The world economy giving less to poorest in spite of global poverty campaign

World's poorest see 73 per cent drop in share of benefits from growth in last decade according to new research from nef released as World Economic Forum gathers in Davos.

nef's report "Growth isn't working: the uneven distribution of benefits and costs from economic growth", released on Monday 23 January 2006, shows that globalisation is failing the world's poorest as their share of the benefits of growth plummet, and accelerating climate change hurts the poorest most.

The report reveals that the share of benefits from global economic growth reaching the world's poorest people is actually shrinking, while they continue to bear an unfair share of the costs. New figures show that growth was less effective at passing on benefits to the poorest in the 1990's than it was even in the 1980's- the so-called 'lost decade for development' - and an age of rising climate chaos will worsen their prospects.

Nuclear power costs underestimated and renewables’ potential overlooked

The cost of new nuclear power has been underestimated by almost a factor of three and the potential of small scale renewables critically overlooked according to a report from nef (the new economics foundation), Mirage and Oasis, released to coincide with the Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy, on 29 June 2005.

Nuclear power has been promoted in the UK and globally as the answer to climate change and energy insecurity. But, as Mirage and Oasis reveals, as a response to global warming, nuclear power is too slow, too expensive and too limited. And, in an age of terrorist threats, it is more of a security risk than a solution. Instead, renewable energy offers as safe, secure and climate-friendly energy supply system. It leaves no toxic legacy and is abundant and cheap to harvest both in the UK and globally.

A new world order - Lester Brown

China now consumes more of the Earth's resources than the US. Lester R Brown examines the consequences should its population devour at the American rate, and how growth is viable within our planet's boundaries

Wednesday January 25, 2006
The Guardian

For almost as long as I can remember, the experts have been saying that the US, with 5% of the world's population, consumes a third or more of the Earth's resources. That is no longer true.

China has now overtaken America as the world's leading resource consumer. Among the basic commodities - grain and meat in the food sector, oil and coal in the energy sector, and steel in the industrial sector - China now consumes more of each of these than the US except for oil. It consumes nearly twice as much meat - 67m tonnes compared with 39m tonnes in the US; and more than twice as much steel - 258m tonnes to 104m.

Time for Plan B

Sustaining our early 21st-century global civilisation now depends on shifting to a renewable energy powered, re-use/recycle economy with a diversified transport system. Business as usual - Plan A - cannot take us where we want to go. It is time for Plan B, time to build a new economy.

Glimpses of the new economy can already be seen in the wind farms of western Europe, the solar rooftops of Japan, the fast-growing hybrid car fleet of the US, the reforested mountains of South Korea, and the bicycle-friendly streets of Amsterdam. Virtually everything we need to do to build an economy that will sustain economic progress is already being done in one or more countries.

Taxing negative activities

The key to restructuring the global economy is restructuring national tax systems. In effect, lowering taxes on income and increasing those on environmentally destructive activities. This has progressed fastest in Europe, where countries are taxing negative activities, such as carbon emissions, the generation of rubbish (landfill taxes), and cars driven in cities.

A four-year plan adopted in Germany in 1999 systematically shifted taxes from labour to energy. By 2001, this plan had lowered fuel use by 5%. It had also accelerated growth in the renewable energy sector, creating some 45,400 jobs by 2003 in the wind industry alone - a number that is projected to rise to 103,000 by 2010.

Of all the resources needed to build an economy that will sustain economic progress, none is more scarce than time. With climate change, we may be approaching the point of no return. The temptation is to reset the clock. But we cannot.
Nature is the timekeeper.

Cutting Carbon Emissions

Some time ago, I had a call from my son Brian, who had come across a huge new wind farm as he was driving on one of the interstate highways in west Texas. He described the rows of wind turbines receding toward the horizon. Interspersed among them were oil wells. The wind turbines were turning and the oil wells were pumping. My son was fascinated by the juxtaposition of the old and the new, the past and the future. I said, “If you return 30 years from now, the wind turbines will still be turning, but it is unlikely that the oil wells will be pumping.” What he was looking at in a nutshell was the energy transition, the shift from the age of fossil fuels to renewables.

2006 Environmental Performance Index

A pilot nation-by-nation study of environmental performance shows that just six nations - led by New Zealand, followed by five from Northern Europe - have achieved 85 percent or better success in meeting a set of critical environmental goals ranging from clean drinking water and low ozone levels to sustainable fisheries and low greenhouse gas emissions.

The pilot study, called the 2006 Environmental Performance Index, is jointly produced by Yale and Columbia Universities.

Titanic

The world we know is like the Titanic. It is grand, chic, high-powered, and it slips effortless through a frigid sea of icebergs. It does not have enough lifeboats, and those that it has will be poorly employed. If we do not change course, disaster, perhaps catastrophe, is almost inevitable. There is a reason why interest in the Titanic has been revived; it's the perfect metaphor for our planet. On some level we know: we are on the Titanic. We just don't know we've been hit.
--John Brandenburg: "Dead Mars, Dying Earth

"Stun, bludgeon, and slaughter animals at a breakneck pace"

Global meat production has increased more than fivefold since 1950, and more than doubled since the 1970s; livestock meet "30 per cent of total human needs for food and agricultural production"; and the average meat consumption in the developing world is about 30 kg a year, compared to 80 kg in the developed countries.

To match the demand, production is through factory farming, or CAFO, short for `confined animal feeding operations'. Industrial systems generate almost three-fourths of the world's poultry products, and half of all pork. On the fast lane, "Beef calves can grow from 36 kg to 544 kg in just 14 months on a diet of corn, soybeans, antibiotics and hormones." To help hasten the process, cattle are fed with "cow's blood, chicken, chicken manure, feather meal, pigs, and even saw dust."

Read the full story here

What they don't want you to know about the coming oil crisis

Soaring fuel prices, rumours of winter power cuts, panic over the gas supply from Russia, abrupt changes to forecasts of crude output... Is something sinister going on? Yes, says former oil man Jeremy Leggett, and it's time to face the fact that the supplies we so depend on are going to run out.

We have allowed oil to become vital to virtually everything we do. Ninety per cent of all our transportation, whether by land, air or sea, is fuelled by oil. Ninety-five per cent of all goods in shops involve the use of oil. Ninety-five per cent of all our food products require oil use.
Just to farm a single cow and deliver it to market requires six barrels of oil, enough to drive a car from New York to Los Angeles. The world consumes more than 80 million barrels of oil a day, 29 billion barrels a year, at the time of writing. This figure is rising fast, as it has done for decades. The almost universal expectation is that it will keep doing so for years to come.

On a high...

Humankind is presently suffering from a drug-induced high (in this case, the drug is cheap energy) and now faces the prospects of the most terrible and persistent hangover. The drug is exhausted and future generations will look back upon this time as the peak of human insanity. Destroying a world for the sake of wealth must rank as the greatest act of stupidity in the history of life in the Universe.

The energy intensive industrial-technological world which has such a short history (appearing like a long time only because the human attention span is so short) will cease to exist in a geologically trivial period of time.

David Mathews

State of the World 2006: China, India, the U.S., Europe, and Japan by the Numbers

These slides offer a glimpse of the rising ecological impact of two populous developing nations, China and India, while illustrating that the per-capita resource consumption and pollution of countries in the industrialized world—including the United States, the European Union and Japan—is much higher. If by 2030, China and India alone were to achieve a per-capita footprint equivalent to that of Japan today, together they would require a full planet earth to meet their needs.
Learn more in the State of the World 2006 report.

The Revenge of Gaia - James Lovelock

Thirty years ago, the scientist James Lovelock worked out that the Earth possessed a planetary-scale control system which kept the environment fit for life. He called it Gaia, and the theory has become widely accepted. Now, he believes mankind's abuse of the environment is making that mechanism work against us. His astonishing conclusion - that climate change is already insoluble, and life on Earth will never be the same again.

In a profoundly pessimistic new assessment, published in today's Independent, Professor Lovelock suggests that efforts to counter global warming cannot succeed, and that, in effect, it is already too late.

The world and human society face disaster to a worse extent, and on a faster timescale, than almost anybody realises, he believes. He writes: " Before this century is over, billions of us will die, and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable."

He terms this phenomenon "The Revenge of Gaia" and examines it in detail in a new book with that title, to be published next month.

In his book's concluding chapter, he writes: "What should a sensible European government be doing now? I think we have little option but to prepare for the worst, and assume that we have passed the threshold."
And in today's Independent he writes: "We will do our best to survive, but sadly I cannot see the United States or the emerging economies of China and India cutting back in time, and they are the main source of [CO2] emissions. The worst will happen ..."

Related article:
James Lovelock: The Earth is about to catch a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years.

As soon as you pump up the temperature, everything changes. And at the moment the system is amplifying change. "So our problem is that anything we do, like increasing the carbon dioxide, mucking about with the land, destroying forests, farming too much, things like that - they don't just produce a linear increase in temperature, they produce an amplified increase in temperature.

"The analogy I use is, it's as if we were in a pleasure boat above the Niagara Falls. You're all right as long as the engines are going, and you can get out of it. But if the engines fail, you're drawn towards the edge faster and faster, and there's no hope of getting back once you've gone over - then you're going down.

"And the uprise is just like that, the steep jump of temperature on Earth. It is exactly like the drop in the Falls."

Why Gaia is wreaking revenge on our abuse of the environment.

Over the Peak

No one knows when oil production will start declining, but we must focus on alternatives to petroleum now.

As oil prices soared from $24 per barrel in early 2003 to a peak of $70 per barrel in September 2005, the question being asked by experts and policy makers alike was whether we've "entered a new era," as Chevron Corporation CEO David O'Reilly has said, or just encountered a temporary glitch that will be corrected by market forces, as ExxonMobil President Rex Tillerson argued in a speech to the World Petroleum Congress last September.

Those who live by the crystal ball often end up eating ground glass, so I won't join those in the peak oil school who have predicted which month world oil production will peak. But there's one conclusion on which I'm ready to stake my reputation: the current path -- continually expanding our use of oil on the assumption that the Earth will yield whatever quantity we need -- is irresponsible and reckless.

By Christopher Flavin, World Watch.

World Watch Magazine - Jan/Feb 2006 - Peak Oil

Watching as the world vanishes

By Roxana Robinson | January 1, 2006 | The Boston Globe

IT WAS SHAMEFUL, everyone agreed afterward, that no one did anything at the time. Because people knew it was happening. There were reports, early on. People saw things, near where it was happening. They knew. Later, they said they hadn't known, really; they hadn't understood the scale of it. They explained their reasons for doing nothing. They said the government was responsible, there was nothing they could do. Certainly the government was determined to carry out its plans, and maybe people felt overwhelmed and helpless. Maybe this was a place where the curves of ignorance, courage, and survival instinct intersected, to exclude the possibility of action.

The affected population knew about it, of course, but they had no political power, no voice. As they diminished in number, they became increasingly less important, which seemed to validate what was happening. How could they be important if they were gone?

Even the people who were distanced from it, and not in danger, knew about it, but they did nothing either. Maybe they didn't believe what they heard. Maybe they felt it did not threaten them, it was too far away and too terrible. There are things too terrible to consider. If you acknowledged their reality, you would be unable to function. And where would we be, if we couldn't function?

The news has actually been coming in for decades -- from the field, from eyewitnesses, from relief organizations. We can even see the evidence ourselves -- it's happening near us, wherever we are -- but we don't believe these accounts, even our own. We don't want to, because they are too terrible to consider. We're afraid we won't be able to function. The more tremendous a threat is, the harder it is to comprehend. As Raphael Lemkin said in 1944, ''. . . reports which slip out from behind the frontiers . . . are very often labelled as untrustworthy atrocity stories, because they are so gruesome that people simply refuse to believe them." What we're hearing is too frightening to believe.

The evidence is still growing, and growing worse, but we're still resisting it. When the scientists grew more serious and more impassioned about the situation, when they began giving numbers, offering proof, asking for action, we decided that we no longer believed in science. We distanced ourselves; we hoped we wouldn't be affected. The population at risk is not our population, at least not right now, so we needn't do anything right now. We might do something later. The government can do something if there's a real crisis. We trust the government to take care of us, to act responsibly. Believing this is easier than taking drastic steps to stop what's happening, particularly since this government is very much opposed to stopping what's happening. This government is very much intent on pursuing its present course, which results, as a side effect -- though the government would not acknowledge this, or even comment on the fact that it is taking place -- in the complete destruction of the affected population. The affected population is one-half of all the species presently living on earth.

Fanaticism is a driving force here, as it often is behind great crimes. This is a crime against nature, and this fanaticism is economic -- the belief that money and profit should outweigh all other considerations, including survival of the species. If we maintain our current rates of consumption and environmental strategies, by the end of this century, one-half of the species now alive on earth may be extinct. We don't know what the specific effects will be, but we know they'll be extreme. We're presiding over the greatest extermination of living species since the end of the dinosaurs. We're eliminating habitat, reliable climate, fresh water, clean air, and nourishment. We're imposing intolerable living conditions on thousands of species. The current rate of extinctions is thought to be at least 1,000 times higher than the natural level. Right now, one-quarter of all mammals are endangered with extinction; one-third of all species, animal and vegetable, may be gone by 2050.

It may not be evident to us, as we sit in our cubicles, at our laptops, but we need these other species, even those that seem impossibly small and remote. We need the Northern lapwing, the Scottish crossbill, the king protea (South Africa's national flower), the albacore tuna, Boyd's forest dragon (an Australian lizard) -- all of which are in dire straits. We're interconnected to everything. The scrawniest weed in Patagonia absorbs carbon dioxide, which poisons us, and produces oxygen, which we breathe in New York or Houston. Plants provide air, food, and medicine; every living being occupies a niche in the global mosaic. Birds transport seeds and pollen; they destroy insect pests; they clean our harbors and cities and landscapes. All living species perform functions valuable to the ecosystem, to the planet, and to the people who live on it. But species everywhere are being systematically deprived of the possibility of life.

We know what we're doing. We hear the reports, the gruesome stories, but we've decided just to wait and see. We think the scientists -- all of them -- could be wrong. Maybe we'll just do nothing. Short-term self-interest suggests that we do nothing right now. Why should we drive slower cars because of the Scottish crossbill?

Cutting fossil fuels and reducing greenhouse gases would save many species from vanishing, but we're not committing ourselves to that strategy. One hundred eighty-two nations ratified the Convention on Biological Diversity; the United States -- largest producer of greenhouse gases -- is the only industrial country that refused. We didn't want to be subject to any regulation over our destruction of the air, the water, the habitat, and the voiceless inhabitants of the earth. Others agree. Many developing countries wanted nothing in the treaty that might limit their freedom to exploit -- and destroy -- their natural resources. So the treaty is neither very powerful or effective, since almost everyone involved places short-term economic goals ahead of the long-term health of the planet. Similar issues affect the Kyoto Agreement. It seems we're all in this together, this destruction of species. This is an international effort.

Do we not think we need a healthy planet? Do we think that the animals dying all around us means nothing? That this wholesale destruction won't affect us? Where are the birds, most common and vivid form of wildlife? Intensive agriculture destroys hedges, woods, and wetlands that birds need for feeding and nesting; toxic chemicals poison the pests and the seed-bearing wild plants they need for food. Logging destroys whole regions of habitat; industry pollutes air around the globe. The birds can't build nests, they can't find food, they can't feed their young. They're dying off. Migrating birds used to move in flocks of thousands. Now they straggle past in groups of 20 or 30. Remember the passenger pigeons? Once they darkened the entire sky, across the prairies; we wiped them out in a few decades. We're watching life being extinguished all around us.

The use of fossil fuels, and the resulting climate change, is wreaking havoc everywhere. Monster storms, temperature spikes, and erratic, destructive weather all take their toll on agriculture, construction, transportation, and communication, as well as wildlife. Do we still think we don't belong to the affected population? What if the group we're destroying turns out to include our own? Don't we remember the canary in the coal mine? The canaries are dropping like flies. Why are we standing here, holding the cage?

Whom will we believe, if not these scientists -- experts in the field -- with their gruesome and alarmist facts? How long will we keep denying the evidence? What will we say to our children, and their children, when they learn about the beautiful, rich, and varied life on earth that we were privileged to know? The fields of rippling grasses, the graceful trees, the strange and marvelous wild creatures -- how will we explain that we stood by and watched all this vanish? What kind of courage do we need, to respond to what's happening?

And this time, there's no one else to blame. It's us.

Roxana Robinson is a novelist, most recently of ''A Perfect Stranger."