“Technologies for circular economies” by Hazel Henderson

Jay OwenSustainability News, Latest Headlines

Re-thinking, re-designing, reducing, reusing, regenerating nature

4 SEPTEMBER 2021, HAZEL HENDERSON

The days of empty promises of “net-zero by 2050” are too little

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes (IPCC) in its latest report, has given humans its starkest warning: to end burning of fossil fuels and shift our industries toward renewable resources within the next ten years. This requires the global transition toward the goals of the UN Climate Accord in Paris in 2015, to be re-assessed at COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland in November 2021. This means shifting to regenerating the Earth’s natural re-cycling and restoration processes which humans have exceeded during the past Industrial Age. This means mimicking Nature’s technologies, as we humans have done in the past.

 

 

The days of empty promises of “net zero by 2050” are too little, rely too much on offsets and are too late, as reported in key articles in New Scientist, August 21, 2021. Today we must focus on reducing emissions to zero before 2050. Our beloved children are demanding this: This Is the World Being Left to Us By AdultsNew York Times, August 18, 2021.

This does not require further technological research, but instead, to use and scale up all the regenerative technologies and means already available. Current consumerist lifestyles, political will, and incumbent special interests are slowing this transition to more sustainable, equitable, greener, knowledge-richer societies of the incoming Solar Age. This now rapidly advancing transition leaves legions of research professors, think tanks, technology pundits, venture capitalists, stock market players, and lobbyists still on the wrong side of history, with their intellectual and financial assets stranded and losing out. As we have reported in our Green Transition Scoreboard® annual reports since 2009, private sector investors, asset managers, entrepreneurs, and global NGOs are helping drive this green transition into mainstream politics in the European Union (EU), the USA and in many other countries. Other reports that confirm ours include RethinkXHow Humanity Can Choose to Reduce Emissions 90% by 2035 through the Disruption of Energy, Transport and Food with Existing Technologies, (2021). Even this report omits the additional expansion of the world’s food-based only on its 3% of freshwater which could be expanded with nutritious halophyte, salt-loving plants thriving for centuries in 22 countries without fertilizers or pesticides on unused and desert land as we detail in Capturing CO2 While Improving Human Nutrition and Health, (2018).

 

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