May you live in interesting times...

...environmentalism is a political idea; it aims to reorganise society around its values and ethics. Yet this ideology has never been tested democratically. It hasn’t won any seats in the UK parliament, yet almost the entire house of commons has embraced environmentalism. It's as though, one morning, the House of Commons turned up for a debate, not as the Labour Party, the Conservative Party, the Liberal Democrats, and the independents, but as members of the Green Party. (More here...)

Why is this? Is it that the science is truly settled or that the precautionary principle has won converts? Or simply that most elected MP's in the U.K. are entirely comfortable with drastic wealth reduction ?

Next month's elections, the global financial crisis and the acknowledged forecast global cooling - for possibly the next 30 years - will see the beginnings of a reappraisal of climate change as an environmental and economic priority. At least one likely future cabinet minister in NZ, Rodney Hide; is a firmly declared climate change sceptic.

The gloves are coming off, and battle is about to begin...in NZ we can only hope for determined, principled leadership and an enlarged debate over climate change...



This too, re financial anguish internationally from the UK blog An Englishman's Castle. Challenging and interesting times indeed...

The intervention, or rather interference, of the state in financial and economic matters can only lead to sclerosis, the suppression of enterprise, the raising of taxes, starvation of investment, lack of innovation, technological retardation and the rise of the power of organised labour. Judging from yesterday's interest cut, the much-vaunted independence of the Bank of England has already gone out of the window and state control of the central bank is back with a vengeance.
If you doubt this analysis, recall what happened in this country between 1945 and 1979, when such an ethos as we are now returning to existed unchallenged, even by Tory governments. The more the state intervened, the more it had to intervene: the appetite grew with eating...more here...