Articles Tagged with “Environment”
29/03/2008: Earth Hour
The Sydney Morning Herald has just (about 2 hours ago) reported that:
This year, 26 cities joined Earth Hour as official partner cites, including — along with all of Australia’s capitals — Atlanta, Bangkok, Chicago, Christchurch, Copenhagen, Dublin, Manila, Montreal, Odense, Ottawa, Phoenix, San Francisco, Tel Aviv and Toronto.
In the US, the lights were going out on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz Island, and Chicago’s Sears Tower. North of the border, Canada was turning off the lights at Toronto’s CN Tower and the floodlights at Niagara Falls.
In Britain, Brighton Pier was blacked out, and Prince Charles gave Earth Hour royal approval by turning off the lights at Highgrove House, his Gloucestershire home.
Now I do appreciate that it’s very late in Sydney now, and the SMH’s reporters want to be tucked up in bed at home, but that’s no excuse for such…
18/02/2008: Bottled Water
Panorama has just run an exposé on bottled water — you can still watch it on iPlayer. As a rule, I tend not to buy bottled water, initially this was because it’s a waste of money, but in the last couple of years, having considered the environmental cost of bottled water, that is now a big justification too.
The obvious (to me) environmental problem with bottled water is that bottled water is transported hundreds, and sometimes thousands of miles, using carbon-hungry transport methods — ships and trucks mostly. By contrast, tap water is transported from a relatively local source (i.e. the reservoir)
But Panorama brought up another few environmental and moral reasons to avoid it:
- The plastic that makes the bottles needs to be produced from a large quantity of crude oil, both directly as a raw material for the polymers, and…
03/02/2008: The World in 2050?
I drew this map and wrote the skeleton of this article in November, but have only recently gotten around to finishing it…
Empires
The US is occasionally referred to as “the only remaining global superpower”. By 2050, I believe that it will still be a superpower, but that others will have risen to join it.
The United States
The US will keep military bases in the middle east, even if its original reason to do so (namely oil) has diminished by the middle of the 21st century.
The European Union
Growing co-operation between member states, a strengthening European Parliament and weakening national parliaments will have transformed Europe into effectively one country, even if officially the member states retain some form of soverienty. Most importantly, by 2050…