Peak Oil and the New Carbon Boom

In the past year, the United States appears to have entered a new age of energy abundance. The extraction of gas and oil from shale formations has led to the most rapid increase in new energy supplies in the country’s history.1 Political leaders and the news media present this sudden reversing of a thirty-five-year decline […]

Ugo Bardi on “Plundering the Planet” – Part IV

The control of noble metals was a key to ancient and modern empires. Soldiers were paid with gold or silver coins, so they were able to extent the empire and conquer more mines to pay more soldiers. Modern empires like the British Empire were built on coal – which went down with the end of […]

Fracking’s Threats to Drinking Water Call for a Precautionary Approach

At least one aspect of fracking’s risks to drinking water became a little clearer this week. A study led by Rob Jackson of Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that drinking water wells located within 1 kilometer of a shale gas well in a […]

Radiation Levels Skyrocket at Fukushima

The Accident Is NOT Contained Record high levels of radioactive tritium have been observed in the harbor at Fukushima. Japan Times notes: The density of radioactive tritium in samples of seawater from near the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant doubled over 10 days to hit a record 1,100 becquerels per liter, possibly indicating contaminated groundwater […]

How to save the world food chain

Socially responsible investors will want to look at a nascent hive of activity where governments and the private sector are lumbering to save the world food supply threatened by mass crop displacement. The survivability of the tiny, nuisance bee is one key to that monumental task. Bee populations around the world dropped by some 30 […]

Ugo Bardi on “Plundering the Planet”, part III

Fracking, tar sand, shale oil: „immense historical error“ / Short term profit interests decide about investments With oil prices rising, „unconventional“ oil and gas resources become attractive for investors: tar sands, shale oil and shale gas, which is extracted by a controversial technology called „fracking“. The exploitation of these sources is an „immense historical error“, […]

Ugo Bardi on “Plundering the Planet” (Part II)

Ugo Bardi, professor for physical chemistry at the University of Florence, author of the Report to the Club of Rome “Plundering the Planet” As oil production stagnates and is likely to fall in the future, „king coal“ enjoys a renaissance – with disastrous consequences for the climate. If we continue to build coal-fired power plants, […]

Ugo Bardi on “Plundering the Planet” (part 1)

More than 40 years after the report „The Limits to Growth“, the Club of Rome presented its new report: „Plundering the Planet“. Its author Ugo Bardi explains the consequences of overexploitation. Growing energy costs for the extraction of minerals from less and less concentrated ores could soon lead to shortages of key resources like oil, […]

Shale Truth Interview Arthur Berman

The Delaware Riverkeeper Network is presenting a series of interviews on the real impacts of the shale gas industry. In this first segment of our “Shale Truth Interview” series energy expert Arthur Berman discusses some of the industry claims on the supply and availability of shale gas. The Delaware Riverkeeper Network will present a new […]

Unsettling truth in population data

The news on the population front sounds bad. Birth rates are not dropping as fast as expected and we are likely to end up with an even bigger world population by the end of the century. The last revision of the United Nations’ world population prospects, two years ago, predicted about 10 billion people by […]

Methane found in drinking water near natural gas wells

Elevated levels of methane, ethane and propane gases were found in drinking water wells in Pennsylvania, close to operations that shake natural gas loose from underground shale formations in a process known as fracking, scientists report. Detection of contaminated drinking water suggests the gas wells are leaking, according to Robert Jackson of Duke University, lead […]

Can Frackers Be Paid Off? How One Community Is Trying to Buy Out Oil and Gas Leases

Craig Amichaux considers saving the Thompson Divide a last stand. “That’s all we’ve got left,” said Amichaux, an avid skier who runs a family campground in his native Glenwood Springs, Colorado. The Thompson Divide encompasses 221,500 acres of national forest land in five Colorado counties (Pitkin, Gunnison, Garfield, Mesa and Delta) on the Rockies’ Western […]

New UN Population Projections Released: Pockets of High Fertility Drive Overall Increase

October 31, 2011, was notable not only for the annual ritual of candy and costumes, but also for its designation by the United Nations as the date when global population reached seven billion. Although just an estimate – demographers are not able to count individuals in real time on such a large scale – the […]

World Population: The African Exception

The news on the population front sounds bad: birth rates are not dropping as fast as expected, and we are likely to end up with an even bigger world population by the end of the century. The last revision of the United Nations’ World Population Prospects, two years ago, predicted just over 10 billion people […]

Blame Canada: Greedy for oil money, the country is turning into a rogue petrostate

When I recently interviewed Canadian artist Franke James, whose outspoken appeals to her government for climate action landed her on Ottawa’s shit list, I was taken aback to hear her casually refer to her country as a “petrostate.” I knew Canada’s been spending gobs of federal money to promote its tar-sands agenda, but I didn’t […]

Our Overcrowded Planet: A Failure of Family Planning

New UN projections forecast that world population will hit nearly 11 billion people by 2100, an unsettling prospect that reflects a collective failure to provide women around the world with safe, effective ways to avoid pregnancies they don’t intend or want. Until just a couple weeks ago, the great global food challenge was how to […]

Mammal And Bird Extinctions Will Greatly Increase In Frequency During The Next 40 Years

Human population growth over the next 40 or so years will cause the extinction of a great number of mammal and bird species, according to new research from Ohio State University. Image Credit: Tarsier via Flickr CC The new research states that a typical growing nation should expect at least 3.3% more threatened species in […]

Are we overpopulating?

The premise of Dan Brown’s bestseller “The Da Vinci Code’’ was that Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, presumably bored of miracles and sermons, married and had kids. His newest novel, “Inferno,’’ is kind of the same except that this time (spoiler alert!) it’s the rest of us having kids — and far, far too many. […]

TEPCO reports new radioactive water leak at Fukushima

The tsunami-battered Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has suffered another radioactive water leak, its operator said Friday, the latest in a series of incidents at the crippled plant. About 360 liters of tainted water leaked from a desalination unit although it did not escape from the complex, Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) said. The desalination […]

World population becoming more urbanized

By 2050, the world population is expected to increase by 2.3 billion to 9.3 billion, according to the United Nations Population Division. But the size of the rural population is forecast to decline over the next 40 years as the world’s population becomes more urban. By 2050, the number of people living in urban areas […]

Club Of Rome Founder Proposed “Global Matrix” Of Manufactured Consent

Environmental think tank aspired to global matrix of manufactured consent Recently unearthed documents from the private collection of former diplomat and Bilderberg regular George C. McGhee have revealed (among other things) that the Club of Rome in 1970 wanted to create a “global matrix approach”, or G-Matrix approach, as a means of bringing people into an […]

Japan finds highly toxic strontium-90 in Fukushima groundwater

High levels of a toxic substance called strontium-90 have been found in groundwater at the devastated Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan, the utility that operates the facility said on Wednesday. Strontium-90 is a by-product of the fission of uranium and plutonium in nuclear reactors as well as nuclear weapons, according to the website of […]

Entropia: Life Beyond Industrial Civilisation

Samuel Alexander, from the Simplicity Institute, Australia, just published, “Entropia: Life Beyond Industrial Civilisation”, which is a fictional account of a post-carbon ‘utopia of sufficiency’ that emerges on the other side of civilisation’s demise. However grim the world looks, it is important to try to envision a better future. More info below: “Entropia is a […]

The “Green” Line

The recent release of the UN World Population Prospects: The 2012 Revision contains some sobering reading. The global population projection for 2050 has been revised up from 9.3 to 9.6 billion and for 2100 from 10.1 to 10.9 billion. The reason is that fertility levels in a number of developing countries, particularly those in Sub-Saharan […]

Leave coal in ground, scientists urge government

Most of Australia’s coal reserves will have to be left unburned if the world is to avoid catastrophic global warming, according to a major new report from the federal government’s Climate Commission. The report puts the key science advisory body on a collision course with some of the nation’s biggest export industries, and marks the […]

World Population to Reach 500 BILLION?!

That would be 500 with nine zeroes. Given that we are at about 7 billion now, this is not completely impossible to visualize. Look around you and consider that for each person you see, there would be 71 more people flocked around them, or about three standard classrooms more for each person in sight. I […]

British Honeybees Are Dying Faster Than Ever

UK honeybee deaths were the worst on record, the British Beekeepers Association (BBKA) said in a statement on Thursday. Over the 2012-2013 winter season, 34 honeybee colonies of every 100 were lost on average — more than double that of the previous year. Widespread die-offs are being blamed largely on bad weather and a late […]

India set to overtake China in population

India’s population is set to outstrip China’s as much as 15 years earlier than previous estimates, according to a new United Nations report. But the real concern is that the scary UN numbers could trigger a drastic and counterproductive government response. “This is bound to cause a kneejerk reaction,” said demographer A.R. Nanda, a former secretary […]

World population to hit 10.9bn by 2100

The world’s population will hit 7.2 billion next month and 10.9 billion by 2100, with most of the growth a result of high birthrates in the developing world, the United Nations said Thursday. The UN’s latest “World Population Prospects” report said the number of people inhabiting the planet at the start of the next century […]

World population projected to reach 9.6 billion by 2050: UN report

UNITED NATIONS, June 13 (APP): The current world population of 7.2 billion is projected to increase by 1 million over the next 12 years and reach 9.6 billion by 2050, according to a United Nations report launched today, which points out that growth will be mainly in developing countries, with more than half in Africa.  “Although […]

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