This is the front-page headline carried by the Daily Mirror on New Year’s Day. Will this be the year transformative change happens? Or will we face another decade of business as usual? One relatively simple test of our current trends in decarbonising our lifestyles is to ask ourselves this question: How many cars can the UK take? In 1971 there were 15.5 million cars on the road. By 2000 there were 27 million. Today, the number is 38 million and still rising! So, despite the clear and undeniable impact of climate change around the world ,we keep growing our dependency on fossil fuelled transport. As one commentator has ruefully claimed: “jam today has become part of our way of life”.An exciting and thoughtful new book offers a more optimistic view of the next decade:
A Finer Future is the blueprint for an inspiring regenerative economy that avoids collapse and works for people and the planet. https://www.moralmarkets.org/book/a-finer-future/
I met two of the authors ,Hunter Lovins and Stewart Wallis at an OECD meeting on Wellbeing in Paris in 2019. This is a summary of their story:
Humanity is in a race to forestall a global catastrophe. We face a future ravaged by global warming with 65 million migrants brutalised by the social and economic consequences, along with widening inequality, and political gridlock.
As fires and flooding sweep the globe, the spectre of collapse looms ever larger. A Finer Future demonstrates that humanity has a chance, a real choice to take a different route, based on the principles of a regenerative economy.
The authors describe in some detail an evidence-based roadmap for achieving this by:
- Transforming finance and corporations
- Reimagining energy, agriculture, and the nature of how we work
- Enhancing human well-being
- Delivering a world that respects ecosystems and human community.
As this eloquent and hopeful book suggests: can the world ease down on the global gas pedal and avoid collapse? Is there time? Is there enough money, technology, freedom, vision and foresight ? Their answer: “We think a transition to a sustainable world is technically and economically possible, but we know it is psychologically and politically daunting”
They argue that the world needs a new and transformative narrative; one which seeks to create a world that works for 100% of Humanity. This new narrative is based on an economy in service to life as exemplified by the Wellbeing Economy Alliance which re-frames the current neoliberal paradigm which dominates our thinking and actions.
Postscript: The City of York to Ban Cars within the Next 3 Years
York, which attracts millions of tourists every year to its medieval walls, cobbled streets and 13th-century Gothic cathedral, does not escape the smog. According to the data, compiled by Friends of the Earth, 12 locations in the city centre exceeded national air quality standards of 40 micrograms of nitrogen dioxide per cubic metre (ug/m3). A bus stop on Rougier Street was the city’s most polluted spot in 2018, the data shows, followed by a taxi rank outside the railway station (59.9 and 57.7 ug/m3 respectively).
transformativefuturelearning.home.blog 