Category Environment

Entries 45 Total Description

The natural world, especially as affected by human activity.

Airdrops finally begin in Haiti

Jan 19, ’10 8:35 AM

U.S. Defence Sec­ret­ary Robert Gates on the 15th Jan:

It seems to me that without hav­ing any struc­ture on the ground in terms of dis­tri­bu­tion, that an air­drop is simply going to lead to riots as people try and go after that stuff … It seems to me that’s a for­mula for con­trib­ut­ing to chaos rather than pre­vent­ing it.

People are dying of star­va­tion and dis­ease but they’re not allowed any sup­plies because the head of the armed ser­vices of Amer­ica, now the con­trol­ler of Haitian air­space, thinks they can’t be trusted.

This is what hap­pens when you leave author­it­ari­ans in con­trol of a human­it­arian mission.

The lack of air­drops in these crit­ical few days has also helped to cre­ate a self-fulfilling proph­ecy of dis­order, to be “fixed” by out­siders. They’ve already mil­it­ar­ised this relief effort and based on their his­tory in Haiti I don’t think the the Amer­ic­ans can be trus­ted one bit. Unfor­tu­nately Haitians don’t have much choice at the moment.

Lim­ited air­drops finally began yes­ter­day but it will be too little too late for many.

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Haiti earthquake disaster is man-made

Jan 15, ’10 7:33 PM

This might sound a strange thing to say but let’s not delude ourselves, the dis­aster in Haiti is largely a man-made one. And it’s down to the usual sus­pects:

Haiti is routinely described as the “poorest coun­try in the west­ern hemi­sphere”. This poverty is the dir­ect leg­acy of per­haps the most bru­tal sys­tem of colo­nial exploit­a­tion in world his­tory, com­poun­ded by dec­ades of sys­tem­atic post­co­lo­nial oppression.

Dec­ades of neo­lib­eral “adjust­ment” and neo-imperial inter­ven­tion have robbed its gov­ern­ment of any sig­ni­fic­ant capa­city to invest in its people or to reg­u­late its economy.

It is this poverty and power­less­ness that account for the full scale of the hor­ror in Port-au-Prince today. Since the late 1970s, relent­less neo­lib­eral assault on Haiti’s agrarian eco­nomy has forced tens of thou­sands of small farm­ers into over­crowded urban slums.

As one com­menter notes:

Now is exactly the time to inject some real­ism into the dis­course. I’ve been reading/listening to reports from the West­ern media, and they are full of revi­sions and dis­tor­tions con­cern­ing our his­tor­ical role there. ‘Haiti is a failed state,’ ‘Aristide ‘fled,’ was ‘forced out by a rebel­lion,’ etc., ignor­ing the delib­er­ate cam­paign of destabil­isa­tion and coup d’etat against the demo­crat­ic­ally elec­ted gov­ern­ment in 2004.

Religion-free ways to donate to the relief effort:

To donate to the relief effort in a religion-free way and help counter the scan­dal­ous myth that only the reli­gious care about their fellow-humans you can donate at SHARE or Non-Believers Giv­ing Aid.

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The Big Picture: Earthquake in Haiti

Jan 13, ’10 10:22 PM

Jesus. Utter dev­ast­a­tion. There are reports the death toll could be in the hun­dreds of thousands.

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Weather is not the same as climate

Jan 8, ’10 1:56 PM

George Mon­biot attempts to mop up the mess made by some of the idi­ots claim­ing the cold snap we’re hav­ing some­how dis­cred­its global warm­ing and cli­mate change.

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Congratulations New Zealand

Dec 18, ’09 8:08 AM

You can rest assured that when your grand­chil­dren ask you what you did when you were warned of man-made cli­mate change you voted into gov­ern­ment a bunch of self-centred old men and fin­an­ci­ers try­ing to squeeze every last dol­lar from their invest­ments in out­dated indus­tries who then went to Copen­ha­gen and com­mit­ted New Zea­l­and to fuck all.

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Climate change and intergenerational warfare

Dec 15, ’09 7:40 AM

Alex Stef­fen of World­chan­ging puts his fin­ger on one of the more damning aspects of the polit­ics of cli­mate change, the vast chasm of per­spect­ive between the gen­er­a­tions, Copen­ha­gen and the War for the Future:

To be young and aware is to know you’re being lied to; to know that a bright green future is pos­sible; to know that we can reima­gine the world, rebuild our cit­ies, redesign our lives, retool our factor­ies, dis­trib­ute innov­a­tion and cre­ativ­ity and all live in a world that is not only bet­ter than the altern­at­ive, but much bet­ter than the world we have now.

To be young and aware is to sus­pect that, in the end, the debate about cli­mate action isn’t about sub­stance, but about rich old men try­ing to squeeze every last dol­lar, euro, and yen from their invest­ments in out­dated indus­tries. It is to agree with the envir­on­ment­al­ist Paul Hawken that we have an eco­nomy that steals the future, sells it in the present, and calls it GDP. It is to begin to see your eld­ers as can­ni­bals with golf clubs.

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Oil lobby behind climate change denial

Dec 8, ’09 8:43 AM

Cli­mate change deni­al­ism fas­cin­ates me. How does one become a deni­al­ist in the face of sci­entific con­sensus? Hav­ing talked to people who exhibit vari­ous levels of denial and scep­ti­cism my hunch is that it’s an inherit psy­cho­lo­gical defect of humans. People can’t bring them­selves to accept that they might be partly respons­ible for a crime of such enorm­ity, so they deny. A clas­sic psy­cho­lo­gical response.

But while this might explain why so many are ready and will­ing to be duped into think­ing man-made cli­mate change is a con­spir­acy, it doesn’t seem to explain why so many are duped. Turns out there’s an explan­a­tion for that:

Think envir­on­ment­al­ists are stooges? You’re the unwit­ting recruit of a hugely power­ful oil lobby – I’ve got the proof.

I have placed on the Guardian’s web­site four case stud­ies; each of which provides a shock­ing example of how the denial industry works.

Remem­ber this the next time you hear people claim­ing that cli­mate sci­ent­ists are only in it for the money, or that envir­on­ment­al­ists are try­ing to cre­ate a com­mun­ist world gov­ern­ment: these ideas were devised and broad­cast by energy com­pan­ies. The people who inform me, appar­ently without irony, that “your art­icle is an ad hom­inem attack, you four-eyed, big-nosed, com­mie sack of shit”, or “you scare­mon­gers will des­troy the entire world eco­nomy and take us back to the Stone Age”, are the unwit­ting recruits of cam­paigns they have never heard of.

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Offset your international flight with the life of one African

Dec 3, ’09 1:10 PM

James Love­lock, amongst oth­ers, is pro­mot­ing a plan to cut CO2 emis­sions by pay­ing for fam­ily plan­ning in the devel­op­ing world:

Cal­cu­la­tions based on the trust’s fig­ures show the 10 tonnes emit­ted by a return flight from Lon­don to Sydney would be off­set by enabling the avoid­ance of one unwanted birth in a coun­try such as Kenya.

So one African’s life is worth the car­bon emis­sions of one flight from Lon­don to Sydney? Some­thing tells me the African is not the prob­lem in this equation.

Provid­ing the means for women to avoid an unwanted birth is an admiral pur­suit but, really, off­set­ting the over con­sump­tion of people in rich coun­tries to fund it?

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U.S. militarism, oil and global warming

Dec 3, ’09 1:05 PM

A friend just for­war­ded this art­icle from 2007 on mil­it­ar­ism and global warm­ing. Con­sider this:

US mil­it­ar­ism has to be con­sidered under three head­ings: First, the US mil­it­ary is the largest single con­sumer of fossil fuel in the world. Second, the US eco­nomy, the largest national con­sumer of fossil fuel in the world, has shown that its primary mode of main­tain­ing a sup­ply of fossil fuel for itself is through mil­it­ary action (assault, inter­ven­tion, occu­pa­tion of other oil pro­du­cing nations). Third, the US mil­it­ary oper­ates in the interest of a cor­por­ate eco­nomy of which it (the mil­it­ary) is the fore­most sec­tor in the US.

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Monbiot on peak oil and food production

Nov 17, ’09 8:49 AM

Mon­biot on peak oil and food pro­duc­tion:

If the whis­tleblowers are right, we should be stock­pil­ing … If we are taken by sur­prise, if we have failed to replace oil before the sup­ply peaks then crashes, the global eco­nomy is stuffed. But noth­ing the whistle-blowers said has scared me as much as the con­ver­sa­tion I had last week with a Pem­broke­shire farmer.

Wyn Evans, who runs a mixed farm of 170 acres, has been try­ing to reduce his depend­ency on fossil fuels since 1977. He has installed an anaer­obic digester, a wind tur­bine, solar pan­els and a ground-sourced heat pump. He has sought wherever pos­sible to replace diesel with his own elec­tri­city. Instead of using his tractor to spread slurry, he pumps it from the digester on to nearby fields. He’s replaced his tractor-driven irrig­a­tion sys­tem with an elec­tric one, and set up a new sys­tem for dry­ing hay indoors, which means he has to turn it in the field only once. Whatever else he does is likely to pro­duce smal­ler sav­ings. But these innov­a­tions have reduced his use of diesel by only around 25%.

We prac­tic­ally eat oil.

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