Beyond Management: How and Why Kymlicka Is Wrong
Response to book review “Panarchy and Dystopia.” Toronto Globe and Mail, November 11. 2006, by Will Kymlicka.
Environmental Stress and Conflict
The End of Ingenuity
Having to search farther and longer for our resources isn’t the only new hurdle we face. Climate change could also constrain growth. A steady stream of evidence now indicates that the planet is warming quickly and that the economic impact on agriculture, our built environment, ecosystems and human health could, in time, be very large.
Unleash Capitalism’s Creativity on Climate Change
If we unleash Canada’s capitalist creativity, we could be an international leader in a suite of technologies urgently needed in a warming world that will depend on fossil fuels for many decades. These include technologies for the clean combustion of coal, for storing carbon dioxide underground, and for using hydrogen as a transportation fuel. We could make staggering amounts of money selling these technologies around the world.
Review of Colin Kahl, States, Scarcity, and Civil Strife in the Developing World
What is the relationship between environmental stress—especially shortages and degradation of cropland, forest stocks, and supplies of fresh water—and civil violence in developing countries, including insurgency, ethnic strife, and revolution?
Ahead: More – and Worse – Katrinas
The science of climate change is the kind of topic that gives journalists great difficulty. As they bounce from issue to issue in our info-glutted world, they aren’t able to explore each one in depth or develop detailed expertise about a subject. So when it comes to complex scientific problems, journalists tend to cherry-pick findings and cite opinionated statement by outspoken researchers. Context and nuance are lost. And in the case of research on the links between global warming and hurricanes, context and nuance are everything.
Caught Up in Our Own Connections
But perhaps the most important factor contributing to our continuing vulnerability is something that we rarely recognize and that’s even harder to change: a belief that greater connectivity and speed in all aspects of society are always good things.
Coal in a Nice Shade of Green
When it comes to energy, we are trapped between a rock and several hard places. The world’s soaring demand for oil is pushing against the limits of production, lifting the price of crude nearly 90 percent in the last 18 months.
Out of the Energy Box
with S. Julio Friedmann | The prognosis for the future of climate change is indeed alarming. Scientists say plausible scenarios include terrible droughts, crop failures, and dying forests around the Mediterranean and in the United States, South America, India, China, and Africa. Sea levels are expected to rise significantly, drowning islands and possibly displacing hundreds of millions of people from coastlines, where more than a third of the world’s population lives. Ground water supplies are set to shrink, reservoirs to dry up. Wildfires and violent storms will strike more often and much harder. And much of this change is expected within the next 50 years.
Cold Truths About Global Warming
By February, Canadians’ love of fresh snow and winter sports has given way to annoyance, as we shovel our driveways for the umpteenth time. This winter, we’ve had some particularly nasty weather. But far colder and much nastier winters could be in store for us, especially for eastern Canadians and perhaps very soon. The culprit, weirdly enough, could be global warming.
Of Human Fallout
Remember the population bomb? This profound concern over exponential growth of the world’s population provided ample fodder for academic dispute and dinner conversation during the 1960s and 1970s. Commentators like Stanford University’s Paul Ehrlich warned we would soon see famine, eco-catastrophe, and war as poor nations failed to cope with their surging birth rates. Yet these worries were swept from the popular imagination in the 1990s, when a less gloomy view prevailed: Yes, world population had grown dramatically, but birth rates were dropping practically everywhere. Many conservative commentators declared that the human population explosion was over. The real problem had become the impending global “birth dearth” or “population implosion.”