4.3.3 Pipe dreams? The idea underlying complementary currencies – that there is a great well of social capital waiting to be drawn upon to make society more sustainable – is an idea that is becoming quietly influential. ‘Social capital’ is a term frequently used by those mainstream politicians and civil servants tasked with addressing the widening gap between rich and poor people within societies throughout the world. Indeed, investing in and enhancing social capital is now the starting point in
4.2 Carbon reduction targets Let's now look at carbon footprint reduction targets in a bit more detail. The first international agreement to set carbon reduction targets was the 1997 United Nations Kyoto Protocol, which requires developed countries to reduce their human-generated greenhouse gas emissions by an average of just over 5% on 1990 levels by 2008 to 2012. By the time the treaty came into force in 2005, only the USA and Australia had refused to sign. (A new Australian government finally signe
2.3.2 Total carbon footprints Of course, the picture changes when you consider total CO2 emissions for different countries rather than emissions per person. Figure 8(b) is another chart that shows that America was by far the greatest total emitter of CO2 in 2002, but, owing to their huge population
2.2.4 Identifying the carbon heavyweights I've focused on two studies of the carbon footprint of UK individuals and households, but there are many others (e.g. WWF, 2006; Goodall, 2007 and Marshall, 2007a). References 2.6.2 The role of modelling studies State-of-the-art models are designed to simulate the workings of the climate system (in so far as this is currently understood), and include the ‘internal’ interactions that generate short-term natural variability in the real world. They provide modellers with a means of carrying out ‘virtual’ experiments on the climate system. In the present context, an important aim of these experiments is to identify the ‘signal’ of a human influence on climate, so studies typically involve ‘ 2.2.1 Long-term rhythms in the climate The instrumental record referred to above is based on direct temperature measurements (using thermometers), and extends back only 150 years or so. Temperatures further back in time are reconstructed from a variety of proxy data. These include historical documents, together with natural archives of climate-sensitive phenomena, such as the growth or retreat of glaciers, tree rings, corals, sediments and ice cores (see Author(s): 1.1 Introduction At the beginning of the 21st century, terms such as the ‘greenhouse effect’, ‘greenhouse gases’ and ‘greenhouse warming’ are printed or spoken thousands of times a week in the context of climate change caused by human activities. This section is designed to consolidate your understanding of the basic science behind these terms, and then to review what is known about the human impact on the composition of the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial age, commonly put (in this co 1.3.7 Corporate connections continued One issue that might be added by a workers' organisation or trade union, for instance, might be that of freedom of association and the right of workers to organise. Another might be the right to collective bargaining. In fact, the coverage of the codes of conduct vary considerably depending on who instigated the code and the parties involved (Pearson and Seyfang, 2001). Most codes of conduct, it seems, are top-down affairs, drawn up by the companies involved or by trade associations. Some hav 1.1.3 Introduction continued The difficulty perhaps is that things which happen at some distance from the everyday routine of our lives are often hard to place or connect with. Moreover, it has to be said that not everyone views factory sweatshops in quite the same way as groups such as Oxfam, or indeed endorses their negative claims about the use of cheap labour in places such as East Asia. For that is what the statements of such groups are: claims. And they are far from uncontroversial. In fact, it is poss 1.1.2 Activity 1 You have already glanced at Figure 1 and some of the worki Acknowledgements The content acknowledged below is Proprietary (see terms and conditions) and is used under licence. Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material within this unit. Box 4: Four Scenarios for 2050, Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, 22nd
Report, Energy– The Changing Climate, June 2000. Crown copyright material is reproduced under class licence number C01W0000065 with the p 4.5 Sustainability of renewable energy sources Renewable energy sources are generally sustainable in the sense that they cannot ‘run out’ – although, as noted above, both biomass and geothermal energy need wise management if they are to be used sustainably. For all of the other renewables, almost any realistic rate of exploitation by humans would be unlikely to approach their rate of replenishment by nature, though of course the use of all renewables is subject to various practical constraints. Renewable energies are also rela 2.3.1 Public participation and perspectives on sustainability When it comes to issues around the environment, ‘experts’ – whether ecologists, economists or other types of social scientist – are clearly not infallible. Environmental crises have led to a questioning of traditional expert support as a guarantor of environmental planning. This has had two consequences. Firstly, there have been some interesting and useful explorations amongst environmentalists in seeking guarantors through the domain of spiritualism. In particular, traditional worldv 2.2.3 Ecological economics Ecological economics, which formally came to prominence in the mid-1980s, represents a departure from reliance on the use of mainstream economic modelling. Instead, it branches out to actively engage with and incorporate the ethical, social and behavioural dimensions of environmental issues. In short, ecological economics attempts to provide an interdisciplinary approach to environmental issues, whereas environmental economics maintains the primacy of economic modelling. Mark Sag 2.2.2 Environmental economics and green consumerism In economic terms, green consumerism is typically expressed using measures based on the willingness to pay (WTP) principle. As mentioned above, this takes two main forms: eco-taxation, in which environmental costs are estimated and added to the price of commodities (e.g. vehicles with high carbon emissions); and eco-labelling, in which products are labelled with relevant environmental information, such as is now required by the food industry and governments in many industrialised count 2.2.1 Environmental economics Environmental economics emerged as a sub-discipline in the 1960s, following a tradition that began in the early twentieth century with ‘agricultural’ economics and continued in the 1950s with ‘resource’ economics. In each case, natural resources are treated as environmental assets in the same way as other resource inputs, using the classical mainstream supply and demand economic models. David Pearce, who at one stage was at the forefront of environmental economics and was an ac 2.2 Economic valuation: towards ecological economics The blue whale could have supplied indefinitely a sustainable yield of 6000 individuals a year. This is one of the earliest references to sustainability in the literature, taken from the 1971 edition of the science journal Nature (cited in Senge et al., 2006, p. 45). Here, the blue whale is given instrumental value – a means of measuring not the survival of the blue whale for its intrinsic v 2.1 Accounting for the consequences of environmental harm The ethical tradition of consequentialism informs not only what matters from the perspective of caring for the environment, but also what matters from the perspective of accountability towards it. In eighteenth-century Europe, the actual environmental consequences of rapid economic development, triggered by the industrial revolutions taking place at that time, prompted an increasing concern for accountability. The most evident expression of this came with ideas of sustainable development Learning outcomes By the end of this unit you should be able to: describe environmental matters regarding obligation and entitlements from a ‘caring’ perspective; appreciate the significance of environmental consequentialist ethics in conversations around developing care; identify and compare formal and less formal expressions of environmental responsibility; understand ‘accountability’ in the context of environmental issues; ide
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