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Educating Sustainability Management

The other day I was teaching an introductory course on Sustainaibility Management to PhD students (mostly Engineers, some MBAs, some Computer Scientists). This is always an exciting experience, many different rationalities and perspectives on the issue. We discussed a case study, the sustainability report of BMW, and some important realities of corporate sustainability became clear to me.

First, for some companies, sustainability provokes some kind of “organizational schizophrenia” i.e. they refer, in the same paragraph, to sustainability and ecological awareness as well as to the overarching goal of earning profits with even the most unsustainable products.… Read more

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Corporate Degrowth

In a recent blog entry, Saamah Abdallah commented on some remarks made by Duncan Green on the Oxfam blogs, as regards degrowth policy. Duncan’s original post was critical on the practical conclusions of a workshop on degrowth in London earlier this year. Myself, I was giving a talk there on “Degrowth and the Firm” and tried to give some empirical substantiations as what a degrowth business model might look like.

Saamah gives three direct policy implications for degrowth:

  1. Reduction of working hours.
… Read more
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Green Growth?

I was just reading an article in the newly established Ecological Economics Review on economic growth, written by Peter A. Victor. In this article, Victor is revisiting Kenneth Boulding‘s remarks on the economy of the coming spaceship Earth, focusing on economic growth and environmental impact.

He defines the concept of green growth as an economic state in which the rate of reduction of environmental impact per unit GDP exceeds the rate of increase in GDP.… Read more

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Nuclear Energy, Sustainable Energy?

Recently, German environmental minister, Norbert Röttgen, made some interesting remarks on the remaining operationg time of Germany’s nuclear power plants. After the Schröder-Fischer government neogiated a fade-out of nuclear power until 2022, the newly elected center-right government of Merkel-Westerwelle proposed an extension for nuclear industry between 10 and 20 years beyond that date. The argument was, that renewables needed that extra time to become a susbstantial part of German energy supply. Röttgen now made it clear, that nuclear energy’s time will be up when renewables will reach about a share of 40% in Germany’s energy supply.… Read more

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Sustainable Lifestyles @ KIT

The mysteries of blogging… My first article about my talk at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) suddenly disappeared because this scientist here definitely is a learner as regards blogging 😉
Anyway, I wanted to readdress the issue I was raising: When talking about sustainable lifestyles, the question often revolves around the issue of “what type of people do we need for that?” or “what kind of education is necessary?” In my point of view, this is pointing into the wrong directions.… Read more