What happened to the 25 tram projects mooted by John Prescott in 2000? And how can they be revived? Can good come of the Japanese nuclear crisis, if it inspires this kind of investment in renewable energy? I didn’t watch the royal wedding, but I did read Bishop Richard Chartres’ sermon on Byron’s blog. Apparently [...]
Archive | April, 2011
5 reasons why the world can’t feed 10 billion
Every year, we add 78 million people to the world’s population – equivalent to a new USA every 4 years. Demographers, mathematicians and environmentalists have been warning for years that the world’s population will eventually hit a natural limit. In part one of this series, I looked at five reasons to be optimistic about our [...]
5 reasons why the world can feed 10 billion
Every year, we add 78 million people to the world’s population – equivalent to a new USA every 4 years. Demographers, mathematicians and environmentalists have been warning for years that the world’s population will eventually hit a natural limit. Although famines are more rare in some parts of the world, the number of hungry people [...]
The delicate art of making predictions
There’s been a bit of a debate over population predictions on last week’s review of Peoplequake. Among the bones of contention are the UN population estimates, and a 2005 UNEP report on environmental refugees, currently the subject of much skeptic tub-thumping. Making predictions is a tricky business, but it’s also a natural and necessary process. [...]
UK arms sales to the Middle East
In the papers today, another story about Syrian soldiers firing into protesting crowds. 17 people were shot dead last week, 112 over the weekend. It’s entirely possible that they used British ammunition. It’s not the first time our equipment has been used this year to suppress calls for the democracy that we enjoy ourselves. Bahrain: [...]
What is the Royal Wedding worth to the British economy?
I picked up the local paper this morning, and was greeted with the full front page ad. ‘Come and celebrate the Royal Wedding at Essence of Asia’ it beckons, with the prospect of an all-you-can-eat Asian buffet and a glass of complimentary champagne. That generous offer, yours for a bargain £14.95, was not the last [...]
Book review: Peoplequake, by Fred Pearce
The world is going through a massive demographic transition. It is a century in and has at least another century to run. Life on this planet, and even the planet itself, will be very different by the time it is over. This is the ‘peoplequake’, as Fred Pearce has named it, the boom in human [...]
Welcome to the world of peak gold
This week the price of gold burst through the $1,500 an ounce mark. It’s a new record in a long run for gold over the last five years. This week’s spike is at least partly due, once again, to a credit ratings agency. Standard and Poor’s passed judgement on US debt on monday, and some [...]
The Red Tape Challenge
Governments love to make up new rules, as we all know. Little laws about this, regulations and standards for that, procedures and processes, and next thing you know we’re all drowning in paperwork. Every once in a while, we should review them and tidy up the regulation that’s got out of hand. That’s the idea [...]
Smart Growth: from Sprawl to Sustainability, by Jon Reeds
For 100 years, we have been re-shaping our environment around the false promise of suburbia, “spurred on by a fuzzy nostalgia for our ancestors’ rural past, by a desire to live in the countryside the sprawl destroys, by a widely held belief that low-density garden suburb living is good for us, and by a retreat from community into individualism.”
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