Building a Green Economy - Columbia University

Due to the urgent need for the United States to respond to the escalating crisis in global climate destabilization, Organizing for Action is hosting action and education events around the country this month, and has invited Joseph Robertson—author of Building a Green Economy: On the Economics of Carbon Pricing & the Transition to Clean, Renewable Fuels, founder and president of Geoversiv Envisioning and a coordinating volunteer for the non-partisan Citizens Climate Lobby—to speak about carbon pricing policy and the emerging green economy.

Robertson will discuss how the United States and the world can transition comprehensively and affordably to a 100% clean energy economy, within the time-frame required to avert the most catastrophic climate impacts.

The event will be hosted by Roshni Karwal.

- - - RESOURCES - - -

Liberate Capital from Carbon Risk

If we do not work collaboratively and thoughtfully to change current practice, trillions of dollars of private investment capital will remain stranded in outmoded fossil fuel operations. Those carbon-focused business lines carry with them diverse varieties of long-term risk, linked to the pervasive externalization of costs and secondary impacts, related to the use of fossil fuels. Such exposure is known as carbon asset risk. We need to liberate that capital to protect future life and build the creative collaborative clean energy economy that will sustain us in a low-carbon future.

Solving It: Fee & Dividend to Stabilize Climate

A carbon fuel reimbursement—a carbon correction fee with 100% household return, also known as Carbon Fee and Dividend—is designed to span the entire marketplace, so that citizens, families and small businesses can drive change toward the systems that will create the most liberating, prosperous, sustainable future. This HaikuDeck slideshow details the basics.

Building First-level Resiliency

Building first-level resiliency requires sound thinking about what kind of generative investments build humanizing social resources, at the human scale—in the immediate environment of real people living their lives organically as they do every day in the society in question. We can do this by first harmonizing generative economic analysis with the testimony of stakeholders and their least self-interested witnesses.

Restore Human-safe Climate by 2070

To mitigate the severity of already built-in climate impacts, and to reverse the long-term trend toward a destabilized and more volatile global climate system, we need to stop emitting greenhouse gases. We can do that in 20 years, using already existing technologies, without spending more than we would were we to invest primarily in new forms of fossil fuel production. Once we cease adding excess CO2 and methane to the atmosphere, we will still need decades to bring CO2 levels down to 350 ppm. If we stop emitting excess greenhouse gases by 2035, we can get to 350 ppm by 2070.

8 Steps to Fuel Free Sustainable Democracy

This 8-point framework-upgrade plan would do what R. Buckminster Fuller consistently set out to do, in his work: replace a flawed system that generates unnecessary corrosive impacts with a more vibrant, organic intelligent order, aimed at reducing entropy and expanding fairness, continuity and sustainable human thriving, thus eliminating the crisis-level system-wide problem of mounting and accelerating global climate destabilization.