The Future of Growth

By Dr. Milton Saier and Art Elphick, guest writers. [Photo by Flickr user Images Money via Creative Commons license] Recent articles call for higher birthrates to spur economic growth. But upon observing the human impact on our resources and environment, many scientists consider even current economic and population growth rates unsustainable. Our world has just […]

Radioactive Fukushima Particles Found In Alaska’s Bering Strait

Radioactive particles from Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant have drifted as far north as a remote Alaskan island in the Bering Strait, according to scientists at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. Seawater collected last year near St. Lawrence Island contained a slight elevation in levels of cesium-137, a man-made radioactive isotope formed during […]

‘Doomsday vault’ town warming quicker than any other on Earth

The world’s northernmost settlement and home to what is known as the “Doomsday vault” – the subterranean Svalbard global seed vault which stores specimens of almost all the world’s seeds – is now believed to be the fastest-warming location on Earth, according to a new report. Longyearbyen, on the Norwegian island of Svalbard, had an average temperature in Svalbard […]

Fast-Melting Greenland Glacier Starts Growing Again In Massive U-Turn

A large and fast-melting glacier in Greenland is growing again, according to a new NASA study. The Jakobshavn (YA-cob-shawv-en) glacier on Greenland’s west coast had reportedly been retreating by around 1.8 miles and thinning by nearly 130 feet annually in 2012. May 30, 2012, photo shows an iceberg in or just outside the Ilulissat fjord that […]

The Catastrophe is coming

Dear 22nd century, Do you still use that quaint phrase ‘the elephant in the room?’ Does the family Elephantidae, currently at risk, still exist, or is its extinction such a horrific elephant in the room that no one dares speak that name? Either way, you’ve probably noticed the metaphorical elephant in my letters so far. […]

Richard Heinberg: The House is on Fire

A: The house is on fire! B: You sound so shrill. Can’t you say something witty or insightful? A: How about this: The house is on fire! C: We’re never going to be able to do anything about the house until we defeat capitalism first. A: But the house is on fire NOW! If we […]

Africa Is Running Out of Water

As water supplies in Ghana’s capital grew increasingly erratic, Beatrice Kabuki stopped customers from using her grocery store’s bathrooms and installed a plastic storage tank at her home. “The taps flow once a week and usually at night, so we stay awake to fetch what we can store,” Kabuki, 35, said in an interview in […]

Overheating About Global Warming

Decades of climate-change exaggeration in the West have produced frightened children, febrile headlines, and unrealistic political promises. The world needs a cooler approach that addresses climate change smartly without scaring us needlessly and that pays heed to the many other challenges facing the planet. PRAGUE – Across the rich world, school students have walked out […]

Zombie-filled Death Ships

“Each passenger’s carbon footprint while cruising is roughly three times what it would be on land.“ In 1996, the late essayist David Foster Wallace described his excursion on a cruise liner as a “special mix of servility and condescension.” He exhaustively journaled every event, person, and feeling during a seven-night, all-inclusive voyage. In “A Supposedly […]

Fracking the World: Despite Climate Risks, Fracking Is Going Global

The U.S. exported a record 3.6 million barrels per day of oil in February. This oil is the result of the American fracking boom — and as a report from Oil Change International recently noted — its continued growth is undermining global efforts to limit climate change. The Energy Information Administration predicts U.S. oil production will increase again […]

Doug Casey On The Climate-Change Hoax

Climate change is a hoax. Not many people would go out on record and say this. After all, the idea of man-made climate change is practically universally accepted at this point, at least among the general public. But Doug Casey says this notion is nothing more than hysteria. Strategic Investor editor E.B. Tucker shares this controversial opinion. […]

Cheerleaders for Doom

“Exaggerated is in the eye of the beholder.”  I just finished reading David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. Then, in a climate change webinar, I was asked whether I thought focusing on predictions of doom — and Wallace-Wells is hard core in this respect — is productive or just numbing. Wallace-Wells says he […]

The $1 Trillion Storm: How a Single Hurricane Could Rupture the World Economy

Climate change and a potentially vulnerable insurance market could combine in a disaster that starts in South Florida but hits the entire globe. Nobody is going to be ready when a Category 5 hurricane slams into Southeast Florida, flattens Miami, bankrupts insurance companies, threatens a foreclosure crisis, and sends financial shockwaves across the world. mes […]

Video of Mexico natural gas pipeline fire

Viewer Ethan Kronquist captured video of a natural gas pipeline fire north of Mexico, Missouri, early Sunday, March 3, 2019. ABC17

The Great Barrier Reef Was Just Hit by a Flood of Polluted Water Visible From Space

The Great Barrier Reef just can’t catch a break. Year after year, this global treasure has been battered by cyclones and beaten by bleaching events. Now, with little time to recover, a part of the reef is being kicked while its down. An exceptional year of rainfall in Queensland, Australia has caused a huge flood […]

Toxic ‘Forever Chemicals’ in Drinking Water

FOUNTAIN, Colo. — When Army Staff Sgt. Samuel Fortune returned from Iraq, his body battered by war, he assumed he’d be safe. Then the people around him began to get sick. His neighbors, all living near five military bases, complained of tumors, thyroid problems and debilitating fatigue. Soon, the Colorado health department announced an unusually […]

Is Natural Gas a Fossil Fuel?

Fossil fuels are the energy of the past. With new technologies like wind, solar, and advanced batteries in our hands, we can power today and tomorrow with clean, reliable energy that doesn’t harm our health or destroy our planet. The shift to a clean energy economy is on – and accelerating by the day. Year […]

Global Population Decline And Economic Growth

Rising population was thought to be bad for our standard of living, with classic books such as Limits to Growth and Population Bomb projecting fewer resources per person and environmental collapse. A new book, Empty Planet, makes the forecast that world population will hit a peak and then decline. The authors take this as positive […]

Food shocks increase as world warms

More than ever, the world’s ways of keeping hunger at bay are taking a pounding as food shocks become more frequent. Potatoes are being baked in heat waves. Corn is being parched by drought. Fruit is being bitten by frost. And a long-term study suggests that for the world’s farmers and graziers, fishing crews and fish […]

The Road To 10 Billion: Where Is Global Population Actually Headed?

It was a girl. On Sunday, October 30, 2011, just before midnight, Danica May Camacho entered the world in a crowded Manila hospital, bringing the human population of our planet to seven billion. Actually, the scales could have tipped a few hours later, in a village in Uttar Pradesh, India, with the arrival of Nargis […]

Which species are we sure we can survive without?

Two years ago I asked the question in the title of this piece. Now comes a wide-ranging study that suggests we are about to test that question in a major way. The study predicts that at the current rate of loss of insect species, 40 percent could be gone “in the next few decades.” What […]

Nature doesn’t need people

Harrison Ford is a man who has the knack of being in the right place at the right time. And if he didn’t, he’d likely now be a retired carpenter who worked doing odd in and around Los Angeles. Maybe he’d be living on a pension in one of those boardwalked coastal towns up and […]

1st contact made with melted nuclear fuel at Fukushima

A probe touched melted nuclear fuel debris in a destroyed reactor at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, a long-awaited milestone in the battle toward decommissioning, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Feb. 13. The rod-like probe, fitted with 3-centimeter-long claws, lifted pieces of the nuclear fuel debris during the eight-hour operation at the bottom of […]

Insect Apocalypse: 40% of world species threatened with extinction

What’s happening? Over 40% of global insect species are threatened with extinction, scientists said in a new report, marking an unprecedented loss of biodiversity. A third of the total world’s insects are endangered, the report found, warning that at their current pace of extinction, they might disappear completely in 100 years. Common species such as […]

The Alarm Bells Of Climate Change

In 2015, nearly every nation collectively recognized the threat of climate change. This was done by signing the Paris Agreement which seeks to combat greenhouse effects. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) stated that the document’s central aim is to “strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping […]

Why We Dominate the Earth

Why did Homo sapiens diverge from the rest of the animal kingdom and go on to dominate the earth? Communication? Cooperation? According to best-selling author Yuval Noah Harari, that barely scratches the surface. *** Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens is one of those uniquely breathtaking books that comes along but rarely. It’s broad, but scientific. It’s written for […]

The non-stop waste of water

Every year, water shortages affect more than one-third of the world’s population. In 2017, even Rome — ancient pioneer of urban water provision — saw its myriad public drinking fountains switched off. Environmental economist Edward Barbier plunges deep into these and other stories from the fascinating, often fraught world of water management past and present […]

What can you do to prepare when you can’t?

“A split vortex sending waves of cold into North America, Europe and Russia is what a warmer ocean does.” Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images “And the sixth angel poured out his vial upon the great river Euphrates; and the water thereof was dried up, that the way of the kings of the east might be […]

Warning: A ‘Shrinking Window’ of Usable Groundwater

Share 0 Tweet Reddit 0 Share 0 Share By Tara Lohan, the Revelator. Originally posted on The Revelator. New analysis reveals that we have much less water in our aquifers than we previously thought — and the oil and gas industry could put that at even greater risk. We’re living beyond our means when it comes to groundwater. That’s […]

Time to Replace the Word ‘Sustainable’

For 2019, let’s replace a once-useful word that, like a guest who stays too long, has worn out its welcome. Depending on the context, it can sometimes have no meaning or far too many meanings (which is just as useless). The word is “sustainable.” In a stricter sense, sustainable means minimizing the use of resources […]

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