STWR - Share The World's Resources

George Monbiot is an author, journalist and campaigner. His articles are regularly featured on this site and can be accessed below.

The economic crisis is petty by comparison to the nature crunch, but they have the same cause and the rules are the same in both cases. If you extract resources at a rate beyond the level of replenishment, your stock will collapse, writes George Monbiot.

The banking crisis has diverted attention from the billions of dollars of public money being spent to help car manufacturers go green. The greenest thing governments could do is to allow these multinationals to go under, says George Monbiot.

The claims that a bailout of Wall Street would mark unprecendented "American Socialism" are unfounded. Rather, the 0 billion in banking subsidies rejected by the US Congress are as American as apple pie and obesity, argues George Monbiot.

The EU's Economic Partnership Agreements on trade for 76 of the world’s poorest countries (the African, Caribbean and Pacific nations) pose as “instruments for development”, but in fact threaten to beggar them, writes George Monbiot.

Where once they used gunboats and sepoys, the rich nations now use chequebooks and lawyers to seize food from the hungry. The scramble for resources has begun, but - in the short term at any rate - we will hardly notice, writes George Monbiot.

Why is the US government still pouring billions into missile defence?  The answer is in the question: the programme persists because it doesn’t work, writes George Monbiot.

The climate camp must succeed. In the absence of political backbone, our only hope is an avalanche of public revulsion, writes George Monbiot.

There is no cheap alternative to a green economy - and no trade off possible between the economy and ecology. What we need is a green industrial revolution and a 'new New Deal', writes George Monbiot.

Crime is down, convictions are down, but the prisons are bursting. So what is the link between all the statistics?  The answer is inequality, argues George Monbiot.

James Hansen is right about lobbyists sponsoring the junk science of climate change denial, writes George Monbiot. But prosecuting energy executives is not the answer.

Guantánamo has proved a useful distraction from the secret detention camps run by the US around the world, writes George Monbiot.

An open letter to the leader of Opec's biggest oil producer, the one man who can force Britain to cut its carbon emissions.

They bleat about the free market, then insist that we subsidise them, writes George Monbiot.

Never mind the economic crisis. Focus for a moment on a more urgent threat: the great food recession that is sweeping the world faster than the credit crunch. You have probably seen the figures by now: the price of rice has risen by three-quarters over the past year, that of wheat by 130%. There are food crises in 37 countries. One hundred million people, according to the World Bank, could be pushed into deeper poverty by the high prices.

Human life is not a commodity. It cannot be traded against profits or exchanged for convenience. We have no right to decide that others should die to make us richer.

Now they might start sitting up. They wouldn't listen to the environmentalists or even the geologists. Can governments ignore the capitalists? A report published last week by Citibank, and so far unremarked on by the media, proposes "genuine difficulties" in increasing the production of crude oil, "particularly after 2012". Though 175 big drilling projects will start in the next four years, "the fear remains that most of this supply will be offset by high levels of decline".

29th January 2008 - George Monbiot, The Guardian (UK)

I cannot avoid the subject any longer. Almost every day I receive a clutch of emails about it, asking the same question. A frightening new report has just pushed it up the political agenda: for the first time the World Food Programme is struggling to find the supplies it needs for emergency famine relief. So why, like most environmentalists, won't I mention the p-word? According to its most vociferous proponents (Paul and Anne Ehrlich), population is "our number one environmental problem". But most greens will not discuss it. Is this sensitivity or is it cowardice? Perhaps a bit of both. Population growth has always been politically charged, and always the fault of someone else.

Don't believe all this nonsense about waiting for the next president to sort it out - this is a much bigger problem than George Bush.

An Agricultural Crime Against Humanity - Biofuels could kill more people than the Iraq war.

A few weeks ago I read what I believe is the most important environmental book ever written. It is not Silent Spring, Small Is Beautiful or even Walden... It is a novel, first published a year ago, and it will change the way you see the world.

23rd Oct 07 - George Monbiot, Monbiot.com

Matt Ridley raged against the government - until he needed £16 billion.

“The little-known ninth law of thermodynamics states that the more money a group receives from the taxpayer, the more it demands and the more it complains.” Thus wrote Matt Ridley in 1994(1). He was discussing farm subsidies, but the same law applies to his chairmanship of Northern Rock. Before he resigned on Friday, the bank had borrowed £16 billion from the government and had refused to rule out asking for more. Ridley and the other bosses blamed everyone but themselves for this disaster.

9th October 07 - George Monbiot, The Guardian (UK)

Economic growth is a political sedative, snuffing out protest as it drives inequality. It is time we gave it up.

If you are of a sensitive disposition, I advise you to turn the page now. I am about to break the last of the universal taboos. I hope that the recession now being forecast by some economists materialises. I recognise that recession causes hardship. Like everyone I am aware that it would cause some people to lose their jobs and homes. I do not dismiss these impacts or the harm they inflict, though I would argue that they are the avoidable results of an economy designed to maximise growth rather than welfare.

3rd Oct 07 - George Monbiot, Monbiot.com

China has become the world’s excuse for inaction. If there is anything a government or a business does not want to do, it invokes the Yellow Peril. Raise the minimum wage to £6 an hour? Not when the Chinese are paid £6 a year. Cap working time at 48 hours a week? The Chinese are working 48 hours a day. Cut greenhouse gas emissions? The Chinese are building a new power station every nanosecond. China is our looking-glass bogeyman. If you behave well, the bogeyman will get you.

Given that the crises of inequality is the predictable effect of the dismantling of public services and the deregulation of business and financial markets, given that it damages the interests of nearly everyone, how has neoliberalism come to dominate public life?

"The governments making genuine efforts to tackle global warming are using figures they know to be false."

24 April 2007 - George Monbiot, The Guardian

No one noticed. Or if they did, no one complained. The government didn't even bother to issue a press release. Last week the Ministry of Defence quietly secured a £1.7bn increase in its budget. The spending for 2006-7 was allocated months ago, which means that another fund must have been raided to find the extra money. It's the equivalent of half the annual budget for the Department for International Development. But another billion or two doesn't make much difference when we are already sloshing out £32bn a year on a programme whose purpose is a mystery.

The British and US governments will today join forces in Geneva to block an international ban on cluster bombs

The central mystery of the modern state is this. The necessary resources, both economic and political, will always be found for the purpose of terminating life. The project of preserving it will always struggle. When did you last see a soldier shaking a tin for a new rifle, or a sponsored marathon raising money for nuclear weapons? But we must beg and cajole each other for funds whenever a hospital wants a new dialysis machine. If the money and determination expended on waging war with Iraq had been used to tackle climate change, our carbon emissions would already be in free fall. If as much money were spent on foreign aid as on fighter planes, no one would ever go hungry.

A US leader in his second term should have the power to rein in Israel. But George Bush is no ordinary president, writes George Monbiot.

February 2006, George Monbiot, the Guardian (UK)