market

The music of time – or how we’ll not change the music unless we change how we sing

"It should be a natural relief to step back inside natural limits. Limits have forms, sounds and scents – we can touch them – taste them. They should feel like home. We’ll be prodigals shuffling homeward from a wild fossil-fuelled adventure to finally open the familiar garden gate," writes Patrick Noble.

“Even the pope gets it – carbon markets won’t fix the climate”

Good article on the problems with carbon offsets: “Carbon markets are in fact designed to seek out cheap emissions reductions such as HFC-23 destruction over fundamental structural changes to energy systems away from fossil fuels and towards renewables.” But see also Aubrey Meyer’s comment at the end: the root of the problem is that there is currently no “budget” – ie limit or cap – for carbon. …

Let’s think about Adam Smith

In a second excerpt from his book The Commons Of Soil, Patrick Noble discusses the relationship between soil, the commons and social systems. He describes how Adam Smith's theory of comparative advantage has become distorted in our present-day casino economy and he argues that "fluctuations in the health of the soil which grows the city become measures of chosen paths to and from civic virtue and so civilization."

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