Deja vu all over again?

The future is getting repetitive…
At least, that seems a fair reaction to the 2025 report issued last week by the US National Intelligence Committee. Nothwithstanding the fuss made in much of the serious press, this prospect of a multipolar, interdependent world seemed pretty familiar.
The feeling is reinforced by the security futures report just out from [...]

Limits to Growth got it right…

New Scientist recently ran a suite of features on the need to re-think our assumptions about economic growth which was reminiscent of the 1970s (and that’s fine by me). They follow up this week by highlighting an interesting paper from Graham Turner of CSIRO in Autralia, now published in the Journal Global Environmental Change but [...]

Biking back to happiness

Thomas Friedman is way ahead of me (no surprise) on charting a constructive way forward without talk of saving the planet – at least not in the title of his excellent-sounding new book, Hot, Flat and Crowded.
Excellent sounding? Well, haven’t read it yet, so I’m going mainly on the interview with fellow scribe Elizabeth Kolbert [...]

jesus saves…

Been having trouble lately reconciling a long-standing dislike for overblown rhetoric with genuine concern for climate change. The problem? All these exhortations to save the planet.
I have so many ways of getting annoyed with with this it is hard to know where to begin. It is daft (the planet is pretty much impervious to anything [...]

climate jokes… and presidential prospects

no jokes in the climate scenarios mentioned below – or if there are I haven’t spotted them yet
which makes me think the general dearth of such jokes is a good sign: they always show up when things get really bad, as the rash of credit crunch jokes confirmed.
I did like the acroynm for one current [...]