Fracking headlines

•Fracking by the Numbers: Key Impacts of Dirty Drilling at the State and National Level •Monterey Shale isn’t all it’s fracked up to be •West Virginia Landfills Will Now Accept Unlimited Amounts Of Often Radioactive Fracking Waste •Too Big to Believe: Top Economists Doubt California Oil Industry’s Jobs Figures •Colorado Cities Sued Over Fracking Bans by Oil, Gas Group

The debt ceiling: What’s good for the public goose is good for the private gander

Tea Partiers railing against raising the debt ceiling have a valid point. Operating on perpetual deficits and debt is unsustainable. In fact, a perpetually growing government would be impossible under any circumstances. That’s pursuant to the dictum that nothing grows forever.

Gauging the urban appetite

The agendas that are set so solemnly for international (or global) food and hunger problems cannot be used at the sub-national or local administrative level, which must analyse its own problems and find practical solutions, All too often, catering sensibly to the food needs of urban populations is ignored by policy makers, while economic ‘development’ (more infrastructure, more financing, more consumption, more personal mobility at the cost of public transport) is welcomed. The provisioning of food and the planning for shortening and localising food supply chains is usually abandoned by public administrators to the ruthless methods of the market

The necessary transition to a new economy

Even Forbes is jumping on the bandwagon of the “sharing economy” with a recent article on AirBnB. This closely follows Van Jones’s CNN article about the “sharing economy,” but the push to transform our broken economy isn’t just about sharing, though; it isn’t even just about renewable energy, energy efficiency, public transportation, and the other elements of the green economy movement. There is a “new economy movement” that’s pushing for a fundamental shift away from the neoliberal policies that have dominated our economy and society for decades.