Published on July 8th, 2008
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This week, world leaders of the G8 Club and their colleagues from the regional blocs of Asia, Africa and Latin America, are gathered in Hokkaido, Japan for yet another round of talks in which climate change will ultimately feature.
Apart from parading their own theoretic short and long term goals and how best to approach this growing problem while clouding their own best national interests, making concessions for climate change may prove harder than committing to curb global carbon pollution.
As the main players at the Hokkaido summit, were the G8 Club, and China, Brazil and India, to pose and think about climate change issues as possible recipe for wars, the plight of the millions of victims of the conflict in Darfur, Sudan would connect with their jostling for the best breathing space.
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Published on July 4th, 2008
For those who fervently follow global warming to the secret labyrinths of the White House, we all know what the professional spinners did with that email attachment from the Environmental Protection Agency about how greenhouse gasses were polluting the environment and should be checked.
Instead of acting upon it or even printing copies to president George Bush and his handlers, they tossed it in a cyber trash bin called Spam folder as if that was the only green thing to do.
Many months after Scott McClellan quit spinning for Dubya, climate watchers are crying foul that he never ever touched the seemingly hot subject in his recently released book, What Happened. But in his famous spins, he had blamed human activity - you and me - as responsible for global warming on more than one occasion.
Spin can be clever tomfoolery sometimes but the White House stance on global warming is well known and George W. Bush has never disappointed with his public statements that smack verily of official ignorance or pretense on the subject as an inconvenient truth.
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Published on June 26th, 2008
The US has in the past shown great moral strength, courage and sacrifice to respond to global crises but no so with the imminent threat of global climate change.
Yet, in order to accelerate global efforts to protect the environment, the US must not only be held to a higher environmental standard than the rest of the world, it must also show greater commitment to a coordinated worldly response.
The statistics speak for themselves - the US produces a total of 5,410 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide per year, almost a quarter of the global emissions, according to researchers. This makes the US the world’s leading polluter, making it imperative to hold the country to a higher environmental standard.
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Published on June 20th, 2008
They go by the boisterous acronym MEND, or the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, and they are lethal. As political students of Niccolò Machiavelli, they have crafted Machiavellian tactics to a fault, and boast about shutting oil pipelines in their motherland to get the ears of their sullen government and the rest of the capitalist world which is driven by its lust for oil.
But they don’t just boast, they actually engage in hostage taking and abduction of foreign oil workers working in Nigeria’s oil rich but socio-economically poor Delta region for ransom (they call it pollution reparation); sometimes killing them and even bombing oil pipelines for effect.
MEND said in an email circulated to news media in January 2006: “It must be clear that the Nigerian government cannot protect your workers or assets. Leave our land while you can or die in it…. Our aim is to totally destroy the capacity of the Nigerian government to export oil.”
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Published on June 18th, 2008
World Wildlife Fund (WWF) published a report in 2006 that documented the plunder of natural resources by human activity and warned that the globe itself could be outstripped in its capacity to support life, rendering the earth extinct in under 50 years.
Based on scientific data collected from across the globe, it revealed that more than a third of the natural world has been destroyed by human activity in just over the past three decades, because of, among others, increased emissions of green house gases into the ecosystem.
Unless consumption of natural resources was cut and the destruction of vital ecosystems was stopped, human life and that of thousands of other animals and plants would not be sustainable hence the suggestion that the earth itself could be extinct by 2050. In short, the demise of biodiversity will be the death of life on earth, as we know it.
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Published on June 16th, 2008
Contrary to popular opinion, bicycling can potentially damage the environment due to the increased longevity of people engaged in physical activity, says Karl Ulrich, a Wharton Business School professor.
Ulrich argues that the greatest environmental peril society may face is the looming prospect of slowing the aging process, and bicycling potentially contributes to slowing aging.
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Published on June 16th, 2008
Bicycling it isn’t always easy. Busy streets, honking horns, and inadequate city funding for bike lanes and paths can make bicycling an uphill battle. However, with green in the news, the economy in a slump, and summer on its way, it’s getting easier to find reasons why there are some 1.4 billion bicycles and only about 400 million cars in the world today.
This week, EcoWorldly authors from six continents contributed articles on bicycling in their country. With exerpts from those articles and others in the blogosphere, here are seventeen very good reasons to bicycle no matter where you live. Click the headings as you go to read more.
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Published on June 13th, 2008
Note: this article is part of this week’s EcoWorldly cycling series: Cycling and its importance in countries around the world.
What does it cost you to get to get around these days? How much was your fuel spend in May in the wake of the sky-high gas prices?
With global crude oil prices anywhere between US$ 120 and US$ 140 on an average week these days, it is highly likely that you are grimacing or gnashing your teeth each time you get to fill your tank at the pump.
But that is not all the gas costs you. It also depends with your choice. As more and more motorists around the world find ways to beat the high gas prices, quite a number are turning to ingenuity of the cheap, just to remain afloat in the bubbling sea of high oil prices.
In America, for instance, a friend tells me that a new craze (or is it culture) is slowly catching on - pedal power. The popularity of bicycles as gasoline prices hit the roof is on a remarkable rise in many US cities. Big automobile makers like General Motors seem to be seeing the light early enough and have announced plans to close several plants for manufacturing of their gluttony SUV models that still remain the darling of most Americans.
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Published on June 10th, 2008
80,000 in Seoul, South Korea protest U.S. beef over mad cow disease: Would boycott work better?
What burgers are to the United States, a good marinade of galbi (barbecued beef) is to South Korea. (And man, does it taste good!)
Mad Cow Disease Scare
However, according to United Press International, the South Korean market closed its doors to U.S. beef imports after mad cow disease hit the U.S. in 2003. After a four year ban on imports, the cautious reopening of the South Korean market in 2007 to beef from the U.S. met reservations from the public. These reservations turned to outrage, however, after Lee Myung-bak agreed to resume U.S. beef imports without restriction during his golfing trip and fireside chat, er, “diplomatic” visit to Camp David in April.
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Published on June 5th, 2008
Looking up ‘Kogelo village’ on the Kenya page of Google Search, you are bombarded by 6,540 results in just 0.04 seconds. Well, to start with, Kogelo village is where the remarkable story of Barack Obama begins.
Hours after the news of his clinching the Democratic Party presidential nomination over Hillary Rodham Clinton reached Kenya, I took the trouble to visit the cradle of an African immigrant whose son would be United States of America’s 44th president for one thing - to see the faces of the village elders here and the look in the eyes of Mama Sarah Obama, Barack’s step-grandmother, and try to describe what I’d see.
Well, a definite description of the pride, nobility, ecstasy, hope, jubilation, glory, humility and triumph that I saw in those faces and in the deep penetrating eyes of this charming 85 year old lady escapes me. But I saw a twinkling tear in Mama Sarah’s eye and I dropped a tear too.
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