Dr Robert Costanza on ecological economics

Dr Robert Costanza, Director of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics recently gave a talk at Wellington’s Victoria University on the the ecological and financial crises that are underway.

The video is quite long (55 min) - Costanza's talk starts 5 minutes in. There is also an accompanying presentation, entitled "The Global Recession: an opportunity to create a sustainable and desirable future" (.ppt 27 Mb).

Costanza was invited to New Zealand by the NZ Green Party (via frogblog).

Excellent post Big Gav. I think the Gund Institute is one of the few areas for the study of ecological economics. We are hoping to bring Dr. Costanza to Michigan for this year's Conference on Michigan's Future: Energy, Economy and Environment www.futuremichigan.com

I always find your posts on many various topics to be very informative. In the future I will be looking for information on offshore wind power so anything you could send along on this would be helpful.

Our governor has recently formed a Great Lakes Offshore Wind council and we are going to be looking into this for Michigan. However, much of Lake Michigan is >30 Meters in depth so we will need some creative ideas on offshore platforms. We are also fortunate to have the 1875 MW Ludington pumped storage plant nearby to help store some of this wind energy.

Thanks for all of your efforts and keep blogging.

Dear Jim,

This might be up your alley: http://anz.theoildrum.com/node/4849

Wind power for the "Windy City" eh? - Now that's *thinking*!

That is a great post Cretaceous. thanks a bunch. Looks like Big Gav is all over offshore wind too. Not surprising.

Good to see someone remembers my posts - thanks Cretaceous !

That particular post was looking at floating offshore wind, which is still a pretty immature field.

Jerome has done a few posts on regular offshore wind power, which has huge potential and is being harnessed today in large scale projects (Jerome's area of expertise).

http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/10/30/231713/57
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/4670
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/5003

Here's one on wind power in Lake Ontario too:

http://local.theoildrum.com/node/2513

Thanks for the link Big Gav! It was a great evening and I thoroughly enjoyed hanging out with the good doctor for the day we had him here in the office.

There is so much good work being done in this area, but it is being studiously ignored by most of the Treasury departments around the world.

No worries frog - thanks for organising the event / video - I think its important to discuss these sorts of issues and raise their profile.

Hi all. Have not been able to access Mr. Constanza's video. Any ideas anyone.

works for me fine - Firefox/PC.

The link to the original at YouTube might work for you - its fine for me on Firefox / Mac hewre though.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZ0xyQw8cX4&feature=player_embedded

Great Presentation by Dr. Costanza if one simultaneously follows along by scolling/clicking through the Powerpoint at the same time.

EDIT: BTW, I enjoyed and agree with his comment that our conventional economic model is structured so that a 'rising tide' only lifts all the Yachts, while swamping the poor's lifeboats.