Posts Tagged ‘ natural resource exploitation ’

Renowned Scientist Says Global Collapse “Likely”

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January 28, 2013

Podcast: Play in new window | Download According to a paper appearing in the March Proceedings of the Royal Society, “Now, for the first time, a global collapse [of civilization] appears likely.” The paper makes, in a scholarly, peer-reviewed manner, many of the same points about the existential threats that I made in my book [...]


Running Out of Water and Time

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August 15, 2012
Drought-stricken corn under a hot and rainless Iowa sky last week. Two more studies say, things are going to get worse. (Photo by USDA)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download The train is coming at 80 miles per hour. Children are playing on the railroad tracks, oblivious. The train is closer now. The children are not aware of it. You can hear the train, people are yelling at you that it is coming, and you, my friend, stand [...]


USGS: World on Really Bad Acid Trip

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February 29, 2012
It has become a fad to argue about the effect of industrial smokestacks on changing climate. But that is far from all they do, as the USGS has just reminded us. (Photo by Eric Schmuttenmaer [akeg] /Flickr)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download The US Geological Survey has been getting things right since at least the 1930s, when it correctly identified the Dust Bowl — while it was occurring — as a human-caused, not natural, event. Few people recognized the implications at the time, few know them today, and not many [...]


Water Scientists say Brace for Impact

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October 26, 2011
A cow’s carcass in Northern Kenya, photographed last week, testifies to the reality of what happens when the water runs out. And it is running out. (Photo courtesy CIAT The International Center for Tropical Agriculture/Flickr)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download The burgeoning world population, already grown far beyond the numbers the planet can sustain, is increasing its consumption of water twice as fast as it is growing, according to the World Resources Institute. In a world already profoundly short of clean water, where the number of people is [...]


Saudis Try Drinking Oil, Burning Water, Eating Money

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October 20, 2011
An oil-and-water cocktail is hard to burn and nasty to drink, but the Saudis, running out of both, are drinking hard and burning bright. (Photo by Yortw/Flickr)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download While the industrialized world approaches the brink of peak oil — the point at which supply can no longer, ever, meet demand — the supplier of much of that oil, Saudi Arabia, is teetering on the brink of peak water. With increasing desperation, the kingdom is juggling the [...]


Experts Shout “Fire!” in Crowded Planet. Crowd Ignores Them

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October 18, 2011
Some experts believe, although not without contradiction from other experts, that increased temperatures in the place where we live may because for some level of concern. (Photo by Ada Be/Flickr)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download A conference in London this past weekend on climate and health concluded that the “alarming speed” of the depletion of natural resources around the world, now being accelerated by climate change, poses “an immediate, growing and grave threat” to health and security everywhere. The medical, academic and military [...]


Report: Trawlers Scraping Last Life from Oceans

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September 8, 2011
A new study details how factory trawlers such as the Northern Osprey are stripping the deep oceans of fish that cannot replace themselves. (Photo by Dennis Jarvis/Flickr)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download A perfunctory article deep inside yesterday’s Washington Post paints a horrifying picture of exhausted oceans — described as “more akin to a watery desert” —  being scraped clean of the last traces of marine life by pitiless, gargantuan deep-water trawlers operating beyond the law and beyond sanity.  The story is [...]


Energy Industries Rush to Sell Out Their Country

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September 6, 2011
1252 people were arrested for demonstrating against a proposed tar-sands pipeline from Canada. Meanwhile, the real crimes wre being committed elsewhere. (Photo by tarsandsaction/flickr)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download The most real and present danger to the security — indeed, the survival — of the United States is the advent of peak oil (the time when the oil-producing nations’ declining output can no longer meet the rising demand of the oil-consuming nations). The condition is imminent (even [...]


The Mother of All Fracking Lies

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August 17, 2011
Water from one of the wells never harmed by fracking explodes, in a scene from the documentary "Gasland."

Podcast: Play in new window | Download The claim that not one single water well has been harmed by hydraulic fracturing for natural gas is the anthem of the oil and gas industry as it presses its case to perforate the shale formations of the world without regard for the vital water resources also to [...]


A New Tragedy of the Commons: Water Banks

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August 1, 2011
The tragedy of the commons is that herdsmen will overgraze a common pasture unless constrained. The same, it seems, applies to water. (Photo by Srinivasa Krishna/Flickr)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download If you liked what investment bankers and hedge-fund managers did to our economy in recent years, you’re going to love what water banks are doing to our ecosystem. The same, time-tested methods are in play: unleash unrestrained greed on a commodity that everyone needs in order to make [...]


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