Oil industry safety record blown open

National Wildlife Federation says catalogue of oil industry accidents proves BP disaster in Gulf of Mexico is not a one-off ...

In a further grim reminder, the American midwest was in the throes of its own environmental disaster today, with a ruptured pipeline gushing gallons of oil into Michigan's Kalamazoo River.

Enbridge Energy, which is Canadian-owned but based in Houston, said the spill may have reached 1m gallons. Federal government officials in Washington and the state of Michigan were struggling to stop the oil from reaching the Great Lakes ...

The report from the National Wildlife Federation drew on records from the Minerals Management Service, which regulates offshore drilling, and the Environmental Protection Agency, to come up with a figure of 1,440 offshore leaks, blowouts, and other accidents were reported between 2001-2007.

In addition to environmental damage, these caused 41 deaths and 302 injuries.

The safety record for onshore activities was even more dismal.

Some 2,554 pipeline accidents occurred between 2001 and 2007, killing 161 people and injuring 576 ...

Guardian  29 July 2010    Corporate Sociopathy Log    Peak Oil

Assault on America

Cairn Energy's Arctic oil drilling plan condemned

Our environment is the natural foundation on which our economy is built

Caroline Spelman knows nothing of the Gulf oil 'spill' or the environmental damage caused by
tar sands, or the damage our need for nuclear power is causing to the Kalahari Desert.

Protecting our natural world has solid economic benefits – it creates thousands of jobs and generates billions of pounds ...

Too often as a society, we decide that economic gain and environmental protection are incompatible, instead of inseparable ...

So today, when rebuilding their economies is the number one priority for governments across the world, we need to start making the economic case for our environment at least as strongly as we have been making the aesthetic one.

Today, Defra is launching a discussion paper that will lead to the first Natural Environment white paper in 20 years ...

The natural environment is incredibly generous – it provides us with goods and services worth trillions of pounds at no cost.

All it needs in return is that we allow it the ability to function and maintain itself.

If we degrade it to the point that its ability to mitigate the effects of climate change, purify our air and water and keep us healthy is lost, there will be a heavy price to pay.

And our children and theirs will be the one to pay it. We need to become the generation that draws a line in the sand of the steady degradation of our natural capital and says "no more".

Guardian  26 July 2010    Trashing the Environment

Energy prospectors go west ... in search of 'shale gas'

Government axes UK sustainability watchdog

Britain's nuclear strategy threatens destruction of Kalahari

Canada’s vast oil-sands fields

Scraping the bottom of Earth's barrel

Energy prospectors go west to Blackpool in search of 'shale gas'

Cuadrilla Resources, backed by former BP chief Lord Browne, hopes to extract gas from the Bowland shale ...

Any kind of gas is a relatively carbon-friendly alternative to oil, and countries around the world are keen to find their own supplies that will help to limit climate change while also providing energy security.

But shale gas comes with its own environmental problems. The gas is reached by drilling wells deep into rock formations, which are then "fractured" or broken up with the aid of water and heavy chemicals, to release tiny pockets of trapped gas.

The US Congress is currently investigating the potential threat posed by these substances to local water supplies but the big oil companies have no doubt that shale gas is the new oil rush ...

Guardian  25 July 2010    Trashing the Environment

Government axes UK sustainability watchdog

It's another of those 'you-could-not-make-it-up' moments.

A government dedicated to growth, and the Austrian school of economics,
does sustainablity 'as a matter of course'.

Really?

Heard about the Gulf oil 'spill', Caroline?

News of the withdrawal of funds from the next financial year comes as the SDC published a report today showing that green action such as reducing waste and energy use is saving government as much as £70m a year.

Spelman said: "This government is committed to being the greenest government ever and the structural reform plan published last week sets out how Defra will play its part in achieving this. Reducing the deficit is priority for the government and all departments are playing their part in making efficiency savings. Together with [climate and energy secretary] Chris Huhne I am determined to play the lead role in driving the sustainability agenda across the whole of government and I am not willing to delegate this responsibility to an external body."

She added that the sustainability agenda had become part of what government does "as a matter of course" since the SDC was set up in 2000 by the then deputy prime minister John Prescott. "Times have changed since many of these bodies were set up and much of what they do is now everyday government business."

Guardian  22 July 2010

Caroline Spelman waxes lyrical

Energy prospectors go west ... in search of 'shale gas'

How scrapping the SDC to save money will cost the taxpayer a fortune

After Oil Spills, Hidden Damage Can Last for Years

On the rocky beaches of Alaska, scientists plunged shovels and picks into the ground and dug 6,775 holes, repeatedly striking oil — still pungent and dangerous a dozen years after the Exxon Valdez infamously spilled its cargo.

More than an ocean away, on the Breton coast of France, scientists surveying the damage after another huge oil spill found that disturbances in the food chain persisted for more than a decade.

And on the southern gulf coast in Mexico, an American researcher peering into a mangrove swamp spotted lingering damage 30 years after that shore was struck by an enormous spill.

These far-flung shorelines hit by oil in the past offer clues to what people living along the Gulf Coast can expect now that the great oil calamity of 2010 may be nearing an end ...

NYT  17 July 2010    Deepwater Horizon    Trashing the Environment

The oil spill is under control – now it's time to count the ecological cost

... the damage yet to be revealed will be far worse than a few dead birds and tar balls along 500 miles of coast ...

Dolphins, whale sharks and sea turtles numbers will almost certainly have been hit hard, and some populations may not recover for years.

Fish and shrimp-breeding habitats will have been hit. Deep coral reefs, which can take centuries to grow, may also have been affected.

Furthermore, the ecological damage done in the last three months is made far more serious because it comes on top of years of man-made degradation of the Gulf environment.

The Gulf is also heavily polluted by nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilisers and livestock waste washed down the vast Mississippi river from farms and industry.

Every year, a massive oxygen-starved region known as the "dead zone" develops off the coast of Louisiana in which nothing can live.

Last month, the US government's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said it expected this year's "zone" to be between 6,500 and 7,800 square miles, the 10th largest ever ...

Guardian  16 July 2010

Biologists find 'dead zones' around BP oil spill in Gulf

Scientists are confronting growing evidence that BP's ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico is creating oxygen-depleted "dead zones" where fish and other marine life cannot survive ...

Guardian  30 June 2010    Deepwater Horizon    Trashing the Environment

Now Cameron jilts the environment

Cameron's 'ethical' friends revealed

He is opening the oceans off the Shetland Islands to deep-sea drilling, and promising Big Oil tax breaks to drill, baby, drill ...

Cameron has put the man (Lord Browne) most to blame for the worst environmental disaster in living memory in charge of his cuts agenda, and appointed a man (David Rowland) who has faced accusations of wriggling out of cleaning up an environmental atrocity to run his party's finances ...

He commissioned another oil man, Tim Eggar, to go and ask the world's oil companies what they want from his government ...

But we know oil companies received big tax cuts in the Budget, and the Government's subsequent energy policy paper says life needs to be made "simpler [and] clearer" for oil companies to drill in British waters.

Even though it is our addiction to oil that is causing and worsening global warming, the paper says:

"We need policies designed for hunting [oil]... We need policies that offer the right incentives to explore for and extract the remaining reserves of oil and gas, and to keep existing fields open for as long as possible." ...

Independent  16 July 2010    Corporate Sociopathy Log    David Cameron

Why the former BP boss's new government job is beyond parody

How the Sun King sank BP

Ex-Bunker Hill exec enters British politics

The dirty past of the former tax exile who’s the new Tory Treasurer

Tim Eggar, former Energy Minister

Caring for one's country

As Oil Industry Fights a Tax, It Reaps Billions From Subsidies

When the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform set off the worst oil spill at sea in American history, it was flying the flag of the Marshall Islands.

Registering there allowed the rig’s owner to significantly reduce its American taxes.

The owner, Transocean, moved its corporate headquarters from Houston to the Cayman Islands in 1999 and then to Switzerland in 2008, maneuvers that also helped it avoid taxes.

At the same time, BP was reaping sizable tax benefits from leasing the rig. According to a letter sent in June to the Senate Finance Committee, the company used a tax break for the oil industry to write off 70 percent of the rent for Deepwater Horizon — a deduction of more than $225,000 a day since the lease began.

With federal officials now considering a new tax on petroleum production to pay for the cleanup, the industry is fighting the measure, warning that it will lead to job losses and higher gasoline prices, as well as an increased dependence on foreign oil ...

According to the most recent study by the Congressional Budget Office, released in 2005, capital investments like oil field leases and drilling equipment are taxed at an effective rate of 9 percent, significantly lower than the overall rate of 25 percent for businesses in general and lower than virtually any other industry ...

NYT  04 July 2010    Corporate Sociopathy Log    Deepwater Horizon    

Dark side of the mountain

The Dark Mountain Project has been accused of being a haven for ‘utopian dreamers’ and ‘nihilists’, ‘crazy collapsitarians’ and ‘feral possessive individualists’.

I met none of those at Llangollen. Instead I met, again and again, folk who were still fighting the good fight, who’d been to Copenhagen, were involved in the Transition movement; who campaigned for social justice and marched against war. But who also recognised the simple truth that Western industrial society cannot be made sustainable, that we will not protect the biosphere unless we completely renegotiate our relationship to it.

A talking-shop? A weekend of music and beer and flights of self-indulgent fancy? Some may dismiss it as such, but I won’t.

For me, and I’m sure for many others, ‘Uncivilisation’ was a kindling of consciousness, a communion, and a rare opportunity to begin the process of ‘reconstitution’.

openDemocracy     Deepwater Horizon    

Dark Mountain Project

Gulf oil spill: A hole in the world

How long will it take for an ecosystem this ravaged to be "restored and made whole" as Obama's interior secretary has pledged to do?

It's not at all clear that such a thing is remotely possible, at least not in a time frame we can easily wrap our heads around.

The Alaskan fisheries have yet to fully recover from the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill and some species of fish never returned ...

This Gulf coast crisis is about many things – corruption, deregulation, the addiction to fossil fuels.

But underneath it all, it's about this: our culture's excruciatingly dangerous claim to have such complete understanding and command over nature that we can radically manipulate and re-engineer it with minimal risk to the natural systems that sustain us.

But as the BP disaster has revealed, nature is always more unpredictable than the most sophisticated mathematical and geological models imagine ...

Virtually all indigenous cultures have myths about gods and spirits living in the natural world – in rocks, mountains, glaciers, forests – as did European culture before the scientific revolution.

Katja Neves, an anthropologist at Concordia University, points out that the practice serves a practical purpose.

Calling the Earth "sacred" is another way of expressing humility in the face of forces we do not fully comprehend.

When something is sacred, it demands that we proceed with caution. Even awe.

If we are absorbing this lesson at long last, the implications could be profound ...

Guardian  19 June 2010    Deepwater Horizon

BP Is Pursuing Alaska Drilling

Partner puts blame on BP as spill costs grow

Barack Obama calls for clean-energy push

Earlier ... the president asked his network to lend their name to a campaign to change the way America produces and consumes its energy.

"Beyond the risks inherent in drilling four miles beneath the surface of the Earth, our dependence on oil means that we will continue to send billions of dollars of our hard-earned wealth to other countries every month - including many in dangerous and unstable regions," he said.

"In other words, our continued dependence on fossil fuels will jeopardise our national security. It will smother our planet. And it will continue to put our economy and our environment at risk.

"We cannot delay any longer, and that is why I am asking for your help." ...

BBC NEWS  15 June 2010    Alternatives to Fossil Fuels    Peak Oil

U.S. Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan

"Afganistan ... has little or no history of environmental protection ... "

Welcome to the world of Bhopal and Deepwater Horizon, guys!

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe ...

An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys ...

The corruption that is already rampant in the Karzai government could also be amplified by the new wealth, particularly if a handful of well-connected oligarchs, some with personal ties to the president, gain control of the resources. Just last year, Afghanistan’s minister of mines was accused by American officials of accepting a $30 million bribe to award China the rights to develop its copper mine ...

Endless fights could erupt between the central government in Kabul and provincial and tribal leaders in mineral-rich districts.

Afghanistan has a national mining law, written with the help of advisers from the World Bank ...

At the same time, American officials fear resource-hungry China will try to dominate the development of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth ...

Another complication is that because Afghanistan has never had much heavy industry before, it has little or no history of environmental protection ...

NYT  13 June 2010    Afghanistan    Corporate Sociopathy    War on Terror Log

Government review to examine threat of world resources shortage

Ministers have ordered a review of looming global shortages of resources, from fish and timber to water and precious metals, amid mounting concern that the problem could hit every sector of the economy.

The study has been commissioned following sharp rises in many commodity prices on the world markets and recent riots in some countries over food shortages.

There is also evidence that some nations are stockpiling important materials, buying up key producers and land and restricting exports in an attempt to protect their own businesses from increasingly fierce global competition.

Several research projects have also warned of a pending crisis in natural resources, such as water and wildlife, which have suffered dramatic losses due to over-use, pollution, habitat loss, and, increasingly, changes caused by global warming.

Professor Bob Watson, the chief scientist for the Department for Food, Environment and Rural Affairs, the leading department in the initiative, said every sector of the British economy was directly or indirectly vulnerable to future shortages ...

Guardian  31 May 2010    

Green Economy

Despite Moratorium, Drilling Projects Move Ahead

In the days since President Obama announced a moratorium on permits for drilling new offshore oil wells and a halt to a controversial type of environmental waiver that was given to the Deepwater Horizon rig, at least seven new permits for various types of drilling and five environmental waivers have been granted, according to records.

The records also indicate that since the April 20 explosion on the rig, federal regulators have granted at least 19 environmental waivers for gulf drilling projects and at least 17 drilling permits, most of which were for types of work like that on the Deepwater Horizon shortly before it exploded, pouring a ceaseless current of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Asked about the permits and waivers, officials at the Department of the Interior and the Minerals Management Service, which regulates drilling, pointed to public statements by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, reiterating that the agency had no intention of stopping all new oil and gas production in the gulf ...

NYT  23 May 2010    Corporate Sociopathy Log    Deepwater Horizon

BP to promise $10bn payday

BP oil rig registration raised in Congress

BP Used Riskier Method to Seal Oil Well

Washington and BP -- 'Like a Junkie Controlling His Dealer'

Despite Moratorium, Drilling Projects Move Ahead

UN says case for saving species 'more powerful than climate change'

To mark the UN's International Day for Biological Diversity tomorrow, hundreds of British companies, charities and other organisations have backed an open letter from the Natural History Museum's director Michael Dixon warning that "the diversity of life, so crucial to our security, health, wealth and wellbeing is being eroded".

The UN report's authors go further with their warning on biodiversity, by saying if the goods and services provided by the natural world are not valued and factored into the global economic system, the environment will become more fragile and less resilient to shocks, risking human lives, livelihoods and the global economy.

"We need a sea-change in human thinking and attitudes towards nature: not as something to be vanquished, conquered, but rather something to be cherished and lived within," said the report's author, the economist Pavan Sukhdev.

The changes will involve a wholesale revolution in the way humans do business, consume, and think about their lives, Sukhdev, told The Guardian. He referred to the damage currently being inflicted on the natural world as "a landscape of market failures" ...

Guardian  21 May 2010

'World needs a barometer of life'

Biodiversity loss is Earth's 'immense and hidden' tragedy

Is man on course to cause the sixth extinction?

Crisis for the world’s amphibians

Earth's 'sixth great extinction event'

Honeybees under attack on all fronts

Saving species needs a shift in values

Wildlife populations 'plummeting'

Species are going extinct because humans can’t see it happening ...

Almost half of all primates face 'imminent extinction'

Save 'special' carnivores plea

Bleak Future_Penguins

Cetacean Alliance

Endangered species

IUCN_Biodiversity

Stop Whaling

WWF-UK: Species & Habitats

Shell seeks to drill in Arctic seas this summer

What's the world going to do when the 27bn barrels have been used up?

• Shell ignores calls for moratorium on drilling
• Company says world needs 27bn barrel resource ...

Guardian  18 May 2010    Deepwater Horizon    Peak Oil    

Danger for Florida

Nature loss 'to damage economies'

The Earth's ongoing nature losses may soon begin to hit national economies, a major UN report is to say.

The third Global Biodiversity Outlook (GBO-3) warns that some ecosystems may soon reach "tipping points" where they rapidly become less useful to humanity.

Such tipping points could include rapid dieback of forest, algal takeover of watercourses and mass coral reef death ...

WHAT IS BIODIVERSITY?
UN defines biodiversity as "the variability among living organisms from all sources including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part; this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems"
Considered to provide value to humanity in four ways:

• Provisioning - providing timber, fish, etc
• Regulating - disposing of pollutants, regulating rainfall
• Cultural - sacred sites, tourism, enjoyment of countryside
• Supporting - maintaining soils and plant growth

BBC NEWS  10 May 2010    Blog

Tread carefully, Mr Obama. You need big oil

World's 2010 nature target 'will not be met'

World's biodiversity 'crisis' needs action

Biodiversity loss is Earth's 'immense and hidden' tragedy

Is man on course to cause the sixth extinction?

Species' extinction threat grows

Honey, who shrunk the bee population?

"A World Without Bees"

Saving species needs a shift in values

Deforestation

Endangered species

IUCN_Biodiversity

Stop Whaling

WWF-UK: Species & Habitats

Heathrow protesters win third runway court victory

... the transport secretary, Lord Adonis, countered their claims:

"I welcome this court ruling. Heathrow is Britain's principal hub airport. It is vital not only to the national economy but also enables millions of citizens to keep in touch with their friends and family and to take a well-deserved holiday.

"The airport is currently operating at full capacity. A new runway at Heathrow will help secure jobs and underpin economic growth as we come out of recession. It is also entirely compatible with our carbon-reduction target, as demonstrated in the recent report by the Committee on Climate Change ...

Guardian  26 March 2010

Empty skies proved that airports cause pollution

Heathrow ruling will not change plans, say ministers

How Heathrow runway plans came unstuck

Heathrow third runway

Airlines vow to halve carbon emissions by 2050

Willie Walsh's 'challenging target'

Adonis defends aviation industry over emissions

We will protect air travel for the masses

We can expand Heathrow and still tackle climate change

Hello Big Carbon ...

Ruth Kelly's 'offsets'

New car registrations up 26% on February 2009

But the February 2010 total of new registrations was 1.3% below 2008's figure and 12.2% below the 10-year average for February ...

Announcing the figures today, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) said the government's soon-to-end car scrappage scheme had accounted for 19.6% of the February 2010 new car market.

Today's figures were boosted by the fact that this time last year the motor industry was suffering a downturn in demand and production.

It was the introduction of the scrappage scheme which eventually reversed a trend which had seen year-on-year sales fall for 15 successive months.

SMMT chief executive Paul Everitt said: "Scrappage has generated eight consecutive months of growth in the new car market and we expect its benefits to stretch beyond the scheme's closure later this month.

"The industry continues to face challenging market conditions, but positive trends in the fleet and business sectors suggest that negative impacts can be minimised. Strengthening business and consumer confidence remains industry's priority.

"A clear and consistent approach to CO2-based taxation and improved access to affordable credit are essential elements in sustaining recovery in the new car market." ...

Guardian  04 Mar 2010    Peak Oil

Enterprise is key to UK economic growth, says Gordon Brown

Prime Minister Gordon Brown pledged on Thursday to “unleash” Britain’s entrepreneurial talents in a bid to promote prosperity.

Speaking alongside Business Secretary Lord Mandelson at the launch of a government strategy for economic growth, Mr Brown said “going for growth” was the government’s number one priority ...

... Lord Mandelson condemned Tory plans to accelerate the reduction of debt as “potentially dangerous nonsense” that could stall the recovery.

He insisted the Government was committed to cutting Britain’s £178bn annual deficit, but said it was important to focus on growth as well as spending cuts and tax increases.

Fostering growth was “the best antidote to debt, both in the short and long term”, he said ...

Telegraph  07 Jan 2010

Wind farms could power half of Britain’s homes, but jobs could go overseas

The summit’s premise is that the age of heroism is over.

We have entered the age of accomodation. No longer may we live without restraint. No longer may we swing our fists regardless of whose nose might be in the way.

In everything we do we must now be mindful of the lives of others, cautious, constrained, meticulous. We may no longer live in the moment, as if there were no tomorrow.

This is a meeting about chemicals: the greenhouse gases insulating the atmosphere. But it is also a battle between two world views.

The angry men who seek to derail this agreement, and all such limits on their self-fulfilment, have understood this better than we have. A new movement, most visible in North America and Australia, but now apparent everywhere, demands to trample on the lives of others as if this were a human right.

It will not be constrained by taxes, gun laws, regulations, health and safety, especially environmental restraints. It knows that fossil fuels have granted the universal ape amplification beyond its Palaeolithic dreams. For a moment, a marvellous, frontier moment, they allowed us to live in blissful mindlessness.

The angry men know that this golden age has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings ...

Monbiot.com  14 Dec 2009

Can Obama Stop America's Gas-Guzzling Ways?

CEO: Business Lobby Pushing Self-Interest Over Success

Atlas Shrugged

This report is intended as a non-technical examination of a basic question: Can any combination of known energy sources successfully supply society’s energy needs at least up to the year 2100?

In the end, we are left with the disturbing conclusion that all known energy sources are subject to strict limits of one kind or another.

Conventional energy sources such as oil, gas, coal, and nuclear are either at or nearing the limits of their ability to grow in annual supply, and will dwindle as the decades proceed—but in any case they are unacceptably hazardous to the environment.

And contrary to the hopes of many, there is no clear practical scenario by which we can replace the energy from today’s conventional sources with sufficient energy from alternative sources to sustain industrial society at its present scale of operations.

To achieve such a transition would require

(1) a vast financial investment beyond society’s practical abilities,

(2) a very long time—too long in practical terms—for build-out, and

(3) significant sacrifices in terms of energy quality and reliability ...

CounterCurrents.org  17 November 2009

Report.pdf

Most of the world's major river deltas are sinking, increasing the flood risk faced by hundreds of millions of people, scientists report.

Damming and diverting rivers means that much less sediment now reaches many delta areas, while extraction of gas and groundwater also lowers the land.

Rivers affected include the Colorado, Nile, Pearl, Rhone and Yangtze.

About half a billion people live in these regions, the researchers note in the journal Nature Geoscience.

They calculate that 85% of major deltas have seen severe flooding in recent years, and that the area of land vulnerable to flooding will increase by about 50% in the next 40 years as land sinks and climate change causes sea levels to rise ...

Of the 33 major deltas studied, 24 were found to be sinking ...

THE HIGH-RISK LIST
Deltas with "virtually no aggradation (supply of sediment) and/or very high accelerated compaction"
Chao Phraya, Thailand
Colorado, Mexico
Krishna, India
Nile, Egypt
Pearl, China
Po, Italy
Rhone, France
Sao Francisco, Brazil
Tone, Japan
Yangtze, China
Yellow, China

BBC NEWS  22 September 2009

Seas 'threaten 20m in Bangladesh'

Bangladesh river erosion

Arctic Refuge drilling controversy

New survey of Arctic's mineral riches could stoke international strife

Arctic Oil Online

Riches in the Arctic: the new oil race

Arctic 'has 90bn barrels of oil'

Why Trash an American Treasure for a Tiny Percentage of Our Oil Needs?

• ... the most advanced "renewable" technologies are too often based upon non-renewable resources ...
• ... the most advanced solar-cell technologies rely on much rarer materials than silicon ...
• ... multi-junction solar cells owe their performance to the rare metal indium, which is far from abundant. There are fewer than 10 indium-containing minerals, and none present in significant deposits – in total the metal accounts for a paltry 0.25 parts per million of the Earth's crust.
  
  Most of the rare and expensive element is used to manufacture LCD screens, an industry that has driven indium prices to $1000 per kilogram in recent years. Estimates that did not factor in an explosion in indium-containing solar panels reckon we have only a 10 year supply of it left.
  
  If power from the Sun is to become a major source of electricity, solar panels would have to cover huge areas, making an alternative to indium essential ...
• ... fuel cells are still the most effective way to turn (hydrogen) into electricity. But these mostly rely on expensive platinum to catalyse the reaction ... platinum makes indium appear super-abundant. It is present in the Earth's crust at just 0.003 parts per billion and is priced in $ per gram, not per kilogram. Estimates say that, if the 500 million vehicles in use today were fitted with fuel cells, all the world's platinum would be exhausted within 15 years ...
• ... Biofuels, like ethanol fermented from maize, are the most infamous examples of the doubtful sustainability of supposedly renewable forms of energy. This time the non-renewable resource at risk is the world's arable land ...
• ... unless a second generation of sustainable energy ideas based on truly sustainable resources is established, the renewable light could be in danger of dimming.

New Scientist 06 February 2009

Water Crisis - Parched Planet

Kabul faces severe water crisis

Drought land 'will be abandoned'

China and India warned their water is running out

China's water supply could be cut off as Tibet's glaciers melt

Coca-Cola sucking communities dry

Global Water

How the thirst for strawberries is draining Spain's precious water

NGOs launch campaign against privatisation of water

Our rivers are starting to run dry

Parched Planet

Water Aid

Water resources

Why deserts will inherit the Earth

The challenge of feeding billions of people as fuel supplies fall is staggering. And yet leaders' heads remain stuck in the sand ...

According to farm scientists at Cornell University, cultivating one hectare of maize in the United States requires 40 litres of petrol and 75 litres of diesel.

The amazing productivity of modern farm labour has been purchased at the cost of a dependency on oil. Unless farmers can change the way it's grown, a permanent oil shock would price food out of the mouths of many of the world's people.

Any responsible government would be asking urgent questions about how long we have got.

Instead, most of them delegate this job to the International Energy Agency ...

Almost every year the agency has been forced to downgrade its forecast for the daily supply of oil in 2030: from 123m barrels in 2004, to 120m in 2005, 116m in 2007, 106m in 2008 and 103m this year.

But according to one of the whistleblowers, "even today's number is much higher than can be justified, and the International Energy Agency knows this" ...

The challenge of feeding seven or eight billion people while oil supplies are falling is stupefying. It'll be even greater if governments keep pretending that it isn't going to happen.

Guardian  16 November 2009

Peak Oil Log

Key oil figures were distorted by US pressure

Warning over global oil 'decline'

Canada's Tar Sands

Peal Oil

Dick Cheney on Peak Oil

Encircling the Peak of World Oil Production - Richard C. Duncan and Walter Youngquist

Hubbert peak theory

Oil Depletion Analysis

Peak Oil

peakoil.com

Peak Oil News

Wikipedia

World faces 'perfect storm' of problems by 2030

Food, water and energy shortages will unleash public unrest and international conflict ...

"We head into a perfect storm in 2030, because all of these things are operating on the same time frame," [Professor John] Beddington told the Guardian.

"If we don't address this, we can expect major destabilisation, an increase in rioting and potentially significant problems with international migration, as people move out to avoid food and water shortages," he added.

Food prices for major crops such as wheat and maize have recently settled after a sharp rise last year when production failed to keep up with demand. But according to Beddington, global food reserves are so low – at 14% of annual consumption – a major drought or flood could see prices rapidly escalate again.

The majority of the food reserve is grain that is in transit between shipping ports, he said.

"Our food reserves are at a 50-year low, but by 2030 we need to be producing 50% more food. At the same time, we will need 50% more energy, and 30% more fresh water.

"There are dramatic problems out there, particularly with water and food, but energy also, and they are all intimately connected," Beddington said.

"You can't think about dealing with one without considering the others. We must deal with all of these together." ...

Guardian  18 March 2009    

In a speech to the CBI on Thursday, Brown will underline the depth of the global economic problems, which demand a global response. ...

But Brown will say that Britain is well-placed to weather the downturn:

"In the next 20 years the world economy will double in its size and wealth and we have a great opportunity to win new business, new jobs and prosperity for Britain."

Guardian 01 September 2008   

Around 85,000 commercial flights take off each day, and this number is predicted to double by 2050.

[There is] a widening disparity between the air industry's growth - over 5 per cent annually - and the projected improvement in jetlines fuel efficiency, which is nearer 2 per cent each year. ... If the industry wants to grow but grow green, it will have to make ... little short of a design revolution. ...

A single flight across the Atlantic can guzzle about 60,000 litres - more fuel than an average motorist uses in 50 years of driving - generating around 140 tonnes of carbon dioxide, along with 750 kilograms of [Nitrogen Oxides Emissions]. ...

The net result ... is that pollution from high-flying jets is up to four times as damaging ... as the same amount released from chimneys and exhaust pipes at ground level. ...

New Scientist 24 February 2007 pages 33-34

AirportWatch

Plane Stupid

Stansted Airport

Deep sea destroyers

Frightening facts:

Bottom trawling has already extinguished as many as 10,000 species

It destroys ancient deep water coral systems, which provide food and shelter for fish

Around half of all bottom trawler catch is unwanted and thrown back overboard dead or dying.

Despite the evidence, on 16 November 2004 the United Nations General Assembly failed to back a ban on high seas bottom trawling. Instead, the world's governments called for a two-year review of the problem.

We're calling for an immediate halt to deep sea bottom trawling. If it is allowed to continue, we will lose countless more species before they have even been discovered.

Greenpeace

BBC NEWS

Deep-Sea Fish 'Plundered' to Extinction by Trawling

EU trawlers get fishing rights off Africa for £350m

Exploitation of global stocks has hit a dangerous peak

Fishing quotas are an ecological catastrophe

Invasion of the African jellyfish

Not Enough Fish in the Sea

Oceans Commission Report

The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World and What We Eat

WWF-UK

WWF's Living Planet Report 2006, the group's biennial statement on the state of the natural world, shows that we are currently using the planet's resources far faster than they can be renewed. On current projections, this means that as a whole, humanity will need at least two planets' worth of natural resources by 2050.

In the UK alone, we are currently living a 'three planet lifestyle' and the report indicates that the world's Ecological footprint - the demand people place upon the natural world - has more than tripled since 1961 and that rising carbon dioxide emissions are the biggest cause of our ecological impact on the planet.

The UK has also risen from 15th to 14th place in the world's ecological footprint league table with an increased footprint of 4 per cent to 5.6 global hectares per capita since 2004. This means that each person in the UK uses the equivalent of 6 football pitches worth of natural resources to support their lifestyles. ...

Humanity's over consumption has been increasing year on year since WWF and partners started to collate this report, with demand exceeding supply by about 25 per cent in 2003. This means that it took approximately a year and three months for the Earth to produce the ecological resources we used in that year.

The report has shown that between 1970 and 2003 terrestrial species have declined by 31 per cent, freshwater species by 28 per cent, and marine species by 27 per cent. The Living Planet Report 2006, pulls together various data to compile two indicators of the Earth's well-being.

The first, the Living Planet Index, measures biodiversity, based on trends in more than 3600 populations of 1300 vertebrate species around the world. In all, data for 695 terrestrial, 344 freshwater and 274 marine species were analyzed.

"Jonathan Loh (Zoological Society of London), one of the editors of the report, said "The Living Planet Index is a stark indication of the rapid and ongoing loss of biodiversity worldwide. Populations of species in terrestrial, marine and freshwater ecosystems have declined by more than 30 per cent since 1970, a rate that is unprecedented in human history. In the tropics the declines are even more dramatic, as natural resources are being intensively exploited for human use." ...

WWF 18 October 2006

Living Planet Report .pdf

" ... we conclude from the evidence that growth in the harvest of renewable resources, depletion of non-renewable materials, and filling of the sinks are combining slowly and inexorably to raise the amount of energy and capital required to sustain the quantity and quality of material flows required by the economy.

"Those costs arise from a combination of physical, environmental, and social factors. Eventually they will be high enough that growth in industry can no longer be sustained. When that happens, the positive feedback loop that produced expansion in the material economy will reverse direction; the economy will begin to contract.

1. For a renewable resource: soil, water, forest, fish;
   The rate of use = the rate of regeneration.



2. For a non-renewable resource: fossil fuel, high-grade mineral ores, fossil groundwater;
   
   The sustainable rate of use can be no greater than the rate at which a sustainable renewable resource can be substituted for it.



3. For a pollutant the sustainable rate of emission can be no greater than the rate at which that pollutant can be recycled, absorbed, and rendered harmless in the sink.

1. The Runaway Train.

   If civilization is to survive it must live on the interest, not the capital, of nature. Ecological markers suggest that in the early 1960s, humans were using about 70 per cent of the nature's yearly output ... in 1999, we were at 125 per cent ... Such numbers ... mark the road to bankruptcy.

2. The Dinosaur.

   ... our present behaviour is typical of failed societies at the zenith of their greed and arrogance. This is the dinosaur factor: hostility to change from vested interests, and inertia at all social levels ... The idea that the world must be run by the stock market is as mad as any other fundamentalist delusion, Islamic, Christian, or Marxist.

3. The House of Cards.

   Civilisations often fall quite suddenly ... because they reach full demand on their ecologies, they become highly vulnerable to natural fluctuations. ... Droughts, floods, fires, and hurricanes are rising in frequency and severity. The pollution surges caused by these - and wars - add to the gyre of destruction.
   
   The most compelling reason for reforming our system is that the system is in no one's interest. It is a suicide machine.

"Greed really has become a part of America’s value system.

"Get as much as you can, while you can, and don’t worry about the other guy.

"Corporate greed often exploits the poor for greater profits.

"Political greed makes promises never meant to be kept in order to achieve position.

"Personal greed sets us free from a sense of responsibility to the community, and establishes love of self as the greatest commandment."

Joe Thorn.net

... Josef Fritzl represents merely the most extreme form of a very common philosophy of life: I will do what makes me happy, and if that causes others to suffer, hard luck ...

Diocese of Lichfield  30 May 2008