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China and the United States are the world’s two largest emitters of CO2 and other GHGs. Together they produce almost half of the world’s emissions – the number currently stands at 45%. They must both work assiduously to address these problems, and with as much cooperation as possible. China actually produces more than twice the emissions of the US, approaching 12 million metric tons per year compared to 5 million or so by the US.
ESG is taking some fire, and we think it needs a re-definition. It focuses on companies, and we think it can, and should, also focus on entire nations. ESG has its roots in the ideas of University of Chicago sociologist James S. Coleman (1926-1995), credited as one of the first people to use the term social capital , and a key writer on the topic late in his career.
Author’s Note: We have teamed up with McMaster University to develop a for a research and executive roundtable series on the primacy of networking technology to prepare for, drive, and enable the resiliency and sustainability of the new digital world order in which we all now live. This is the opening essay for that six-month research hike, with trail-marking breadcrumbs in a webinar stops along the way, and the capstone being at the Great Canadian Data Centre Symposium 2022 (GCDC22), scheduled
By Bruce Armstrong Taylor Climate 4.0 is a post-industrial-era state of biosphere equilibrium reached only when the unit being measured has not only achieved net-zero carbon, en toto, but is both circular and regenerative. And at the level of whatever unit is being measured. Unit being measured means the individual person (you/me), home, business, corporate enterprise, public agency, city, state/province, nation state.
The SEC's proposed rule changes regarding corporate reporting of Scope 1 and 2, and under certain circumstances, Scope 3 greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions, strike a middle ground between the view that strong, relentless government regulation is needed to address climate-change and the view that the market should decide everything. By having companies report their emissions – which in itself will enforce a discipline upon them to document and more closely manage their carbon profile across the scope
The dynamic growth of mobile communications is driving positive socioeconomic progress throughout the developing world. The most dramatic effects have been seen in Sub-Saharan Africa. I make these statements by analyzing the work I've been doing for the past decade with Tau Global Research , and I've been heartened to see similar opinions expressed by other people and organizations in recent years.
I think of HAL 9000's implacable red eye staring relentlessly, tirelessly at the activities of the Discovery One's unfortunate crew in Arthur Clarke's novel and Stanley Kubrick's movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. I also think of the Eye of Sauron in J.R.R. Tolkien's earlier Hobbit creations. This is how I imagine the Earth: all-knowing yet impassive, and effectively eternal, regarding us in a dour, saturnine fashion as we flippantly gallivant our way to destruction.
The governments of China and India have made their moves regarding the COP26 climate-change abatement conference, which opens in Glasgow on Sunday, October 31. Xi Jinping, Video Star China's supreme leader Xi Jinping has announced he will deliver remarks by video. His expected no-show in real life at Glasgow have already been criticized by US President Joe Biden's administration.
There's a well-known fantastical element to much great Spanish Latin America literature and art, and one could regard fantastical aspirations such as creating a new EU as being in line with such a worldview. The reality is somewhat different. Our research has consistently found Latin America to lag the other developing regions of the world over the past 10 years.
The Spanish language originates in the ashes of the Roman Empire, and today is the primary language of most of South and Central America, some of the Caribbean, Mexico, and about 10% of the United States. This constitutes what I call Spanish World, a rich, culturally deep place of which I have very little knowledge. I remain a beginning-level Spanish speaker, and doubt my ability to improve significantly.
I just returned from four lovely days in San Diego, attending the Sustainable Brands '21 (SB21) ( www.sustainablebrands.com ) conference. I appeared on a panel that was focused on the potential ROI of sustainable, regenerative business practices. My role was to take a high-level view of nations and regions as a whole, as places to do business based on their technological and socioeconomic conditions and progress.
In my previous post , I discussed the large nations of Europe and the imperative for their leadership in global efforts at climate-change abatement and creating sustainable economies. I have a little more context to that discussion: I ran a little twitter poll recently asking people to vote on which European country will be the most consequential – not necessarily the largest – within 30 years.
Europe's five largest countries – Germany, France, the UK, Italy, and Spain – have a combined population about equal to that of the United States. They have a combined GDP about two-thirds the size of the US. Yet produce less than half the CO2 and related emissions of the US every year. The 26-nation European Union (which no longer includes the UK) produces about 60% of the US total, and has reduced its overall emissions almost 40% from its peak 40 years ago.
I ran three little polls on my twitter account last week, seeking people's opinion as to what will be the most consequential country 30 years from now – in Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and the world. By “consequential,” I don't necessarily mean “largest.” The polls were not meant to seek – or capable of seeking - rigorous, statistical valid results.
A project in South Korea to eliminate coal-fired electricity emissions to zero by the year 2050 illustrates both the promises of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and achieving sustainability and the difficulty of doing it quickly. The project is in Chungnam, also known as South Chungcheong Province, and the site of 31 of the country's 61 coal-fired electricity plants.
This week has been Climate Week at the United Nations in New York. Part of the General Assembly meeting, Climate Week saw both China and the United States, the world's two largest CO2 and related emissions producers, issue significant statements related to climate-change abatement. China's commitment to stop funding coal-fired power plants outside its borders ducked the important question of how much more coal it is planning to burn domestically.
Capital-city relocation and construction projects as described in my previous post are not new. We can go all the way back to Roman Emperor Constantine, who created a new capital more than 1,000 miles from Rome (more than a month’s journey in those times), to improve communications and address the administrative challenges imparted by his predecessor Diocletian, who'd cleaved the original empire into western and eastern divisions.
A newly announced plan to build a $4.5 billion, high-speed rail line in Egypt to service a new capital city, financed with investment from China, is the latest indicator of a recent trend in developing nations of governments throwing their hands in the air and starting from scratch to create viable, workable administrative centers. The new rail line is part of a current effort in several cities around the world to create new, sustainable capitals and similar major new cities: The Egyptian projec
I wrote the other day about Crossing the Chasm , a 1991 classic from Geoffrey Moore that addressed the stages of product adoption. I sought to apply its thesis to adoption of sustainability among the nations and peoples of the world. As an initial step in examining this issue, today I took a look at Congressional votes in favor of sustainability, as recorded by the League of Conservation Voters ( www.lcv.org ).
US Lags Badly in Addressing Emissions My previous post looked at how Members of Congress in the United States either support or lag in support of pro-environmental (and thus, sustainability) legislation. It showed 54% overall support in Congress, but in a highly polarized way, with Democrats scoring 93% support and Republicans only 7% support. A look at another dataset – the level of CO2 emissions and the inherent challenge in achieving significant progress in eliminating them – has been part of
Building A Sustainability Index for Our Times “Bending the linear economy towards the circular” is a nice way to visualize how humans must become far less wasteful and cognizant of how the damage we inflict on the Earth will destroy us in the end. There are unequal challenges facing the 180 or so nations of the world in making any sort of progress to this goal.
A quick review of the book Crossing the Chasm is useful in understanding how to frame the Climate Change movement. The book now 30 years old, was written by Geoffrey Moore, a former English professor who has made his living as a thoughtful consultant for the past few decades. The gist of the book defines the audience for tech products as having people at five different stages: innovators, early adopters, the early majority (which he also called pragmatists ), the late majority, and laggards.
Most analyses say no, and the best of the most recent studies say the gap is widening, but it's still worth thinking through. By BRUCE ARMSTRONG TAYLOR bruce@climate4.org July 7, 2021 The very best, most sustainable answer to this question is that the vehicle you don't buy is the most sustainable of all. I'm waiting for autonomous, self-driving EV by subscription or shared ownership, frankly.
About five years ago at the beginning of 2016 I wrote an article for the Altoros company blog about "Q sectors." All national economies are traditionally viewed as having three basic sectors – the first, or primary (agriculture and extraction), the secondary (industrial), and the third, or tertiary (services). The "Q" means "quarternary" and "quinary," more simply stated as "fourth" and "fifth.
Outside of Rwanda, which is in my current Top 10 most relatively dynamic sociotechnomic countries in the world, Tanzania finishes 67 th among the 143 nations I survey in my Tau Index , with the rest of the region below that. Another critical issue today is to gauge the challenge facing each nation to improve its level of CO2 and related emissions, while continuing to develop economically.
The question is, how do the developed nations of the West effectively and honorably interact with the developing world today, in East Africa and elsewhere? Investment and private-public partnerships (another use of the term “PPP”) are ideally more appealing to people I know in the tech business, particularly when it comes to major traditional and digital infrastructure.
Africa is so large that even its regions are consequential in size, population, and potential global influence. In this post and two to follow, I'll take a look at East Africa, specifically the eight nations of Ethiopia, South Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Kenya, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This area's population is approaching 400 million people (compared to about 328 million in the U.S), contained with 2.3 million square miles (compared to about 3.1 million for the co
I don't use the term "Third World" to describe these nations, as it is certainly outdated and often perceived as insulting. Whatever they are called, the poorer nations of the world are seen as basket cases in much general reporting, places of sub-standard living conditions and starving people throughout. I agree that this is the reality for a still-high percentage of people in many developing nations, particularly in the group of Least-Developed Countries (LDCs).
(Note: I wrote this article in August 2019 and published it our Tau Institute site. I was inspired by Bruce Taylor, who outlined for me the dimensions of the Digital Infrastructure that is increasingly essential to the global economy. We took this thought beyond compute, storage, and networking to the electricity that powers it. With the interest by the Biden Administration in Digital Infrastructure, this article has become quite relevant.
The world's citizens face a seemingly contradictory challenge: how to lighten our heavy carbon footprint while at the same time lifting the economies of the world's developing nations. By Roger Strukhoff The first part of the challenge seems existential. If we don't make serious inroads to eliminate CO2 and related emissions from our atmosphere, we face the prospect of an uninhabitable planet sooner rather than later.
By Eric Aldrich The Resilient and Connected Network, an ambitious GIS mapping tool developed over the past 10 years by more than 270 scientists led by The Nature Conservancy (TNC), gives conservationists a way to save biodiversity for the future. It is now available for land trusts, government agencies, and scientists for conservation planning throughout the contiguous lower 48 US states.
Under discussion is the notion that Industry 4.0 may be the way out of climate- change catastrophe as its transformative power to dematerialize and decarbonize the economy is marshalled by industries and governments By Bruce Armstrong Taylor SmartNations Foundation and The Climate 4.0 Project have teamed with CleanTech Alliance and the CleanTech Focus Network to host a series of panel conversations on the positive role Industry 4.0 can/will have on decarbonization.
March 22, 2021 : In June 2019 Britain became the first advanced economy to enshrine in law a goal to eliminate or offset all greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050 , symbolising a growing trend towards “net-zero” goals. Governments from Costa Rica to America and China have adopted them. So have a growing number of companies and financial institutions.
In my previous post , I reported on an analysis we've done at the Tau Institute that shows a relatively modest global investment to bring the electricity resources of the developing world much closer to developed-world standard. Specifically, I mentioned an overall number to bring the developing world to 25% or 40% of the developed-world standard. But large projects stall and founder in the best of circumstances.
In Part 1 and Part 2 of this post, I described how we can measure the economic and technology-driven challenge facing nations in the developing world to develop their energy grids. The circle to be squared here is how to lift up the two-thirds of the world's nations that lie below median income levels to something approaching developed-world status.
The mission of getting the world to reach Climate 4.0 status, in which the global economy has transformed itself from being primarily focused on consumption to exclusively focused on regeneration, follows a path abounding with potholes and hurdles along the way. The first step is to understand that two-thirds of the world's nations have economies in which their people live below the world average.
For Digital Transformation and Industry 4.0 to be truly successful – in scale and velocity – in bending the curve of carbon-heavy linear corporate economics toward zero-carbon circular and regenerative business performance must become a priority matter. By Bruce Armstrong Taylor, Editor Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) corporate performance deserves to rise to the level of a business first principle.
It’s been fashionable in the 21st Century for large companies to pursue beneficent initiatives, i.e. create foundations, name Chief Sustainability Officers, develop Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs, and, particularly in the technology business, support the notion of #TechForGood. The latter encompasses projects large and small across a wide range of experiences.
Digital Transformation, Industry 4.0: the keys to bending the curve of the linear economy toward the circular The Climate 4.0 Economy will be achieved only when global warming is held to 1.5°C above the pre-industrial-era level is achieved -- and well within this century. The UN’s 195-member-country Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sets the target year at 2050.
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