China

Money (that’s what I want)

by Bryan Walker October 12, 2010

I participated a few days ago in a Friends of the Earth urgent email action concerning US stances on the proposed Global Climate Fund through which developed countries will give financial assistance to developing countries in tackling the impacts of climate change. Friends of the Earth were alarmed by the US push for the management [...]

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Anyway, anyhow, anywhere

by Bryan Walker October 5, 2010

Two modestly hopeful signs from the political world struck me when reading today’s Guardian news. One was the opening of the climate change talks at Tainjin in China aimed at refining possible goals for the Cancun talks in November-December. The comment of Oxfam observer Kelly Dent attracted my attention. Oxfam is a careful watchdog of [...]

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Wake the world

by Gareth September 24, 2010

This is a guest post by Anthony Giddens and Martin Rees. Giddens is a former director of the London School of Economics, a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge and the author of The Politics of Climate Change. Rees is president of the Royal Society. This year has seen outbreaks of extreme weather in many regions [...]

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The politics of failure/the failure of politics

by Bryan Walker September 22, 2010

As an example of contradictory thinking it would be hard to better Energy and Resources Minister Gerry Brownlee this week. He was announcing that oil and gas exploration in New Zealand is to get a substantial boost in government resources, including funding to further the possible exploitation of deep-sea methane hydrates. He made a plea [...]

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The answer, my friend…

by Bryan Walker September 13, 2010

Some encouraging facts and figures are provided in an interview with the CEO of the European Wind Energy Association, Christian Kjaer, by Yale Environment 360. For the past two years 40 per cent of all new electricity generating capacity in Europe came from wind turbines. (Add solar and other renewables and that rises to 63 [...]

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The secret migration

by Gareth August 30, 2010

Acouple of weeks ago, a comment on carbon footprints and immigration kicked off a brief exchange of views on New Zealand’s vulnerability to climate-forced migration. It’s an interesting subject, worth more attention, and so in this post I’m going to set out how I see NZ’s position in the context of the likely future flows [...]

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Lester Brown: Russian heat hits world grain supplies

by Bryan Walker August 13, 2010

One of the things that persuaded Gwynne Dyer that it was time to write his book Climate Wars was the realisation that “the first and most important impact of climate change on human civilization will be an acute and permanent crisis of food supply”. He’s not the only one to recognise that. Many of us [...]

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Climate Refugees

by Bryan Walker June 14, 2010

Eleven French journalists – writers and photographers of Collectif Argos – visited some of the people who live on the front line of climate change. Their report was first published in France in 2007, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has now published an English version: Climate Refugees. It invites reading. The written narratives are [...]

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All guns blazing

by Bryan Walker May 31, 2010

I well remember a meeting of the Hamilton group of Amnesty International back in the 1990s, when a visitor who lived in the Maldives turned up, wanting to find out more about how AI worked. It wasn’t long before we found out why he was interested, as he told us the story of repression and [...]

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Friedman: China beating US on low carbon energy

by Bryan Walker January 13, 2010

Thomas Friedman is now doubtful that China will follow an American lead towards a greener economy, as he suggested in his book Hot, Flat and Crowded reviewed here. He considers rather that it is more likely to pull ahead of the US. He writes from China in his recent column in the New York Timesthat [...]

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