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The Coming Food Crisis: Blame Ethanol?
Posted by Forbes: WILLIAM PENTLAND on July 28th, 2012
Forbes: A series of spikes in global food prices resulted in riots in 2008 and contributed to violent uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East in 2011. The culprit is a matter of considerable and frequently heated debate, but the most commonly cited candidates include market speculators, global warming and aggressive government renewable fuel mandates. If you believe the folks at the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Mass., the global food supply system is stumbling into a drought-induced...
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The God Species: Rethinking Environmentalism
Posted by Forbes: WILLIAM PENTLAND on October 23rd, 2011
Forbes: The trouble with Mark Lynas`s otherwise excellent new book, The God Species, is that it isn`t controversial enough.
Lynas, a veteran English environmentalist trained at Oxford University, prescribes a "new" paradigm for managing the planet based on the concept of "planetary boundaries." Drawing on research published in the journal Nature in 2009, Lynas carves the natural systems that sustain life on Earth into nine separate processes, which he labels biodiversity, climate change, aerosols, ocean...
Carbon Emissions Plunge
Posted by Forbes: WILLIAM PENTLAND on April 1st, 2011
Forbes: After reclaiming leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives and strengthening its influence in the Senate, the Republican Party has relentlessly challenged the Environmental Protection Agency`s efforts to regulate greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions under the Clean Air Act. Although Republicans are less inclined to molest trees than their Democratic counterparts, they insist that they are not "anti-environment" but "pro-economy."
Unfortunately, for people like myself who believe that there is...