Subscribe to Dollars & Sense magazine. Recent articles related to the financial crisis. George Monbiot on the 'Other Crisis'From the fantastic Tuesday morning Guardian columnist's latest. Note in particular this little item: "This approach is challenged by the American thinker Sharon Astyk. In an interesting new essay, she points out that replacing the world's energy infrastructure involves "an enormous front-load of fossil fuels", which are required to manufacture wind turbines, electric cars, new grid connections, insulation and all the rest. This could push us past the climate tipping point."The planet is now so vandalised that only total energy renewal can save us It may be too late. But without radical action, we will be the generation that saved the banks and let the biosphere collapse George Monbiot guardian.co.uk Tuesday November 25 2008 00.01 GMT George Bush is behaving like a furious defaulter whose home is about to be repossessed. Smashing the porcelain, ripping the doors off their hinges, he is determined that there will be nothing worth owning by the time the bastards kick him out. His midnight regulations, opening America's wilderness to logging and mining, trashing pollution controls, tearing up conservation laws, will do almost as much damage in the last 60 days of his presidency as he achieved in the foregoing 3,000. His backers--among them the nastiest pollutocrats in America--are calling in their favours. But this last binge of vandalism is also the Bush presidency reduced to its essentials. Destruction is not an accidental product of its ideology. Destruction is the ideology. Neoconservatism is power expressed by showing that you can reduce any part of the world to rubble. If it is too late to prevent runaway climate change, the Bush team must carry much of the blame. His wilful trashing of the Middle Climate--the interlude of benign temperatures which allowed human civilisation to flourish--makes the mass murder he engineered in Iraq only the second of his crimes against humanity. Bush has waged his war on science with the same obtuse determination with which he has waged his war on terror. Is it too late? To say so is to make it true. To suggest there is nothing that can be done is to ensure that nothing is done. But even a resolute optimist like me finds hope ever harder to summon. A new summary of the science published since last year's Intergovernmental Panel report suggests that--almost a century ahead of schedule - the critical climate processes might have begun. Read the rest of the article Labels: bailout, environmental crisis, George Monbiot, The Guardian Please consider donating to Dollars & Sense and/or subscribing to the magazine (both print and e-subscriptions now available!). |
