Ecological civilization (shengtai wenming ) has been written into China’s constitution as the ideological framework for the country’s environmental policies, laws and education. It is also increasingly presented not only as a response to environmental degradation in China, but as a vision for our global future. In this article, scholars from the disciplines of media science, anthropology and sinology analyse media representations of eco-civilization in order to explore which values and visions this highly profiled state project actually entails. The article argues that eco-civilization is best understood as a sociotechnical imaginary in which cultural and moral virtues constitute key components that are inseparable from the more well-known technological, judicial, and political goals. The imaginary of eco-civilization seeks to construct a sense of cultural and national continuity, and to place China at the center of the world by invoking its civilization’s more than 2000 years of traditional philosophical heritage as a part of the solution for the planet’s future. It is constructed as a new kind of Communist Party led utopia in which market economy and consumption continue to grow, and where technology and science have solved the basic problems of pollution and environmental degradation.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959378018304448

State subsidies for industry: Brussels greenlights €4bn German initiative – Euractiv
https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/state-subsidies-for-industry-brussels-greenlights-e4bn-german-initiative/

The European Commission has approved Germany’s €4 billion scheme to green industrial production by deliberately inflating carbon prices, although the sum is a far cry from Berlin’s initial vision.

For every tonne of CO2 emitted, European companies have to purchase ‘CO2 certificates’, under a scheme known as the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) – with the extra cost set aside to drive investment in green production. However, because of low CO2 market prices today and long lead times in industry, few of the necessary investments are taking place.
..
This €4 billion aid scheme will support ambitious projects that will significantly reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of industrial production processes in Germany,” explained Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager on Friday afternoon (16 February).

The report where experts around the world boldly reimagine sustainable development finance

Discover how GPI addressed major criticisms of the international public finance system and aid. Global Public Investment is the closest thing to a new and shared vision for a universal and lasting transformation of the international development architecture

Report: Time for GPI - Global Public Investment Network
https://globalpublicinvestment.net/report-time-for-gpi/

Velmi zajimavej clanek o chapani inlface v ekonomicky teorii a jak soucasny soky - od covidu, valku na UA po nutnost alokovat zdroje na reseni klimaticky krize to cely obracej naruby. Celkem must read.

Policymakers don’t need to wait until things go wrong to try to stabilize them—they could instead take proactive steps to insulate important sectors from shocks. The Biden Administration is now trying to do just that. Last summer, it began selling oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve and issuing price guarantees to drillers in return for expanded production. Meanwhile, Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act and the chips and Science Act, which, combined, provided six hundred and thirty billion dollars for domestic microchip factories, wind and solar power, scientific research, and an electric-vehicle program that subsidizes the entire E.V. production chain.

There’s a coherent, unified energy strategy at work here. Biden has been helping households manage short-term fossil-fuel costs while attempting to lower long-term fossil-fuel demand by expanding the supply of electric vehicles and green energy. Consumers aren’t being punished with high prices today, and they will be offered lower prices on cleaner vehicles in the future. You can call this climate policy, foreign policy, or industrial policy—regardless, as a deliberate demotion of the market in favor of public economic management, it has a Weberian aura. Biden and Congress have decided not to let individual self-interest, consumer choice, or market competition determine the course of energy and manufacturing policy. They are quite straightforwardly attempting to reshape an industrial sector for the sake of other democratic goals.

Parts of the economy have always worked this way, to different degrees. The U.S. government has been subsidizing agriculture since the nineteen-thirties, and energy development since the First World War. The government helped build railroads and develop the early Internet. It owns Amtrak and built the highways that carry our cars, and it guarantees the money that ordinary people store in banks. But, starting in the late nineteen-seventies, mainstream economists and policymakers began to view these efforts as outliers and embarrassments. “The vision of public investment that had energized the American project in the postwar years—and indeed for much of our history—had faded,” Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national-security adviser, said recently. “It had given way to a set of ideas that championed tax cutting and deregulation, privatization over public action, and trade liberalization as an end in itself. There was one assumption at the heart of all of this policy: that markets always allocate capital productively and efficiently.”

https://www.newyorker.com/news/persons-of-interest/what-if-were-thinking-about-inflation-all-wrong

Regenerative-agriculture-conference-2023 –                  UKRAINIAN ECOSTATIONS NETWORK
https://mey.org.ua/en/regenerative-agriculture-conference-2023-2/

This conference is the beginning of a journey to build a vision for sustainable and regenerative agriculture in Ukraine as part of a post war recovery. It will be a unique combination of farmers and scientists from within Ukraine, expert speakers in the field of regenerative agriculture from around the world, and active citizens who are looking for new models of agriculture

TUHO: Zajimavej nahled na Novou hedvabnou stezku - Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)

With its BRI, China is propagating the global vision of a Global Energy Interconnection (GEI; see Map 1). This study focuses on three macro-regions within the EuropeAsian continental area: Europe (consisting of the EU and its eastern, southern and southeastern neighbourhoods as well as the Middle East and North Africa); two Eurasian subregions (the South Caucasus and Central Asia); and Asia (with its subregions South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Northeast Asia).

https://www.dezeen.com/2022/08/08/sustainability-liveability-the-line-saudi-170km-city-naive/

Following the Saudi Arabian government's unveiling of plans for an enormous linear megacity in the desert, urban design experts have expressed skepticism about whether its utopian vision is realistic.

"There would be so many physical and environmental phenomena that would have to be dealt with to achieve the incredible minimal and singular character that the renderings propose," said Marshall Brown, director of the Princeton Urban Imagination Center and an associate professor of architecture at Princeton University.

Philip Oldfield, head of the built environment school at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney, warned that the huge embodied carbon cost of construction "will overwhelm any environmental benefits".

C40 Cities director of urban planning and design Hélène Chartier argued she would not "want to live in a place where it's so narrow", while architect Winy Maas said he "would love to live in such a kind of environment".

When working with living systems, we constantly face the cyclical nature of life – birth, growth, death, and decay – that allows all energy to come into existence, serve its purpose, and eventually give all that it has in order for new life to do the same.

Just as grass, humans, livestock, and all living things exist within this circle, so do our ideas, beliefs, and actions. Just as old oxidized forage must be grazed or trampled down to allow for regrowth, old ways of being must sometimes fade away to allow for our continued growth.

We're making a concerted effort to give energy to those new perspectives, ideas, and beliefs that will best serve our context while acknowledging the stepping stones of humanity that served a purpose long ago but whose time has now come.

This shift from reductionist thinking to embracing the interconnected nature of living systems is the essence of holism, one of the four Key Insights of Holistic Management.

Based upon the original graphic of Jan Konietzko's concept "Carbon Tunnel Vision," and reiterated most recently by Bridget McKenzie's "Earth Crisis Blinkers," we've adapted these graphics to fit our Holistic Context.



https://www.facebook.com/100064516757443/posts/381564294004126/

About • Regenerators
https://theregenerators.co/regenerating-australia/about/

The hope and climate catastrophe roadshow: ‘there’s just this thirst for optimistic story’ | Australian film | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/apr/03/the-hope-and-climate-catastrophe-roadshow-theres-just-this-thirst-for-optimistic-story

Before the film plays, Gameau talks about his vision, how “to achieve sustainability we need to regenerate”. As he speaks, calls of “yeeeew!” and “boom!” come from the crowd, the audience giving the impression of not so much being thirsty for what he has to say, but outright starving. This is a community particularly attuned to the realities of the climate crisis – the fires of 2019-2020 came within a few hundred metres of the cinema, hundreds of homes in adjoining suburbs were lost, and many other homes are exposed to coastal inundation.

The film is set in December 2029. A hybrid of mockumentary and documentary, it takes the shape of a TV news report, looking back on a decade where First Nations sovereignty is recognised, a federal anti-corruption commission introduced, and Australia undergoes a rapid energy transition. The economy is booming as Australia runs on 90% renewables and exports green steel; individuals communities have energy security and cheap power from their own micro-grids; tenants lower their power bills by renting solar panels from other roofs; and electric vehicle owners earn cash by using their batteries as storage for the grid.

Regenerating Australia | Trailer
https://youtu.be/JOqOBOOyzFg


Gameau’s style of film-making brings together the unlikely companions of catastrophic climate crisis and hope. His 2019 documentary 2040, framed as a letter to his four-year-old daughter, explores various solutions for climate mitigation and visualises the positive scenarios he believes could eventuate if these things are rolled out at scale. The response – Gameau says crowdfunding of projects started, and two million copies of the educational materials produced with the film were downloaded – convinced him that optimism is more motivating than gloom.

Dusty Hinz
28. říjen 2021
https://www.facebook.com/dusty.hinz/posts/10100421344125518


I think one of the fundamental questions of our time is, are we down to walk away from the comforts and ease that modern, technological, fossil fuels-based, industrial civilization provides us? Yet it is excruciatingly rare that I ever hear the question asked.

If we are not, if we are going to ride this thing out to the scorched-earth bitter end, which is what it seems, then most other things are just bull shit posturing and fantastical techno-saviorist illusions.

There is a zero sum game between all human activity and the rest of all nature. There is no techno-futurist utopia. Solar panels and wind turbines are not going to save us. In fact, as Jeff Gibbs says, we would do well to stop calling these forms of energy "renewable" or "sustainable", and should instead call them "technological energy".

Not once, never have I ever heard on NPR when they are discussing climate change, a reference to the need for what I will call an ecological, bioregional embeddedness. Nothing even remotely close to this concept.

I also think that just using the term "climate change" as a catch-all for all environmental issues is reductive and does a disservice to the multitude of crises that we face. As if, hey, let's just suck some carbon out of the atmosphere and we can go back to business as usual....this line of thinking is a fatal mistake.

Mostly, a far-ranging, full-on assault is being waged against all of nature. So I prefer to use the term "eco-catastrophe" or "the converging eco-catastrophes".

I don't think people really grasp the extent to which pretty much all aspects of modern life are bound up with the abundant use of fossil fuels, and thus, the monumental amount of sacrifice and hard-work it would take create an *actually* sustainable world that did not use them.

It would take an upending. The vast majority of people would have to do something completely different on a day-to-day basis. Literally, the physical, material aspect of it all. They may not even be able to live where they currently live (cue the person that says "oh, you are talking about forced relocations"...no, what I am saying is that if something is not sustainable, then it's not sustainable, and there is no getting around that fact.)

So, what I am saying, is that without a collective social vision, in which most of the population coalesces around a place-based, ecological, bioregional embeddedness, which would think deeply about the systems that we need and from my view would be agrarian and horticultural with a healthy dose of rewilding, and would prioritize agroforestry efforts...without this, the future seems to be one destined for a tragic, bleak, scorched-earth.