Cool It - The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming out now

By September, the world’s 193 governments will meet in New York and agree on a set of ambitious, global targets for 2030. Over the next 15 years these targets will direct the $2.5 trillion to be spent on development assistance, as well as countless trillions in national budgets.

2013-10-14 FOR the past half century, a fundamental debate has raged between optimists and pessimists over the state of the world. Pessimists build their case on overpopulation, starvation and depletion of resources. Optimists stand for the infallibility of the market economy. Wouldn't it be nice to remove the darkened or rose-tinted spectacles for once, and try to quantify how the world really has done and will do in future? I asked some of the world's leading economists to do just that. The result is a groundbreaking book, How Much Have Global Problems Cost The World?

Air pollution kills more than 16 lakh people in India every year — more than smoking, malnutrition or even a lack of water and sanitation. And while the toxic soup of outdoor air pollution over Delhi and many other cities rightly gets a lot of attention, indoor air pollution from household cooking and heating with biomass fuels kills almost as many, or about eight lakh people, every year. A majority of rural households continue to use biomass (such as wood and cow dung) as their primary cooking fuel.