The year is 2018. London traffic came to a standstill when the Extinction Rebellion climate activists organized human roadblocks, while at home in the states, the Climate Silence and the Climate Mobilization Project people marched with the message that it’s time to “cancel the apocalypse.”
Pan over to the political sphere, several Democratic contenders are signed onto the Green New Deal framework — the restorative, climate-protective measures estimated to take trillions of dollars noting also, that curbing climate change could prevent trillions of dollars in global damages.
All the planet’s magnificent civilizations — ancestral, fungal, cryospheric — are wobbling at a fulcrum, like a drop of water on the head of a pin. A tilt more to one side puts us on our way to abolishing global poverty in the 21st century. Current trends on global prosperity show people are living longer, more children are going to school; extreme global poverty has already fallen worldwide from 85% to 10%.
Why, then, have we seen only a little consensus on the implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals? It is a reticence that could be explained by the 3.3 to 4.5 trillion estimated as needful US dollar annual investment, as published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Now pan away to the glass conference rooms in Denmark and Spain, where the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] reports receive the scrutiny of a painstaking peer review process every few years.
Zoom in over the conference table to the Methodology Report on Short-lived Climate Forcers. Estimates in these reports give a window to correct for the cascade effects of climate imbalance while it’s still viable to do so. In 2018, that window was twelve years.
Amsterdam, already the model city of urban engineering known for leading among nations with the moves in climate change mitigation and adaptation, has decided to commit to the ambitious goal of becoming the first completely-circular city by the year 2050. Officials have invited Oxford economist Kate Raworth to be on the city’s post-pandemic economic planning team, who has joyously accepted.
At the most basic level, going circular means to think about economic infrastructure organized into the shape of a donut. Or a compass. Kate Raworth’s written word offers the best explanation, as she coined the term in her book Doughnut Economics, Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist. “The Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries … acts as a compass for human progress this century.”
Not everybody’s mad about it. [Please note, possible UK reader, we do realize that not being “mad about it” has another meaning in the UK.] Some are even rushing in as early adopters. The World Economic Forum promised to create $4.5 trillion in economic value in the next 11 years for corporate leaders to “go circular.”
Here in late-capitalist America, we might be asking ourselves what it’s going to take for robust government recovery responses to the approaching climate changes. “What would the good and wise people of Amsterdam do?”
If we learned anything from the pandemic, it’s that a government can implement lickety-split when it is imperative to get it on time. When needs must, the devil rides.
