There’s no right and wrong to tackling climate change
There’s no right and wrong to tackling climate change
Mike Hulme says we need to stop looking for climate change scapegoats and start engaging in honest discussion.
- guardian.co.uk, Thursday 13 May 2010 16.31 BST
- Article history
Climate change has come to signify far more than the physical ramifications of human disturbance to the earth’s atmosphere, says Mike Hulme – it’s a social phenomenon too. Photograph: MODIS/Terra/NASA
One of the enduring characteristics of public debates and political negotiations about climate change is that the protagonists end up arguing about different things. Political arguments masquerade as arguments about science; ethical arguments become economic ones. Legitimate differences about ideologies and values are reduced to trading blows about the ‘right’ numbers – the decimal points on rates of warming; the number of noughts in the cost of climate change. We are not being honest with one another. The consequence is that the quality of both science and public debate suffers.
Since it first emerged as a prominent public-policy issue in the late 1980s, anthropogenic climate change has evolved into an idea that now carries an astonishing amount of ideological freight. Yet, too often, arguments about climate change continue to treat it as an environmental problem to be solved. But climate change is not a phenomenon of this kind. It is not like mercury pollution in rivers, asbestos in buildings or even ozone-depleting gases entering the stratosphere. These relatively ‘tame’ problems lend themselves to relatively straightforward solutions: the Montreal Protocol, for example, which opened for signature in 1987, successfully restricted and then prohibited the use of ozone-depleting substances.
Coral reefs crucial to origin of new marine species, finds study
Coral reefs crucial to origin of new marine species, finds study
New research provides a new incentive to protect reefs, overturning ideas that coral sealife originated elsewhere
- guardian.co.uk, Thursday 7 January 2010 19.00 GMT
- Article history
Coral reefs are responsible for about 50% more new species than shallow-water environments. Photograph: Jeff Hunter/Getty Images
Coral reefs give birth to a dazzling number of new species of sea creatures, according to a study that highlights their critical role in marine ecosystems.
Scientists have found that the reefs not only harbour amazing biodiversity, but are actively involved in the generation of new life forms. The study overturns conventional thinking that much of the sea life in coral reefs originated elsewhere.
Wall Street plays carbon trading
OXFORD, England — Marc Stuart and Pedro Moura Costa have become multimillionaires in a booming new market designed to fight global warming. Now, their empire is under attack. Their firm, United Kingdom-based EcoSecurities Ltd., helps companies in the industrialized world meet their obligations to pollute less by selling them "credits" that fund clean-air projects in Continue Reading →
Whack on the Greenwash
The typical image of the Mediterranean is a blue sea with white-walled houses clinging to the rocky landscape. Every spring, after the Easter processions when the Mistral stops blowing, house-proud citizens freshen up those walls with a bucket of whitewash.
The power of a simple mixture of lime, chalk and water to hide the ravages of a year’s wear and tear is so compelling it has entered the language. When a politician puts the best face on a difficult policy, we accuse them of ‘whitewashing’ the truth.
The language lives and whitewash has now acquired a green tinge as companies appeal to environmentally careful consumers. Some of them claim green credentials where no green credentials exist. Culprits range from “green phones” through “eco-credit cards” to “clean, green nuclear power”. The Australian Consumer and Competition Commission has had to step in and regulate the offset of carbon dioxide emissions and provide guidelines and definitions for the term “climate neutral”.
Your challenge is to develop the necessary X-ray vision to see past the greenwash to the facts underneath. A mixture of specific examples and general principles are provided here to hone your green wash detectors.
Blogger calls for end to Greenwash
Dr Glen Barry of the popular Earth Meanders blog believes that now climate change and the environmental stresses are on the mainstream agenda, it is time to ramp up the message. His article It is Time to Stop the Greenwash is attached here.
The Ebono Institute publishes it here, because it reflects what we have been writing and saying on The Generator for the last 12 months. It is not a matter of whether green politics is right or not, or whether we can influence the mainstream or not, it is a matter of how quickly we can shift the agenda and take the action we need to take.
Read about TerraChoice’s initiative on GreenWash
In Australia we have immediate pressures from coal and uranium miners, an agricultural lobby keen to develop Australia’s tropical north and suburban dwellers worried about their future water supply and traffic congestion. On all of these issues we need to take immediate action to change the expectations of the public and the decisions of government.
Dr Glen Barry puts it very forcefully.
Recycling is just rubbish
Waste is big business. Australians spend over $2billion each year on disposing of around 30 million tonnes of waste. Over 1700 companies operate in the waste disposal sector employing about 10,000 people. The waste management industry is bigger than sugar or cotton and only marginally smaller than Australia’s annual export of grapes.
Big business it may be, but that two billion dollars produces nothing and, while it adds to the published GDP, adds no value to the economy. In an attempt to reduce the rising costs of landfill governments actively promote recycling.
As individuals, Australians enthusiastically embrace recycling. We separate paper, glass, metals and recyclable plastic from the rest of our rubbish. Many of us compost kitchen scraps and garden waste, some councils offer a third, green topped bin for garden waste.
We get a warm inner glow from carting the yellow (or purple) topped wheelie bin into the street once a fortnight, confident that we can save our grandchildren from a mad Max future. They shall not fight over the few, remaining resources among the remnants of a once great civilisation, just so long as we sort our rubbish.
This view is over simplistic. In fact, something about the waste management business smells and it is not just the unwashed wheelie bins.