Environment

We learned yesterday that a British university had made a small contribution to addressing a climate emergency that its spokespeople argue is going to kill us all just 12 years from now.  As Katherine Sellgren at the BBC reports: “A university is banning the sale of [beef] burgers to try …

A couple of weeks ago, Nick Butler at the Financial Times opined about the uselessness of various campaigns to address climate change: “When companies fail to deliver, managers and investors are forced to change their strategies. The process is often difficult, but always essential. Non-governmental and campaigning organisations are not …

Climate change was meant to be a central plank of the US Democrat Party’s plan to unseat Trump in next year’s presidential election.  Instead, there is broad agreement – even among the left-leaning media – that climate change turned into a train wreck for would-be candidates in last week’s debates.  …

The BBC’s latest contribution to the green energy fantasy turned out to be largely the usual mix of techno-utopian hopium and green energy industry PR.  Amid the bullshit, however, was a repeat of a key piece of propaganda by a spokeswoman from the UK’s Committee on Climate Change.  This was …

You wait centuries for an apocalyptic horseman to arrive and then two of them appear at once.  I refer, of course, to two of humanity’s oldest foes; famine and pestilence – both of which are in the news this month. Famine comes in the form of the unfolding calamity across …

Rising food prices were a major contributor to the recession in 2010-11. Climate variation across Eurasia had resulted in a poor grain harvest that produced shortages around the planet.  As Troy Sternberg noted: “In 2010, the world wheat harvest was affected by changing weather patterns that led to shortages. Production …

This morning I awoke to the news that we now have something called a Climate Emergency (note the capital letters).  This is clearly something different to the (lower case) climate emergency that scientists and campaigners have been warning about since I was a child; and it seems to be something …

Remind me again why you go to work in the morning?  Is it because you are so committed to the mission of your corporate employer that you would willingly work for nothing if they asked you to?  Does your job provide you with so high a degree of life-meaning and …

The immediate urgency of Brexit has helped the UK avoid much of the “green new dealism” that is currently exercising our cousins on the other side of the Atlantic.  Along with school students around the world, ours are taking time out from classes to protest the imminent arrival of an …

There is broad agreement that 2018 was the worst year yet for the environment.  According to the New York Times “The Story of 2018 Was Climate Change;” while the Washington Post informed us that: “Extreme weather in 2018 was a raging, howling signal of climate change.”  Meanwhile on this side …