“Hadn’t you heard, the age of cheap food is over?”, Ibu Susan retorted tersely one day a couple of years back as I was grumbling to her about the succession of price hikes on a number of staple items. Decent olive oil for example, acceptable soy milk, a nice piece of fresh fish, non-rancid walnuts, […]
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Then & Now: Forty Years on & Eco-Catastrophe is One Big Yawn
It wasn’t always so. Forty years ago, 20 million Americans took part in the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. Fifth Avenue in New York City was closed to automobiles as 100,000 people joined in concerts, lectures, and street theater. More than 2,000 colleges and universities across America interrupted their anti-war protests to […]
Read moreDon’t Throw REDD out with the Bathwater Just make sure the Safeguards work
I don’t recall who said it, probably Oscar Wilde, but whoever it was defines a cynic as just another disappointed optimist. Nowhere in our age would this be more true than in the arena of climate change. A healthy skepticism in all spheres when it comes to what politicos and corporate honchos of all stripes […]
Read moreClimate Change: The Long & Winding Road to Cancun Norwegians put Developed World to Shame
With a qualified result, at best, achieved in Copenhagen last December, progress toward reducing the world’s green house gas (GHG) emissions appears to have stalled, pending the next major conference on climate change COP16, scheduled for Mexico this coming December. Some progress appeared to have been made at Copenhagen toward reducing the destruction of tropical […]
Read moreCast Your Fate to the Winds… . Looking to the Great & the Good for Eco-Salvation?
What on earth are we to believe when it comes to global warming and the health of our planet? For every scientific claim that says unless we take drastic action now we are headed for catastrophic climate change, that the planet is grossly overpopulated and we will be unable to feed ourselves, that pretty soon […]
Read moreMea Culpa, Mea Maxima Eco-Culpa… .
Once again BBC’s Channel 4 sets the cat among the eco-pigeons with a documentary where Green Movement luminaries old and new recant their views, eat humble pie and espouse nuclear energy, GM food and hi-tech solutions to save the world from Global Warming. Let’s get one thing out of the way: climate change is a […]
Read moreThe End of Cheap Food Is it Temporary or Prelude to Global Famine?
“Hadn’t you heard, the age of cheap food is over?”, Ibu Susan retorted tersely one day a couple of years back as I was grumbling to her about the succession of price hikes on a number of staple items. Decent olive oil for example, acceptable soy milk, a nice piece of fresh fish, non-rancid walnuts, […]
Read moreGoodbye to Cheap Food… Hello, Malthus & Pigweed
Even without taking into account the negative effects of climate change on our food supply, how is the world going to feed itself in years to come? If world population continues to grow at the rate it is we could be looking at a world population of some 12 billion by 2050. Until quite recently […]
Read moreLovelock’s Cull or Monbiot’s Snowflake? No wonder we Opt for the Ostrich Option… .
If the polls tell us that ordinary people are denying the reality of global warming, as indeed they do, the collective unconscious is telling us a different story. I can’t think of a time when there have been so many and such bleak books and movies about our post-apocalyptic future – and disconcertingly, not in […]
Read moreThe “Skeptical Environmentalist” Recants ‘Just Kidding! Climate Change is Real’, he says….
Do you remember Bjorn Lomborg, the peroxide mop-topped Danish business lecturer who won fame and fortune back in 2001 with a tendentious yet readable book The Skeptical Environmentalist, which told us that doing anything about climate change was a waste of our time and money? Now, just on ten years later, he tells us he’s […]
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