By Simon Leufstedt on January 19th, 2009
What is equality and development? And what kind of influence has the environment on both of these relations? For me, environmentalism has always been about caring about the well-state and equality of everyone and everything. Al Gore said, during the annual World Economic Forum Meeting in 2008, that you can’t solve climate change or poverty in the developing world “without dealing with the other”:
“Earlier this year, Bono and I spoke about the intersection between the extreme poverty in the developing world – especially in Africa – and the climate crisis. It is impossible to solve one of these issues without dealing with the other (Gore, 2008)”.
So if we are to solve the equality in the world, our uneven development and environmental problems we just can’t work on one of them. They are all connected and thus we have to deal with all of them at once.
(more…)
By Dr Gideon Polya on January 5th, 2009
Australians (and indeed most people in the Western Murdochracies) live in an Orwellian world in which “war is peace, slavery is freedom, ignorance is strength and 2 plus 2 does not equal 4”. [1]
Thus Australia is the world’s biggest coal exporter and a world leading per capita greenhouse gas polluter (the Developed World’s worst) but linear projections from official US Energy Information Administration data indicate that the Australian Government’s “carbon pollution REDUCTION policy” actually means that Australia’s disproportionately huge, annual Domestic plus Exported greenhouse gas pollution (in Mt CO2-e = million tonnes of CO2-e) will INCREASE from 885 Mt CO2-e (2000) to 1245 Mt (2020; an increase of 41%) to 1586 Mt (2050; an increase of 79%). [2]
Similarly, the Australian Government accepts the Israeli “Gaza rockets” excuse for the ongoing Gaza Massacre (over 300 Occupied Palestinians dead and 1,000 wounded, so far), ignoring official Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs data that 23 Israelis have been killed by Gaza rockets and mortars in the last 8.25 years. [3]
This latter statistic corresponds to an “annual homicide rate” of 0.4 per million (Israelis from Gaza rockets and mortars) as compared to 15 per million (Israelis murdered by Israelis), 164 per million (Palestinians killed violently by Israelis), 902 per million (Palestinian non-violent deaths through Israeli-imposed deprivation), 56 per million (Americans), 200 per million (African-Americans), 300 per million (Americans by Guns) and 473 per million (people of Detroit, Michigan, USA). [4]
(more…)
