Tag Archives: jobs

The Economics of Kindness: Moving from a Selfish Economy to a Cooperative Economy

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by Guy Dauncey  July 2023

Palgrave/MacMillan, Summer 2024

Chapter 1: To Change the World

Our world needs more kindness. People need more kindness. Nature needs more kindness. But we need it deep within our economies, where so many of our troubles begin. 

We have been told a thousand times that the capitalist free-market economy is the best and indeed the only kind of economy that works, but for so many people, it’s no longer working. Surely, there must be a better way. Our economies have been built on the primacy of selfishness and greed. What is the alternative? The economics of kindness – and it’s not just an idea. It’s a very real thing. Before we begin, however, we must answer the question that’s being asked by so many people around the world: 

“Why is our world in such a mess?”

Continue reading The Economics of Kindness: Moving from a Selfish Economy to a Cooperative Economy →

Ten Green New Deals – How Do They Compare?

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Ten GNDs

By Guy Dauncey, Revised September 29th 2019

Guy Dauncey is founder of the BC Sustainable Energy Association, co-founder of the Victoria Car Share Cooperative, and the author or co-author of ten books, including The Climate Challenge: 101 Solutions to Global Warming and Journey to the Future: A Better World Is Possible. He is currently completing The Economics of Kindness: A Ten-Year Transition to a Green Cooperative Economy. He lives in Yellow Point, on Vancouver Island, Canada. His website is www.thepracticalutopian.ca.

I premise my analysis on five statements:

  • The climate emergency is real.
  • The ecological emergency is real.
  • The inequality, household debt and affordable housing crises are real.
  • A new global financial crisis is lurking, caused by excessive corporate and private debt and banking deregulation.
  • We need a ten-year mobilization to achieve a rapid transition to a green cooperative economy that is human-friendly, community-friendly, climate-friendly and nature-friendly, leaving self-interested capitalism behind us.

Continue reading Ten Green New Deals – How Do They Compare? →

Six Green New Deals: How Do They Compare?

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This blog was updated on September 27th 2019 to TEN Green New Deals – see here.

 

 

 

BC’s Climate Intentions Papers: A Timid Response – and the Twelve Solutions We Really Need

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Timid Response

August 20, 2018

I wish I didn’t have to write this. I count myself a friend of the NDP/Green Alliance, and I had high hopes for the government’s new climate action plans. [1]  

BC’s Ministry of Environment has published a series of Clean Growth Intentions Papers, with a deadline for public feedback of August 24th, in the heart of this fire and smoke-filled summer. In my head, I can see that they have been framed in a very positive way, emphasizing the multiple economic benefits of engaging in climate action, reframed as clean growth.

But the policies floated contain little that is new. They are really timid. And by downplaying the climate crisis almost to a state of mental non-existence, they have written the urgency out of the picture. In my heart, I feel as if they have been written by a holiday season policy-drone operating on auto-pilot. Hard words, but that’s what I feel.

Continue reading BC’s Climate Intentions Papers: A Timid Response – and the Twelve Solutions We Really Need →

Canada’s Choice

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CanaDAS CHOICE 2

by Guy Dauncey

$4.5 Billion Dollars to Subsidize Fossil Fuels? Here’s a Much Better Idea

$4.5 billion of Canada’s money, to buy a bitumen pipeline? Some suggest that it could rise as high as $12 billion, including future construction and legal costs.

So what if the money was invested in solutions to the climate crisis, instead making things worse by being invested in the primary cause, which is our use of fossil fuels? When Canada signed the Paris Climate Agreement most people presumed that it was being signed honestly, not as an act of laugh-behind-your-hand hypocrisy.

Thirty to Fifty Times More Jobs

That much money could leverage enough electricity to replace most of Alberta’s coal and gas-fired electricity, and generate between 30 and 50 times as many jobs. It could also power 18 million electric vehicles for 25 years. Continue reading Canada’s Choice →

The Birth of a New Cooperative Economy

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They say we are self-interested, we’re always out to win.
Always individualistic, though it used to be a sin.
They say we need free markets, the better to compete,
and the economy will flourish if we only think of greed.

This is Economics 101, the way it’s taught today. Not a word about nature, community, caring, sharing, or cooperation.

During the mid 19th century, advances in science, democracy, education, literacy, public healthcare, labour unions, technological breakthroughs, banking, and the power of fossil fuels to generate rapid economic growth certainly made it seem that after ten thousand years of economic stagnation the competitive pursuit of profit was improving life for all. In the 1760s it took eighteen hours of human labour to transform a pound of cotton into cloth. By the 1860s it took one and a half hours. Today, it probably takes five seconds.

Continue reading The Birth of a New Cooperative Economy →

A New Cooperative Economy

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Guy Dauncey, April 2017

essay-3

This essay was submitted to The Next Systems Project Essay Contest, in which it won second place. “We received hundreds of submissions from 30 different states and 26 countries, proving that many around the world not only believe system change is necessary, but have thought long and hard about what a new system should look like and how we might get there.” http://thenextsystem.org/announcing-the-winners-in-our-essay-competition/ 

http://thenextsystem.org/…/2017/04/Dauncey_AtLargeSecond.pdf

You can download the essay as a PDF here. A New Cooperative Economy

*

Our task is to fashion a political vision and a political narrative that is a compelling answer to neo-liberalism and the ideology of competition, free markets, and the primacy of capital. We need a political economy of cooperation, solidarity, of mutual benefit. –  John Restakis, Civil Power and the Partner State, 2016

Our modern economy is in crisis. Can we build an alternative economy as our ancestors did in the transition from feudalism to capitalism? It’s a question that takes us deep into our values, culture, history, politics—and visions of the future.

Continue reading A New Cooperative Economy →

A New Economy for Small Communities

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by Guy Dauncey

When the future teenager walks down the future Main Street in future Smalltown BC, be it Williams Lake, Smithers, Houston, Creston or Kimberley, which of these thoughts might she or he be thinking?

“I can’t wait to get out of this place—it’s so, like, basic.”

or

“This place is so cool. I wish there was work, so that I could stay.”

or

“This place is so über-cool. My friends in the city are so jealous that I get to live, work and play here.”

British Columbia has many communities that built their economies around traditional resources that are now either collapsing or going into decline. Unless there’s a strong impulse for community economic renewal, there’s a risk that working people will leave and young people will follow, never to return.

Continue reading A New Economy for Small Communities →

Almost Twice as Many Green Jobs if Canada Phases out Fossil Fuels

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Almost

by Guy Dauncey

The 48-Page Report is here.

Is It Really True?

Is it really true that if we don’t build more pipelines and allow more exports of coal, oil and gas, that Canada’s economy will be in danger and unemployment will rise?

That’s certainly what we are frequently told, both by the Conservative federal government and by several provincial governments, either directly or by implied assumption.

There is alternative, however. The climate crisis is inescapably real. It threatens everyone’s future, and it is being caused by carbon emissions from the same fossil fuels that our governments want to expand.

So what would it look like if there were an organized plan to phase out fossil fuels and embrace 100% renewable energy in Canada? That’s certainly what the climate crisis calls for. Continue reading Almost Twice as Many Green Jobs if Canada Phases out Fossil Fuels →