The Most Likely Armageddon Threat … Preventable for a Small Amount of Money

Well-known physicist Michio Kaku and other members of the American Physical Society asked Congress to appropriate $100 million to harden the country’s electrical grid against solar flares.  As shown below, such an event is actually the most likely Armageddon-type event faced by humanity. Congress refused. Kaku explains that a solar flare like the one that hit the U.S. in 1859 would […]

Japan starts cleaning radioactive groundwater at Fukushima before dumping into ocean

TEPCO launched a contaminated water management system at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, which will pump groundwater into tanks before it passes through the premises of the plant. After checking the water’s quality it will be dumped into the ocean. The operator of the highly damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), […]

Gulf Oil Spill “Not Over”: Dolphins, Turtles Dying in Record Numbers

Four years after the biggest oil spill in U.S. history, several species of wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico are still struggling to recover, according to a new report released today. In particular, bottlenose dolphins and sea turtles are dying in record numbers, and the evidence is stronger than ever that their demise is connected […]

Our High-Energy Planet

More than one billion people globally lack access to electricity, and billions more still burn wood and dung for their basic energy needs. Our High-Energy Planet, a new report from an international group of energy and environment scholars, outlines a radically new framework for meeting the energy needs of the global poor. According to the authors, […]

The Club of Rome all over again

The note by Nafeez Ahmed on the “Nasa-funded paper” (a term that went viral) on societal collapse was followed by a heated debate. In a previous post of mine, I noted how we were seeing again the debate that took place after the publication of the first “The Limits to Growth” study in 1972. Indeed, […]

The Soil, Land, Water, Climate, Honey Bees, Oil, Food Nexus: Peak Soil

There is a tendency for humans to perceive ill occurrences as unconnected events, rather as the Biblical plagues of Egypt: water into blood, frogs, lice, wild animals or flies, deceased livestock, boils, storms of fire, locusts, darkness and death of the firstborn. Scientists now believe that these events really happened, but they were in fact […]

Could a giant sunburst unplug the Earth?

When the sun got ornery in 1859, American telegraph operators saw sparks fly. A huge solar flare belched a cloud of charged particles into Earth’s path. But other than frying telegraph lines, the electromagnetic collision caused little stir in the world. Nobody back then had yet switched on a decent light bulb, much less charged […]

Thom Hartmann Interviews Guy McPherson, On The Brink Of Extinction

Thom Hartmann´s Conversation with great Minds, April 4th, 2014

Why Humans Are Not Fated To Destroy The World

One often hears that we are in the midst of exponential population growth, and that the Earth cannot support many more people. Unless we take immediate measures to control population growth, the story goes, we are on a crash course for ecological and humanitarian disaster. But what is really going on with global population trends? […]

Mounting Evidence of Health Concerns Near Tar Sands Development

Two studies released in the past week have drawn attention to the linkage between tar sands development and significant health concerns.  The two reports both released by the Alberta government separately show that the incidence of cancer downstream of tar sands development is higher than expected and that air emissions from a certain type of […]

Worried About Peak Oil and the Other Peaks?

Peak Everything! We’re Doomed. This Time for Sure. “In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill… The real enemy then is humanity itself.” – Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider, The […]

Fracking depleting US water supplies

America’s oil and gas rush is depleting water supplies in the driest and most drought-prone areas of the country, from Texas to California, new research has found. Of the nearly 40,000 oil and gas wells drilled since 2011, three-quarters were located in areas where water is scarce, and 55% were in areas experiencing drought, the […]

Peak phosphorus will be a shortage we can’t stomach

Here’s the good news. We probably don’t have to worry about peak oil just yet, as it isn’t going to run out anytime soon. The bad news is, as the IPCC has recently reported, we can’t afford the costs of what liberating all that carbon into the Earth’s atmosphere would do to the climate. So […]

Tech Talk – of Wheat and Coal

The release of the latest assessment of the IPCC on the future of the planet, failing their push to cut greenhouse gas emissions, has brought forth headlines and supportive editorials in papers around the world. Yet I could not help but note a couple of things that form the basis for this tech talk. The […]

What to Do When You Suspect We’re Headed for Collapse

If you’ve been paying attention to the environmental news, then you know people are pummeling the planet. Because of the way we run the economy, with continuously growing population and consumption, we are destabilizing the climate, depleting topsoil, drawing down aquifers, acidifying the oceans, and driving species to extinction. Even as we impoverish the Earth’s […]

Hanford Nuclear Site Workers Sickened by Unknown Vapors

The KING 5 Investigators have found that six Hanford workers were sickened Wednesday from ingesting chemical vapors at the nuclear facility. Three were helping to conduct a video inspection of an underground nuclear storage tank. Two of the three were transported to Kadlec Medical Center by ambulance for treatment of symptoms. Another received treatment at […]

On oil-water nexus

In addition to the conventional energy market issues, mainly oil, related to price and production, the industry seems to be gearing for a new worry — how to handle the oil-water nexus. A recent UN Water Day has a very simple message to deliver: Water needs energy and energy needs water. The interdependencies between the […]

The Losing Economics of Investing in Aging Coal Plants

Noah Long, Legal Director, Western Energy Project, Energy & Transportation Program; and Clean Energy Counsel, Land & Wildlife Program, San Francisco This entry is the first of a two-part follow up to the blog I wrote last fall. This first entry focuses on the national story, the next entry will focus on coal in the […]

Hell in a Hand Basket and Why We’re Going There, Guaranteed (sort of)

The ebb and flow of societies is well documented by historians and archaeologists. It seems every society rises in complexity to a zenith of some kind and then falls. There are an increasing number of people who contend that this sociopolitical transformation is fast-approaching for our globalised, industrial civilization, and of those some believe that […]

Keystone: The Pipeline to Disaster

The new State Department Environmental Impact Statement for the Keystone Pipeline does three things. First, it signals a greater likelihood that the pipeline project will be approved later this year by the administration. Second, it vividly illustrates the depth of confusion of US climate change policy. Third, it self-portrays the US Government as a helpless […]

Water Used by Power Plants

, Breaking Energy has been focusing on the energy-water nexus today in our coverage in recognition of UN World Water Day, which occurred this past Saturday. The infographic helps visualize the volumes of water used to generate electricity from various sources. In addition to power generation, water is used to produce oil, gas, coal, biofuels […]

3 Surprising Sources of Oil Pollution in the Ocean

  The Texas spill is obvious, but automobile oil is a bigger contributor. An iridescent sheen spreads from a drop of crude oil on top of the water in the Gulf of Mexico. Obvious oil spills, like the 168,000 gallons (635,000 liters) of oil that leaked into Galveston Bay on Saturday, usually make national news, […]

Orlov: Ukrainians on the verge of a nervous breakdown

In this intercepted phone call Yulia Tymoshenko, a likely Ukrainian presidential candidate (but there will be no elections*) talks about using nuclear weapons on the eight million Russian citizens who live in Ukraine. Good thing these “Ukrainians” don’t have any nuclear weapons, but they do have plentiful baseball bats and AK47s looted from armories in […]

Thoughts About Norm Borlaug On : The 100th Birthday Of “The Man Who Fed The World”

Norman Borlaug would have been 100 years old today. He has been called “The Man Who Fed The World,” and “The Father of The Green Revolution.” Norm Borlaug was the first plant pathologist to be awarded a Nobel Prize (1970) – for contributions to world peace. For all of use who are fellow plant pathologists, […]

Climate Change and Human Extinction – A Personal Perspective

“Just one source, methane from the arctic…leads us [by 2030] to…a temperature beyond which humans have never existed on the planet.” Guy McPherson, professor emeritus of University of Arizona in Environmental Studies, shares highlights from his compilation of recent reports on climate change effects. Their number and extent have grown exponentially since he began five […]

After 25 years, Exxon Valdez oil spill hasn’t ended

Andy Wills was sleeping on a friend’s couch in Cordova, Alaska, on March 24, 1989, ready to head out and harvest spring herring in Prince William Sound. “My buddy had just handed me a cup of coffee in the morning and we’re watching ‘Good Morning America,’ ” Wills said. “And there’s the Exxon Valdez on […]

Major oil spill after million-gallon barge collides with ship in Texas

A barge carrying nearly a million gallons of especially thick, sticky oil collided with a ship in Galveston Bay on Saturday, leaking an unknown amount of the fuel into the popular bird habitat as the peak of the migratory shorebird season was approaching. Booms were brought in to try to contain the spill, which the […]

World energy use threatens water

Rising demand for energy, from biofuels to shale gas, is a threat to freshwater supplies, according to a United Nations report released Friday. The report urged energy companies to do more to limit their use of water in everything from cooling coal-fired power plants to irrigation for crops grown to produce biofuels. “Demand for energy […]

Could a global grab for fertile soil, bring civil unrest?

The estimated 1.6 billion hectares of fertile soils currently under cultivation can certainly feed the current world population. If we still have approximately 800 million undernourished and hungry people on this planet, it is due to serious imbalances in the distribution of wealth, land and natural resources in general. Market driven preference to allocate part […]

A Look at Man’s Massive Impact on Earth

With the continuing rise in world population comes more energy needs, meaning ever-more demand on water resources. That’s the message coming out of World Water Day (March 22), a day created by the United Nations to build awareness of a range of water issues. This year the UN campaign for World Water Day focuses on […]

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