Articles by George Monbiot
We found 121 results.
THE HOLOCAUST WE WILL NOT SEE
George Monbiot - The Guardian,
12 Jan 2010
Avatar half-tells a story we would all prefer to forget.Avatar, James Cameron’s blockbusting 3-D film, is both profoundly silly and profound. It’s profound because, like most films about aliens, it is a metaphor for contact between different human cultures. But in this case the metaphor is conscious and precise: this is the story of European […]
→ read full articleTHIS IS ABOUT US
George Monbiot - The Guardian,
19 Dec 2009
The talks at Copenhagen are not just about climate change. They represent a battle to redefine humanity. This is the moment at which we turn and face ourselves. Here, in the plastic corridors and crowded stalls, among impenetrable texts and withering procedures, humankind decides what it is and what it will become. It chooses whether […]
→ read full articleARRESTING BLAIR
George Monbiot - Published in the Guardian, 26th October 2009,
28 Oct 2009
His bid for the EU presidency gives us the best chance we’ll ever have.Tony Blair’s bid to become president of the European Union has united the left in revulsion. His enemies argue that he divided Europe by launching an illegal war; he kept the UK out of the eurozone and the Schengen agreement; he is […]
→ read full articleTHE POPULATION MYTH
George Monbiot,
3 Oct 2009
People who claim that population growth is the big environmental issue are shifting the blame from the rich to the poor.It’s no coincidence that most of those who are obsessed with population growth are post-reproductive wealthy white men: it’s about the only environmental issue for which they can’t be blamed. The brilliant earth systems scientist […]
→ read full articleTOXIC ASSETS
George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian, 22nd September 2009,
22 Sep 2009
The Trafigura scandal is just one of thousands of cases of the rich world’s fly-tipping. It was revolting, monstrous, inhumane – and scarcely different from what happens in Africa almost every day. The oil trading company Trafigura has just agreed to pay compensation to 31,0000 people in Cote d’Ivoire, after the Guardian and the BBC’s […]
→ read full articleHELP ADDICTS, BUT LOCK UP THE CASUAL USERS OF COCAINE
George Monbiot - Published in the Guardian 30th June 2009,
30 Jun 2009
The UN’s Proposal for Decriminalisation is Senseless and DestructiveIt looked like the first drop of rain in the desert of drugs policy. Last week Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said what millions of liberal-minded people have been waiting to hear. “Law enforcement should shift its focus from […]
→ read full articleSTOP BUILDING TANKS
George Monbiot,
23 Jun 2009
Let’s divert the money spent on arms to addressing the real strategic threat.What would we be doing now if we took climate change seriously? Last week the government released a report on the likely temperature changes in the United Kingdom(1). It shows that life at the end of this century will bear no relationship to […]
→ read full articleFOR 300 YEARS BRITAIN HAS OUTSOURCED MAYHEM. FINALLY IT’S COMING BACK HOME
George Monbiot,
10 Jun 2009
Opium, famine and banks all played their part in this country’s plundering of the globe. Now it’s over, we find it hard to accept. Why now? It’s not as if this is the first time Britain’s representatives have been caught out. The history of governments in all countries is the history of scandal, as those […]
→ read full articleCAPTIVE KNOWLEDGE
George Monbiot,
13 May 2009
The Funding for Academic Research Has Been Taken Over by Business Why is the Medical Research Council run by an arms manufacturer? Why is the Natural Environment Research Council run by the head of a construction company? Why is the chairman of a real estate firm in charge of higher education funding for England? Because […]
→ read full articleA SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY
George Monbiot,
17 Mar 2009
If you think preventing climate change is politically difficult, look at the political problems of adapting to it. Quietly in public, loudly in private, climate scientists everywhere are saying the same thing: it’s over. The years in which more than two degrees of global warming could have been prevented have passed, the opportunities squandered by […]
→ read full articleTIME TO CHANGE ‘CLIMATE CHANGE’
George Monbiot,
14 Mar 2009
What’s clear from Copenhagen is that policymakers have fallen behind the scientists: global warming is already catastrophic. The more we know, the grimmer it gets. Presentations by climate scientists at this week’s conference in Copenhagen show that we might have underplayed the impacts of global warming in three important respects: • Partly because the estimates […]
→ read full articleTHE PROCEEDS OF CRIME
George Monbiot,
3 Mar 2009
The US and British governments have created a private prison industry which preys on human lives. It’s a staggering case; more staggering still that it has scarcely beeen mentioned on this side of the ocean. Last week two judges in Pennsylvania were convicted of jailing some 2000 children in exchange for bribes from private prison […]
→ read full articleNUKED BY FRIEND AND FOE
George Monbiot,
21 Feb 2009
An unsentimental appraisal of our energy choices doesn’t boost your popularity. One of my favourite environmental writers, my friend Merrick Godhaven, is taking shots at me and Mark Lynas – http://bristlingbadger.blogspot.com/2009/01/nuke-mark-lynas.html. It concerns that most divisive of green topics: nuclear power. Merrick argues that if you express even qualified support for new nukes, it takes […]
→ read full articleFLYING OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST
George Monbiot,
14 Jan 2009
How did Marxist class warriors end up fighting for the bosses’ right to fly? It would be stupid to claim that environmentalism is never informed by class. Compare, for example, the campaign against patio heaters to the campaign against Agas. Patio heaters are a powerful symbol: heating the atmosphere is not a side-effect, it’s their […]
→ read full articleSHELL’S GAME
George Monbiot,
7 Jan 2009
Why Good People Do Bad Things For a while it seemed that Shell had stopped pretending. The advertisements which filled the newspapers in 2006, featuring technicians with perfect teeth and open-necked shirts explaining how they were saving the world(1,2,3), vanished. After being slated by environmentalists for greenwash, after two adverse rulings by the Advertising Standards […]
→ read full articleJEROEN VAN DER VEER CHALLENGED
George Monbiot,
7 Jan 2009
I grill the chief executive of Shell in the fourth of my aggressive interviews with policy makers. In the latest of his groundbreaking encounters with the figures whose decisions shape our environment, George Monbiot challenges Jeroen van de Veer, chief executive of oil and gas giant Shell, on ethics, greenwash advertising, renewable energy investments and […]
→ read full articleTHE PARANOIA SQUAD
George Monbiot,
24 Dec 2008
Published in the Guardian, 23rd December 2008. A British police unit is demonising peaceful protesters to stay in business. When you hear the term “domestic extremist”, whom do you picture? How about someone like Dr Peter Harbour? He’s a retired physicist and university lecturer, who worked on the nuclear fusion reactor run by European governments […]
→ read full articleCLEARING UP THIS MESS
George Monbiot,
19 Nov 2008
John Maynard Keynes Had the Answer to the Crisis We’re Now Facing; But It Was Blocked and then ForgottenPoor old Lord Keynes. The world’s press has spent the past week blackening his name. Not intentionally: most of the dunderheads reporting the G20 summit which took place over the weekend really do believe that he proposed […]
→ read full articleTHE TRIUMPH OF IGNORANCE
George Monbiot,
30 Oct 2008
Why morons succeed in US politics. How was it allowed to happen? How did politics in the US come to be dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance? Was it charity that has permitted mankind’s closest living relative to spend two terms as president? How did Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle and other […]
→ read full articleTHE FREE MARKET PREACHERS HAVE LONG PRACTISED STATE WELFARE FOR THE RICH
George Monbiot,
6 Oct 2008
Bailing out banks seems unprecedented, but the US government’s form in subsidising big business is well established. According to Senator Jim Bunning, the proposal to purchase $700bn of dodgy debt by the US government was "financial socialism, it is un-American". The economics professor Nouriel Roubini called George Bush, Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke "a troika […]
→ read full articleRICH COUNTRIES ONCE USED GUNBOATS TO SEIZE FOOD:
George Monbiot, Guardian UK,
16 Sep 2008
Now They Use Trade DealsRead more
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