Resilience Roundup – Nov 13

November 13, 2015

NOTE: Images in this archived article have been removed.

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A roundup of news, views and ideas from the main stream press and the blogosphere.  Click on the headline link to see the full article.


Renewable energy made up half of world’s new power plants in 2014: IEA

Damian Carrington, The Guardian
Renewable energy accounted for almost half of all new power plants in 2014, representing a “clear sign that an energy transition is underway”, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Green energy is now the second-largest generator of electricity in the world, after coal, and is set to overtake the dirtiest fossil fuel in the early 2030s, said the IEA’s World Energy Outlook 2015 report, published on Tuesday…


Peabody Settlement Shows Muscle of Law Now Aimed at Exxon

David Hasemyer, InsideClimate News
Pulling the same legal levers as those involved in its climate change investigation of ExxonMobil, the New York state attorney general’s office obtained an agreement from coal giant Peabody Energy to end misleading statements and disclose risks associated with global warming.

Peabody Energy has a responsibility to be honest with investors and the public about the risks posed by climate change, New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman said in announcing the settlement with Peabody Monday. Other fossil fuel companies must embrace the same obligation, Schneiderman said…


Only 1% of the Bakken Play Breaks Even at Current Oil Prices

Art Berman, Petroleum Truth Report
Only 1% of the Bakken Play area is commercial at current oil prices. 4% of horizontal wells drilled since 2000 meet the EUR (estimated ultimate recovery) threshold needed to break even at current oil prices, drilling and completion, and operating costs.

The leading producing companies evaluated in this study are losing $11 to $38 on each barrel of oil that they produce, the very definition of waste…


Oil industry slipping into the red as outlook dims

Ron Bousso, Karolin Schaps and Anna Driver, Reuters
The oil sector is slipping into the red after years of fat profits as the steep slump in oil prices shows little sign of ending, with this quarter shaping up to be the worst since the downturn started.

The world’s top oil companies have struggled to cope with the halving of oil prices since June 2014. They have cut spending repeatedly, made thousands of job cuts and scrapped projects.

The lower-for-longer outlook for oil prices took its heaviest toll yet in the third quarter as oil companies again reported a dramatic drop in income. Some saw results swing into the loss column, and the industry had billions of dollars in impairment charges…


The World is Halfway to 2°C

Brian Kahn, Climate Central
It’s all but certain that 2015 will end up as the hottest year on record. And in setting that mark, the world is on track to finish the year 1°C above pre-industrial levels, a dubious milestone.

That would make 2015 the first year to crack the halfway mark of 2°C warming, the benchmark that’s been targeted as “safe” climate change and what nations are working toward meeting ahead of climate talks in Paris in December. But Monday’s announcement by the U.K. Met Office hints at how difficult achieving that target will be…


Images Show Impact of Sea Level Rise on Global Icons

Benjamin Strauss, Cliamte Central
Long-term sea level rise set in motion by near-term carbon emissions threatens major coastal cities across the world. Here we present paired images showing how iconic locations — in London, Shanghai, Mumbai, Sydney, Rio de Janeiro, Durban and New York — could fare under scenarios of business as usual vs. a sharp transition to clean energy…

Projections of locked-in sea level come from our peer-reviewed research published October 12 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A. A special Climate Central-led report, published November 9, describes the application of those projections to global elevation data for making the maps upon which these images are based…


Setting a country alight: Indonesia’s devastating forest fires are manmade

Irhash Ahmady and Sam Cossar-Gilbert, The Guardian
We are witnessing the worst manmade environmental disaster since the BP gulf oil spill. Huge, out-of-control fires rage through the forests of Indonesia – and the source of many is the practice of deliberately burning the land to clear it for palm oil and paper products.

Thousands of fires have been lit to clear land simply because it is 75% cheaper than other methods. By burning down forests companies can get access to the land and can commence industrial pulp and palm oil plantations.

The blazes are occurring in the peatland forests of Kalimantan and Sumatra, which is a unique wetland ecosystem home to threatened species. Over the past three months, toxic haze from fires has harmed millions of people in Indonesia, and is believed to have been fatal for some. The crisis is so bad that Friends of the Earth Indonesia/WALHI is providing face masks, and health checkups, and evacuating vulnerable groups to safety…


Restoring Global Soil Quality Is One Of The Best Things We Can Do For Climate Change

Ben Schiller, Fast Coexist
Scientists have proposed all kinds of complicated—and probably dangerous—ways to take carbon pollution out of the atmosphere or mitigate its effect. But there’s actually a far simpler geo-engineering technique available to us: improving soil quality.

"Improving soil" doesn’t have quite the same ring as, say, pumping sulphur into the air to block out the sun. Yet soil is known to be highly effective at storing carbon, because the Earth has been doing it for millions of years. Just the first meter of soil contains 1,500 gigatons of organic carbon, or three times as much carbon as there is in the atmosphere. If we could restore more carbon to the world’s soil—it’s lost 50% to 70% of its carbon content since we started land cultivation—we could put a huge dent in the climate change problem, say researchers and campaigners.

Carbon sequestration is vital because even if we reduce the current level of CO2 emissions, we’re still left with all the carbon already in circulation. That in itself is enough to cause 1,000 years of climate change, studies show. Either we develop our own machines to do that, or we look to forests and oceans…


Farm bill favors corporations and ignores people of color

Katie Herzog, Grist
This likely won’t be surprising to anyone who isn’t white, but a new report from U.C. Berkeley shows that the U.S. government has a long history of favoring corporations and white farm owners over people of color.

Take the farm bill, a monolithic piece of legislation. When I asked Grist food editor Nathanael Johnson to explain it to me, he said that while a large part of the farm bill provides subsidies for farmers, it’s also the government’s means of funding food stamps programs as well as providing money for farmers markets, organic training, sustainable food hubs, and grants. Some 80 percent of the funding from the law goes toward feeding hungry people. But if you look at the remaining 20 percent of the farm bill that actually goes to farms, it’s way more generous with giant, corporate agribusinesses than it is to, you know, people…


It’s so dangerous to be a black American, I’ve sought asylum in Canada

Kyle Lydell Canty, The Guardian
Black people or people of African descent living in the United States should consider seeking asylum in other countries. That’s what I did. On 23 September, I applied for asylum in Canada. We were brought to America as slaves, and the country hasn’t changed its ways at all since then.

Throughout my life, police departments have harassed me and made me fear for my life – this is something many other people of color will have experienced too…


Forecast on Emerging-Market Slowdown

Mark Deen, Bloomberg
The OECD trimmed its global economic forecasts for the second time in three months as slower growth in emerging markets spilled over into countries such as Germany and Japan.

World output will expand 2.9 percent in 2015 and 3.3 percent in 2016, down from the 3 percent and 3.6 percent predicted in September, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said in a semi-annual report published Monday…


The Leviathan

Jim Kunstler, kunstler.com
T he economic picture manufactured by the national consensus trance has never been more out of touch with reality in my lifetime. And so the questions as to what anyone might do can hardly be addressed. How can I protect my savings? Who do I vote for? How do I think about where my country is going? Incoherence reigns, especially in the circles ruled by those who guard the status quo, which includes the failing legacy news media.

The Federal Reserve has morphed from being a faceless background institution of the most limited purpose to a claque of necromancers and astrologasters, led by one grand vizier, in full public view pretending to steer a gigantic economic vessel that has, in fact, lost its rudder and is drifting into a maelstrom…


7 Paths to Development That Bring Neighborhoods Wealth, Not Gentrification

Marjorie Kelly and Sarah McKinley , Yes! Magazine
In cities across the nation, a few enjoy rising affluence while many struggle to get by.

An August 2015 study by The Century Foundation reported that—after a dramatic decline in concentrated poverty between 1990 and 2000—poverty has since reconcentrated. Nationwide, the number of people living in high-poverty ghettos and slums has nearly doubled since 2000. This situation is created in part by the practices of traditional economic development, which prioritize corporate subsidy after corporate subsidy over the needs of the local economy. Current trends threaten to worsen, unless we can answer the design challenge before us.

Can we create an economic system—beginning at the local level—that builds the wealth and prosperity of everyone?…


Down by the River

Rowan Jacobsen, Orion Magazine
Although you wouldn’t have known it as recently as ten years ago, the Sonoran Desert city of Yuma, Arizona, is a river town. Located near the junction of California, Arizona, and Mexico, this kiln-dry city of ninety thousand people and 3 billion heads of lettuce has always owed its existence to the Colorado River. It was here in 1849 that thousands of Gold Rushers arrived at Yuma Crossing, where two granite ledges funneled the powerful Colorado River through a deep narrows that made for the easiest ferry crossing in the Southwest. The native Quechan enjoyed a brief monopoly ferrying settlers across the Colorado until the U.S. Army established Fort Yuma in 1850, ostensibly to protect the river crossing. Regular skirmishes between the Quechan and the newcomers followed. Soon enough, more than a few Quechan were dead, and the river crossing was firmly in the hands of the United States. The Quechan were relegated to the Fort Yuma Indian Reservation on the west bank, while the city of Yuma grew up on the east bank, welcoming riverboats that steamed up from the Gulf of California laden with settlers and supplies…

News clippings image via shutterstock. Reproduced at Resilience.org with permission.

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