by Marcia
These questions were posed by Huck, a member of the Youth Delegation at Copenhagen. They challenge us to think more concretely about what kind of world we are living in and what kind of world we want to be living in. What are your thoughts?
1. Do you agree that Climate Change is an issue about security? Why don’t you relocate military resources into mitigation, adaptation, and other sustainable purposes and make a Climate Peace agreement/protocol/convention at Copenhagen?
2. How about taking time, work time, as a tool to control GHG emissions? By shortening work hours and cutting work days per week, Humans can greatly reduce production, transportation and consumption all at the same time, and save lots of fuel energy. Starting the global sabbatical for one or more years.
3. What connection or relationship do you think there is there between money and climate? Do you agree that people and Earth are controlled and colonized by an endlessly growing money system and an ideology which is made by man?
Initiatives of Change - Environment 
Interesting questions Marcia. I have also thought about the question of time. Back in the early ’80s when unemployment was pretty high there was quite a bit of talk about work-sharing. The idea was that technological advances mean that the average productivity of individual workers was increasing faster than the economy could grow. Factories that once employed a thousand workers now employed a hundred using better machines to produce the same amount of widgets. By work-sharing, the argument went, the factory could still employ a thousand workers, but each doing just a tenth of the hours.
In practice it never happened like that. The benefits of those productivity gains were unevenly distributed to shareholders, management and the remaining workers – not to mention the rest of us who got cheaper widgets. High rates of employment were maintained by a huge growth in the economy while we all consumed more and more cheap widgets.
However, that model has to come to an end and we will have to spend less time making consumables. This raises two interesting questions. Firstly: How will we share the wealth produced by making widgets? and secondly: How will we use the extra time when we are not making widgets? I see a lot of potential for a growth in the non-material economy. Things like personal and spiritual development, the performing arts, community development, pastoral care etc.