Seeking Consensus on the Externalized Costs of Gas

What is meant by “externalized costs”? Externalized costs are costs associated with energy consumption which is not reflected in the selling price of the energy. These costs are directly or indirectly paid by other sectors of the economy in forms such as increased healthcare expenditures, losses in property values, increased costs associated with natural disasters, and a […]

Creditors get priority over environment in Redwater Energy insolvency: judge

Alberta Chief Justice Neil Wittmann has ruled to put lenders ahead of clean-up costs when energy companies go bankrupt. The Redwater Energy case is one that the energy sector, international investors, bankers, lawyers and regulators were all watching closely. Redwater was a tiny oil and gas company that went into insolvency in the spring of […]

5 of Your Favourite Foods Predicted to Go Extinct

World Environment Day (WED) is one of the greatest annual events celebrated across the globe on 5th June. The objective of the event is to raise awareness about the leading issue of the sustainability of our environment. It was initiated in 1973 by the United Nations General Assembly and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to […]

Let Them Drown: The Violence Of Othering A Warming World, By Naomi Klein

Edward Said was no tree-hugger. Descended from traders, artisans and professionals, he once described himself as ‘an extreme case of an urban Palestinian whose relationship to the land is basically metaphorical’.＊ In After the Last Sky, his meditation on the photographs of Jean Mohr, he explored the most intimate aspects of Palestinian lives, from hospitality […]

Let Nature be Nature

“Can the extravagance of growth fanatics continue? Clearly not. Will President @realdonaldtrump keep the lemmings racing towards the cliff? Definitely so.” !Kung peoples managed their energy well – C.A.S. Hall After posting a pretty dour outlook last week we were amazed to watch it attract more page views more quickly than any of our previous […]

BP to Pay $175 Million to Settle Claims It Hid Spill Costs

BP Plc said it agreed to pay $175 million to settle claims by U.S. investors that its managers lied about the size of the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill to prop up its stock price, removing the company’s last major overhang from the disaster. The investors, who blamed BP for massive losses when the true […]

Five Years Later, TEPCO Still Can’t Locate 600 Tons Of Melted Radioactive Fuel

Five years after the Fukushima tragedy, TEPCO’s chief of decommissioning Naohiro Masuda admits that the company still has no idea exactly where 600 tons of melted radioactive fuel from three nuclear reactors is located. As we discussed when we profiled the status of Fukushima on its five year anniversary, the radiation at the plant is […]

Love in the Age of Ecological Apocalypse

Given the daunting, dire predicament in which we find ourselves on this planet, what is described by social critic James Howard Kunstler as a “Long Emergency” may in fact become a “Last Emergency” for humanity. Whether we encounter a “long” or a “last” emergency, Carolyn Baker seeks to offer inspiration and guidance for inhabiting our […]

World Population Will Stabilize Because Humans Aren’t Cockroaches

For bizarre reasons that I simply do not understand, world population growth is a hot-button issue. There is a large segment of the public that seems to believe that humans will continue to reproduce until we run out of food and water. Basically, we’re just like cockroaches or bacteria. No serious demographer believes that — […]

Shell’s Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill

A leak from an undersea pipeline network operated by Royal Dutch Shell spilled nearly 90,000 gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico last week. The leak occurred about 90 miles off the Louisiana coast in the Glider Field near the company’s Brutus Tension-Leg Platform. The US Coast Guard (USCG) and Shell have recovered over […]

28% of US bees wiped out this winter, suggesting bigger environmental issues

More than a quarter of American honeybee colonies were wiped out over the winter, with deadly infestations of mites and harmful land management practices heaping mounting pressure upon the crucial pollinators and the businesses that keep them. Preliminary figures commissioned by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) show that 28% of bee colonies in the […]

The Five Horsemen of the Modern World

Global warming, food shortages, water shortages and quality, chronic illness and obesity – these worldwide crises share striking similarities: each is getting worse, despite extensive and concerted efforts to control them. Daniel Callahan calls them the five horsemen of the modern world. “I have not been able to find any global crises of similar magnitude […]

Groundwater Contamination from Fracking Changes over Time

A new Texas study has found that horizontal oil wells fractured by the injection of high volumes of chemicals, sand, and water contaminate nearby water wells with a variety of heavy metals and toxic chemicals that fluctuate over time. In the last decade, North America’s $40-billion fracking industry has punctured uneconomic or ”unconventional” rock formations […]

Crude prices up as Canada’s blaze grows

Oil prices have jumped again as a huge wildfire in Canada’s oil sand region knocked out over a million barrels in daily production capacity. As Hayley Platt reports, a government reshuffle in Saudi Arabia is also being closely watched. reuters

Raging wildfire in Canada fuels oil prices

Canada’s oil-rich province of Alberta is under siege from massive wildfires. And that’s threatening key oil facilities. Huge forest fires have already torched at least 1,600 homes and forced the evacuation of about 88,000 people in the region, including the entire population of the oil sands town of Fort McMurray. Forty-nine wildfires were still burning […]

Why Oil Companies Should Stop Looking For Oil

Oil companies are getting hammered by investors for being oil companies. The price of a barrel of crude is down 60 percent in the last two years. The New York Stock Exchange index for oil and gas stocks has fallen about 25 percent over the same period. Exxon Mobil has been downgraded by Standard and […]

A massive wildfire in Canada has destroyed 1,600 homes and forced 80,000 people to flee

Tens of thousands of Canadians have been evacuated while wildfires rage through their homes in Alberta.The town of Fort McMurray has seen more than 1,600 homes destroyed and 80,000 residents flee. As of Thursday, the fire showed little sign of slowing down, Reuters reports, and it now threatens the local airport. Alberta Premier Rachel Notley […]

We’re More At Risk Of Death From Climate Change, Pandemic, Than A Car Crash

A new report has found that the average person is five times more likely to die in an “act of human extinction” than an act of human error. And while this may be good news for those with a fear of driving, for the rest of us the future looks grim. The media has hinted […]

Human Extinction Isn’t That Unlikely

Nuclear war. Climate change. Pandemics that kill tens of millions. These are the most viable threats to globally organized civilization. They’re the stuff of nightmares and blockbusters—but unlike sea monsters or zombie viruses, they’re real, part of the calculus that political leaders consider everyday. And according to a new report from the U.K.-based Global Challenges […]

How many people can the Earth actually hold?

Earth may only be a tiny blip on the map relative to the entire universe, but for our purposes, it’s pretty darn big. Of course, the vast majority of earth – about 70% – is comprised of water. Taking that into account, the actual area of land on earth is estimated to be around 150 million […]

Australian river near fracking site bursts into flames

In a protest against coal seam gas leaking into South West Queensland’s Condamine River, NSW Greens MP Jeremy Buckingham headed to the river and hopped on a boat. Then he sparked a lighter a few inches above the water and the river burst into flames. He ignited gas that has been bubbling in the river […]

A warning for parched China: a city runs out of water

Yang Shufang wakes up at 5 o’clock each morning and fetches water. “I bring a few buckets, enough for drinking or cooking,” she says. Yang doesn’t live in the remote countryside, and her water isn’t from a village well. She lives on the seventh floor of a luxury condominium complex in Lintao, a Chinese city […]

We are Bacteria in a Petri Dish

  In a previous post, I speculated that a thermodynamic system such our industrial economy is completely dependent from its “outside”. As it grows and incorporates this “outside”, it is obliged to store high entropy inside itself. Possibly, the epidemic diffusion of riots in the very heart of the global system is an indicator of this […]

Earth Day predictions from 1970 never came true

Environmentalists truly believed and predicted during the first Earth Day in 1970 that the planet was doomed unless drastic actions were taken. Humanity never quite got around to that drastic action, but environmentalists still recall the first Earth Day fondly and hold many of the predictions in high regard. So this Earth Day, The Daily […]

This Earth Day, Let’s Look at How Much Energy We’ve Been Using

Earth Day was first celebrated in 1970, and that got us thinking about how households used energy back then. What did they use it for? Do we follow the same conventional wisdom for saving energy in our homes today, even though there are some obvious differences in the types of devices we use now? We […]

Energy at any cost?

If all else is uncertain, how can growing demand for energy be guaranteed? A review of Vaclav Smil’s Natural Gas. Near the end of his 2015 book Natural Gas: Fuel for the 21st Century, Vaclav Smil makes two statements which are curious in juxtaposition. On page 211, he writes: I will adhere to my steadfast […]

Chernobyl and Fukushima: lessons not learned

Around 8,000 km and 25 years separate the catastrophic Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear disasters. There are clear differences between the Ukraine and Japan-based catastrophes, but what are some of the more subtle distinctions? And how were they similar? Both power stations opened in the 1970s; Fukushima in 1971 and Chernobyl six years later. The Japanese […]

Introducing Turn 21

As part of Launch Turn21, we were recently interviewed for the University of Hawaii’s student paper, Ke Kalahea. Here are the answers to their questions, useful in conveying what Turn21 is about.  What is Turn 21? Turn21 is a group of committed and concerned citizens of the planet dedicated to preserving the only world we have, here […]

Hedging Your Bets in a Water-Stressed World

You probably have some sort of insurance – for your healthcare, car, house, or apartment. Acting on climate change is also like insurance. It is all about managing the risks. We can’t know for certain what the future brings, but recent research predicts a 40 percent shortfall of available water across the globe by 2030. […]

Thousands Of Gallons Of Radioactive Waste Leak At Nuclear Site

The ongoing radioactive leak problems at the Hanford Site, a nuclear storage tank in Washington State, are nothing new. We first wrote about the ongoing radioative leakage at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, created as part of the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb, in 2013.   As a reminder, during the Cold War, the […]

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