Coronavirus originated in China, of that there is no dispute. But by the time it has run its course, it will be inevitably be known as The American Disease. While there is a great deal of finger-pointing and blame-laying in the US politicosphere and commentariat about whose fault it all is, the debate has almost … Continue reading Diagnosing the American disease

As the world reels under corona virus and the resulting economic meltdown,  another crisis - far more serious - appears to be building: the potential collapse of global food supply chains. For those who cry “We don’t want any more bad news”, the fact of the matter is we have landed in our present mess … Continue reading Is a Food Crisis the next big hit for humanity?

Julian Cribb FRSA FTSE Humans are facing our greatest existential emergency since we first appeared as a distinct species a million or more years ago. Ours is the era of global catastrophic risk, a beyond-perilous time in which ten great, interwoven threats combine to confront us, as individuals and as a species, with the most … Continue reading Preparing for Catastrophic Risk

Citizens of the USA, Australia, Brazil, Canada and elsewhere are slowly waking to the sickening awareness that they are no longer up against local political forces – but, rather, a metastasizing international power against which they are largely impotent. Common attributes now unify the regimes of Trump, Morrison, Bolsonaro, Trudeau, Salman, and maybe also those … Continue reading The War on Global Carbon

From The Guardian By Julian Cribb On any day between 10,000 and 30,000 wildfires blaze around the planet. Realms as diverse and distant as Siberia, Amazonia, Indonesia, Australia and California are aflame. The advent of ‘The Age of Fire’ is the bleakest warning yet that humans have breached boundaries we were never meant to cross. … Continue reading Time to speak the unspeakable

By Julian Cribb FRSA FTSE In all the sound and fury over climate change, too little public and media attention has been devoted to the ‘methane gun’ [1] – and yet this terrifying phenomenon could usher humans unceremoniously off Earth’s stage for good. Like CO2, methane (CH4) is a greenhouse gas that helps trap the … Continue reading The methane gun

The most destructive implement on the Planet, without a doubt, is the human jawbone.  Every year, in the course of wolfing through 8.5 trillion meals, it dislodges more than 75 billion tonnes of topsoil, swallows seven billion tonnes of fresh water, generates 30 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions and distributes five million tonnes of concentrated biocides. That same human … Continue reading Of food, war and ecology: how we can end the 6th Extinction

It is an oft-overlooked fact of history that World War II was originally fought chiefly over food and the means to produce it. The military philosopher Clausewitz once observed that ‘War is the continuation of politics by other means’ and, in 1920s’  Weimar Republic Germany, the politics were very much about securing sufficient new land … Continue reading WWII: the first big food war

Centuries from now, future historians will be able to assign a date to the start of the Australian Dark Age: it began in July of 2019. That was the date the nation turned its back on the enlightenment of reason, evidence, science and rationality and forged into a befogged future of political fantasies and wild, … Continue reading The Dark Age of Science Denial