Andrew Campbell
20 January 2009
We have recently been reminded of how easily the immediate swamps the important. Collapsing world credit markets and myopia on Wall St are of course important, but in the long view they are but an artefact of a financial system out of whack with the fundamentals of production, distribution and consumption.
Ross Garnaut rightly points out that climate change and the imperative to tackle it will be around long after the current financial crisis has washed through our superannuation statements and the credibility of bank executives and financial markets. As both Garnaut and Nicholas Stern have observed, climate change represents the world’s biggest market failure.
Now is exactly the time to be rewiring, re-stumping and re-plumbing the economy in order to meet the environmental challenges ahead. A key emerging issue in the climate change debate that exemplifies this challenge is food...
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