Opening the Swedish “Svenska Dagbladet” Sunday paper today I read “Meeting Doomed to Failure”, referring to the upcoming COP 15 conference and summit taking place in 29 days (they are counting the days). The debate article is by Danish Björn Lomborg, head of the Copenhagen Consensus Center think-Tank (CCC).

Based on a global carbon tax study by CCC and climate economist Richard Tol, ample “evidence” is presented to favour technical solutions adding that whatever promises politicians, our leaders, are expected to make, because they have to in order to maintain a strand of credibility, these promises will not be fulfilled, cannot be fulfilled, because the “cost will be 50 times higher than the cost of the damage of climate change”.

Interesting… And I think, hmm, what “cost” is he talking about? Is this the cost of families losing their homes? Is it the cost of losing a loved one in a cyclone? Is this the cost of more than 1 billion human beings not having food on their table? Or perhaps, is it the cost of (currently) 24,000 children dying of starvation, every day?

So I dedicate the lines above to anybody wishing to enter into a discussion of “the cost of the damage of Climate Change”.

I don’t.

I choose to engage in a dialogue for sustainability and leadership, a dialogue for Sustainable Communities. This dialogue, I believe, must be based on the fundamental premise of “Reduce, Reduce, and then Reduce some more” (then perhaps Reuse, and last, Recycle). There are lots of ways to reduce, and they all oppose our consumer (shop-till-you-drop) society, and are an opposition to the concept of “growth”. So let’s stop kidding ourselves, we have to reduce our consuming. That means each and every one of us has to make some conscious choices as to what reductions in consumption we can make, and hope that collectively it’s enough. I’m on my way to Brazil to start our Replanting a Rainforest project, and I’m flying there, bad, and I feel that I need a camera to document this, which I will buy, bad, but not going there, and not being able to document the work would be worse. These are my choices, and it is these choices we make every day which create the reality of our lives, the reality we experience.

I like the idea of a sustainable community, and I think about it a lot, so my choices lately have been very much about what I can do to make it happen. This is also why Open World Café is about “Dialogues on Sustainability and Leadership”. So I think, then I like to promote a dialogue, then I like to get down to creating, building these sustainable communities.

Who wants to join me?