January 2010 printable subscriber newsletter

Ecologist

5th January 2010

In this month's newsletter, we ask whether greens have got it wrong about tar sands, learn from a remote Scottish community, look at land struggles in Africa, examine the claims for carbon capture, and look at whether sugar might be the new oil. To download, log-in and scroll to the bottom of the page...

And so, after the crushing disappointment of the Copenhagen climate talks, comes the mud-slinging.

UK environment secretary Ed Miliband’s opinion piece for the Guardian newspaper the day after the conference closed fingered China, Sudan and Bolivia for knobbling any chance of a strongly worded commitment from world leaders.

This was followed by an ‘eyewitness’ article on the Guardian website from environmentalist Mark Lynas, who attended the talks as an advisor to the Maldives’ delegation.

Lynas damned China for not only refusing to allow any country to mention binding greenhouse gas targets in the final agreement, but also for playing aggressive diplomatic games such as sending second-rate bureaucrats to negotiate opposite Obama, Brown and Merkel.

Lynas also took a swipe at NGOs that he saw as allowing China to get away with such tactics through a lack of political pressure:
‘Campaign groups never blame developing countries for failure;...

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