Rio+20: 5 key takeaways

Here are some of the promising developments and bigger disappointments of the Rio+20 global sustainability conference, which ends today.

Fossil fuel subsidies

On the face of it, the failure to explicitly call for an end to fossil fuel subsidies in the nearly 50-page conference text was cited as a major failure, leading to a Twitter campaign of more than 100,000 Tweets. But Mr. Shultz says that the world is talking about it – underlined by the Twitter campaign and far beyond – and that it's one of the most promising developments in terms of the public coalescing around an idea towards a sustainable future.

“There is a clear consensus that the first order of business is to get rid of subsidies for gas and oil and carbon,” he says. “I think that everybody from the World Bank to leftists in Latin America are talking about that.”

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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