People ... Peter Augsten
A Sustainable Society

'Our global economy is treating the planet as if it were a business in a liquidation sale.'

Burgess COMMENTARY
I agree very much with the theme of this post. It seems so obvious, so why do so few major corporations, bankers and politicians embrace these ideas. I argue it is because, as Peter Drucker famously said, you manage what you measure. The dominant measures in the modern socio-enviro-economic system are money profits, company stock price performance and GDP growth. Relative to the power of these measures we do nothing to measure the state and performance of society nor the state and performance of nature. The is a terrible state of affairs and and a train wreck waiting to happen! Peter Burgess http://www.truevaluemetrics.org
Peter Burgess

'Our global economy is treating the planet as if it were a business in a liquidation sale.'

Recent article from Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy provides deep insights to what it will take to survive for life on earth:

http://steadystate.org/time-to-stop-worshipping-economic-growth/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DalyNews+%28The+Daly+News%29

The myth of eternal quatitative growth in the light of finite resources is heading us to bold issues; we need an urgent transformation of global and country economic systems. Current attempts with sustainability reports and indexes will not lead to good results, as the system itself is flawed... no brochure can change that. Quest for more profit, more operational efficiency, and nurturing of exploitatory regimes / systems, is not of help here, but counter-productive and fuel on the fire...

Consultancies, companies, and political actors must work in parallel and integrated to drive a truly sustainable setup.

Excerpt from a.m. article with critical transition steps to take in the given emergency situation:

'To remain within the nine planetary boundaries, nations must shed the fetish of economic growth and transition to a true-cost, steady state economy. Some of the critical transition steps include:

• Replacing the GDP as a measure of well-being (lots of work has been done on coming up with an index of sustainable productivity).

• Getting the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to require corporations to disclose their pollution externalities (the SEC is not hopeless, as can be seen by its recent decision to require CEOs to publish their salaries along with those of the average workers at their companies).

• Going to a four-day work week to secure fuller employment (this has happened in some European countries; Canadian economist Peter Victor has papers on why this is a crucial transition step).

• Dematerializing the economy (i.e., so that it’s cheaper to repair an appliance than it is to buy a new one).

• Identifying the areas in which the economy should grow—and those where it should shrink or degrow (i.e., the usage of fossil fuels must shrink sharply, and in so doing, roof-top solar will grow to become a much larger part of the global economy).

• Identifying the most heinous types of economic growth (ruthless and futureless) and showing how their costs exceed their benefits.

• Stabilizing population growth to keep humanity from further transgression of the nine boundaries.

There are about seven billion people on earth today, and forecasts indicate there will be nine billion by 2050. Already, almost one billion malnourished people are feeling the squeeze, as they painfully bear testimony to the truth of what Malthus predicted two centuries ago. Key first steps to stabilizing population in a progressive way are:

• Empowerment of women.

• Requiring all foreign assistance to be designed so that women will be better off as a result.

• Making contraceptives widely available.