On the BBC's Horizon tonight, Sir David Attenborough, patron of the Optimum Population Trust, tackles the question How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth? Except he doesn't. He comes up with an answer alright - 15 billion if we all live like the average Indian, 2.5...
A Peak Peak-Oil-Theory Theory
Five months is a long time in climate politics. The arguments change with the seasons. Back in the hazy days of July and August, the eco-newswires were dominated by stories about ‘record-breaking’ arctic ice extent – even though it wasn’t record-breaking, and the...
Painting Pictures of Poverty
It’s Oxfam. Again. Some people have been a little confused about our ‘attacks’ on Oxfam. Why would we want to criticise nice people who are trying to do good? We are interested in the ideas which Oxfam use to understand and explain the problems they hope to answer....
“Environmental Justice” – a Fiction
Oxfam, with the Climate Justice Program and Advocates for International Development are running a competition. We are calling on lawyers, academics and law students worldwide to put forward the strongest legal case possible to demonstrate that rich countries’...
Who's the Basket Case, Oxfam?
There's an advert for Oxfam running on UK TV at the moment that caught our attention. It is most odd. [youtube eQK6ODxDfDY] The little old lady and her friends seem to be vomiting at injustice, thereby making the world a better place. In a way, this almost represents...
Backwards to the Future
Oxfam was once a charity set up to provide famine relief. It was hard to criticise without looking a bit mean. It is now a gigantic international NGO which influences the direction of policy towards and within the developing world. Like many other organisations, it...
Climate Change Delusion By Proxy
Since the first case of the psychiatric disorder 'climate change delusion' was diagnosed in an Australian patient earlier this month, commentators have suggested that the symptoms expressed by Al Gore and the like point to the condition being a rather common one....
In Praise of Unsustainability
We've mentioned before that everything that humans have ever done has been unsustainable. And not in a bad way. According to architect Austin Williams, sustainability is 'a philosophy of low aspirations, miserablism, petty-mindedness, parochialism, sanctimony'. Ben...
Infinite Regress
In a recent post, we looked at some of Green MEP Caroline Lucas's arguments for action on climate change. One of them has stuck with us as especially absurd, and merits further attention: this planet has finite resources. You cannot go on growing indefinitely on a...
Sustainababble
Writing in the Guardian this week, John Vidal says, The government is in danger of losing credibility on climate change because more than half of all its departments are failing to reduce their carbon emissions enough to reach levels that the nation as a whole is...