Next time you meet a Transition Towner who wants to tell you that everyone should localise food production, ask him / her about what happens to the following...
Alex Evans
Alex Evans is founder of Larger Us, which explores how we can use psychology to reduce political tribalism and polarisation, a senior fellow at New York University, and author of The Myth Gap: What Happens When Evidence and Arguments Aren’t Enough? (Penguin, 2017).
He is a former Campaign Director of the 50 million member global citizen’s movement Avaaz, special adviser to two UK Cabinet Ministers, climate expert in the UN Secretary-General’s office, and was Research Director for the Business Commission on Sustainable Development.
Alex lives with his wife and two children in Yorkshire.
British armed forces to be replaced by the A-Team
Currently doing the rounds in Whitehall: As part of budget cuts the entire Ministry of Defence is to be dismantled and replaced by four soldiers of fortune...
So much for Scandic liberalism
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkRRdth8AHc[/youtube]
When’s the next oil price spike?
Back in 2008, just as the oil price started to plummet after hitting its all-time high of $147 a barrel, I did a post pondering whether the drop was "the...
Raytheon unveils new Iron Man suit
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mO0xNI3xpmE[/youtube]
NYC’s race segregation map
This map of New York City, produced by photographer Eric Fischer, is colour-coded by race: Red is White, Blue is Black, Green is Asian, Orange is Hispanic,...
How many deaths from terrorism is society willing to accept as the price of being free?
David Foster Wallace in the Atlantic has a good question: What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims but...
What Ron Paul thinks of the World Bank
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQruuwuJnKE[/youtube]
Brits almost as fat as Americans; Italy trimmest EU member in OECD
A new OECD report finds Britain has the highest rates of overweight and obesity in the EU, and rates 5th overall (after the US, Mexico, NZ and Australia)....
Social networking technologies a la Foreign Office
H/t Owen Barder.
‘The most sophisticated malware in the last 5 years’ – and it’s aimed at power plants
Today's FT has a piece about a bit of malware called Stuxnet, which "has infected an unknown number of power plants, pipelines and factories" (or more...
The world’s poor aren’t where we think they are
New research from the Institute of Development Studies finds most of the world’s poor are in middle income countries – with far-reaching implications for how the UK should allocate its aid
Do resource scarcity and climate change cause violent conflict?
New World Bank paper by Alex Evans, which says that the answer’s “yes, but usually as threat multipliers rather than as stand-alone drivers of conflict”
Resource Scarcity, Climate Change and the Risk of Violent Conflict
Background paper on whether resource scarcity and climate change will cause increased violent conflict
The World Bank’s landgrabs report
So the World Bank has finally published its big report on landgrabs (this after an earlier version of it was leaked at the end of July, as I noted at the...
Oh. My. God.
News just in from Colum Lynch at FP's Turtle Bay blog: Sha Zukang, the U.N. undersecretary general for Economic and Social Affairs and the organization's most...
Mozambique government backs down on wheat subsidies
Following up on my post last week about the spike in wheat prices and the rioting in Mozambique that killed (at last count) 10 people, it emerges this morning...
Food spike 2.0 – what you need to know (updated)
The FT's big front page splash today ("Fears grow over global food supply") has sent a ripple of interest through the wider media - expect to hear a lot about...
Peak coal – by 2011?
That's the rather arresting finding of new research from the University of Texas, published in the journal Energy (which should be behind a paywall, but...
Why being a diplomat sucks
Tyler Cowen sets it all out: I see diplomacy as a stressful and unrewarding profession. A good diplomat has the responsibility of deflecting a lot of the...
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