Frankenfoods vs Thomas Malthus

It’s nice to see two classic scientific scare stories facing off. We’ve read a lot about both over the years, and both have been the subject of a lot of media-led panic, and now they’re being set against each other in a battle to the death. It’s a bit like Alien vs Predator, except it’s […]

British government: World needs global food system overhaul

The world needs fundamental changes to the global food system to feed the expanding population, according to a British government report out Monday on how to feed the planet until 2050. Governments must take action to change dietary habits, cut waste, reduce subsidies and embrace genetically modified food, said the “Global Food and Farming Futures” […]

Heinberg’s New Coal Question

The most serious carbon issue today, as scientists like NASA’s James Hansen emphasize, is not oil but coal. To avert a disastrous climate change tipping point, Hansen argues, peak oil must be accompanied by peak coal, and in fact coal-fired plants must be rapidly phased out to protect the earth.1 Yet coal exploitation is commonly […]

Population Redux

Recently I’ve been thinking about world population again. Here are some of the things that have come up. The first thought is that “we” (as in the aggregate species h. Sap) are not rational creatures. We are instead rationalizing creatures who make most of our decisions unconsciously, based on a stew of emotions and heuristics […]

Cash-strapped UK to sell its forests to stop climate change

To raise revenue and stop global warming, the cash-starved UK government plans to privatize England’s crown forests. Environmental groups, unable to explain why climate change shouldn’t trump the preservation of forests, have to date been largely muted. The UK policy, revealed in November by Jim Paice, Minister of State for Agriculture and Food, would see […]

The population timebomb is a myth

The human appetite for bad news knows no bounds. That is why gossip is usually malicious and why, on a grander scale, prophets of doom are always guaranteed a credulous audience. Conversely, good news – however well attested – is generally squeezed in the margins of newspapers. For example, The Independent buried in a few […]

Evidence of climate change as 2010 joint warmest year on record

Climatologists have reported further evidence of climate change as figures show that 2010 was the joint warmest year since records began in 1880. Temperatures seen last year and in 2005 were 0.62 C above the global average and the year marked the 34th consecutive year of above average global temperatures, according to the National Oceanic […]

How variations in Sun’s energy contribute to climate change

A new study has brought experts one step closer to understanding how much energy the Earth receives from the Sun, and how changes in that energy could contribute to climate change. The researchers report a lower value of that energy, known as total solar irradiance, than previously measured. “Improved accuracies and stabilities in the long-term […]

Global Population Speak Out, 2011

Third annual Global Population Speak Out to be launched in February: World Population will reach 7 Billion in 2011 The third annual Global Population Speak Out (GPSO), an international advocacy campaign that recruits leading ecologists, academicians, parliamentarians and ordinary citizens to speak out publicly on the fundamental links between population and sustainability, will take place […]

Richard Heinberg: Peak Oil and the Globe’s Limitations

Richard Heinberg, senior fellow with the Post Carbon Institute and the author of The Party’s Over, Peak Everything and, most recently, Blackout, discusses the phenomenon of peak oil and how it will affect life on this planet.

US military plans for Arctic melting

The US military wants more budget to police Arctic sea lanes opened by global warming. Photo: Marion Doss via Flickr. As civilian Washington, with climate skeptics in the ascendant, continues to bicker about how-real and how-bad, the military has once again shown that, when it comes to global warming, it’s a much more reality-based organization […]

Peak oil and Global Warming

Professor Heinberg discusses the links between peak oil and global warming. We need to reduce our use of fossil fuels to prevent Global Warming.

Swarm: Exploding humanity

More birth control, more sterilization — plus more education and prosperity — these are urgently needed to halt humanity’s lemminglike rush toward misery. Many senior West Virginians were born around 1930, when the world population was 2 billion and America had 123 million people.  By 2000, the global manswarm had passed 6 billion — tripling […]

Panel: Gulf oil spill could happen again

Disasters like the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig could happen again without significant reform, according to the conclusions of a presidential panel that has the companies involved in the nation’s largest oil spill pointing fingers at each other again. In a 48-page excerpt of its final report obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press, the […]

Why are climate scientists ignoring peak oil and coal?

While criticising the pervasive obsession with infinite growth of our political and economic institutions, it appears that many (albeit not all) climate scientists hold the belief that human ingenuity will somehow substitute declining oil with different forms of natural-gas, liquefied-coal, shale gas, and other carbon fuels at prices that can sustain growth. For example, at […]

Is Sustainable Development Compatible with Western Civilization?

Sustainable Development is one of those terms that seems to have leapt into our vocabulary from nowhere Five years ago no one, apart from a few green philosophers, had ever heard of the term. Today, thanks largely to the publicity it received from the 1993 ‘Earth Summit’ in Rio, it has become common parlance. Politicians […]

Deepwater Horizon oil spill: The real cause is peak oil

The devastating report from the presidential commission on the Deepwater disaster spells out the reasons for the gigantic oil spill and the deaths of 11 men but not the root cause: the looming threat of peak oil. The report, to be released in full on Tuesday, is utterly damning. The safety failures of BP and […]

Apocalypse now? Mystery bird deaths hit Louisiana

Birds dropping dead from the skies and rivers flowing with tens of thousands of dead fish sounds like a cheesy Hollywood movie about the Apocalypse. Or the ravings of a Revelation-obsessed street preacher. But residents of several US states are coping with the reality of mystery mass wildlife deaths, which have left officials scratching their […]

Humans Could Create New Mass Extinction Event

Mankind’s introduction of invasive species across the globe and destruction of natural habitats threatens to destroy the diversity of species essential to the natural world, researchers claim. The modern biodiversity crisis, a lack of variation in life forms, means Earth could meet a similar fate to the collapse of marine life 378-375 million years ago […]

National Geographic: 7 Billion!

I have understood the population explosion intellectually for a long time. I came to understand it emotionally one stinking hot night in Delhi a couple of years ago… The temperature was well over 100, and the air was a haze of dust and smoke. The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people […]

Peak Water in India: Dry wells narrate the story

India’s water resources are under stress by the growing needs of agriculture and manufacturing sectors. Better availability of water, which keeps natural and manmade contaminants at bay; spell several business opportunities for this key sector. The International Food Policy Research Institute says that by 2020, the world will have an additional two billion people, who […]

India population will overtake China by 2025

Asia is set to become the most populous region in the world by 2025 – and not only this, but India is also on track to overtake China to become the most populous country in the world. The United States will remain the third largest nation, followed by Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria. Analysts […]

World population to reach 6.9 billion at New Year

The world’s population will have grown to about 6.9 billion at the new year and hit 7 billion by the middle of 2011, says a German aid group that promotes birth control. The German Foundation for World Population in Hanover, or DSW, runs a “population meter” on its website that calculates the current world population […]

Why Is It So Cold? Should the Big Freeze Alter Our Approach to Climate Change?

Preface: If you believe in man-made global warming, please read this essay from the beginning to the end. If you are skeptical of man-made global warming, please skip ahead to the last two sections of this essay so that you see where I’m going. Europe, the U.S. East Coast, and many other places are suffering […]

BP Oil on Gulf Floor Draws Concern

Oil from BP PLC’s blown-out well has lodged in the sediment of the Gulf of Mexico at levels that may threaten marine life, according to a federal report released Friday. Heavy contamination from the oil spill is limited to a few locations in the Gulf relatively close to BP’s Macondo well, officials said. Chemical tests […]

Peak Oil And Population Decline

A solution that is sometimes proposed for the dilemma of fossil-fuel decline is a global campaign for the humane implementation of rapid population decline (RPD). With all due respect for the attempt to find a satisfying answer to the question of overpopulation, such a proposal would conflict with the available data on the rate of […]

Our increasing use of biomass could mean trouble for our planet

According to research released by NASA, humans are using more and more plant life for “food, fiber, building and packaging materials and biofuels.”  That increase is happening not just overall as the world population increases but also per person. According to satellite data, our consumption of the Earth’s total land plant production in 1995 was […]

Scary math

The impact the humans are having on Earth’s resources depends essentially on three factors; population size, the affluence of this population, and our technological efficiency. This simple equation, laid out by the Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich nearly 40 years ago, makes for pretty scary math in 2010. In a sobering, post-global-financial-crisis book, Prosperity Without Growth; Economics […]

WikiLeaks cables: BP suffered blowout on Azerbaijan gas platform

Striking resemblances between BP’s Gulf of Mexico disaster and a little-reported giant gas leak in Azerbaijan experienced by the UK firm 18 months beforehand have emerged from leaked US embassy cables. The cables reveal that some of BP’s partners in the gas field were upset that the company was so secretive about the incident that […]

An agriculture that stands a chance: perennial polyculture & the hard limits of post-carbon farming

“The American food system rests on an unstable foundation of massive fossil fuel inputs. It must be reinvented in the face of declining fuel stocks.” — Richard Heinberg and Michael Bomford, ‘The Food and Farming Transition‘ (http://www.postcarbon.org/report/41306-the-food-and-farming-transition-t…) “The United States and many other heavily populated countries face a growing threat of severe and prolonged drought […]

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