Even when nuclear power plants go horribly wrong, they do less damage to the planet and its people than coal-burning stations operating normally.

Why is it so easy to save the banks - but so hard to save the biosphere?

It is a campaign not for abundance but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less. Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but against ourselves.

Governments are deemed to succeed or fail by how well they make money go round, regardless of whether it serves any useful purpose. They regard it as a sacred duty to encourage the country’s most revolting spectacle: the annual feeding frenzy in which shoppers queue all night, then stampede into the shops, elbow, trample and sometimes fight to be the first to carry off some designer junk which will go into landfill before the sales next year. The madder the orgy, the greater the triumph of economic management.

August 28th 2012. Remember that date. It marks the day when the world went raving mad.

Do we want to be remembered as the generation that saved the banks and let the biosphere collapse?

If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.