Latest Articles
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Malawi celebrates, but for how long?
So while the U.S. Farm Bill is out to pasture until 2008, it looks like most commodity subsidies will remain untouched. Agricultural price supports may be the law of the land here, but it's certainly not what we've been advocating abroad. A bittersweet story on page one of today's NY Times documents how Malawians are pulling back from the brink, largely because -- going against the wishes of the World Bank -- they've begun to reinstitute government crop subsidies:
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Australia ratifies Kyoto Protocol
On his very first official day in office today, new Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd ratified the Kyoto Protocol, committing his country to deep emissions cuts and putting ever more peer pressure on the United States — the only industrialized nation still holding out on Kyoto ratification. Full official ratification for Australia is still 90 […]
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Our challenge: surviving the rule of economists
"Ending famine simply by ignoring the experts" heads the encouraging story of Malawi's turnaround on hunger ...
What's strange is that the "experts" in the piece are U.S. and British economists who advocated the standard imperial liberal solution (grow cash crops for export to us, and buy your food from us). Thankfully, the people of Malawi ignored such expertise and concentrated instead of the physical reality before them.
There is very little time for us to stop seeing our manifest crises in the physical and biological world through the lenses of "experts" who are themselves totally untrained in those fields of study.
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Australia national government transforms; conservative party falls apart
UPDATE: Australia’s new government has ratified Kyoto. Wow. That was fast. Though we’ve mentioned them a couple of times in our news stream, I’m not sure I’ve fully appreciated just how seismic recent political changes in Australia have been. Not only was the Liberal (pro-business right) party defeated but according to John Quiggen it’s completely […]
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Greens need to learn how to celebrate their friends and their movement
I’ve run into a lot of sentiment along the lines of this comment thread — harumphing about how weak and insufficient the impending energy bill is — and it seems crazy and wrongheaded to me. I urge you to check out this post by Josh Dorner on the post-2000 history of energy bill negotiations. Remember […]
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Notable quotable
“We’re probably further ahead in actually doing something about greenhouse gases than most other countries.” — John Marburger III, chief science adviser to President Bush
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The global nature of global warming
This is my formal rebuttal to Brooke Coleman (director of the Renewable Energy Action Project), specifically to comments found in Tom Philpott's latest corn ethanol article. I'm using my access to the bully pulpit to pull it out of comments, like I did the last time a corn ethanol enthusiast joined the discussion.
Welcome to the best environmental blog on the planet, Brooke. You don't seem to have a very high opinion of this community, but maybe you'll warm up to us. I don't speak for the whole community of course, I'm just one of the many who come here to learn and engage in reasoned debate.
You seem to think that anything is better than oil. But believe it or not, in the real world, we sometimes have to pick between the lesser of two evils, at least until something better comes along.
Plowing under the world's remaining grasslands and forests to grow industrial agrofuels dwarfs the damage done by oil spills. What happens when you take grain off the world food market and stuff it into American gas tanks? I'll tell you. Someone somewhere on this planet takes advantage of the high prices to plant more of it to fill the hole in the human food chain. Where is the arable land they need to do that? It is under an existing carbon sink or has another crop on it already. The second leading cause of global warming is deforestation. How hard is that concept to understand? Global warming is global. What we do here screws everybody.
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The 100 most vulnerable nations have contributed least to climate change
Another short new briefing (PDF) from the International Institute Environment and Development (IIED), this one on the 100 countries most vulnerable to climate change: • Human-induced climate change is likely to have the heaviest impact on small low-lying island and coastal states, African nations, Asian mega-deltas and the polar regions. • The 100 most vulnerable […]
