We have good news this month from the UK, where the government’s latest energy auction secured contracts for 11GW of new renewable energy capacity at a quarter of the price of current gas fired power stations. The new projects will provide approximately 13% of the UK’s electricity and include mostly offshore wind, as well as onshore wind and solar. This new low carbon power will start to come online within the next 5 years, helping clean up the UK’s energy grid while also helping lower energy bills for citizens. It’s a win for the environment and for the people of Britain who are increasingly struggling with the cost of energy.
Really interesting thoughts! Nice to meet you Tom - my husband Joe Mellin sent this post my way and sends his best! I've been thinking a lot about systems change lately. To my ears, the company's proposal and arguments almost press into the realm of disinformation. The arguments seem designed to press for and justify a prechosen conclusion - that companies raising prices gets to count as advancing sustainability, which strikes me as a litigious way of preparing to greenwash. An alternate frame of thinking would be to pick up some of the ideas from Donella Meadows' Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System. The company's arguments, to my ear, seem to be a "goose chase" as we call it, justifying and reentrenching the nasty habits of our current economic paradigm and the way we wield it - valueslessly disconnected from the earth. The language the company chooses to frame the problem, before positioning its own increasing prices as a sustainability solution, seems to locks us as listeners psychologically into fatalism around the present paradigm being the only paradigm, as though the best we can do is batten down the hatches and do our best to sink slowly. Meadows points out that any paradigm can be bested by claiming our power to transcend paradigms. The paradigm they're in (any product doesn't matter, what matters to the planet is the sum total of humans using sum total of products) objectifies both humans and products. An alternate paradigm is subjectification and experiencing. Pressing math and optimization on top of a wicked problem is the oldest trick in the book, but acting like (and using math and "logic" to justify!) tame-problem optimization is the best we've got (or even a meaningful frame) for tackling the complexity of a living ecosystem & the possibilities held within it, well.... that's never been a thing. Mathing it doesn't make it true. If you ever want to chat more about Meadows' work I would be so game!
Is the free market a sustainability seesaw?
Really interesting thoughts! Nice to meet you Tom - my husband Joe Mellin sent this post my way and sends his best! I've been thinking a lot about systems change lately. To my ears, the company's proposal and arguments almost press into the realm of disinformation. The arguments seem designed to press for and justify a prechosen conclusion - that companies raising prices gets to count as advancing sustainability, which strikes me as a litigious way of preparing to greenwash. An alternate frame of thinking would be to pick up some of the ideas from Donella Meadows' Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System. The company's arguments, to my ear, seem to be a "goose chase" as we call it, justifying and reentrenching the nasty habits of our current economic paradigm and the way we wield it - valueslessly disconnected from the earth. The language the company chooses to frame the problem, before positioning its own increasing prices as a sustainability solution, seems to locks us as listeners psychologically into fatalism around the present paradigm being the only paradigm, as though the best we can do is batten down the hatches and do our best to sink slowly. Meadows points out that any paradigm can be bested by claiming our power to transcend paradigms. The paradigm they're in (any product doesn't matter, what matters to the planet is the sum total of humans using sum total of products) objectifies both humans and products. An alternate paradigm is subjectification and experiencing. Pressing math and optimization on top of a wicked problem is the oldest trick in the book, but acting like (and using math and "logic" to justify!) tame-problem optimization is the best we've got (or even a meaningful frame) for tackling the complexity of a living ecosystem & the possibilities held within it, well.... that's never been a thing. Mathing it doesn't make it true. If you ever want to chat more about Meadows' work I would be so game!