Feasta Annual Lectures

Since its foundation, Feasta has held an annual public lecture to promote awareness and inspire action. The texts of the first four lectures, together with other articles by the lecturers, are printed in the Feasta Review and published on the website. The more recent lectures are available in video format for online streaming. This is a list of the speakers and their lecture topics.

2010 Feasta Annual Lecture: Making Sense of the Financial Crisis in the Era of Peak Oil – Stoneleigh

Nicole Foss, Energy Consultant and Financial Blogger, presented the Feasta Annual Lecture at The Greenhouse,17 St. Andrew Street, Dublin 2.
Tuesday 3rd August 2010 at 7pm.
Entry €10 – €5 Feasta members/ unwaged.

Peak Oil and the collapse of global Ponzi finance are a “perfect storm” of converging phenomena that threaten to sink our age of prosperity through wealth destruction, social discontent, and global conflict.

Foss, who blogs under the name “Stoneleigh” at the website The Automatic Earth (www.theautomaticearth.blogspot.com), discussed the many converging factors that are contributing to the multi-faceted predicament we face today, and how individuals can …

2008 Feasta Annual Lecture: Capital Partnerships – Chris Cook

How Ireland got into its Property Mess

an introduction by Richard Douthwaite

Capital Partnerships: a Debt-Free Solution to the Property Crash

a lecture by Chris Cook

Date: 7:00pm, Wednesday 5th November, 2008

Venue: McClelland Room, Central Hotel, Exchequer St, Dublin 2.

Entry: 5 Euro Feasta members, 10 Euro non-members

Chris Cook, an international expert on Open Capital and a widely published energy market consultant, discussed his ground-breaking ideas for capital partnerships, a financing structure that could provide a debt-free solution to the Irish property crash.

The global financial crisis has highlighted the urgent need to refinance trillions of euros’ worth …

2007 Feasta Annual Lecture: Who Owns The Sky? – Peter Barnes

The 2007 speaker was successful US social entrepreneur and author Peter Barnes. Peter's work explores how a "cap and rebate" system is our best bet for an ethical and economic framework to stabilise the climate. His previous career has ranged from setting up one of the first solar energy companies in California to pioneering the use of charity credit cards and ethical phone services at www.workingassets.com.

2006 Feasta Annual Lecture: Re-Thinking Progress: Well-Being as the Focus of Policy – Nic Marks

Nic Marks is the head of the Centre for Well-Being at NEF (The New Economics Foundation) and has recently set up a new global measure of progress, the Happy Planet Index, which shows the ecological efficiency with which human well-being is delivered around the world. He talked about how the economy is only really a means to an end and that we should be measuring the ‘ultimate end’ of people’s well-being instead of measuring GDP. He showed how simply relating the length and satisfaction of people’s lives to their ecological footprint creates a much more useful way of comparing …

2005 Feasta Annual Lecture: How To Live Well Without Carbon -Decouple Life Satisfaction from Economic Growth, as well as Economy from the Environment – Roger Levett

Date: Monday November 21 2005 – 7.30 pm
Venue: Davenport Hotel,at Merrion Square,Dublin 2

Our Speaker –

As a partner in Levett-Therivel Sustainabilty Consultants, Roger advises UK government departments, public bodies including regional and local authorities on sustainability policy and tools including indicators, sustainability appraisal, strategic environment assessment and quality of life assessment.

His publications include:

  1. A Better Choice of Choice – a critique of consumer choice as a principle of public policy (Fabian Society 2003)
  2. Leading the way: how local authorities can meet the challenge of climate change (UK Local Government Association 2005). This is a fascinating vision for
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