Want to Address Climate Change? We Need New Economic Models!

By Hazel Henderson for American Sustainable Business Council, asbcouncil.org, January 20, 2016

Robert Pollin, author of Greening the Global Economy and Joseph Romm of the Center for American Progress, author of Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know, are both influential in the USA but little known to global audiences.  Both argue that climate change generated by the burning of fossil fuels and other unsustainable human activities can best be addressed by more efficient use of all resources and an accelerated shift to renewable energy: solar, wind driven by the Sun, hydro and geothermal from within the Earth.

Joseph Romm reaches his conclusion as a physicist with deep scientific research and policy experience.  Robert Pollin reaches the same conclusions as an academic economist turned renewable energy entrepreneur and investor.  I and our researchers at Ethical Markets Media reached similar conclusions a decade earlier, based on my experience as a science policy wonk for the US Office of Technology Assessment (OTA); the National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Engineering Policy  from1974 until 1980. My book, The Politics of the Solar Age (Doubleday, 1981) reviewed in the New York Times talked about a more sustainable energy path.

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