A RENEWED CALL FOR A GREEN NEW DEAL

Common Dreams offers "Why We Should Listen to the Protesters: The way out of the credit and the climate crunch is the same - a Green New Deal" by Johann Hari. Here are some excerpts:

+ We are facing a collapsed economy and a rapidly warming world because an extreme ideology has dominated world affairs for decades.

+ The climate is currently going the same way as the banks. Last month, the world's climate scientists gathered in Copenhagen to explain we are facing "devastating consequences" - not in some distant future, but in my lifetime and yours.

+ A major study by the University of Massachusetts compared the effects of an old-style stimulus that simply gives people more cash to a green stimulus. They found that a green stimulus creates four times more jobs, and three times more "good jobs", defined as those that pay more than $16 per hour. Why? Because a green stimulus is labour-intensive: you spend more money on people and less on machines. And the money you spend stays at home, making it easier to sell: you can only insulate a loft in Hull in Hull; you can only build a wind farm in the Mid-West in the Mid-West.