Kjell Aleklett

“The Failure in Copenhagen”

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On 15 November 2009 in the “Focus” column [of the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet] I advanced the opinion that the climate negotiations in Copenhagen would fail (Read my blog). The reason was that they would not consider all the elements in “the global welfare equation”. They had forgotten about food and the economy…The person responsible for drafting a treaty proposal was Michael Zammit Cutajar, but the spider at the centre of the web was Laurence Tubinan from France, founder of the French Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations.

Are “More Jobs” Sustainable or Necessary in the Post-Peak Oil World?

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What was required for a growing economy, that was supposed to uplift all of modern humanity, is at root a false notion for the manipulated public: the overwhelming majority must work for others to enrich the few so that all of society benefits through unlimited expansion. This problematic profit-scheme is failing to hold up, what with general economic uncertainty on the rise (apart from “Hope”) and the advanced depletion of easily extracted, cheap oil.

Living Hero interview with Vandana Shiva

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Around the world civilian rights to food and water are being eroded by the patenting of life forms and by privatization of water systems. Some farmers have been hit with law suits for patent infringement, while they were planting heritage seeds. The outspoken, multi-talented Vandana Shiva, joins us to talk about these and other issues of capitalist globalization. She is a celebrated ecofeminist, grassroots activist, research physicist, author, and international advocate for alternatives to global corporate hegemony.

Transport – Mar 10

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-Crunching the Numbers ($$$) on Bike Commuting
-Want to Foster Walking, Biking and Transit? You Need Good Parking Policy
-Streetfilms: Fixing the Great Mistake of Planning for Cars
-Korea unveils the ‘future of transport’ — the Online Electric Vehicle
-Streetfilms: Seattle’s Link Light Rail — The Start of Something Big
-New York Plans Transitway on 34th Street, but It’s Not BRT, for Better or Worse

Tiny Homestead Discoveries Inspire Big Wild Ideas

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To my amusement, a slate colored junco hopped into a little pool of snow melt and splashed and fluttered around joyously. Looked like joy anyway. I had to laugh right out loud. It was hardly warm enough to go out without a coat on, yet here was this tiny bird obviously enjoying an outdoor bath. Why couldn’t I go for a dip too? Life just ain’t fair.

Nothing left to lose

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Rolfe Winkler wrote some good stuff in the wake of the Make Markets Be Markets conference held in the Imperial capital last week. I’ll get to that in a moment. The purpose of the get together, which was hosted by the Roosevelt Institute, was to push for much needed financial reform. Many of the usual suspects were there, including Simon Johnson and Elizabeth Warren. Rob Johnson, Senior Fellow and Director of the Project on Global Finance at The Roosevelt Institute, wrote the introduction to the conference report (big pdf).

Why GM Has No Place in a World in Transition

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The piece builds on Lynas’s previous much publicised conversion to nuclear power, arguing that if we are to apply the scientific rigour that underpins climate science to all other areas of life, in the same way that nuclear power is supported by the science, so is GM. While I strongly disagree with him on both, I want here to challenge Lynas’s conversion to GM, and the belief that if we are serious about climate change, we have no option other than to embrace GM.

North-South Divide And Tackling Global Warning

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As signs of climate instability increase, radical and rapid action is becoming ever more urgent…Yet even within the environmental movement there is no unanimity on this thorny question: should the countries of the South have the right to increase their emissions as they industrialize and “develop”?

The Scalability of Biochar

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A popular idea at the moment to address climate change is biochar – essentially taking organic materials, charring them, and burying them in the soil…Now, the biofuel story has given me a bit of a horror of ideas that sound cool to environmentalists, are fine on a small scale, but are a disaster when scaled up by industrial society.  So I wanted to do a few quick back-of-the-envelope calculations of the limits of this approach.

Using behavioral science to make smarter energy policy

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On Friday, journalist John Fleck made a great point, comparing coverage of two new pieces in Science. One is about the latest potential climate disaster: methane venting from the seafloor in the Arctic. The second is about a promising new climate solution: using behavioral science to influence energy use. Not surprisingly, the disaster got tons of coverage. The solution got none. This is entirely typical. As Fleck says, “The problem space gets more attention than the solution space.”