When it comes to climate change, we — the media, the public, the world — need radical transformation, and we need it now. Just as the smartest minds in earth science have issued their warning, the best minds in media should be giving sustained attention to how to tell this most important story in a way that will creates change. We may be doomed even if that happens. But we’re surely doomed if it doesn’t.

The world is approaching a tipping point on climate change, when protecting the future of civilization will require dramatic interventions. Avoiding this scenario will require a green economic transformation – and thus a radical overhaul of corporate governance, finance, policy, and energy systems.

Understanding the real problem.

These free studies and reports contain the latest authoritative information about food security, U.S. flood risks, renewable energy, and much more.

Addressing climate change will involve renewable energy, low-carbon transportation, energy efficiency, sustainable agriculture, ecosystem restoration, along with dozens of other innovative and exciting ideas.

Chile was the poster child for economic growth and poverty eradication — until the yawning inequality created by its market-friendly policies sparked an intense backlash. While subway prices may have been the spark, the ongoing public disorder was fueled by deeper and longer-standing concerns over inequality and the injustices of the private market model Chile, led by the so-called «Chicago boys», faithfully embraced. 

The Omidyar Network believes capitalism can still be a powerful force for good. But while free markets have led to prosperity for some, they have also generated increasingly harmful and untenable inequities across economic, racial, and geographic lines. They are capitalists who know that the current form of capitalism is fundamentally broken. That’s why they are working to address the structural challenges at the heart of our economic system, and to shape a new, inclusive economy where markets serve the interests of all people and society. 

In a monumental step toward setting broader standards for corporate leadership, the lobbying group Business Roundtable is endorsing stakeholder capitalism. Is it achievable? 

Milton Friedman’s free-market ideas found favor in a free-love era and helped redirect the country toward the right. The aftershocks of his radical arguments are still being felt today.

The current system has led to profound inequality. To fix it, we need businesses and executives to value purpose alongside profit. When we finally start focusing on stakeholder value as well as shareholder value, our companies will be more successful, our communities will be more equal, our societies will be more just and our planet will be healthier.

Nations United is a special, first of its kind film, created by the United Nations on its 75th Anniversary and to mark five years since the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals. In the midst of a pandemic radically transforming our world, Nations United tells the story of the world as it is, as it was, and as it could be. It focuses on the solutions and action we need to tackle poverty, inequality, injustice and climate change. 

The planet will not wait for us to see sense. Investing in sustainability is the logical economic decision, and must be seen as a matter of urgency, as the real basis for economic recovery. A necessary redesign of the post-pandemic world that involves, fundamentally, technological, political, economic and geopolitical decisions, such as opting for clean and sustainable technologies instead of continuing to depend for everything on burning hydrocarbons. 

But the last, arguably most important obstacle comes in the form of international borders. The division of the world into sovereign nation states whose supposed mission is to provide a higher level of well-being to their citizens in direct competition for resources with other nation states has turned our planet into a living hell desperately in need of supranational control mechanisms. This will be the biggest challenge in reimagining capitalism: countries that claim what they believe to be their historical right to produce more carbon dioxide to drive development, others that refuse to reconvert their energy grid or modify their tax schemes, tax havens that offer refuge to capital that should be taxed in their countries of origin, more or less proactive or inactive environmental policies…in short, a wide variety of strategies that are completely impossible to agree upon and that lead many skeptics to state, simply, that the problems of the planet, even those that are leading us toward our own destruction as a species, have no solution.

The sooner we understand that this can be done, and that we must base our calculations and our decisions of all kinds on the long term, the sooner we will see it clearly. And above all, we will understand that the decision regarding the climate emergency is enormously simple, and is not political: it is simply that there is no other possible decision that makes sense.

As a professor of innovation with a background in technology and biology, I write about these topics on a regular basis in my pages in Spanish and in English. If you are interested, subscribe to my page or follow me on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn... or even better, right here on Refind!