The big switch
Global warming is with us. So are the solutions. Why don’t we wake up to them? asks Vanessa Baird.

Toxic sceptics – six climate-change deniers and their views.

End tailpipe tyranny
Jim Motavalli charts a route for hydrogen-fuelled cars.

Time for Topia
In the heart of trouble, a village that an teach the world. Monica del Pilar Uribe Marín reports on Gaviotas, Colombia.

Climate justice – THE FACTS

Run with the wind
Germany has made a high-speed shift to wind and solar power.
Janet L Sawin outlines how.

People power
Surging up across the world.

From coal to sunrise
Unions and workers view renewable energy with mistrust.
They needn’t. Danny Kennedy reports from Australia.

Shares in the sky
A model to reduce global warming – and increase global justice.
Mark Lynas explains ‘contraction and convergence’.

Worth reading

FREE POSTER! Slobbie Ozzie Does Detox A 20 point-programme to shake the ostrich mentality and kick that energy-guzzling habit.

Photo: Ian Nixon

A book entitled Notes from a Defeatist recently landed in my pigeon hole. It’s by satirical cartoonist Joe Sacco – and its angry, quirky, scabrous wit had me laughing out loud.

Partly, I suspect, because of the light relief it offered from the relentless and demanding optimism of digging up ‘climate change solutions’.
Cheery positivism is not a charge often levelled at any media, least of all those with radical or Leftish tendencies. Quick to critique, we are generally slow to provide solutions and leave those to more practical, down-to-earth, technical types.

The aims – and claims – of this issue of the NI are, by contrast, unashamedly positive and ambitious. Absurdly so, some might say, in light of the Biblical-scale floods, storms, droughts and other calamities which have been associated with climate change in recent times. I should perhaps admit that I did at one point write an alternative Keynote article to the one printed in this magazine. It was three lines long and went like this: ‘It’s hopeless. We’re all going to fry. The bastards are going to win.’

But anger and frustration are not enough. The situation we are facing is too serious for easy pessimism. And if climate scientists are right, the cause of our problems is manic, consumptive, fossil-fuel driven human activity. Which suggests that the solutions have got to be human too.

Even the most dedicated defeatist wouldn’t deny that – would they?

Vanessa Baird
for the New Internationalist
Co-operative
vanessab@newint.org