MASSIVE DIVERSION OF U.S. GRAIN TO FUEL CARS IS RAISING WORLD FOOD PRICES

Lester R. Brown

If you think you are spending more each week at the supermarket, you may be right. The escalating share of the U.S. grain harvest going to ethanol distilleries is driving up food prices worldwide.

Corn prices have doubled over the last year, wheat futures are trading at their highest level in 10 years, and rice prices are rising too. In addition, soybean futures have risen by half. A Bloomberg analysis notes that the soaring use of corn as the feedstock for fuel ethanol “is creating unintended consequences throughout the global food chain.”

The Climate Change Swindle

Don't expect a balanced report.
Here is some background information on the director of that documentary:

http://www.lobbywatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=39
http://www.gmwatch.org/p2temp2.asp?aid=38&page=1&op=2
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007...ies-of-denial/

There is a very clear point-by-point description of how the film misled people at
http://www.medialens.org/alerts/07/0313pure_propaganda_the.php
It is worth reading, because there’s a need to counter the arguments used to suggest that the global warming scare has been disproved.

Learning to respect water

BOTTLED WATER COSTS more than petrol and yet most of us flush around 50 litres of drinking water down the loo every day. Fifty litres is a tank of petrol. The water in our lavatory cisterns is as clean as that in the heavily marketed and transported bottles that line our supermarket shelves, but we are as careless of tap water as of fresh air. How can we be so inconsistent? On one level we venerate water with Evian and sacred wells; on another we treat it as a national nuisance that falls unbidden from the sky, spoiling our shoes and holidays.

Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning

Oliver Tickell analyses some sound solutions to global warming.

Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning
George Monbiot
Allen Lane, UK, 2006, £17.99

FIRST LET ME declare an interest: my name listed on the acknowledgements page of this book. I am also grateful to George Monbiot for publicising in Heat an idea of mine about ‘smart’ domestic electricity meters, which would charge us according to the instantaneous marginal cost of electricity on the network. This, in a nutshell, is what Heat is about ­– solutions to global warming. And in particular, how the rich nations that emit most of the world’s carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases can cut those emissions by a whopping 90% – essential, in Monbiot’s view, if the world is to avoid catastrophic climate change within this century.

Intolerable beauty

This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics tend to feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or $12.5 million spent every hour on the Iraq war. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs.


Read on...

Water prices rising worldwide

The price of water is increasing-—sometimes dramatically—-throughout the world. Over the past five years, municipal water rates have increased by an average of 27 percent in the United States, 32 percent in the United Kingdom, 45 percent in Australia, 50 percent in South Africa, and 58 percent in Canada. In Tunisia, the price of irrigation water increased fourfold over a decade.

A recent survey of 14 countries indicates that average municipal water prices range from 66¢ per cubic meter in the United States up to $2.25 in Denmark and Germany. Yet consumers rarely pay the actual cost of water. In fact, many governments practically (and sometimes literally) give water away for nothing.

The average American household consumes about 480 cubic meters (127,400 gallons) of water during a year. Homeowners in Washington, DC, pay about $350 (72¢ per cubic meter) for that amount. Buying that same amount of water from a vendor in the slums of Guatemala City would cost more than $1,700.

The price people pay for water is largely determined by three factors: the cost of transport from its source to the user, total demand for the water, and price subsidies. Treatment to remove contaminants also can add to the cost.

Read on...

Climate Policy Solutions that Save the Planet

Responses must be sufficient, scientifically based, rapidly pursued, address underlying causes, and go beyond seeking to maintain conspicuous excessive consumption by the rich.

Earth Meanders, http://earthmeanders.blogspot.com/
By Dr. Glen Barry
February 28, 2006OK,

Climate Change Is Real, So Should We All Consume Like MovieStars?

It has been said that Oscar wins for "An Inconvenient Truth"could spur climate action. This begs the question what type of action? Not all actions would be equally effective, nor prove cumulatively adequate to eventually stop global heating. As the efforts to find climate solutions mount, prepare yourself forever greater levels of corporate, political and celebrity greenwashing - false claims of environmental sensitivity and climate concerns for the purpose of public relations.

I love you Al. It was me that said "Climate, Forests, Save the Planet Al" on the 2000 election rope line in Madison; as we shook hands, to which you replied "We'll do it together". I think we have both been holding up our part of the bargain. While Mr. Gore has done a great service raising awareness regarding climate change, I am far from convinced that he and his Hollywood friends, with their energy hungry multiple mansions and jet-set life-styles (carbon offsetting or not), have diagnosed planetary climate change solutions, nor are they leading by example. There are serious questions being asked regarding celebrity environmentalist's rich, excessive lifestyles that cannot be pawned off on "I'm offsetting the carbon" of living in opulent luxury.
This simply shifts the necessity of actually reducing emissions to others that are less well off.

Hollywood greenies are not enunciating a message of personal and societal sacrifice for the Planet and our children, or leading by example by showing a willingness to live in smaller homes, drive less, fly rarely or appreciably cut their own energy use and emissions; nor raising the politically and religiously complex issues such as population control, carbon rationing, carbon taxes and other fundamentals that are crucial for global ecological sustainability. It is not just about protecting the climate. How are we going to feed, house and clothe the world while shrinking its population, repairing the climate and other planetary ecosystems and learning to live sustainably? The answer is a series of fundamental social changes, not reformist greenwashing where we all aspire to live as movie stars.

Crafting Climate Policy Solutions Adequate to Save the Planet

There is still plenty of climate change debate to come. Now that virtually every sensible scientist and citizen understands climate change, which is an important part of broader global ecological change, is a reality. We are now entering the period of identification and implementation of long-term sufficient policy solutions. There is still plenty of room for humanity to go wrong - moving too slowly, too incrementally, or even wrongly with chimerical techno-fixes, and/or refusing to think outside of the box about profound social, political, economic and ecological change adequate to address the collapse of the global atmosphere and other ecosystems. We can be 100% aware, and yet through poorly conceived and implemented solutions continue our trajectory of greatly overshooting the global ecological system's carrying capacity.