On a wing and a prayer

Posted on May 7, 2008 by John Gibbons

Airlines are forever telling us that aviation is just a teeny weeny contributor to greenhouse gases, nothing to be bothered about really. The figure of 2% of total emissions being attributable to flying is frequently quoted in defence of our collective ‘right’ to fly as often – and as far – as we like.

These protestations of innocence have always been controversial. For starters, the fact that airlines dump their CO2 into the upper atmosphere means that in effect its impact, ton for ton, is twice that of carbon emitted at ground level. Continue reading →

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Hillary shows her true colours on climate

Posted on April 30, 2008 by John Gibbons

America, in the words of its own president and close compadre of the oil industry, George W. Bush, is “addicted to oil”. Tackling this addiction and turning the country away from its grossly unsustainable frenzy of consumption is essential if the world’s number one energy hog and CO2 polluter is to begin to mend its ways.

Great news then that the reign of America’s worst environmental president in at least a century is now in its last couple of hundred days. By January next, a new president will be in the White House and the serious work of tackling the climate crisis can begin. Right? Wrong. Continue reading →

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Minor drama over Major Emergencies

Posted on April 26, 2008 by John Gibbons

A number of years ago, a Fianna Fail junior minister, Joe Jacob got himself into a right tangle in an interview with RTE’s Marian Finucane. The subject was Ireland’s preparedness in the event of an incident at Sellafield.

The minister huffed and puffed, and eventually allayed his acute embarrassment at not understanding his brief by rushing out, at a cost of millions, iodine tablets to over 1.2 million bewildered Irish households. “I think it’s important to reassure people and know that there is in place a national emergency plan for nuclear accidents”, Jacob told his interviewer. Continue reading →

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Food shortages come home to roost

Posted on April 22, 2008 by John Gibbons

It’s been said that a recession is when your neighbour loses his job; a depression is when it’s your job that goes. This comes to mind as reports have been pouring in over the last while about soaring food prices and food riots in a range of countries.

It’s probably accurate to say that there are not – yet – absolute or irreversible food shortages globally, but the crux is the sharp increases in prices that are literally taking the bread out of the mouths of the people at the sharp end of the food chain – the world’s poor. Continue reading →

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Let them eat cake

Posted on April 14, 2008 by John Gibbons

It takes around 230 kg of corn to feed a child in the ‘developing world’ for a year, according to UN estimates. By a ghoulish coincidence, that’s around the same amount of corn as is needed to produce enough biofuel to fill a 50-litre fuel tank on a car – once.

World grain stocks are the lowest they’ve been in 25 years, with just 5 million tons in the kitty, enough for between 8 and 12 weeks. Continue reading →

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Some like it hot?

Posted on April 7, 2008 by John Gibbons

Climate sceptic Bjorn Lomborg was in Dublin last Friday telling the folks at the IMI national management conference that everything’s just honky dory on the climate front – a business-as-usual message that was no doubt eagerly lapped up by that audience.

And who wouldn’t want to believe Bjorn? His Polyanna feel-good messages may fly in the face of everthing we know about climate; they even require a re-writing of the laws of physics, but hey, his messages sell lots of (his) books. Continue reading →

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The sweet smell of excess

Posted on April 2, 2008 by John Gibbons

‘Fused with idealism, heritage moulded to modernity, classicism reinterpreted through originality…inspired by a search for balance and harmony in a chaotic and contradictory world’

The above verbiage is taken verbatim from the current Aer Lingus Sky Shopping magazine. It’s describing a little bottle of perfume, I should add, not a Caravaggio or Mozart’s Requiem. And there’s more. Much more. Continue reading →

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ESB finally sees the light

Posted on March 27, 2008 by John Gibbons

Ireland, it appears, is at last starting to get serious about tackling our huge energy requirements, and the dagger that our massive dependence on imports of oil and gas in particular holds to our collective throat.

We are reckoned in the energy stakes to be among the OECD’s most import-dependent countries. This, with Peak Oil somewhere on the horizon and with ultra-volatile supply chains putting us totally at the mercy of the Middle East for oil and Russia for gas, is not where a modern economy or society wants to be. Continue reading →

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Watch out, Gaia’s about…

Posted on March 22, 2008 by John Gibbons

At 88, James Lovelock is for many people the Grandfather of the modern ecology movement. He today is admired and despised by people in the general ‘green’ movement in about equal measure.

Apart from a highly successful career as a scientist, he is most famous as the man who developed the Gaia Hypothesis. Briefly, this proposes that all elements on earth, living and inorganic, are part of a complex single organism whose unifying aim is to keep conditions on the planet optimal to support life. Continue reading →

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Forty shades of brown?

Posted on March 18, 2008 by John Gibbons

Climate change is set to change the very face of Ireland in the coming decades. This is the conclusion of a study published to coincide with St. Patrick’s Day. The study is called ‘Changing Shades Of Green – The environmental and cultural impacts of climate change in Ireland.’

This report has been produced by the Irish American Climate Project, a group working in tandem with the ICARUS science team headed by Prof John Sweeney in Maynooth, and it makes for extremely interesting reading. Continue reading →

Posted in Energy, Global Warming, Habitat/Species, Irish Focus, Sustainability | 9 Comments

The most dangerous man in Europe?

Posted on March 14, 2008 by John Gibbons

Gordon Brown gets it. Kevin Rudd gets it. John McCain gets it. Bertie Ahern (sort of) gets it. For goodness sake, even George W Bush is beginning to get it.

It, of course, is the realisation sweeping the world that we face a planetary climate, energy and sustainability emergency of a scale and intensity never before experienced. Yes, pretty much everybody gets it these days, and most of our political and corporate leadership at the very least know how to mouth soothing eco platitudes.

No so Mr Vaclav Klaus, President of our fellow EU state, the Czech Republic, and currently the inhabitant of an alternate reality. Continue reading →

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Ssssh, don’t mention the ‘E’ word

Posted on March 10, 2008 by John Gibbons

There’s an episode of the 1970s comedy, Fawlty Towers, in which German visitors come to stay in the hotel. Basil Fawlty goes to great lengths to avoid any references to World War 2 (it was then barely 30 years after the end of the war).

Pandemonium ensues after he receives a blow to the head, and the concussed and now entirely uninhibited Fawlty goose-steps around the hotel in imitation of Der Fuhrer, to the consternation of his guests. So much for his plans that, at all costs, we “don’t mention the war”. Continue reading →

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Drowning in an ocean of rubbish

Posted on March 7, 2008 by John Gibbons

Nobody likes living near a rubbish dump. Fewer things are quicker at getting Irish people out to protest than the prospect of a new dump or incinerator opening anywhere near them.

Earlier today, around 400 people in Nobber, Co. Meath marched on a local animal rendering factory to protest against its plans to develop an incinerator. However we may feel about it, rubbish is the flip side of our high-consumption throwaway society. And it’s got to go somewhere. Continue reading →

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Feast or famine

Posted on March 3, 2008 by John Gibbons

Food, or more precisely the lack of food, is deeply ingrained in the Irish psyche. Small wonder, having been victims of the worst western European famine of the last 250 years.

In today’s world of plenty, where the local Tesco probably has 10 or more varieties of coffee beans from the furthest reaches of the world to tempt us, the very notion of food being scarce seems in the realm of the fantastic.

What’s more, haven’t we been hearing for decades about EEC and then EU Food Mountains and Wine Lakes. After all, aren’t Irish farmers paid to not grow food? Continue reading →

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There Will Be Oil!

Posted on February 28, 2008 by John Gibbons

The prolific American author Upton Sinclair died 40 years ago, but his novel Oil, published in 1927, has recently had a second coming, being the book upon which the Oscar-winning film There Will Be Blood is based.

Another of Sinclair’s pearls was also recently made famous, this time by Al Gore, when he recalled one of the author’s quotations in his film, An Inconvenient Truth. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”. Continue reading →

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