I just took out Gwynne Dyer's Climate Wars. He will have a lot to say about this, I've heard him talk about it and it was interesting - Chinese curse interesting. -
Havent heard anything about this. If you arent from germany you likely have not herad anything about Peter Scholl Latour. He died recently, he was a great journalist of the Middle East. He "predicted" the uprisings there and so on...
But what I want to say is that he was a strong believer that in the 21st century the most wars will be fought about water. And that was even before climate change got mainstream, dont know if he calculated that in.
Resource wars are nothing new, and they are already going strong, the question is if the "poor" countries will find a way get along with each other and not get sucked dry by China (biggest buyer of agricultural land in Africa) and the Western world.
Solar panels are now economically feasible for many people. Every set that goes up means that tons of coal, natural gas or other hydrocarbons don't have to be pulled from the earth.
(In western countries) recycling is drastically more popular than it was in 1972.
I live in germany, we know a lot about recycling ;)
The problem with re-cycling is, that it is in 99% a down-cycling. You made "bad" paper out of "good" paper, that way.
What we sould need is the so-called up-cycling where you have "bad" stuff and make "good" stuff out of it, preferable without (lots of and only regenerative) additional resources.
But currently the economic-political ecosystem is one of "usage", of consumerism, not regeneration. The highest goal for politics is to create jobs so that people have money to buy stuff so that factories can produce this stuff to make more jobs.
And so, the big (coal) energy companies sucessfully lobbied the EEG (law for regenerative energies) to death a few month earlier. Solar panel installments e.g. which were driven by private small grade investors (on your own roof) have nearly stopped. In germany, start of anti-atomic and green movement! The big energy firms get lots of money or lowered taxes instead of getting punished for building new coal power plants. The C02 trade is... lets call it non-functional, because there are politically inclined way to much certificates in the wild. And so on.
At the same time innovative concepts are (at best) ignored by most political stakeholders. Just a week ago I visited for a day a week long programme (was there to speak about the Cultural Commons Collecting Society, a new and btw crowdfunded alternative to german GEMA). A lot of people are trying to "make a better world". Lots of interesting things. Its just all so damn small-scale.