One of the great failures of the market system is the pharmaceuticals industry. The most serious health problems are in the developing world, but all the money is in the developed world. This skews the industry’s priorities, leading to pointless medical innovations such as botox, while millions die of neglected diseases like malaria or TB [...]
Archive | February, 2009
The world’s most indebted countries
When you think of the most indebted countries, who do you think of? You probably think of African countries such as Ethiopia, Malawi or Chad. Those countries are all on the IMF’s list of heavily indebted countries, all places that are struggling under a heavy burden of public debt. If you add personal and public [...]
A greener valentine’s day
You may remember my feelings about Valentine’s Day, but I dealt with that last year. I will refrain from lamenting the shallow consumerism of it and talk about something else this time, like the Energy Saving Trust. Under the slogan ‘turn me on, turn it off‘, the Energy Saving Trust are inviting people to take [...]
Please stop exaggerating, say UK’s top climate scientists
The Met Office’s Hadley Centre, one of the world’s leading research centres on climate change, has issued an appeal to journalists to be more careful with their headlines. “News headlines vie for attention and it is easy for scientists to grab this attention by linking climate change to the latest extreme weather event or apocalyptic [...]
Can we please stop ‘saving the planet’?
I’ve been reading a book this week called ‘Seven years to save the planet’. More on that later, but rather than clutter my review with a tangent, can I just say that’s a rather annoying title. We need to stop using the phrase ‘save the planet’ in our campaigning and advertising. Here’s why: 1) The [...]
Rediscovering the local
Lindsay Mackie hits the nail on the head with her post ‘Snow economics‘ over on the nef blog, making the same point I made yesterday, only better and with examples: “The snow brought with it the mantras of new economics – sharing of skills, time banking, local reliance, small scale acts of collaboration – to [...]
Keep it simple – the zero-carbon refrigerator
Here’s a great example of what E F Schumacher called ‘intermediate technology’, an innovation that improves on traditional methods without requiring all the infrastructure of the the developed world. The ‘zeer pot’ consists of two clay pots, one inside the other, with a layer of sand in-between. It is placed on a stand, water is [...]
Questions in the snow – is our lifestyle nature-proof?
This week has been a bit of a reminder of the fragility of our lifestyles here in the UK. After the heaviest snowfall in 18 years last Monday, schools closed, public transport stopped, and millions of people struggled to get to work. The economy lost £1.2 billion as a result. It snowed again on Wednesday, [...]
Cutting your car use, by Anna Semlyn
At around sixty pages and full of bullet points and pictures, this is a short and simple little book to help drivers to think through how they use their cars. It may actually have been given away free originally, considering it has ‘Perth and Kinross Council, with compliments’ on the back of my copy. Anna [...]
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