Showing results for "J" in Environmental Economics

The last century saw a revolution in life expectancy. Whether you are male or female, born in the global south or north, the chances are that you can expect to live much longer than previous generations. But instead of seeing this as a precious gift of extra life, we see it as a burden, with ageing populations dogged by infirmity, dependent on an ever-decreasing number of young people to support them. Andrew Scott argues it doesn't have to be like that.

We are using up the planet at almost double the rate it can regenerate. To support our economies, we're told we must shop now like we've never shopped before. And whilst we can do it more responsibly, the scale of our consumption remains the biggest factor in the ruination of the planet. Yet our reliance on stuff continues to grow. But what would our world look like if we stopped? Would civilisation collapse? Would the planet's ecology be reborn? What would happen to the way we think, make products, use time, express our individuality? Would life be better - or worse?

Outsourcing and a trim corporate profile enabled Coke to scale up production of a low-price beverage and realize huge profits. But the costs shed by Coke have fallen on the public at large. Coke now uses an annual 79 billion gallons of water, an increasingly precious global resource, and its reliance on corn syrup has helped fuel our obesity crisis. Bartow J. Elmore explores Coke through its ingredients, showing how the company secured massive quantities of coca leaf, caffeine, sugar, and other inputs.

Monsanto, a St. Louis chemical firm that became the world’s largest maker of genetically engineered seeds, merged with German pharma-biotech giant Bayer in 2018 - but its Roundup Ready® seeds, introduced 25 years ago, are still reshaping the farms that feed us. When researchers found trace amounts of the firm’s blockbuster herbicide in breakfast cereal bowls, Monsanto faced public outcry. Award-winning historian Bartow J. Elmore shows how the Roundup story is just one of the troubling threads of Monsanto’s past, many told here and woven together for the first time.

Rationing: It’s a word and idea that people often loathe and fear. Health care expert Henry Aaron has compared mentioning the possibility of rationing to "shouting an obscenity in church". Yet societies in fact ration food, water, medical care, and fuel all the time, with those who can pay the most getting the most. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has said, the results can be "thoroughly unequal and nasty". In Any Way You Slice It, Stan Cox shows that rationing is not just a quaint practice restricted to World War II memoirs and 1970s gas station lines. Instead, he persuasively argues that rationing is a vital concept for our fragile present.

Just as your power bill continues to rise, the sun also rises. Why are we letting a renewable resource that beams down on us each day go to waste? Solar energy is no longer a distant dream of the future. It is a real, viable option for America’s power needs, and T.J. Kanczuzewski of Inovateus Solar is mapping out a path for energy independence for anyone looking for clean, renewable power.

Our construction process is stuck in the Flintstones, yet we manufacture phones, computers, and electric cars like spaceships. This needs to change so humanity can continue to thrive in the next century. We need to completely eliminate the current construction process and rebuild it from the ground up. It took 20 years of research working in construction, entertainment, and design to invent a quickly scalable solution to begin solving our housing problems.