Saving the Planet according to Bill

I am at least somewhat inspired by the fact that one software billionaire decided to resign from operating his company and putting his money to work on the most critical issues of our time. Even he is mystified by the conspiracy theories that have resulted from his work in virus development and prevention. His medical student daughter who has received the vaccine says that unfortunately it didn’t contain the microchip so loved by the conspiracy crowd that might make her as smart as her dad.

Bill Gates has written a book about how to save the planet and several reports have summarized some of the steps. Here are seven of them where we need to send a message:

• Advocate for governments to support research and development in clean energy technology if and when the private sector refuses to do so. That’s how we got to where we are with modern technologies - government funding

• Level the playing field of production costs of carbon use. Both the actual producer and consumer needs to pay for it. Otherwise we all do.

• Ensure that the right information is available to home owners and landlords re upgrades. That’s a government responsibility to know and communicate.

• Ensure that government keeps up to date with building standards and mandates the best construction policies.

• When communities transition from fossil fuels and jobs are lost, respond that governments respond with financial help to ease the obvious pain that the changes bring.

• Ensure that government policies work on the big things - not just the small stuff.

• Take a coordinated approach to technology, policy and markets. It’s not as though they aren’t all connected.

About Oil

Justin Worland writes a good occasional newsletter for Time called One-Five Everything Climate and a recent one focuses on the fact that large oil companies are waking up to the fact that the engine that has fueled them for decades may have to address climate change.

He points out both how oil is damaging the environment and at the same time has brought us all the prosperity we value. We blame oil companies for their disinformation and at the same time savour all the benefits they bring us. He quotes Daniel Yergin’s book, The Prize which links both democracy and the rise of capitalism. But Blowout by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow takes a different stance, noting both its importance and its questionable governance. She calls it “the least well governed industry in the history of mankind.” She stresses its political power as historian Timothy Mitchell does in his book, Carbon Demoocracy. He stresses the importance of oil to the economy. He also notices how it can also enforce authoritarian governance as it has in the Middle East.

All recent - and all providing food for thought.

The Doughnut- an important perspective.

That one? - Or this one?

Canadians are fans of doughnuts with endless brands. But the one I have recently discovered is more than a calorie laden deliverer of sugar but a way to bridge economy and the planet. Kate Raworth’s doughtnut brings these two aspects of our lives together in a remarkably intelligent way.

I was moved after a recent conference to ponder the words in a distributed report entitled Church Growth Statistics. Not surprisingly totals were down showing a decline - and there was an underlying anxiety in what the report showed. If only 25% of the parishes studied were growing what did this predict for the future.

The benchmarks were the number of persons attending on Sundays and the average annual donation. From my not-for-profit director days, I would have used similar ones. What both depend on for a happy outcome is growth. Enter an aging population with aging buildings. The vocabulary shifts at this micro level the same way it does in the macro one. We start to hear about “sustainability”, or “sustainable growth” or” long term sustainability” as the video below shows. What is missing is the reality that we live on a planet whose capacity for growth has limits. To make it even worse, our collective practice of exploiting its resources make it even more devastated

Economics is complicated. So is politics We have to decide whether we are citizens or consumers in every realm in which we exist - even church land. I expect there will be some new perspectives on how we use words like growth and sustainability going forward..

Here’s some help with the doughnut:

You can also visit Kate Raworth’s site for more information here.

Out of Fashion

Fashion appears to be killing us. Fast Company tells us several really disturbing things about its effects.

• Think you are helping by sending your old clothes to Goodwill? In California alone, the company spends seven million on dumping them.

• In Vasteras, a town in Sweden, a power plant relies on unsold H&M products as a fuel source.

• Every piece of unsold clothing has relied upon materials to make and package them and fuel to transport them. Now destroying them takes additional resources that are destroying us.

• Clothing companies are making 53 million tons of clothes. Much of it ends up in landfill or in oceans; much of it includes plastics.

The writer of the article notes that some companies are trying to reduce their carbon footprint. Nevertheless 100 billion pieces of new clothing for the seven billion humans on the planet in 2015 and that number has doubled in 15 years. The 80-20 rule also applies. We wear 20% of what we have 80% of the time.

The journalist’s solution is to buy better quality and more expensive and fewer clothes. But she doesn’t deal with the reality that those of us in the West have far more clothes than we need already - or that our identity is tied so closely to what we wear. Other kinds of beauty are all around us. We’re not the most important species on the planet and the most clothes or the most luxurious clothes will never change that.

A recent documentary of CBC’s The Passionate Eye documents the real cost of cheap fashion to those who produce it ad you can watch it here. The effects of the use of water is particularly sobering and the devastation of the environment is heart-breaking. The telling moment is when some of the young women who promote fast fashion on their websites saw this for themselves, they changed their attitude. Telling the full story to the consumers is our greatest challenge.