Environment

Articles

Cents and sensibility

Fifty years ago the Limits to Growth report started a debate that pitted environmentalists against economists — and the economists won. Richard McNeill Douglas investigates why and what comes next. 

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The Bumpy Ride

Roland Kupers argues that fixing the climate crisis will necessarily be turbulent. Our current approach to the climate problem falls well short of what is objectively required, but that does

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As real as it gets

Climate change: Bangladesh is where it is at. Rohini Kamal shows the way.  Debates on climate change are often dominated by heated commentary from the West on its impending peril

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Farming carbon

Dr Mandy Stoker tells how captured carbon is neither black gold nor a guaranteed green deal. The 5,000 trees we planted seven years ago are bursting into leaf. They have

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Pensions get the green-lite

Why better pensions help the climate – Bruno Bonizzi explains. In October 2021, two UK-based academics, Dr Neil Davies and Dr Ewan McGaughey, issued proceedings against the directors of the

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The ifs and buts of Hydrogen

Hydrogen may be useful, but how green can it really be? asks Roland Kupers. It has been used for centuries: from lifting the balloon that Jacques Charles floated over Paris

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Beyond denial

Sandra White maps a route through denial and towards action on climate change. Despite growing evidence of climate change, only a few years ago I regularly heard people deny that

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All together. How?

If the way out of climate crisis requires a world that works together, can economics and markets provide the direction? Şerban Scrieciu reflects. Two globally significant events this year have

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The human touch

Paul Frijters shares a dream. The world is getting hotter and wetter due to humanity increasing its carbon dioxide and other greenhouse emissions over the past 200 years. Even if

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The only way out

Post-war reconstruction involved taxing the richest – it could help with building a low-carbon economy according to Dario Kenner. Amid the worst public health crisis in a generation, an economic disaster has

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An inconveniently complex truth

Roland Kupers tells how complexity characterises climate policy questions. And how it also provides answers. The world’s governments in 2015 made a radical shift in the principles that governed their

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All for One

A combination of government edicts, broken promises and climate change has driven Malian villagers away from their collective livelihoods and traditions to bring prosperity for the few, not for the

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Carbon dating

Getting together to reduce carbon emissions brings hope in a world that doesn’t care, say Colin Nolden and Michele Stua On first sight, the global climate conference in Madrid was a

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Trash can

Lagos’s garbage entrepreneurs are cleaning up. Adeyemi Adelekan explains. While growing up in a small suburban community in Lagos state, I was accustomed to hearing people with carts and sacks

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Zero is circular

A circular economy is starting to roll towards zero carbon in Ireland. Geraldine Brennan writes. Since the 1970s global resource use has tripled, reaching some 92 billion tonnes in 2017,

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A new steer

Spanish farms are revitalising their land on the hoof. Sacha Bernal Coates and Kerry Wolters explain how the herd instinct holds back the desert. Manuel’s ranch is an hour’s drive

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Climate short change

Global warming is happening but the planning to halt it doesn’t just happen. Charles Seaford asks who? And other questions. Well-informed people the world over knew, in 1933, that something

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Interviews

The differential equation

David Stainforth is professor of physics with a deep passion for modelling the dimensions of the climate crisis in a form that is useful for decision makers and the wider

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Killer watts

Helen Thompson is a professor of international political economy who thinks that understanding energy can explain a lot (if not all as she is careful to say) that has happened

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Beyond the pale?

Lebohang Liepollo Pheko is a South African activist academic who was one of the non-Europeans invited to speak at the recent Beyond Growth conference in the European Parliament. This conference

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On being an inspiration

Chee Yoke Ling has, since the 1980s, supported Global South countries in becoming more effective in international policy negotiations. The Mint called her up in Bonn, where she was attending

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Drowning in silence

The Mint spent time with Waqar Rizvi, a media commentator in Pakistan, to discuss views from the global South – particularly its perspectives on demands for climate change compensation –

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Bad grammar?

British academic, and ecological economist, based in Vienna, Clive Spash, was one of the few expert voices who openly and scathingly criticised the recent Dasgupta Review.  The  600-page review by

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The land ahead

The only point of agreement on the future of land management and agriculture in the UK is that it is undergoing huge change post-European Union exit and the new imperative

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A new class act

Douglas Eger is an environmentalist and a serial entrepreneur.  He is looking to bring together these two strands of his career in a new venture to create a new asset

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Commons concern

American natural resource economist, Erik Nordman, has just written a book about Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. The Mint quizzed him

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News

Columns

Central Eating

Pam Warhurst is an impressive community leader with a CBE for her efforts. She has been a council leader, chaired the Forestry Commission and has sat on other influential boards.

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Spin Offs

Tom Szaky started TerraCycle in high school to “end waste”. The company currently operates in 21 countries, working with some of the world’s largest retailers’ and manufacturers’ brands. In each

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Global calories

The food on your plate, and how it got there, is the theme for our tenth issue. Food has been an area of conflict at least since the sugar boycotts

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The bull in China’s shop

In this issue we are exploring the world of international organisations, values and globalisation. This is at a time when Trump is challenging all the norms, but maybe the norms

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Collaboratively yours

The theme of this issue is common resource management. This may seem a niche interest but when you think about it there are many resources we have to manage together.

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We can be heroes

Many of us like the idea of swimming with dolphins and our children having dolphins around to give them the option to swim with them. Patriotism anyone? Most of us

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Sustainably Yours

A late charge by Thomas into the green, ends in bloodshed and disappointment. If only they had consulted Professor Bastion. Thomas has gone green. Our dear girl Hermione wasn’t even

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Books

The Waste-Free World

From the publisher: Our take-make-waste economy has cost consumers and taxpayers billions while cheating us out of a habitable planet. But it doesn’t have to be this way. The Waste-Free

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Beautiful Economics

From the publisher: A handbook for rebooting the world with a new economic narrative that combines ecological, philosophical and entrepreneurial wisdom. What if we could all become rich in Life

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Tomorrow’s Economy

From the publisher: A balance sheet for the planet: How we can achieve healthy growth—more regenerative than wasteful, instilling equity rather than exacerbating inequalities. In Tomorrow’s Economy, Per Espen Stoknes reframes

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Unsustainable Inequalities

From the publisher: A hard-headed book that confronts and outlines possible solutions to a seemingly intractable problem: that helping the poor often hurts the environment, and vice versa. Can we

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The New Map

From the publisher: Pulitzer Prize-winning author and global energy expert, Daniel Yergin offers a revelatory new account of how energy revolutions, climate battles, and geopolitics are mapping our future The

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The Spatial Contract

From the publisher: Housing. Water. Energy. Transport. Food. Education. Health care. These are the core systems which make human life possible in the 21st century. Few of us are truly

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Degrowth in Movement(s)

From the publisher: Degrowth is an emerging social movement that overlaps with proposals for systemic change such as anti-globalization and climate justice, commons and transition towns, basic income and Buen

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Revenge Capitalism

From the publisher: Capitalism is in a profound state of crisis. Beyond the mere dispassionate cruelty of ‘ordinary’ structural violence, it appears today as a global system bent on reckless

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A circular passion

Why does Walter Stahel mention The Little Prince author, Antoine Saint-Exupery at four critical points in his latest book: The Circular Economy: a user’s guide? Ron Nahser reflects on a

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All Hell Breaking Loose

All Hell Breaking Loose is an eye-opening examination of climate change from the perspective of the U.S. military. The Pentagon, unsentimental and politically conservative, might not seem likely to be worried

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Carbon Inequality – Dario Kenner

Publisher Description  With a specific focus on the United States and the United Kingdom, Carbon Inequality studies the role of the richest people in contributing to climate change via their luxury consumption

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On purpose

Campaigners seeking deep transformation of the economy should look no further for ideas than Colin Mayer’s book, Prosperity. Within it they will find a surprisingly radical agenda even if they

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Short and Sweet

In remarkably few words Nick Silver gets to many points in his biting analysis of the global financial system, Finance, Society and Sustainability. It’s all good – more would be

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Event Recordings

Why Capitalists Need Communists

The 2020s look set to be the decade of make or break. The big problems we face – climate change, inequality, job creation in the face of automation, housing shortages and pressures

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