A few weeks ago, the British government's chief scientific adviser, John Beddington, made a bloodcurdling speech about the horrors lying in wait for us. By 2030, he said, the world will be facing a perfect storm of food, energy and water shortages caused by population growth and exacerbated by climate change. James Lovelock, the creator of the Gaia theory, receives extensive, largely uncritical, coverage when he predicts that global warming will have wiped out 80% of humankind by the end of the century. In the meantime, we are living through what many people believe (and some hope) to be the final collapse of capitalism, while attempting with only limited success to fight a "global war on terror" against an enemy that threatens to destroy "our way of life".
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