Articles 2010

For decades fossil fuel majors tried to fight the consensus – just as big tobacco once disputed that smoking kills.

Action on climate change is arguably the greatest challenge for public policy of our times. But despite economic forces being the major driver of the carbon dioxide problem, this column argues that economists have so far been too silent on the subject. For example, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the most-cited journal in economics, has never published an article on climate change. Good economics can and should play a fundamental role in guiding the policy framework that will influence investment decisions in the coming years, so it is important that the profession dramatically increases its work now.

Advocates of the Green New Deal say there is great urgency in dealing with the climate crisis and highlight the scale and scope of what is required to combat it. We can afford it, with the right fiscal policies and collective will. But more importantly, we must afford it. The climate emergency is our third world war. Our lives and civilization as we know it are at stake, just as they were in the second world war.

Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.

Those who destroy the living world should be charged with the international crime of ecocide

Humans will cause so many mammal species to go extinct in the next 50 years that the planet's evolutionary diversity won't recover for 3 to 5 million years, a team of researchers has found.

Il y a cinquante ans, des chercheurs du Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) développaient un modèle informatique prédisant l’effondrement de la civilisation pour le siècle à venir. Une vision apocalyptique du monde, qui aujourd'hui ressemble malheureusement de moins en moins à de la fiction.

So it makes sense that, of all the patents found by the researchers, 47% belonged to Baden Aniline and Soda Factory (BASF), the largest chemical-producing company in the world. Collectively, Germany-based BASF owns 5,701 patents on sea life genes—more than any of the other 220 gene-patenting companies combined. Other major players include Dow Dupont, Bayer, Monsanto, Syngenta

Learning about the Limits to Growth

For the first time, the world's tourism footprint has been quantified across the supply chain—from flights to souvenirs—and revealed as a significant and growing contributor to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Le climat de notre planète évolue — une tendance qui devrait se maintenir dans un avenir prévisible. L’agriculture sera particulièrement touchée, la hausse des températures, la modification des régimes de précipitations et la recrudescence des maladies et des attaques de ravageurs constituant autant de risques nouveaux qui fragiliseront un peu plus le système alimentaire mondial. En bref, le changement climatique compliquera encore plus la lutte pour la sécurité alimentaire et la réduction de la pauvreté.

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