Global Stability Through Disarmament Metropolis And Population Ozone Hole Carbon Dioxide Balance Global Warming Renewable And Nuclear Energy International Seminar On Nuclear War And Planetary Emergencies 18th Session

Global Stability Through Disarmament, Metropolis and Population, Ozone Hole, Carbon Dioxide Balance, Global Warming, Renewable and Nuclear Energy

The clock is relentlessly ticking! Our world teeters on a knife-edge between a peaceful and prosperous future for all, and a dark winter of death and destruction that threatens to smother the light of civilization. Within 30 years, in the 2030 decade, six powerful 'drivers' will converge with unprecedented force in a statistical spike that could tear humanity apart and plunge the world into a new Dark Age. Depleted fuel supplies, massive population growth, poverty, global climate change, famine, growing water shortages and international lawlessness are on a crash course with potentially catastrophic consequences. In the face of both doomsaying and denial over the state of our world, Colin Mason cuts through the rhetoric and reams of conflicting data to muster the evidence to illustrate a broad picture of the world as it is, and our possible futures. Ultimately his message is clear; we must act decisively, collectively and immediately to alter the trajectory of humanity away from catastrophe. Offering over 100 priorities for immediate action, The 2030 Spike serves as a guidebook for humanity through the treacherous minefields and wastelands ahead to a bright, peaceful and prosperous future in which all humans have the opportunity to thrive and build a better civilization. This book is powerful and essential reading for all people concerned with the future of humanity and planet earth.

This highly accessible book provides an extensive and comprehensive overview of current research and theory about why and how we should protect future generations. It exposes how and why the interests of people today and those of future generations are often in conflict and what can be done. It rebuts critical concepts such as Parfits' non-identity paradox and Beckerman's denial of any possibility of intergenerational justice. The core of the book is the lucid application of a veil of ignorance to derive principles of intergenerational justice which show that our duties to posterity are stronger than is often supposed. Tremmel's approach demands that each generation both consider and improve the well-being of future generations. To measure the well-being of future generations Tremmel employs the Human Development Index rather than the metrics of utilitarian subjective happiness. The book thus answers in detailed, concrete terms the two most important questions of every theory of intergenerational justice: what to sustain? and how much to sustain?

During the middle and late 1960s, concern about the way the world might be going began to move out of the arena of academic debate amongst specialists, and became a topic of almost everyday interest to millions of people. Concern about mankind's disruption of the natural balance of 'the environment' brought the term 'ecology' into widespread use, though not always with the meaning to be found in the dictionary, and fears that world population might be growing so rapidly that very soon we would run out of food, resulting in mass starvation and a disastrous collapse of civilisation, helped to make books such as The Limits to Growth best sellers in the early 1970s. Today, quite rightly, decisions on long-term policy with widespread repercussions - most notably, those concerning nuclear energy planning - are a subject of equally widespread public discussion. But all too often such debate focuses on specific issues without the prob lems ever being related effectively to an overall vision of where the world is going and how it is going to get there. At the Science Policy Res~arch Unit, University of Sussex, a group working on studies of social and tech nological alternatives for the future has been contributing to 'the futures debate' for several years, cautiously (perhaps, in a sense, almost too cautiously!) developing a secure foundation for forecasting the way the world may develop.