02/11/2222
The Urgent Need for Planetary Systems Change
In February, 2022, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued “a stark warning about the impact of climate change on people and the planet, saying that ecosystem co…
Roar Bjonnes
Roar Bjonnes is the co-founder of Systems Change Alliance, a long-time environmental activist and a writer on ecology and alternative economics, which he terms eco-economics.
Articles
26/05/2222
What is carbon offsetting?
If you are concerned about global warming and you are the CEO of a corporation in Europe or the US, and your company’s production plants pollute the air and water with various chemicals, then you’d naturally want to do s…
13/05/2222
“The world's richest ten percent are responsible for an estimated 47 percent share of global CO2 emissions,” writes Florian Zandt at Statista. This is the result of a recent study published in the journal Nature Sustainability. The st…
04/04/2222
1. Plant-Centered Diet
Photo by Anna Pelzer on Unsplash
The Western diet is increasingly meat-centered and raising livestock accounts for nearly 15% of global greenhouse gasses. If livestock were a nation of their own, it would be the third gre…
03/03/2222
Deep inside the Lysefjord, on the Norwegian southwestern coast, heavy rain is the main energy source in producing clean energy. Waterfalls cuts into the mountains. The fjord’s wide gorge has steep, partly overhanging rock walls on both sides.
In t…
01/02/2222
The story of how we got to climate change is familiar to most of us: our extractive human habits, free market economies, and short-sighted use of new inventions gave us coal-fired power plants, industrial farming, and gas guzzling automobiles. These …
02/12/2121
In American consumer culture there is an apt saying: “Shop, shop until you drop.” Not surprisingly, American household consumption amounts to about 70 percent of Gross National Product (GDP). On average, most countries spend between 50-80 percent of …
23/11/2121
William E. Rees, in his essay ”A blot on the land“ (Nature 421, 898; 2003), uses the ecological-footprint concept to argue that the “carrying capacity” of the Earth has been exceeded because of technological and economic growth, and to counter s…
10/11/2121
With COP26 still underway in Glasgow, Scotland, a leaked report from the IPCC (The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) states that the only way to avoid climate collapse is to end capitalism’s perpetual economic growth model.
…
02/11/2121
At the COP26 summit in Glasgow, more than 100 world leaders representing over 85% of the planet's forests have committed to ending deforestation and land degradation by 2030, a British government statement says.
Among the nations taking part are C…
19/10/2121
Adam Smith’s most famous and most quoted idea is that of the invisible hand--the notion that if you work for your own selfish goals, the result would still be the same as if you worked to serve society as a whole.
In economic terms this means that…
15/09/2121
Albert Einstein supposedly said that “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” This statement, made a long time before global warming, is acutely relevant today, not only in solving chronic health problems bu…
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- Roar Bjonnes
- December 15, 2020
The best selling French economist Thomas Piketty has documented in well researched detail how inequality is increasing in the world today. His solution? A global wealth tax on the rich. But is that enough to create a more just and equitable economy? In this podcast, Roar Bjonnes suggests that tax reforms are not enough and that what we need instead is economic systems change through economic democracy.
Dec 15, 2020
The best selling French economist Thomas Piketty has documented in well researched detail how inequality is increasing in the world today. His solution? A global wealth tax on the rich. But is that enough to create a more just and equitable economy? In this podcast, Roar Bjonnes suggests that tax reforms are not enough and that what we need instead is economic systems change through economic democracy.
Nov 12, 2020
Shopping locally, growing some of our own fruits and vegetables, these are all very important habits to cultivate if we want to create deeper systems change. But individual changes are not enough in order to stem the tide of economic destruction against nature and the local economy. In this podcast, Roar Bjonnes outlines the eight design principles we need to implement a truly local economy.
Oct 27, 2020
Corporate capitalism is addicted to making money and therefore has a very short planning cycle--hardly longer than its next quarterly profit fix. A truly green, regenerative economy will have to plan long term. To do that, we need deeper economic changes. In this episode, Roar Bjonnes talks about the two most important systems changes needed to create an eco-economy of the future.
Oct 09, 2020
Green capitalism is overlooking a fundamental issue in economics; an issue that we need to overcome through systemic restructuring in order to create a sustainable economy. In this episode of Musings on Systems Change, Roar Bjonnes talks about what this fundamental issue is and how to overcome and go beyond the limits of green capitalism.
Sep 25, 2020
In this new Musings on Systems Change podcast, Roar Bjonnes asks if the popular Triple Bottom Line slogan of green capitalism--Profit, People, Planet--which has been adopted by companies such as Shell, is really enough in creating systems change in economics.
Aug 20, 2020
Learning from human history. Not all peoples and cultures from the past were environmentalists. What can we learn from their mistakes?
Aug 13, 2020
Is sustainable capitalism just another green mean machine or does it hold the promise of a new economy? Can we solve our environmental problems by producing and buying green products?
Jul 24, 2020
Is making capitalism more green a practical strategy? How can an economy built on greed create global economic justice and ecological balance?
