ETC Blog

I am still in the Bella Centre, still tracking technology negotiations.  That means I have a magical “secondary pass” unlike thousands of other NGOs who cannot get into the building today. Technology is supposed to be the “easy issue”, on which there will possibly be an agreement, evoked by both the Danish Presidency and the [...]

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So much has happened in the past three days it is has been impossible to blog.  We have been trying to lobby for precaution and assessment on technology, trying to talk to the press about our issues, attending side events, organizing our own workshops, meeting old and new friends and allies and basically working from [...]

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It is the mad dash for Copenhagen.
I am leaving Montreal for the international summit tomorrow although the conference actually got underway today.  In between urgent emails over the weekend I found the time to take my ten year old daughter and two of her friends to see A Christmas Carol, a Geordie Theatre production of [...]

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Dumping iron sulphate into the ocean, or, how to ‘geo-engineer’ the climate
Written for The Ecologist – March 2009
Available online at http://www.theecologist.org/pages/archive_detail.asp?content_id=2125
Climate change due to human interference with fragile ecosystems? No problem – we can just dump 20 tonnes of iron sulphate into the ocean
The time has come to talk about geo-engineering – and I mean [...]

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Written for The Ecologist – February 2009
available online at http://www.theecologist.org/pages/archive_detail.asp?content_id=2053
Somebody somewhere has to have a cunning plan to fix our environmental problems and save the world – right? Jim Thomas sorts through the big tech ideas you’ll be reading about this year 
Almost every day sees new technologies being proposed to fix old problems. 2008 witnessed global [...]

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Below you will find a series of articles on biofuels, originally written in Spanish by one of ETC Group’s researchers. (Unfortunately, English translations are not always available). Biofuel production is currently a much-debated topic in Latin America. The prominent farmers’ organizations in the region believe that the production of biofuels will lead to further marginalization [...]

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*Silvia Ribeiro
Una de las muestras más claras de las lógicas perversas del capitalismo es el empuje que desde gobiernos y trasnacionales se da a la producción industrial de agrocombustibles, principalmente etanol y biodiesel. La mayoría de los enunciados de esta campaña -mediática, política y subsidiada con recursos públicos- son falsos. Lo que sí es verdad [...]

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Silvia Ribeiro*
Malí, que alojó en febrero 2007 el Foro Mundial de Soberanía Alimentaria “Nyéléni”, es uno de los diez países más pobres del mundo, si se mide en dinero. Sin embargo el país tiene recursos como oro y algodón —del cual es uno de los principales productores del continente—, pero la herencia colonial y las [...]

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Silvia Ribeiro*
Cada vez más queda más claro que los agrocombustibles no solamente no son una panacea ambiental para enfrentar el cambio climático, sino por el contrario, lo van a empeorar. Al mismo tiempo van sentando las bases para nuevas crisis alimentarias y de escasez de agua, junto a la expulsión de campesinos e indígenas de [...]

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You’d think that after some of the world’s most eminent marine biologists attacked it; the IPCC report dumped on it; and the IMO’s scientific group to the London Convention last week passed the equivalent of an emergency motion advising it not to proceed – that Planktos Inc. would go to ground or hoist a white [...]

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