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CRISIS POLICY FORUM PUBLISHED THIS MONTH AN INTRODUCTORY TEXT FOR AN ACTION PLAN TO CURB GLOBAL EMISSIONS & TRANSFER TO GREEN ECONOMY 28 November 2007 :: Crisis Policy Forum Due to the science we already have, the laws we have to govern our own activity and to force government to act for the public health, we face the real possibility of being forced, in American courts, in the future, to pay for damage done to the most affected populations in other parts of the world, as a result of inaction by our government. The public voice, and those campaigning for the level of public respect needed for election to office, should bring this issue to the fore, push for real initiatives to tackle the problem boldly, in a collaborative way, now. [Keep Reading] THE COST OF GOING GREEN MAY ACTUALLY BE NEW BOOM ECONOMY Ecological advancement and retro-fitting will be the new boom economy. Let's make sure we do everything possible to fund not only research, but implementation. What will it cost to produce an environmentally-oriented overhaul of the US economy, by way of the private sector, with government incentives, and to the ever-growing benefit of private sector interests? [Full Story] CHINESE CITY EXAMPLE OF CRISIS IN FRESH WATER FOR FUTURE DEVELOPMENT Shijiazhuang, a city of 2 million on the North China Plain saw 11% growth last year, is undergoing a population and construction boom, and is inviting new residents with money to spend to inhabit water-intensive luxury housing, even as irreplaceable aquifers are drying up, and water tables are dropping at alarming speed. Fossil aquifers upon which the region is already over-dependent may be dry by 2037. [Full Story] WATER RESOURCE STRESS: GLOBAL ECONOMIC-ECOLOGICAL FACTOR FOR THE 21ST CENTURY Water is one of the "fundamental building-blocks of life", as is often said in science, in biology classrooms, in medicine, theology, environmental policy debates, and in cosmology and space exploration. It is also a commodity whose economic reality is increasingly defined by chronic scarcity and often intensely uneven distribution. [Full Story] ENERGY INDEPENDENCE & CLIMATE PROTECTION: A BUSINESS PERSPECTIVE We are currently in the grips of the many problems inherent in a petroleum-centered economy and increasingly, business is seeing the urgent need to transition to a cleaner, more cost-effective, less politically hazardous, and economically and environmentally sustainable future. A video documentary now suggests the time has come when government, business and the public are aware of the need to build a comprehensively "new economy". [Full Story] PINK SOLAR CELLS CAN PRODUCE POWER AT 25% OF CURRENT COST As environmental groups, lobbyists and the general public push for more environmentally friendly industrial practices, scientists are finding innovative ways to bring down costs and increase the efficiency of renewable resources. The dye-sensitive solar cells (DSSC), with a pinkish sheen, now being developed at Ohio State University, are an example of the type of engineering innovation that could bring about a genuine green-power revolution. [Full Story] ENERGY POLICY, OR THE UNNECESSARY PROLONGATION OF AN INEFFICIENT STATUS QUO? The US Congress is still working on producing legislation that would bring together federal law and executive regulatory policy in one comprehensive national energy strategy. The special consulting group organized in 2001 by the vice president wanted nuclear plants and "clean coal", but both carry huge costs for preventing or reversing high levels of contamination, and neither is broadly considered the "future" by scientific consensus. [Full Story] NEW STRAIN OF STEM RUST THREATENS WHEAT CROP ACROSS AFRICA, SOUTHERN ASIA A new strain of wheat-eating stem rust has emerged as a threat to the global food supply. Ug99, named for the place and date of its discovery, Uganda, 1999, takes advantage of weaknesses in wheat varieties which were specifically developed to be resistant to stem rust, and which have been so for nearly 4 decades. [Full Story] DISTILLERY DEMAND FOR GRAIN TO FUEL CARS VASTLY UNDERSTATED Investment in fuel ethanol distilleries has soared since the late-2005 oil price hikes, but data collection in this fast-changing sector has fallen behind. Because of inadequate data collection on the number of new plants under construction, the quantity of grain that will be needed for fuel ethanol distilleries has been vastly understated. Farmers, feeders, food processors, ethanol investors, and grain-importing countries are basing decisions on incomplete data. [Full Story] GEOTHERMAL: WEST DIGS DEEP FOR THE NEXT BIG THING IN POWER Geothermal energy is increasingly being touted by scientists and researchers as one of the most efficient and environmentally friendly sources of power available. Currently, geothermal sources supply enough energy, 2,800 megawatts, to run 2.8 million American homes. [Full Story] SHIFTING PROTEIN SOURCES The composition of world meat production has changed dramatically over the last half-century or so. From 1950 until 1978, beef and pork vied for the lead. Then the world meat consumption pattern began to change as economic reforms adopted in China in 1978 led to a dramatic climb in pork production, pushing it far ahead of beef worldwide. [Full Story] THE WORLD AFTER OIL PEAKS 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, and in a world of declining oil production, no country can use more oil except at the expense of others. [Full Story] 'THE WIND RUSH IS ON' IN TEXAS State authorities in Texas have announced plans to build the nation's largest offshore wind farm. The facility would be built about 10 miles off Padre Island in the Gulf of Mexico and would consist of 500 wind-harvesting turbines, 400 feet in height. [Full Story] SCIENCE ABOVE TECHNOCRACY, FOR A FULLER FUTURE Science is in many ways an artform, but it is specifically and most importantly, the art of knowledge. It is not philosophy, not a study of how knowledge comes about, what it is, whether it can be trusted or whether we need to adjust our thinking; it is, instead, a direct study of the natural world, its tendencies, its evidence, and its capacity to work with us, for us and around us. [Full Story] WORLD WATER DAY HIGHLIGHTS EFFECTS OF POVERTY, CLEAN WATER SCARCITY ON 1 BILLION WORLDWIDE Parts of east Africa have not seen rain for six years and six nations there are facing extreme famine. Through events organized by UNESCO, the UN and NGOs are hosting World Water Day today, to raise awareness of the problem of scarcity of safe drinking water affecting an estimated 1 billion people worldwide. [Full Story] BOTTLED WATER: POURING RESOURCES DOWN THE DRAIN 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. [Full Story] NORWAY TO BUILD ARCTIC SEED BANK The Norwegian government has announced plans to create a global seed bank, to be located in the nation's arctic subsoil, to preserve all world crop varieties against extinction, should any number of natural disasters strike. The seed bank will be located inside a frozen mountain on the island of Spitsbergen, in the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. [Full Story] PERMAFROST MELT IMPERILS INFRASTRUCTURE, HOMES A new study by American researchers, published today in Geophysical Research Letters, suggests the top layers of arctic permafrost could be melted by the end of this century. Researchers believe the melt would release large amounts of contained carbon into the atmosphere, contributing to an accelerating cycle of warming and interrupting deep ocean currents that help regulate the planet's climate. [Full Story] DEPENDENT SPECIES ALSO FACE EXTINCTION PERIL New calls from conservation groups to take swift and sweeping action to protect species endangered by global climate change are gaining attention. This week, three such groups filed suit against the US government to gain listing for the polar bear as a species endangered by climate change. A planetary "extinction crisis" is spreading and accelerating... [Full Story] GREEN LIGHT FOR RENEWABLE FUELS Renewable fuels have enjoyed a lot of attention in recent months, in a market driven by escalating oil costs, strained fuel stocks, worsening environmental degradation, and promises by the G8 to reduce carbon emissions. Revelations about the vulnerabilities inherent in the fossil fuel infrastructure, together with new technological advances in wind- and solar-based power generation mean renewables are now directly competitive with traditional fuel sources. [Full Story] HANDICAPPING FOR NUCLEAR POWER Petroleum is a finite resource, a "fossil" fuel that cannot be replaced when existing volume has been exhausted. The UK is finding it hard to cope with Kyoto-agreed obligations. Current infrastructure cannot extract enough power from wind or tide... So, the nuclear power lobby came up with a great solution: build more nuclear power plants despite the enormous costs of maintenance, cleanup and storage. [Full Story] CARTERET ATOLLS OFFICIALLY TO EVACUATE PLANET'S FIRST CLIMATE CHANGE REFUGEES On 26 November, the Guardian newspaper first reported that inhabitants of the Carteret atolls, six islands which form part of Papua New Guinea, in the southwest Pacific, have been subject to the first officially mandated permanent climate change evacuations. Rising sea levels have placed the circular grouping of six islands in serious danger of permanent inundation, and have left the soil useless for harvesting traditional foods. [Full Story] AIDS KILLED MORE THAN 3 MILLION IN 2005 The human immuno-deficiency virus (HIV) and its deadly end-stage syndrome, AIDS, killed at least 3 million people in 2005. HIV also infected 5 million new people around the world, the largest single increase on record, though similar numbers were reported for 2003. The pandemic is still extremely deadly and is still spreading. [Full Story] CHINESE CITY STRUGGLES WITHOUT WATER, AMID CHEMICAL CONTAMINATION The Chinese city of Harbin and environs, located in Heilongjiang province, and home to an estimated 3.8 million people, is beset with a severe water crisis. Panic buying followed hoarding of municipal water, after authorities announced they would shut off the entire municipal water system, to spend four days testing and cleaning water reportedly contaminated by runoff from a chemical plant explosion. [Full Story] ECONOMY OF ERRORS: HOW ABUNDANCE MAY BRING SCARCITY The global economy in its present form is not only full of and forced to deal with problematic distortions; it has come to depend a great deal on the "bubble" effect of certain miscalculations and manipulations. Assumptions built into weak threads in the economic web mean that markets are not able to set prices or distribute wealth at sustainable levels. [Full Story] WHY WIND IS SMARTER Wind energy offers something no carbon-based fuel can offer: zero emissions, zero cleanup, local control and reasonable local supply everywhere on Earth, and it is 100% non-climate disruptive and essentially infinitely renewable. In fact, the overall global wind resource far exceeds our capacity even to harness or to use it. As of 2003, Pentagon-commissioned research had found that just 3 wind-rich midwestern states possess sufficient wind resources to power the entire US economy with existing wind-turbine technology. [Full Story] DOWN TO THE LAST DROP: THE COMING RIPPLE EFFECT OF THE PROJECTED OIL PEAK Petroleum is a finite resource, an energy-rich "fossil" substance, and we can only burn what we find, until it is gone. "Peak Oil" is the moment when extant reserves of crude oil are no longer enough to sustain the global economy's annual production levels, and production will no longer be able to match increases in demand... A permanent disruption in the supply of cheap oil means a worrying and widespread threat to the world's food-production and distribution systems. [Full Story] WORLD DEMANDS RENEWABLE RESOURCES AT BONN The Renewables 2004 global conference in Bonn, Germany, has resulted in recommendations for more aggressive research and development of renewable energy resources. Citing persistent unrest in oil rich countries, the negative environmental impact of fossil fuels, along with soaring prices and the economic problems associated with any finite resource, the conference noted the benefits to economic and political security of using resources that are local, clean and renewable. [Full Story] EPI REPORTS STRAIN ON GLOBAL FOOD HARVEST, COMING SHORTAGES The Earth Policy Institute is reporting new strains on global food stocks and current and coming harvests. According to the non-profit research organization, global food security is now imperiled by the fourth consecutive year of increasing grain harvest shortfalls. In 2003, the shortfall was "easily the largest on record", reducing reserve stocks to 30 year lows, pushing wheat and corn prices to their highest level in 7 years and rice to a 5-year high. During the current year, the momentum of falling grain stocks may be compounded by other evolving crises, such as "falling water tables and rising temperatures". If this year's harvest shows another vast shortfall, grain prices will continue to rise, affecting economies around the world. [For more: EPI at EcoVaria.com]
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