2 million every 5 days....

The world's population of 6.4 billion continues to grow by more than 70 million people per year—nearly two million every five days—yet today's population story is not only about rising numbers, it's also a tale of too many restless young people in some parts of the world, a larger share of elderly in others, and the economic instabilities of a globalized world.

World Watch magazine - Population

BP expects £3.5bn income from alternative energy

BP promised yesterday to build the biggest alternative power business in the world, capable of producing $6bn (£3.5bn) worth of revenues per annum from projects in Britain and abroad within 10 years.

Read on...

and this one also.

Entering a dark age of innovation

SURFING the web and making free internet phone calls on your Wi-Fi laptop, listening to your iPod on the way home, it often seems that, technologically speaking, we are enjoying a golden age. Human inventiveness is so finely honed, and the globalised technology industries so productive, that there appears to be an invention to cater for every modern whim.

But according to a new analysis, this view couldn't be more wrong:
far from being in technological nirvana, we are fast approaching a
new dark age. That, at least, is the conclusion of Jonathan Huebner,
a physicist working at the Pentagon's Naval Air Warfare Center in
China Lake, California. He says the rate of technological innovation
reached a peak a century ago and has been declining ever since. And
like the lookout on the Titanic who spotted the fateful iceberg,
Huebner sees the end of innovation looming dead ahead.

Read the full New Scientist article

Environment 'devastated by tax-free airline fuel'

The Independent, 23 November 2005 - Aviation fuel is untaxed, despite the growing evidence that it is undermining international efforts to reduce the damaging gases that cause global warming.

The high cost of air travel

ENVIRONMENTAL COST PER PASSENGER OF A RETURN FLIGHT FROM LONDON TO:

AMSTERDAM

Miles: 217
Fuel: 36 kg
Greenhouse gases: 341 kg CO2

The greenhouse gas emitted per passenger is equivalent to the weight of 179 Edam cheeses.

ATHENS
Miles: 1,485
Fuel: 250 kg
Greenhouse gases: 2,336 kg CO2

After visiting, someone would have to go without heating, cooking, lighting and mechanised transport for 2 years and 9 months to make up for their impact on the environment.

DUBLIN
Miles: 288
Fuel: 48kg
Greenhouse gases: 891 kg CO2

Travelling by car and ferry is 13 times more considerate to the ozone layer than flying.

OSLO
Miles: 714
Fuel: 120 kg
Greenhouse gases: 1,122 kg CO2

The amount of carbon emitted " equivalent to the weight of four reindeer " would be cut by 85 per cent through travelling by car.

NEW YORK
Miles: 3,455
Fuel: 414 kg
Greenhouse gases: 3,863 kg CO2

A visitor would have to take 700 two-hour bus tours of the Big Apple to emit the same amount of CO2.

SYDNEY
Miles: 10,557
Fuel: 1,196 kg
Greenhouse gases: 11,149 kg CO2

The carbon emitted per passenger is equivalent to a mini driving around the earth 640 times, or the weight of four Indian elephants.

Figures on jet fuel and greenhouse gases based on 80% occupancy on jumbo jet DC-747.
All greenhouse gases expressed as warming equivalent in CO2.

Source: air travel calculator at www.chooseclimate.org and United Nations Environment Programme.

Carbon dioxide levels highest for 650,000 years

Shafts of ancient ice pulled from Antarctica's frozen depths show
that for at least 650,000 years three important heat-trapping
greenhouse gases never reached recent atmospheric levels caused by
human activities, scientists are reporting today.

The measured gases were carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide.
Concentrations have risen over the last several centuries at a pace
far beyond that seen before humans began intensively clearing
forests and burning coal, oil and other fossil fuels.

"CO2 and climate are like two people handcuffed to each other," he
said. "Where one goes, the other must follow. Leadership may change,
or they may march in step, but they are never far from each other.
Our current CO2 levels appear to be far out of balance with climate
when viewed through these results, reinforcing the idea that we have
significant modern warming to go."

New York Times article - 25 Nov 2005

Mad Max meets American Gothic

Is there a friendlier option for the post-peak future?

Can you feel the mood shifting? I can. A year of spiking speculation about peak oil and the death of suburbia has rattled lots of Americans. Plenty of people suddenly feel that real, civilization-shaking change might be around the next corner. And plenty of them also feel frozen in the headlights, unsure what, if anything, to do about it. Other than wait.

It reminds me a little of the very early days in the fight over global warming. Appalled at the forecasts of global destruction, some of us demanded immediate and strong action—high taxes on carbon emissions, for instance, and never mind the pain. Others—more moderate or more politically realistic—advocated a suite of what they called "no regrets" policies. They suggested, say, gradual rises in gas mileage, higher efficiency standards for appliances. Even if climate change proved to be overblown hooey, they pointed out, such rational and easy measures would still save us money, reduce conventional pollution, and so on. These steps were like taking out a modest amount of insurance; whatever happened we'd have no regrets about having adopted them.

In actual fact, of course, we took neither the urgent nor the more relaxed steps. Instead we bought Ford Explorers. Now everything that was frozen is melting and soon we will have . . . regrets.

Orion Magazine

Global warming hits Himalayas

Nawa Jigtar was working in the village of Ghat, in Nepal, when the sound of crashing sent him rushing out of his home. He emerged to see his herd of cattle being swept away by a wall of water.

Ghat was destroyed when a lake, high in the Himalayas, burst its banks. Swollen with glacier meltwaters, its walls of rock and ice had suddenly disintegrated. Several million cubic metres of water crashed down the mountain.

The roof of the world is changing, as can be seen by Nepal's Khumbu glacier, where Hillary and Tenzing began their 1953 Everest expedition. It has retreated three miles since their ascent. Almost 95 per cent of Himalayan glaciers are also shrinking - and that kind of ice loss has profound implications, not just for Nepal and Bhutan, but for surrounding nations, including China, India and Pakistan.

Not only villages are under threat: Nepal has built an array of hydro-electric plants and is now selling electricity to India and other countries. But these could be destroyed in coming years, warned Reynolds. 'A similar lake burst near Machu Picchu in Peru recently destroyed an entire hydro-electric plant. The same thing is waiting to happen in Nepal.'

Essential Oil : Oil Crisis for beginners

This ‘book’ serves to look at the fossil fuel & energy crisis that we will experience in the years ahead. This book is a collection of links to excellent documents and articles on the subject.

You should be able to print off all the documents you are lead to via these links to create ‘Essential Oil’ – to give a beginner an excellent understanding of the oil & energy problem. This is the first edition – expect revisions in the weeks ahead.

Cities of Joy

Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogotá, believes that cities of the Third World can offer us lessons about urban quality-of-life.

PEÑALOSA'S IDEAS STAND as beacon of hope for cities of the South, which will absorb much of the world's population growth over the next half-century. These are places with the usual complications of rapid urban expansion (pollution, slums, crime, unemployment, sprawl, corruption, traffic) aggravated by deep poverty. Based on his experiences in Bogotá, however, Peñalosa believes it's a major mistake to give up on these places, no matter how out-of-control their problems appear.

"If we in the Third World measure our success or failure as a society in terms of income, we would have to classify ourselves as losers until the end of time," declares Peñalosa, a tall man with salt-and-pepper hair and trim beard. "With our limited resources, we have to invent other ways to measure success. This might mean that all kids have access to sports facilities, libraries, parks, schools or nurseries."

Link to this article

Renewable Energy Markets Show Strong Growth - REN21

Global investment in renewable energy set a new record of $30 billion in 2004, according to a report produced by Worldwatch Institute for the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century (REN21).
Technologies such as wind, solar, biomass, geothermal, and small hydro now provide 160 gigawatts of electricity generating capacity, about 4 percent of the world total, the report finds.

"Renewable energy has become big business," said Eric Martinot, lead author of Renewables 2005: Global Status Report. Martinot, who is a Senior Fellow at the Worldwatch Institute and a Lecturer at Tsinghua University in Beijing, notes that renewable energy is attracting some of the world's largest companies, including General Electric, Siemens, Sharp, and Royal Dutch Shell. The report estimates that nearly 40 million households worldwide heat their water with solar collectors, most of them installed in the last five years. Altogether, renewable energy industries provide 1.7 million jobs, most of them skilled and well-paying.

Author Eric Martinot's website.

Prepare for Peak Oil Now - Richard Heinberg

Only 150 years ago, 85 percent of all work being accomplished in the U.S. economy was done by muscle power -- most of that by animal muscle, about a quarter of it by human muscle.
Today, that percentage is effectively zero; virtually all of the physical work supporting our economy is done by fuel-fed machines.
What caused this transformation? Quite simply, it was oil's comparative cheapness and versatility.
Perhaps you have had the experience of running out of gas and having to push your car a few feet to get it off the road. That's hard work. Now imagine pushing your car 20 or 30 miles. That is the service performed for us by a single gallon of gasoline, for which we currently pay $2.65. That gallon of fuel is the energy equivalent of roughly six weeks of hard human labor.

It was inevitable that we would become addicted to this stuff, once we had developed a few tools for using it and for extracting it. Today petroleum provides 97 percent of our transportation fuel, and is also a feedstock for chemicals and plastics.

It is no exaggeration to say that we live in a world that runs on oil.

Read the full story

This paper, exclusively available to AlterNet, was presented at a Reception with Their Royal Highnesses The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, at the California Leaders Round Table Dialogue on Peak Oil, Climate Change and Business Action; November 7, 2005 in San Francisco.

Homo sapiens hydrocarbonus

The images of the Earth at night show us how great our reach is. They also show us how overextended we are, and how vulnerable we are to the collapse which inevitably follows upon the overextension of any species beyond the carrying capacity of its environment.
The abundance of resource wealth - particularly energy wealth, which the technological revolution of the last two centuries brought into our grasp, has been largely squandered.
Our population has climbed exponentially following the curve of energy production. But the subspecies which has evolved over the last couple centuries, Homo sapiens hydrocarbonus, could quite possibly be the most short-lived lifeform on the planet.

The world we face will not be able to support Homo sapiens hydrocarbonus for much longer. And we have all but forgotten how to exist without hydrocarbons. It is time for Homo sapiens to
evolve a new subspecies, and hopefully this subspecies will be wiser than hydrocarbonus. We must make it our hope and our goal that the next subspecies will be more egalitarian in nature, possessing a better understanding of her place in the scheme of things and born of a vision of sustainability and harmony.

Global Commons Institute - GCI

The Global Commons Institute (GCI) is an independent group concerned with the protection of the global commons.

The global commons is the common heritage of all humanity. It comprises those features of the geo-biosphere - such as forests, biodiversity, oceans and global atmosphere - that in combination form the global climate system

GCI was founded in 1990 after the Second World Climate Conference. Since that time GCI has contributed to the work of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UN FCCC) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

GCI is based in the UK. Its director is Aubrey Meyer

Greenland melting...

Satellite images show that, after decades of stability, a major glacier draining the Greenland ice sheet has dramatically increased its speed and retreated nearly five miles in recent years.

These changes could contribute to rapid melting of the Greenland ice sheet and cause the global sea level to rise faster than expected, according to researchers studying the glacier.

Read the full story

The pictures above: Seasonal surface melt extent on the Greenland Ice Sheet has been observed by satellite since 1979 and shows an increasing trend. The melt zone, where summer warmth turns snow and ice around the edges of the ice sheet into slush and ponds of meltwater, has been expanding inland and to record high elevations in recent years. Source: Arctic Impacts of Arctic Warming, Cambridge Press, 2004.

The Big Thaw - The Independent Online Edition - 21 Nov 2005

Human stupidity...

Only 2 things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity;
and I’m not sure about the former….

Albert Einstein

Two myths that keep the world poor

Global poverty is a hot topic right now. But anyone serious about ending it needs to understand the true causes, argues Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva.

Vandana Shiva

From rock singer Bob Geldof to UK politician Gordon Brown, the world suddenly seems to be full of high-profile people with their own plans to end poverty. Jeffrey Sachs, however, is not a simply a do-gooder but one of the world’s leading economists, head of the Earth Institute and in charge of a UN panel set up to promote rapid development. So when he launched his book The End of Poverty, people everywhere took notice. Time magazine even made it into a cover story.

But, there is a problem with Sachs’ how-to-end poverty prescriptions. He simply doesn’t understand where poverty comes from. He seems to view it as the original sin. “A few generations ago, almost everybody was poor,” he writes, then adding: “The Industrial Revolution led to new riches, but much of the world was left far behind.”

This is a totally false history of poverty. The poor are not those who have been “left behind”; they are the ones who have been robbed. The wealth accumulated by Europe and North America are largely based on riches taken from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Without the destruction of India’s rich textile industry, without the takeover of the spice trade, without the genocide of the native American tribes, without African slavery, the Industrial Revolution would not have resulted in new riches for Europe or North America. It was this violent takeover of Third World resources and markets that created wealth in the North and poverty in the South.

Two of the great economic myths of our time allow people to deny this intimate link, and spread misconceptions about what poverty is.
First, the destruction of nature and of people’s ability to look after themselves are blamed not on industrial growth and economic colonialism, but on poor people themselves. Poverty, it is stated, causes environmental destruction. The disease is then offered as a cure: further economic growth is supposed to solve the very problems of poverty and ecological decline that it gave rise to in the first place. This is the message at the heart of Sachs’ analysis.
The second myth is an assumption that if you consume what you produce, you do not really produce, at least not economically speaking. If I grow my own food, and do not sell it, then it doesn’t contribute to GDP, and therefore does not contribute towards “growth”.

Read on...

Deforestation continues at an alarming rate

14 November 2005, Rome

Each year about 13 million hectares of the world’s forests are lost due to deforestation, but the rate of net forest loss is slowing down, thanks to new planting and natural expansion of existing forests, FAO announced today.
The annual net loss of forest area between 2000 and 2005 was 7.3 million hectares/year -- an area about the size of Sierra Leone or Panama -- down from an estimated 8.9 million ha/yr between 1990 and 2000.

These are some of the key findings of The Global Forest Resources Assessment 2005 (FRA 2005), the most comprehensive assessment to date of forest resources, their uses and value, covering 229 countries and territories between 1990 and 2005.

Forests have multiple functions, including conservation of biological diversity, soil and water, supplying wood and non-wood products, providing recreation opportunities and serving as carbon sinks.

Forests are particularly important as carbon sinks: the amount of carbon stored in forest biomass alone is about 283 Gigatonnes (Gt) of carbon, though it decreased globally by 1.1 Gt annually between 1990 and 2005. Carbon stored in forest biomass, deadwood, litter and soil together is roughly 50 percent more than the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

Key findings

Press Release

Just another day for you and me in paradise....

She calls out to the man on the street"
Sir, can you help me?
It's cold and I've nowhere to sleep,
Is there somewhere you can tell me?"

He walks on, doesn't look back
He pretends he can't hear her
Starts to whistle as he crosses the street
She's embarrassed to be there

Oh, think twice, 'cause it's another day for
You and me in paradise
Oh, think twice, 'cause it's another day for you,
You and me in paradise

She calls out to the man on the street
He can see she's been crying
She's got blisters on the soles of her feet
She can't walk but she's trying

Oh, think twice,'cause it's another day for
You and me in paradise
Oh, think twice, it's just another day for you,
You and me in paradise

(Just think about it)

Oh lord, is there nothing more anybody can do
Oh lord, there must be something you can say

You can tell from the lines on her face
You can see that she's been there
Probably been moved on from every place
'Cos she didn't fit in there

Oh, think twice,'cause it's another day for
You and me in paradise
Oh think twice, it's just another day for you,
You and me in paradise

It's just another day for you and me in paradise
It's just another day for you and me in paradise

"Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important."

T.S. Elliot

Running on Empty - Jeremy Leggett

Jeremy Leggett explains how a bid to defuse the coming global peak-oil crisis was sidelined

"Political systems do not deal easily with long term threats, even if they have a probability of 100%," Schlesinger warned.

"His message was clear: economic horror will descend on the world if we do not plan ahead, and the time to start is now. We are asleep at the wheel, like the citizens of Pompeii and Herculaneum were, looking up at their volcano and thinking that its dormant state would be destiny. They ignored the rumbles, and ended up buried under ten metres of ash."

Excerpts from: Running on Empty - Jeremy Leggett

Published in The Guardian - Nov 8, 2005

Jeremy Leggett's book on peak oil, Half Gone: Oil, Gas, Hot Air and the Global Energy Crisis, is published this week by Portobello Books.

Ode magazine

Ode is an independent magazine about the people and ideas that are changing the world.

Sometimes it’s difficult to see beyond the war, poverty, exploitation and pollution that the mainstream media use to fill our view of the world. But there is more to life. There are other stories to report. Stories of countless initiatives being launched around the globe by people devoted to justice, respect and equality. Stories that bridge the gap between thinking and doing, between rage and hope, and the painful gap between the rich and poor – and thus build peace and sustainability. That is the news that Ode promises to deliver. By reading Ode you connect to a network of positive change and inspiration. Ode points the way to knowing better, doing better and feeling better.

Ode publishes ‘the stories that are different from the ones we are brainwashed to believe’ (Arundhati Roy). Ode challenges us and invites us to change. We realise that change starts with information. We can only make a choice to change things for the better when we learn how it can be done. Similarly, we can only change our behaviour when we understand the harmful effects of what we do. Ode teaches and inspires us, helps us see how every one of us can contribute to a more just and sustainable world.

Ode is published monthly in English, Dutch and Portuguese.

More about Ode

keep it simple

This book is for anyone who wants a less complicated life. Drawing on examples and inspiration from a wide range of sources, there are ideas and thoughts to help you deal with money, simplify your possessions, recognise your own priorities, 'budget' your time, find space for quietness and shape your own rule of lifeIf you want to live more simply, if you want to create space for what is really important in your life, then this friendly, funny and thought-provoking book is for you.


More on simple living:
The Simple Living Network
Simple Living

Time Magazine finally covers Peak Oil

Time magazine became the most recent mainstream publication to finally give detailed coverage to Peak Oil. Its Oct. 31 twelve-page spread on “The Future of Energy” follows major articles in USA Today, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle and other big city dailies in recent months. They finally mention the coming Peak Oil that many geologists have been warning us about for years.

Another article on this

Mighty Amazon close to running out of water

Desperate times ... canoes stranded in the Amazon River near Santarem in Brazil. The drought has caused many tributaries to completely dry out, isolating some communities.

A state of emergency has been declared in the Amazon River basin, which is suffering its worst drought in 42 years.

More than 1000 towns and hamlets that rely on the river for transport have been cut off as water levels fall, making the river unnavigable.

Several major tributaries, as well as parts of the main river itself, contain only a fraction of their normal volumes of water, and lakes are drying up.

The Amazonas Government secretary Jose Melo said hamlets cut off from the outside world by the low river level were running out of drinking water, medical supplies and provisions.

The region bakes in intense heat of about 38 degrees at this time of year. The level of the Rio Negro, a tributary of the Amazon, has dropped 12 metres since July to just 16 metres.

The Amazon River, South America's largest, has hit its lowest level in the 36 years since records have been kept near its source in Peru.

The Amazon is the second-longest river in the world, after the Nile, but discharges far more water at its mouth than any other.

"This drought and its effects are really shocking," said Carlos Rittl, Greenpeace Brazil's climate campaigner. "Towns are lacking food, medicines and fuel because boats cannot get through."

To make matters worse, as the rainforest becomes increasingly dry, damaging wildfires are regularly breaking out across the region, destroying trees.

Greenpeace blames deforestation and climate change for the drought. "The Amazon is caught between these two destructive forces, and their combined effects threaten to flip its ecosystems from forest to savannah," Mr Rittl said.

WHY I AM SAVING THE WORLD

So, as a new Dark Age approaches, are you just going to carry on living your life as if nothing has changed?
John-Paul Flintoff, for one, decided he couldn't bury his head in the sand. He explains how he went on a one-man crusade to show that humanity can adapt and survive.