By Levien van Zon

This article was published on The Substance of Sustainability and in Dutch on Duurzaamheidsweb. It is also available as PDF or ebook (EPUB and Kindle) for offline reading.

Today, on Earth day, countries will start signing the Paris climate treaty that was reached last December by the representatives of 195 countries. A lot has already been said and written about this Paris Agreement, which in 2020 should succeed the venerable 1997 Kyoto protocol.¹ While the agreement is a great step forward, we’re certainly not there yet. There’s a lot of work ahead for governments, civil society and the private sector. The key to controlling global warming basically lies in keeping government-owned fossil fuel reserves in the ground, and halting the exploration of new reserves by private …

By Levien van Zon

This article was published on The Substance of Sustainability and in Dutch on Duurzaamheidsweb, and as PDF or ebook (EPUB and Kindle) for offline reading. The footnotes provide additional background information, and can safely be skipped or read separately.

I had originally planned to write my first article on a different subject, the ecological footprint. But World Climate Action Day and the UN Climate Summit last month persuaded me to write about CO₂ instead. I must admit, I think that maybe too much emphasis has been put on climate change over the last few years. It is but one aspect of an underlying problem, that of energy sources and energy use. Moreover, it distracts from other important problems, such as land use, biodiversity decrease and ethical issues. Sometimes …