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Introduction
Jürgen Vollmer
Complex Dynamics Group, Institute for Theoretical Physics
Abstract
The Introduction to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development states
1. We, the Heads of State and Government and High Representatives, meeting at the United Nations Headquarters in New York from 25-27 September 2015 as the Organization celebrates its seventieth anniversary, have decided today on new global Sustainable Development Goals.
2. On behalf of the peoples we serve, we have adopted a historic decision on a comprehensive, far-reaching and people-centred set of universal and transformative Goals and targets. We commit ourselves to working tirelessly for the full implementation of this Agenda by 2030. …
- In 2019 Greta Thunberg complained at the UN Climate Action Summit that “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.[…] And all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”
- Also in that year the award-winning writer and journalist Naomi Klein argues in her book On Fire that the transition to a better world will require a Green New Deal, and she popularizes this idea with am Emmy nominated video “Message from the Future”.
- In 2020 the Euopean Union implements an European Green Deal, and the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announces that this will be “Europe’s man on the moon moment.”
- Previous students of the module argued that “Sustainable Development” is an oxymoron.
In the introductory lecture I hope to learn about the attendents point of view, and we will discuss the aims and the setup of the course.
Literature
- Climate and sustainability
- Tim Flanney: The Weather Makers: Our Changing Climate and What it Means for Life on Earth (Penguin, 2005)
- Naomi Klein: On Fire
- Gerald O. Barney, ed.: The Global 2000 Report to the President (US Government Printing Office, 1980); bzw. die dt. Übersetzung Global 2000 (Zweitausendeins, 1980)
- Understanding the scientific endeavor
- Randall Munroe: What if? (John Murray, London, 2014)
- Robert Ehrlich: Nine Crazy Ideas in Science: A Few Might Even Be True (Princeton UP, Princeton, 2001)
Talk on 17. October 2024 — Ringvorlesung in Winter Term 2024/25