Category: 1. Reasons to 146 now

A cooperative local market could drive the circular economy

Sweden, like many countries, is pursuing the circular economy as a path to decarbonization, to the bio-economy and to ensure their economy has enough material resources. Apart from the climate emergency, pressure from population increases and rising standards are about to create inevitable material shortages. Still developing, the idea of circular economy begs us to envision a circular home, a circular neighbourhood and circular municipality. This article explores what a circular economy neighbourhood might look like, and how […]

Aim for 25%. Here’s why

Writing in the Guardian, George Monbiot gives us a hopeful message that societies suddenly shift, and only 25% of the population are needed to change attitude before the whole society starts to change. Monbiot points to research by Simon Sharpe and Tim Lenton: Upward-scaling tipping cascades to meet climate goals: plausible grounds for hope. What this means for 146 clubs is to understand that your area can encompass four times the maximum number of members […]

You might as well start now

Great quote from Dave Pollard on his blog Our human civilization culture, with its 7.8B hostages, is collapsing, ecologically, economically, and, inevitably, to some extent socially as well. We all sense it. The evidence is everywhere. Sooner or later, as collapse takes hold, we are going to have to start to build local communities from the ground up with the people with whom we find ourselves. Some, perhaps most, of those people are going to […]

Dunbar number gives agency

As I write this, COP 25 is going on. Children activists interviewed on stage, including Greta Thunberg, are stating simply that they represent the younger generation who want a chance to be able to live on the Earth in future and they see no action that is going to offer them more than a 50% chance of an inhabitable planet. No change since their last COP, only increasing CO2 levels. They, like most people cannot […]

Let this sink in: there is no technological solution. We must use what we have.

Speaking at the Youth Climate Summit ahead of COP 26, Greta Thunberg postulates that the speed of change required to avoid the worst of the climate disaster is so high that no technology can help: we just have to change the way we do things. This means finding ways to eat, live and work with what we already have that does not use fossil fuels or degrade the planet. Let this sink in. It means […]

Is your local 146 hub the next Extinction Rebellion movement?

Writing on the UK Green World blog, Extinction Rebellion co-founder Rupert Read explains that XR reached one of its targets and failed the other. It succeeded in creating a movement that brought the climate crisis to public (and government) attention. If did not succeeded in bringing in 3.5% of the population to create a tipping point. That task, he says, is now up to more moderate groups who want to take action into their own […]

Graph shows the magnitude of the scale and speed of defossilization ahead

The brutal logic of a cumulative problem: After 30 years of failure, global CO2 emissions must now get to 0 within 20 years (for global warming of 1.5°C). pic.twitter.com/u4NACjvJxN — Lasse Kummer (@LasseClimate) August 24, 2021 In 10 years, the global climate debate will be completely different from today. Global leaders will either have to admit that global warming will definitely exceed 1.5°C (or already has) or we’ll be able to celebrate a decade of […]