David Mitchell: Amazon's Tax Arrangements are nothing short of a work of art. Bravo!

“Amazon, in contrast, has never ruled out evil as part of its business plan, aspiring only to “Work hard. Have fun. Make history.” It sounds like anApprentice contestant’s Twitter profile. Last week it emerged that, despite £4.2bn of UK sales, the company paid only £2.4m in corporation tax in 2012. In the same year it received £2.5m in government grants. Which makes it a net benefits scrounger. And, in terms of sheer rapacious acquisitive nerve, I’d say that has made a little bit of history.

Is there any point in my being angry about this? Everyone else already is. It feels like the interesting thing would be to come out in favour of it. After all, as the company’s spokesman proudly announced: “Amazon pays all applicable taxes in every jurisdiction that it operates within.” So maybe it’s fine. Better than that, maybe it’s crazy and interesting. It’s a challenging artwork, but instead of oil paint or wood or clay or the excrement of the artist, it’s constructed out of pure injustice. A huge, malevolent sculpture of unfairness, ground-breaking and thought-provoking, reminding us of the iniquities of the natural world – a corporate metaphor for the worms that will one day eat all of our corpses.

Like any really important work of art, it’s bound to upset a few people. Just as Banksy causes collateral damage to the neatness of walls, so Amazon’s masterpiece is a defacement of the public purse. But it’s not just some hooligan’s tag, like Google’s artless Irish scam. This shows an impish wit and a dark insight. What elevates Amazon’s activity is the fact that it applied for government grants. The elegance of that corporate choice is like the ambiguity of the Mona Lisa’s smile, the ruthlessness of Mike Tyson’s punch and the adaptability of the malaria virus combined. There is no point in criticising anyone or anything that can do that. They can only be admired or destroyed.”

Full article here

Schoolchildren need to eat a proper breakfast, but should Kellogg's really be paying for it?

The provision of free breakfasts is dealing with the symptom rather than the disease. It’s a short term sticking plaster solution. Obviously it’s important to deal with each individual child who is hungry now, but long term we should be looking at projects which help parents to feed their children even when resources are very short. It should, moreover, go without saying that since children really do need a healthy breakfast at school to get them through the day, then it shouldn’t just be during SATs week that we attend to this need.

And I worry about the involvement of companies such as Kellogg’s in all this. There’s a great deal of emphasis on ‘healthy’ breakfasts for these deprived children and we are supposed to see it as disinterested altruism.

But Kellogg’s cornflakes are probably not the best thing to give children. A survey last year by Which?, the independent consumer watchdog, found that Kellogg’s Crunchy Nut Cornflakes contain a staggering 35 per cent sugar – at a time when we are all told that this is the world’s most addictive white powder and is likely to impact severely on the health of almost everyone because it lurks in almost all processed foods. These little yellowish-brown flakes also contain more than the 2012 maximum salt target of 1.1g per 100g and 5 per cent fat - which is higher than most other cereals. Yes, they’re fortified with useful vitamins and minerals but could hardly be termed a healthy food. Scrambled egg on wholemeal toast and a glass of orange juice would be a great deal better for these children.

Full opinion piece at the Independent

Heat-Trapping Gas Passes Milestone, Raising Fears

Chris Stewart/Associated Press

The average carbon dioxide reading surpassed 400 parts per million at the research facility atop the Mauna Loa volcano on the island of Hawaii for the 24 hours that ended at 8 p.m. on Thursday.

By JUSTIN GILLIS, for the ‘New York Times’.

Published: May 10, 2013

The level of the most important heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, has passed a long-feared milestone, scientists reported Friday, reaching a concentration not seen on the earth for millions of years.

Scientific instruments showed that the gas had reached an average daily level above 400 parts per million — just an odometer moment in one sense, but also a sobering reminder that decades of efforts to bring human-produced emissions under control are faltering.

The best available evidence suggests the amount of the gas in the air has not been this high for at least three million years, before humans evolved, and scientists believe the rise portends large changes in the climate and the level of the sea.

“It symbolizes that so far we have failed miserably in tackling this problem,” said Pieter P. Tans, who runs the monitoring program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that reported the new reading.

Ralph Keeling, who runs another monitoring program at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, said a continuing rise could be catastrophic. “It means we are quickly losing the possibility of keeping the climate below what people thought were possibly tolerable thresholds,” he said.

Virtually every automobile ride, every plane trip and, in most places, every flip of a light switch adds carbon dioxide to the air, and relatively little money is being spent to find and deploy alternative technologies.

China is now the largest emitter, but Americans have been consuming fossil fuels extensively for far longer, and experts say the United States is more responsible than any other nation for the high level.

The new measurement came from analyzers atop Mauna Loa, the volcano on the big island of Hawaii that has long been ground zero for monitoring the worldwide trend on carbon dioxide, or CO2. Devices there sample clean, crisp air that has blown thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean, producing a record of rising carbon dioxide levels that has been closely tracked for half a century.

Carbon dioxide above 400 parts per million was first seen in the Arctic last year, and had also spiked above that level in hourly readings at Mauna Loa.

But the average reading for an entire day surpassed that level at Mauna Loa for the first time in the 24 hours that ended at 8 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on Thursday. The two monitoring programs use slightly different protocols; NOAA reported an average for the period of 400.03 parts per million, while Scripps reported 400.08.

Carbon dioxide rises and falls on a seasonal cycle, and the level will dip below 400 this summer as leaf growth in the Northern Hemisphere pulls about 10 billion tons of carbon out of the air. But experts say that will be a brief reprieve — the moment is approaching when no measurement of the ambient air anywhere on earth, in any season, will produce a reading below 400.

“It feels like the inevitable march toward disaster,” said Maureen E. Raymo, a scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a unit of Columbia University.

From studying air bubbles trapped in Antarctic ice, scientists know that going back 800,000 years, the carbon dioxide level oscillated in a tight band, from about 180 parts per million in the depths of ice ages to about 280 during the warm periods between. The evidence shows that global temperatures and CO2 levels are tightly linked.

For the entire period of human civilization, roughly 8,000 years, the carbon dioxide level was relatively stable near that upper bound. But the burning of fossil fuels has caused a 41 percent increase in the heat-trapping gas since the Industrial Revolution, a mere geological instant, and scientists say the climate is beginning to react, though they expect far larger changes in the future.

Indirect measurements suggest that the last time the carbon dioxide level was this high was at least three million years ago, during an epoch called the Pliocene. Geological research shows that the climate then was far warmer than today, the world’s ice caps were smaller, and the sea level might have been as much as 60 or 80 feet higher.

Experts fear that humanity may be precipitating a return to such conditions — except this time, billions of people are in harm’s way.

“It takes a long time to melt ice, but we’re doing it,” Dr. Keeling said. “It’s scary.”

Dr. Keeling’s father, Charles David Keeling, began carbon dioxide measurements on Mauna Loa and at other locations in the late 1950s. The elder Dr. Keeling found a level in the air then of about 315 parts per million — meaning that if a person had filled a million quart jars with air, about 315 quart jars of carbon dioxide would have been mixed in.

His analysis revealed a relentless, long-term increase superimposed on the seasonal cycle, a trend that was dubbed the Keeling Curve.

Countries have adopted an official target to limit the damage from global warming, with 450 parts per million seen as the maximum level compatible with that goal. “Unless things slow down, we’ll probably get there in well under 25 years,” Ralph Keeling said.

Yet many countries, including China and the United States, have refused to adopt binding national targets. Scientists say that unless far greater efforts are made soon, the goal of limiting the warming will become impossible without severe economic disruption.

“If you start turning the Titanic long before you hit the iceberg, you can go clear without even spilling a drink of a passenger on deck,” said Richard B. Alley, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University. “If you wait until you’re really close, spilling a lot of drinks is the best you can hope for.”

Climate-change contrarians, who have little scientific credibility but are politically influential in Washington, point out that carbon dioxide represents only a tiny fraction of the air — as of Thursday’s reading, exactly 0.04 percent. “The CO2 levels in the atmosphere are rather undramatic,” a Republican congressman from California, Dana Rohrabacher, said in a Congressional hearing several years ago.

But climate scientists reject that argument, saying it is like claiming that a tiny bit of arsenic or cobra venom cannot have much effect. Research shows that even at such low levels, carbon dioxide is potent at trapping heat near the surface of the earth.

“If you’re looking to stave off climate perturbations that I don’t believe our culture is ready to adapt to, then significant reductions in CO2 emissions have to occur right away,” said Mark Pagani, a Yale geochemist who studies climates of the past. “I feel like the time to do something was yesterday.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 10, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the amount of carbon dioxide in the air as of Thursday’s reading from monitors. It is .04 percent, not .0004 percent.

A version of this article appeared in print on May 11, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Heat-Trapping Gas Passes Milestone, Raising Fears.

A link to the wikipedia entry on the Keeling Curve:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeling_Curve

World Fairtrade Day 2013

Fair Trade will be celebrated on 11 May 2013 in diverse places and cultures across the globe. Various events are organized in more than 70 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, North America and Pacific Rim. Leading the celebration are members of the World Fair Trade Organizations (WFTO) that have pioneered Fair Trade for more than five decades.

The World Fair Trade Day is an initiative of theWorld Fair Trade Organization (WFTO) that takes place on 11 May 2013. It is a worldwide festival of events celebrating Fair Trade as a tangible contribution to the fight against poverty, climate change and the economic crisis that has the greatest impact on the world’s most vulnerable populations. A third of the world’s population lives on less than two dollars a day. The global crisis confirms the need for a fair and sustainable economy locally and globally. Trade must benefit the most vulnerable and deliver sustainable livelihoods by developing opportunities for small and disadvantaged producers. Millions of producers and traders, business and policy makers, supporting organizations and volunteers have contributed to the substantial growth of Fair Trade.