I wouldn’t be the first person to analogize Americans’ thirst to fossil fuels to an addiction. The arch-environmentalist George W. Bush said the US was “addicted to oil” in his State of the Union address in 2006. What we do for the Mexican drug gangs in terms of addiction to their products while advancing their […]
The World Food Program has released a hunger quiz in which an anonymous donor will feed a child a warm meal for every person who completes it. The short quiz challenges some basic assumptions about hunger, such as where it is in the world, who it disproportionately affects, and how much it takes to feed […]
Being a lifelong and avid NY Giants fan, I am not generally given to blowing the horn for the Philadelphia Eagles. However, there was a great story in the NY Times yesterday about how the Eagles’ stadium, Lincoln Field, is going to be tricked out with a particularly impressive array of renewable energy upgrades. This […]
An article from Reuters yesterday flagged the fact that the US fleet has been averaging more miles per gallon thus reducing gasoline use and fewer carbon dioxide emissions. The President made an announcement on raising the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards last April but the trend to more MPG and fewer GHGs has been […]
The Financial Times had another blockbuster special report on energy out a couple of weeks back. Some highlights: US policy: A nation in thrall to the power of oil in which we learn that federal policy has been generally a failure for decades – no news there, I’m afraid. “The only really successful federal policy […]
Want to save the planet? I do. Want to save money, the public health, energy and not be reliant on Big Oil? Me too. Okay, here’s the equation then: Internal combustion engines are inherently inefficient – losing as much as 85% of the power that goes into the gas tank along the way to moving […]
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won the George McGovern Leadership Award given by the World Food Program USA on October 5th, 2010. Secretary Clinton received the award for establishing the U.S. government program Feed the Future (FTF). According to the press release, Feed the Future will be a “comprehensive approach to food security that increases […]
I’ve been lauding the good folks of California for their progressive views – expressed at the polls last Tuesday – on climate and energy. I should toot the horn for my own state, New York, too. I worked for 11 years for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and came to have a […]
Among the many significant aspects of President Obama’s trip to Asia this week are the agreements and programs that are being announced relative to climate and energy. In India, the headline news was his endorsing India’s quest for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. But with India being one of the fastest growing […]
The Executive Director of the World Food Programme Josette Sheeran recently outlined a 10 point strategy for ending hunger. According to a WFP press release, the “world is making headway on fighting hunger – the first Millennium Goal — but not as fast as is needed. The proportion of hungry people in the world has […]
The Word Food Programme has started the Women’s Empowerment Fund, a new initiative which recognizes the importance of women in the global fight against hunger. The Fund envisions helping women in four areas. One is in business leadership, since, as the press report writes: “women in Africa re-invest about 90 percent of their income back […]
I went to an interesting talk last night by Dr. Anthony Fauci. He is the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The Foreign Policy Association initiated a new series with his talk: the Dame Jillian Sackler Distinguished Lecture. (She was married to Arthur Sackler, the research psychiatrist and art patron.) Dr. […]
Further to my post immediately below, Californians yesterday showed the world that they, living in the most-populous US state, and the eighth largest economy in the world, care enough about their public health, environment, jobs and the state of the world’s climate system to categorically reject the attempt to roll back their GHG regulations. With […]
I’ve been sitting in yesterday afternoon and this morning on some fascinating discussions on the state of play of GHG regulation, how US politics is influencing our work on climate and energy, and what the world is going to look like tomorrow after the mid-term elections here. (More on that later.) For the moment, the […]
With over two-thirds of the world’s hungry found in Asia, the Asia Society and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) formed a task force to examine food security issues in Asia and develop public policy approaches for overcoming hunger. The initial findings of the task force were released last month in a report titled, “Never […]