Climate change, Global action after Copenhagen, Greening the Brown Economy

The global financial, energy and environmental crises all have their roots in decades of intense natural resources extraction along with poor governance. The result is that a massive but largely hidden ecological debt has steadily built up. It is a toxic debt that will be difficult to repay in the face of climate change and unsustainable growth and consumption patterns, and is also a debt not fully accounted for either in financial rescue packages or in plans for greening our brown economies.

These crises have a number of common features, and if corrected promptly as part of fiscal reforms could synergize the emergence of more sustainable economies. These features include misleading market prices that do not properly cover all the costs and risks, hidden market incentives, opaque transactions, inadequate accounting of assets, a lack of precautionary mechanisms to respond to early warning signals, and a perverse social compass that has allowed massive inter-generational debts to accumulate. Obscured in the shadows there are other very unsettling findings that include an absence of controls to address the destruction of natural capital, a lack of accountability, an unerring belief in models that have little connection to reality, and an excessive hubris in the place of ethics and common sense.

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