You don’t read the Worldwatch Institute site for good news on global warming, of course. But it’s worth noting their report that world car production was up 4% last year - reaching a new record output of 67 million vehicles. The most dramatic change in the global industry was a 30% increase in the number [...]
Not even August yet and there’s already an outstanding contender for ‘greenwash as chutzpah’ of the year award, in the shape of Vauxhall’s current ‘eco-ad’, which boasts of its 30% reduction in emissions at its Ellesmere Port plant. I’ll expand on the reasons for this in a moment - but it does point up [...]
In his latest collection of essays, Hold Everything Dear, John Berger makes a striking comparison in a piece first published in 2002 between Hiroshima 1945 and World Trade Centre 2001 as representing significant turns in our perceptions of American power.
I’m a huge fan of professional cycling. I love the toughness of the sport, but also its tactical complexity. I don’t like the drug-taking (even if some of the best stories about the sport are about drug-takers being found out: “I have good news and bad news: you’ve passed the drugs test but you are [...]
The rains this week reminded me of a recent workshop I facilitated. One of the participants - who was certainly in a position to know - commented that the recent floods in Doncaster seemed to be ‘the first 21st century flood’ . What I understood him to mean by this was that the flooding had [...]
The UK`s Equal Opportunities Commission, which is to be subsumed on 1st October into a new Commission for Equality and Human Rights, has got its retaliation in early by releasing a report, The Gender Agenda, which shows how far from complete its task is.
There’s a fascinating article by the geographer Saskia Sassen on Open Democracy which challenges some of the prevailing ‘wisdom’ about globalisation - most notably that it inevitably weakens the power of national government. The article is written in response to Gordon Brown’s announcement in early July that he would hand back certain powers taken by [...]
I haven’t been able to blog for more than a week because the line which has my broadband connection on it went down so I’ve barely had any internet access. But the experience of getting my phone supplier to get BT (the wholesaler) to sort out my fault, which was at the BT exchange, did [...]
The intense rains of last Friday found me in Dublin, waiting for the aviation schedule to sort itself out. My plane eventually left around three hours late, but what was interesting was the pilot’s explanation.
Ulrich Beck, who invented the concept of the ‘risk society’ more than a decade ago is consistently interesting on the way societies are responding to rapid social change. In an article in today’s Guardian he offers a neologism to describe the shape of the world to come: “cosmopolitics”. Globalisation, he suggests, is reaching its limits.
