Last spring, I attended an event about the new positive resource contracts of Liberia, held at Revenue Watch, an international NGO which seeks transparency in the finances of governments with natural resources. During the Q & A, a man got up to congratulate a Liberian official there, and to pray that in his own country, […]
You may have been hearing about the contretemps regarding emails to and from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia. I have no particular desire now, frankly, to get into all the allegations, counter-allegations, etc., etc. that have been flying around in the news, the blogosphere and beyond. There is a […]
“People Want Action on Climate Change” – That’s the conclusion of a poll out this week that was commissioned by the World Bank and carried out by WorldPublicOpinion.org. The press release says “People signaled they would support public measures to limit greenhouse gas emissions and step up adaptation measures.” The report on the poll, Public […]
“I have seen the future and it works,” Lincoln Steffens famously said, albeit prematurely, in 1921 about Soviet Communism. (After ten years time, however, he realized it didn’t. In any event, it’s a great line.) Well, the Germans are showing us the future now: It’s renewable energy. For how, see the segment on “The German […]
Can democracy survive 21st century capitalism? In October, the courts of France dismissed a suit by Transparency International (and other plaintiffs) that sought to investigate how three African dictators in Francophone Africa came to possess hundreds of millions of dollars even though the people of their countries were amongst the poorest in the world. The […]
If you play poker you know that all the players have to ante up with a stake before each new deal. You have to “feed the kitty” – or you don’t play. Perhaps not coincidentally, parties that have an interest in a particular project, enterprise or, in the case of COP 15, addressing the looming […]
Reuters reports fierce fighting instigated by insurgent groups in Somalia has caused the relocation of several expatriate workers, while aid agencies fear a continuing breakdown of security in the country. The workers were part of the UN World Food Programme and World Vision, among the last few international aid agencies still providing aid in war-torn […]
At a party last year, an acquaintance asked me why Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela, was so anti-Israel. How were Israel and Jews a threat to him? Since Chavez has been president, anti-Semitic behavior in Venezuela (not known as a hotbed of anti-Semitism) has increased noticeably with attacks on synagogues and against the tiny […]
The banks thst lent about $40 billion to the state-owned corporation Dubai World must have figured, “Okay Dubai doesn’t have oil, but it’s part of a larger oil country (United Arab Emirates), and it’s in an oil region, and so they’re good for the money.” Apparently, no one thought that an enterprise based on ridiculously over-priced real […]
A recent report by the Department of Agriculture has shed light on some shocking numbers about the food security of Americans. Last year, the Department reports, the number of Americans that did not have consistent access to food jumped from 36 million to 49 million, the highest increase since 1995. As reported in The […]
If you’ve been betting on Copenhagen, as many of us have, then things are looking up. “President Barack Obama will attend climate-change talks in Copenhagen next month, offering an emissions-cut goal of about 17 percent by 2020…” reports Bloomberg News here. The White House blog confirms this and bullets the major initiatives that the administration […]
Dr. Margaret Hamburg, Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, was awarded the Foreign Policy Association medal at the organization’s Fall Dinner on November 18th. Watch the video of Dr. Hamburg’s remarks. A partial transcript can be found below: And so, as I take on my new role as Commissioner of the Food and […]
I wrote about The Earth here a while back. It was really about soil and focused on a fantastic article in “National Geographic Magazine.” I’ve become more and more interested in “cool farming,” teach this stuff in my climate change classes, and have even had the opportunity to write an article about biochar. Here is […]
The International Energy Agency is out with its 2009 World Energy Outlook. Some of the revelations presented at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on Monday were hardly startling: energy demand and investment down due to global recession, but demand expected to return and grow, China using more energy, etc. But a couple […]
The New York Times reported that last week’s UN’s World Summit on Food Security, once praised for moving developing and developed countries together towards improved aid relations, was an unabashed failure due to lack of progress on substantial issues. The UN FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization), the body leading the Summit, has been criticized for […]