Bold move from the US this week, as Obama announces new fuel economy standards for the nation’s road vehicles. Chris Mooney wonders why everyone tries to link the tornadoes to climate change when there is little evidence, but doesn’t attempt the same thing with heatwaves when the evidence is much stronger. Teachers, Practical Action’s ‘100 [...]
Archive | July, 2011
How self-sufficient is Britain?
Interesting graph from the Climate Safety website this morning, showing Britain’s declining ability to feed itself. It’s not a disaster as long as we’re able to trade, but it is a clear vulnerability in a world of rising oil prices. We’ve been stung by this vulnerability before, albeit under exceptional circumstances, during the war. In [...]
Fair shares in a world of limits
The basic premise of this website is that since we have already overshot the earth’s biocapacity and much of the world is still poor, it is simply impossible for all seven billion of us to enjoy a consumer lifestyle. Those of us that live in rich countries need to downsize our lifestyles towards a sustainable [...]
Thanks for asking – measuring Britain’s wellbeing
The limited usefulness of Gross Domestic Product is well known. It counts quantity, not quality, and measures activity without discerning whether it’s useful or not. Nevertheless, GDP remains the baseline measure of success for most nations. Running a health check on economic activity makes sense when countries are recovering from war or depression, or are [...]
How do we reverse the trend in household energy use?
In recent weeks, two of Britain’s biggest energy suppliers announced price rises for gas. The price of gas has risen by 122% since 2004, and in the process pushed one in five households into energy poverty - that is, spending 10% or more of their income on energy. Despite the rising costs of energy, we [...]
What we learned this week
This week I added a Google+ button to the blog. I don’t really know what Google+ is, and I suspect Googling it isn’t the best way to get an honest answer. Can anyone point me to a useful introduction? The week that a Scottish couple won a record Euro lottery win, Life Squared has an [...]
Growing a GM cure for AIDS
On Tuesday, a group of European scientists made an announcement at the Wellcome centre in London: the first clinical trials have been approved for an HIV antibody produced by a genetically modified plant. The story was picked up by a few news outlets, but it’s a bad week for any kind of announcements and it [...]
Where does your supermarket shop?
We all get to choose where we do our shopping, and for most of us that basically means choosing from one of the big supermarket chains. But supermarkets have to go shopping too, filling those shelves in the first place. Suppliers in turn need to buy in their ingredients, and so on back through processors [...]
Silent Spring and the mixed up story of DDT
Last year I picked up an old copy of The Limits to Growth report from the Club of Rome. It’s a much-maligned book, and I was surprised to find that almost all of the commonly held beliefs about the book are false. You only had to read the book and the controversies evaporated, but several [...]
Spotting the next economic bubble
So Greece is going down the pan, Ireland’s wobbling again, and Italy is desperately hoping they’re not next to walk the sovereign debt plank. A cooling economy is not hard to spot, amidst the serious debts, stuttering GDP, and increasingly antsy creditors. But there’s more than one way for an economy to go wrong, and [...]
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