Volume 56, Number 3 · February 26, 2009
Can We Transform the Auto-Industrial Society?
By Emma RothschildThe distant future, in these frightening times, includes the prospect of a low-carbon economy. According to the energy plan outlined by the Obama-Biden campaign, overall US emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases will by 2050 have been reduced by 80 percent, from more than twenty tons per person per year in 1990 to some 2.6 tons per person. Cars and light trucks now account for about 20 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions, or more than four tons per person per year, and more than 40 percent of US oil consumption. "The UAW shares the growing national concern about climate change," the president of the United Auto Workers union told a congressional committee in 2007; even the president of GM said that "GM is willing to engage in discussions on carbon constraints on the US economy."
....A new deal in which the bailout of the automobile industry was one component of a program of investment in the transformation of the auto-industrial society would connect economic, environmental, and energy policies. It would be a commitment to current as well as capital expenditures; to a Transportation Security Agency, for example, composed not only of people who search passengers in airports but of people who drive electric buses in inner cities. Like the "Economic Security" programs of the New Deal of the 1930s, a new New Deal would be an effort to change the distant future of the United States—in this case the future use of space—by government expenditure and more open regulation.[31> But something of this is going to happen in any case, because of the increase in federal government expenditure that has already been promised —the macro-economic stimulus —and the decrease in state and local government expenditure that is one of the few predictable consequences of economic depression, as income and sales tax revenues fall. For Obama, who is the most metropolitan, as well as the most cosmopolitan, of all modern American presidents, the next generation could begin, for once, with the urgent economic crisis of now.Source: New York Review of Books
In April 2009, adventurer and environmental storyteller David de Rothschild, along with a handpicked crew of leading scientists, sailors, adventurers, thought leaders and creatives will embark on an ocean adventure of unrivalled proportions, approx 10,500 nautical miles across the Pacific Ocean from San Francisco to Sydney in the Plastiki a 60 foot vessel made out of plastic bottles, srPET plastic and recycled waste products.
AccoladesNational Geographic awarded David de Rothschild the accolade of ‘Emerging Explorer‘ and Clean Up The World has invited David to be an international ambassador. Furthermore, the World Economic Forum made David a ‘Young Global Leader’.
Literary workIn early 2007 David wrote the ‘Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook’, which was the official companion book to the Live Earth concert series and in the summer of 2008 David was the editorial consultant for Earth Matters, a children’s book published by Dorling Kindersley.
Even Geert Wilders from the Netherlands gets a look-in.
2 comments:
Don't forget the daddy:
“There is a huge difference in the Soviet-style mentality that occurred in Paris in 1982, and the extraordinary achievements that politicians, led by Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy, have made to save the global banking system from systemic collapse,” he says. “They moved to protect the world from billions of unemployment. In five to 10 years those banking stakes will be sold – and sold at a profit.”
Baron Rothschild shares most people’s view that there is a new world order.
In his opinion, banks will deleverage and there will be a new form of global governance. “But you have to be careful of caricatures: we don’t want to go from ultra liberalism to protectionism.”
You learn some new bullshit every day:
deleverage definition | Dictionary.com
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