Rising prices for cooking oil are forcing residents of Asia’s largest slum, in Mumbai, India to ration every drop. Bakeries in the United States are fretting over higher shortening costs. And here in Malaysia, brand-new factories built to convert vegetable oil into diesel sit idle, their owners unable to afford the raw material. This is the other oil shock. From India to Indiana, shortages and soaring prices for palm oil, soybean oil and many other types of vegetable oils are the latest, most striking example of a developing global problem: costly food.
The government's decision to give the go-ahead for a new generation of nuclear power stations sums up New Labour's fundamental ignorance, short-sightedness and lack of imagination. When the prime minister says expanded nuclear power is essential to meet an expected energy deficit, and cut carbon emissions and global warming, he is badly misinformed and seriously mistaken.
Delivery of drinking water from the tap is mostly controlled by public utilities in the EU, but fears are being voiced that new policies promoting competition are skewed in favour of giving a greater role to the private sector in this area.
For the briefest of moments this week, the price of oil crossed the historic $100 per barrel threshold for the first time, pushed up by a single eager trader in New York. Fleeting though it may have been – the price dropped almost immediately back down into the high 90s – the crossing of that barrier was the clearest sign yet that the era of cheap oil was over and raised a raft of unsettling questions about the implications for the global economy.
More than 1 billion people on our planet are forced to drink foul, infected water, which has killed at least 22 million people in the last decade. They could all have safe, clean water within 10 years, for just a tiny fraction of the cost of global military spending. Why isn't it happening. Most governments, especially rich white ones, would apparently rather buy weapons to kill other human beings than build water facilities to save the lives of black, brown and yellow poor people.
The rising cost of oil has wiped out the benefits many African countries were expecting from western aid and debt relief over the past three years, new research from the International Energy Agency has shown.
The price of oil is approaching $100 a barrel, the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is accumulating faster than the most pessimistic scenarios are predicting, anthropogenic climate change is occurring. The recognition that the world's scientists, diplomats and media gathered at the Bali climate-change summit are arguing over - the necessity of moving beyond dependency on a fossil-fuelled, carbon-emission-based global economy - is becoming increasingly hard to ignore.
