After Copenhagen, allow me some bleak Christmas humour. If you’re a dog lover, look away now. But before you reach for the green ink, remember this is an attempt at satire. I got some fairly aggressive responses to my recent posts on population, and one of the core arguments of the population controllers seemed to be that because climate change

Wow, where to begin. I wasn’t in Copenhagen, but followed it from afar. A couple of reflections and then some highlights from two of the more comprehensive post mortems. Firstly, geopolitics. 2009 began with The G7 still apparently in the driving seat, saw the formal recognition of the shift from G7 to G20 in Pittsburgh, and then ended with the

A few newspapers are running the kind of minute by minute commentaries normally reserved for soccer matches. Gripping stuff, but will it make history? The Guardian The Times

Credit is the lifeblood of farming – you need cash to plant seeds, buy fertiliser and stay alive long long enough to reap and sell your harvest and pay off your loan. But you can’t always get it when you need it. A new Oxfam research paper identifies one of the main market failures resulting from the retreat of the

The momentum behind the Financial Transactions Tax (a tiny levy of 0.005% on all financial trades would raise about $30bn a year for climate change, development and/or filling fiscal holes) continues to grow since my last post (Why has the Tobin Tax gone mainstream?). The French government, which as far back as 2003 was the first to seriously propose the

Last week George Soros was passing through London and invited a bunch of NGO types for breakfast at his very nice house in South Kensington. (In case you’re interested we all got sticky pastries, but George made do with grapefruit and muesli). He was en route to Copenhagen to launch his big new idea – using the IMF to pump

As ministers and heads of state start to fly in, and Copenhagen (hopefully) gets serious,  here’s the companion to my previous post, summarizing key developing country positions in the negotiations. Let me know if there are any mistakes/additions and I’ll pass them on. [sorry for two blogs in one day, but this week is a bit special, and I promise

Here’s a handy guide from our Copenhagen team to all the offers currently on the table from developed countries (I’m now off to do a companion post on developing country positions). Do let me know if there are any mistakes/additions and I’ll pass them on. European Union Emission Reductions At last week’s EU summit, leaders did not agree to 30%

Trust the military to give it to me straight. Population comes up at virtually every talk I give – on climate change, development or just about anything else. But usually my questioners are a bit more circumspect than the man from the armed forces who recently asked what could be done about ‘women popping them out’ in poor countries. People

OK, the Copenhagen climate summit is warming up nicely (even faster than the rest of the world), and I am trying to sift through the information overload. What on earth to read for those of us with limited time and not at the summit? I’ve been asking a few climate change guru chums and here’s a selection. Overviews The official

After decades of decline, aid to agriculture has started to rise in the last few years in response to a renewed understanding of the role of agriculture in triggering growth and reducing poverty (see previous blog). But some recent research from 3 countries in West Africa (Niger, Burkina Faso and Ghana) suggests that quality is as much of an issue

The Protestant Work Ethic is back, this time supported by econometrics….. A recent article in the Boston Globe summed up research showing that a belief in hell is good for growth, and other linkages between religion and development. Highlights: ‘A pair of Harvard researchers recently examined 40 years of data from dozens of countries, trying to sort out the economic