Home/Posts Tagged ‘industry’
Posts Tagged ‘industry’
Climate Change, Green living, Sep 8th, 2010,
Environmental writer and Guardian columnist George Monbiot knows a lot more about environmental issues than I do. But his latest article, ‘I was wrong about veganism. Let them eat meat – but farm it properly’, seems too much of a flip-flop: from advocating one ‘extreme’ lifestyle to going a bit close to absolving meat eating’s environmental damage, because theoretically, the livestock industry could be a lot more sustainable. It is admirable for a public intellectual to admit he was wrong and Monbiot’s article makes good points, gleaned from Simon Fairlie’s book Meat: A Benign Extravagance. But the issue was never…
Tags: environmental, farm, George, industry, livestock, meat, Monbiot, vegan, veganism
Conservation, Green living, Jul 19th, 2010,
The rise of inexpensive non-European wines and convenience-obsessed consumer culture are threatening the ancient and sustainable cork industry. But besides the potential loss of long-established ‘green jobs’ and the fact that plastic stoppers and screw caps are bad for the environment, the cork industry also sustains large areas of industry-managed forests, which are hotspots for biodiversity. Large bird populations depend on these forests, as does the endangered Iberian Lynx. Cork forests are not cut down, but rather the trees are stripped of their soft bark every nine years throughout their 200-year lifespan. This makes the industry very sustainable because it…
Tags: biodiversity, caps, cork, environment, forests, Green, Iberian, industry, lynx, Portugal, screw, stoppers, trees, wine
Green living, Health, Jul 16th, 2010,
A recent piece for The Ecologist, entitled ‘Biomass Britain: do fields of energy crops spell an end to grazing livestock’, explores the possibility of a revolution in the UK’s land use. 70-80% of land in the UK is used by the British livestock industry. The possibility of a near-complete shift from livestock farming to the growing of food crops and biomass for energy production may sound revolutionary to some and catastrophic to others. It would mean the de-industrialization of Britain’s meat industry and a 60-70% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, according to The Ecologist article. It’s a revolutionary vision that…
Tags: biomass, British, carbon, change, diet, emissions, energy, farming, forestry, industry, livestock, meat, Peel, plant, Scotland, Scottish, UK, wood
Climate Change, Health, Pollution, Science & Technology, Jul 9th, 2010,
I’ve assumed that transport via boat, whether shipping goods or people, is less polluting and has a lower carbon footprint than flying or road freight, for example. Not so, according to both scientific research and inside information from the maritime shipping industry. While diesel cars – once known as smelly, noisy polluters – have relatively cleaned up their act to the level of standard petrol or gasoline-fuelled cars, the heavy-duty diesel and low-grade fuel oil engines that power ships are a scourge on the environment and human health. From an article in the Economist: Research by James Corbett of the…
Tags: cargo, cars, Danish, deaths, denmark, diesel, emissions, environment, freight, H2O, Health, industry, nitrogen, ocean, oxide, Pollution, research, ship, shipping, ships, US
Climate Change, Pollution, Jul 7th, 2010,
When I was a little kid in the 1970s, my brother had a poster on his wall depicting an artist’s renderings of three possible future environments with the headline, ‘Which future would you choose?’ One showed a future in which man had chosen to live in harmony with nature and developed eco-friendly technology. A thriving green landscape dotted with white globes and pods while happy future-people tended vegetable gardens in the fresh air and had scintillating conversations about what great choices their predecessors had made. Ahhh… The second was a highly urbanized future featuring a glowing red sunset that backlit…
Tags: China, ecocide, future, humanity, industrial, industry, Linfen, primitive, wasteland
Climate Change, Politics, Pollution, Jul 2nd, 2010,
Is there is just too much revenue in big oil to stop dangerous deep sea drilling? The oil industry, like the massive investment banks behind the financial crisis of 2008, is considered by some to be ‘too big to fail’. Yet also like financial crashes, disasters are calculated by those in charge as risks worth taking. Sure, a tragedy on the scale of the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico wasn’t expected, but the industry and the government – and everybody – knew that spills happen. Also like the banks, the oil industry is largely self-regulating, so they…
Tags: blowout, BP, Brazil, British, dangerous, deep, Deepwater, disaster, government, Gulf, Horizon, industry, Mexico, north, oil, P-52, platform, rig, risk, risky, sea, spill, too big to fail, UK
Nature, Politics, Wildlife & Flora, Apr 15th, 2010,
The annual seal hunt is currently winding down in northern Newfoundland, Canada. Clubbing and hooking baby seals while they squeal helplessly on the ice is a disturbing image – even for some hunters. It’s a plainly brutal practice that draws lots of sympathy, especially in societies that categorize animals into sometimes-arbitrary roles. Cats and dogs are ‘companion animals’ and cannot be killed for food, while pigs and cows are slaughtered routinely, often in shockingly industrialized conditions. From an article in the Telegraph: The hunt is always deeply controversial and highly emotive. Critics argue that baby seals, alone on the ice…
Tags: baby, Canada, EU, Europe, farm, fur, humane, hunt, industry, Newfoundland, seal, seals
Politics, Videos & Documentaries, Mar 20th, 2010,
About six years ago I took a summer course on migration at Lund University in Sweden. The classes were taught by a University of California professor and focused on the contemporary issues of global human smuggling and human trafficking. A brief distinction between the two: Human smuggling is a ‘victimless’ crime in which a migrant pays a smuggler to assist in the illegal passage across a political border. Human trafficking, on the other hand, is far more sinister. Human trafficking involves human victims who are coerced, tricked and/or forced by criminals to work in exploitative relationships in which the traffickers…
Tags: call, child, global, human trafficking, industry, labor, Lilja 4-ever, migration, response, sex, slavery, slaves, smuggling, trafficking, victim
Climate Change, Politics, Mar 10th, 2010,
Major environmental groups are ignoring climate scientists while lining their pockets with money from big polluters and the fossil fuel industry. That is the gist of Johann Hari’s thorough piece of journalism in The Nation, entitled ‘The Wrong Kind of Green’. Apparently some seriously big players in the environmental movement are helping to greenwash big business – and receiving hefty sums of money to do so. The guilty parties include Conservation International, the Sierra Club, and the WWF. They are funded by some of the usual suspects in Shell and British Petroleum, but also by Swedish furniture giant IKEA, among…
Tags: big business, carbon, environmental, greenwash, greenwashing, groups, Hari, industry, Johann, nation, polluters
Green living, Health, Jan 15th, 2010,
According to a piece in the London Times ‘two thirds of dairy farmers in England and Wales have gone out of business in the past decade,’ with another failing every day. The culprit? For one, it’s cheap milk. Prices are so low on standard, non-organic milk that dairy farmers in the UK have trouble turning a profit. Surplus milk products, on the other hand – butter, cream, cheese and yoghurt – are much better earners. The problem is that so many of these products sold in Britain are produced in other countries – from Ireland to as far away as…
Tags: BBC, Bloom, Britain, British, cattle, cheap, climate, cows, dairy, Health, industry, milk, organic, Times, UK
