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Weak Dollar is Canary in Proverbial Economic Coal Mine

October 24, 2007 :: admin :: No Comment Yet

Americans living overseas see the front edge of the dollar collapse. Life in Europe seems to be twice as expensive as just a few years ago, as Euro-driven price-inflation meets the rapid drop in the value of the dollar against major currencies, like the Euro and the British Pound Sterling. Americans at home are facing higher food prices, higher fuel costs, and an overall slowdown in home-buying.

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Bottled Water: Pouring Resources Down the Drain

October 15, 2007 :: admin :: No Comment Yet

The global consumption of bottled water reached 154 billion liters (41 billion gallons) in 2004, up 57 percent from the 98 billion liters consumed five years earlier. Even in areas where tap water is safe to drink, demand for bottled water is increasing—producing unnecessary garbage and consuming vast quantities of energy. Although in the industrial world bottled water is often no healthier than tap water, it can cost up to 10,000 times more. At as much as $2.50 per liter ($10 per gallon), bottled water costs more than gasoline.

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Preventive Measures to Curb Damage from Climate Change: How Close Are They?

October 14, 2007 :: admin :: No Comment Yet

Can the world prepare to face the potential economic fallout from increasingly intense weather phenomena, prolonged heat waves, desertification, ice-melt and flooding? While there is no clear proof Hurricane Katrina was a direct result of climate change, hurricanes of such intensity will become increasingly frequent as Gulf waters warm; the aftermath provides real instruction for just how fragile the social fabric can be in the face of natural disaster.

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Nobel Peace Prize Awarded for Work to Raise Awareness About Global Climate Change

October 14, 2007 :: admin :: No Comment Yet

Climate change is no longer controversial; it has been accepted as scientific fact by a global consensus of researchers and policy makers, including the Bush White House, which resisted acknowledging human activities were a vital contributing factor, until recently. Now the Nobel committee selecting the Peace Prize laureate has raised the issue of warming posing a major international security crisis.

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The World After Oil Peaks

October 13, 2007 :: admin :: 3 Comments

Peak oil is described as the point where oil production stops rising and begins its inevitable long-term decline. In the face of fast-growing demand, this means rising oil prices. But even if oil production growth simply slows or plateaus, the resulting tightening in supplies will still drive the price of oil upward, albeit less rapidly.

Few countries are planning a reduction in their use of oil. Even though peak oil may be imminent, most countries are counting on much higher oil consumption in the decades ahead, building automobile assembly plants, roads, highways, parking lots, and suburban housing developments as though cheap oil will last forever.

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World Grain Stocks for 2006 Fell to 57 Days of Consumption

October 11, 2007 :: admin :: No Comment Yet

The world grain harvest for 2006 was projected mid-year to fall short of consumption by 61 million tons, marking the sixth time in the last seven years that production has failed to satisfy demand. As a result of these shortfalls, world carryover stocks at the end of this crop year were projected to drop to 57 days of consumption, the shortest buffer since the 56-day-low in 1972 that triggered a doubling of grain prices.

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Project Quipu: Integrated Economic Atlas for the 21st Century

October 8, 2007 :: admin :: One Comment

Examining the manner in which financial news is reported in the popular media, HotSpring proposes to create a system whereby live-update, rss-technology, and financial and editorial expertise, come together to produce a reliable up-to-the-minute resource for evaluating broad economic trends and engagements, without limiting analysis to single-parameter references like GDP or individual stock indices.

It is often thought that in order to organize ideas or to put some kind of order to any analysis, one needs uniformity, a limited number of generic categories and a single system of uncomplicated parameters by which to categorize each subject under review. But the truth is, this uniformity is not and will not be the rule of any part of lived reality.

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Darfur Scene of Ongoing Ethnic Cleansing, Largest UN Peacekeeping Force Deployed

October 4, 2007 :: admin :: No Comment Yet

Darfur, beset by years of bloody internecine violence, with the Khartoum-backed janjaweed militia killing civilians in numbers the US government has officially declared to be genocide, is still struggling to find a real beginning for peace. For years, human rights groups have pleaded with the international community to intervene, with or without the support of the Khartoum government. Finally, in August, the UN Security Council ordered the world’s largest peacekeeping mission to secure Darfur.

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