On the Path Past 9 Billion, Little Crosstalk Between U.N. Sessions on Population and Global Warming

The United Nations and the streets of Manhattan are going into global warming saturation mode, from Sunday’s People’s Climate March through the Tuesday climate change summit convened by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and on through an annual green-energy event called Climate Week. Photo A graph showing the percentage of married women surveyed in parts of Asia, […]

With 38% of Global Shale Gas Located in Regions of Water Stress, More Oversight of Fracking is Urgently Needed

Natural gas rig in the Piceance Basin in Colorado. Fracking in water-stressed areas poses risks to energy producers and communities. Photo: Energy Tomorrow/Creative Commons 2.0. As more data emerge, shale gas increasingly appears to be in the cross-hairs of the water-energy nexus, and far too little is being done to defuse impending conflicts. While hydraulic fracturing (or […]

World Population Could Hit 12.3 Billion by 2100

Researchers had earlier estimated the population would only reach 7.2 billion The world population may balloon to anywhere between 9.6 and 12.3 billion by 2100, according to a new report that used statistics from the United Nations. The new estimates far outstrip previous calculations of 7.2 billion. The root of the booming population is high […]

China Bans Use of Coal With High Ash or Sulfur to Fight Smog

China will ban sales and imports of coal with high ash or sulfur in a move to promote cleaner types of the fuel and improve the nation’s air quality. Coal with ash content of more than 40 percent and sulfur of more than 3 percent is banned from sales and imports into China starting Jan. […]

The Consequences Of Fracking: Two Clashing Views

Two academic studies of the health dangers of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, have produced different conclusions. One, conducted by Yale University, said people living near fracking sites report increased health problems. The other, by Penn State University, says fracking water stays underground, far below the groundwater supplies that people use for drinking, and poses no […]

A Flood of Energy Projects Clash with Mexican Communities

Since January, villagers and townspeople near the Los Pescados river in southeast Mexico have been blocking the construction of a dam, part of a multi-purpose project to supply potable water to Xalapa, the capital of the state of Veracruz. “Our rights to a pollution-free life, to decide where and how we live, to information, to […]

Are we on the path of ‘Limits to Growth’?

Probably the most important thing you need to know about the 1972 book entitled Limits to Growth is that it makes no predictions. Rather, the much maligned study provides scenarios for thinking about the future of resource use, pollution, population, food, and industrial production. Limits to Growth detailed three scenarios originally, one of them called […]

The Seven Billionth Child

What is the future of this seven billionth child? The seven billionth child is here. The clock has stopped ticking. Past midnight on October 31, the symbolic seven billionth child was born into some mega spotlights. This time, the UN refrained from declaring one baby as the seven billionth child. Each country declared its own […]

On Becoming an Ecomodernist

The last few years have seen the emergence of a new environmental movement — sometimes called ecomodernism, other times eco-pragmatism — that offers a positive vision of our environmental future, rejects Romantic ideas about nature as unscientific and reactionary, and embraces advanced technologies, including taboo ones, like nuclear power and genetically modified organisms, as necessary to reducing humankind’s ecological footprint. […]

Whose consumption is killing the planet?

THE CONSEQUENCES of human-induced climate change are dire. Crop failures will increase. Severe weather and rising sea levels will wreak more havoc. Species are being wiped out by the hour–and the continued existence of our own is threatened. Even without the threat of climate change, we live in a world of vast inequality, where the […]

The more uncertain we are, the more careful we should be

Earthquake damage to the Sam Kee Laundry Building in Napa, California, August 2014. Photo by Jim Heaphy via Wikimedia Commons. Built in 1875, this historic structure was damaged by a quake on a fault that was only sketchily understood by geologists. Drone tour of the damage.(When I grew up in Napa, we were blissfully unaware of […]

The West Without Water

Dr. B. Lynn Ingram is a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at UC Berkeley, California. The primary goal of her research is to assess how climates and environments have changed over the past several thousand years based on the geochemical and sedimentologic analysis of aquatic sediments and archaeological deposits, with a […]

Canada’s oil sands

ONE of the bleakest scenes of man-made destruction is the strip mining of oil sands in the forests of Alberta, Canada. The sand is permeated with natural bitumen, a type of petroleum with the consistency of peanut butter. Once dug from the surface, the sand is hauled to an extraction plant where it is mixed […]

Will Malthus Eventually Be Right?

One of the more wrong-headed predictions of a famous 19th century thinker, Thomas Malthus, was that because world population would grow more rapidly than food production, mankind faced a bleak future of mass starvation. Continued improvements in farming have proved him wrong despite a mushrooming of population growth since Malthus issued his doomsday forecast. I’ve […]

Is Coal Really “Peaking” in China?

“While uncertainty over the changes in coal stockpiles still exists, we’re confident that the unbelievable may be at hand: peak coal consumption in China.” So concludes a recent blog post from the Sierra Club’s Justin Guay and Greenpeace International’s Lauri Myllyvirta, the latter of whom recently published an analysis suggesting that Chinese coal consumption dropped […]

Should Your Town Have the Right to Ban Fracking?

In June 2014, in a much awaited decision, New York’s Court of Appeals delivered a blow to oil and gas corporations while giving a much needed lift to communities facing fracking. The court, which is the highest in the state, held that towns in New York can use local zoning laws to ban oil and […]

The World Isn’t Running Out of Water

Apparently a quote from environmental activist Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians has made it into the new Mad Max movie.  The Council of Canadians even wonders aloud if Barlow is the inspiration for Mad Max. The quote from Barlow in Mad Max is that “the world is actually running out of water,” sampled […]

The Time for Burning Coal Has Passed

“People have gathered here to tell their politicians that the way in which we used energy and our environment in the 19th and 20th centuries is now over,” says Radek Gawlik, one of Poland’s most experienced environmental activists. “The time for burning coal has passed and the sooner we understand this, the better it is […]

How The Current Mass Extinction Of Animals Threatens Humans

More species are becoming extinct today than at any time since dinosaurs were wiped off the face of the Earth by an asteroid 65 million years ago. Yet this bio-Armageddon, caused mainly by humans, is greeted by most of us with a yawn and a shrug. One fewer bat species? I’ve got my mortgage to […]

Will we all be African one day soon?

Will we all be African again one day soon?  It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds.  There has been an unprecedented demographic shift this century towards an increasingly African world. A report released this week by the UN children’s agency (UNICEF) found that by the end of this century about 40 per cent of all […]

A New Frontier for Fracking: Drilling Near the Arctic Circle

Hydraulic fracturing is about to move into the Canadian Arctic, with companies exploring the region’s rich shale oil deposits. But many indigenous people and conservationists have serious concerns about the impact of fracking in more fragile northern environments. Among the dozens of rivers that flow unfettered through the Canadian North, the Natla and the Keele […]

Thousands Of Gallons Of Oil Spill Into Ohio River Upstream Of Cincinnati

Lately it is not just trains blowing up across the country in the ongoing effort to prove just how safer rail transport is for crude oil transit compared to pipelines: as citizens of Cincinatti found out this morning, their drinking water may come with an added kick after thousands of gallons of diesel fuel spilled […]

“Peak Water,” Methane Blow Holes, And Ice-Free Arctic Cruises

“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed.” – Mahatma Gandhi   We begin this month’s climate disruption dispatch with comments from NASA’s Earth Observatory about the extreme juxtaposition of temperatures we are experiencing in North America this summer.   “If you live in the northern hemisphere, the past few […]

Is producing more food to feed the world beside the point?

Imagine you are a small farmer in a poor country, growing corn and a small mix of other crops to support your family. One year a drought destroys most of your harvest, and suddenly you — along with everyone else in the region — face the threat of going hungry. You were able to salvage a […]

Spill Some Oil? Magnetize It for Cleanup

A physicist may have dreamed up a new way to clean up oil spills. David Biello reports. Download MP3 Oil and water don’t mix. Despite that age-old axiom, it sure is hard to get spilled petroleum out of seawater, as was evident during BP’s blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. But what if you could […]

Central America braces for drought-linked food crisis

Low rainfall linked to the El Nino weather phenomenon has led to drought in parts of Central America, causing widespread damage to crops, shortages and rising prices of food, and worsening hunger among the region’s poor. An unusually hot season and extended dry spells have brought drought to areas in eastern and western Guatemala and […]

The Ice-Wall Go-eth – Japan Scraps Fukushima Freezing Plan

On the heels of our previous aggregation of all things Fukushima, we were ‘shocked’ to see the flashing red headline tear across the Bloomberg exclaiming that “The Japanese government has decided to abandon the ‘frozen water wall’ solution to Fukushima’s meltdown.” When they unveiled this “Game of Thrones”-esque 1.4km long ice-wall a year ago, we […]

Children are children, not bundles of carbon producers

I guess it takes global warming hysteria to get the bioethics movement to criticize what is known in the trade as “artificial reproductive technologies” or ART. But now, in the ever more radical Journal of Medical Ethics, Cristina Richie, of Boston College’s Department of Theology, argues that these technologies should be regulated to limit the […]

Fukushima: We’ve Opened the Gates of Hell

Preface: we’ve written thousands of articles on Fukushima and radiation. But this post will spotlight recent articles from EneNews … with which we have no affiliation of any nature whatsoever. The American media hasn’t covered Fukushima for a long time. But that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been any news. It just means that the  U.S. and Japanese governments have worked hard to cover […]

Busting the Bureau of Land Management’s Frackopoly

Even without looking at a photo album, I can picture in my mind’s eye a vacation photo from the gorgeous BLM-managed (Bureau of Land Management) land near Moab, Utah. That image of my family and friends on a bicycle trip in the red rock lands, perfectly faded by time, carefully preserved for posterity. Nowhere in […]

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