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Monbiot: How Much Reality Can You Take?
Does anyone really want to stop climate change?
Commentary, October, 09 2006
George Monbiot
Monbiot's ZSpace page
You have to pinch yourself. Until now, the Sun has denounced environmentalists as "loonies" and "eco beards". Last week it published "photographic proof that climate change is real."(1). In a page that could have come straight from a Greenpeace pa...
Monbiot: Still the Rich World's Viceroy: If the IMF wants to reform itself, why not try democracy?
Commentary, September, 20 2006
George Monbiot
Monbiot's ZSpace page
The glacier has begun to creak. In the world's most powerful dictatorship, we detect the merest hint of a thaw. I am not talking about China, or Uzbekistan, Burma or North Korea. This state runs no torture chambers or labour camps. No one is execu...
Monbiot: Peace Is For Wimps
Commentary, August, 31 2006
George Monbiot
Monbiot's ZSpace page
It's described by a senior official at the Ministry of Defence as "a dead duck ... expensive and obsolete."(1) The editor of World Defence Systems calls it "10 years out of date."(2) A former defence minister remarked that it is "essentially flawe...
Monbiot: The King of Fairyland
Commentary, August, 02 2006
George Monbiot
Monbiot's ZSpace page
Of all the curious things which have been written about Israel's assault on Lebanon, surely the oddest is contained in Paddy Ashdown's article for the Guardian on Saturday. "There is only one solution to this crisis, and it is the same solution we...
Monbiot: Still Drilling
Commentary, June, 27 2006
George Monbiot
Monbiot's ZSpace page
For a company that claims to have moved "beyond petroleum", BP has managed to spill an awful lot of it onto the tundra in Alaska. Last week, after the news was leaked to journalists, it admitted to investors that it is facing criminal charges for ...
Monbiot: Britain's Most Selfish People
Commentary, June, 04 2006
George Monbiot
Monbiot's ZSpace page
What greater source of injustice could there be, than while some people have no home, others have two? Yet the vampire trade in second homes keeps growing - by 3% a year - uninhibited by government or by the conscience of the buyers. Every purchas...
Monbiot: Feeding Crime
Commentary, May, 14 2006
George Monbiot
Monbiot's ZSpace page
Does television cause crime? The idea that people copy the violence they watch is debated endlessly by criminologists. But this column concerns an odder and perhaps more interesting notion: if crime leaps out of the box, it is not the programmes t...
Monbiot: Children of the Machine
Commentary, March, 14 2006
George Monbiot
Monbiot's ZSpace page
It received just a few column inches in a couple of papers, but the story I read last week looks to me like a glimpse of the future. A company in Ohio called CityWatcher has implanted radio transmitters into the arms of two of its workers. The imp...
Monbiot: Property Paranoia
Commentary, February, 20 2006
George Monbiot
Monbiot's ZSpace page
A few days ago, after a furious argument, I was thrown out of a wood where I have walked for over 20 years. I must admit that I did not behave very well. As I walked away I did something I haven't done for a long time: I gave the gamekeeper a one-...
Monbiot: Buying Complacency
Commentary, February, 02 2006
George Monbiot
Monbiot's ZSpace page
Sometimes I envy the self-belief of the Daily Mail's columnist Melanie Phillips. When Andrew Wakefield, a researcher at the Royal Free Hospital, suggested that there might be a link between autism and the MMR injection, she decided he was right.
Monbiot: How Much Energy Do We Have?
Commentary, December, 28 2005
George Monbiot
Monbiot's ZSpace page
In one respect, Simon Jenkins is right. "Nobody", he complained in the Guardian last week, while laying out his case for nuclear power, "agrees about figures"(1). As a result, "energy policy is like Victorian medicine, at the mercy of quack remedi...
Monbiot: Better Off Without Him
Commentary, October, 23 2005
George Monbiot
Monbiot's ZSpace page
Are religious societies better than secular ones? It should be an easy question for athiests to answer. Most of those now seeking to blow people up - whether with tanks and missiles or rucksacks and passenger planes - do so in the name of God. In ...
Monbiot: The Man Who Betrayed the Poor
Commentary, September, 27 2005
George Monbiot
Monbiot's ZSpace page
Two months have not elapsed since the G8 summit, and already almost everything has turned to ashes. Even the crustiest sceptics have been shocked by the speed with which its promises have been broken.
Monbiot: A Life With No Purpose
Commentary, September, 13 2005
George Monbiot
Monbiot's ZSpace page
All is not lost in America. When George Bush came out a couple of weeks ago in favour of teaching "intelligent design" - the new manifestation of creationism - the press gave him a tremendous kicking. The Christian Taliban have not yet won.
Monbiot: The Treaty Wreckers
Commentary, August, 04 2005
George Monbiot
Monbiot's ZSpace page
Saturday is the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. The nuclear powers are commemorating it in their own special way: by seeking to ensure that the experiment is repeated.
Monbiot: A Game of Double Bluff
Commentary, June, 29 2005
George Monbiot
Monbiot's ZSpace page
Rejoice! The world is saved! The governments of Europe have agreed that by 2015 they will give 0.7% of their national income in foreign aid. Admittedly that's 35 years after the target date they first set for themselves, and it's still less than t...
Monbiot: Spin, Lies and Corruption
Commentary, June, 17 2005
George Monbiot
Monbiot's ZSpace page
The G8's debt reduction plan is little better than an extortion racket
Monbiot: Junk Science
Commentary, May, 16 2005
George Monbiot
Monbiot's ZSpace page
For the past three weeks, a set of figures has been working a hole in my mind. On April 16th, New Scientist published a letter from the famous botanist David Bellamy. Many of the world's glaciers, he claimed, "are not shrinking but in fact are gro...
Monbiot: Signal Your Opposition
Commentary, April, 24 2005
George Monbiot
Monbiot's ZSpace page
A vote for a minor party could be the most powerful one you could cast.
Monbiot: Harassment Laws
Commentary, March, 20 2005
George Monbiot
Monbiot's ZSpace page
It was the greatest legal victory against corporate power in living memory. Last week, two penniless activists, Dave Morris and Helen Steel, persuaded the European Court of Human Rights that Britain's libel laws, under which they had been sued by ...
Monbiot: Mocking Our Dreams
Commentary, February, 25 2005
George Monbiot
Monbiot's ZSpace page
It is now mid-February, and already I have sown eleven species of vegetable. I know, though the seed packets tell me otherwise, that they will flourish. Everything in this country - daffodils, primroses, almond trees, bumblebees, nesting birds - i...
Monbiot: America's War with Itself
Commentary, January, 13 2005
George Monbiot
Monbiot's ZSpace page
I have a persistant mental image of US foreign policy, which haunts me even in my sleep. The vanguard of a vast army is marching around the globe, looking for its enemy. It sees a mass of troops in the distance, retreating from it. It opens fire, ...
Monbiot: The Victims Of The Tsunami Pay The Price Of War On Iraq
Commentary, January, 06 2005
George Monbiot
Monbiot's ZSpace page
There has never been a moment like it on British television. The Vicar of Dibley, one of our gentler sitcoms, was bouncing along with its usual bonhomie on New Year's Day when it suddenly hit us with a scene from another world. Two young African c...
Monbiot: Feeding Cars, Not People
Commentary, December, 12 2004
George Monbiot
Monbiot's ZSpace page
If human beings were without sin, we would still live in an imperfect world. Adam Smith's notion that by pursuing his own interest a man "frequently promotes that of ... society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it" and Karl ...
Monbiot: Religion of the Rich
Commentary, November, 29 2004
George Monbiot
Monbiot's ZSpace page
"If Bush wins", the US writer Barbara Probst Solomon claimed just before the election, "fascism is possible in the United States."(1) Blind faith in a leader, she said, a conservative working class and the use of fear as a political weapon provide...
Monbiot: The Paradox of Transition
Commentary, November, 06 2004
George Monbiot
Monbiot's ZSpace page
There is one good reason for attending the Labour Party Conference. This is that it offers the last hope of unseating Tony Blair as Prime Minister. It won't happen through composite motions from the constituencies, or any of the other cumbersome a...
Monbiot: Proliferation Treaty
Commentary, September, 29 2004
George Monbiot
Monbiot's ZSpace page
Of course Iran wants the bomb, and the international system has given it everything it needs to build one.
Monbiot: A Thousand Dusty Codicils
Commentary, August, 25 2004
George Monbiot
Monbiot's ZSpace page
If we have learnt anything over the past 18 months it is this: that the first rule of politics - power must never be trusted - still applies. The government will neither regulate itself nor be regulated by the institutions which surround it. Parli...
Monbiot: Think Inside The Box
Commentary, August, 06 2004
George Monbiot
Monbiot's ZSpace page
Every year the figures inch downwards, and every year they are greeted as a triumph. Britain now has the best record for road safety in Europe. Only 3,508 people were killed on our roads last year, and only 171 of them were children. (1) Only 33,7...
Monbiot: War x 4
Commentary, July, 14 2004
George Monbiot
Monbiot's ZSpace page
Any government concerned about global security and climate change should be banning 4x4s.
