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Ed Webb

Global fight for natural resources 'has only just begun' | Environment | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...l-natural-resources-food-water

resources energy water UN environment sustainability

shared by Ed Webb on 12 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • the developed world tends to be profligate in its use of natural resources, because most western companies have in the last century experienced few limits on their ability to access raw materials in peacetime, thanks to the opening up of global trade
  • The failure of businesses, individuals and governments to improve their efficiency, even by relatively small amounts, has been one of the conundrums for resource economists in recent years. According to standard economic thinking, rising prices should prompt more efficiency, but this has happened at a much slower rate than should have been the case.
  • This obsession with perpetual economic growth (whether it's coming from consumer capitalism, nationalist industry expansion, or whatever) is a hideous destructive beast which must be slain, and quickly.
Ed Webb

Texas shale oil has fought Saudi Arabia to a standstill - 0 views

www.telegraph.co.uk/...t-saudi-arabia-to-a-standstill

KSA USA US OPEC Saudi oil energy economy

shared by Ed Webb on 01 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • Ed Webb on 01 Aug 16
     
    Really important for KSA's medium term strategy and prospects.
Ed Webb

With Yemen's Saleh gone, attention turns to problem of qat - 0 views

uk.mobile.reuters.com/...idUKBRE83O0TQ20120425

Yemen water economy politics agriculture development

shared by Ed Webb on 26 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • One in every seven working Yemeni is employed in producing and distributing qat, making it the largest single source of rural income and the second largest source of employment in the country after the agriculture and herding sector, exceeding even the public sector, according to the World Bank. Many of Yemen's poorest families admit to spending over half their earnings on the leaf. "Qat is the biggest market in Yemen, bigger than oil, bigger than anything," said Abdulrahman Al-Iryani, Yemen's former water minister and founder of 'qat uprooting', a charity which supports farmers in replacing qat shrubs with coffee plants.
  • qat is entwined in all of Yemen's problems
  • the cultivation of qat - the least taxed, most subsidized and fastest-growing cash crop in Yemen - consumes 40 percent of irrigated farming land
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • One "daily bag" that can be consumed by one person in one day requires hundreds of litres of waters to produce
  • In 1972, then-Prime Minister Mohsin Al-Aini forbade qat-chewing by public servants during working hours and banned its cultivation on lands run by state-controlled religious trusts. He received death threats from tribesmen and qat farm owners around Sanaa. Many Yemenis suspect his eventual dismissal from office three months later was in large part due to his push.
  • "As water prices go up, the competition drives more and more people toward farming qat which in turn uses up even more water. If the spread of qat farms continues like this soon all our arable land will be used to grow qat."
  • everyone chews
Ed Webb

BBC News - The world's longest running carbon dioxide experiment - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...world-us-canada-11685516

environment climate research US coasts

shared by Ed Webb on 07 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • The marsh is dotted with atmospherically controlled chambers that contain the same amount of CO2 that the planet may be exposed to by the year 2100 - roughly double what it is today. "They're like time capsules. We are simulating the future inside them," says Dr Megonigal. "We're trying to travel forward in time by subjecting these plants to the conditions the whole world will be subjected to a hundred years from now."
  • Coastal wetlands are the first defence against climate change and the 60-hectare (148-acre) salt marsh at the heart of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center has been home to some of the most important ecological studies of the past 40 years.
Ed Webb

BBC News - Middle East countries hit by storms - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...world-middle-east-11979285

climate MENA weather drought

shared by Ed Webb on 12 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Fierce winds and heavy rain and snow have lashed eastern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern countries for a second successive day. The storms have sunk a ship off the Israeli coast, closed ports and disrupted shipping in the Suez Canal.
  • The storms have ended a long drought in Lebanon, Syria and Israel and come just a week after more than 40 people died in a forest fire.
Ed Webb

Egyptian NGOs complain of being shut out of Cop27 climate summit | Cop27 | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ut-out-of-cop27-climate-summit

Egypt authoritarianism UN COP NGOs civil_society climate environment Sisi

shared by Ed Webb on 24 Aug 22 - No Cached
  • A group of Egyptian civil society organisations have been prevented from attending the Cop27 climate summit by a covert registration process that filtered out groups critical of the Egyptian government.
  • “You don’t let a government tell the UN who is and who isn’t an NGO, certainly not the Egyptian government,” said Ahmad Abdallah, of the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms (ECRF), one of five leading organisations unable to register to attend the conference due to the screening.
  • “the UN is colluding with the Egyptian government to whitewash this regime”
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The Egyptian authorities’ efforts to screen out prominent organisations with a record of criticising their rule, particularly on the issue of human rights, comes amid growing concern over their treatment of protests and civil society at the Cop in Sharm el-Sheikh in November.
  • The UNFCCC told the Guardian host nations were permitted to invite organisations at their discretion for one-time access, but that “there is no fixed written policy” on one-time registration. The UK did not recommend any NGOs for one-time admission to attend Cop26.
  • Abdallah told the Guardian the ECRF had applied to attend Cop27 not just to represent Egyptian citizens but also to provide legal assistance in Sharm el-Sheikh to anyone detained for protesting.“Not allowing ECRF to attend strips participants from our protection, meaning protection from a watchdog organisation that can actually support them,” he said. “No one else is doing this.”
  • Abdallah said the Egyptian government wished to use Cop27 “to portray a different image of Egypt, one where people are kept away from cities suffering from pollution, poverty or repression. Part of this image is keeping critical voices out so that the only ones heard in Sharm el-Sheikh are those praising the government.”
  • Since coming to power in a military coup in 2013, Sisi has moved to strangle civil society activity. The state has demanded that NGOs receive government approval to continue operating and has outlawed funding received from abroad as a way to curtail their operations.
  • Organisations tracking detentions by security services, use of torture by state bodies or the state’s crackdown on civil rights have found their offices raided, their founders targeted with asset freezes and travel bans or their premises forcibly closed by the authorities.
  • The secretariat does not consider itself to be competent to unilaterally identify additional organisations from the host country
  • Climate justice activists have said Egypt should not be allowed to host Cop27 while thousands of prisoners of conscience remain behind bars, particularly the British-Egyptian activist and blogger Alaa Abd El-Fattah, now more than four months into a hunger strike. Abd El-Fattah, imprisoned on terrorism charges for a social media post, told his family during a recent visit that he believed he would die in prison.
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