Photo credit: Hipnos

I often hear people saying that overpopulation is the main problem to our environmental and ecological problems. Some people even claim that it’s responsible for global warming. I also agreed with this idea before. But after reading more about the subject over the years I have changed my mind.

The rich countries in the “North”, i.e. the West, have a “rapidly decreasing” population which is “expected to decline over the next forty years.” Developing countries such as India, China and most of Africa on the other hand is where we will see future population numbers increasing.

And yes. It seems so easy to blame countries with an overwhelming rising population for being responsible for wrecking our planet, climate and environment. Because surely more people must mean more pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Right?

Not really. The West is responsible for about 80% of the worlds CO2 increase. An average person living in Great Britain will in only 11 days emit as much CO2 as an average person in Bangladesh will during a whole year. And just a single power plant in West Yorkshire in Great Britain will produce more CO2 every year than all the 139 million people combined living in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia and Mozambique.

As Fred Pearce from the Yale Environment 360 blog notes, only a small portion of the world’s people are using most of the planets resources as well as producing the most of the greenhouse gases. And those are living in the West:

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Photo credit: jurvetson

This past Friday the House of Representatives in USA voted yes to the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, a cap-and-trade energy bill, by a vote of 219 to 212. This historic climate change bill will require limits on pollution responsible for man-made climate change and it will help USA create a green economy, if it also gets thumbs up in the Senate.

“After a tense debate, in which the margin of success or failure never moved beyond a handful of votes, the House of Representatives passed the most sweeping climate change policy ever considered by Congress early Friday evening, the Huffington Post reports.

The outcome had remained up in the air up until the actual vote, with the White House and the president himself engaging in a heavy lobbying campaign aimed at restoring Democratic Party unity that seemed to be fracturing.”

President Barack Obama said in his weekly address that this new bill will help “create green jobs, ensure clean air for our children, move towards energy independence and combat climate change.”

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Photo credit: Brave New Films

The well-known Oscar and Emmy-winning director Michael Moore says goodbye to GM today as the failed auto company files for bankruptcy. Moore says the “big three” auto companies in the USA are responsible for their own demise and that they have created “some of the greatest weapons of mass destruction responsible for global warming”.

“We are now in a different kind of war — a war that we have conducted against the ecosystem and has been conducted by our very own corporate leaders. This current war has two fronts. One is headquartered in Detroit. The products built in the factories of GM, Ford and Chrysler are some of the greatest weapons of mass destruction responsible for global warming and the melting of our polar icecaps. The things we call “cars” may have been fun to drive, but they are like a million daggers into the heart of Mother Nature. To continue to build them would only lead to the ruin of our species and much of the planet.”

But Moore says he feel “joy” about the fact that the American people now owns 60% of GM and that he is confident “we can do a better job”. He is also calling for a swift transformation of GM into a modern and environmentally-friendly company that produces cars for the future, and that the old GM factories start to produce windmills and solar panels. In short Moore is suggesting the following:

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Here is the full video of Al Gore’s testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about repowering America and the need for USA to resume global leadership on the climate crisis. You can read and watch his opening statement here.

Watch the whole testimony below:

You can also watch it on YouTube.

Yesterday Al Gore testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about repowering America and the need for USA to resume global leadership on the climate crisis. You can read his opening statement below.

Al Gore is also calling for you to support his energy and climate plan which will create 100% electricity from carbon-free sources within 10 years while creating millions of green high-tech jobs:

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The people have spoken. And they have clearly chosen Barack Obama as the next President of the United States of America. Hopefully the election outcome will result in USA moving away from its current destructive climate and environmental politics and policies. Hopefully well-needed change will come to USA, and the world.

People, leaders and organisations from around the world hurry to congratulate Obama and his running mate Biden while hoping that this will be a new “fresh” chapter in U.S. relations and politics.

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There are currently around 12000 traditional “yellow cabs” in New York today. They are big and gas-guzzling. Now Ford wants to replace them all with their new Ford Transit Connect Taxi Concept.

The new Ford Transit Connect is smaller and more compact than the older yellow cabs. They are designed with less horizontal space and with more vertical space. But it will actually have more space for passengers and their cargo than the older cabs. It also features dual sliding doors which help cause less pain in an over-crowded city like New York.

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Libby Rosenthal over at the International Herald Tribune’s Business of Green blog worries, just like me, about the lack of green issues being raised in the US primaries.

Having spent the last week in the United States and having watched all the presidential candidates debate, I’m struck by how little talk there is of climate change and what the United States intends to do about it!

The climate threat that faces us today is the important issue that should be among the top things discussed between the different presidential candidates. Cause the climate threat will affect everything from healthcare to immigration and Iraq to education and welfare.

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