Recently Wikileaks offered a reward for the text of the secret Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). A people's hero must have stepped forward because today Wikileaks released the full text of the chapter on Intellectual Property Rights. Click here to see their report. The TPP has been kept secret by the Obama Administration for nearly 4 years because they know that if people find out what is in it, they will strongly oppose it.
In 2011, the top 11 richest carbon emitters spent an estimated $74 billion on fossil fuel subsidies, or seven times the amount spent on fast-track climate financing to developing nations, according to a recent report by the Overseas Development Institute. Worldwide, nations spent over half a trillion dollars on fossil fuel subsidies in 2011 according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). "The status quo encourages energy companies to continue burning high-carbon fossil fuels and offers no incentive to change," said the report's author Shelagh Whitley.
An international conference in Edinburgh aimed at conserving wildlife is coming under attack from campaign groups for trying to "sell off nature" to multinational corporations. The first World Forum on Natural Capital on 21-22 November is due to attract business and conservation leaders to debate how to give natural resources a monetary value to try and protect them. The first minister, Alex Salmond, will deliver a speech to delegates.
The cradle-to-grave cost to Canadian taxpayers to acquire new warships will exceed $100-billion, the federal government says – tens of billions of dollars more than Ottawa has previously disclosed. It is the first time the federal government has gone public with its best guess on the full life-cycle cost of up to 15 surface combat vessels. The political demand for transparency has changed in Ottawa since a controversy over the true cost of a plan to buy F-35 fighter jets, and the Harper government feels pressure to open the books.
In a speech last week, the Secretary General of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) had a message for oil and gas investors: Their biggest risk isn't a spill or a blowout or a storm. And for countries deriving a large portion of revenue from oil and gas, it isn't the U.S. shale boom's competing with OPEC. Rather, it is stranded assets in a carbon-entangled world, according to OECD Secretary General Angel Gurría. It's also the biggest risk for any investor exposed to fossil fuels.
Three years after the financial meltdown of 2008, the U.S. Occupy movement opened the possibility for a left regroupment against resurgent neoliberalism.
FIVE years ago the world was in the grip of a financial crisis that is still reverberating around the globe. Much of the blame for that can be attributed to weaknesses in human psychology: we have a collective tendency to be blind to the kind of risks that can crash economies and imperil civilisations. Today, our risk blindness is threatening an even bigger crisis. In my book The Energy of Nations, I argue that the energy industry's leaders are guilty of a risk blindness that, unless action is taken, will lead to a global crash – and not just because of the climate change they fuel.
Gone are the days when U.S. billionaires accounted for over 40 percent of the list. With the help of Forbes magazine, we and colleagues at the Institute for Policy Studies have been tracking the world’s billionaires and rising inequality the world over for several decades. Just as a drop of water gives us a clue into the chemical composition of the sea, these billionaires offer fascinating clues into the changing face of global power and inequality. After our initial gawking at the extravagance of this year’s list of 1,426, we looked closer.
