North America

Despite the incessant media repetition that the economic situation is getting better, there is growing evidence that the economy is in fact growing worse. Where all this leaves oil prices is not yet clear.

-Green fuels cause more harm than fossil fuels, according to report
-Chemists create biofuel from plant waste
-Seeking a More 'Poplar' Biofuel

-Public safety means more than just cops
-Dominican Authorities Approve Container Cities For Haiti Housing Relief
-Detroit homes sell for $1 amid mortgage and car industry crisis
-Digital designer shows what future towns could look like

A popular idea at the moment to address climate change is biochar - essentially taking organic materials, charring them, and burying them in the soil...Now, the biofuel story has given me a bit of a horror of ideas that sound cool to environmentalists, are fine on a small scale, but are a disaster when scaled up by industrial society.  So I wanted to do a few quick back-of-the-envelope calculations of the limits of this approach.

Should climate activists and feminists support campaigns to slow population growth? Laurie Mazur says that alliance will strengthen the movement. Ian Angus strongly disagrees …

Peak Shrink has an interesting post on The Tyranny of Positive Thinking, a review of Barbara Ehrenreich's book Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. In it, she expresses the same frustration I've felt when dealing with our cult of positivity.

On Friday, journalist John Fleck made a great point, comparing coverage of two new pieces in Science. One is about the latest potential climate disaster: methane venting from the seafloor in the Arctic. The second is about a promising new climate solution: using behavioral science to influence energy use. Not surprisingly, the disaster got tons of coverage. The solution got none. This is entirely typical. As Fleck says, "The problem space gets more attention than the solution space."

It's almost too easy to vilify corporations. What, with all the evil stuff they do. Take the coal industry for example, who blow up our mountains, poison our air and water, contribute massively to global climate change, and spend untold millions of dollars on disinformation campaigns, lobbying Congress, buying Senators, and lying to block efforts to tackle the climate crisis. I mean, they are practically begging for our hatred, right? Right.

...Most of us know in our bones that a sea change is coming in agriculture. But the biggest driver of that change is not going to come from the issues that I’ve mentioned so far. The biggest driver is going to be the increasing cost and decreasing availability of fossil fuels, especially oil. Because agriculture is so dependent on oil, the entire system is extremely vulnerable to oil depletion—and to oil price spikes. The situation brewing on the horizon regarding oil compels us to begin rethinking how we grow our food, and even how we eat.

-S&P Rally Slowed by Fastest Cash Depletion Since 1991
-Economists: Another Financial Crisis on the Way
-Thousands rally on campuses, streets for schools
-China's worthless economic statistics
-Murray Bookchin on Growth and Consumerism
-Swaps and Robbers
-We’re all PIGS now
-The Great American Bank Robbery

-Fury as EU approves GM potato
-France blasts GM crop approvals by EU agency
-Are GMOs the ‘financial innovations’ of agriculture?
-GM and farming technology 'key to fighting climate change'

-Arctic arch failure leads to sea-ice exodus
-World's temperature record to be re-analysed
-In India, a Clear Victor on The Climate Action Front
-Is Arctic methane on the move?
-Methane Releases from Arctic Shelf May Be Much Larger and Faster Than Anticipated
-Climate scientists must be ruthlessly honest about data

Time Magazine recently had an article (Why the Tea Party Movement Matters) that looked at the latest manifestation of populism in the United States, with widespread discontent at the state of the US economy and the US political system, particularly the lack of transparency evident in many government initiatives ranging from the bail-out of the financial system to proposed changes to healthcare, along with discontent about costly wars in the middle east that seem to be never-ending.

Various subjects compete for this week’s Daly News, coming on the heels of the Eastern Economic Association conference in Philadelphia. “Forty Shades of Green” comes to mind, with all that we hear these days about “greening” the economy. Green jobs, green technology, green sectors… even “green growth.”