Costs of inaction: the economics of high-end warming

BY Eban Goodstein
grist
2 FEB 2011

Perhaps nowhere is the contrast between the science and economics of climate change as great as in the dueling metaphors governing the impact of high-end warming: "collapse" (following scientist Jared Diamond) vs. "reductions in the rate of growth" (following all standard integrated assessment models in economics, including those of Nicholas Stern and the IPCC)...

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BP: Billionaire Polluter

Amy Goodman
Truthdig
May 4, 2010

Less than a week after British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon drilling platform exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and unleashing what could be the worst industrial environmental disaster in U.S. history, the company announced more than $6 billion in profits for the first quarter of 2010, more than doubling profits from the same period the year before...

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Jim Shultz on “Dignity and Defiance. Stories from Bolivia’s Challenge to Globalization”

DemocracyNow!
April 19, 2010

Jim Shultz, founder of the Cochabamba-based Democracy Center, gives a snapshot of Bolivia ahead of the World Peoples’ Summit on Climate Change and Rights of Mother Earth. Ten years ago Shultz helped expose the role of Bechtel in the privatization of Cochabamba’s water supply...

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Boycott, Divest From, and Sanction Israel?: A Debate on BDS with Omar Barghouti and Rabbi Arthur Waskow

DemocracyNow!
March 04, 2010

In 2005, a coalition of Palestinian civil society groups called for people all over the world to engage in a nonviolent campaign to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel until it complies with international law. The call was inspired by the international boycott and divestment initiatives applied to South Africa in the struggle to abolish apartheid. We host a debate between Omar Barghouti, a founding member of the BDS campaign and a Palestinian human rights activist and commentator, and Rabbi Arthur Waskow, a longtime antiwar and civil rights activist who is the founder and director of the Shalom Center.

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Security “Red Zones” in Haiti Preventing Large Aid Groups from Effectively Distributing Aid

DemocracyNow!
January 22, 2010

As thousands of well-equipped US soldiers pour into Haiti, there is an increasing concern about the militarization of the country, supporting the soldiers and not the people. Or, as one doctor put it, “people need gauze, not guns.” We take a look at aid distribution in Haiti and the effect on Haitians fighting to survive in the aftermath of the earthquake...

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Raj Patel on “The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy”

DemocracyNow!
January 12, 2009

Author and activist Raj Patel joins us to discuss his new book, The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy. “We’ve come to believe that the only way we can value things is by sticking them in a market,” Patel says. “The trouble is, as we’ve seen through this recession, that markets are a tremendously bad way of valuing things, tremendously fickle.”...

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Hoodwinked: Former Economic Hit Man John Perkins Reveals Why the World Financial Markets Imploded—and How to Remake Them

DemocracyNow!
November 10, 2009

John Perkins calls himself a former economic hit man. He has seen the signs of today’s financial meltdown before. The subprime mortgage fiasco, the collapse of the banking industry, the rising unemployment rate—these are all familiar to him. Perkins was on the front lines of monitoring and helping create these very events that were once just confined to the Third World. From 1971 to 1981, he worked for the international consulting firm of Chas T. Main, where he was a self-described “economic hit man.” He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Confessions of An Economic Hit Man and The Secret History of the American Empire...

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