[happychicken]

And we'll need a massive re-think about the way we transport things including ourselves around the place - a move away from any transport requiring large amounts of oil-based fuel.

Food will have to be produced and distributed locally rather than from the other side of the world.

[seldom_seen]

The idea that we're going to "save the earth" and the "economy" with a "green new deal" just as industrial civilization is hurling itself over a cliff is ludicrous.

The province of Alberta is being dug up and turned in to a slag heap, the last tracts of rainforest are on fire and being turned in to crops to run automobiles. Global fisheries are depleted..just read this morning that the north pacific pollack fishery is about to collapse. This is just the beginning...we're just getting started with the last great plunder of nature. Wait until people really get desperate.

This "Green new deal" is the product of deskbound people stuck in a cubicle on the 58th flloor of some office building in New York or London. It's insulting.

[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('TheDude', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Plantagenet', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '
')The Green Economy Initiative - which will be spearheaded by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), headquartered here, and is already being backed by governments – draws its inspiration from Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, which ended the 1930s depression and helped set up the world economy for the unprecedented growth of the second half of the 20th century.

[Carlhole]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Plantagenet', 'I')ts a simple fact that the economy contracted AFTER the New Deal was in place. This contraction started in 1936 and culminated in 1937. It was very severe. FDR's new deal not only didn't stop the depression, it didn't even help keep unemployment from rising and GDP/GNP from falling as shown by the collapse of 1936-7.

It took WWII to end the US depression.

[Graeme]

Thanks for all your contributions. I would like to add that this thread is about a 'Green New Deal' and not the cause of the Great Depression. However, I do sympathize with Carlholes criticism of Fed.

I think that this initiative by the UN with support from governments around the world is the best energy policy that we have seen in recent years. George Soros also believes that a green economy could yet save the world:

George Soros on the Clean-Energy Economy

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'L')ast Friday, in an interview with Bill Moyers on PBS, George Soros, who has made billions of dollars based on his ability to read the ebb and flow of markets, suggested that investing in alternative energy technologies, refurbishing aging electricity grids and pursuing household energy efficiency, among other green strategies, could yet save the global economy.

Mr. Soros, whose prescient book “The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means,” was published in May, told Moyers that the business of green could serve as the new “motor of the world economy” — echoing a refrain he has used before.

[mos6507]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('seldom_seen', '
')This "Green new deal" is the product of deskbound people stuck in a cubicle on the 58th flloor of some office building in New York or London. It's insulting.

[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Graeme', ' ')George Soros also believes that a green economy could yet save the world

[Graeme]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Plantagenet', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Graeme', ' ')George Soros also believes that a green economy could yet save the world

[Revi]

I don't see why we can't live in compact towns and get around in a small vehicle. Take mass transit between towns. Live in houses that make most of their own energy. Why don't we? Cheap energy. Now that that's practically over it's time to change to the Green New Deal.

It's going to happen anyway. Why not embrace it as official policy? Fossil fuel is going to make up a decreasing share per person of the energy we use. The only way to have any growth is to utilize renewable energy.

We can live on renewables. Right now our water is being heated by the sun, I am typing this from hydropower, my car is charging in the sun and stored sunlight in the form of wood is waiting to heat our house.

We use half of the fossil fuel that we used to, and we could use half of that. Our lives are much better than they were when we used twice as much.

I can't see why it wouldn't work. It works for us.

http://www.msad54.org/sahs/appliedarts/ ... /index.htm

www.sunnev.com

[dohboi]

ss said: "The province of Alberta is being dug up and turned in to a slag heap, the last tracts of rainforest are on fire and being turned in to crops to run automobiles. Global fisheries are depleted..just read this morning that the north pacific pollack fishery is about to collapse. This is just the beginning...we're just getting started with the last great plunder of nature. Wait until people really get desperate."

Very well put. And all good reasons to turn dramatically away from the kind of rampant market fundamentalism and radical capitalism that has driven these depredations, and to turn toward some new model that proiritizes preservation of crucial biological systems on which all of our futures depend.

If some global elites can't save us, we'll have to depend on aliens I guess.

Our own elites are pretty uniformly brain dead an clueless.

[tex123]

I'm glad they figured out what the next bubble should be. Tulips and dot.com are so passe.

[mos6507]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Revi', '
')I can't see why it wouldn't work.

[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Revi', '
')
It's going to happen anyway. Why not embrace it as official policy? Fossil fuel is going to make up a decreasing share per person of the energy we use. The only way to have any growth is to utilize renewable energy.

We can live on renewables. Right now our water is being heated by the sun, I am typing this from hydropower, my car is charging in the sun and stored sunlight in the form of wood is waiting to heat our house.

[Revi]

I reluctantly agree, Plantagenet. We'll need something to provide power. The perils of carbon may be worse than the perils of nuclear.

Even Obama is saying we'll need some nuke.

It costs a lot and we don't have much to spend anymore.

It's time to get the green economy going. There may be no choice.

[dohboi]

"It costs a lot and we don't have much to spend anymore."

This says it all. The credit crisis has sucked all the cash out of the economy. Nothing of any magnitude, alternative or otherwise, is likely to be developed now.

Perhaps that is ultimately for the best. We have to get past our period of frenetically always trying to patch up our last debacle, and almost always creating new ones in the process. Time to just stop doing as much and buying as much as we have. Ecological necessity has finally met economic necessity. Maybe the market does work after all?

[dohboi]

"Sorry, cars have to go within the next 20 years."

Well, this part we can agree on, at least. Maybe we can start here.

No cars in 20 years looks like a hopeless dream in the US, with some three quarters of the population in suburbs and exurbs. It looks like you blokes are a bit better off in Britain. Or have you succumbed to mass exodus to ever further outposts around the perimeters of your urban centers?

How reachable would a car-free near-future for Britain be? Will it require Arthur rising out of his mound to lead you to such a glorious future, smashing cars and lorries with Excalibur?

"No money? Print some!"

That's not working out too well for you friends up in Iceland these days.

[dohboi]

Thanks for the insights, Gas.

And I hadn't seen that news about the loan to Iceland. I hope they can work something out with EU. Not that EU is perfect, but at least their not run by the mafia like Russia seems to be.

[The_Virginian]

UNtrue

Most people remember the headlines: Massacre Of Innocents As UN School Is Shelled; Israeli Strike Kills Dozens At UN School. There was just one problem: The story, as etched in people's minds, was not quite accurate.

Physical evidence and interviews with several eyewitnesses, including a teacher who was in the schoolyard at the time of the shelling, make it clear: While a few people were injured from shrapnel landing inside the white-and-blue-walled UNRWA compound, no one in the compound was killed. The 43 people who died in the incident were all outside, on the street, where all three mortar shells landed.


--------

No moral judgment about the whole affair...it's just important to know the truth...