Humans have already used up 2015’s supply of Earth’s resources – analysis
Emma Howard, The Guardian
Earth ‘overshoot day’ – the day each year when our demands on the planet outstrip its ability to regenerate – comes six days earlier than 2014, with world’s population currently consuming the equivalent of 1.6 planets a year…
The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here
Belle Boggs, Rollingstone
Historians may look to 2015 as the year when shit really started hitting the fan. Some snapshots: In just the past few months, record-setting heat waves in Pakistan and India each killed more than 1,000 people. In Washington state’s Olympic National Park, the rainforest caught fire for the first time in living memory. London reached 98 degrees Fahrenheit during the hottest July day ever recorded in the U.K.; The Guardian briefly had to pause its live blog of the heat wave because its computer servers overheated. In California, suffering from its worst drought in a millennium, a 50-acre brush fire swelled seventyfold in a matter of hours, jumping across the I-15 freeway during rush-hour traffic. Then, a few days later, the region was pounded by intense, virtually unheard-of summer rains. Puerto Rico is under its strictest water rationing in history as a monster El Niño forms in the tropical Pacific Ocean, shifting weather patterns worldwide…
The Great Northern Meltdown: First It was the Polar Bears, Now It’s the Hemisphere
Robert Hunziker, Counterpunch
A lone polar bear on a small sheet of ice has become an iconic image of global warming. Unfortunately, the image of the distraught polar bear sends a beguiling image that renders the dangers of global warming a disservice. A better image, or icon, would be a massive 100-foot thick naturally coagulated renegade iceberg broadsiding an oil rig, more on this truly catastrophic event later. National Geographic, President Obama, and the Circumpolar Flaw Lead System Study (International Polar Year Project) have brought worldwide attention to the most fearsome challenge to the planet’s ecosystem in human history. It’s all about the Great Northern Meltdown…
Speed of Glacier Retreat Worldwide Reaches Record Levels
Alex Kirby, Climate News Network via Truthdig
The world’s glaciers are melting fast—probably faster than at any time in recorded history, according to new research.
Measurements show several hundred glaciers are losing between half and one metre of thickness every year—at least twice the average loss for the 20th century—and remote monitoring shows this rate of melting is far more widespread.
The World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS), based at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, has compiled worldwide data on glacier changes for more than 120 years.
Drawing on reports from its observers in more than 30 countries, it has published in the Journal of Glaciology a comprehensive analysis of global glacier changes…
The Greening of Greece – the ecologic opportunity for Europe to embrace
Oliver Tickell, The Ecologist
Greece’s economic woes will never be solved by merely moving money around the banking system, writes Oliver Tickell. The lasting solution is to restore native forests to her barren hills and mountains, invest in large-scale solar power to energise Europe, and create an examplar of sustainable development for our global future…
India’s war on Greenpeace
Samanth Subramanian, The Guardian
Environmental activists are being investigated, prevented from leaving the country and having their funds frozen. Why is India’s political class lining up to brand them enemies of the state?…
IEA Sees Oil Glut Through 2016 After Reaching 17-Year High
Grant Smith, Bloomberg
The global oil glut will last through 2016 as the strongest demand growth in five years and faltering supply fail to clear the surplus, according to the International Energy Agency.
Record inventories will expand further even as consumption growth doubles in 2015 and supplies outside OPEC contract next year for the first time since 2008, the IEA predicted. Stockpiles won’t be diminished until the fourth quarter of next year, or even later if sanctions on Iranian crude are lifted, the agency said.
“While a rebalancing has clearly begun, the process is likely to be prolonged as a supply overhang is expected to persist through 2016 — suggesting global inventories will pile up further,” the Paris-based adviser to 29 nations said in its monthly report…
Methane Leaks May Greatly Exceed Estimates, Report Says
John Schwartz, New York Times
A device commonly used to measure the methane that leaks from industrial sources may greatly underestimate those emissions, said an inventor of the technology that the device relies on.
The claim, published Tuesday in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, suggests that the amount of escaped methane, a potent greenhouse gas, could be far greater than accepted estimates from scientists, industry and regulators.
The new paper focuses on a much-heralded report sponsored by the Environmental Defense Fund and published by University of Texas researchers in 2013; that report is part of a major effort to accurately measure the methane problem. But if the supposed flaws are borne out, the finding could also have implications for all segments of the natural gas supply chain, with ripple effects on predictions of the rate of climate change, and for efforts and policies meant to combat it…
Why Japan is bringing back nuclear power — four years after Fukushima
Brad Plumer, Vox
After a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and ensuing tsunami hit Japan’s northeastern coast in 2011, leading to the infamous reactor meltdown at Fukushima, the country decided to hit the pause button on nuclear power. Over the next two years, Japan took all 54 of its reactors offline as regulators reevaluated their safety rules.
The adjustment turned out to be quite painful.
Before Fukushima, nuclear power supplied 27 percent of Japan’s electricity. By 2014, that had dwindled to zero. To make up the gap, Japan has had to import more coal, oil, and natural gas from overseas…
That all helps explain why Japan’s central government is keen on bringing many of the country’s 43 remaining operable reactors back online. This week, officials hailed the news that a reactor on the island of Kyushu was being restarted under new safety rules, the first to flip on since 2013.
The catch? Between widespread public opposition and various technical challenges, bringing back the bulk of Japan’s reactors won’t be as easy as it sounds…
Image source: Energy Information Administration
Mapping how the United States generates its electricity
John Muyskens, Dan Keating and Samuel Granados, Washington Post
Coal and natural gas are the most common sources for electricity in the country, but coal represents a declining share. The new Clean Power Plan seeks to accelerate that trend by requiring power plants to cut carbon pollution levels and rewarding states and companies that embrace clean sources of energy.
How and why the UK government hopes to fast-track fracking
Simon Evans, The Carbon Brief
UK ministers have announced a series of measures designed to fast-track shale gas planning applications in England.
The government says shale gas is a "national priority" and that today’s measures will ensure the industry gets up and running without delay.
Carbon Brief runs through the changes and explores the government’s argument for fracking…
The Science of Citizenship
Ian Dunlop and Rob Sturrock, Orion
one of the MOST remarkable scenes in Rebecca Skloot’s 2010 work of science journalism, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, happens about halfway through the book, in a smoky Baltimore kitchen. Skloot has been pursuing the reluctant Lacks family for about a year and has finally managed an introduction to Lawrence Lacks, the oldest son of Henrietta and Day Lacks. He cooks eggs and pork chops for Skloot and begins reminiscing about his mother, a strict, pretty woman who died of cervical cancer when he was a young teenager, but soon admits that, at sixty-four, he barely remembers her at all. Instead of memories, photographs, and family anecdotes, he and his siblings have only the ominous stories of her stolen cells: that there are enough of them now to “cover the whole earth,” that they have cured diseases, that they will soon make it possible for humans to live to be eight hundred years old.
After ushering Skloot into the living room with her plate of food, Lawrence asks her to tell him what his mother’s cells (now known in biomedical research as the “HeLa immortal cell line”) “really did,” and Skloot asks him if he knows what a cell is. “Kinda,” he tells her. “Not really.”…
…How is it possible that no one has ever told him how a cell works before? You could speculate that because Lawrence was educated during the time of Jim Crow segregation, he received poor instruction, or that the economic and emotional pressure on his family after the death of Henrietta affected his educational attainment. You could consider the partial deafness, untreated until adulthood, that made it hard for Lawrence and his siblings to understand teachers, or the time Lawrence spent out of school, doing field labor. You could point to his environment, a low-income neighborhood in a poor city, where rumors of body snatching and unauthorized medical experimentation on African Americans engendered suspicion of doctors and scientists. Certainly all of these details contributed to Lawrence’s abashed admission that he did not know what a cell was or how it functioned.
But it is also true that the public school system of the United States, the richest country in the world, still struggles to educate our citizens about science and to make that education relevant and present in their daily lives. How well we understand science affects almost every aspect of our personal and civic lives: our health, our reproductive choices, our understanding of the news, how and whether we vote, and our interaction with the environment. Many of the most important and contentious political issues of our time — climate change, hydraulic fracturing, offshore drilling — are also environmental and require an understanding of basic scientific principles that many of our poorest citizens lack. These same citizens will suffer from their lack of understanding: from water quality damaged by fracking, from mountaintop removal, from flooding caused by rising water levels. Poor people are disproportionately susceptible to poor health and more likely to be exposed to environmental or household pollutants. But for many of our poorest citizens, science education is largely ignored, especially in the foundational elementary and middle school years, as we favor the “basics” of reading and math through a testing and school accountability system that does not prepare our students for the significant social and environmental challenges to come…
Liberals and the New McCarthyism
Derrick Jensen, Counterpunch
It’s easy enough, some sixty years after the fact, for us to cluck our tongues at the cowardice and stupidity of those who went along with McCarthyism. It’s especially easy for liberals and academics to say that had they been alive back then, they would certainly have had the courage to stand up for discourse and to stand up for those being blacklisted. That’s partly because universities like to present themselves as bastions of free thought and discourse, where students, faculty, and guests discuss the most important issues of the day. Liberal academics especially like to present themselves as encouraging of these discussions.
Bullshit.
A new McCarthyism—complete with blacklisting—has overtaken universities, and discourse in general, and far from opposing it, liberal academics are its most active and ardent perpetrators, demanding a hegemony of thought and discourse that rivals the original…
Food production shocks ‘will happen more often because of extreme weather’
Emma Howard, The Guardian
Major “shocks” to global food production will be three times more likely within 25 years because of an increase in extreme weather brought about by global warming, warns a new report.
The likelihood of such a shock, where production of the world’s four major commodity crops – maize, soybean, wheat and rice – falls by 5-7%, is currently once-in-a-century. But such an event will occur every 30 years or more by 2040, according to the study by the UK-US Taskforce on Extreme Weather and Global Food System Resilience…
Affordable Housing’s Forever Solution
Jake Blumgart, Next City
Are community land trusts the answer for cities seeking neighborhood stability?
When Evelyn Correa first moved to Boston, she refused to walk around her neighborhood alone. Arriving in the city in 1987, she moved in with her husband and his parents in the Upham’s Corner section of North Dorchester, then a blighted area in a floundering city. Their new home was at the heart of Boston’s urban crisis, a chain of neighborhoods in Dorchester and Roxbury that had been redlined into instability and crisis decades earlier.
Today, Correa’s home and her neighborhood are wholly different, in large part due to the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI). During the 1980s, this energetic neighborhood organization convinced the city that it could steward and revitalize its surroundings and did so using a then unheard of method: a community land trust. Through their land trust, Dudley Neighbors Incorporated, DSNI took possession of most of the dozens of vacant lots that pocked the area, either by purchasing them from private owners using foundation money or obtaining them for almost nothing from the city. DSNI then removed the properties from the private market, leasing them out to developers under Dudley Neighbors, with the caveat that properties remain permanently affordable. Correa’s house belongs to her, but the land beneath it belongs to Dudley Neighbors, which will ensure that if she ever sells, it will be to someone of a similar income…
Jason Mraz: Stand With Farmers, Fight the Drought, Help Reverse Climate Change
Stefanie Spear, Ecowatch
Jason Mraz: Stand With Farmers, Fight the Drought, Help Reverse Climate Change
Kiss The Ground, a Los Angeles-based non-profit, launched a campaign Monday urging people to support a petition asking California legislature to allocate $160 million from California’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund for regenerative agriculture, composting and other land management practices that help sequester carbon.
As part of the campaign, Kiss The Ground released a new short film, The Soil Story, which features recording artist Jason Mraz. The campaign also has support from other celebrities, including Willie Nelson, Incubus and Moby…
Open data can unravel the complex dealings of multinationals
Brett Scott, The Guardian
…Groups like OpenOil and Sourcemap could be the beginnings of an alternative accounting system that helps investors make sense of global businesses
Accountants in Rome, a quadrennial forum to help set global accounting standards. The behind-closed-doors politics of the event were tangible. The real power players are the global accounting firms, transnational corporations and major transnational investors. The real concerns are not issues like sustainability or labour rights. They’re about national competitiveness and profitability of large firms.
However, this closed accounting world could now be challenged by the burgeoning open data sector.
Just like we have complementary currencies to address shortcomings in national monetary systems, we now need to encourage an alternative accounting sector to address shortcomings in global accounting systems…
Is the Local Economy the Solution to a Post-Capitalist World?
H.L. Onstad. AlterNet
Think local. Buy local. Support your local community. Community investment.
This all makes sense, right? Right. Then why do so many government-funded economic development programs get this wrong?
According to community economics advocate Michael Shuman, mainstream economic development today is a scam. States and local government agencies spend big money to lure corporations to their region but do little to stimulate the local economy or support local businesses. And those small businesses, not the chain stores, are often what give a neighborhood its unique identity and make it desirable to live in.
In his new book, The Local Economy Solution: How Innovative Self-Financing “Pollinator” Enterprises Can Grow Jobs and Prosperity (Chelsea Green, June 2015), Shuman debunks many of the myths around economic development—that tax breaks for wealthy corporations are beneficial for all, that only big businesses create jobs, that consumers only care about price, and that social enterprises can’t be self-financing…
