I share this post from environmentalist and founder of Solar Century, Jeremy Leggett, which is a co-member with me of the Green New Deal group:
The tenth anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and the onset of the financial crisis, is on 15th September. The Green New Deal group, a team of British green economic thinkers of which I am a member, has updated a report it wrote at that time, recommending an investment programme on the scale of the New Deal of the Great Depression in the 1930s, to repair economies and keep people in work. Had this happened, we might have had a chance of staving off the rise of authoritarian and proto-authoritarian populism that has swept the world since. Our arguments (and the same or similar arguments by many others like us) were not acted on then. Many have analysed why, not least of late Jeremy Grantham and Martin Wolf. Now we fear arguments such as ours have to be acted on, or our civilisation will collapse into a collage of police states, ruled by despots desperately trying to dismiss as fake news the environmental disasters that increasingly will be washing away their economies, and any prospects their populations may once have had of a life worth living.
This slideshow is my compilation, from entries in the Future Today chronology, of the energy-and-jobs case. The Green New Deal group's report is downloadable here.
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Very good slide show. Back in 2015 a large japanese company who built coal fired stations asked us to do some due diligence on two coal-fired stations in the process of completion in Europe. One questions reduced us to tears of laughter “Parr-san – could you also review the future of coal in Europe” – there was a big temptation even in 2015 to give a two word reply: “what future”. Writing on the wall even then.
Agreed