Archive of his syndicated column about international and British politics and issues, arranged by topic.

We are defending ourselves against the wrong threats. For decades, UK governments have been fighting not just the last war, but a redundant notion of war, spending hundreds of billions against ...

Thanks to the government’s draconian new anti-protest order, it’s almost impossible to tell whether you are or are not breaking the law.

In one respect, Simon Jenkins is right. “Nobody”, he complained in the Guardian last week, while laying out his case for nuclear power, “agrees about figures”(1). As a result, “energy policy is like ...

Do Not Resuscitate. This tag should be attached to the oil, airline and car companies. Governments should provide financial support to their workers while refashioning the economy to provide new jobs ...

The government’s plans for clean coal are another great green scam. By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 18th March 2008 “Coal is so clean and fresh that the prime minister brushes his teeth ...

When you hear the term “domestic extremist”, whom do you picture? How about someone like Dr Peter Harbour? He’s a retired physicist and university lecturer, who worked on the nuclear fusion reactor ...

Every society has topics it does not discuss. These are the issues which challenge its comfortable assumptions. They are the ones that remind us of mortality, which threaten the continuity we ...

Here are some estimates for how much fossil fuel we can use, and a call for a global moratorium on new prospecting. By George Monbiot. Published on the Guardian’s website, 6th May 2009. The two papers ...

There are some things we rightly find intolerable, such as the possession of poorly trained, aggressive dogs. There are other things, whose impacts are many thousands of times worse, that we decide ...

The story of the past 500 years can be crudely summarised as follows. A handful of European nations, which had mastered both the art of violence and advanced seafaring technology, used these faculties ...

“The little-known ninth law of thermodynamics states that the more money a group receives from the taxpayer, the more it demands and the more it complains.” Thus wrote Matt Ridley in 1994(1). He was ...