Greening the Economy

The upcoming summit "Rio+20" is not only to set the stage for a green economy, but also to provide an impetus for the institutional reform of the UN environmental sector. An analysis by Barbara Unmüßig.

Ralf Fücks, President of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, gave a welcome address at the conference “Opportunities and Challenges: The Future of E-mobility in Germany and the US”. The e-mobility conference was hosted by the German Embassy and The Representative of German Industry and Trade in Washington D.C. on March 30, as part of the Transatlantic Climate Bridge initiative.

The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) has recently published a new report: The Myth of Green Jobs - The European Experience. It claims that clean energy technologies increase energy prices and don’t lead to a net job growth in Europe. Given the German experience, Arne Jungjohann argues, AEI’s report has several flaws.

Americans consumed 275lb of meat in 2010. That is more than 341 grams each day. Most Americans do not know - or care to know - where their daily meat comes from. The truth is: in the United States, 79% of pigs are raised on farms with 2,000 pigs or more. These factory farms promised better employment, affordable food for everybody and better, more efficient farming practices. They delivered the opposite.

The Heinrich Boell Foundation has published a new report on greening the budget by pricing carbon and cutting environmental harmful subsidies. The publication provides lessons on how greening the budget combines fiscal responsibility with the environmental sensibility that is inevitable for a sustainable future.

In many places, including Germany, the idea of a Green New Deal continues to be criticized from the well-known conservative angle and, more recently, from a progressive perspective as well. This new critique of the Green New Deal is not valid because it fails to understand that the Green New Deal does not entail a simple “greenwashing” of the existing system.

Der Kopenhagener Klimagipfel hat in Europa für Enttäuschung gesorgt. Nicht so in der USA. Klimaschützer kämpfen hier weiter um das Klimagesetz. Doch eine Mehrheit ist alles andere als sicher. IN GERMAN ONLY.

According to an estimate of the U.S. Congressional Research Service, the global financial crisis destroyed 40% of the world’s GDP. Since then, stock indices show a significant recovery of the lost wealth; however, analyses are likely to show that, on the whole, the response to the crisis (government stimulus packages and especially bank bail-outs of worldwide estimated $14 trillion) redistributed wealth upward. In the U.S., unemployment has exceeded the 10% mark and one out of every nine people receives food stamps.

The green industrial revolution will, on a grand scale, create new products, services, and jobs. Although much remains to be done, the great transformation is on its way. In this collection of short articles, the authors debate the pros and cons of carbon capture and storage, the American turn to "green," and the questions of how economic growth and climate protection can be reconciled.

Humanity is confronted by historic challenges. While the economic and financial crisis has rocked the foundations of our economic system and threatened the livelihoods of millions of people here in Europe and in the rest of the world, we cannot afford any further delay in tackling the crises in the realms of climate change and global justice.