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Melting mountains called a water ‘time bomb’
Reuters
Glaciers and mountain snow are melting earlier in the year than usual, meaning the water has already gone when millions of people need it during the summer when rainfall is lower, scientists warned on Monday.
“This is just a time bomb,” hydrologist Wouter Buytaert said at a meeting of geoscientists in Vienna.
Those areas most at risk from a lack of water for drinking and agriculture include parts of the Middle East, southern Africa, the United States, South America and the Mediterranean.
(15 April 2008)
Market Matters: High Energy Prices Reshape Climate Debate
Keith Johnson, Environmental Capital, Wall Street Journal
If the peak-oil crowd is right, and oil prices are stuck in triple digits regardless of what the dollar does or where commodities investments go, what does that mean for the shift to a new-energy landscape? Mark this: High energy prices could prove the most important factor in the debate over what kind of international system will replace the Kyoto Protocol when its caps expire in 2012.
Kyoto sought to wean the world off its fossil-fuel energy base at a time when fossil fuels were cheap. But high energy prices change things, says economist Ricardo Lagos, former president of Chile and a United Nations special envoy on climate change. “It is all an economic argument,” Mr. Lagos told us. “Yesterday, what wasn’t economically viable is viable today. But that’s true if and only if” oil stays expensive.
Higher energy prices make energy-efficiency a more-appealing option for many industries in many countries, he said, and that’s the cheapest and quickest way to get countries with very different political agendas moving in the same direction to cut emissions. Efficiency, forest protection, and a sector-by-sector approach are his preferred ingredients for the next big climate agreement.
(15 April 2008)
Capitalism & Climate Change (part 1 of 5) (YouTube)
John Bellamy Foster, YouTube
Part 1 of a talk by Marxist ecologist & Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster to the Climate Change|Social Change conference held by Green Left Weekly in Sydney April 11-13, 2008. For DVD of this and other feature talks or mp3 CDs write to: [email protected]
(14 April 2008)
John Bellamy Foster is one of the leading Marxists exploring environmental issues. The other four parts of the talk are also online. -BA
