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A study that explores contemporary car advertising in order to suggest that the practices which generate environmental degradation are intimately bound up both materially and symbolically with the reproduction of and transformations within the contemporary global political order is illustrated. Such an imperial politics is connected closely to the politics of cars, and that the specific character of an emerging empire can thus be interpreted through the symbolisms in the ways in which cars are currently being marketed.

An analysis is presented on the demonstrations against higher fuel prices in the United Kingdom that occurred in September of 2000. The analysis goes beyond an interpretation of the demonstrations as a backlash against environmentalism, and examines the issue from a nationalist/populist perspective.

There has been a backlash against environmentalism, and this has shocked some writers in the environmental movement, who are sometimes naive in their reactions. There are different interests involved in the idea of sustainabaility, and there are structural factors that mean that governments may seek to foster capitalist development and ignore attacks on environmentalists who oppose such development. The works dealing with this issue help to understand environmental politics, and the need to be aware that progress cannot be taken for granted, as well as the need to understand forces that oppose environmental groups.

The Second Conference of the Parties to the Climate Change Convention, which was held in Geneva, Switzerland in July, 1996, produced a strong commitment on the member nations to act on global climate change and to draft a legally binding protocol on CO2 emissions. The parties were convinced that there was strong scientific evidence to support significant political action against global climate change which has adverse implications for human health. However, the conference failed to resolve the disagreements concerning the procedures that the conference will undertake in the next conference.