal skins, contraband bushmeat, and plants, some of which carry secret microbial passengers. We travel, moving between cities and continents even more quickly than our transported livestock. We stay in hotels where strangers sneeze and vomit. We eat in restaurants where the cook may have butchered a porcupine before working on our scallops. We visit monkey temples in Asia, live markets in India, picturesque villages in South America, dusty archeological sites in New Mexico, dairy towns in the Netherlands, bat caves in East Africa, racetracks in Australia – breathing the air, feeding the animals, touching things, shaking hands with the friendly locals – and then we jump on our planes and fly home. We get bitten by mosquitoes and ticks. We alter the global climate with our carbon emissions, which may in turn alter the latitudinal ranges within which those mosquitoes and ticks live. We provide an irresistible opportunity for enterprising microbes by the ubiquity and abundance of our human bodies. Everything I’ve just mentioned is encompassed within this rubric: the ecology and evolutionary biology of zoonotic diseases. Ecological circumstance provides opportunity for spillover. Evolution seizes opportunity, explores possibilities, and helps convert spillovers to pandemics.
David Quammen (Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic)
Initially, CERs did spur some forest projects in the tropics. But they also increased activity in an unexpected quarter. A small number of companies in China and India produced a chemical used in refrigerators. Their manufacturing process created a by-product called HFC-23. This chemical has an unusual property: it is a super greenhouse gas. Just one HFC-23 molecule causes as much global warming as 11,700 molecules of carbon dioxide. The manufacturers spotted an opportunity with CERs. Five years into the trading program, it emerged that these companies had doubled their output and had earned roughly half the world’s total CERs. The market for refrigerants had not grown, though, so why had they ramped up production? These companies had changed their business model. Their profit no longer came from producing and selling refrigerant. What they now cared about was producing and destroying the HFC-23 by-product. They duly incinerated every pound of HFC-23 they created. And for every pound of super greenhouse gas they destroyed, the companies were awarded CERs—which they then sold to polluting countries and companies in Europe and Japan. As Gerben-Jan Gerbrandy, a Dutch member of the European Parliament, explained, “It’s perverse. You have companies which make a lot of money by making more of this gas, and then getting paid to destroy it.” Creating and then destroying HFC-23 generated a lot of profit—but it provided zero environmental benefit. Even worse, it was cheaper for companies to buy credits from HFC-23 destroyers than from forest builders. So very little money flowed to rainforests. By the time this scam was recognized and stopped, Chinese and Indian HFC-23 makers had earned a fortune. Billions of dollars had been wasted; the world’s climate got nothing in return.
Michael A. Heller (Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives)
If the forest transition in the tropics runs its course, the loss of carbon to the air and species to the history books would be catastrophic for the whole world. We must halt all deforestation across the world now and, with our investment and trade, support those nations who have not yet chopped down their forests to reap the benefits of these resources without losing them. That is easier said than done. Preserving wild lands is a very different prospect to preserving wild seas. The high seas are owned by no one. Domestic waters are owned by nations with governments able to make broad decisions on merit. Land, on the other hand, is where we live. It is portioned into billions of different-sized plots, owned, bought and sold by a host of different commercial, state, community and private parties. Its value is decided by markets. The heart of the problem is that, today, there is no way of calculating the value of the wilderness and environmental services, both global and local, that it provides. One hundred hectares of standing rainforest has less value on paper than an oil palm plantation. Tearing down wilderness is therefore seen as worthwhile. The only practical way to change this situation is to change the meaning of value. The
David Attenborough (A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future)
The graph in Figure 5-1, based on research in the New York metro region, shows that the carbon footprint of a suburban single-family home is about three times larger than that of urban multifamily dwellings in neighborhoods where residents can walk to shops, schools, and transit. Even residents of “green” energy-efficient single-family houses who use energy-efficient cars produce roughly twice the carbon emissions of those living in smaller urban town houses or apartments close to buses or trains. The big problem, not surprisingly, is caused by longer commutes in single occupancy vehicles. Fortunately for the planet, the housing market is shifting in the direction of lower carbon, denser living alternatives, particularly where transit options are available (Badger 2011).
Randall Arendt (Rural by Design: Planning for Town and Country)
Marijuana, up to now, gives me little reason to adjust that opinion. Pot can be responsibly legalized. Instead, we are choosing the route we took with opioids: a now-legal, potent drug is being made widely available and marketed with claims about its risk-free nature. Big Pot is only a matter of time. Altria, which owns Marlboro, is moving into legal marijuana. The final absurdity is that as we face climate change’s existential threat, we make a weed that thrives under the sun legal to grow indoors, with a huge carbon footprint. Pot may well have medical benefits. Opioids certainly do. But supply matters. So does potency and marketing and distribution. The opioid-addiction crisis should have taught us that. I’m
Sam Quinones (The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth)
Marijuana, up to now, gives me little reason to adjust that opinion. Pot can be responsibly legalized. Instead, we are choosing the route we took with opioids: a now-legal, potent drug is being made widely available and marketed with claims about its risk-free nature. Big Pot is only a matter of time. Altria, which owns Marlboro, is moving into legal marijuana. The final absurdity is that as we face climate change’s existential threat, we make a weed that thrives under the sun legal to grow indoors, with a huge carbon footprint. Pot may well have medical benefits. Opioids certainly do. But supply matters. So does potency and marketing and distribution. The opioid-addiction crisis should have taught us that. I’m sympathetic to the idea of decriminalizing drugs, as well. Yet I believe it misunderstands the nature of addiction and ignores the unforgiving drug stream every addict must face today. One reason overdose deaths during the coronavirus pandemic skyrocketed is that police in many areas stopped arresting people for the minor crimes and outstanding warrants that are symptoms of their addictions. Left on the street, many use until they die. Certainly the story of that death toll is as complex as those of the people whose deaths are counted in it. But I suspect we’ll come to see the last ten months of 2020 and into 2021 at least in part as one long, unplanned experiment into what happens when the most devastating street drugs we’ve known are, in effect, decriminalized, and those addicted to them are allowed to remain on the street to use them.
Sam Quinones (The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth)
The crisis of fuel isn't necessarily a crisis of scarcity or overproduction. The shift away from fossil fuels isn't the end of the regime of cheap energy. Indeed, the climate crisis has afforded an opportunity for finance to present itself as a mechanism of global salvation: it is through carbon credits, offsets, and permits to pollute the atmosphere that the atmosphere will be saved - or so we are told. This is where commoning can finally be ended - through the full financial externalization of collective responsibility, turning what need to be collective decisions on the fate of the commons into a financial product in a global market.
Raj Patel (A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet)
Like any ecosystem, a modern economy cannot survive without recycling. Just as animals and plants are continually recycling the oxygen and carbon dioxide that the other provides, so too must workers recycle their wages by spending them in shops and businesses recycle their revenues by spending them on salaries if both are to survive. And just as in our ecosystems, in which a failure of recycling leads to desertification, so when recycling breaks down in the economy we end up with a crisis that results in devastating poverty and deprivation.
Yanis Varoufakis (Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails)
With the web uncovered, the intricacies of the belowground alliance still remained a mystery to me, until I started my doctoral research in 1992. Paper birches, with their lush leaves and gossamer bark, seemed to be feeding the soil and helping their coniferous neighbors. But how? In pulling back the forest floor using microscopic and genetic tools, I discovered that the vast belowground mycelial network was a bustling community of mycorrhizal fungal species. These fungi are mutualistic. They connect the trees with the soil in a market exchange of carbon and nutrients and link the roots of paper birches and Douglas firs in a busy, cooperative Internet. When the interwoven birches and firs were spiked with stable and radioactive isotopes, I could see, using mass spectrometers and scintillation counters, carbon being transmitted back and forth between the trees, like neurotransmitters firing in our own neural networks. The trees were communicating through the web! I was staggered to discover that Douglas firs were receiving more photosynthetic carbon from paper birches than they were transmitting, especially when the firs were in the shade of their leafy neighbors. This helped explain the synergy of the pair’s relationship. The birches, it turns out, were spurring the growth of the firs, like carers in human social networks. Looking further, we discovered that the exchange between the two tree species was dynamic: each took different turns as “mother,” depending on the season. And so, they forged their duality into a oneness, making a forest. This discovery was published by Nature in 1997 and called the “wood wide web.” The research has continued unabated ever since, undertaken by students, postdoctoral researchers, and other scientists, with a myriad of discoveries about belowground communication among trees. We have used new scientific tools, as they are invented, along with our curiosity and dreams, to peer into the dark world of the soil and illuminate the social network of trees. The wood wide web has been mapped, traced, monitored, and coaxed to reveal the beautiful structures and finely adapted languages of the forest network. We have learned that mother trees recognize and talk with their kin, shaping future generations. In addition, injured trees pass their legacies on to their neighbors, affecting gene regulation, defense chemistry, and resilience in the forest community. These discoveries have transformed our understanding of trees from competitive crusaders of the self to members of a connected, relating, communicating system. Ours is not the only lab making these discoveries—there is a burst of careful scientific research occurring worldwide that is uncovering all manner of ways that trees communicate with each other above and below ground.
Suzanne Simard (The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World)
Under the regime of surveillance capitalism, the corporation’s scientists are not recruited to solve world hunger or eliminate carbon-based fuels. Instead, their genius is meant to storm the gates of human experience, transforming it into data and translating it into a new market colossus that creates wealth by predicting, influencing, and controlling human behavior.
Shoshana Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism)
The California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) provides one example of what leveraging public equities at a system level looks like in practice. It has determined that climate change is a systemic risk and developed a multiyear, multi-asset-class, internally managed Low-Carbon Index (LCI) for passive equity management. Launched in 2017 with a $2.5 billion commitment, the LCI is made up of stocks in all industries in all markets (US, developed, and emerging) around the world. CalSTRS’s goal is for these holdings to have reduced carbon emissions and reserves in each market by between 61 percent and 93 percent in the coming years.4 Since passive index funds hold hundreds, if not thousands, of stocks across all industries, the CalSTRS index will paint a picture of what the future should look like in all companies around the world, in effect setting a benchmark and model for the environmental performance of large corporations on climate change.
William Burckart (21st Century Investing: Redirecting Financial Strategies to Drive Systems Change)
There’s a reason it takes multi-million dollar budgets to sell carbonated drinks, while water sells without a marketing team. The truth endures.
Vironika Tugaleva (The Art of Talking to Yourself)
In 2005 the EU, in order to provide flexibility in the control of emissions, introduced its Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which allocates the rights among more than 5,000 of the EU’s major industrial polluters, allowing those that emit less than their quotas to sell the unused rights to those that use more, and thus creating a ‘carbon market’ which determines the cost of carbon within the EU.
Simon Usherwood (The European Union: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
senator decided that he didn’t want to be the bad guy in the story. He spent Saturday huddling with West, sketching out a fresh offer for a climate bill, assembling a compromise he deemed worthy. When West passed along the document to Petrella and Deese, he told them that some fine-tuning might be required, but he thought it was a fair deal that Schumer and the White House could accept. As Petrella scanned the offer, he braced himself for the worst. But as he read, he absorbed the reality that Manchin had confounded his expectations. The plan was actually ambitious, not that far from the substance of their negotiations. Manchin had his demands, to be sure. They had covered most of this ground before. He wanted approval of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which would transport natural gas from wells in north-central West Virginia, turning his state into a major player in that energy market. He asked for the Democratic leadership’s support for a separate bill reforming the process for permitting new energy infrastructure so that it could be built without having to surmount so many bureaucratic impediments. And he needed hundreds of millions of dollars set aside for deficit reduction, to assuage his centrist conscience. But that was just horse trading. The only thing that truly mattered was his proposing more than $300 billion in tax credits that would incentivize the nation to rapidly embrace clean energy. If Congress passed his proposal, carbon emissions would fall by 40 percent of the 2005 levels by 2030. Petrella, who felt at once elated and frustrated by Manchin’s wild swings, told West, “Lance, I’ve been sticking my neck out, defending you guys, saying that you were going to fucking do something here, for a year. I’m willing to do it one more time, but it’s got to be before the August recess, and this has got to be it. This is the deal. We’re locking arms.” West told Petrella that the document in his hands was the “flight plan.” They were going to finally land the plane. —
Franklin Foer (The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future)
Enviva used impact quantification in its introduction and later under its climate change theme. It makes the point that it has avoided the release of 31 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions since its inception and equates them to four equivalent metrics. 3.5 billion gallons of gasoline not consumed. 34.5 billion pounds of coal not burned. 72.4 million barrels of oil not consumed. 5.3 million homes not using electricity for one year. This use of impacts is part of the straight line it draws from the 16 million metric tons of coal displaced to the avoided emissions and the equivalent measures. All of this illustrates its role in providing biomass to help customers reduce their carbon footprint.
Paul Pierroz (The Purpose-Driven Marketing Handbook: How to Discover Your Impact and Communicate Your Business Sustainability Story to Grow Sales, Retain Talent, and Attract Investors)
Saipem, an Italian-based company founded in 1957, has built some of the world's largest energy and infrastructure projects. It is organized into five business divisions that focus on onshore and offshore drilling, engineering and construction, and conceptual design services. Given its connection to oil and gas contracts, which effectively collapsed in 2014 with a plunge in oil prices, it has had to set a course beyond fossil fuels and rethink everything about its business. This "change or die" scenario sets the tone for its reporting and disclosure. Its 2019 sustainability report acknowledges the scenario it is facing and tackles the issue of the low-carbon transition head-on. At its core is the organziations rallying call, or "the four challenges," which describe the context and frame the opportunities it must capture to remain competitive.
Paul Pierroz (The Purpose-Driven Marketing Handbook: How to Discover Your Impact and Communicate Your Business Sustainability Story to Grow Sales, Retain Talent, and Attract Investors)
Our climate is being destroyed by unadulterated, free-market capitalism—an ideology that simply cannot be sustained on a small planet with limited resources. It is a system that has no interest in the greater good and that rewards inordinate capital and the few that have it, rather than the majority who don’t. It cares nothing for the environment or biodiversity and doesn’t give a fig about the fate of future generations. In fact, it is exactly the wrong economic system to have in place at a time of global crisis. The bankruptcy of the system is especially well upheld in the grossly asymmetric portioning of carbon emissions between the rich elite and everyone else.
Bill McGuire (Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant's Guide)
How crypto mining is impacting enviorment? Crypto mining is the backbone of Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies since miners handle all the transactions and the inclusion of new crypto coins in the network. If a network does not have a diverse mining network, it is prone to both malicious attacks and network halts. Since Bitcoin is highly correlated with the whole market, Bitcoin mining is the backbone of all cryptocurrencies. Many companies and mining rigs worldwide handle Bitcoin mining, and even individuals like you and I can perform mining with proper equipment. Bitcoin mining is a lucrative responsibility with high returns, but the mining community is recently facing a severe backlash because mining is hazardous to the environment. Bitcoin mining - a brief introduction Bitcoin mining is actually a bunch of codes trying to solve complex mathematical problems with the help of a machine's computation power. The complexity of these problems has been algorithmically set in a way that it would take around ten minutes to solve each problem, and hence every transaction takes around ten minutes to complete. The problem's complexity is increased if the time taken is less than 10 minutes and vice versa. Since its inception, when Bitcoin mining was as easy as mining on a 16-bit laptop, the field is getting cut-throat day by day, with millions of miners using high-tech ASIC mining machines costing around INR 1.5 lakhs a piece. Since there are a lot of miners, the program, which is set to release every transaction at around 10 minutes, has to exponentially increase its complexity which means high power-consuming machines with exceedingly high carbon emissions. How bad is it, really? An estimate by Digicomist, a crypto analyst website, said that Bitcoin mining consumes around 130 Terrawatt-hours of energy based on the estimates measured on July 9, 2022. These figures point out that a Bitcoin transaction takes 1455 Kilowatts of electricity, the amount of energy an average American household consumes in 49.5 days. Data by Cambridge Bitcoin Electric Consumption Index (CBECI) estimates that Bitcoin takes 0.36% of global electricity consumption. This data means that if Bitcoin were a country, it would be the 36th biggest country in terms of electricity consumption, ahead of Finland and Belgium. The above comparison is in accordance with the latest country energy data by the US. The second largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum, consumes 62.77 Terrawatt-hours of electricity per year which is comparable to Switzerland's yearly electric consumption. If the above data might not sound alarming, due to the inconsistencies of mining rigs, a massive chunk of electricity consumed is concentrated in countries with low electricity costs like Kazakhstan. The local flora and fauna of the region are duly hurting due to crypto mining, which will consume more electricity with the advancement of mining hardware. Bitcoin mining in the US alone is creating an estimated 40 Billion pounds of carbon emissions. There are several incidents of Bitcoin mining damaging the environment; one of the examples is Greenidge generation, a former coal power plant that then switched to natural gas. When Greenidge started mining Bitcoin, it used to draw water from a nearby lake in Dresden, New York, which increased the lake's temperature by around 50°F, endangering the fauna of the lake and its nearby region. After China's recent crackdown on cryptocurrency and mining, many rigs moved to Kazakhstan, a cost-effective alternative but the implications on Kazakhstan were higher. Many reports have come out of the country regarding constant blackouts due to the high power consumption of crypto miners. Kazakhstan, a country that mainly relies on fossil for its energy, does not have enough electricity to cater to the needs of both miners and its civilians.
Coingabbar.com
This book is a compilation of interesting ideas that have strongly influenced my thoughts and I want to share them in a compressed form. That ideas can change your worldview and bring inspiration and the excitement of discovering something new. The emphasis is not on the technology because it is constantly changing. It is much more difficult to change the accompanying circumstances that affect the way technological solutions are realized. The chef did not invent salt, pepper and other spices. He just chooses good ingredients and uses them skilfully, so others can enjoy his art. If I’ve been successful, the book creates a new perspective for which the selection of ingredients is important, as well as the way they are smoothly and efficiently arranged together. In the first part of the book, we follow the natural flow needed to create the stimulating environment necessary for the survival of a modern company. It begins with challenges that corporations are facing, changes they are, more or less successfully, trying to make, and the culture they are trying to establish. After that, we discuss how to be creative, as well as what to look for in the innovation process. The book continues with a chapter that talks about importance of inclusion and purpose. This idea of inclusion – across ages, genders, geographies, cultures, sexual orientation, and all the other areas in which new ways of thinking can manifest – is essential for solving new problems as well as integral in finding new solutions to old problems. Purpose motivates people for reaching their full potential. This is The second and third parts of the book describes the areas that are important to support what is expressed in the first part. A flexible organization is based on IT alignment with business strategy. As a result of acceleration in the rate of innovation and technological changes, markets evolve rapidly, products’ life cycles get shorter and innovation becomes the main source of competitive advantage. Business Process Management (BPM) goes from task-based automation, to process-based automation, so automating a number of tasks in a process, and then to functional automation across multiple processes andeven moves towards automation at the business ecosystem level. Analytics brought us information and insight; AI turns that insight into superhuman knowledge and real-time action, unleashing new business models, new ways to build, dream, and experience the world, and new geniuses to advance humanity faster than ever before. Companies and industries are transforming our everyday experiences and the services we depend upon, from self-driving cars, to healthcare, to personal assistants. It is a central tenet for the disruptive changes of the 4th Industrial Revolution; a revolution that will likely challenge our ideas about what it means to be a human and just might be more transformative than any other industrial revolution we have seen yet. Another important disruptor is the blockchain - a distributed decentralized digital ledger of transactions with the promise of liberating information and making the economy more democratic. You no longer need to trust anyone but an algorithm. It brings reliability, transparency, and security to all manner of data exchanges: financial transactions, contractual and legal agreements, changes of ownership, and certifications. A quantum computer can simulate efficiently any physical process that occurs in Nature. Potential (long-term) applications include pharmaceuticals, solar power collection, efficient power transmission, catalysts for nitrogen fixation, carbon capture, etc. Perhaps we can build quantum algorithms for improving computational tasks within artificial intelligence, including sub-fields like machine learning. Perhaps a quantum deep learning network can be trained more efficiently, e.g. using a smaller training set. This is still in conceptual research domain.
Tomislav Milinović
If the world were to stay within the range of carbon emissions that scientists deemed reasonable in order for atmospheric temperatures to remain tolerable through the mid-century, 80 percent of the fossil fuel industry’s reserves would have to stay unused in the ground. In other words, scientists estimated that the fossil fuel industry owned roughly five times more oil, gas, and coal than the planet could safely burn. If the government interfered with the “free market” in order to protect the planet, the potential losses for these companies were catastrophic.
Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
Instead of more consumerism – the buying of experiences, the accumulation of things, of eating the ‘other’ – perhaps writers should name their own environment. What is the shape of your watershed? How is your electricity produced? Where is your water treated? Where is your food produced and by whom and how does it travel to your local market? What are the names of the rocks under your feet and around you? What formed those geological features? Who were the first humans here? What flora and fauna live upon it and what are their habits and interfaces? What stars whirl above you and what names have they been given, what lore? How can one trace the relations, find the slippages between histories, the linkages, to find the complexities in naming and of the named? Travel as one’s carbon footprint; travel as a footstep, travel as a naming in a landscape in all its complexity. Homing as a way to place oneself in a constellation of process and being.
Hạo Nguyên
The idea that capitalism and only capitalism can save the world from a crisis created by capitalism is no longer an abstract theory; it’s a hypothesis that has been tested and retested in the real world. We are now able to set theory aside conglomerates that were supposed to model chic green lifestyles who have long since moved on to the next fad; at the green products that were shunted to the back of the supermarket shelves at the first signs of recession; at the venture capitalists who were supposed to bankroll a parade of innovation but have come up far short; at the fraud-infested, boom-and-bust carbon market that has failed miserably to lower emissions; at the natural gas sector that was supposed to be our bridge to renewables but ended up devouring much of their market instead. And most of all, at the parade of billionaires who were going to invent a new form of enlightened capitalism but decided that, on second thought, the old one was just too profitable to surrender.
Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
That study confirmed Keller's point: that a reusable grocery bag made of non-woven polypropylene plastic would have to be used at least eleven times to have a lower carbon footprint than using disposable single-use grocery bags. There were other comparisons in the study, too: Using a paper bag three times would do the trick, while it would take 131 trips to the market with a cotton bag to have a lower carbon footprint - which meant the material used for a reusable bag was critical.
Edward Humes (Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash)
Exploitation: early entrants make use of the wealth of opportunity in their environment to multiply. Most fail, not least because they are poorly-connected individuals facing a dangerous world on their own, but some may eventually build a system with potential and connectedness. This is known as the r phase: r has for many years been used as a label for the rate of growth of the population of an ecology (example of phase: young trees).2 2. Conservation: the system persists in its mature form, with the benefit of a complex structure of connections, strong enough now to resist challenges for a long time, but with the weakness that the connections themselves introduce an element of rigidity, slowing down its reactions and reducing its inventiveness. This is the K phase, where the ecology reaches its carrying capacity (example: mature trees).3 In due course, however, the tight connections themselves become a decisive problem, which can only be resolved by . . . The back loop (moving from bottom-right to top-left in the diagram): 3. . . . release: at this point, the cost and complication of maintaining the large scale—providing the resources the system needs, and disposing of its waste—becomes too great. The space and flexibility for local responsiveness had become scarce, the system itself so tightly connected that it locked: a target for predators without and within, against which it found it harder and harder to defend itself. But now the stresses join up, and the system collapses (example: dying trees). This is the omega (Ω) phase, as suggested by Holling and Gunderson, and it is placed by them in its ecological context: The tightly bound accumulation of biomass and nutrients becomes increasingly fragile (overconnected, in systems terms) until it is suddenly released by agents such as forest fires, droughts, insect pests, or intense pulses of grazing.4 4. Reorganisation: the remains of a system after collapse are unpromising material on which to start afresh, and yet they are an opportunity for a different kind of system to enjoy a brief flowering—decomposing the wood of a former forest, recycling the carbon after a fire, restoring the land with forgiving grass, clearing away the assumptions and grandeur of the previous regime. Reorganisation becomes a busy system in its own right (example: rotting trees). This is the alpha (α) phase.5 In this phase, there is a persistent process of disconnecting, with the former subsidiary parts of the system being broken up. But our diagram is drawn on a graph of potential (increasing from bottom to top) and connectedness (increasing from left to right), which allows us to note a curious aspect of this back loop: the defining relationship of the fore loop—where more potential is correlated with more connectedness—is reversed. In the back loop (even) less connectedness goes with more potential. How can this be?
David Fleming (Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy)
Climate change was, for them, inconceivable because it would get in the way of profits—the Koch brothers run enormous pipeline networks; they are among the biggest leaseholders in Canada’s tar sands—but also because it marred the purity of their belief system. The antigovernment forces had, at some level, no choice but to deny global warming, because tackling it would have required governments to take strong action—at the very least, to set a price on carbon so that markets could then work their putative magic.
Bill McKibben (Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?)
The international oil majors currently use an internal shadow price of carbon in their investment decision making of between $60 and $85 a ton, somewhat in line with expectations that are currently reflected in U.S. stock market valuations.
Amy Myers Jaffe (Energy's Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security (Center on Global Energy Policy Series))