Andrew Simms's Blog, page 17

81 months and counting … | Andrew Simms

Like a bad disaster film, the naysayers have been in charge over climate change. It's not too late to rewrite the final scenes

Every disaster movie has a stock character – the person who tells everyone else that there's nothing to worry about. Shark? There's no shark. What could possibly go wrong with that tower block, ship, plane, volcano, dinosaur safari park or paramilitary robot cop with a slightly psychopathic glint in its eye?

Such "don't worry" confidence is always bullish and...

The price of environmental destruction? There is none | Andrew Simms

Putting a price on nature becomes meaningless if we treat the ecosystems upon which we depend as mere commodities with a price for trading

• World's top firms cause $2.2tn of environmental damage, report warns

The economy is no stranger to creating its own fantasy world with little or no relation to the real one. We witnessed the damage that can cause when the banks thought they had stumbled on financial alchemy and could transform bad debt into good – economic base metal into gold.

Now it's...

82 months and counting... | 100 months to save the world | Andrew Simms

If economics was subject to the same evidence-based scrutiny as climate change, our world would be run very differently

The world is not run according to climate science. Amid the almost hysterical jeering since the Copenhagen climate summit, it's a fact worth remembering. If things were done with one eye carefully checking the planet's ecological engines and the resource levels in its fuel tank, it would look very different The largest indoor snow park in the world would not, for example...

Growth is good ... isn't it? | Andrew Simms

Expansion has progressed so far that key resource boundaries have been broken: we're teetering on the edge of an ecological cliff

Like a patient waiting for hospital scan results, this week the government nervously anticipates new growth figures for the economy. Any sign of an increase and relief could quickly lead to self-satisfaction about its handling of the recession. Approving nods may be seen later this week in Davos at the World Economic Forum. Why? Because among political and business ...

Nine meals from anarchy | Andrew Simms

A cold snap shows how fragile our supply of food and fuel is. We need a more sustainable system

'Man has lost the ­capacity to ­foresee and forestall," wrote Albert Schweitzer. A colossal banking crisis and a big freeze in the middle of what was meant to be a mild winter don't encourage confidence to the contrary.

Reassurance is fine as long as it's well founded. And in the midst of fears about gas supplies and the panic buying of food Gordon Brown is hardly likely to scream that we are all...

83 months and counting… | 100 months to save the world | Andrew Simms

Rich countries have no choice but to lead by example in setting a different, less destructive model for economic success

The mother of all hangovers on 1 January 2010 has nothing to do with alcohol. From London to Washington DC it's the result of waking up to find that the world's most populated country, in whose economy we are inextricably entwined, doesn't give a damn what anyone else thinks. From deciding the fate of civilisation's climate, to the judicial killing of mentally ill people...

10:10: Why your contribution will make a difference | Andrew Simms

If you think signing up to 10:10 is too insignificant to make a difference, you're wrong. And here's why

It was the only time I met him face-to-face. In the summer of 1997, Tony Blair was sitting across the table from me, still flushed with his stomping first election success. We were in New York, on the never-ending international conference trail. The Jubilee 2000 poor country debt relief campaign was gearing up, and my job was to push Blair to promote it to other world leaders. I made my p...

84 months and counting … | Andrew Simms

The world produces 73m cars and trucks a year. So a few million wind turbines and solar plants shouldn't be a problem

On the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit we seem to be poised between the possibility of new directions for the world, and meek capitulation to environmental upheaval. Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says we have just months to take large-scale action on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. He calls on developing countries not to...

Questions for the new world

Our need for a greener, life-enhancing economic model should make us seek answers in the unlikeliest of places

Perhaps it was when investigators realised that a mortgage had been given to an "M Mouse" that the depth of the banking crisis became apparent. Throwing money that didn't really exist, at cartoon characters that weren't real, meant something horrible was bound to happen. And if the old banking system was more vulnerable than people realised, what other things, built on fantasy...

85 months to save the world | Andrew Simms

Without essential funds we won't meet climate change targets. The lucrative oil industry has money to spare, so why not tax it?

Many people forget that the basic principles for the Copenhagen negotiations were set long ago at the Earth Summit in 1992. Rich countries were supposed to go first, fastest and furthest, and pay to help others follow in the footsteps. They failed in every single aspect. Consequently, all they can do now is beg, grovel and implore the major low income countries – the ...