April/May 09 :

It seems that while most governments focus is on the current "so called" banking crisis, a much bigger issue - the environmental crisis - is passing them by?

In the Green Room this week Andrew Simms argues that a failure to organise a bailout for ecological debt will have dire consequences for humanity as a whole.

"Here we are, faced with the loss of an environment conducive to human civilisation, and we find governments prostrate before barely repentant banks, with their backs to a far worse ecological crisis "

Each year, humanity's ecological overdraft gets larger, and the day that the world as a whole goes into ecological debt - consuming more resources and producing more waste than the biosphere can provide and absorb - moves ever earlier in the year.

No Bailouts?

As "nature doesn't do bailouts", how have our politicians fared who ripped open the nation's wallet to save the banks?

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the UK spent a staggering 20% of its GDP in support of the financial sector.

Yet the amount of money that was new and additional, announced in the "green stimulus" package of the Treasury's Pre-Budget Report, added-up to a vanishingly small 0.0083% of GDP.

Globally, the green shade of economic stimulus measures has varied enormously. For example, the shares of spending considered in research by the bank HSBC to be environmental were:

• the US - 12%
• Germany - 13%
• South Korea - 80%

Spam Causes TONNES of Co2?

A study into spam has blamed it for the production of more than 33bn kilowatt-hours of energy every year, enough to power more than 2.4m homes.

The Carbon Footprint of e-mail Spam report estimated that 62 trillion spam emails are sent globally every year.


Also see:
http://news.bbc.co.uk (Economy)

http://news.bbc.co.uk (Smam)

Sources: BBC.co.uk, McAfee