Among the many good points Thomas Piketty makes in Capital in the 21st Century – his world-changing but surprisingly mild book – is that extreme inequality can be sustained politically only through an “apparatus of justification.”(9) If voters can be persuaded that insane levels of inequality are sane, reasonable and even necessary, then the concentration of income can keep growing. If they can’t, then either states are forced to act, or revolutions happen.
The U.S. Eastern Seaboard is being opened to offshore oil and gas exploration for the first time in decades with the Obama administration's approval Friday of sonic cannons that can pinpoint energy deposits deep beneath the ocean floor.
The decision dismays environmentalists worried about the immediate impact of the sonic cannons, which shoot sound waves 100 times louder than a jet engine through waters shared by whales and turtles.
Saving endangered species was their best hope of extending a ban against offshore drilling off the U.S. Atlantic coast.
Evo Morales, President of Bolivia, gave this remarkable opening talk at the summit of the Group of 77 plus China, meeting in Santa Clara, Bolivia, on June 14, 2014.
. . . We have recovered our nation for all of us. Ours was a nation that had been alienated by the neoliberal model, a nation that lived under the old and evil system of political parties, a nation that was ruled from abroad, as if we were a colony.
Three decades of rapid economic development in China has left a troubling legacy – widespread soil pollution that has contaminated food crops and jeopardized public health. Although they once labeled soil data a “state secret,” Chinese officials are slowly beginning to acknowledge this grave problem.
The first in a series.
There have been five mass extinction events in Earth's history. In the worst one, 250 million years ago, 96 percent of marine species and 70 percent of land species died off. It took millions of years to recover.
During his speech at West Point Military Academy earlier this week, President Barack Obama described climate change as a "creeping national security crisis" that will require the armed forces to "respond to refugee flows, natural disasters, and conflicts over water and food."
The speech emphasised that US foreign policy in the 21st century is increasingly being honed in recognition of heightened risks of social, political and economic upheaval around the world due the impacts of global warming.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officially unveiled the Obama administration’s plan Monday to cut greenhouse gases 30 per cent by 2030, stressing what it says will be the economic benefits of its "clean-air revolution."
Under the plan, carbon emissions would be reduced 30 per cent by 2030, compared to 2005 levels, one of the most significant actions to address global warming in U.S. history.
A Japanese oil tanker has exploded off the country's south-west coast near Himeji port, leaving one of the eight people aboard missing, the country's coast guard has said. Four others were severely injured in the accident on Thursday.
Fire gutted the middle of the Shoko Maru – the 998-tonne tanker, based in the western city of Hiroshima, was left leaning over in the water after the accident and was being doused by firefighting ships.
The trajectory of compound growth shows that the scouring of the planet has only just begun. As the volume of the global economy expands, everywhere that contains something concentrated, unusual, precious, will be sought out and exploited, its resources extracted and dispersed, the world's diverse and differentiated marvels reduced to the same grey stubble.
That didn’t take long. The public interest in the state of the natural world stimulated by the winter floods receded almost as quickly as the waters did. A YouGov poll showed that the number of respondents placing the environment among their top three issues of concern rose from 6% in mid-January to 23% in mid-February. By early April – though the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had just published two massive and horrifying reports – the proportion had fallen back to 11%.
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