Page 9 - CSA Speaker Bulletin October 2019 | CSA Celebrity Speakers

CSA SPEAKER BULLETIN SUSTAINABILITY
TRATNHSEFOGRRMEAATTION
A GLOBAL GREEN NEW DEAL
Facing a global climate
emergency, a younger generation
of millennials and Gen Zs is
spearheading an unprecedented
planetary mobilization in support of
a global Green New Deal to save life
on Earth and setting the agenda for
a bold political movement with the
potential to revolutionize society.
In the United States, all of the major
Democratic Party candidates for
the U.S. 2020 presidential elections
have announced their support of a
Green New Deal, as has the United
States Conference of Mayors. In the
European Union, Ursula von der Leyen,
the President-elect of the European
Commission, has likewise made the
Green New Deal the centerpiece of
Europe’s transformation into a zero-
emission post-carbon society.
While the Green New Deal has
become a lightning rod in the political facilities, energy generation plants,
sphere, there is a parallel movement
emerging within the business
community that will shake the very
foundation of the global economy
in coming years. Key sectors of the
economy – ICT; power and electricity;
transportation and logistics; and real
estate – are fast decoupling from
fossil fuels in favor of ever cheaper
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solar and wind energies and the
accompanying clean technologies,
green business practices, and
processes of circularity and resilience
that are the central features of an
ecological society.
The levelized costs of utility-scale
solar and wind installations have
plummeted and are now below
the cost of nuclear power, oil,
coal, and natural gas, leaving the
old conventional energies and
accompanying technologies behind.
New studies are sounding the alarm
that trillions of dollars in stranded
fossil fuel assets could create a
carbon bubble likely to burst by 2028,
causing the collapse of the fossil fuel
civilization. “Stranded assets” are all
the fossil fuels that will remain in the
ground because of falling demand
as well as the abandonment of
pipelines, ocean platforms, storage
backup power plants, petrochemical
processing facilities, gasoline stations, Earth. Rifkin is an advisor to
auto service centers, and the myriad
industries tightly coupled to the fossil
fuel culture.
The leading oil-producing and
consuming nations will be caught
in the crosshairs between the
plummeting price of solar and wind
and the fallout from peak oil demand
and accumulating stranded assets
in the oil industry. The marketplace
is speaking, and governments
everywhere will need to quickly adapt
if they are to survive and prosper.
It is clear that the world needs a new
economic vision that is compelling
and executable by big cities, small
towns, and rural communities if we are
to make the transition from a dying
fossil fuel civilization to an emerging
green civilization. We are on the cusp
of a Green New Deal Third Industrial
Revolution that can take us into a
post-carbon zero-emission green era.
We need to be hopeful that we can
get there in time.
Jeremy Rifkin is the author of
The Green New Deal: Why the
Fossil Fuel Civilization Will
Collapse by 2028, and the Bold
Economic Plan to Save Life on
the leadership of the European
Union and the People’s Republic
of China, and a principal
architect of their Green New
Deal -style transitions.
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