The Age of Stupid – Can We Save the World by 2015?
Last month I saw a fascinating movie premier, The Age of Stupid.
Never mind that it was the first time a movie premier was broadcast live via satellite (from here in New York) around the world on over 550 screens in 45 countries. Or that they had in attendance the likes of Kofi Annan (former Secretary General of the United Nations), Heather Graham and Jillian Anderson as well as music from Moby and Radiohead.. Or that The Huffington Post called the movie launch “One of the most important films of the year (perhaps decade)….” as both a new way independent films will be released and also a way to give additional exposure to the environmental message.
Instead, what was fascinating was it was a film about an old man living in the devastated world of 2055, watching ‘archive’ footage from 2008 and asking: why didn’t we stop climate change while we had the chance?
Today expert climatologists around the world are agreeing we are about to hit the point of no return for our planet. And that point is 2015- closing in on five years away!
What does this mean? The UN’s Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced in 2007 that if we do not stop our earth’s temperature from increasing beyond the levels it will hit by 2015, there will be no stopping the environmental impacts that will ensue.
A month or so later Time Magazine wrote “Can We Save the World By 2015″? and quoted David Doniger, the policy director of the world renowned Natural Resource Defense Council’s climate center, “We’re almost at the point of no return. If we don’t turn these emission trends down soon, we’re cooked.”
Does this sound dramatic and doom and gloom?
Ok, it does! And we’re here to learn about being UnReasonable in creating powerful results.
Quickly. What I teach, train and coach businesses on is the fastest way we will not only stop this disaster from occurring but actually reverse it is to show people how to make money regenerating the earth’s resources.
And a new major player just joined the contest to being the greenest. And it’s not the United States. You may be surprised by whom… China.
Yes, Red China is now going green!
Just two weeks ago Thomas Friedman, writer and three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize wrote an Op Ed piece for the New York Times “The New Sputnik”, arguing, “I believe future historians may well conclude that the most important thing to happen in the last 18 months was that Red China decided to become Green China.”
Examples from the past few weeks are China announcing at the UN last week it will cut carbon emissions by 2020. While they did not explain more clearly what they meant by this, they have already recruited America’s premier solar equipment manufacturer, Applied Materials, to open the world’s largest privately funded solar research facility… in China. This is after already having the world’s largest supplier of solar panels, Suntech, in China.
So this is where YOU come in.
It’s kind of like playing basketball here on the street in Brooklyn. There is a lot of “trash talking,” a form of insulting that is meant to challenge and often poke fun at the other team. And when that happens, often times it motivates the other team to play much better.
Experts predict that before the end of the next year, China will surpass the US in energy technology. And so perhaps we ought to take this as a form of China trash talking us to really step up. Have you been thinking of going green and catching the “green” wave? Now is the time.
Have you already gone down this path? Now is the time to raise the bar to take on this competition from China. Are you not interested in going down the path of “greening up” your act? You may want to seriously rethink that.
Because in case the predictions of 2015, looming just six years away, isn’t enough to get you reconsidering, being caught holding the modern-day equivalent of the buggy whip might be.
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About the Blogger: Stefan Doering is the creator of BEST Coaches’ groundbreaking 90-day “UnReasonable” program which brings to the table his almost 30 years of hard-earned business savvy and 4-plus decades of pure heart.
Stefan started his first company at the age of 17. His later companies included the leaders of major companies and institutions as well as multi-millionaires and billionaires as investors, board members and mentors, and had household names among their clients.
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