In 1993 Tory MP David Willetts wrote a pamphlet called The Opportunities for Private Funding in the NHS, which proposed using Private Finance Initiatives (PFIs) and other commercial mechanisms to provide health services in the UK. Conservative ministers thought Willetts’s proposals too radical. They were consigned to the shelf until 1997, when the New Labour Government put them into action.
I’m sitting opposite the large Coca-Cola bottling plant next to the village of Plachimada in the southern Indian state of Kerala. Plachimada is a farming village of about 800 families, many of them tribal. The ugly factory looks rather out of place in such a beautiful setting, the Western Ghats mountains clearly visible in the distance.
The Channel 4 documentary, ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’, put forward the idea that carbon dioxide did not in fact cause global warming, but instead was a product of global warming. It also suggested that the Earth frequently enters cold and warm periods of climate, and that the current warming was simply a natural phenomenon. We put these arguments to Stephan Harrison, an Associate Professor in Quarternary Science at Exeter University and a Senior Research Associate at Oxford University…
Do wind turbines provide an affordable means of harnessing a limitless source of clean power, or are they inefficient blots on the landscape that devastate birdlife and are more likely to exacerbate than reduce CO2 emissions?
How the Colombian capital Bogotá defied the World Bank and the multinationals, refused to privatise and turned its water services into the best in the country
During the past decade or so, international trade agreements have been dramatically expanded to encompass affairs that had always previously been strictly matters of domestic concern.
Some 245 Indian villages are in the middle of being destroyed by a $7 billion dam project that will consume more energy than it provides and has even been condemned by its World Bank sponsors.
Barbara Streisand prides herself on being a movie star with an environmental conscience. So why did she take one man to court over his efforts to protect the California coastline?
The ongoing battle between US tree-sitters and North America’s big logging firms pitches some of the world’s most determined activists against some of its most ruthless corporations. It is a battle that the tree-sitters simply must not lose.
According to the World Health Organisation, more than 30 serious new diseases have emerged in the last three decades. Mark Walters describes one of them, Lyme disease, and shows how our destruction of the environment is inextricably linked to its proliferation
