Momentum is growing in the movement to divest from fossil fuel companies. On Thursday, South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu called for an anti-apartheid-style boycott and disinvestment campaign against the industry for its role in driving climate change. Meanwhile, nearly 100 members of the faculty at Harvard University released an open letter calling on the Ivy League school to sell off its interests in o ...

By Amy Goodman for Democracy Now! As voting begins in India in the largest elections the world has ever seen, we spend the hour with Indian novelist and essayist Arundhati Roy. Nearly 815 million Indians are eligible to vote, and results will be issued in May. One of India’s most famous authors — and one of its fiercest critics — Roy is out with a new book, "Capitalism: A Ghost Story," which dives into Indi ...

By Samuel Oakford for Inter Press Service UNITED NATIONS, Apr 7 2014 (IPS) - Policy uncertainty and plummeting solar prices led to a 14-percent decrease in investment in renewable energy in 2013, according to a report released Monday. Investment fell across the globe, even in high growth regions like China, India and Brazil. But it was severe cuts in Europe – until recently a pace-setter for the rest of the ...

By embracing their critics and colonising governments, corporations engineer a world of conformity and consumerism. By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 8th April 2014 How do you engineer a bland, depoliticised world, a consensus built around consumption and endless growth, a dreamworld of materialism and debt and atomisation, in which all relations can be prefixed with a dollar sign, in which we ce ...

By Tom Ganderton, Greenpeace The Government of Japan has officially cancelled plans to hunt whales in the Southern Ocean this coming year. Whales everywhere will be jumping for joy today. Why? Japan’s sham ‘scientific whaling’ program me has just been declared ILLEGAL in an international court! At 10am, the judges of the International Court of Justice handed down its long-anticipated decision on whether Jap ...

From the tropics to the poles, from small islands to large continents, and from the poorest countries to the wealthiest, the ominous signs of climate change are profoundly visible, said UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, calling for transformative collective action to tackle the phenomenon now – on all fronts– before it is too late.* “My objective has been to impress on Member States, the world of business a ...

The majority of the world is convinced that humans are changing the climate, for the worse. Now, evidence is mounting that paints just how grim a future we are making for ourselves and the planet. We will experience more extreme weather events, including hurricanes and droughts, mass extinctions and severe food shortages globally. The world’s leading group of climate-change experts, the Intergovernmental Pa ...

Marta Molina for Waging Nonviolence Susana Pacara, one of the founders of Radio Lachiwana in Cochabamba, Bolivia, believes that communication work is a key part of the defense of territory. She doesn’t mean this in an abstract way. Over the years, Pacara has fought the privatization of water, the construction of mega highways and the attacks on the rights of coca growers. She’s braved tear gas and repressio ...

By David Cromwell and David Edwards for Media Lens The new report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is clear that the impacts of climate change are likely to be 'severe, pervasive and irreversible'. Impacts include droughts, floods, heat waves, endangered species, crop failure, food insecurity, famine and even war. But for more than 25 years, since the IPCC was set up in 1988, there have b ...

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) paints a picture of persistent nutrition problems due to vitamin and mineral deficiencies, and stunted growth in its latest snapshot of the Europe and Central Asia.* On the eve of its biennial Regional Conference for Europe – in Bucharest, Romania – FAO concludes that although caloric intake in the 53-country region should see hunger fall to less th ...