By: MARGARET BROWN
Margaret Brown is one of The Resident’s longest standing contributors and has lived in the Algarve for more than 20 years. As well as Point of View, she also writes Country Matters twice a month.
WATCHING THE meltdown of the financial world and the physical meltdown of the planet’s ice caps gives a salutary warning.
It is that Armageddon is not just a lurid plot designed to line the pockets of Hollywood moguls but a warning that wealthy nations should mend their ways.
Skating on very thin ice, the ‘short selling’ of financial instruments the vendor does not own in order to buy back and sell at a profit when the price drops, has finally hit the bumpers.
The resultant chaos caused by dishonest practice and greed waits, as on a knife edge, for the government of the USA to decide what to do about its own enormous mess before other nations’ banks start to fall like dominoes.
Ordinary folk with families, mortgages and aspirations to give their children every advantage denied their parents will be swept along like stones in an avalanche to the foot of the money mountain. Riveting stuff that either keeps us glued to television with its hourly cardiograph of the Money Markets or a total turn off: not being in a position to make a jot of difference, better to pretend it is not happening than to lie awake at night worrying.
While financial whiz kids of today see nothing immoral in juggling with other peoples’ money to make a quick killing on the Stock Exchange, and industrial countries like the USA and China continue to pour pollutant gases into the atmosphere, it appears that the future of this planet has been taken out of our hands.
Recent research led by Stockholm University along the entire northern coast of Russia has found that melting sub-sea permafrost is releasing unprecedented quantities of methane, thus accelerating global warming.
Sounds familiar to students of the Old and New Testaments? Too long has the land been neglected and the fundamental mores of society laid aside.
Read on the internet “The methane time bomb” by Steve Connor.
