On climate change, Howard Bloom, author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, does not hold back,

Our goal is not sustainability. It’s not to bow and grovel hoping Mother Nature will also freeze in place. Our challenge is to outrun nature by inventing radically new ways to deal with change. We have to be able to raise food in drought. We have to be able to raise a rich bounty of fruits, vegetables, and grain in flood or in a new ice age. If necessary, we have to farm the bacteria that love the deep freeze of the Antarctic, the bacteria that live in rock and the bacteria that thrive in radioactivity.

His basic argument, in a long and sensational article, is that we should use our ingenuity to devise new ways of farming the earth because, "We are using less than a quadrillionth of the resources of this planet."

His example from the natural world, "Bacteria are teaching us that there are new frontiers, new riches, and new feasts for those species that dare to defy nature and that dare to innovate." And his example from technology,

Changing World Technologies [a company in New York] claims to have invented a process that performs the bacterial trick, that makes garbage into gold. The company claims that it can remake the molecules of industrial waste and city sewage—two major sources of pollution—into the fatty acids used to make “detergents, soaps, cleaners, stabilizers, industrial surfactants and pharmaceuticals, personal care products, lubricants and rubber products.”

The green movement has lost credibility, with may of the public seeing environmentalists as extremists. However, Bloom, "But environmentalism is not dying. It is being reborn. It is switching from a vision of gloom to a vision of light. It is switching from techno-fear to techno-lust."

If he is right, in his sweeping and grandiose way, humanity just doesn’t have the time do it.

Perhaps, one good thing about this article is that Bloom, like Lovelock, insists that we need technology to deal with our problems.

There are some diseases around that really aren’t diseases. They’ve been invented to sell drugs. When people worry about a disease they may have, they usually go to their doctor and ask what to do. Out comes a prescription for the drug. And money goes into the coffers of the pharmaceutical industry.

Now that’s all right with most of what ails us, but there are things that we didn’t have 50 years ago, dammit. For example, dyslexia is often slapped on very young children who are, at that time, just not interested in spelling.

Shannon Brownlee, author of Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, writes about two of them,

The problem is, osteoporosis and osteopenia aren’t really diseases. Before the 1990s, doctors decided that you had osteoporosis if you were elderly and you broke a bone. When the pharmaceutical company Merck came up with its anti-bone-loss drug Fosamax, it wanted a broader market than just elderly fracture patients. The solution? The company helped fund a panel of medical experts to create diagnostic criteria for osteoporosis so that a diagnosis could be made before the patient actually broke a bone. […] Voila — 30 percent of post-menopausal women suddenly had a disease that needed to be treated early in order to prevent a problem — hip fracture — that wouldn’t occur for many years, if ever.

They’ve gone further. They can now screen you for pre-diseases - such as pre-high blood pressure and pre-diabetes. The drug companies then step in with treatments that are supposed to prevent you from getting the actual disease.

Brownlee, "We worry about every ache and pain; we fret that the least little sign of sadness in a teenager is a symptom of clinical depression."

The big Arctic ice melt continues. Scott Borgerson, International Affairs Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, " This past summer, the area covered by sea ice shrank by more than one million square miles, reducing the Arctic icecap to only half the size it was 50 years ago."

For the first time, the Northwest Passage - a sea route to Asia that Europeans sought in vain for centuries - opened for shipping.

There’s going to be a massive land grab for the property rights and the mineral wealth that lies beneath this ice shelf. It is ironic that this big melt will allow exploitation of the very thing that caused it: fossil fuels.

Countries are already jockeying for position. Russia has lodged a claim with the UN for 460,000 square miles of the Arctic waters. America, Denmark, Canada and Norway are also trying to establish territorial rights over this area. Borgerson, an American says,

The melting Arctic is the proverbial canary in the coal mine of planetary health and a harbinger of how the warming planet will profoundly affect U.S. national security. Being green is no longer a slogan just for Greenpeace supporters and campus activists; foreign policy hawks must also view the environment as part of the national security calculus.

You can be sure there are similar people in the other countries saying the same things.

The young – from teenagers to twenty-somethings - have never been interested in general news. Any message they get is usually through the media they consume - music, video, and film. Sometimes school, sometimes shopping.

Brian Stelter, from the New York Times, quotes Lauren Wolfe, 25, “I’d rather read an e-mail from a friend with an attached story than search through a newspaper to find the story.”

The young are in constant communication with each other, mostly through their cellphone, but also through social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Because of this, recommendations from friends is what motivates them to follow up, to learn about something. He says, "In one sense, this social filter is simply a technological version of the oldest tool in politics: word of mouth."

It’s a little more though. For it to be passed on by the young it has to reach some threshold of entertainment. The message has to do more, it has to entertain. Stelter provides an example,

A musical version of Mr. Obama’s campaign speech made by the singer will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas and a bevy of celebrities, it was released on YouTube three days before the series of coast-to-coast nominating contests on Feb. 5. Counting hits on YouTube and other sites, the video has been viewed more than 17 million times.

A college student, “If the news is that important, it will find me.”

The Americans invaded Iraq arguing that it was for freedom and democracy, and against dictatorship and suppression. Mark Danner, journalist and author of Torture and Truth: America, Abu Gharaib and the War on Terror, puts this very clearly,

This is a vision of great sweep and imagination: comprehensive, prophetic, evangelical. In its ambitions, it is wholly foreign to the modesty of containment, the ideology of a status-quo power that lay at the heart of American strategy for half a century. It means to remake the world, to offer to a political threat a political answer. It represents a great step on the road toward President Bush’s ultimate vision of ‘freedom’s triumph over all its age-old foes.

The war the Americans wage on terror is a war on an ideology. The terrorists, likewise, are fighting against an ideology, a combination of western religion and capitalism, that they find evil.

An ideology is a system of abstract thought applied to public matters. It is central to politics in any form. It is an imaginary relationship to a real situation.

How do you win such a war? Those in power on each side believe they are right. Both sides think they must get rid of the other, that they cannot coexist peacefully.

They believe that only one system can be right, the other is evil and must be destroyed. President Bush, three days after September 11, 2001, "our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.

What can change this belief? Perhaps, the understanding that neither side can win, the costs are too high, and the realisation of the absurdity of waging a war on ideology.