Reading in The Guardian that the need for minerals to use in the production of electric cars is driving undersea mining, and that this mining is likely to be disruptive to an already threatened marine environment, prompted me to offer an alternative theory. Unfortunately it does not offer any easy solutions to global pollution and climate change, but if I am correct it means that we are diving off down a dead end route which will not actually solve any of the problems. First of all, I continue to be slightly sceptical that the current upward trends in global temperatures are totally anthropogenic in nature. Warming periods have come and gone throughout Earth’s long and turbulent history, and historically we are overdue for the next ice age, a phenomenon which seems from the available paleontology evidence to have been preceded on each occasion by a very warm period. (Think, for example, of the evidence that there were wild hippopotamuses in London 125,000 years ago.) Su...
I read this morning, in Guy Watson’s musings on the card that comes with my Riverford Vegetables box, of his grave disquiet about the plight of farmers not only in this country but elsewhere. They have become squeezed between the power of the big corporations which no one seems able to challenge successfully and the costs of fuel and other inputs which they need to grow food. The big corporations include both retailers who continually revise downwards the payments they negotiate with farmers for the food we eat and the fossil fuel giants whose diesel is a necessity for farming machinery. Both are making profits while the farmers are making a loss. As Guy points out, farmers have cut their costs to the bone, sent their partners out to work in other industries, and done without employees, working themselves into the ground as a result. Increasingly, the only way of making a living from farming is to become part of an agribusiness, dedicated to profit at the expense of everything that has...