This is Al Gore’s speech exhorting Americans to change to a carbon-free economy in ten years.
The United States is a very large country. Ireland is a small one. If the United States can do it in ten years, we can do it in five.

We Can Solve It

Re the dreary turf war between Luas and Irish Rail over Broadstone, which according to today’s Irish Times Luas and the RPA have won (sub. required), what a pity there isn’t the imagination in Dublin that the Brazilian city of Curtiba was fortunate enough to have in the person of Jaime Lerner.
With maverick flair [...]

I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time, particularly since I got an email from William Wall about his Citizen’s Manifesto , and shortly afterwards spotted
Damien Mulley’s Questions for the Politicians that stop at your door. Suzy Byrne made a similiar point to my number 1 on Damien’s blog, but [...]

An excellent piece on food, subsidies, and why so many of the poor in the US and elsewhere are obese, by the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma.
It is, in fact, a fine espousal of holistic economics.
You Are What you Grow :: The New York Times [may require registration]

Here we go again, Ireland at the bottom of a league, this time along with France when it comes to the amount of packaging waste per person in Europe.
This is all despite the demise of the plastic bag, for which the government deserves credit - and gets it world-wide.
Yet this is the government that’s pressing [...]

I received a flyer through my letterbox from an independent candidate for Dublin Central, Cieran Perry. His main plank is government waste, and how the wasted money could have been spent. I don’t have the time to check his figures at the moment, but it’s an interesting general point.
He gives two examples.
Example 1
This [...]

Coastal conflicts such as that involving the Corrib gas project in north Mayo could be avoided if member states took a more “holistic” approach to major projects on European seaboards, according to EU Commissioner for Maritime Affairs Joe Borg.
Governments have tended to look at situations in a “very compartmentalised way”, whereas a more integrated approach [...]

NB This is a very rough draft. I originally posted this on the alternative party forum, now defunct, and haven’t had time to update it. Hopefully seeing it on a public space again will prompt me to work on it.
DRAFT
Oil, and therefore petrol, will run dry in the next 15-20 years. Earlier estimates [...]

So what is the holistic budget? Simplistically put, it is a budget which addresses all of the implications of a problem, and not just its symptoms. There’s no point in me paying a lot of money for medicine to cure a bellyache, if I don’t invest money in proper food. Otherwise I just keep [...]