World Population Awareness

Every day, we are presented with a range of "sustainable" products and activities—from "green" cleaning supplies to carbon offsets. But with so much labeled as sustainable, the term has become essentially sustainababble, at best indicating a practice or product slightly less damaging than the conventional alternative. Is it time to abandon the concept altogether, or can we find an accurate way to measure sustainability? If so, how can we achieve it? And if not, how can we best prepare for the coming ecological decline?

In Worldwatch Institute's newest project, scientists, policy experts, and thought leaders tackle these questions, attempting to restore meaning to sustainability as more than just a marketing tool. Within this website, you'll find State of the World 2013: Is Sustainability Still Possible? -- http://blogs.worldwatch.org/sustainabilitypossible/state-of-the-world-2013/ --, which explores these questions in depth in over 30 articles. As well, you'll find additional essays, videos, presentation materials, news updates, and additional translations of the report.

We are living in exceptional times. Scientists tell us that we have 10 years to change the way we live, avert the depletion of natural resources and the catastrophic evolution of the Earth's climate.

The stakes are high for us and our children. Everyone should take part in the effort, and HOME has been conceived to take a message of mobilization out to every human being.

For this purpose, HOME needs to be free. A patron, the PPR Group, made this possible. EuropaCorp, the distributor, also pledged not to make any profit because Home is a non-profit film.

HOME has been made for you : share it! And act for the planet.

Follow the link in the headline to watch it. 1 hr 30 min.

The Sahara Desert, a vast, nearly lifeless expanse of sand and rock was once a fertile grassland and bands of human hunters chased aurochs and antelope, but a wobble in Earth's orbit catalyzed ecosystem changes that caused the Sahara to go from green to brown in a matter of centuries or even decades.

A series of small modifications can push a system to a "tipping point," where it flips, quite suddenly, from one state to another. And many believe that human population dynamics are an increasingly important variable in environmental change, at local, regional, and global scales.

Volcanic eruptions, solar flares, and the clash of continents have changed the Earth, but, since the beginning of the last century, our numbers have quadrupled, reaching seven billion in 2011, resource consumption has skyrocketed, and more people are living in environmentally fragile regions, such as coastal areas, making humans responsible for the more recent changes.

More than 80% of the Earth's land is under direct human control; humans use a fifth of the planet's biomass; humans emit carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases which are warming the planet and acidifying the oceans. Because of all of this disruption, we are now in the midst of the biggest wave of extinctions since the end of the dinosaurs.

Environmentalists learned that environmental impact (I) is the sum of population size (P) times per capita affluence level (A) times the impact of technologies (T). Otherwise known as IPAT. But John Harte in A Pivotal Moment tells us that non-linear effects, including thresholds and feedbacks, can amplify the environmental impact of human numbers. For example, a species may depend on a certain amount of intact habitat to survive. As human settlements encroach, a threshold is eventually crossed, and the species will, sometimes quite suddenly (within a generation or two), collapse.

A classic example is the loss of "albedo": on a warming planet, there is less ice and snow to reflect heat back to space, so more sunlight is absorbed by the Earth's surface, which intensifies warming. Another example: warming accelerates the decomposition of organic matter in cultivated soil. That decomposition, in turn, releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which speeds even more warming. Because more people generally means more cultivated land, population growth affects the intensity of this feedback effect.

In 2009, Johan Rockström, executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Center, and his team of scientists, identified 10 biophysical boundaries that must not be transgressed if we wish to preserve a habitable planet. Three of the boundaries - for climate change, biodiversity loss, and global nitrogen - have already been crossed.

In 2012, University of California, Berkeley, paleoecologist Anthony Barnosky and colleagues warned there may be “a reduction in biodiversity and severe impacts on much of what we depend on to sustain our quality of life, including, for example, fisheries, agriculture, forest products, and clean water. This could happen within just a few generations."

The Mato Grosso region of the Amazon rainforest may soon be “on a one-way route to becoming a dry and relatively barren savannah," according to the New Scientist. And record-breaking declines in the extent and volume of sea ice signal that an ice-free summer Arctic may be near.

Tufts University economists Frank Ackerman and Elizabeth A. Stanton found that “global warming is now causing unprecedentedly rapid changes in the climate conditions that affect agriculture - much faster than crops can evolve on their own, and probably too fast for the traditional processes of trial-and-error adaptation by farmers. ...Within a few decades, business as usual climate change would reach levels at which adaptation is no longer possible." This at a time when global food production must increase by 70% to keep pace with demand.

Authors of the tipping-point studies call for a range of interventions: limiting climate change, low-carbon approaches to development, better ecosystem management, and measures to voluntarily slow population growth where it is still rapid, such as encouraging girls' education and universal access to family planning and reproductive health.

While our capacity to predict the future remains imperfect, we should consider ourselves warned.

In 1972, environmental guru Dennis Meadows in his "The Limits to Growth" predicted that the world was heading toward an economic collapse. The core message of the book remains valid today: Humanity is ruthlessly exploiting global resources and is on the way to destroying itself.

We have developed industries and policies that were at one time appropriate but now start to reduce human welfare. The political and financial power of the oil and car industry, for example, is so great and they can and likely will, prevent proactive change. Instead we are going to have to evolve through crisis.

While the predictions of exponential growth of the world's population, and widespread environmental destruction have come true, the prediction of economic growth ultimately ceasing and collapsing hasn't occurred so far; but that doesn't mean it won't take place in the future. We have the choice of seeing the necessity of change ahead of time and making the change, or of not making the change until we are finally forced to do it anyway.

It doesn't look like private companies are reacting to dwindling resources with innovation in an effort to maintain profitability. Our history with fishing shows that we are destroying the oceans' ecosystems, for example. And we're using our atmosphere as a free industrial waste dump. Nobody has an incentive to protect them.

There are universal problems, and there are global problems. Universal problems can be solved by small groups of people because they don't have to wait for others. You can clean up the air in Hanover without having to wait for Beijing or Mexico City to do the same. Global problems, however, cannot be solved in a single place. There's no way Hanover can solve climate change or stop the spread of nuclear weapons. On the global problems, we will make no progress.

While environmentalist Paul Gilding argues in his book "The Great Disruption" that humanity will mobilize to fight a crisis that they see coming as they would during times of war, we may get stalled out by long delays, such as in climate change. Even if we were to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to zero today, warming would still continue for centuries. The same is true for soil, which we are destroying globally. Recovery can take centuries.

While technological innovation has served to reduce the impact of some long-term problems - for example, modern medicine has increased life expectancy and reduced infant mortality rates and new technologies have dramatically increased harvests and computers and the Internet have brought the world closer together and improved access to education - these achievements were the results of decades of hard work, and someone has to pay for these programs. Big sources of money such as the military and corporations, are not motivated to solve global problems,. Drug companies in the U.S. spend more money on hair-loss prevention than on preventing HIV infections since the former makes greater profits.

Even if we discovered a major new energy source, it would take decades for it to make an impact.

While there seems to be plenty of oil available, the oil reserves we are talking about are scarce and very expensive to exploit. And they, too, will be depleted one day.

Collapse will look different in different places. Some countries are already collapsing, and some people won't even notice. There are almost a billion people who are starving to death these days, and people here basically aren't noticing.

The difference between a decline and a collapse is speed. The rich can buy their way out of a lot of things. The end of fossil energy, for example, will be gradual. But climate change will come to the industrial countries no matter what. And the geological record clearly shows that the global temperature doesn't increase in a linear way. It jumps. If that happens, a collapse will occur.

Societies rise and fall. They have been doing so for 300,000 years.

Researchers at Yale, Texas A&M and Boston University predict that by 2030 urban areas will expand by more than 463,000 square miles, or 1.2 million square kilometers - or 20,000 American football fields per day. A brief window of opportunity exists to shape the development of cities globally before a boom in infrastructure construction transforms urban land cover. The study was in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The urban growth will include the construction of roads and buildings, water and sanitation facilities, and energy and transport systems that will transform land cover and cities globally. An estimated $25 - $30 trillion will be spent on infrastructure worldwide by 2030, with $100 billion a year in China alone. This large investment will make reversal impossible and have lasting impacts on biodiversity.

Karen Seto, lead author of the study and associate professor in the urban environment at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies said: "We have a huge opportunity to shape how cities develop and their environmental impacts."

Nearly half of the increase in urban expansion is forecasted to occur in Asia, with China and India absorbing 55% of the regional total. In China, urban expansion is expected to create a 1,100-mile coastal urban corridor from Hangzhou to Shenyang. In India, urban expansion will be clustered around seven state capital cities, with large areas of low-probability growth forecasted for the Himalaya region where many small villages and towns currently exist.

Africa's urban land cover will grow 590% from 2000 to 2030, concentrating in: the Nile River in Egypt; the coast of West Africa on the Gulf of Guinea; the northern shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya and Uganda and extending into Rwanda and Burundi; the Kano region in northern Nigeria; and greater Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

In North America, 78% of the total population is already in urban areas, but urban land cover will still nearly double by 96,000 square miles by 2030.

48 of the 221 countries will experience only negligible amounts of urban expansion.

"We need to rethink conservation policies and what it means to be a sustainable city," said Burak Güneralp, the study's second author and research assistant professor at Texas A&M University. "It's not all about carbon footprint, which is what mayors and planners typically think about now, but we need to consider how urban expansion will have implications for other, nonhuman species and the value of these species for present and future generations."

Urban expansion will encroach on or destroy habitats for 139 amphibian species, 41 mammalian species and 25 bird species. The researchers estimate the aboveground, biomass carbon losses associated with land-clearing from new urban areas in the pan-tropics to be 5% of the tropical deforestation and land-use-change emissions.

"Urbanization is often considered a local issue, however our analysis shows that the direct impacts of future urban expansion on global biodiversity hotspots and carbon pools are significant," said Seto. "The world will experience an unprecedented era of urban expansion and city-building over the next few decades. The associated environmental and social challenges will be enormous, but so are the opportunities."

Chaos theory says the particulars of the breakdown of the earth's ecosystems are unpredictable. No wonder scientists were "surprised" to find that the size of individual fish in the world's oceans is likely to shrink by as much as one quarter in the coming decades.

Chaos theory asserts that - as an increasing number of essential parts of a complex system break down - such as a stock market, climate or mechanical engine - the overall system is destabilized, and its exact behavior becomes impossible to predict. This event precedes what's known as "runaway," which occurs when a critical number of those parts stop working and irreversible "tipping points" have been passed.

Applied to the ecosystems in the earth's oceans, the number of variables that bear upon that species - temperature, salt levels and the state of species nearby or across the world, for example - becomes too great to be included in any predictive model. The relationships between parts within the system become so complex and the changes occur so rapidly that scientists cannot keep up. By the time they identify a problem and propose a solution, their work becomes obsolete, their discoveries made irrelevant. This fact can make it difficult to trust their predictions.

Scientists don't want to be seen as alarmist, so most will err on the conservative side of the estimates that result from their work.

"We were surprised as we did not think the effects would be so strong and so widespread," project leader professor William Cheung of the University of British Columbia said.

Professor Callum Roberts of the University of York, who was not among the study's authors, said "Additional impacts of climate change such as the acidification of the ocean and reduction of nutrients in surface waters could decrease fish stocks even further."

1 billion people currently count fish as their primary source of animal protein, Roberts pointed out. With 9 billion people expected by 2050, that number will assuredly rise, as will the importance of our understanding of how ecological systems deteriorate.

Predictive models can remain meaningful in the short term, but over time, the growing number of variables that play a role in determining the fate of any plant or animal becomes virtually impossible to make sense of. In their efforts to understand the unraveling, scientists can only scramble to bring their models up to date as their subjects approach levels of complexity that lie beyond the power of any human to comprehend.

Aside from the unsettling fact that the systems that support human and other life are disintegrating at an increasing rate, no one can say for sure exactly what the world we're rushing into will look like.

Today marks the date when humanity has exhausted nature's budget for the year. After only eight months, we are now operating in overdraft. For the rest of the year, we will maintain our ecological deficit by drawing down local resource stocks and accumulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Earth Overshoot Day helps conceptualize the gap between what nature can regenerate, and how much is required to support human activities. Global Footprint Network tracks humanity's demand for, and supply of, natural resources and ecological services. We have used up the renewable natural resources and CO2 sequestration that the planet can sustainably provide this year.

In the past year, the world has seen the European debt predicament, extreme weather events to grain shortages, groundwater depletion and overfishing - affecting many among a world population that has surpassed the 7 billion mark. Dr. Mathis Wackernagel, President of Global Footprint Network said: "Nations around the world, and particularly in the south of Europe, have started to painfully experience what it means to spend more money than what they earn," ... "The resource pressure is similar to such financial overspending, and can become devastating. As resource deficits get larger, and resource prices remain high, the costs to nations become unbearable."

Humanity has - until recent times - used nature's services - to build cities and roads, provide food and create products at a rate that was well within Earth's budget. But in the 1970s, we crossed a critical threshold. Human demand began outstripping what the planet could renewably produce, and we went into ecological overshoot.

Humanity is now using 1.5 Earth's worth of ecological resources and services and - unless we lessen our impact, we will be using two planets-worth well before mid-century.

We are draw down more and more principal at the same time our level of consumption, or "spending," grows. The social and economic costs could be staggering.

"From soaring fossil fuel prices to crippling national debts partly due to rising natural resource prices, our economies are now confronting the reality of years of spending beyond our means," Dr. Wackernagel said.

Earth Overshoot Day is observed today with events to raise awareness : students of Network Siena Sostenibilità at the University of Siena, Italy, are planting trees and providing recommendations for sustainable actions. The Club of Rome in Italy, WWF Cymru in Wales, Greenpeace Germany and Plattform Footprint in Austria, Klimahaus Bremerhaven in Germany are all planning activities.

Five months ago, PricewaterhouseCoopers released a report that concluded it was too late to hold the future increase in global average temperatures to just two degrees Celsius. "It's time," the report announced, "to prepare for a warmer world".

At the same time, the World Bank released Turn Down the Heat, which set out why a 4 degree warmer world must be avoided. Meanwhile we have seen in the press: the failure of the Rio+20 talks to result in positive action, "zombie" coral reefs, calls for higher birth rates, declining Arctic sea ice, an approaching "state shift" in the earth's biosphere.

In our newest annual report, State of the World 2013 we added an important section, "Open In Case of Emergency."

We should consider ways to upgrade the design of the environmental movement so that it doesn't just respond to immediate threats, such as air pollution and chemical run-off, but helps to cultivate a truly sustainable culture and ground the way we live and think more deeply in ecological reality.

We need to strengthen community roots and social capital, including intergroup networks to bridge different communities. This both inoculates against the worst impacts of disruption and helps with the rebuilding process if it comes to that. We need for the government to be more flexible and responsive to the governed. That requires participation, high skill levels, robust debate, and mutual respect - in other words, a deepened democracy.

The movement for a sustainable future may need to utilize non-violent civil disobedience, especially as things get desperate and governments turn to uncertain solutions such as giant space mirrors, carbon-capturing cement - as quick fixes for a disrupted climate.

There may be some comfort in the lessons learned from Cuba's decline. After the Soviet Union's collapse, Cuba suffered a period of harsh adjustment but has scavenged a culture with a small environmental footprint and remarkably high levels of non-material well-being, including infant mortality rates better than its neighbor to the north.

Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson says the real question is not "is it too late?" but "how much will we save?" And that will depend on how quickly and boldly we act now. "We can see our present danger, and we can also see our future potential," Robinson explains. "This is not just a dream but a responsibility, a project. And things we can do now to start on this project are all around us, waiting to be taken up and lived."

This paper is a synthesis of the key messages from the individual papers written by the Blue Planet Laureates. It discusses the imperative of action now. The paper does not claim to comprehensively address all environment and development issues, but a sub-set that are deemed to be of particular importance.

We have a dream - a world without poverty - a world that is equitable - a world that respects human rights - a world with increased and improved ethical behavior regarding poverty and natural resources - a world that is environmentally, socially and economically sustainable, where the challenges such as climate change, loss of biodiversity and social inequity have been successfully addressed. This is an achievable dream, but the current system is deeply flawed and our current pathway will not realise it.

Population size and growth and related consumption patterns are critical elements in the many environmental degradation and social problems we currently face. The population issue should be urgently addressed by education and empowerment of women, including in the work-force and in rights, ownership and inheritance; health care of children and the elderly; and making modern contraception accessible to all.

There is an urgent need to break the link between production and consumption on the one hand and environmental destruction on the other. ... Unsustainable growth is promoted by environmentally-damaging subsidies in areas such as energy, transportation and agriculture and should be eliminated; external environmental and social costs should be internalized; and the market and non-market values of ecosystem goods and services should be taken into account in decision-making.

Governments should recognise the serious limitations of GDP as a measure of economic activity and complement it with measures of the five forms of capital, built, financial, natural, human and social capital,

The world's current commitments to reduce emissions are consistent with at least a 3oC rise (50-50 chance) in temperature: a temperature not seen on the planet for around 3 million years, with serious risks of 5oC rise: a temperature not seen on the planet for around 30 million years

Effective change in governance demands action at many levels to establish transparent means for holding those in power to account. Governance failures also occur because decisions are being made in sectoral compartments, with environmental, social and economic dimensions addressed by separate, competing structures.

There is a need to scale-up the grass roots actions by bringing together a complementary top-down and bottom-up approach to addressing these issues.

Unfortunately, humanity's behavior remains utterly inappropriate for dealing with the potentially lethal fallout from a combination of increasingly rapid technological evolution matched with very slow ethical-social evolution. The human ability to do has vastly outstripped the ability to understand. As a result civilization is faced with a perfect storm of problems driven by overpopulation, overconsumption by the rich, the use of environmentally malign technologies, and gross inequalities.

Total food production has nearly trebled since 1960, per capita production has increased by 30%, and food prices and the percent of undernourished people have fallen, but the benefits have been uneven and more than one billion people still go to bed hungry each night. Furthermore, intensive and extensive food production has caused significant environmental degradation. Aside from the loss of much biodiversity through outright habitat destruction from land clearing, tillage and irrigation methods can lead to salinisation and erosion of soils; fertilizers, rice production and livestock contribute to greenhouse gas emissions; unwise use of pesticides adds to global toxification; and fertilizer runoff plays havoc with freshwater and nearshore saltwater habitats.

One of the key challenges facing the world is to increase agricultural productivity, while reducing its environmental footprint through sustainable intensification, given that the demand for food will likely double in the next 25-50 years, primarily in developing countries. Unfortunately, climate change is projected to significantly decrease agricultural productivity throughout much of the tropics and sub-tropics where hunger and poverty are endemic today.

.. http to download the entire report (pdf).

(watch the video at http://fora.tv/2011/10/26/Growth_Has_an_Expiration_Date to see a more accurate account and several educational graphs)

Presenter: Tom Murphy, Associate Professor of Physics, University of California San Diego

NPR's Ira Flatow guided a group of some of the world's best thinkers and doers at the Compass Summit situated overlooking the California coastline.

We could not have our marvelous technological society, better quality of life, great medical care if it weren't for surplus energy beyond the subsistence level. It's the surplus energy that's made more food available, that's created a population surge and more industry and economic growth.

Today we use energy at a total worldwide rate equivalent to12 terawatts (TW) of electricity. Historically that's grown 2-3% for year. Looking at the charts comparing, in logarithmic form, financial growth and energy growth history for the United States from 1650 to the present and you see how both energy and economics grew in parallel - the economy at 2.9% and energy at 2.3%. Economic growth went up with the rise of energy use. We can also make use of the fact that the rate of increase is quite constant. Today we use 12 TW and projecting that same growth rate - 2.3% - into 336 years from now we see that we will be using as much power as all the solar energy from the sun that hits all the continents, assuming we had a 100% coverage of all the land with 100% efficient solar panels.

Maybe we think we can make things better and find ways to put more solar panels in the sun, we could get up to 1400 years before we would be forced to level out our worldwide usage. Impossible to see how we would physically do it, but in 2500 years we would be using as much energy that is from all the stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.

This would be the devastation of our financial affairs, so if you're stuck in the mindset of exponential growth you have to realize what the consequences are.

Supposing we were, in 1400 years, using as much energy as the sun through some fantastical device on earth, we still have the problem of dissipating the waste heat that will be generated. It's going get hot due to the laws of thermodynamics - starting with the global average temperature of fifty nine degrees Fahrenheit today, in 430 years it will be hot enough to boil the water on the surface of the planet; and we get the sun surface temperature in less than a thousand years.

The idea of using this much energy is absolutely nuts. The lesson is that we have to abandon growth.

Most economists and everybody we've met and everybody that they've met has experienced this assumption that the world is expected to grow. People think we can still bring up standards of living and we can have efficiency gains and technology innovations to keep marching along but those things cannot become the whole economy.

Let's just look at a snapshot of growth over the last century - the gross world product for this entire world and for the first half of the century grew at about a 2.9% rate, which was the same rate as energy growth - which is striking because that's the same rate at which energy growth occurred. But since 1915 we had economic growth faster than energy which may be taken as an evidence that we can grow without energy and in a way we can. This is considered something of a triumph, but that gap is partly due to increased energy efficiency, partly doing more with less, and any other part is growth in things that are less energy intensive, as in the service sector like clerical work, real estate, and the psychotherapy we have to have to cope with this crazy world.

Improvements in energy efficiency have mostly been made, future improvements will contribute only a tiny percent to savings of energy. We can maybe get a savings by a factor of 2%. If we want to keep the economy growing at 5% the gap between energy and economy will continue to widen, and so some increasing fraction of your economy has to be based on low energy activities such as in the service industry, which will have to grow and grow until it approaches a 100%. Food, manufacturing, transport would have to go.

So we need a model for a steady state economy. If we assume we can solve this problem, we're not working on it. Some argue that we cannot comprehend what will happen 200 years from now. If we do nothing, however, we face the strong possibility of losing so much more.

Let's say that we manage the transition to renewable resource and we can level at our energy - leveling out actually means that we have to live at about fifth of the US energy standard of living because the US has 5% world's population and uses 25% of the energy. But the world also has pollution, degredation, rainforests being chopped down, soil quality, ancient aquifers being pumped out - these are part of the story here. We need about a 10 time increase in throughput , or at least 5.

To give an example of our truly understanding the problem and taking responsibility of it: a child might really want a pony, and you say ok well let's start with a gerbil to see you can manage it - you have feed it, to clean its cage, and if you manage that you get kitten it's more work, clean the litter box. If you can manage that we get a puppy - that's more work - you have to walk it, and if you can manage that we upgrade to goat, now you have a paddock to take care which is more like being a farmer, and if you can do that you get the pony. But we're not even taking care of a gerbil. But we think we deserve a pony, deluding ourselves we continue to talk about pony, pony, pony. Do we deserve to be using the word sustainable because we haven't really understood what it means or what level we can expect to operate sustainably? It's an open question.

The fossil fuel joyride has clouded our judgment. We will start to see the decline in oil soon. We need an upfront energy investment to build a new energy infrastructure to build our way out of this problem. With our smarts and our technology that requires an upfront energy investment to build the infrastructure that's exactly what we're reading short time so we have to intentionally exacerbate to make the problem seem worse in order to start down that path and that's politically very difficult to do, to just put some numbers on.

We have to invest one energy unit per year in renewable energy to get 4 units of output. But there's no energy financing in nature. You can build a windmill on promised energy, but you must have the energy upfront while there is still energy to do it.

When you look at a project and wonder if it is sustainable, ask is this idea really sustainable, or is it based on continued growth, does this help secure merger will or is it just more promise up for a pony?

In 1956, a geologist working for Shell Oil named M. King Hubbert predicted that US petroleum production would peak in 1970, and steadily decline in the years thereafter. His prediction showed that, like many other natural phenomenon, oil production over time forms a bell-shaped curve.

It now appears that peak oil was in 2008 to 2010. Mr. Hubbert can be forgiven for missing the date, as he was a petroleum geologist, and geologists usually think in terms of millions of years.

Oil forms in basins on the edge of oceans that are anoxic (lacking oxygen), which prevents the oxidation of the constant rain of dead algae and animals that settle to the bottom of all oceans. The preserved remains, mixed with sand, clay and other accumulations, are then capped with an impervious layer and buried between 7500-15000 feet (1.5 to 3 miles) beneath the earth. At this depth, the temperature is high enough (about 175 degrees F) to "cook" the organic sediments into petroleum. Below this range, it is cooked so far that it all turns into natural gas. The petroleum, trapped by the impervious layer, will reside there, waiting for an industrious oil company to tap it with a well rig. Early oil companies found the "light, sweet crude" that would just push up to the surface when under pressure. 'Light' because it makes a lot of gasoline, and 'sweet' because it doesn't have much sulfur.

But other oils consist of heavy tar residue, or not have enough natural gas, and need to be pumped from great depths, or have high sulfur that takes a lot of processing to refine. Any of these flaws require energy to overcome so that the cost may rise. The Texas oil wells drilled in the early 1900's got 20+ barrels of oil for each barrel of oil it took to pump and process. Today the ratio is as low as 5 barrels of oil "costing" one barrel. If the ratio approaches one to one, there isn't any point in pumping the oil anymore.

A pound of petroleum contains more energy than most other equivalent energy sources, and some sources are very hard to contain, (think of batteries to store electricity compared to a gas tank in a car or truck). Hydrogen would require 7 tanker trucks to carry the energy equivalent of one tanker of gasoline.

For the last 100+ years or so, the production of oil increased almost every year. Now, there will begin to be a bit less oil every year. Over the long term, the price will increase because we are dependent on it and the cheap, easily refined oil has already been pumped. Using oil to replace human labor with machines became the basis for economic success. Now labor will become cheaper than machinery. But politicians don't mention this because a permanent decline in our economy would assure defeat at the polls.

Employment will initially decline, so it will be a tough economy to live in. Food, and every other commodity that depends on oil to be produced or shipped will cost more.

What can you do? Grow your own food if you can. Learn to enjoy cabbage, potatoes, and carrots in the winter. Try to move close to where you work. Get rid of the gas hog. Walk. Expect to pay lots for exotic fruit. Invest in a solar home, if you have anything to invest. Insulate. Stay healthy, and maybe think about alternative health care. Think of strategies to survive when you are poor.

The answers, most of them, have been part of the human condition for generations.

Many cultures have declined, but most haven't talked about it much. Rome in about 1 AD, the Maya of Central America in 700 AD, are examples. Both took involved a decade or two of decline followed by a decade or two of getting by. N

Expect hunger, disease and war - the 'Three Horsemen' to return. On the bright side, we do know more about causes of disease than in the past, and we know how clean water and sewage handling affect public health. Hunger won't be easy either - our current system of baking all the bread at one point and shipping it around the country is likely to get pretty pricy in a while. There just won't be the funds available to rebuild so quickly after an earthquake, flood or fire. One can already see it in the response to Hurricane Katrina, there are parts of the Gulf Coast that won't return for a very long time, if ever. More locally, living in California has some definite advantages as well as disadvantages. The potential for earthquakes in LA and the Bay Area is kind of scary. On the other hand, the agricultural potential of the Central Valley isn't going to disappear, though the water to irrigate may be a problem.

So, what strategies are likely to help? Learn a trade, grow some of your own food, make friends with your neighbors, you may need their help sooner than you think. A lot of the survival strategies are also just common sense. Look for opportunities to develop your local resources - everyone will still need to eat, drink and be merry, any way they can.

Some of the benefits to living in California - close to food sources, relatively warm climate, many Native Americans present during "Pre-European-American contact", indicating that California had a relatively high "carrying capacity", the ability for land to support people living without petroleum.

Some of the detriments to living in California - too many people, (though most of them are down South), fragile infrastructure supplying everyone, too many earthquakes, droughts, fires and floods.

Some benefits/detriments to living in the Sierra Foothills - lower elevations can support agriculture if water is available, lots of oak trees supplying acorns for people to eat, but, travel is difficult and slow, we need to learn to live with fire, and, this is where everyone from the Bay Area/Southern California will come if times get tough. If we ever have a flood like we did in 1862, the Central Valley will fill with water and many of those people will head for these hills.

From "Up and Down California in 1860-1864" by William H. Brewer: In the Winter of 1861, "The great central valley of the state is under water - a region 250 to 300 miles long and an average of at least twenty miles wide . . . Although much of it is not cultivated, yet a part of it is the garden of the state. Thousands of farms are entirely underwater - cattle starving and drowning.", and "An old acquaintance, came down from a ranch that was overflowed. The floor of their one-story house was six weeks under water before the house went to pieces. This was in the Sacramento Valley. . . . Nearly every house and farm over this immense region is gone. There was such a body of water - 250 to 300 miles long and 20 to 60 miles wide, the water ice cold and muddy - that the winds make high waves which beat the farm homes in pieces."

Any natural disaster during our decline is likely to cause immense personal losses, which will not be compensated by government. Locally, we can rely on natural resources such as timber and firewood which will still retain value. On the other hand, we very much need to learn to manage our forest - in the past we have cut the big trees and sold the wood. Now we have a dense, overgrown forest which desperately needs to be thinned. The people who lived here for thousands of years managed the forest with fire - they were after different products of course, but the cost of fire suppression is something we will not be able to afford in the future. Planned fire prevents wildfire, and learning to control fire will be one of our most important tasks.

Some references for readers: The Long Descent, by John Michael Greer, Beyond Oil, by Kenneth S. Deffeyes: Up and Down California in 1860-1864, by William H. Brewer, edited by Francis P Farquhar.

Change is always difficult but our culture must change if it is to continue.

There is a movement that is coming from the people/citizens. It has been given a title of Green but I prefer Sustainable. Basically it is change from a high consumption rate to living within the capacity of our habitat. Resources are being depleted as corporations push us to buy, buy, buy.

When the price of gasoline went up American moved in the direction of using less gas. This worried the oil corporations so the price came down. In Europe where the price of gas is about $10. per gallon they walk, ride their bicycles, use bus and trains, have tiny vehicles----many not using any gasoline at all. Hummers SUVs & gas-guzzlers don't even exist in Europe----here they are no longer selling.

Hybrids can not be made fast enough as demand is so high.

The monster houses being built locally and priced at $750,000 and up are not selling. People want small, sustainable, affordable homes.

Bush's 700 billion "bailout" with taxpayer money is designed to continue the monster mansion industry.

Our culture must move in the direction of what many are already doing. I have attempted to become independent of outside energy sources. I live on one acre. The sun shines on this one acre on which I grow bushes & trees-------birds love it. These plants capture the sun's energy by photosynthesis. The plants that grow feed my goats or are burned in my insert fireplace to heat my home in winter. It requires a lot of chopping, cutting & hauling but the sun is providing the energy---not nuclear power (Diablo).

The sun shines on my solar-panels which heat my water. Of course, no sun, no hot water. In summer I have plenty of hot water for my hot tub. In winter or rainy days I have to supplement solar heat with natural gas to heat water for my hot-tub.

The sun activates my photo-voltaic (PV) panels which produces my electricity. There are essentially no P.V.'s or solar panels on any of the estimated 5,000 new houses in Nipomo ----why?

A clothesline dries my laundry-----not Diablo. If you don't dry your laundry in our abundant sun you are part of the over-consuming problem. I got rid of my lawn years ago as it requires a lot of water, pesticides and herbicides. I replaced it with native plants and friendly exotics which the birds love and feed my goats.

I attempt to eat from my one acre. My pork comes from homegrown pigs. Visitors often ask "How can you eat an animal you've named & raised?" It is easy & delicious. My pigs have a happy life with a straw bed, talked to daily and gets petted often. I avoid "factory raised meat" as the animals have a terrible life in small pens & crowded conditions. I do not buy factory raised meat.

I have goats which provides me with plenty of delicious fresh milk with no chemicals. My happy chickens live on the ground, scratch a lot & lay more nutritious eggs than caged, factory raised hens which go for soup after a laying cycle. My 40 hens and 3 roosters live a long life and enrich my farm ambiance so very much.

Children enjoy visiting & are welcome. The 3 roosters have names & personalities all their own. My garden & orchard do provide some food but production is variable. For example I get more blackberries than I could possibly eat for about three weeks in early summer & then "none".

Nipomo doesn't get much rain (13 inch average/year). We are depleting our water supply---over-draft. Water from my inside toilets go to a septic system whose leach lines water my plants. Lines from my shower, hot tub, sink and laundry all go to water plants. My outside toilet doesn't even use any water & fertilizes my trees. I enjoy listening to the birds & seeing the sun come up.

The large mansions that Bush's 700 billion bailout is attempting to continue is the wrong direction. Small sustainable homes, bicycles and consuming less is the future. The auto industry learned the hard way when the SUV's, Hummers & Cadillacs stopped selling. If there is to be a future-----sustainable living will have to be the emphasis. The bailout is an attempt of our leaders to keep us buying.

If there is to be a future for America we must change to sustainable living. Our current leadership is headed us in the wrong direction-----democracy CAN work----speak up !! For further reading go to Al Gore's article in the most recent Mother Jones magazine page 38. Some of his comments: "The survival of the United States as we know it is at risk", "...the future of human civilization is at stake", "Were borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet.", "We need to act now."

The NOAA is America's best bet for solving problems of poor air quality and an expanding global population. From assessing climate change to providing transportation-related weather forecasts, NOAA is an information center for U.S. and international officials and is bringing together 51 nations to establish a more sophisticated monitoring system for the land, sea and air. The proposed network of thousands of weather stations, buoys, ships and aircraft will take the globe's pulse and transmit the information 24 hours a day. It could transform the way farmers plant their crops and shippers plot their courses. By mid-February, the project's coalition will announce a 10-year plan to accomplish its mission. Activists are still awaiting more aggressive regulation from NOAA to protect deep-sea corals and reduce the incidental catch of fish and other species.

Population size is the universal denominator being the best single measure of the pressure on the environment. It combines the effects of population growth and individual consumption. ... Economic Growth - with consumption-driven economy, economic growth is the best single measure of the mounting pressure on the earth�s environment. ... World Fish Catch measures the health of the oceanic ecosystem where demand is outrunning sustainable stocks. ... Forest Cover - the shrinkage of forests means that capacity to supply wood products is diminished, also the capacity for flood control, soil protection, and the purification of water. ... Carbon Emissions provide clues about the kind of world for future generations. ... Grain Production reflects population growth and its rise in consumption of grain-fed livestock products. ... Water Scarcity - data shows that aquifers are depleted and the water supply is reduced. ... Ice Melting is one of the visible effects of rising temperature; its melting raises sea level. ... Wind Electric Generating Capacity - the rate at which wind generating capacity is expanding compared with fossil fuels gives us a sense of how fast the eco-economy is unfolding.... Bicycle Production - sales measure our ability to reduce traffic congestion, lower air pollution, increase mobility, and provide exercise. ... Solar Cell Production - solar cells are years behind wind power, but sales in 2001 represent by far the largest annual sales to date. As it continues to fall, the cost will cross a critical threshold where production will begin to jump.

Water tables all over the world are falling, as "world water demand has tripled over the last" 50 years. When these aquifers are depleted, food production worldwide will fall.

Water supplies are under increasing stress from climate change and a population of more than 7 billion people likely to reach 9 billion by 2050.

Such stresses are likely to cause more conflicts and water should be considered as vital to national security, according to the U.N. and World Meteorological Organization. 145 nations share river basins with their neighbors and need to promote cooperation over a resource likely to be disrupted by more frequent floods and heatwaves. There are over 300 trans-boundary aquifers from which groundwater can be extracted.

In 2011 an estimated 185,000 Somalis their country, driven largely by water and food shortages linked to drought, while in South Sudan, entire communities were forced to leave due to water scarcity brought on by conflict in 2012. Floods in Pakistan in 2010 killed almost 2,000 people and droughts in the United States and Russia in recent years have driven up global food prices.

Water-related diseases, from diarrhoea to malaria, kill about 3.5 million people every year, mostly in developing nations. Climate change could worsen the toll in some areas.

A good example of cooperation is that Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina have signed a deal in 2010 to cooperate and prevent conflicts over the Guarani Aquifer, which extends over more than 1 million square kilometres (386,000 sq miles).

The World Health Organization estimates that each person needs between 50 and 100 litres (13-26 U.S. gallons) of water a day to meet basic needs.

Population growth is in general constrained by food production,which in turn depends on the access to water resources. Some countries use more water than they control because of their ability to import food and the virtual water required for its production.

In several areas of the world the demand has already exceeded the supply of renewable freshwater resources. This negative water budget be sustained by importing food. This is called virtual water trade. This report investigates the dependence of demographic growth on available water resources for exporting and importing nations.

Most of the water we use is to produce the food we eat. With the world's population that has doubled every 40 years there is a growing concern that water limitations will soon impede humanity to meet its food requirements.

The recent Rio+20 Earth Summit organized by the United Nations addressed the urgency to deal with this alarming situation by developing durable socio-political and economic strategies that promote a sustainable use of the environment and its natural resources.

Several studies have been used to assess whether mankind will run out of water in the next few decades and to investigate possible strategies to deal with the global water and food crisis. In this report the carrying capacity of nations is calculated on the basis of calculations of the virtual water available through the food trade network as a means of demonstrating the existence of a global water unbalance.

It is likely that current export rates will not be maintained and thus the long-term sustainability of the food trade system as a whole is in question. While most exporting countries can afford to sustain VW (virtual water) exports, their demographic growth might soon limit the amount of VW resources they can place on the global market, thus leaving import-dependent regions without enough water to sustain their populations.

However, it may be that the vulnerability of water-controlled societies might be reduced through:

1. cooperative interactions among nations whereby water-rich countries maintain a tiny fraction of their food production available for export,

2. changes in consumption patterns, and

3. a positive feedback between demographic growth and technological innovations.

Water-rich regions are in North and South America, Australia, and the former Soviet Union (or "Eastern Bloc"). Virtual water-dependent regions are mainly in Europe, Mexico, and the western side of South America. Despite VW trade, large parts of Africa and Asia remain affected by water stress.

For this report the "carrying capacity" of a nation, i.e., its maximum sustainable population, is calculated on the basis of the water resources currently available for agriculture and livestock.

For almost one-third of all of the world's nations (i.e., water-rich and VW-dependent countries), the carrying capacity depends on their food availability, which, in turn, depends on the available water resources. Therefore, a quantitative estimate of the average local carrying capacity of a country is obtained by dividing the total water currently available for food production in that country by the volume of water used to produce the food consumed, on average, by one individual in that nation. This will give you the number of individuals that that country can sustain, given the available local freshwater resources of country.

The virtual carrying capacity is the maximum sustainable population of a country when VW imports and exports are accounted for. The carrying capacity can also change with changes in consumption patterns, crop expansion, and increase in the efficiency of agricultural production. Demographic data was from 1970-2010.

The 5 categories of countries used for the model were: water rich nations, eastern block, VW dependent, barely self-suicient, water scarce, and inconsistent data.

A good example is that, during the 2008 food crisis some exporting countries panicked and banned the exports of food crops. Unless new freshwater resources become available or investments for a more water-efficient agriculture are made, these populations would have to decrease, if the exports were banned for a long period of time.

The model shows, that if water-rich countries keep a fraction of their water resources in the VW global market, VW- dependent countries can sustain a larger population. The overall effect of a cooperative regime is a long term increase in the total global population and thus a more sustainable demographic growth. In the absence of such cooperation the decline in the trade-dependent population is expected to start around 2030, a date that is close to von Foerster's Doomsday date. With the keeping of some of the VW water in the global market, the decline is expected to occur between 2040 and 2060, depending on the intensity of the cooperative regime.

Similarly, it was found that strategies based on the enhancement of productivity efficiency and a decrease in per capita global consumption result in a remarkable relief for trade-dependent countries, whose populations are subjected to less pronounced declines.

We also find that changes in consumption patterns and greater equity in per capita consumption would not be sufficient to meet the increasing demand of a growing human population.

Despite the presence of a number of other environmental, cultural, and health-related factors not included in this study, this analysis points out how VW trade is only a temporary solution to a local-to-regional unbalance between populations and food production. The existence of this unbalanced condition might be mitigated if a cooperative regime among water-rich and VW-dependent nations continues to exist even once the excess of VW in the exporting countries is strongly reduced by their demographic growth.

We finally show that strategies aiming at an increase in productivity efficiency through agricultural practices that enhance crop yields while reducing water losses (e.g., water harvesting, water conservation, genetically modified crops) or increased water use efficiency resulting from increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations improve the sustainability of trade-dependent societies with respect to a decrease in export rates from water rich countries.

Irrigation can offer crop yields that are two to four times greater than is possible with rainfed farming. The most recent year for which global data are available from FAO was 2009, and in that year 261 million hectares in the world were being irrigated, according to new research conducted for World Watch's Vital Signs Online service. The countries with the largest irrigated areas in 2010 were India (39 million hectares), China (19 million), and the United States (17 million).

Irrigation takes about 70% of the world's freshwater withdrawals, and currently provides 40% of the world's food from about 20% of all agricultural land.

Since the late 1970s, irrigation expansion has slowed down. 311 million acres were equipped for irrigation in 2009, but only 84% of that was being used. The FAO attributes the decline to the unsatisfactory performances of formal large canal systems, corruption in the construction process, and acknowledgement of the environmental impact of irrigation projects.

The increasing availability of inexpensive individual pumps and well construction methods has led affordable and effective irrigation that is attractive to poor farmers worldwide, with rewards of higher outputs and incomes and better diets. There are also government subsidies for energy costs of running groundwater pumps and support prices of irrigated products. But with rising numbers of farmers tapping groundwater resources, more and more aquifers are in danger of being unable to recharge fast enough to keep pace with water withdrawals.

While 80% of aquifers worldwide could handle additional water withdrawals, the world's major agricultural producers (particularly India, China, and the United States) are also the ones responsible for the highest levels of depletion.

Pumping water from aquifers and redirecting flows for irrigation also causes salinization, which occurs when water moves past plant roots to the water table due to inefficient irrigation and drainage systems; as the water table rises, it brings salts to the base of plant roots. Plants take in the water, and the salts are left behind, degrading soil quality and therefore the potential for growth.

Drip irrigation waters plants slowly and in small amounts either on the soil surface or directly on roots, with the potential to reduce water use by as much as 70% while increasing output by 20-90%. Drip and other micro-irrigation methods have increased from 1.6 million hectares to over 10.3 million hectares in the last two decades,

With predictions of a global population exceeding 9 billion by 2050, water withdrawals for irrigation will need to rise by 11% in the next three decades to meet crop production demands. Intelligent water management is crucial especially in the face of climate change, which will force the agriculture industry to compete with the environment for water.

By Suzanne York

India is a predominantly rural country, with over 600 million of its 1.2 billion citizens relying directly on agriculture. Nearly two-thirds of Indian fields are fed only by rain, which is why Indian agriculture is dependent on the monsoons. June to September the monsoons bring 75% of India's annual rainfall. But climate change is likely to make the South Asia monsoon season 40-70% below normal levels and fail every 5 years or so over the next two centuries, warn experts¹. This is bad news for Indian farmers who depend on the monsoons and consequently bad news for food and water security in a country destined to be the world's most populous by 2030.

Krishna Kumar Kanikicharla, a scientist with the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, said: "Livelihoods, water security, and energy security are all tied to volume and timely arrival of monsoon season."

In India, nearly 80% of women work in agriculture, so they will feel the brunt of climate change the most.

As for the water that is supplied by pumping of groundwater from aquifers - the aquifers are being depleted faster than can be replenished by nature.

The past 200 years of ever increasing reliance on fossil fuels is altering the climate in ways yet unknown. The world should commit to renewable and less carbon intensive solutions, yet the International Energy Agency just issued its annual World Energy Outlook 2012 report that states the world is failing to move towards a more sustainable path for energy, as it continues its addiction to fossil fuels in the face of climate change and growing water scarcity.

The Green Foundation is a grassroots organization that works to empower south Indian women to build resilient communities in the face of climate change and sustain rural livelihoods without damaging the ecosystem. Another organization, GRAVIS, promotes sustainable rural development via capacity building, community and women's empowerment, social justice, and protecting the environment, and using a traditional source of water storage, called taankas.

The overall solution though, is reducing global fossil fuel usage and emissions, which is the challenge facing the whole world.

1. Environmental Research Letters from researchers at Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

The world needs more water - the equivalent of 20 more Nile rivers or 100 Colorado Rivers by 2025 - to grow enough food to feed a rising population and help avoid conflicts over water scarcity, according to a study sponsored by the InterAction Council of former leaders. The group has a membership of 40 leaders, including Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, and Nelson Mandela.

The study - backed by the U.N. University's Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNWEH) and Canada's Gordon Foundation - predicted that many nations were likely to face freshwater shortages within two decades, and called on the U.N. Security Council to make water the top concern, above global warming.

"The future political impact of water scarcity may be devastating," former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien. "It will lead to some conflicts," he said, highlighting tensions such as in the Middle East over the Jordan River. For example, water-related conflicts exist between Israelis and Palestinians over aquifers, between Egypt and other nations sharing the Nile, or between Iran and Afghanistan over the Hirmand River.

3,800 cubic km (910 cubic miles) of fresh water has been taken from rivers and lakes every year.

"With about 1 billion more mouths to feed worldwide by 2025, global agriculture alone will require another 1,000 cubic km (240 cubic miles) of water per year," the study said. The world's population is now over 7 billion.

One billion people have no fresh water and 2 billion lack basic sanitation. About 4,500 children die of water-related diseases every day - the equivalent of 10 jumbo jets falling out of the sky with no survivors, Chretien wrote.

The greatest growth in demand for water would be in China, the United States and India due to population growth, increasing irrigation and economic growth. India and China are expected to exceed their demand for water by 2030.

Water problems will be aggravated by severe weather events - such as droughts, floods, mudslides or downpours, which are becoming more frequent. These are the result of global warming brought on by human emissions of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels

The report said that fixing leaky pipes could help - in developing nations, about 40 percent of domestic water is lost before it reaches households. Some nations are shifting to less water-intensive crops or recycling.

The report said that annual spending on improving water supplies and sanitation in developing nations should be raised by about $11 billion a year. Every dollar spent would yield an economic return of $3 to $4, it estimated.

A study published in Nature finds that the "size of the global groundwater footprint is currently about 3.5 times the actual area of aquifers." An aquifer's footprint is the theoretical size it would need to be to sustainably support use at its current rate, so groundwater footprints being much larger than their corresponding aquifers is a sign of overuse.

Highlighted was overuse in six major aquifers: the Western Mexico, High Plains, North Arabian, Persian, Upper Ganges, and North China Plain.

Some aquifers are replenishable, like many in India, for example, but are being refilled more slowly than they are being drained. So-called "fossil aquifers" - are not replenishable, like the Ogallala aquifer in the midwestern United States and the Sana'a Basin in Yemen. Streams which once deposited water no longer reach them. Once water is depleted from the fossil aquifers, farmers must turn to other forms of irrigation or cease agricultural production altogether. Even before aquifers run dry, falling water tables increase the cost of irrigation by forcing farmers to drill deeper and deeper for access to water.

Yemen, for example, is using up water more quickly than it can be replenished, due to population growth and poor management. Experts predict the country will run out of water by 2025 - the first in the modern era.

The Upper Ganges and the North China plain are two hotspot areas where population is particularly dense and aquifers are already strained. The Upper Ganges includes already dense areas with growing populations, like Pakistan, which has a TFR of 3.6 children per woman, and the Indian province of Uttar Pradesh, with a TFR of 3.8.

Over-use is not universal. Many aquifers appear to be being used at sustainable rates, and some regions thought to be water scarce actually have enormous underground reserves, like those recently mapped in Africa. Then there are areas where water resources are ample, but there are limitations to its use. Northern Russia, for example, experiences harsh Siberian winters-- a natural limit to agricultural production.

The article also looks at how "bringing the world's agricultural yields to within 95% of their potential" would impact the groundwater of each region. Some experts predict food supplies will need to increase at least 70% by 2050 to meet the needs of an expanding and higher-consuming world population.

Unfortunately, many of the areas which have the most room to improve in capacity are already over-consuming groundwater, like the American Midwest, the Upper Ganges, the North China plain, and parts of Poland and Ukraine. These areas are the traditional global grain producers, but because of already-existing stress on their aquifers, "groundwater cannot be used sustainably to increase yields."

In 2004, illegal logging in the Philippines was found to have caused rampant deforestation, flash floods and landslides, and killed nearly 340 people. In 1989, the government of Thailand announced a nationwide ban on tree cutting following severe flooding and the heavy loss of life in landslides. In August 1998, the Chinese government banned all tree cutting in the upper reaches of the Yangtze basin after record flooding and $30 billion worth of damage.

Services provided by forests, such as flood control, may be far more valuable to society than the lumber in those forests.

The earth had 5 billion hectares forested area at the beginning of the twentieth century, now it is just under 4 billion hectares. From 1990, 13 million hectares of developing world forest has been lost per year. This is the equivalent of about 3% each decade and covers an area about the size of Greece.

While the industrial world gains an estimated 5.6 million hectares of forestland each year, mainly from a) abandoned cropland returning to forests on its own and b) from the spread of commercial forestry plantations, net forest loss worldwide exceeds 7 million hectares per year.

Tropical forests that are clear cut or burned off rarely recover, becoming wasteland or scrub forest, and are still counted as "forest" in official forestry numbers, as are plantations.

Only 40% of the world's remaining forests can be classified as frontier forest - large, intact, natural forest systems relatively undisturbed and big enough to maintain all of their biodiversity.

Use of firewood, paper, and lumber is expanding. Only half is used for fuel, but in developing countries, it is three fourths of the total.

In the Sahelian zone of Africa and the Indian subcontinent, deforestation to supply fuelwood is extensive.

Evident from satellite photos taken over time is the widening circle of retreating woods around cities, which leads to increased transport costs of firewood increase, triggering the development of an industry for charcoal, a more concentrated form of energy. Dakar and Khartoum now reach out further than 500 kilometers for charcoal, sometimes into neighboring countries.

In Southeast Asia and Africa logging for lumber is mostly done by foreign corporations more interested in maximizing a one-time harvest than in managing for a sustainable yield in perpetuity. Devastation is left behind. Nigeria and the Philippines have both lost their once-thriving tropical hardwood export industries and are now net importers of forest products.

China now supplies the world with furniture, flooring, particle board, and other building materials, reaching into Indonesia, Myanmar, Papua New Guinea, and Siberia, - recently the Amazon and the Congo Basin - to do so.

The natural forests in Indonesia and Myanmar will be gone within a decade or so, if current trends continue. Those in Papua New Guinea will last 16 years. Those in the Russian Far East, vast though they are, may not last much more than 20 years.

In the Brazilian Amazon, the Congo Basin, and Borneo, the clearing of land for farming and ranching are taking its toll. Brazil has lost 93% of its Atlantic and is now destroying the Amazon rainforest roughly the size of Europe. Close to 20% has been lost since 1970.

Africa's Congo Basin, spanning 10 countries, is also under assault from loggers, miners, and farmers. Here, 190-million-hectares are home to 400 species of mammals, including gorillas, bonobos, chimpanzees, and forest elephants.

Malaysian Borneo has palm oil - a leading biodiesel fuel - plantations which have expanded 8% between 1998 to 2003. In the Indonesian part of Borneo, the growth in oil palm plantings is over 11%.

Firewood demand and land clearing in Haiti has left the country with only 4% of its former land. After the trees go, the soil disappears. Haiti is in an ecological/economic downward spiral from which it has not been able to escape. It is a failed state, a country sustained by international life-support systems of food aid and economic assistance.

Madagascar is following in Haiti's footsteps. Madagascar could soon become a landscape of scrub growth and sand.

Deforestation in the Amazon causes more rain to run back into the sea, reducing dramatically the moisture that is recycled inland. The forest begins to dry out and becomes vulnerable to fire. The Amazon is approaching a tipping point beyond which it cannot be saved.

Similarly in Africa, production of firewood, land clearing, and logging have increased rainfall runoff, depriving the land of the water pumped through trees and into the atmosphere. When the forests disappear, this rainfall declines and crop yields follow.

China, New Zealand, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Viet Nam now have total bans on logging in primary forest. Unfortunately, a ban in one country simply often shifts the deforestation to others or drives illegal logging.

Amazon deforestation jumped 69% in the past 12 months as rising demand for soy and cattle pushes farmers and ranchers to raze trees. Some 3,088 square miles of forest were destroyed between August 2007 and August 2008. Brazil's government has increased cash payments to fight illegal Amazon logging, and eliminated government bank loans to farmers who illegally clear forest. The country lost 2.7% of its Amazon rain forest in 2007, or 4,250 square miles. Monthly deforestation rates have slowed since May, but environmental groups say seasonal shifts in tree cutting make the annual number a more accurate gauge.

Most deforestation is in March and April, and routinely tapers off in May, June and July.

Environmentalists argue that INPE's deforestation report was to alert the government to deforestation hot spots in time to save the land.

The Amazon region covers about 1.6 million square miles of Brazil, nearly 60% of the country. About 20% of that land has been deforested.

Located in the East African Rift Valley, the Lake Manyara Biosphere Reserve is one of the most thrilling tourist attractions of Tanzania. The lake is an important breeding site for residents and migrant birds. Tourists from different parts of the planet earth flock in this Tanzania`s heaven.

Communities living along LMBR are partly within the Lake Manyara National Park. According to Maasai elders` narratives, the indigenous Maasai community that lived close to LMNP used very little firewood for cooking due to their eating habit-mainly unboiled milk.

The town has become cosmopolitan in nature and demands for cooking firewood have increased.

Government initiative on Tse-tse fly eradication encouraged clearing of forests in the villages and paved way for erection of human settlements closer to the park, leading to deforestation, destruction of livestock routes and wildlife corridors.

Maasai elders narrate that, some years ago, people indiscriminately harvested the wildlife. Waters for irrigation drained to Lake Miwaleni and was one of the wildlife`s drinking points. The lake has little water while some animals have moved to other areas.

The cosmopolitan community originated from as far as Kenya and has been living in harmony after settling in the area and attracted by the tourism industry.

The human population in the biosphere reserve is estimated to over 250,000 people.

Most of immigrants in the region depend on tourism though poaching causes a menace to biodiversity. People in the area are now engaged in cultural tourism that relieves them from the jungle of poverty.

Several projects promote activities such as bee keeping or to control the tick infestation in the livestock. Tourists pay for services such as hiring out bicycles, nature trails, food and traditional dances.

There are mutual benefits in the sense that tourists learn from villagers the ways of life, whereas in doing so, they pay for those services thus benefiting villagers and the village government through contributions.

Cultural tourism conserves natural resources as people concentrate on other sources of income.

They have prepared a land use plan which demarcates the land for different purposes and make sure that the type of land use is adhered to. Population pressure has caused blockage of wildlife corridors and creates unnecessary quarrels between the existing communities and wildlife, especially the elephants.

Frequent fires have started jeopardizing the biosphere`s reserve.

Poaching remains one of the critical problems in the area. Plans are underway to annex the buffer zones and establish wildlife management areas that will be managed by the National Park and the surrounding communities.

Human encroachment is shrinking the world's rain forests. Africa is a leader in destructiveness. U.N. specialists estimate 60 acres of tropical forest are felled worldwide every minute, up from 50 a generation back. Scientists today worry about Global warming that is expected to dry up and kill off vast tracts of rain forest, and dying forests will feed global warming. The burning or rotting of trees that comes with deforestation sends more heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than all the world's planes, trains, trucks and automobiles. Forest destruction accounts for about 20% of man made emissions. Healthy forests absorb carbon dioxide and store carbon. If we don't start turning this around in the next 10 years, the crisis will begin to spiral out of control.

The U.N. session in Bali may have been a turning point, endorsing negotiations in which nations may fashion the first global financial plan for compensating developing countries for preserving their forests. Because northern forests remain essentially stable, that means 50,000 square miles of tropical forest are being cleared every 12 months. The lumber and fuel wood removed in the tropics alone would fill more than 1,000 Empire State Buildings. Almost 1% of African forests disappear each year. In 2000-2005, the continent lost 10 million acres a year. South American forests are usually burned for cattle grazing or soybean farming. In Southeast Asia, island forests are being cut or burned to make way for giant plantations of palm, whose oil is used in food processing, cosmetics and other products.

In Africa, it's individuals hacking out plots for small-scale farming. In Nigeria's southeastern state, home to one of the largest remaining tropical forests in Africa, people from surrounding villages go to the forest each day to work their pineapple and cocoa farms. They see no other way of earning money to feed their families. The Cross Rivers government seeks to help would-be farmers learn other trades, such as beekeeping or raising land snails, a regional delicacy. Anyone who wants to cut down one of the forest's valuable mahogany trees must obtain a license and negotiate which tree to fell with the nearby community, which shares in the income. A community benefiting from such small-scale forestry is likely to keep out those engaged in illegal, uncontrolled logging. Environmentalists say such a conservation approach may work for rural, agrarian people in Nigeria, but lessons learned in one place aren't necessarily applicable elsewhere.

A global strategy is needed. A government earning carbon credits for "avoided deforestation" could then sell them to a European power plant, for example, to meet its emission-reduction quota. But in many ways rain forests are still a world of unknowns. How much carbon dioxide are forests absorbing? How much carbon is stored there? How might the death of the Amazon forest affect the climate in, say, the American Midwest?

China faces a farming crisis as mass migration into the industrial zones of mushrooming cities eats up fertile land, while patterns of food consumption and land rights change. Historically the Chinese have spent most of their income on food, but to produce grains, vegetables and meat, the country must retain enough arable cropland. From the Ming Dynasty onwards farmers were able to feed a growing, increasingly urbanised population. Population growth was not an issue until the 19th and 20th centuries.

Today China is importing more food and resources. The sustainable Chinese agriculture has been altered in favour of Western methods that harm the existing ecosystems. China's ability to feed its own people and the environmental destruction provokes serious concern.

By 2030 Chinese demographers expect the population to level out nearer to 1.5 billion, but predicted that soaring grain imports would upset global markets. Water, more than grain or meat, might well be the crucial issue. As water becomes scarce, 80% of the grain crop is irrigated, as per-acre yield gains are erased by the loss of cropland to industrialization. Densely populated countries undergoing industrialization become food importers as the population shifts from rural to urban workers.

The world is experiencing rising food prices. The Chinese government is mandating price freezes and subsiding various manufacturing and food industries.

Water scarcity in China will impact the entire world; the country is experiencing a lack of potable water due to the environmental damage from rapid industrialization without any agencies to protect the ecology.

China, with 20% of the world's population and 7% of the world's arable land, is losing even more land to industrialization.

Beijing has mandated that arable land cannot fall below 298 million acres. China's Ministry of Land and Resources noted that the country has lost 6.6% of its arable land in the past decade.

Corruption also contributes to arable land loss. In central China's Hubei Province every day since November 2, over 10,000 tons of rubbish has turned the small farming village into a stinking dumpsite.

No legislation exists to protect farmers against crooked officials. Local governments have become the epicentre of corrupt land deals.

Chinese farmers fall under a village collective system that forbids them to own, buy or sell the land they till. Competition over raw materials has risen dramatically in the last decade; the impact of greater Chinese food demands has affected global markets. Food price inflation is a serious worry for China's leaders.

The long term outlook is grim, because land is being lost to construction in eastern China. This has degraded the overall quality of the country's remaining arable land. Almost 15% of China's total arable lands are polluted by heavy metals, and more than 40% soil erosion and desertification.

Without effective measures to solve this crisis everyone is going to suffer.

Sergio works in ecotourism in Bolivia's most national park, Madidi. This is where he and four of his 11 siblings show visitors the jungle's many treasures.

Overall, the park is sparsely populated and encompasses the Andean peaks and the tropical basins of the Amazon. Some feel that protected areas like Madidi could deliver more for the country's poor.

Farmers have seized a part of the national park near Apolo. They wanted land to cultivate crops, a road and the exploitation of its oil.

But other villagers say the land is not suitable for agriculture and that extracting oil could cause lasting damage.

The farmers have drawn back and the government is promising a military post to defend Madidi. But the Bolivian president, visited Madidi to highlight the existence of natural resources.

"It is impressive how our own mother Earth has natural resources," he said as he watched oil being extracted.

It was Mr Morales's promise to re-nationalise Bolivia's natural resources and deliver prosperity to the indigenous majority that brought him to power.

But locals fear the president does not understand life in the jungle and will not defend their interests.

The government agrees that ecotourism has potential; but it does not see it as a panacea and says people like Sergio need to be more realistic about what is best for Bolivia.

The government is also concerned that what happens in Madidi will have a domino effect on other national parks and protected areas.

Activists want sustainable development in the constitution

The protected areas belong to the people and should provide opportunities for local communities. Conservation makes no sense if it does not generate benefits for society as a whole.

Environmental groups want to see a commitment to biodiversity and conservation. Biodiversity is Bolivia's biggest competitive strength. We need to define its sustainable development.

Forest loss in Africa stands at 0.6%, in the world at 0.18%. At this pace, Uganda's forests will have gone in 50 years time.

Population pressure and poverty are the underlying causes. With 7.1 births per woman, Uganda has the second highest fertility rate in the world. By 2050, Uganda's population will be 130 million, five times the current number.

Feeding, housing, creating jobs and income for so many people will inevitably eat into the forests. 97% of the population uses charcoal and firewood for cooking. Illegal timber logging has resumed in at times with the support of local politicians.

The number of people building houses, farming and grazing their livestock in the protected forests went up from 180,000 to 220,000 between 2005 and 2006, an increase of 23%. The encroachers resist any attempts by the National Forestry Authority (NFA) to evict them.

Any response leads to mob action and grievous bodily harm to NFA's staff.

Deforestation leads to climate change and drought. Scientists are also linking a rise in infectious diseases to loss of forests and climate change.

By increasing the temperatures under which certain diseases and their carriers flourish, more regions will be affected. South Uganda, which never had malaria in the past, is now hit by the disease.

Climate change may increase the number of refugees who are forced to migrate to other parts of the country or other countries, and will favour the spread of diseases.

Tree planting, timber trade and eco-tourism, if properly managed and controlled, can turn into a major activity. The New Vision will distribute eight million seeds as part of a country-wide effort to promote sustainable development.

The raging monster upon the land is population growth. In its presence, sustainability is but a fragile theoretical construct. To say, as many do, that the difficulties of nations are not due to people but to poor ideology or land-use management is sophistic.

The global food system and agricultural sustainability are under stress that is expected to increase in the coming decades, facing a growing world population of seven billion today, continuing to around nine billion around 2050 and then leveling off. Today one billion are estimated to be undernourished. Add to that hotter, drier weather, more erratic weather patterns, expanding desert areas brought about by climate change, as well as soil degradation and erosion on large areas of existing agricultural land.

The acute food crisis of 2007-2008 and ongoing poverty and malnutrition provide evidence of structural failure of the dominant market-centric organisational and institutional agricultural framework.

A report calling for root and branch changes to the world food system, specifically stating that "business as usual is not an option," was created by International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) and was sponsored by the World Bank and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and other United Nations affiliated organisations. The report took four years of work and over 400 authors, and it was ratified by 57 nations in 2008.

Unfortunately the World Bank and FAO and other key organisations have ignored this report and denigrated its legitimacy.

Key findings of the IAASTD report are as follows:

*Agriculture involves far more than yields: it has multiple social, political, cultural, institutional and environmental impacts and can equally harm or support the planet's ecosystem functions on which human life depends.

*The future of agriculture lies in biodiverse, agroecologically based farming and can be supported by ‘triple-bottom-line' business practices that meet social, environmental and economic goals.

*Reliance on resource-extractive industrial agriculture is unsustainable, particularly in the face of worsening climate, energy and water crises; expensive, short-term technical fixes - including transgenic crops - do not adequately address the complex challenges of the agricultural sector and often exacerbate social and environmental harms.

*Achieving food security and sustainable livelihoods for people now in chronic poverty requires ensuring access to and control of resources by small-scale farmers.

*Fair local, regional and global trading regimes can build local economies, reduce poverty and improve livelihoods.

*Strengthening the human and ecological resilience of agricultural systems improves our capacity to respond to changing environmental and social stresses. Indigenous knowledge and community-based innovations are an invaluable part of the solution.

*Good decision-making requires building better governance mechanisms and ensuring democratic participation by the full range of stakeholders.

The GM paradigm touts takes the existing industrialised, transnational market food system as a given and touts GM crops as the basis for a "new green revolution", and as the key solution to feeding the world in the face of population growth and the exhaustion of new sources of agricultural land. The "Green Revolution" of the 1960s was based on the technological innovations of high yielding hybrid grain varieties and synthetic fertilisers and pesticides.

However the GM paradigm does not address agricultural ecological sustainability issues such as biodiversity loss, soil and water degradation, reliance on petroleum and its byproducts, or the problem of inherently unstable food systems based on monoculture cropping, high inputs and concentration of land ownership and of agricultural input and output marketing.

Research resources are being monopolized by the centralized, privately marketable industrial-biotechnology (GM) approach to agricultural intensification, commanding a great majority of global agricultural research publications and research money at the expense of research into the knowledge based and socially embedded agro-ecological approach.

While GM-engineered herbicide resistance, toxicity to insect pests, nutrional alterations, and abiotic stress resistance, as well as the production of novel plant products such as pharmaceuticals are listed as GM accomplishments, there is no reference to data supporting actual yield increases, or any discussion of the relative merits of plant biotechnology versus other tools or actions. The promise of GM crops that effectively resist abiotic stresses such as drought remains unrealized. Economic access to high technology products by the poor is not addressed.

While GM success stories claim significant yield gains, improvements in pest management and reductions in pesticide use in developing country agriculture; results, particularly in the developing world, are mixed and equivocal. With Bt cotton in China, India and South Africa, results show that while an increase in average yields on an aggregate level can be demonstrated, but there has been a high degree of variability between regions and farmers and across seasons, with significant numbers of farmers losing out on their investment in the more expensive seeds. As for pesticide use, some studies did show a reduction, but others showed no significant impact or increases in pesticide use, including in response to major outbreaks of secondary insect pests in China.

The alleged connection between Bt cotton adoption and farmer suicides in India was dismissed, despite finding that there had in fact been poor performance in some areas that had in fact coincided with local spikes in farmer suicides. Instead, the fault was attributed to the base cotton hybrid in which the trait was inserted and of poor marketing practices. Such arguments that treat the GM trait as somehow disconnected from the socio-economic and agronomic context in which it is adopted are routinely encountered.

GM soybeans in South America that rely on broadscale glyphosate application as a routine management strategy, required an increase in pesticide use and an alarming increase in pesticide related deaths in Paraguay and major outbreaks of glyphosate resistant weeds in Argentina and Brazil, resulting in increased use of more toxic herbicides. In the Amazon basin, the rapid expansion of industrial agriculture facilitated by GM crops has resulted in accelerated land grabs and clearing of rainforest. The large scale uptake of GM crops in South America has failed to deliver demonstrable benefits in this regard, with persistent poverty and income inequality.

The globalized market driven approach transforms food into a global commodity that responds to monetary demand, not social need. It sees the poorest consumers in direct competition for basic grain foods with rich consumers, the intensive meat industry, and now biofuels manufacturers. Meanwhile, the poorest farmers are increasingly pressured to enter export markets, reducing the availability of locally grown food for local consumption or self consumption, hence increasing vulnerability to food shortage in response to price fluctuations.

Most importantly, the technology has been married to a market-industrial paradigm of agriculture characterized by ever increasing concentration of land ownership, germplasm ownership and agricultural input and output marketing ownership. This industrial model relies heavily on the finite and non-renewable resource of petroleum, and is accelerating landlessness, urbanisation, wilderness clearing, ecotoxicity, agricultural carbon and nitrogen emissions and soil and water degradation. Moreover, its basic structural features place the poorest consumers and farmers at further disadvantage. Its fundamental assumptions need to be seriously questioned as the world seeks solutions for hunger.

The massive worldwide investment in biotechnology would only be justifiable if GM crops were a panacea in their own right. While increased investment in agriculture is needed, the priorities of investment need to be urgently re-thought from the ground up, from the context of true public interest and the universal right to food. The emphasis needs to move away from private marketable goods and towards agroecological research, participatory extension services with a social mandate and free from industry influence, and participatory, localised plant breeding programs that give farmers control of improved plant genetics.

First published in the Durango Herald

"…the first essential component of social justice is adequate food for all mankind." .. Norman Borlaug, in his 1970 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech

I used to love to listen to Baxter Black on the radio. I admired his sense of humor and his human insight. Then I read an article he wrote.

"What is sustainable ag?" appeared in the March 2013 issue of Western Farmer-Stockman. I am writing this as a response to my friend Al, who clipped the article for me. Al is a wise man and an experienced farmer. He wrote: "I thought this was a good article on sustainable agriculture. I hope you find it interesting."

Indeed, it is interesting - not for what it contains, but for what Black left out. First, let me summarize the article.

Black writes that most agriculturalists think that "sustainable farming" is a joke, and derides those who want to return to pre-1950 farming methods. He makes fun of "hobby farmers" who have a garden and a few animals because they don't produce enough food to feed their families for even two weeks.

Black then rightly recaps the history after World War II, when world population soared and people worried about food shortages. Mega-corporations and scientists were able to increase food production remarkably, despite the creep of cities taking over productive ag land. He doesn't mention the “green revolution" of Norman Borlaug and others, which is credited with saving more than a billion lives by developing highly productive strains of crops.

This modern, industrial model of agriculture is sustainable according to Black, because it can sustain so many people. Great grandpa's old-fashioned ways of producing food are laughable in today's context, he writes. He would prefer the term “subsistence-level farming."

Although I understand Al's and Black's viewpoint, I cannot agree. My concern is that, along with its good, the “green revolution" has had several dreadful unintended consequences.

Growing highly productive plants and animals requires the use of many chemicals that are made from limited resources, and are toxic. The chemicals include fertilizers, insecticides, fungicides and herbicides. They are all derived from fossil fuels, and all transported with fossil fuel. Unfortunately, supplies of carbon-based fuels are limited. We have probably already maximized the production of petroleum and soon will see its decline - and a rapid increase in prices.

We are starting to realize the subtle toxicity of many of the agricultural chemicals. The wonder insecticide of my childhood, DDT (which I was told was entirely safe), turned out to be an ecological disaster and now is banned in many countries. An amazing group of insecticides, neonicatinoids, is probably responsible for the die-off of our honeybees - colony collapse disorder. Because bees pollinate so many crops, this is an agricultural disaster.

We now realize that many agricultural chemicals have endocrine effects, even in minuscule concentrations. Just a pinch in all the water in an Olympic-size swimming pool can cause harm! Insecticide residues may decrease sperm counts. One common agrichemical, atrazine, has been shown to cause feminization of male frogs and has been implicated in reproductive cancers.

The seeds of highly productive plant strains must be bought from corporations that control their prices. In the past, seed grain was carefully preserved from the previous crop, but now farmers need cash - or credit - in order to buy seeds. This expense, along with the cost of the chemicals, has broken many farmers. In a good year, they can make a living, but in a bad year, their suicide rate climbs.

Finally, modern agriculture depletes our soil. The use of chemicals exhausts many components that help plants grow.

There is a subtle chicken-and-egg situation here. Modern agriculture has increased food supply, which allowed our population to swell. Borlaug outwitted Malthus, who predicted that human population would be limited by starvation from lack of food.

Here is the quandary: Does modern agriculture only provide a short-term gain? As we deplete petroleum and as crop growing conditions worsen from climate change and drought, can the amazing technology of modern agriculture be sustained? Indeed, some scientists have a terrible vision of severe food shortages with bloodshed and more deaths than Borlaug's green revolution saved.

In his 1970 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Borlaug said, “The first essential component of social justice is adequate food for all mankind."

But he also said: “Most people still fail to comprehend the magnitude and menace of the ‘Population Monster.'" Hopefully, Herald readers are better informed than most. But only time will tell if Baxter Black is correct about sustainable agriculture, or if he should go back to being a humorist.

Richard Grossman practices gynecology in Durango. Reach him at richard@ population-matters.org. © 2013 Richard Grossman, M.D.

Steven W. Running has written a review of the book Harvesting the Biosphere -- What We Have Taken from Nature by Vaclav Smil - MIT Press. Excerpts of that review, "Approaching the Limits", is below. In Sept 13, 2012, Running had an article published in Science titled "A Measurable Planetary Boundary for the Biosphere." A summary of that article follows the Approaching the Limits excerpts.

Approaching the Limits excerpts:

Although global NPP (Net Primary Productivity of energy from photosynthesis or chemosynthesis) currently appears stable, Smil suggests the great potential for pollution, exhaustion of soil nutrients, and irrigation depletion to substantially reduce the future NPP available for humanity. In addition, bioenergy is emerging as a massive new demand on NPP. Should fossil fuels become scarce, expensive, or unwanted, biofuels could, if allowed by policy and economic strategies, consume all remaining available NPP.

The future limits of HANPP (human appropriation of NPP) become an urgent policy issue when one considers the 40% increase in global population expected over the next three or four decades and the expansion in living standards aspired to by the under-developed world. Smil expects that HANPP demand will increase 2-3 times in the next half century, and he rightfully asks if this increase is possible.

In 1972 the landmark book Limits to Growth asked the same question. More recent analyses - such as the global human footprint, planetary boundaries, and Gaia - address the question from various angles. Each has indicated that another half-century of the current trajectory of human development, consumption, and economic aspirations does not appear possible.

Systems ecology teaches that the human population and consumption trajectories need a stronger feed-back control than currently exists. Either we are smart enough to craft that feedback mechanism ourselves, or the Earth system will ultimately provide it.

A Measurable Planetary Boundary for the Biosphere - Sept 13, 2012, by Steven W. Running

In the 1972 Meadows et al. book Limits to Growth, analysis of global limits to human activity done on a primitive computer model of the Earth system concluded that - by the early decades of the 21st century, tangible limits to key global resources would begin to emerge. Another analysis of the original results in 2008 found that the original global resource depletion projections were remarkably accurate. Since then, Rockström et al. have defined a new term—planetary boundaries— to describe nine variables of high importance to habitability of Earth, including climate change, ocean acidification, land-use change, and biodiversity loss. These metrics are compelling conceptually, but many are not easily measured globally. I suggest a new planetary boundary, terrestrial net primary (plant) production (NPP), that is supported by an existing global data set for defining boundaries. Using solar energy, water and atmospheric CO2 are transformed into plant carbohydrate matter. This plant matter then sustains the global food web and becomes the source of food, fiber, and fuel for humanity.

In 1986, Vitousek et al., estimated that humans were consuming or directly co-opting 40% of biospheric production; they later postulated that humanity may one day consume all available NPP. Newer estimates that use satellite data but somewhat different assumptions agree that humans now co-opt roughly one-third of terrestrial NPP. Global NPP is now derived from satellite measures of vegetated cover and density, combined with daily weather observations to analyze light, temperature, and water constraints to plant growth. For more than 30 years, global NPP has stayed near 53.6 Pg per year, with only 2% of variation annually. Thus, although there is huge regional variability within the Earth system, —for example, due to droughts, floods, and heat and cold waves— the final planetary totals of energy may average out because of the constancy of solar radiation globally (varies by less than 0.001% from year to year) and global precipitation (only 0.05 mm/day, or 2% each year).

If global NPP is fixed by planetary constraints, then no substantial increase in plant growth may be possible. Hence, the obvious policy question must be whether the biosphere can support the 40% increase in global population projected for 2050 and beyond.

According to the most recent estimates from global satellite data sets, humans currently appropriate 38% of global NPP, which would appear to leave 62% available for future consumption. However, an estimated 53% of global NPP is not harvestable. This includes plant growth in root systems, preserved land (for example, in national parks that are critical for ecosystem services and biodiversity), and wilderness areas where no transportation exists for harvesting. That leaves only about 10% of total global NPP for additional future use by humans.

Cropland under irrigation has roughly doubled in the last 50 years. Many analyses now conclude that fresh-water use for irrigation has already reached a planetary boundary. As some rivers are completely drained for agriculture and ground-water withdrawal limits are reached in some regions, irrigated crop area could decrease in coming decades. Also nitrogen and phosphorus cycles may have already exceeded planetary boundaries, as evidenced by massive river pollution and ocean anaerobic dead zones.

If anything, future increases in NPP must be achieved with less, not more, irrigation and fertilizer use.

Possibly the biggest unknown in this global analysis is the future of bioenergy. If every bit of the remaining 10% of NPP were used for bioenergy, only 40% of current global primary energy consumption would be satisfied.

The question is thus not whether humans will reach the global NPP boundary but when we will do so. The projected 40% increase in human population by 2050, combined with goals to substantially improve standards of living for the poorest 5 billion people on Earth, implies at least a doubling of future resource demand by 2050. As suggested 40 years ago the limits to growth as measured by human consumption of NPP may well be reached in the next few decades.

In Bangladesh unplanned growth of population is complicating the process of meeting the demand for food, basic health requirements and educational facilities, which, in turn, is expected to lead to unemployment and social unrest. For example, trees are being chopped down for fuel on a regular basis. Climatic disruption in recent times, followed by salinity intrusion, shrinking farmlands and crop losses, has added to the woes of the people of the country.

Bangladesh, with the world's highest density of population, is fast losing arable land due to growing industrialisation and rapid encroachment of human habitat on farming areas. 8000 hectares of farm land are being lost every year from its original 13 million hectares of cropland due to urbanisation, industrialisation, unplanned rural housing and infrastructure buildings.

Entrepreneurs are going to the remote areas of the countryside to set up factories. Agriculture accounts for only 21% of the country's gross domestic product (GDP) although the sector employs around 50% cent of the nation's workforce.

At the current rate of loss of cultivable land, there will be none left in 50 years. If the trend is not reversed now, the country would permanently lose its food security, making its poor population more vulnerable to volatile international commodity prices. The government has banned the use of arable land for purposes other than agriculture. It has been suggested that the factories and educational institutions that have already been built should now go vertical. But the government does not have adequate staff to monitor such things.

The average farm size has been reduced to less than 0.6 hectares and 59% of inhabitants are landless, with nearly 80% of the ultra-poor living in rural areas.

80% of Bangladesh's total cultivated area is in rice, the staple food and a politically-sensitive product,.

No one seems to worry about farmland depletion and the call for ensuring optimum utilisation of arable land and bringing fallow land under cultivation is only rhetoric. Focus was put on rice production, while fuel, cooking oils and pulses were imported at volatile prices. Suggestions for diversifying crops have been ignored by the policymakers.

Government expenditure on agricultural research has been steadily declining in Bangladesh. Investing more on agricultural research is vital for Bangladesh since it is losing cropland quite fast.

According to experts, Bangladesh could easily utilise regions such as Barind tracts, coastal zone and Sylhet haors to grow more Rabi crops comprising pulses and oil seeds to significantly reduce imports.

The World Trade Organisation (WTO) pointed out that in the world's poorest corners, including Bangladesh, land is getting divided through inheritance and farm sizes are getting smaller and smaller with the passing of every generation.

The probable loss of arable and residential lands through flooding would result in increase of internal and external environmental migration and strained relations between countries. Bangladeshis, on an average, spent 50% of their income on food.

In Bangladesh, the problem of economic development has so far been addressed mainly in isolation from the population issue. It is expected that the National Population Council will play its due role in controlling population while strict monitoring and vigilance of RAJUK and all city corporations are a must to stop unplanned development of towns and industries across the country. The nation cannot afford to lose agricultural land any further.

'Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert,' begins Allan Savory in this quietly powerful talk. And terrifyingly, it's happening to about two-thirds of the world's grasslands, accelerating climate change and causing traditional grazing societies to descend into social chaos. Savory has devoted his life to stopping it. He now believes -- and his work so far shows -- that a surprising factor can protect grasslands and even reclaim degraded land that was once desert.

Desertification contributes as much to climate change as fossil fuels.

The Philippines, a country the size of Arizona, has about 1/3 the U.S. population of 313 million and is expected to double in size by 2080. To feed its people, the Philippines imports more rice than any other country on the planet and its oceans show severe signs of overfishing.

The Philippines has one of the highest birth rates in the world and the highest teen pregnancy rate in the Asian Pacific.

Two thirds of native plant and animal species are endemic to the islands and nearly half of them are threatened. Less than 10% of the islands' original vegetation remains and 70% of the 27,000 square kilometers of coral reefs are in poor condition."

Late last year Philippine President Benigno Aquino signed the Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Act of 2012. This means that government health centers will have to make reproductive health education, maternal health care and contraceptives available to everyone. The Catholic Church is vehemently opposed to it and has threatened excommunication for the president and any politicians who support it. One 44-year-old woman, a devout Catholic with 16 children, said, "We don't pay attention to (the Church's opposition). They are not the ones who are giving birth again and again. We are the ones who have to find a way to care for the children."

In the slums of its capital, Manila, a woman who had 22 pregnancies and has 17 surviving children, reported, "Many times, we sleep without eating." One of the reasons for enacting the reproductive health law is to help break the cycle of poverty.

Pilot studies from USAID and UNFPA have shown that integrated population, health and environment (PHE) programs have made inroads in saving the environment.

One community supported by a PATH Foundation family planning program,saw the family size go from an average of 12 children to no more than four children over the first six years of the program. The community set up a marine preserve to protect the fish and eventually boost the declining catch. One man in the community noted that if they can "control the number of children, they don't need as much fish."

Sam Eaton, maker of the film "Food for 9 Billion: Turning the Population Tide in the Philippines," notes that people empowered by their ability to control their future can make a better future for their children.

With sequestration looming in the U.S., assistance to important international programs supported by USAID and UNFPA are in jeopardy. Population Action International estimates that cuts will deny access to contraceptive services and supplies to an additional 1.68 million women and couples in developing countries overseas, and result in 1,292 more maternal deaths each year.

Here in the U.S. some of our lawmakers in the U.S. want to take us backward. Numerous suits have been filed opposing contraceptive coverage in the Affordable Care Act.

It is vital that all women, here and overseas, have the ability to decide for themselves the size of their families.

Bonnie Tillery is volunteer population issues coordinator for the New Jersey chapter of the Sierra Club.

A UN FAO report showed women produce 60% to 80% of the food in developing countries, including those in Africa. But for many of them, owning land, accessing credit and even having a bank account is out of reach. The women shoulder much of the responsibility of growing crops and tending chicken, goats and sheep but men remain in control of much of the marketing and finances. The International Livestock Research Institute's (ILRI) Dr Jemimah Njuki said women were significantly disadvantaged in their access to information, training, farm equipment and financial help which was holding back economic productivity of many countries.

An ILO study shows a 22% jump in productivity in countries where there is equal access by men and women to resources. "In 2010 there were one billion hungry people in the world but if we could increase agricultural productivity even by 20%, we could reduce this by 150 million," Dr Njuki said. "We will not be able to grow agriculture if we do not address the gender imbalance." Women should be able to benefit from what they are putting into agriculture. "Gender inequality in Africa is slowly changing with ILRI and its partners increasing their capacity to train women in farm production and also train more female service providers," she said.

When markets become commercialised, women who participated in localised markets selling eggs and milk lack the capital or necessary skills to move up to formal markets. ILRI has been working with many women on innovative market payment schemes enabling them to use village banks or receive payment through their mobile phones.Projects of the Australian AusAID'S Africa Food Security Initiative have prioritised the importance of women in African agriculture and provided them with education and training into food production, marketing and post harvest production.

One project that really helps women is the Sustainable Intensification of Maize and Legumes in Eastern and Southern Africa (SIMLESA). Its goal is to increase maize and legume production by 30% to more than 500,000 small farmers in Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania. Maize has been grown in previous years with continual tillage and no fertiliser applications, significantly reducing the soil's fertility and leading to erosion. SIMLESA promotes conservation agriculture (or no-till cropping), inorganic fertilisers, spraying weeds prior to planting, improved plant varieties - potentially trebling maize yields from less than a tonne per hectare to 3.5t/ha.

Kenyan Agriculture Resource Institute agronomist and SIMLESA Project Team Leader for western Kenya John Achieng said "There will be more maize for farmers to eat and feed their households and surplus to sell so they can pay school fees for their children, buy clothing and even improve their houses." Consultant Cathy McGowan has been running research and development and extension programs for women in two other developing countries, Papua New Guinea (PNG) and India for well over a decade. She says women in subsistence agriculture work long hours because of their strong connection to food growing for their families. Their work is often invisible and not considered important because it does not contribute to the country's gross domestic product but as an example in PNG, 85% of the food is grown by women in their gardens.

African women contribute 70% of the effort towards food production, yet they are still under-represented in areas of research and policymaking, as well as influential leadership positions in agriculture.

The African Women in Agricultural Research and Development (AWARD), a programme funded by the Gates Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is seeking to strengthen research and leadership skills of female agriculture scientists to enable them contribute to food security in sub-Sahara Africa.

This should enable Africa to revolutionize farming practices and rescue millions of citizens from recurrent hunger crises.

So far, the program has benefited 250 women across eleven countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

As hunger and drought spread across Africa, there's a focus on increasing yields of staple crops, such as maize, wheat, cassava, and rice. Although these crops are important for improving food security, they cannot cure malnutrition alone.

There is no one-size fits all or single crop solution to solving global hunger, alleviating poverty, or protecting the environment and mitigating climate change. But the good news is that there is a multi-crop solution and it's already being spear-headed by farmers on the ground: vegetables.

Some 1 billion people worldwide are affected by "hidden hunger," or micronutrient deficiencies - lack of Vitamin A, iron, and iodine, none of which are found in staple crops, but rather, in vegetables. Vegetable production is the most sustainable and affordable way of alleviating micronutrient deficiencies among the poor.

It's also the most sustainable and affordable way of improving biodiversity, preserving traditions and cultures, and improving livelihoods. Because vegetables typically have a shorter growing period than staple crops, they are less risk-prone to drought, maximizing scarce water supplies and soil nutrients better than crops such as maize.

Unfortunately, no country in Africa has a big focus on vegetable production. But that's where AVRDC - The World Vegetable Center steps in, working with farmers to build a sustainable seed system in Africa. The Center does this by breeding a variety of vegetables with different traits—including resistance to disease and longer shelf life—and by bringing the farmers to the Regional Center in Arusha and to other offices across Africa to find out what exactly those farmers need in the field and at market.

Babel Isack, a tomato farmer from Tanzania, is just one of many farmers who visit the Center, advising staff about which vegetable varieties would be best suited for his particular needs—including varieties that depend on fewer chemical sprays and have a longer shelf life.

Mel Oluoch, a Liaison Officer with the Center's Vegetable Breeding and Seed System Program (vBSS) trains both urban and rural farmers in seed production. "The sustainability of seed," says Oluoch, "is not yet there in Africa." In other words, farmers don't have access to a reliable source of seed for indigenous vegetables, such as amaranth, spider plant, cowpea, okra, moringa, and other crops. But Oluoch and others at the Center are working closely with farmers to change that.

The hardiness and drought-tolerance of traditional vegetables become increasingly important as climate change becomes more evident. Many indigenous vegetables use less water than hybrid varieties and some are resistant to pests and disease without the use of chemical inputs, which are expensive both financially and environmentally.

Of course, it's not only crucial for farmers to grow indigenous species; people also need to want to eat them. In many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, local foods are looked down upon by rich and poor shoppers alike. In Senegal, for example, many consumers and cooks consider local rice to be inferior and instead buy imported European brands that can cost four times as much.

At the heart of these issues is a loss of knowledge about agricultural practices and indigenous varieties that create local agricultural, as well as cultural, biodiversity. While what we eat is important, what may be even more essential over the long term is preserving knowledge about how to plant, grow, and cook what we eat.

In Uganda's Mukono District, Edward Mukiibi, 23, and Roger Serunjogi, 22, founded the Developing Innovations in School Cultivation Project, or DISC, with this premise in mind. The project began in 2006 as a way to improve nutrition, generate environmental awareness, and preserve food traditions and culture for local students by establishing school gardens at 15 preschool, day and boarding schools.

By focusing on school gardens, Mukiibi and Serunjogi are helping not only to feed children, but are also revitalizing an interest in - and cultivation of - African indigenous vegetables, cultivating the next generation of farmers and eaters who can preserve Uganda's culinary traditions and increase food security.

Says one 19 year-old student, Mary Naku, who is learning farming skills from DISC, "as youth we have learned to grow fruits and vegetables to support our lives."

Organizations like the AVRDC and DISC, by inspiring our future farmers, working with current farmers and reigniting an interest and appetite for indigenous crop varieties, are helping to improve diets, livelihoods and local ecosystems around the world.

Staple crops can't do it alone. Luckily for us, creating a sustainable agriculture system and fighting hunger takes all kinds of crops, for a more delicious and sustainable, well-nourished future.

Specialists say aquaculture can help spur the recovery of natural populations of aquatic species - and provide food and income for small-scale farmers in developing countries.

Asia continues to dominate the farming of aquatic species, accounting for approximately 92% of the world harvest.

According to the UNFAO, annual production from commercial fishing has stabilized at about 95 million metric tons, while aquaculture has increased by almost 9% each year since 1970. Aquaculture's probably producing about 50% of the fish that are eaten.

The most problematic problem is the spread of non-native species, when farmed fish escape. The best way to avoid this is to raise only fish that are native to that area.

Other potential problems include pollution from excessive feeding and waste products, and the clearing of environmentally sensitive land to create ponds. Also, when the ponds are filled with salt water the salt can contaminate the soil.

When practiced sustainably, aquaculture can benefit the environment by reducing pressure from commercial fishing and helping to rebuild wild populations.

Disease, poor water quality and decades of overharvest have drastically reduced the Chesapeake Bays natural oyster population and aquaculture is a way to bring the oysters back. Oysters are removed and replaced with disease-free hatchery seed and allowed to grow until 60% are at least 10 centimeters long. Aquaculture contributes to local food security and generates income.

The demand for seafood is expected to increase, and aquaculture will continue to be the most rapidly growing food production system.

A technology for diminishing the fertility difference was developed about 7000 years ago, by Indian tribes in Amazonia. The technology was never transmitted to European settler. Modern man discovered this ancient technology around 1870, and this attracted widespread interest among soil scientists around 1950. As a result, scientists from many parts of the world are now busy trying to reproduce the technology, including the ability to spread the fertile tropical soils over large areas.

Throughout Amazonia one finds countless patches, roughly 50 acres (0.2 km2) in size, of fertile soil with depths of up to about 2.0 meters (04D1). Patches 350 to 500 km2 in size have also been found (04D1). Modern-day Brazilians extract this fertile "terra preta" (a fine dark loam) and sell it.

Terra preta soil organic matter content is about 50 times greater than that found in typical low fertility tropical soils Terra preta also contains three times as much phosphorous and nitrogen as surrounding soils. Tropical rains don't seem to leach nutrients from fields of terra preta soil.

Terra preta soils are often 1-2 meters deep, far deeper that global average topsoil thicknesses and "self-propagates" (somewhat like sourdough bread), perhaps due to some microorganism.

It now appears that among the first effects will be the elimination of global warming as a result of the improved tropical soils creating a huge carbon sink. The likely side effects include huge economic benefits to developing nations, and probable major reductions in both human hunger and tropical deforestation. This would suggest that elimination of global warming could be accomplished at very low cost. For most tropical soils, fertility resides in the plant life growing on these soils and in the decaying leaves, stems, branches, trunks, roots and fruit of dead plants. This difference in soil fertility, in combination with the higher population growth rates in tropical nations, probably explains why the bulk of the world's hunger is found in tropical nations.

The basic reason for the difference in soil properties is that the organic matter contents (carbon) of most tropical soils are roughly a third of what they are in most temperate soils. The useful forms of key soil nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, calcium, magnesium and other elements) are to be found associated with the soil organic matter. So with less soil organic matter these key nutrients tend to leach out into surface waters and ground waters draining the soil.

The formation of organo-mineral complexes makes the soil more fertile as a result of the stable organo-mineral complexes remaining in the soil, effectively increasing the soil organic matter content.

Converting ordinary tropical soils into terra preta can double or triple crop yields. It has been calculated that simply by replacing the "slash-and-burn" agriculture by "slash-and-char," up to 12% of the carbon emissions produced by human activity could be eliminated.

The Energy Department is creating three start-up companies with $125 million each in capital, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Madison, Wisconsin; and near Berkeley, Calif. They will involve numerous universities, national laboratories and private companies. The goal is to bring new technologies to market within five years to support Bush's goal of reducing gasoline consumption by 20% in 10 years.

The centers will focus on finding naturally occurring microbes that can break down plants and trees, to give access to cellulose that can be converted into liquid fuels. Today, companies trying to commercialize cellulosic ethanol use heat and acids an expensive process. They have focused on cellulose which is made up of six-carbon sugars, found in grains that have been turned into fermented products like beer for thousands of years, and of five-carbon sugars, which cannot be fermented by ordinary means.

The centers will also work on creating new crops that produce lignin that is easier to deal with.

Ethanol is increasingly used as a gasoline substitute, but that has driven up the price of corn. There are other sources of biomass that has nothing to do with corn or any other food, such as switch grass.

In another area, it would help establish laboratories to test designs for wind turbine blades up to 300 feet long. The size has tripled in the last five years and could triple again, but would require blades of lighter materials.

The centers, each to be financed by $25 million a year, are to be fully operational by Sept. 1, 2009.

Corn prices have doubled over the last year, wheat futures are at their highest level in 10 years, and rice prices are rising. The use of corn as the feedstock for fuel ethanol is creating consequences throughout the global food chain.

In Mexico, the price of tortillas is up by 60% percent. Angry Mexicans have forced the government to institute price controls on tortillas.

Food prices are also rising in China, India, and the US, 40% of the world's people. Vast quantities of corn are consumed indirectly in meat, milk, and eggs in both China and the US.

In China, pork prices were up 20% above a year earlier, eggs were up 16%. In India, the food price index in 2007 was 10% higher than a year earlier. The price of wheat has jumped 11%.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that the wholesale price of chicken in 2007 will be 10% higher than in 2006, the price of eggs will be up 21%, and milk 14%, and this is only the beginning.

As more and more fuel ethanol distilleries are built, world grain prices are starting to move up toward their oil-equivalent value. In this new economy, if the fuel value of grain exceeds its food value, the market will move it into the energy economy. Some 16 of the 2006 U.S. harvest was used to produce ethanol. With 80 or so ethanol distilleries under construction, nearly a third of the 2008 grain harvest will be going to ethanol.

Since the United States is the leading exporter of grain, what happens to the U.S. grain crop affects the entire world. The world's breadbasket is fast becoming the U.S. fuel tank.

The UN lists 34 countries as needing emergency food assistance. Food aid programs have fixed budgets.

Protests in response to rising food prices could lead to political instability that would add to the list of failed and failing states. President Bush set a production goal for 2017 of 35 billion gallons of alternative fuels. Given the difficulties in producing cellulosic ethanol at a competitive cost and the mounting public opposition to liquefied coal, most of the fuel to meet this goal might have to come from grain. This could leave little grain to meet U.S. needs, much less those of the countries that import grain.

The risk is that millions of those on the lower rungs of the global economic ladder will start falling off as higher food prices drop their consumption below the survival level.

In 2007, 18,000 children are dying every day from hunger and malnutrition. There are alternatives. A rise in fuel efficiency standards of 20% over the next decade would save as much oil as converting the entire U.S. grain harvest into ethanol.

One option is plug-in hybrids. Adding a second storage battery to a gas-electric hybrid car along with a plug-in capacity allows most short-distance driving to be done with electricity. If this was accompanied by thousands of wind farms that could feed cheap electricity into the grid, then cars could run largely on electricity for the equivalent cost of $1 per gallon gasoline.

Toyota, Nissan, and GM, have announced plans to bring plug-in hybrid cars to market. It is time to decide whether to continue with subsidizing more grain-based distilleries or to encourage a shift to more fuel-efficient cars. The choice is between a future of rising world food prices, spreading hunger, and growing political instability, or one of stable food prices, sharply reduced dependence on oil, and much lower carbon emissions.

Note: there are a lot of numbers being thrown around on this topic, depending on who you ask. Please read the article through before you start quoting anything.

Conventional gas production peaked in the 1970's in the United States. New supply from unconventional tight gas (and some coal-bed methane), along with imports, filled the supply/demand gap. The "new" technology (horizontal drilling & hydraulic fracturing) combined with rising price boosts recoverable reserves over time.

If you add up the mean values for Traditional Gas Resources, which includes shale gas, and Coal Bed Methane, you get the 1,836 Tcf (trillions of cubic feet) of potential resources. If you throw in the EIA's proved reserves, the total resources are 2,074 Tcf in the Lower 48 and Alaska. This represents the ‘technically recoverable' gas resource potential of the U.S. At current consumption rates, the new total represents about 100 years of supply. If speculative resources (500 Tcf) are excluded, we would still have about 75 years of supply.

There has been a lot of promotion of the newly-found natural gas:

The (T. Boone) Pickens Plan promotes using natural gas to replace liquid fuels in transportation, especially as a replacement for diesel in long-haul trucking. The PGC (Potential Gas Committee) reports say that "the 2,074 trillion cubic feet of domestic natural gas reserves cited in the study is the equivalent of nearly 350 billion barrels of oil, about the same as Saudi Arabia's oil reserves." But ASPO-USA commentator Tom Standing said it would take decades build out the supply chain (e.g. swap petroleum gas stations for natural gas stations). The Pickens Plan is currently dead in the water.

Dr. Joseph Romm of the influential Center for American Progress proposes to use natural gas to ramp up under-utilized natural gas electrical power generation capacity to replace base-load coal. We now have the makings of a de facto moratorium on coal. We seem to be unwilling to build new nuclear capacity. It is theoretically possible for wind to provide 20% of our electricity by 2030, but there are many practical, economic & political barriers to success. Thus it would behoove us to switch to natural gas at large-scales if we want to maintain a functioning electricity grid 10-15 years from now.

There is little reason to doubt that the potential natural gas resource base in the United States is very large. The hidden problem with such estimates relates to whether the gas is economic to produce.

The Tristone Capital study (October, 2008, described in Oil & Gas Journal, shows increased shale gas production with a risked estimate out to 2018, from analysis of nine US and Canada shale gas plays. These are risked production additions — "the study expects companies ultimately to recover from these resources 261 Tcf of gas, based on various risk factors applied and a long-term average gas price of $8.50/MMbtu. Without the risk factors, Tristone Capital says these shales have a 743-Tcf recovery potential."

Despite the likelihood that we will have low or average gas prices over the next few years due to the recession and oversupply, the market share of shale gas grows and grows. This forecast looks like a high-wire act that defies not only gravity, but also the laws of supply & demand. One wonders what the minimum price is that makes shale gas unprofitable. $4.50/Mcf (millions of cubic feet)? $3.50/Mcf?

Art Berman, a Houston geologist and columnist at World Oil Magazine, does not believe most shale gas wells are economic unless operator costs go down, gas prices rise sharply, and high average prices are sustained. Talking about the Haynesville shale site, he says— "The play is marginally commercial today for operators with favorable hedge positions, but not commercial based on cost and price fundamentals. At current prices, the netback of $3.25/mcf barely covers operating costs, so no Haynesville well is economic and rates and reserves simply do not matter.

Berman's analysis of the Barnett: "Shale gas is not commercial at any 'reasonable' price because the costs are too high. ... The average per-well EUR (estimated ultimate recovery) is about 0.6 Bcf (billions of cubic fee) —pathetic!"

Berman says he has looked at the financial documents filed with the SEC of most of the major shale players (Chesapeake, Petrohawk, Range Resources, etc.) "they're all taking a bath financially but put on a brave face, and have huge debt. As long as their stock price is good, the executives get rich so why do they care? The analyst community is so naive about true costs that they believe the propaganda."

The frac costs keep increasing because operators are now commonly using 10-12-stage fracs that cost millions. The extra cost may only accomplish a rate acceleration and not an increase in reserves. In the Barnett Shale, the average horizontally drilled and fractured wells only have approximately 25% more reserves than vertical wells but 3 times the cost! This talk about lowering operating cost and increasing reserves is more propaganda, and most cost benefit is more than negatively compensated by more interest expense on debt.

From the L. David Roper website http://www.roperld.com/science/minerals/shalegas.htm

Please go to this website to see the charts.

Shale-gas recoverable reserves have been estimated at 264 Tcf. Shale natural gas adds a short large blip to the natural-gas extraction for the United States. It could be reduced in size and stretched out over a larger time interval, but I doubt it will be. The U.S. will probably extract and use it as fast as possible.

I could not find any data for shale-gas extraction for the world. Since the U.S. is way ahead of other nations in this effort, I assume that the extraction-rate data for the world is essentially the same as for the U.S.

I also assume that the extractable reserves for the U.S. is 500 Tcf and that the extracable reserves for the world is the ratio of the Earth land area to the U.S. land area (~16) times 500 Tcf = ~8000 Tcf.

Adding the 8000-Tcf-reserves shale gas to the conventional natural-gas depletion curve for the World adds just a short large blip to the natural-gas extraction for the World. It could be reduced in size and stretched out over a larger time interval, but I doubt it will be. The world will probably extract and use it as fast as possible.

Trade-secret chemicals are inserted into the shale formations to fractionate ("fracking") the formation into cracks for the gas to seep through to the well pipe. There is strong indications that the fracking allows the gas to seep up into the water table, contamination wells for human use.

There is very little information about what the chemicals used might be doing to the environment.

A documentary film, Gasland, has been made about the dangers of hydraulic fracturing to extract natural gas. Another documentary, Shale Gas and America's Future, gives great detail about the drilling and fracking process and discusses the environmental problems. The TV program 60 minutes showed a program about fracking.

There is an effort in the Congress to regulate the gas companies such that they have to disclose the chemicals used in fracking.

From Wikipedia:

A study by Cornell University professor Robert W. Howarth in 2010 finds that, once methane leak impacts are included, the life-cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) footprint of shale gas would be worse than those of coal and fuel oil. Methane is by far the major component of natural gas, and it is a powerful greenhouse gas: 25-times more powerful than is CO2 per molecule in the atmosphere. However, this report has been discredited as being only a preliminary study which has not gone through the peer process.

Matthew Simmons, a well-connected industry insider has concluded that some of the world's largest oil beds may be on the verge of collapse. Author of the recently published Twilight in the Desert: The Coming, Simmons is founder of an investment bank that handles mergers and acquisitions among energy companies and has predicted that the price of a barrel of oil could hit the high triple digits within a few years. To postpone this he says we should be drilling in the Arctic and other contested spots. At the same time, he's calling for improvements in efficiency, as well as a return to local farming and manufacturing. He said that we are either at or very close to peak oil and have to assume that five or 10 years we'll be producing less oil than today. And yet we expect that oil usage will grow by 30% to 50% over the next 25 years. It's a problem that could end up leading to more geopolitical fights and give way to a very ugly society. The odyssey began in the early 1980s when Simmons realized that his firm was threatened by a collapse in the oil business. So many experts in the energy market, including government analysts, don't base their opinions on actual data, because the relevant data are confidential. No major oil-producer allows audits of the data on their reserves which leaves the experts playing a guessing game. An inventory of the top oil fields showed that nobody had ever listed even the top 20 oil fields by name. There are only about 120 fields in the world that produce half of the world's oil supply. The top 14, which make up 20% of global supply, are over 53 years old. In Saudi Arabia there are only five key fields producing 90% of their oil. During a trip to Saudi Arabia they plied us with data that didn't add up, even vaguely. The major Saudi fields are at risk of reaching their peak, at which point they will see their output decline. Simmons started a year ago saying that we need to prepare for triple-digit oil prices that will be set by demand and supply. Current oil prices are cheap, consider that $65 a barrel translates to 10 cents a cup, cheaper than bottled water. For decades, Saudi Arabia has been injecting water in each key oil field to keep pressure high. The Saudis are injecting between 15 and 18 million barrels a day of water to recover 8 million barrels a day of oil. What they are doing is rapidly depleting the high-quality, high flow-rate oil, so they'll be left with vast amounts of oil that just won't come out of the ground without massive water input or thousands and thousands of wells being drilled. Sadad al-Husseini, a former executive of Saudi Aramco, corroborated this thesis. The foreign minister of Saudi Arabia spoke at Rice University and said, "We're as transparent as anybody." Until we force that same standard of disclosure on Exxon and Shell and BP, there's no reason to expect Saudi Arabia to behave better. Ultimately, we have to create new forms of energy. Solar and wind are not helpful on the transportation front. Biofuels need to be examined, but corn-based ethanol is a scam because it requires such intensive oil inputs. There are some 220 million cars on the road in the U.S. and the problem with hybrids and hydrogen, which many people think is the alternative energy, is it will take 30 years to turn over the entire vehicle fleet. We don't have 15 or 20 years, much less 30. We have to find more energy-efficient methods of transporting products by rail and ship. We have to liberate the workforce and let them work in their village, through emails, faxes and video conferencing. We need to return to local farms and attack globalization. Manufacturing things close to home will begin to make sense again.

Bioenergy crops such as Miscanthus and switchgrass appear to be promising resources for renewable energy, but Jody Endres - University of Illinois professor of energy and environmental law and chair of the Council on Sustainable Biomass Production (CSBP) - says standards are needed so farmers, ethanol producers, and others in the biofuels industry will all be on the same page here in the United States as well as in Europe and Brazil.

"We can put any requirement into writing, but will it really work on the ground or is it just 'green washing?'. "Endres said. "Even though we think we're achieving rural development, receiving carbon reductions or climate mitigation benefits, or that we're having increased energy security, people may still be suspicious of biomass fuels unless there is a certification that we can operationalize."

First, to achieve public acceptance, standards must be built upon foundations of good governance.

Second, the producer's sustainability toolbox, including a determination as to whether or not existing tools are effective, must be fortified. "For example, environmentalists would like to see improvements at the watershed scale. If only isolated farmers need to be certified, and they have to figure out what their contributions to that watershed are, it can be very difficult, particularly when states have not fully assessed baseline water quality and all parties responsible for its degradation."

Third, international harmonization is needed. "Even if the biomass goes to the biorefinery with the right lignin-to-sugar content and the right amount of water, if you had to add nitrogen to produce it, or lost habitat or soil when harvesting it, it may not comply with European regulations. "Environmental groups don't want to see a race to the bottom -- adopting requirements that are bare minimum." One the other hand, small farmers must be able to meet the standard.

The European Renewable Energy Directive is primarily concerned with land conversion -- high carbon stock land or lands that are high in biodiversity values," Endres said. "They also require a cross-compliance with agro- environmental laws, which is something required in return for receipt of agricultural payments under the Common Agricultural Program. In large part, we don't have a similar system in the United States."

For example, in the aviation industry: "To land a plane in Europe, U.S. carriers will have to prove that they have reduced their carbon footprint below a certain level. If not, they will have to buy credits within the European Emissions Trading System. Although the requirement has been postponed until January 2014, the aviation sector is actively seeking ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through biofuels. The challenge is not only how to convert cellulosics into jet fuel, but also how to certify that they are grown, refined, and distributed in a sustainable manner," Endres said.

Hopefully we can all agree that the current energy economy is fundamentally toxic to nature and people; that we need to build a new energy economy, one that supports flourishing human and natural communities; that the future energy economy should be powered by renewable sources, not fossil fuels. But consensus breaks down getting into the specifics of just how to advance toward this energy future.

Some "green power" activists are upset by the new book ENERGY: Overdevelopment and the Delusion of Endless Growth, centerpiece of Post Carbon Institute's Energy Reality Campaign because -- among the photos of coal plants, tar-sands development, and the shattered hulk of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear station -- a handful of the book's roughly 200 photos were of a concentrated solar plant and a wind power development which were accompanied by a headline which used the phrase "energy blight."

Some environmentalists don't want to look at the significant ecological costs of renewables, but hope to create support for "green" energy by only talking about the upsides. They believe that discussing the downsides only strengthens the fossil-fuel lobbies that are hell-bent on cooking the planet.

But all large-scale energy infrastructure destroys habitat, whether it is hardwood forests cleared for ridgeline wind power development on Lowell Mountain in Vermont, or Mojave Desert vegetation displaced by concentrated solar generating facilities. And big, river-killing dams can produce lots of power with low greenhouse gas emissions.

I am not sympathetic to techno-utopians who seem to think embracing every "green" energy technology, from biofuels to wave power to concentrated solar plants, is going to allow humanity to keep growing our numbers and economic output without destroying the ecosphere.

Conservation and efficiency first, not "drill baby drill" or “build baby build." We envision a future energy economy that supports wild nature, not corporate profit; that fosters beauty and biodiversity, rather than spreading ugliness and ecological damage; that promotes health for nature and people, not perpetual economic growth. And of course is anchored by renewables, not fossil fuels.

Issues of scale, ownership, indigenous rights, and corporate influence over political decision-making are heating up everywhere that large-scale renewables are proposed, from the mega-dams of Brazil and Chilean Patagonia to wind power development in southern Mexico.

Avoiding superficial thinking and truly developing our individual and collective energy literacy is a start toward building the distributed, resilient, nature-friendly energy economy that we seek.

Between 1900 and 2000, global energy consumption rose roughly 17-fold, while economic output rose 16-fold — "as close a link as one may find in the unruly realm of economic affairs," University of Manitoba environmental scientist Vaclav Smil has calculated. Of the 11 recessions since the end of the Second World War, all but one were associated with spikes in energy costs — specifically, abrupt jumps in the price of oil.

The rush for imported oil started in 1911 when Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, pushed to replace coal with oil to power the Royal Navy because fuel oil produces about twice as much energy as coal, and ships go faster and farther on oil. Since the U.K had next to no oil, it bought 51% of what is now British Petroleum, which had rights to Iranian oil. This evoked a revolution in Iran, and so Britain worked to install new shahs in Iran and carved Iraq out of the collapsing Ottoman Empire.

Soon all of the Western powers joined the race to secure oil concessions in the Middle East. The struggle created decades of turmoil, oil shocks in 1973 and 1979, failed programs for "energy independence," and two wars in Iraq.

Then, in the 1970s, geologists discovered beneath the seafloor methane hydrate -- deposits of water molecules laced into frigid cages that trap “guest molecules" of crystalline natural gas -- perhaps twice as abundant as all other fossil fuels combined.

Japan is a military and industrial power almost wholly dependent on foreign energy. It is the world's third-biggest net importer of crude oil, the second-biggest importer of coal, and the biggest importer of liquefied natural gas. Japan Oil, Gas, and Metals National Corporation (JOGMEC) has been exploring the extraction of this methane-hydrate.

In January this year, the Chikyu, a Japanese deep-sea drilling vessel, set out to begin a production test. By mid-March, it had already retrieved about 4 million cubic feet of natural gas from methane hydrate, at double the expected rate. Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry set 2018 as a target date for commercializing methane hydrate. India and South Korea are following along, each spending as much as $30 million a year on hydrate experiments.

If the Chikyu efforts are successful, methane hydrate could have similar effects in Japan, China, India, Korea, Taiwan, and Norway.

The petroleum industry has recently been recharged by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking — a technique for splitting rock by shooting water mixed with sand and chemicals into it and releasing previously inaccessible oil, referred to as “tight oil." Natural gas is also released, which, when yielded from shale, is known as shale gas. Fracking has been attacked as menace to underground water supplies, and may eventually be greatly restricted. But it has also produced so much petroleum in North America that the International Energy Agency predicted that by 2035, the United States will become “all but self-sufficient."

Scientists claim that avoiding the worst effects of climate change will require a complete phase-out of carbon emissions over 50 years. However, natural gas burns so much cleaner than coal that the switch from coal to gas - brought about by fracking -- has already reduced U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions to their lowest levels since the 1970s. But burning natural gas still produces carbon dioxide. Some scientists consider natural gas a bridge fuel, but if societies do not take advantage of that bridge to enact anti-carbon policies, natural gas could be “a bridge from the coal-fired past to the coal-fired future," says Michael Levi, the director of the Program on Energy Security and Climate Change at the Council on Foreign Relations. It could undermine the economic rationale for investing in renewable, carbon-free energy around the world".

There are also the surprising oil fields like the Kern River in Bakersfiled California, that was first drilled in 1899 and is still producing oil after analysts said in 1949 that it was nearly played out. In 1998, an oil rig near the Kern River field drilled thousands of feet deeper than any previous attempt in the area and released an enormous gusher.

In 1956 by M. King Hubbert, a prominent geophysicist at Shell Oil spoke about how easy, cheap oil was taken first and that extracting the rest gets progressively more difficult and expensive. Eventually, Hubbert observed, conditions get so tough that production levels off — it peaks. After the peak, decline is unstoppable. Hubbert predicted that the crude-oil yield in the continental United States would flatten between 1965 and 1970.

On the other hand, under Hubbert's boss, Vincent E. McKelvey, the USGS issued a stream of optimistic assessments about the country's oil future. However, Hubbert's prediction proved to be correct. In 1977, newly elected President Jimmy Carter, a Hubbertian, forced McKelvey to resign. President Carter proclaimed that the planet's proven oil reserves could be consumed “by the end of the next decade," and instituted energy-efficiency measures: gas-mileage regulation, home-appliance energy standards, conservation tax credits, and subsidies for insulation and weatherization.

However, in the 1980s so much crude oil was found that, by the 1990s, prices had fallen to one-fifth of what they had been during the Carter administration. Estimates of reserves rose and rose again. Energy conservation faltered; oil and gas were too cheap to be worth conserving.

On one side, pessimists claim that the planet is slowly running out of petroleum. The other side, the McKelveyans insist that there are vast, untapped petroleum deposits in Alaska and Alberta and off the coast of Virginia, that geysers of natural gas exist in the shale beds of Pennsylvania and North Dakota, and that huge oil patches await extraction in the deep ocean.

Looking again at the Kern River field, its pumps are siphoning up oil so goopy that it almost doesn't float on water, very difficult to extract from the ground. After 1949 engineers developed a precursor to fracking: shooting hot steam down Kern River wells to thin the oil and force it out of the stone. At first heating the water to produce the steam required as much as 40% of the oil that came out of the wells and burning unrefined crude oil released torrents of pollution: nitrous oxide, sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide. But it squeezed out petroleum that had seemed impossible to reach.

To McKelveyan followers, innovation will keep pushing down the cost of getting the rest. Natural resources cannot be used up, they claim. If one deposit gets too expensive to drill, producers will either find cheaper deposits or shift to a different energy source altogether. Because the hardest-to-get stuff is left in the ground, there will always be petroleum to mine later. The race between declining oil and advancing technology determines the size of a reserve - not the number of hydrocarbon molecules in the ground.

Companies that scrambled to follow the Kern River gusher found millions of barrels of deep oil, but it was mixed with so much water that they couldn't stop the wells from flooding. Within a few years, almost all the new rigs ceased operation. The reserve vanished, but the oil remained.

In the 1980s, OPEC discussed allocating sales based on the size of member states' reserves and six of the 11 OPEC members abruptly hiked their reserve estimates during these discussions. Petroleum geologists Jean Laherrère and Colin Campbell who co-founded the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO) denied these sweeping claims of huge reserves. Their prediction in 1998 that “within the next decade, the supply of conventional oil will be unable to keep up with demand," came true.

Laherrère says. “Once we have used up the easy oil, new types of cheap energy will not appear by magic. We will keep drilling for oil, and it will not be easy to get. Look at the enormously expensive equipment they use now only to keep up production."

“The supply of oil is limited," said President George W. Bush in 2008, echoing Carter. Since then bookshelves shudder beneath the avalanche of warnings, but McKelveyans remain undeterred. Michael Lynch, of the energy-consulting firm SEER, said "It's because the technology is getting better and increasing our reach."

Fracking is unleashing torrents of oil in North Dakota and Texas - it may create a second boom in the San Joaquin Valley - and floods of natural gas in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio. As companies switch to cheap natural gas, the U.S. petroleum boom could add as much as 3.3% to America's GDP in the next seven years, according to a Citigroup report. Leonardo Maugeri, of the Italian energy firm Eni, said that, by 2020, all of this country's oil needs “theoretically could come entirely from the Western Hemisphere." Because of fracking, U.S. natural-gas reserves have jumped by almost three-quarters since 2000.

Japan, China, India, much of Europe and Southeast Asia do not have either shale deposits to frack, or the requisite technological base, or the entrepreneurial infrastructure to finance such sweeping changes. Methane hydrate offers some promise to these countries.

Petroleum unconventionals take many forms: tar sands, tight oil, heavy oil, shale gas, coal-bed methane, shale oil, oil shale. (shale oil is different from oil shale.) Methane hydrate is, by some estimates, twice as abundant as all other fossil fuels combined. Unconventionals can be of two kinds: forms of petroleum that are heavier and less refined than the crudest of crude oil, and forms that are lighter and more refined than crude oil. The second category, which includes the natural gas from methane hydrate, seems likely to play a much larger role in humankind's future.

Tar sands have an EROEI of 4 to 7. Plus extracting the bitumen also requires a lot of water. Where is it all going to come from? And to convey the tar sand oil requires building a huge pipeline from Alberta to Texas. This pipeline has been stalled by opposition from U.S. environmentalists, just as pipelines within Canada have been stalled by opposition from both environmentalists and indigenous peoples.

Energy costs for fracking are surprisingly small; a Swiss-American research team calculated in 2011 that the average EROEI for fracked gas in a representative Pennsylvania county was about 87 - about six times better than for Persian Gulf oil and 16 times better than for tar sands. (Fracking uses a lot of water, though, and activists charge that the chemicals contaminate underground water supplies.)

Jean Laherrère claims that shale gas is a “Ponzi scheme" in which oil companies acquire largely fictional methane deposits to polish their balance sheets for Wall Street. A recent Post Carbon Institute study dismissed shale gas as “a temporary reprieve from having to deal with the real problems." But the head of the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) said that the additions to America's energy reserves were the "highest ever recorded since EIA began publishing proved reserve estimates in 1977."

The most promising U.S. deposits of methane-hydrate are in the Gulf of Mexico. Hydrates are thought to blanket about 174,000 square miles of the Gulf, an area about the size of California. Timothy Collett, the energy-research director for the USGS program, says that some of the gulf's more than 3,500 oil and gas wells are in gas-hydrate areas. Extracting these hydrates, in his view, is the logical next step “..as you go into decline on deepwater production."

If one nation succeeds in producing commercial quantities of undersea methane, others will follow. The consequences would be turbulent in petro-autocratic countries where “The possibilities for corruption are endless." Governments dip into the oil kitty to reward friends and buy off enemies. A methane-hydrate boom could lead to a southwest-to-northeast arc of instability through Venezuela, Nigeria, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Siberia.

Also the methane hydrate is inconveniently located in areas of disputed sovereignty. An energy-independent planet may turn out to be be a world of fractious, autonomous actors, none beholden to the others, with even less cooperation than exists today.

Burning coal often releases black carbon, tiny particles that can get into the lungs, estimated to kill 100,000 people in India in a year. Black carbon absorbs heat, darkens clouds, and sometimes alters rain patterns. Falling on snow, it accelerates melting. A four-year assessment from nine nations recently claimed that planetary black-carbon output is the second-biggest driver of anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change.

Natural gas produces next to no soot and half the carbon dioxide that coal does. Replacing coal with with natural gas would be a huge step. Methane itself has a much greater capacity to trap solar heat than carbon dioxide does -- about 20 or 30 times more potent. However, while there are some concerns about escaping methane, we can be assured that any escaping underwater methane will be re-trapped by the cold temperature and high pressures that trapped it in the first place. The real concern, Carolyn Ruppel of the Geological Survey reports, is a slow discharge at ground level, from the machinery that will pull methane hydrate out of the seafloor. The problem already exists with fracking. If a well leaks more than about 3% of its methane production into the air, “natural gas actually becomes dirtier than coal, from a climate-change perspective," says Ramez Naam, the author of The Infinite Resource. Worse still, the aging natural-gas infrastructure is riddled with holes and seeps. Early this year, a survey of gas mains along Boston's 785 miles of road, the first-ever such examination, found 3,356 leaks.

Fixing leaks is something that developed nations can accomplish. What we can't do, or at least not readily, is overcome the laws of economics.

Typical solar cells today have an EROEI of about 10 - better than tar sands but worse than most oil and gas. One recent estimate put the EROEI of Spain's extensive solar-power network at less than three. Many advocates for solar power believe that its EROEI will match that of fossil fuels within a decade. However, as more and more energy comes from sun, wind, tides, and other variable sources, the problem of balancing fluctuating supply and fluctuating demand will worsen. When renewables supply 20 to 30% of all electricity, the system will no longer be able to balance supply and demand. Brownouts will ripple across the landscape; control centers will call up big companies and beg them to turn off the lights. Germany, a leader in renewable-energy use, is already facing this situation. Natural gas seems like the perfect stopgap.

The biggest problem occurs when renewables are ready for prime time after shale fracking is replaced globally by undersea mining of methane hydrate. Revamping the electrical grid from conventionals like coal and oil to accommodate unconventionals like natural gas and solar power is daunting in scale and scope, but it must be done to avert climate change, because electricity generation is responsible for about a third of America's greenhouse-gas emissions.

Scientists have experimented with injecting carbon dioxide into methane hydrate, which takes it in and expels natural gas. If undersea methane hydrate could be mined in this fashion, the sequestered carbon dioxide, forever imprisoned in ice beneath the waves, would offset some emissions. This new kind of carbon sequestration could ameliorate some of the long-term environmental damage that widespread global use of cheap natural gas from methane hydrate will do.

Plentiful natural gas will give us less incentive to accommodate solar power. Vaclav Smil, the University of Manitoba environmental scientist, claims: “Energy transitions are always slow." Modern energy infrastructures, assembled over decades, cannot be revamped overnight. And, there is little public appetite for beginning the process, or even appreciating the magnitude of what lies ahead.

Natural gas, both from fracking and in methane hydrate, gives us a way to cut back on carbon emissions while we work toward a more complete solution. It could be a useful crutch. But only if we have the wit to know that we will soon have to lay it down.

This article says pretty much the same as a May 2011 article from Post Carbon Institute at http://www.postcarbon.org/report/331901-will-natural-gas-fuel-america-in - but here are some highlights:

"Fracking, it turns out, is about producing cheap energy the same way the mortgage crisis was about helping realize the dreams of middle-class homeowners. For Chesapeake, the primary profit in fracking comes not from selling the gas itself, but from buying and flipping the land that contains the gas. The company is now the largest leaseholder in the United States, owning the drilling rights to some 15 million acres - an area more than twice the size of Maryland. McClendon has financed this land grab with junk bonds and complex partnerships and future production deals, creating a highly leveraged, deeply indebted company that has more in common with Enron than ExxonMobil. As McClendon put it in a conference call with Wall Street analysts a few years ago, ‘I can assure you that buying leases for x and selling them for 5x or 10x is a lot more profitable than trying to produce gas at $5 or $6 per million cubic feet.'"

Arthur Berman, a respected energy consultant in Texas says: ‘When you look at the level of debt some of these companies are carrying, and the questionable value of their gas reserves, there is a lot in common with the subprime mortgage market just before it melted down.'

"In January, the Energy Department cut its estimate of the amount of gas available in the Marcellus Shale by nearly 70%, and a group affiliated with the Colorado School of Mines warns that there may be only 23 years' worth of economically recoverable gas left nationwide.

In addition, because of fugitive emissions of methane from wellheads and pipelines, natural gas may actually be no better than coal when it comes to global warming.

Aubrey McClendon of Chesapeake Energy buys up such huge swaths of land requires huge chunks of cash - and the money often comes not from gas production, but from selling off land or going into debt. After Chesapeake drills a few wells in a region and ‘proves up' the reserves, it hawks the leases to big oil and gas companies looking to get into the shale-gas game. In 2010.

Recently Chesapeake has also sold futures in oil production, the first deal was made with Deutsche Bank and a Swiss investment firm for $1 billion in return for 15 years of future production from 4,000 wells. Because Chesapeake is not liable if the production fails, this gives the company a poor credit rating.

"To make its operations even riskier, leaseholders like Chesapeake are required by law to drill on the land within three to five years after acquiring the rights or wind up forfeiting the lease. ‘The more land they acquire, the more capital they have to spend upfront,' says Deborah Rogers, a former investment banker. ‘They have to drill it or lose it, which further adds to capital costs. And the more they drill, the more gas they produce, which lowers the price of gas and further reduces their revenues. In the end, this drilling treadmill is difficult to sustain for long - especially if the wells under­perform, or the resource turns out to not be as valuable as they thought.' Thanks to McClendon's gambles, Chesapeake is struggling to cover $10 billion in long-term debt."

By Chris Nelder - The recent press about the potential of shale gas would have you believe that America is now sitting on a 100-year supply of natural gas. It's a "game-changer."

Assuming that the United States continues to use about 24 tcf per annum, then, only an 11-year supply of natural gas is certain. The other 89 years' worth has not yet been shown to exist or to be recoverable.

In addition, those 273 tcf are located in reserves that are undrilled, but are adjacent to drilled tracts where gas has been produced. Due to large lateral differences in the geology of shale plays, production can vary considerably from adjacent wells.

One complicating factor here is recoverability, because we are never able to extract all of an oil or gas resource. For oil, a 35% recovery factor is considered excellent. But recovery factors for shale gas are highly variable, due to the varied geology of the source rocks. Even if we assume a very optimistic 50% recovery factor for the 550 tcf of probable gas (536.6 tcf from shale gas plus 13.4 tcf from coalbed gas), that would still only amount to 225 tcf, or a 10-year supply. That plus the 11-year supply of proved reserves would last the United States just 21 years, at current rates of consumption.

Follow the link in the headline for the rest of the article, plus some excellent visuals.

Colorado: Noble Energy Production is moving forward with plans to drill 78 gas wells at a site south of Rifle where in 1969 an underground atomic bomb was set off in an effort to boost natural-gas production.

The experiment, Project Rulison, did increase natural-gas production — but the gas was not marketable because it was radioactive.

The federal Bureau of Land Management and the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission have approved parts of Noble's plan.

To view the entire article, follow the link in the headline.

Natural gas interests have spent more than $747 million during a 10-year campaign - stunningly successful so far - to avoid government regulation of hydraulic "fracking," a fast-growing and environmentally risky method of tapping underground gas reserves, according to a new study by Common Cause.

A faction of the natural gas industry has directed more than $20 million to the campaigns of current members of Congress and put $726 million into lobbying aimed at shielding itself from oversight, according to the report, the third in a series of "Deep Drilling, Deep Pockets" reports produced by the non-profit government watchdog group.

“Players in this industry have pumped cash into Congress in the same way they pump toxic chemicals into underground rock formations to free trapped gas," said Common Cause President Bob Edgar. "nd as fracking for gas releases toxic chemicals into groundwater and streams, the industry's political fracking for support is toxic to efforts for a cleaner environment and relief from our dependence on fossil fuels."

The study - which includes inserts for the fracking-heavy states of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan - found that the natural gas industry focuses its political spending on members of the Congressional committees charged with overseeing it. Current members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee have received an average of $70,342 from the industry; Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, the former committee chairman, has collected a whopping $514,945, more than any other lawmaker.

What's more, the industry's political giving also heavily favors lawmakers who supported the 2005 Energy Policy Act, which exempted fracking from regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act. Current members who voted for the bill received an average of $73,433, while those who voted against the bill received an average of $10,894.

The report comes as the Environmental Protection Agency is scheduled to publish new, preliminary findings about the potential dangers of fracking in 2012, giving the industry a powerful incentive to increase political spending now in an attempt to shape public opinion and the debate over fracking in Congress, as well as affect the outcome of the 2012 congressional elections.

“Thanks to the Supreme Court and its Citizens United decision, the natural gas industry will be free to spend whatever it likes next year to elect a Congress that will do its bidding," Edgar said. “The industry's political investments already have largely freed it from government oversight. Controlling the flow of that money and other corporate spending on our elections is critical to protecting our environment for this and future generations."

Note: this is an excellent article, well worth reading. To see the entire article, follow the link in the headline

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President, Waterkeeper Alliance; Professor, Pace University writes about how the New York Times is being attacked by the natural gas industry (like Exxon and Chesapeake) for its superb investigative journalism into the irresponsible practices involved in the fracturing (fracking) of gas rich shale beds.

This natural gas coalition is using slick PR firms, industry funded front groups and a predictable cabal of right wing industry toadies from cable TV and talk radio to avoid public disclosure and reasonable regulation.

In 2009, before Kennedy found out the truth about fracking, he wrote an op-ed for the Financial Times predicting that newly accessible deposits of natural gas had the potential to rapidly relieve our country of its deadly addiction to Appalachian coal and end forever catastrophically destructive mountaintop removal mining. At that time geologists were predicting that new methods of fracturing gas rich shale beds would provide enough gas to power our country for a century.

These rich reserves would have allowed us to replace 336 gigawatts from antiquated coal fired electric plants with energy from the underutilized capacity of existing gas generation plants, and reduce U.S. mercury emissions by 20%-25%, cutting deadly particulate matter and the pollutants that cause acid rain and slash America's grid based CO2 by an astonishing 20%. Gas could have been a critical bridge fuel to the new energy economy rooted in America's abundant renewables and could have helped free us from our debilitating reliance on foreign oil now costing our country so dearly in blood, national security, energy independence, and two pricey wars that are currently running tabs $2 billion per week.

Kennedy sits on the New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo's High Volume Hydraulic Fracturing Advisory Panel. Because this natural gas coalition has successfully battled regulation and stifled public disclosure while bending compliant government regulators to engineer exceptions to existing environmental rules, the Panel has to sort truth from the web of myths spun about fracking by fast talking landsmen, smarmy CEOs, and federal regulators.

Public skepticism toward the industry and its government regulators is at a record high. There are over 40,000 highly motivated anti-fracking activists in New York alone; popular mistrust of the industry is presenting a daunting impediment to its expansion.

Recent studies show that fracking is not all it's promoted to be:

* Releases of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas, may counterbalance virtually all the benefits of CO2 reductions projected to result from substituting gas power for coal.

* The human health impacts (breast cancer) of gas extraction on local communities may rival those associated with coal.

* The USGS just slashed its estimate on the amount of gas in the Marcellus Shale by 80%, raising doubts about all the industry's positive economic projections.

* Only a small percentage of the land in each shale gas field turns out to be highly productive, even at the start. Nevertheless, companies routinely pretend that all of their acreage will be equally promising.

* Contaminated well water, poisoned air, nuisance noise and dust, diminished property values and collapsing quality of life are often the predictable collateral damage of gas shale development in the rural towns of the east.

* The industry says it cannot pay localities the costs of roads damaged from the thousands of truck trips per wellhead, leaving those ruinous costs to local taxpayers, many of whom will see no benefits from the shale boom.

* For the most part, the industry has demonstrated a disturbing fervor for secrecy while advocating regulatory policies that favor the most irresponsible practices and the worst actors.

The Times' reporting has found that sewage treatment plants in the Marcellus region have been accepting millions of gallons of natural gas industry wastewater that carry significant levels of radioactive elements and other pollutants that they are incapable of treating. . For many of us on New York State's fracking panel, the one bright light has been the presence of Southwest Energy's Vice President and General Counsel Mark Boling. Boling is bullish on shale gas but his passion for public disclosure and a rigorous and rational regulatory framework, his candor about the perils of certain practices and his honest assessments of the costs and benefits of gas shale extraction have inspired trust and confidence among his fellow panelists. The panel's confidence in his integrity is the one thing that might allow us to go forward with recommendations regarding a regulatory scheme that could allow certain kinds of fracking to proceed in New York State.

In a study by researchers from the United States Forest Service, two years after hydraulic fracturing fluids were legally spread on a section of the Fernow Experimental Forest, within the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia, more than half of the trees in the affected area were dead, demonstrating that more research into the safe disposal of chemical-laced wastewater resulting from natural gas drilling.

The Fernow Experimental Forest is also the site of a drilling operation by Berry Energy. While the government owns the surface rights to the forest, the sub-surface mineral rights are privately owned and available for natural gas exploration there and in other forest lands.

The companies did not disclose the exact composition of the fluids, but the study assumed the main constituents appeared to be sodium and calcium chlorides because of their high concentrations on the surface soil.

Almost immediately after disposal, the researchers said, nearly all ground plants died. After a few days, tree leaves turned brown, wilted and dropped; 56% of about 150 trees eventually died.

Natural gas has been touted as a "bridge" from high-carbon sources of energy like coal and oil to a renewable energy future. This assumes sufficient quantity of natural gas from previously inaccessible shale gas deposits to be accessed by horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. Without shale gas, U.S. domestic gas production is projected to fall by 20% through 2035, according to a review of the latest outlook (2011) of the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).

Unfortunately shale gas is characterized by high-cost, rapidly depleting wells that require high energy and water inputs, as well as contamination of surface water and groundwater, and the disposal of toxic drilling fluids produced from the wells. New York State has placed a moratorium on shale gas drilling.

In addition, the marginal cost of shale gas production may be well above current gas prices, and above the EIA's price assumptions for most of the next quarter century, some analyses show. EIA's gas production forecast reveals that record levels of drilling will be required to achieve it, along with incumbent environmental impacts. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from shale gas may also be worse than previously understood - if you consider the full cycle, and possibly worse than coal.

Furthermore replacing coal would require a 64% increase of lower-48 gas production over and above 2009 levels, heavy vehicles a further 24% and light vehicles yet another 76%, as well as a massive build out of new pipelines, gas storage and refueling facilities, and other infrastructure - a logistical, geological, environmental, and financial pipe dream.

There are many other ways to reduce greenhouse emissions and improve energy security. Such as improving the efficiency of our coal- fired electricity generation fleet, much of which is over 40 years old. The EPA is requiring the retirement of as much as 21% of coal-fired capacity under regulations set to take effect in 2015. Best-in-class technologies for both natural-gas- and coal-fired generation can reduce CO2 emissions by 17% and 24%, respectively, and reduce other pollutants. Capturing waste heat from these plants for district and process heating can provide further increases in overall efficiency.

The continued need for natural gas for uses other than electricity generation in the industrial, commercial, and residential sectors, which constitute 70% of current natural gas consumption must also be kept in mind. Natural gas vehicles are likely to increase in a niche role for high- mileage, short-haul applications.

Strategies for energy sustainability must focus on reducing energy demand and optimizing the use of the fuels that must be burnt. At the end of the day, hydrocarbons that aren't burnt produce no emissions.

Capital- and energy-intensive "solutions" such as carbon capture and storage (CSS) are questionable at best and inconsistent with the whole notion of energy sustainability at worst.

There are three widespread assumptions about the role that natural gas can and should play in our energy future:

#1: That, thanks to new techniques for hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling of shale, we have sufficient natural gas resources to supply the needs of our country for the next 100 years.

#2: That the price of natural gas, which has historically been volatile, will remain consistently low for decades to come.

#3: That natural gas is much cleaner and safer than other fossil fuels, from the standpoint of greenhouse gas emissions and public health.

Based on these assumptions, President Obama touted natural gas as a cornerstone of his Administration's “Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future" and endorsed plans for converting a sizable portion of the vehicle fleet to run on natural gas.

What emerges from the data is a very different assessment.

The shale gas industry was motivated to hype production prospects in order to attract large amounts of needed investment capital; it did this by drilling the best sites first and extrapolating initial robust results to apply to more problematic prospective regions. The energy policy establishment, desperate to identify a new energy source to support future economic growth, accepted the industry's hype uncritically. This in turn led Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, 60 Minutes, and many other media outlets to proclaim that shale gas would transform the energy world.

The biggest losers in the shale gas promotion are members of the public, who need sound energy policy based on realistic expectations for future supply, as well as sound assessments of economic and environmental costs.

In the last decade the Post Carbon Institute and other non-profit energy groups warned that depletion of giant oilfields and declining oil discoveries would lead to a situation of higher petroleum prices and tight supplies beginning before 2010. Yet EIA oil forecasts in the early years of the decade contained no hint of this impending and wholly foreseeable supply-price shift. The EIA is now making similar mistakes in its too-rosy projections with regard to shale gas supplies and natural gas prices.

If environmental groups focus their arguments only on the contamination of ground water supplies of shale gas without at the same time questioning the economics of shale gas drilling, they will have helped set up conditions for a political battle that could undermine their own influence and credibility. Oil and gas industries will once again claim that environmentalism is the only thing standing between Americans and energy security.

While enormous amounts of natural gas, oil, and coal remain, the portions of those fuels that were cheapest and easiest to produce are now mostly gone, and producing remaining reserves will entail spiraling investment costs and environmental risks. Moreover, while alternative energy sources exist— including nuclear, wind, and solar—these come with their own problems and trade-offs, and none is capable of replicating the economic benefits that fossil fuels delivered in decades past.

Energy conservation - reducing demand for energy and using energy more efficiently - are the cheapest and most effective ways of cutting carbon emissions, enhancing energy security, and providing a stable basis for economic planning.

Unfortunately, energy supply limits and demand reduction do not support robust economic growth. This is probably the main reason why policy makers and many energy analysts and environmentalists shy away from conveying the real dimensions of our predicament.

There is much we can do to ensure a secure social and natural environment in a lower-energy context, but we are unlikely to take the needed steps if we are laboring under fundamentally mistaken assumptions about the amounts of energy we can realistically access, and the costs of making that energy available.

As recently as 2005, despite near record amounts of drilling, production in North America had fallen from a 2001 peak, and hit a low when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita roared through the Gulf of Mexico in 2005. Gas prices soared in 2005 and in mid-2008 at about the time the price of oil hit an all-time record of $147 per barrel. But gas demand and prices fell when the "Great Recession" in late 2008 struck. Meanwhile, production from unconventional gas plays, most prominently the Barnett Shale of east Texas, was rising rapidly and creating a glut. A new era of cheap, abundant natural gas was declared thanks to the latest hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling technologies, which unlocked previously uneconomic shale gas and tight sand reservoirs.

Texas oil and gas entrepreneur T. Boone Pickens and shale gas driller Aubrey McClendon suggested U.S. gas production could fuel fleets of vehicles and displace oil imports and the EIA suggest it could provide 45% of an expanded supply by 2035.

A good place to start is the EIA's Annual Energy Outlook 2011, which looks at existing consumption patterns and provides forecasts through 2035. While there is concern about the accuracy of these projections, which generally assume there will be no physical limits to hydrocarbon (i.e., fossil fuel) supplies through 2035, they serve as a starting point to understand the current energy system, and where we might go in a world without limits.

Hydrocarbons (oil, natural gas and coal) provided 84% of consumption in 2009 and the forecast in this scenario is for hydrocarbons to provide 82% of an expanded energy demand in 2035. Oil was the largest source of energy in 2009 at 39%, followed by natural gas at 24%, coal at 21%, and non-carbon-emitting energy sources—nuclear power, hydropower, biomass (largely wood), and renewables (wind, solar, geothermal)—at 16%. In 2009, renewable energy from wind, solar, and geothermal sources made up less than 1.4% of energy consumption.

We have succeeded—in what amounts to a blink of the eye in all of human history—in becoming nearly completely addicted to the dense, convenient stores of “fossilized sunshine" represented by hydrocarbons. Breaking that addiction, of course, will be no easy task.

The transportation sector is the largest single consumer of energy. Roughly 68% of the energy used to generate electricity is unavailable due to generation and transmission losses.

Moving away from large, remote, centralized sources of electricity generation to local, smaller- scale, distributed sources of generation can serve to increase efficiency and minimize these energy losses, as well as make cogeneration of both heat and power more feasible.

Oil is currently the premier fuel for transportation, although it is also a very important feedstock for the petrochemical industry. The transportation sector consumed 72% of oil demand in 2009 and the industrial sector 22% .

The American predilection for personal vehicles accounts for 62% of oil consumption in the transportation sector and 44% of all U.S. oil consumption. Personal vehicles also account for 19% of all U.S. CO2 emissions.

Natural gas is a very versatile fuel with major uses in all sectors except transportation, where it is mainly used in the pipeline transport of natural gas and to a very limited extent for compressed natural gas (CNG) vehicles. Natural gas is a primary feedstock in the petrochemical industry and underpins the production of nitrogen-based fertilizers, which are responsible for the “Green Revolution" that has improved crop yields by nearly 200% over the past 80 years. Industrial use of natural gas accounted for 32% of its consumption in 2009. Distributed use, as in residential and commercial heating applications in 2009 accounted for 21% and 14% of its use, respectively. Electricity generation accounted for a further 30% of U.S. natural gas consumption in 2009, mainly in “peaking" power plants. Peaking plants are used to meet peak electricity demand loads.

Coal is primarily suited as a source of heat in the electricity generation sector and as a source of coke in the production of steel in the metallurgical industry. In 2009, 93% of U.S. coal consumption was used for electricity generation, with practically all of the balance used in the industrial sector, primarily in the steel industry. Transforming coal to gas or to liquids involves large capital investments in infrastructure that are roughly equivalent in scale to those required for oil-sands production, and the transformation process entails large energy losses and GHG emissions.

In 2009, 45% of U.S. electricity was generated by coal and 23% by natural gas. Non- GHG-emitting sources including nuclear, large hydro, biomass, wind, solar, and geothermal generated only 31% of U.S. electricity in 2009.

Electricity generation is the primary use for renewable energy sources such as wind and solar; yet these sources, including geothermal energy, generated only 2.7% of U.S. electricity in 2009, with biomass generating a further 1%. Even if these renewable sources more than double through 2035, as projected by the EIA, they will still constitute only 8% of forecast U.S. electricity demand. The scale of the problem of replacing hydrocarbons in electricity generation is simply daunting. Moreover, renewables have well- known issues with intermittency and unpredictability, which compromise their ability to make up a major proportion of electricity supply, especially at current rates of consumption and necessary supply reliability.

Oil is by far the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions at 43%, followed by coal at 34% and natural gas at 23%. While this would seem to lead to a doomsday climate change scenario, there are potential supply constraints on the hydrocarbon inputs to this scenario that make it unlikely to happen. Even so, evidence mounts that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are already altering the climate.

Electricity generation is the largest source of CO2 emissions in the U.S. at 40% Non- electric use in the transportation sector is next at 34% followed by the industrial (16%), residential (6%), and commercial (4%) sectors.

EIA projections assume that U.S. shale gas production will nearly quadruple by 2035, when it is supposed to account for 45% of U.S. gas supply. Other estimates for increases in shale gas production are even higher.

But natural gas production is really a story about a race against depletion. Typically, the production from a new conventional gas well will decline by 25% to 40% in its first year, before tapering off to lower yearly declines as time goes by.

There are now more than half a million producing gas wells in the United States, nearly double the number in 1990 . Yet the gas production per well has declined by nearly 50% over this period.

When gas production peaked in 1973, about 7,000 gas wells were drilled annually. Throughout the 1990s gas drilling averaged about 10,000 wells yearly, which allowed some growth in production. Despite doubling this rate to more than 20,000 wells annually, gas production hit a post-peak summit in 2001 and began to decline. In the run-up to the Great Recession, gas drilling more than tripled from 1990s levels to 33,000 wells per year in the 2006-2008 time frame before falling back below the 20,000 level. This burst of drilling served to grow production modestly to near the 1973 peak, albeit at more than four times the 1973 drilling rate. This “exploration treadmill" indicates the United States will need on the order of 30,000 or more successful gas wells per year to increase production going forward, which is triple the 1990s levels.

It is unlikely that drilling will rebound to 2008 levels in a low-priced gas environment; hence production can be expected to start falling until prices and drilling activity recover. Thus the level of drilling activity that would be required to maintain and grow U.S. gas production in the future would be unprecedented in the history of U.S. gas production.

Economist Jeff Rubin notes that “far from being the game-changer it's supposed to be, North American shale gas production isn't even sustainable at today's natural gas prices." The bottom line with natural gas is that it isn't so much a matter of the resources in the ground that count. What really counts are the flow rates at which these resources can be produced. The flow rate will determine the ability of natural gas to contribute to future energy requirements, as well as to the social and environmental impacts of this production.

Virtually all growth in gas supply in the current EIA reference case is projected to come from shale gas, which constitutes only a third of estimated U.S. gas resources.

The U.S. House of Representatives has recently released a report on the chemicals used for hydraulic fracturing, several of which are carcinogenic and are hazardous air pollutants. Anywhere between 15% and 80% of the injected water is brought back to the surface, along with formation water if it is present (Figure 15). Most of this water is produced in the first few months of production and, as it is toxic, must be disposed of through recycling, through reinjection, or, on the surface, through processing at wastewater treatment facilities.

Analyst Arthur Berman, who has studied the Barnett Shale (the oldest and best-known shale gas play) in depth, suggests that the estimated ultimate recovery from shale gas wells and overall recoverable reserves have been overstated by operators, and that shale gas plays are marginally commercial at best in the current low gas price environment.

As Berman pointed out, quoting Chesapeake Energy CEO Aubrey McClendon, in the Barnett Shale all 17 counties were thought to be equally prospective a few years ago, but today just two and a half counties have been proven to be highly productive core areas.

In 2010, the documentary movie Gasland brought many of the issues involved with hydraulic fracturing and shale gas production to the forefront.

Most of us have heard about the high concentration of toxic chemicals involved in fracking, and the contamination of groundwater, but there is also these points to consider: - Very high water consumption, between 2 million and 8 million gallons per well, which is potentially problematic. - Higher full-cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Full-cycle GHG emissions from shale gas are far larger than the burner-tip emissions of the gas itself. - Induced earthquakes through fluid injection both during the hydraulic fracturing process and during the disposal of waste fluid through injection wells. To date, seismic activity related to the injection of waste flowback fluids from hydraulic fracturing seems to be the largest source of induced seismic activity.

Howarth et al. of Cornell University in their April 2011 paper states: Natural gas is composed largely of methane, and 3.6% to 7.9% of the methane from shale-gas production escapes to the atmosphere in venting and leaks over the lifetime of a well. These methane emissions are at least 30% more than and perhaps more than twice as great as those from conventional gas. The higher emissions from shale gas occur at the time wells are hydraulically fractured—as methane escapes from flow-back return fluids—and during drill out following the fracturing. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, with a global warming potential that is far greater than that of carbon dioxide, particularly over the time horizon of the first few decades following emission. .... Compared to coal, the footprint of shale gas is at least 20% greater and perhaps more than twice as great on the 20-year horizon and is comparable when compared over 100 years."

Should the United States commit to large amounts of new gas- fueled infrastructure that cannot be supplied by domestic gas production, it would consider imported LNG. The life-cycle emissions of CO2 are much higher for LNG than for conventional gas due to the energy required for liquefaction, transportation, and regasification. LNG-transported natural gas adds 20% more CO2 emissions than conventional gas on a full life-cycle basis. LNG increases emissions for the overall delivery process before the burner tip by 137% on average compared to the emissions for conventional gas.

Greenhouse gas impacts over the next 30 to 40 years could be made considerably worse by a wholesale switch to gas for electricity generation. Thus the concept of natural gas as a low-carbon bridge fuel to a future powered largely by renewable energy is cast in considerable doubt as a strategy to reduce global warming. Indeed, it may in fact be a strategy that increases global warming over the next few decades.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies are being promoted by politicians as a panacea for expanding the consumption of fossil fuels globally while minimizing carbon emissions. There are four major issues with CCS that make it counterproductive: - The safety and long-term integrity of CO2 storage in deep saline aquifers which has been largely untested and then there is the potential for leakage. - The parasitic energy loss in separating CO2 from flue gas and compressing it to a liquid or supercritical state. These losses range from 18.8% to 26.8% of the power output from a coal plant, depending on the technology. - The capital cost of a CCS-equipped power plant is estimated to be between 32.2% and 74.2% higher than a conventional plant, depending on the technology . - The additional capital and energy costs of building CO2 pipelines, drilling injection wells, and monitoring storage sites for a few hundred years.

CCS has yet to be demonstrated at a commercial scale, its projected costs could instead be invested in alternative energy and infrastructure to radically lower energy footprints.

Oil is limited and renewables are slow in being developed. We depend on oil in many more ways than one would imagine. What will our future be like without this important resource? Follow the link in the headline to read all about it.

Researchers with the Radiation and Public Health Project in their peer-reviewed paper published in Open Journal of Pediatrics reported that children born in Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington from 1 to 16 weeks after the Fukushima reactor meltdowns began in March 2011 were 28% more likely to suffer from congenital hypothyroidism than were kids born in those states during the same period one year earlier, a new study shows.

The meltdowns produced substantial quantities of the radioisotope iodine-131, which was blown over the Pacific Ocean and fell over Hawaii, the American West Coast, and other Pacific countries in rain and snow, reaching levels hundreds of times greater than those considered safe.

Radioactive iodine tends to gather in our thyroids, the glands that control how we grow. In babies, including those not yet born, such radiation can stunt the development of body and brain. The condition is treatable when detected early. The links between iodine radioisotope exposure and juvenile hypothyroidism were established after the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown.

"Congenital hypothyroidism can be used as one measure to assess any potential changes in U.S. fetal and infant health status after Fukushima because official data was available relatively promptly," the researchers wrote. "However, health departments will soon have available for other 2010 and 2011 indicators of fetal/infant health, including fetal deaths, premature births, low weight births, neonatal deaths, infant deaths, and birth defects."

America alone produces about 2,000 metric tons of nuclear waste annually and our best solution for disposing of it: bury it deep in the Earth. However, a pair of MIT scientists believe they've found not only a better way of eliminating nuclear waste but recycling the deadly detritus into enough clean electricity to power the entire world until 2083. Win, meet win. The conventional nuclear power method involves inserting radioactive rods into a r
. . . more at Gizmodo

Two years after an accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant triggered the worlds' worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl, decommissioning is set to begin. The threat of extremely hazardous radioactive contamination from the plant - which suffered a triple meltdown and hydrogen explosions - forced tens of thousands of farmers, families and elderly to evacuate from their homes.

The greatest danger has passed since those dark days. In December 2011, the Japanese government declared that the plant had reached a safe state of "cold shutdown". That was nine months after the March 11 magnitude 9 earthquake set the accident in motion at this nuclear plant 250 kilometers north of Tokyo.

Radioactive contamination levels on site remain extremely high, making the decommissioning of the plant a Herculean task for plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco). The conditions at reactors 1, 2 and 3 remain too severe for workers to enter. Decommissioning is going to take more than a quarter of a century, says Tepco.

Follow the link in the headline to see the entire article.

More than 200m hectares of land in the global south - over eight times the size of the UK - have been sold or leased between 2000 and 2010, according to a study published by the International Land Coalition.

Population growth, the increasing consumption of a global elite, and an international legal system skewed in favour of large scale investors are fuelling a worldwide rush for land that is unfolding faster than previously thought and is likely to continue.

The food price crisis of 2007-08 may have triggered a boom in international land deals, however "a much broader set of factors - linked to population growth and the rise of emerging economies - is raising the prospect of "a new era in the struggle for, and control over, land in many areas of the global south", the study argues.

The large land acquisitions may marginalise rural communities and jeopardise the future of family farming in favour of big industrial projects. Enthusiasm for industrial-scale agriculture continues to sideline small farmers.

Suprises uncovered by the study: rich national investors play a much larger role than previously thought, food is not the main focus of these deals, and African governments are not the only ones signing away large tracts of land.

Overall, about 40% of land acquired over the last decade is for biofuel production, 25% is for food crops and another 27% for mining, tourism, industry and forestry.

However, in Africa, 66% of land deals are intended for biofuel production, compared with 15% for food crops.

in south-east Asia, 75% of reported land deals have been struck by regional players, while in Africa, South African investors have acquired an estimated 40.7m hectares since 2009.

The IMF, the World Bank and a number of government aid agencies are pressuring developing countries to attract and legally protect foreign investment in agriculture and extractive industries,and to set up sophisticated specialised agencies to promote investment opportunities and offering benefits such as tax breaks and low prices, said the report.

USAID is hosting an international conference to promote foreign investment in South Sudan. Almost 9% of South Sudan's land had already been leased or bought by investors prior to the country's independence in July this year.

There are few effective international mechanisms exist to safeguard the rights of the rural poor. Meanwhile, the common lack of formal, legal titles to land is heightening the vulnerability of rural communities.

Lorenzo Cotula, of the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development said that " poor communities need to have "stronger rights over the land they have lived on for generations."

The G20 summit in Seoul last year encouraged all countries and companies to uphold a set of principles for responsible agricultural investment, developed by the UN and the World Bank But such agreements are little more than window-dressing.

Residents of Mukaya Payam, in South Sudan's Central Equatoria state, launched a campaign in August against what would have been the country's largest land deal - a 49-year lease of 600,000 hectares by an American company. In Selingue, in southern Mali, hundreds of smallholder farmers and civil society activists came together for the first international farmers' conference to tackle the global rush for land.

While, China's strategy of flooding the global market with subsidised goods may be found to be too aggressive, in the case of solar panels, tariffs are the wrong solution.

China is providing huge loans and subsidies to the solar industry while most other governments have failed to do so.

After some US and EU solar manufacturers went bankrupt, some lobbyists blamed China, instead of the U.S.'s own insufficient and inappropriate subsidies. Some claim that domestic jobs are threatened by low cost Chinese panels, however; the vast majority of jobs in the solar sector outside of China are in installing and servicing panels, not manufacturing them, and the proposed tariffs could cost 60,000 jobs in the US alone. Cheaper panels now means more jobs and less climate change.

The EU trade Commissioner initiated the investigation into tariffs recently and the US ITC proceedings are about to start. We're in a race against the clock to green our economies and prevent catastrophic climate change, and Chinese success in green tech could be the perfect catalyst for the rest of the world to scale up the technology and sustainably bring down prices. Let's make sure the EU and the US don't kill our ray of hope. Click on the headline to take action.

Most people have heard of peak oil -- easy-to-get-to petroleum reserves are mostly already extracted, and most of what's left is the hard-to-get stuff. But what about peak phosphorus and potassium? They are the P and K of NPK - nitrogen, phospohorus, and potassium - the three nutrients needed in order for plants to grow. These nutrients are extracted from soil every time we harvest crops, and have to be replaced if farmland is to remain productive.

In traditional agriculture, these nutrients were supplied by returning food waste, animal waste, and in some cases, human waste to the soil. In the first part of the 20th century we learned to mass produce the industrial version of N,P, and K

Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer can be synthesized from nitrogen in the air, by a process that requires an enormous amount of fossil energy. Phosphorus and potassium cannot be synthesized -- they're found in significant amounts only in a few large deposits scattered across the world from phosphate rock and potash.

Jeremy Grantham, cofounder and chief strategist for the Boston invetment firm Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo, lays it out: the former Soviet states and Canada have more than 70% of the potash. Morocco has 85% of all high-grade phosphates. There can be only one conclusion: their use must be drastically reduced in the next 20-40 years or we will begin to starve.

Grantham has foreseen every bubble from the Japanese equity/real estate craze of the '80s through the U.S. real estate mania of the 2000s, the S&P 500 near all-time highs, and the Bear Stearns nosedive. In Nature magazine, Grantham argues that "we should not unnecessarily ruin a pleasant and currently very serviceable planet just to maximize the short-term profits of energy companies and others."

Phosphorus is the more urgent due to the fact that It's in the Morroco's Western Sahara region, which is contested by he Polisario Front, a rebel movement the UN recognizes as the rightful representatives of the territory. "If the people of Western Sahara ever resume their war to get their country back -- or if the Arab Spring spreads and Morocco goes the way of Libya—then we may be adding phosphate fertilizer to the list of finite resources, such as water and land, that are constraining world food supplies sooner than we think."

Developing an agriculture without potash means a massive focus on recycling the nutrients we take from the soil back into the soil -- in other words, composting, not on a backyard level but rather on a society-wide scale. It also requires policies that give farmers incentives to build up organic matter in soil, so it holds in nutrients instead of letting them leach away. Both of these solutions are specialties of organic agriculture.

Metals Economics Group, a Canada based minerals focused research organisation, has done anaysis that suggests that despite a huge focus by global miners and explorers on precious metals exploration over the past few years, the rate of new gold resource discovery is substantially lagging behind resource depletion.

Significant gold finds (of at least 2 million ounces) over the past 14 years could only replace around 56% of the estimated amount of gold mined over the same period - and this is only if these same discoveries prove to be economically mineable.

It is true that the top 26 global gold miners (those that mined at least 600,000 oz of gold in 2011) collectively replaced almost 208% of the gold they produced. Individually, 21 of these major producers added enough reserves through exploration and acquisitions to keep ahead of production, maintaining a strong pipeline of projects to insure stable or increased gold production.

These larger gold producers have increased their aggregate annual production 17% over the past ten years to 57% of 2011 world mine production, and continued to raise production levels, perhaps to a projected 67% by 2017. Based on their 2011 production, the report suggests, each major producer already needs to replace an average of almost 2 million oz of gold in reserves each year.

The biggest reserves replacement challenge faced by the bigger producers, and the industry as a whole, is perhaps not that there is no gold left, but that all the "easy" gold has been found. Worldwide, the total gold in reserves and resources at development-stage projects is essentially equal to that in currently producing mines. However, with increasing risk of political, regulatory, and tax instability in many resource-rich nations, declining grades, rising costs, and dramatically longer development times, the amount of gold available for production in the near term is likely far less than has been found.

Across Latin America, Asia and Africa, more and more community lands, rivers and ecosystems are being despoiled, displaced and devoured by mining activities. Over the last 10 years, iron ore production is up by 180%; cobalt by 165%; lithium by 125%, and coal by 44%.

The rights of farming and indigenous communities are increasingly ignored in the race to grab land and water. Each wave of new extractive technologies requires ever more water to wrench the material from its source. The hunger for these materials is a growing threat to the necessities for life: water, fertile soil and food. The implications are obvious, if not widely ignored by the industrial and economic powers that profit from such activities.

The Opening Pandora's Box report was spearheaded by the Gaia foundation and supported by Friends of the Earth International, Grain, Oilwatch, Navdanya in India and other groups.

The increase in prospecting has also grown exponentially, which means this massive acceleration in extraction will continue if concessions are granted as freely as they are now.

The executive summary to the report says: "if we continue in our current direction, our children will be left to clean up an increasingly barren and unstable planet, littered with toxic wastelands and a huge scarcity of water, which we would have left in our wake."

Environment editor at The Guardian, Jon Vidal added: Of the 10 biggest mining deals to be completed last year, seven were in Africa, with Anglo American earmarking $8bn (£5bn) for new platinum, diamond, iron ore and coal projects on the continent, and Brazil's Vale planning to invest more than $12bn over the next five years in Africa.

China now extracts much of the world's mineral resources: 53% of the world's cement, 47% of its iron ore, 46% of its coal and more than 40% of the world's steel, lead, zinc and aluminium and re-exports much of this in the form of finished products for world markets.

The loss of enormous quantities of soil, and the eviction of people to make way for large-scale extraction now threaten to make millions of people landless and hungry, a recipe for social problems.

Water could be the limiting factor in the extraction of minerals in future. If demand continues to grow at the same rate that it has in the last decade, industry demands for fresh water are expected to grow from 4,500bn cubic metres today to 6,900bn cubic metres in 2030. Most mining companies have said they are already experiencing shortages.

"Large-scale mining is now targeting all parts of the planet," said Gathuri Mburu, co-ordinator of the African Biodiversity Network.

The Gaia Foundation's report, "Opening Pandora's Box" tells us of the scramble for the world's land and mineral resources, threatening the last remaining wilderness and critical ecosystems, destroying communities and contaminating huge volumes of fresh water.

The more accessible resources have been consumed. Now the extractive industries, funded by pension funds and commodities speculators, are using new technologies like fracking for natural gas to get at previously unprofitable resources. These industries use far more raw material and have a much larger destructive footprint than in the past.

Canada's tar sands require that two to four tonnes of earth be dug up and a similar amount of fresh water is needed to produce one barrel of oil. Copper requires 10 times the ore it once did to get the same volume. In the last 10 years, mining for iron ore has increased 180%, cobalt by 165% and lithium by 125%. China's mining sector grew 30% in just five years. Peru's mining exports increased by one-third in 2011 alone. Coal mining has increased by 44% in the past 10 years.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has recently warned of the threats to World Heritage Sites from planned mining and oil and gas projects. One in four iconic natural areas in Africa is negatively affected.

Hobbelink of GRAIN, a small NGO working with small farmers, first told the world about the millions of hectares of land in Africa, Asia and South America that were being leased or purchased by foreign investors for food and biofuel production. More than 400 large land deals totalling nearly 35 million hectares, roughly the size of The Netherlands are involved.

This movement is turning communities into refugees on their own land. Polly Higgins, author of "Eradicating Ecocide" said "This new wave of land grabbing is putting profit above people and planet."

Major investments are going into the search for fossil fuels in remote regions like the Arctic and into "extreme energy sources" like shale gas and tar sands that have big environmental impacts.

Canada's tar sands have 130,000 hectares of tailings ponds full of toxic wastes behind some of the largest earthen dams ever constructed. Mining companies dump more than 180 million tonnes of hazardous mine waste into rivers, lakes and oceans worldwide every year. Mining enough gold for just a single wedding band generates, on average, 20 tonnes of contaminated mine waste.

Rising prices, increasing material consumption and a huge flood of investment have triggered this global boom, the report found. Following the 2008 collapse of financial markets, hedge and pension fund investors dramatically increased investments in metal, mineral, oil and gas commodities.

The average U.S. citizen using an astonishing 22,000 times their weight in minerals, metals and fuels in their lifetime.

Alaska's Bristol Bay watershed is one of America's last and most important wild places -- an unspoiled Eden of vast tundra, crystal clear streams and pristine lakes.

Sockeye salmon runs there support an abundance of bears, whales, seals and eagles as well as Native communities that have thrived here for thousands of years. Endangered Cook Inlet beluga whales live there - there are only 340 - truly are the last of their kind.

A consortium of foreign mining companies is planning to dig a mega open-pit mine in the heart of this extraordinary ecosystem. This 2,000-foot-deep, two-mile-long gold and copper mine would have colossal earthen dams that are supposed to hold back some 10 billion tons of toxin-laced mining waste - despite being built in a known earthquake zone.

The mine would be dug on state land, right next to 1.1 million acres of our federal public lands.

Click on the link in the headline to help by telling BLM Director Bob Abbey NOT to open our public lands in Bristol Bay to hard rock mining at the Pebble Mine.

Dr Gavin Mudd of Monash University says that while demand for Australia's minerals is going up, the quality of ore is going down. The mining industry is not sustainable in the long-term, and the problem is international.

At the standard of living in Australia, the amount of steel that is consumed, per person - or the amount of copper -and if we extrapolate those same standards across the whole of the global population, that's a challenge for sustainability of the world's mineral resources. Fifty years into the future, with everyone in the world at the same standard of living, there won't be any mineral resources left.

We know that ore grades will decline, and that has important implications in terms of the amount of rock to dig up, and to dig up more rock means more energy, more CO2 emissions and so on.

The mining industry has moved to improve its environmental management. The nature of rehabilitation bonding can be improved, and that way the liability and the risks and so on are not just borne by government if the company goes bankrupt.

If we extrapolate 100 years into the future it's hard to believe that we'd actually have anywhere near the same scale of the iron ore industry that we do now.

With an increasing population, India's energy demands is mounting. The household sector is the largest consumer, accounting for 40%-50%. In rural areas, the domestic sector accounts for 80%. With the current rate of consumption, India would require 450 million tones of coal, 94 million tones of oil and 220 million units of electricity by 2006. Most of these are non-renewable resources. India realized that the key to sustainable consumption is to divert the energy load onto the renewable sources. More than 3165 MW of power based on renewable sources have been installed, including the world's largest deployment of solar PV (Photovoltaic) aggregating 50 MW. India ranks 3rd in annual production capacity of solar PV. With 3.23 million biogas plants, India ranks 2nd after China. There is a potential of about 3500 MW of biogas-based power from 453 sugar mills. With wind power India ranks 5th in the world with 18710 MW.

Solar energy is especially valuable as there is sunshine available for most parts of the year and most of the time. The amount of solar energy impacting India is about 32.8 million MW every second on the Indian land mass. Solar energy is inexhaustible, widely distributed, environment friendly and cost free in raw form. Offsetting these benefits are its low intensity and its unpredictability. Solar energy can supply from 40% to 75% of a building's energy needs.

Harnessing the sun is a clean way to provide hot water or space heating. Another way is through photovoltaic cells.

The Indian government has taken the initiative in promoting the use solar energy. Indian Renewable Energy Development Agency (IREDA) provides revolving fund offering credit for the purchase of PV systems, which service lower volume customers. Soft loans are provided at low interest rates for solar water heaters for the period of 6 years. To provide low-cost energy to every rural household has been the top priority of the successive Indian governments. Only the political and practical will is necessary for the encouragement of solar energy in India.

Thailand canceled a public hearing on a new power production plan to include the country's first nuclear plant. 200 villagers traveled 300 km (190 miles) from the west coast province of Prachuab Khirikhan to attend.

They didn't have a big enough room the senior ministry official Norkhun Sitthipong told reporters.

The villagers, whose protests in 2002 forced the government to cancel plans for two coal-powered plants, said they wanted no power plant in the province.

Thailand's latest plan calls for 11 700-megawatt power plants, three coal powered, to be built in Prachuab Khirikhan.

It also seeks to use more coal, biofuels and nuclear power and buy electricity from Laos, Myanmar and China.

The new Three Gorges Dam on China's Yangtze River is an environmental and human-rights disaster of monumental proportions, critics say. Up to 1.9 million people will be forced to leave their homes. It was built with more than six times as much concrete as the Panama Canal and already has cracks, some up to 8 feet in length. Experts in China have urged their country's government to rethink its plans.

The number of motor vehicles in Beijing passed 2 million, seven years ahead of projections. One in five households in the Chinese capital now owns a car, a huge shift from 10 years ago. But with this has come congested roads, high pollution, rising accidents and worries about the policy to encourage car ownership. Concerns - whether Beijing, with 14 million people, will become another crammed Asian mega-city or an enlightened model of planning - are important as leaders remake the city for the 2008 Olympic Games. Beijing pledged to invest $12 billion to clean the air and water and $7.7 billion to add 90 miles of rail and subway, doubling the current network. It will spend $6.8 billion on road construction and repair, adding 900 miles by 2008, when vehicles are expected to number 3.5 million. Beijing and other Chinese cities have the highest air pollution levels in the world. Cities all over China are building roads and highways, in response to burgeoning commerce and as a way to attract investment. Few have the vision for proper urban and traffic planning. Beijing urban sprawl makes car ownership almost a necessity as developments spring up farther from the city center. As market reforms accelerated, Chinese leaders viewed freeways and private cars as signs of a modernized country and enticed the likes of Volkswagen, Ford and General Motors. For every car sold, two people are employed, either directly or indirectly. The media may criticize road designs or poor planning, but no one dares call for limiting the number of cars. Shanghai limits license plates for new cars to 2,000 to 3,000 a month, Beijing issues nearly 2,000 every day.

The Olduvai theory is based on world energy and population data and is defined by the ratio of world energy use and world population. It states that the life expectancy of Industrial Civilization is less than or equal to 100 years: 1930-2030.

World energy production per capita from 1945 to 1973 grew at 3.45 %/year. From 1973 to the peak in 1979, it slowed to 0.64 %/year then took a long-term decline of 0.33 %/year from 1979 to 1999. The Olduvai theory explains the 1979 peak and the subsequent decline. It says that energy production per capita will fall to its 1930 value by 2030, thus giving Industrial Civilization a lifetime of less than or equal to 100 years.

Should this occur, any number of factors could be cited as the 'causes' of collapse. I believe, however, that it will be correlated with an 'epidemic' of permanent blackouts of high-voltage electric power networks. Briefly explained: When the electricity goes out, you are back in the Dark Age.

The Olduvai theory, of course, may be proved wrong. But it cannot be rejected by the world energy production and population data.

Joanne Disan, director of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs' Division for Sustainable Development, told the the United Nations Committee on Energy and Natural Resources that energy consumption in the world's
developing countries has declined 2.3% over the last year, "seriously" hampering economic and social development performance in these nations. In
contrast, increased consumption was among Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, where energy demand stuck to a 10-year growth trend. OECD countries currently represent almost 60% of total world commercial energy demand.

Rising industrialization in Asia is discharging millions of tons of
previously undetected contaminants annually into the winds that travel across the Pacific Ocean. Every spring there are massive dust storms in Asia
that transport soil across the Pacific to the US, previous research has shown. Now Thomas Cahill, a researcher and professor emeritus of physics
and atmospheric science at the University of California at Davis and an international authority on the atmospheric transport of pollutants has found
that "sulfate and organic aerosols are also present, and in roughly the same amounts." These aerosols are killing crops, spreading illness in Asia,
appear to be adding toxic materials to waters in America, and they could dramatically alter global climate. Every year, Asia burns millions of tons of
coal in coal-burning power plants and coal-fired locomotives. Aerosols are also generated from metals production, vehicle exhaust, home heating,
and overtilling of dry-area farmland. The U.S. has slowed it's annual releases of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere from about 20 million tons to 13
million tons between 1990 and 2000, while Asia's has climbed to about 45 million tons. Pollution of the air above the Pacific ocean, will change the
heating/cooling effect of the ocean and produce changes in the weather. The research project is called the University of California Pacific Rim
Aerosol Network and it works by determining the origins of these aerosols by finding the unique signature of their origins in their composition of
trace elements, such as nickel, copper, zinc, arsenic and lead. Aerosols with these unique signatures from Asia have been detected all the way to
the Rocky Mountains in the United States.

When millions of citizens from economically wealthy nations can still go to fully-stocked stores and have relatively high living standards, it is easy to justify business-as-usual policies.

However, with fish stocks collapsing and degradation of coral reefs due to overfishing and ocean warming; shortages and rapid price increases of commodities (like wheat and corn) due to water scarcity and extreme heat; deforestation; and literally drawing down our wells, overshoot's consequences are all-too-real.

Humanity has been living beyond its means like a community that draws down its well faster than it can recharge.

The Persian Gulf may be one of the hardest-hit regions in terms of fisheries decline due to climate change and acidification. The nations of the Mediterranean region nearly tripled their demand for ecological resources and services, and the region increased its ecological deficit by 230% in the past fifty years.

Awareness of our Ecological Footprint and the economic implications of resource constraints and climate-altering carbon emissions is being heightened.

In the 1960s Ecuador had four times as much biocapacity as it used. Now it is facing the onset of an ecological deficit. In 2009 Ecuador became the first nation to incorporate the Ecological Footprint into its national plan.

For traditional measures of economic wealth (such as GDP or credit worthiness) to be sufficient, they must take into account ecological wealth.

The trend is increasing medium- and long-term national risk because of exposure to resource constraints. Fortunately forward-looking governmental and financial leaders are investing in the stability of their own nations by adopting ecological accounting and moving towards its integration in decision-making—so we may keep our wells recharged.

How big a city would have to be to house the world's 7 billion people? That would depend on which real city it was modeled after. If we all lived like New Yorkers, for example, 7 billion people could fit into Texas. If we lived like Houstonians, though, we'd occupy much of the conterminous United States.

The infographic for this is shown here (follow the link in the headline to see it).

However, what's missing from this first infographic is the land that it takes to support such a city. Cities' land requirements far outstrip their immediate physical footprints. They include everything from farmland to transportation networks to forests and open space that recharge fresh water sources like rivers and aquifers. Just looking at a city's geographic extents ignores its more important ecological footprint. How much land would we really need if everyone lived like New Yorkers versus Houstonians?

While some cities track resource use, most don't. Of those that do, methodologies vary city to city, making comparisons nearly impossible. Plus, cities in most developed nations still use a shocking amount of resources, regardless of whether they are as dense as New York or as sprawling as Houston.

But what we can do is compare different countries and how many resources their people—and their lifestyles—use. Data from the National Footprint Account from the Global Footprint Network. Their methodology is based on peer-reviewed research by Mathias Wackernagel, the organization's founder. It's consistent and comprehensive. While each country's footprint is assembled from sub-footprints, ranging from cropland to carbon to urbanization to fishing grounds, the second infographic only used terrestrial sub-footprints.

Click on the link in the headline and scroll down past the first infographic to see this amazing and educational graphic showing eight countries and the amount of land each country's footprint takes up. All eight countries shown - Bangladesh, India, Uganda, China, Costa Rica, France, the U.S., and the United Arab Emirates - take up more land on the terrestial subfootprint than they occupy as countries.

The world's biodiversity is down 30% since the 1970s with tropical species taking the biggest hit. Humanity is outstripping the Earth's resources by 50% — essentially using the resources of one and a half Earths every year, according to the 2012 Living Planet Report, produced by conservation agency the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

Colby Loucks of WWF, compared humanity to bad houseguests: "We're emptying the fridge, we're not really taking care of the lawn, we're not weeding the flower beds and we're certainly not taking out the garbage."

Paul Ehrlich, billed as the world's most renowned population analyst, says that, without a massive reduction in the number of humans and redistribution of natural resources, we will be faced with a nuclear disaster, the plague, or other disaster.

While the Royal Society in London said that physical numbers are as important as the amount of natural resources consumed, Paul Ehrlich, Bing professor of population studies at Stanford University in California and author of the best-selling Population Bomb book in 1968, says that the optimum population of Earth - enough to guarantee the minimal physical ingredients of a decent life to everyone - is 1.5 to 2 billion people rather than the 7 billion who are alive today or the 9 billion expected in 2050.

With 1.5 to 2 billion you can have big active cities and wilderness. If you want a world where everyone has minimum space and food and everyone is kept just above being alive you might be able to support about 4 or 5 billion people in the long term. But we already have 7 billion. "So we have to humanely and as rapidly as possible move to population shrinkage."

If we go on at the pace we are there's going to be various forms of disaster: a slow motion disaster like people getting more and more hungry, or "catastrophic disasters because the more people you have the greater the chance of some weird virus transferring from animal to human populations, there could be a vast die-off."

Ehrlich was described as alarmist in the 1970s but claims most of his predictions have proved correct. "We have 1 billion people hungry now and we are going to add 2.5 billion. They are going to have to be fed on more marginal land, from water that is purified more or transported further, we're going to have disproportionate impacts on how we feed people from the population increase itself," he said.

He agreed with the Royal Society report that said human population and consumption should not be divided but multiplied together. You have to deal with them together. We have too much consumption among the rich and too little among the poor. That implies that terrible thing that we are going to have to do which is to somehow redistribute access to resources away the rich to the poor.

Visualizing.org illustrates the value of nature and our use of nature's services.The group joined up with TEEB (the Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity), a UN-sponsored effort to put a dollar figure on nature's services such as providing fuel, food, water and habitat, by assessing both their economic benefits and the costs associated with their depletion. Uses Global Footprint Network data to graphically show the relationship between countries' ecological demand, their biocapacity and the size of their deficit or reserve.

Refering to the IPAT equation (Impact = Population X Affluence X Technology), there seems to be a never-ending squabble over which is heavier in making Impact: Population or Affluence. It's both. We need to freeze and cut both population and consumption.

However, without lowering population, cutting back on the high consumption can't do the job. Looking at the Ecological Footprint we see that the production and consumption of goods and services depends entirely on arable soils, forests, croplands, pasture lands, fishing grounds, clean waters and air, the atmosphere, ozone layer, climate, fossil fuels, and minerals - to perform the ecological services and provide the materials and energy and waste sinks that sustain civilization.

Those who see Affluence or consumption as the key use the Ecological Footprint as a yardstick for lowering their Impact, such as: * Drive less/Get a higher mileage car/Take the bus/Bicycle/Walk; or Buy food grown nearby/Eat organic/Grow your own/Eat lower on the food chain; or Make your house more energy efficient/Have a smaller house/Live with others.

Americans can lower their footprints by trimming fat - but they aren't going to give up too much. They may be willing to go to the leaner Japanese and Western Europeans lifestyles, but cutting back to how Mexicans or Nigerians or Bangladeshis live, is not an option that Americans will consider.

We can bring our per person footprint down, but not nearly enough for generous sustainability, which includes creating societies that leave sufficient natural resources for future human generations to live good lives; and sharing the landscape generously with nonhuman beings.

This leaves us with no choice but to freeze how many we are and begin to become fewer.

Environmentalists who think we can double or triple U.S. population without wiping out wildlife and scalping our last wildernesses, are living in a fool's paradise.

Research from Murtaugh and Schlax at Oregon State University shows that a hypothetical American woman who switches to a more fuel-efficient car, drives less, recycles, installs more efficient light bulbs, and replaces her refrigerator and windows with energy-saving models, would increase her carbon legacy by 40 times if she has two children.

Murtaugh and Schlax have shown well how overweight P is in I*PAT, not only for carbon emissions, but for the consumption of fresh water, for example. We can't lower Impact only by lowering Affluence.

And Americans have the biggest Affluence footprint per person of any people in the world. Any population growth in the United States, then, is growth of these big Affluence footprints, making U.S. population growth more harmful to the world than population growth anywhere else. The world cannot afford more Americans.

The author has more on this in his book, Man Swarm.

In 2007, humanity's footprint exceeded the Earth's biocapacity by 50%.

This is called "ecological overshoot", and has continued since then.

It will take 1.5 years for the Earth to regenerate the renewable resources that people used in 2007 and absorb CO2 waste.

Put another way, people used the equivalent of 1.5 planets to support their activities.

The Ecological Footprint is an indicator of human pressure on nature.It measures how much land and water people need to produce the resources they consume (like food and timber), provide land for infrastructure, and absorb the CO2 they generate - and then compares this to biocapacity, nature's ability to meet this demand.

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Mahatma Gandhi argued that "the world has enough for everyone's need, but not for everyone's greed." In his lifetime, however, the world had less than half its current population, and population could double again as we struggle to turn around our wasteful and destructive consumption patterns.

Meat consumption is going up worldwide, and that demands correspondingly higher per capita production of grain. It takes about 7 pounds of grain to yield 1 pound of beef. Poultry takes 2.7 pounds of grain to produce 1 pound of meat, while swine eat 6 pounds of grain for every pound of pork. In the U.S. and Canada, each person eats about a ton of grain annually, mostly as meat.

People in Developing countries consume about 200 pounds of grain per capita each year. Between now and 2030, grain consumption, primarily as animal feed, is expected to grow by about 2.5% annually in the developing countries. Those millions of tons of grain represent, in turn, great quantities of expended natural resources -- from water for irrigation to the natural gas used to produce fertilizers.

Then there is the associated environmental impact: rivers polluted with pesticides and nitrates, exhausted aquifers, and eroded soil. Unfortunately, the quantity of arable land is all too finite.

Cars and Light Trucks
The manufacture and, more important, the use of consumers' vehicles cause more environmental damage--especially air pollution and global warming --than any other single consumer spending category.

Meat and Poultry Meat and poulter production requires large amounts of water and causes 20 percent of the common (as opposed to toxic) water pollution related to consumer expenditure. It also uses a significant share of the nation's land--800 million acres for grazing livestock and an additional 60 million acres to grow animal feed. Red meat causes especially hight amounts of environmental damage for the nutrition it delivers.

Fruit, Vegetables, and Grains Irrigated crops grown to meet consumer demand use an enormous quantity of water (30 percent of consumer-related water use). pesticides and fertilizers cause 5 percent of consumer-related toxic water pollution. Food crops also use substantial amounts of land.

Household Appliances and Lighting Electricity seems clean and nonpolluting when it's used in the home, but most of it is generated by burning polluting fossil fuels, especially coal. Appliances and lighting are responsible for 15 percent of the greenhouse-gas emissions related to consumer expenditures and 13 percent of consumer-related common air pollution.

Home Heating, Hot water, and Air Conditioning Cooling and heating homes and water has an impact on global warming and air pollution similar to that of appliances and lighting. Systems that rely on electricity or oil contribute heavily to both problems. Most fireplaces and wood stoves are especially high air polluters.

Home Construction The land and wood used for new home s are responsible for about a quarter of consumers' impact on wildlife and natural ecosystems. Six percent of consumer-related water pollution comes from manufacturing the materials for new homes and disturbing the soil during construction.

Household Water and Sewage Despite advances in sewage treatment, municipal sewage remains a major source (around 11 percent) of water pollution, especially affecting coastal areas and estuaries. Interestingly, households' home water use is only 5 percent of the total compared with nearly 74 percent for food production and distribution.

Affordable housing for low-income Americans is subsidized by U.S. taxpayers to the tune of billions of dollars. This social safety net helps keep families and the elderly from falling through the cracks. But the problem is that housing has been built far away from public transit, schools, and jobs. Residents have to drive long distances and spend lots of money on gas in doing so. Transportation and housing costs can eat up over half of their income, leaving healthy food, higher education, and health care unobtainable.

However interest has been shown on the state and federal levels to alleviate transportation costs for low-income families. Tax breaks and funding for projects are awarded more to to housing that is close to public transit. In the Chicago region 85% of the housing funded by the Illinois Housing Development Authority (IHDA) is now located within walking distance of bus or train stations.

Often the transit systems are not up to snuff. Living near a train station is great, but you're less apt to ride the train if it only passes through a couple times a day. Ditto with buses that don't get you where you need to go when you need to get there. From 2001-2008, transit service to neighborhoods with IHDA-financed housing dropped 24 %.

More important than access to mass transit, are densely developed, compact neighborhoods with lots of amenities like grocery stores, schools, and jobs - in other words, communities where residents don't have to travel long distances to meet their basic needs.

One idea being floated is a labeling system where you would find information about the transportation costs associated with a house. Families receiving rental assistance could then compare different residences to find a location that fits within their budget.

When they began ranking different areas of San Francisco on how many amenities were within walking distance, within about a year, for sale signs in front of houses were listing their walk scores.

Ditching the long car commute (via car, train, or otherwise) and creating walkable, tight-knit communities is the ultimate goal.

To blame the mess we are in mainly on consumption rates is misplaced. If all humans could consume at higher rates they would, because we are all greedy and needy in various ways. Those of us accustomed to cars are not suddenly going to walk everywhere instead of driving or take mass transit because of past patterns that established far flung housing distribution based on cheap fuel. In China, they are abandoning the bicycle for cars. The population is the driver of most if not all of our problems from intra-specfic competition for jobs and resources to environmental damage to ecosystems on a wholesale basis.

One has to understand that the population/environmental problem has its roots in the agricultural revolution and it began to overshoot planetary carrying capacity with the industrial revolution. We are far along into overshoot of carrying capacity and if you don't know what that means, I suggest you consult an ecology textbook. Homo sapiens is an evolutionary fluke that was altogether too successful and has pretty much destroyed the planet that we knew as hunter-gatherers.

The bumper sticker that states: "Its the population, stupid," pretty much tells the whole story. I don't mean to imply that we should not reduce consumption to save resources, though many an economist is currently complaining about the lack of sufficient consumption to create jobs for the many jobless. I am afraid many more will be jobless before the unfolding scenarios of collapse are over.

We may well be at peak oil and peak food as well. Population is going up and food production will not keep up which means more hungry people just as Mr. Malthus elucidated 200+ years ago. Stopping and reversing population growth is the most relevant and important thing that humanity needs to do. If we can cut consumption too and keep a viable economy going as well; that would be a welcome bonus.

by Richard Grossman MD, 2011

A child born in a developing country will have only a fraction of the impact that a child would have in the United States. And worldwide our numbers are increasing by 1 % per year while consumption is skyrocketing at 2 to 4 %.

Costa Rica is a good example of a nation that approaches sustainability. The income of an average Costa Rican (or "Tico", to use their nickname) is significantly less than that of an American. Our buying power is about $47,000 per person each year, but in Costa Rica it is less than a quarter of that, at $11,000. Obviously Ticos consume less than do norteamericanos.

Yet on the Satisfaction with Life Index, rates Ticos higher (13th in the world) than Americans (just 23rd).

Most Ticos do not own cars, but use their feet or public transportation to travel. On average, Ticos live a year or two longer than Americans. Tico people are physically active and fast food is uncommon.

Costa Rica is unique in the world in that it emphasizes education and health. It has no military—that's right, none! Instead it provides free health care to all citizens and free education through high school. In contrast, the USA spends a huge fraction of our finances on the military. Part of our expenditure is to support our extravagant use of petroleum, which largely comes from far away. A large portion of our military might is used to gain and protect sources of petroleum. Furthermore, our military consumes huge amounts of oil.

Contraception is free and available to all Ticos as part of their health care. Funding for family planning in the USA, however, has been shrinking when measured in real dollars, and its very existence has been jeopardized with recent political changes.

The Tico lifestyle uses much less of the planet's resources and adds less pollution to the environment. Costa Rica has also preserved a greater proportion of its land as parks than any other country in the world. Its rain and cloud forests have become a major tourist destination, and a major source of income. Almost all electricity in Costa Rica comes from renewable sources—hydro and wind—but it is affordable for all.

We cannot all move to Costa Rica. We here in the USA can, however, endeavor to reduce our consumption. People who choose "simple living" (or a lifestyle of voluntary simplicity) work less, spend less, and enjoy life more. Most important is that they are happier and have less impact on the planet.

In Nigeria there is a lack of understanding of the rights, responsibilities and limits of communities, companies, State and Federal Government.

In the 1960s, mining drove the infrastructure. The current administration has recognised the need to focus on coal, barytes, bitumen, gold, iron ore, lead/ zinc and limestone, as they are available in sufficient quantities and will contribute 5% to the GDP by 2015.

Sustainable development is a pattern of resource use that aims to meet human needs while preserving the natural environment, it is in the most common form of development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the future. Enviromental sustainability is the ability of the environment to continue to function properly indefinitely. The goal of environmental sustainability is to halt environmental degradation.

It is possible to consume less and have economic growth as is found in European economies. Between 2005 and 2006, the quantity of natural resources used by the UK economy, fell by 6 million tonnes 0.9%. Over the last decade, resource use remained unchanged, despite rising economic activity.

Th Malthus doctrine of resource scarcity and economic growth says that humanity is endowed with finite amount of material resources. If uncontrolled, the tendency of human population is to grow exponentially.

Technology should not be perceived as the ultimate escape from the problem of resource scarcity.

Economic activity cannot be expected to grow indefinitely unless the rates of population growth and resource utilisation are effectively controlled. Population + Resources = Scarcity.

In 1968, Paul R Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb (1968) that predicted disaster for humanity due to overpopulation and the "population explosion".

Population growth will outpace agricultural growth unless controlled. The failure on a global scale has not happened because of the flow of ideas, knowledge and capital, but there are failures where inequalities have accelerated the breaching of the limits of growth. The dependence on natural resources has to be understood within the conditions arising when the actions of some individuals have direct effects on the welfare of others who have direct control over that actions.

During the past century, globalization grew exponentially, paced by population, technological and economic hyper-growth. However, we find ourselves without mechanisms to create solutions for the whole. New problems do not recognize national boundaries, every nation has sovereign power over its own territory. The Tällberg Foundation proposes new frameworks for international negotiations, and changed institutions for global governance.

The initial objective is to develop recommendations for humanity's relationship with nature. We will use well-tested methods to develop global operations. Planning is missing in the international negotiations that should guarantee welfare and security for all. Responses today are based upon the spontaneous crises that erupt from changes in the balance of power.

Environmental issues are systems problems. No one nation can solve the climate problem or control water problem.

The world now relies on economic growth. To question the idea of growth is taboo. That growth should have limits is not politically or economically acceptable, but environmental crises say otherwise. Current trends of growth destabilize our future.

The political rhetoric is that continued high global economic growth is compatible with avoiding the effects of climate change. All serious research demonstrates that our planet does not meet the growth ambitions of everyone in the current technological infrastructure.

The American invasion of Iraq demonstrated that the institution does not have the authority to limit a superpower's ambition to maximize its own interests.

But all parties must be part of the process toward political agreement. Yet today we lack political debate about how to organize our global society.

Distrust among nations has grown for many years within multilateral organizations, with conflicts between poor and rich nations, between various religions, ethnic and cultural spheres.

There is mistrust over the ever-increasing gap between promises, agreements and results delivered. In the meantime, the sustainability of Earth's ecosystems continues to be undermined.

The technological infrastructure is not compatible with the growth that 6.6 billion people see as their vision of the future. Too many in too short a time strive after too high a material standard of living. We are caught between our ambitions and the Earth's capacity.

Within 30 years the world's population will grow to 9 billion and will place the ecosystem under an enormous stress.

Water is one example of a resource with imbalances throughout the world. In large areas of Africa, the Middle East, Pakistan, India, China and western and southwestern US, water is approaching critical levels.

The shortages are greatest in the most densely populated areas. In many regions of the world groundwater levels are sinking and global warming will hasten this process.

The struggle for natural resources will harden geopolitical tensions, with resulting military conflicts and terror. There are no longer new worlds to which millions could emigrate. A fight for survival awaits us, as the international systems of economy, finances and logistics erode.

Management of global issues needs new principles and models to meet the fast-growing mutual dependencies.

The Tällberg Foundation will organize a series of workshops in seven national capitals in cooperation with diverse partners with a goal to develop global public opinion that does not stem from individual political, national or economic interests.

One Swedish tradition is a centuries-old practice protected by the Swedish Constitution: Everyone shall have the right of access to nature. You may go anywhere as long as you heed the common sense of freedom and responsibility concisely expressed in the phrase, "Do not disturb, do not destroy."

The governments using biofuel to tackle global warming know that it causes more harm than good. From next year, all suppliers in the UK will have to ensure that 2.5% of the fuel they sell is made from plants. By 2050, the government hopes that 33% of our fuel will come from crops. By 2017 the USA should be supplying 24% of the nation's transport fuel.

Biofuels are a formula for environmental and humanitarian disaster. Those who can afford to drive are richer than those who are in danger of starvation and it will lead to the destruction of important habitats.

The price of maize has doubled. The price of wheat has reached a 10-year high, while global stockpiles of both grains have reached 25-year lows. There have been food riots in Mexico and the poor are feeling the strain all over the world. According to the UN the main reason is the demand for ethanol. Farmers will plant more, but it is not clear that they can overtake the booming demand. Biofuel is worse for the planet than petroleum. A UN report suggests that 98% of the natural rainforest in Indonesia will be gone by 2022 with the planting of palm oil to turn into biodiesel.

Biodiesel from palm oil eventually causes 10 times as much climate change as ordinary diesel.

Indigenous people in South America, Asia and Africa are starting to complain about incursions onto their land by fuel planters. The environment secretary noted that palm oil plantations "are destroying 0.7% of the Malaysian rainforest each year, reducing a vital natural resource (and in the process, destroying the natural habitat of the orang-utan). It is all connected."

The European commission was faced with a choice between fuel efficiency and biofuels. After heavy lobbying on behalf of car manufacturers, it caved in and raised the limit to 130 grams. It announced that it would make up the shortfall by increasing the contribution from biofuel.

The British government says it "will require transport fuel suppliers to report on the carbon saving and sustainability of the biofuels they supply". But it will not require them to do anything. Biofuels occupy the space that other crops now fill, displacing them into new habitats. It promises that one day there will be biofuels made from straw or grass or wood. But there are still major technical obstacles. The author suggests a five-year freeze.

Encouraged by government policy, vast investments are now being made by farmers and chemical companies.

"Sustainable development" has the most commonly used definition : "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

Suggesting the possibility of a "sustainable" economy has changed the primary goal of environmentalism away from "protecting the environment" and toward the creation of a society that will simultaneously provide economic and social well-being for over 6 billion human beings and guarantee healthy habitats for millions of species that share the Earth with us.

Transportation, agriculture, energy, forestry, architecture, construction, mining, urban planning, financial institutions, and manufacturing are a few industries that are toying with new approaches aimed at "sustainability."

Environmental professionals have taken to heart the idea that it is our responsibility to take the lead in defining what a sustainable society and economy might look like.

Before the idea of sustainability caught hold, it seemed fair for environmental professionals to protect Nature against the destructiveness of the human economy.

The idea that we could be seen as a privileged elite who "care more about birds and bears than about people" was hard to grasp.

And yet, years of environmental and conservation work had taught us that most of the exclusively "environmental" approaches were pushing the boundaries of political support. Putting environmental regulatory, technical, and managerial fingers in the dike would not ultimately hold back the rising waters of population growth, economic desires, and social injustice.

The ideal of a "sustainable economy," then, was a new statement of goals, a political strategy for winning over economic development champions and social justice advocates, and a practical recognition that the existing tools for improving the planet's ecological health were ultimately no match for the forces arrayed against it.

We must all be honestly engaged in the work of inventing a truly new synthesis that seeks to accommodate the economic and social justice desires of people with the habitat requirements of the widest possible spectrum of species on the planet.

It's not outlandish to ask if we are all willing to "care about birds and bears as well as about people." As we struggle to become environmental professionals who understand the legitimate human requirement for economic security and social justice, we are within our rights to require other professions to take on the quest for global ecological health and habitat protection.

If we do, then the vision of a sustainable economy suggested may become Our Common Future. If we don't, we may be engaging in unilateral disarmament, brilliantly disguised as an attempt at social innovation.

Fertility rates are dropping while population continues to increase. By 2080, world population will peak at approximately nine billion. There is a school of thought that argues that smaller populations are good. Decreased population will lead to higher wages and a better quality of life as supplies exceed demands.

These arguments do not withstand scrutiny.

Ehrlich wrote that, in the face of expanding populations, "the world will undergo famines - hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death."

Instead, the availability of food has increased, even with growing population. Famine, has become a matter of fair distribution, not of inadequate supply.

Population increase fosters agricultural innovation, which, spurs leaps in production. Everywhere you go today, you find traffic jams and sprawl, but this is a problem of density, not population. There's plenty of land available out there.

Markets and human innovation stepped in to provide greater efficiency.

For instance, in 1850, you needed an average of 4.6 tons of petroleum equivalent to produce $1,000 of goods and services. By 1950, you needed only 1.8 tons, and, by 1978, 1.5 tons. More population means more creators and producers, both of goods along established production patterns and of new knowledge and inventions."

All things being equal, population increase leads to increased per capita production.

Between A.D. 200 and 600, population shrank from 257 million to 208 million. It took 400 more years for the population to recover. There is no precedent in human history for economic growth on declining human capital.

There is good reason to believe population decline will be bad for us. Innovation will suffer and economies contract. The supposed benefits of population decline are a mirage. The real question is whether falling populations will lead Western civilization to something like the fall of Rome.

Increased patrolling along the border with Mexico, and easier, higher-paying jobs in the city have made farmworkers scarce. Farms are feeling the pinch, but organic farms that grow labor-intensive, hand-picked crops are especially suffering.

More than half the 1.8 million farmworkers are here illegally, though in California the percentage is probably much higher.

One farmer has been forced to tear out nearly 30 acres of vegetables, and estimated his loss so far to be about $200,000. Growers check documents of prospective workers, knowing that fakes are easy to find and the industry couldn't make it without the labor of undocumented workers.

This has turned farmers into strong advocates of immigration reform. They're pushing hard for a program for guest worker. One farmer hired 320 workers for the harvest at his raspberry and blackberry farm. He could have used an extra 30 to 50 workers, but made do by paying workers to put in 12- or 14-hour days and postponing trellising, weeding and covering the plants.

The labor shortage is a serious problem, and getting worse as the government adds more law enforcement to the border. Some growers are moving parts of their operations to Mexico; others, are having to tough it out, he said.

"We need the workers; they need the work," one farmer said. "We just need to figure out some way to make this happen".

The Gaia Foundation's report, "Opening Pandora's Box" tells us of the scramble for the world's land and mineral resources, threatening the last remaining wilderness and critical ecosystems, destroying communities and contaminating huge volumes of fresh water.

The more accessible resources have been consumed. Now the extractive industries, funded by pension funds and commodities speculators, are using new technologies like fracking for natural gas to get at previously unprofitable resources. These industries use far more raw material and have a much larger destructive footprint than in the past.

Canada's tar sands require that two to four tonnes of earth be dug up and a similar amount of fresh water is needed to produce one barrel of oil. Copper requires 10 times the ore it once did to get the same volume. In the last 10 years, mining for iron ore has increased 180%, cobalt by 165% and lithium by 125%. China's mining sector grew 30% in just five years. Peru's mining exports increased by one-third in 2011 alone. Coal mining has increased by 44% in the past 10 years.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has recently warned of the threats to World Heritage Sites from planned mining and oil and gas projects. One in four iconic natural areas in Africa is negatively affected.

Hobbelink of GRAIN, a small NGO working with small farmers, first told the world about the millions of hectares of land in Africa, Asia and South America that were being leased or purchased by foreign investors for food and biofuel production. More than 400 large land deals totalling nearly 35 million hectares, roughly the size of The Netherlands are involved.

This movement is turning communities into refugees on their own land. Polly Higgins, author of "Eradicating Ecocide" said "This new wave of land grabbing is putting profit above people and planet."

Major investments are going into the search for fossil fuels in remote regions like the Arctic and into "extreme energy sources" like shale gas and tar sands that have big environmental impacts.

Canada's tar sands have 130,000 hectares of tailings ponds full of toxic wastes behind some of the largest earthen dams ever constructed. Mining companies dump more than 180 million tonnes of hazardous mine waste into rivers, lakes and oceans worldwide every year. Mining enough gold for just a single wedding band generates, on average, 20 tonnes of contaminated mine waste.

Rising prices, increasing material consumption and a huge flood of investment have triggered this global boom, the report found. Following the 2008 collapse of financial markets, hedge and pension fund investors dramatically increased investments in metal, mineral, oil and gas commodities.

The average U.S. citizen using an astonishing 22,000 times their weight in minerals, metals and fuels in their lifetime.

Environmental activists said they had uncovered the biggest smuggling racket with huge shipments of logs shipped from Papua New Guinea to China. They said the illegal trade was threatening the last intact tropical forests in the Asia-Pacific region. International criminal syndicates were behind looting merbau trees - a hardwood used mainly for flooring, that was being taken from Papua at a rate of 300,000 cubic meters of logs each month to feed China's timber industry. This trade is controlled by a few people, so it's the biggest smuggling racket. More than 70% of Indonesia's forests have been lost. The government banned the export of logs in 2001, but that has not stopped the trade. Collusion with Indonesia's military was apparent, activists said. The armed forces has denied the institution was engaged in the trade, but conceded rogue elements could take part. Indonesia's new president has pledged to crack down on illegal logging. Local communities receive around $10 for each cubic meter felled on their land, they fetch $270 per cubic meter in China and up to $2,700 in North America. With forest cover at around 70% , New Guinea contains the last tracts of undisturbed forest in the Asia-Pacific region. A network of middlemen and Aokers arrange shipment of the logs to China. The syndicates paid $200,000 per shipment in bribes to ensure the logs were not intercepted. The majority of logs were destined for the Chinese port of Zhangjiagang. Indonesia and China signed an agreement over two years ago to cooperate in tackling the trade in illegal timber, but the words have not been matched by actions.

In Nigeria, Kula residents seized three oil platforms operated by Royal Dutch Shell and Chevron Texaco, cutting off oil flows and trapping more than 100 workers. They left the installations after assurances that they would not be restarted until their grievances were addressed. The protesters threatened to extend the closures to another 100,000 barrels unless the government and oil companies responded to their demands for talks on jobs and development. Disputes are common in the region that pumps all of Nigeria's 2.3 million barrels a day and have caused armed conflict, occupations, hostage-taking, extortion and sabotage. Kula people feel they have little to show for the wealth being pumped from their tribal lands. State and local governments receive a larger share of oil revenues than other regions in recognition of their large contribution to the nation's economy, but civil society groups accuse the region's leaders of looting the money instead of channelling it into services and infrastructure. In September an ethnic militia threatened to blow up oil facilities in Rivers state, helping drive prices above $50 per barrel, but the leader of that group, said he was not involved in the Kula occupation.

Recently, planes have been spraying Afghan poppy fields orchards, and perhaps even families -- with toxic chemicals intended to kill poppy crops. Afghan President said his government has vowed never to support this, and called on U.S. and U.K. ambassadors to explain the abrogation of Afghan sovereignty. The U.S. announced that it will provide $780 million to battle illegal drug production in Afghanistan, and has control over Afghan airspace. Both the U.S. and the U.K. denied involvement and didn't know who was responsible.

An estimated 473,500 gallons of crude is missing from a damaged oil tanker in the Delaware River; the spill could be worse than thought and 15 times greater than the 30,000 gallons that ship's engineers said had spewed from the Greek tanker. It is unclear whether all of the missing oil had spilled into the Delaware River. Some may have collected in an empty ballast tank. A leak of 473,500 gallons would be a worst-case scenario. The spill had spread, affecting patches of shoreline in a 44-mile stretch from the Salem nuclear power station to the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge. The hardest-hit sections remained along the 10 miles between the southern end of Little Tinicum Island and the Schuylkill. The oil reached within three miles of drinking-water intakes for South Jersey and Philadelphia and precautions are being taken. Investigators had yet to determine what ripped the hull open, but some speculated that the hull struck a propeller that fell off a dredge owned by the Army Corps of Engineers. The spill was discovered about 90 minutes after low tide in that section of the river. The number of cleanup workers has swelled from 557 to 730 who have recovered about 6,300 gallons of oil. Between 500 and 1,000 birds are have been "oiled," most are common birds, but two pairs of bald eagles are partly covered with oil. Rescue workers were trying to capture and clean them. Environmentalists feared that heavy rain could slow the cleanup, and strong wind from the north push the spill farther south. The company that manages the ship has agreed to pay for the multimillion-dollar cleanup, which is expected to take months. Nearly 100 claims have been filed including 75 owners of pleasure boats, four private owners with dock damage, and 10 commercial vessels that were delayed when the Coast Guard shut down marine traffic. A report said the tanker was detained in Korea in March after black oil that had filled the bottom of its engine room was pumped overboard. On this trip, the Athos I was loaded with 14 million gallons of heavy crude from Venezuela. Tugboat operators spotted the leak as they guided the 750-foot ship toward the Citgo dock. Divers found a six-foot-long gash and a nearly two-foot-wide puncture in the hull and the two holes jut inward, indicating the damage was caused by an object in the water. Citgo is responsible for keeping the waterway clear and deep enough for ships. Citgo said it had dredged the terminal area in 1992. But the Army Corps of Engineers said records indicate Citgo had not dredged the port since 1982.

Well-meaning tourists are putting increasing pressure on animals worldwide. In some cases, ecotourism appears to be killing the wildlife it seeks to protect. So far ecotourism has done more good than harm, but there are signs that this can become more about profit than penguins. With more than 60 "green certification" programs, the World Tourism Organization and the International Ecotourism Society announced a new program to harmonize standards. Tourism generates so much cash that is needed by preservation groups, even good companies face a dilemma in trying to balance to help a community without destroying the goose that laid the golden egg. Tourism, profit-driven, and ecotourism geared to helping nature, make up 20% of international tourist travel and has worked well in many cases. Each year, the Galápagos Islands receive tens of thousands of human visitors yet have managed to preserve animals and habitat with little damage. Indirectly, money may help marine tourism. A 2001 study found that whale-watching took place in 87 countries, generating $1 billion. But human visits to whales can be a serious threat. Nineteen of 292 reported whale-ship strikes between 1975 and 2002 involved whale-watching vessels. Some operators try to maximize revenue by taking as many people as possible and that means zooming in at maximum speed. In Puget Sound, the industry organization of about 30 US and Canadian whale-watch operators has set up guidelines, including reducing speeds to limit underwater sound pollution that might interfere with orca feeding. Researchers report that meerkats and mongoose have caught tourist-borne diseases in Africa. On the south shore of Hudson Bay entrepreneurs in the 1980s built school-bus-size vehicles on top of monster-truck tires to take people to view 12-foot-tall polar bears but the bears go "on alert" every time a tundra vehicle goes by, when they should be sleeping which diminishes the fat they will carry into the winter and need for hunting or defending themselves. Bottlenose dolphins in northeastern New Zealand are getting less rest because of tourists, who arrive in droves to try to swim with them. New Zealand announced restrictions that limit dolphin visits to certain areas and times of day.

The declining fish supply in Ghana has led to increased illegal hunting of wild game. Dwindling marine resources have led to the extinction of almost half the species in some reserves. If people aren't able to get their protein from fish, they'll turn elsewhere for food and economic survival.

African leaders have blamed subsidized foreign fleets for helping to accelerate the downturn in the fish supply. EU subsidies artificially increase the profitability for EU ships to fish in African waters. Data was recorded by park rangers from 1970 to 1998 for 41 species of larger mammals at six savanna nature reserves in Ghana. The information was compared with the supply of fish in the region during the same time period. There was a 76% drop in the 41 species studied. At the same time, the supply of fish ranged from 230,000 to 480,000 tons in a year. Years with a lower-than-average supply of fish had higher-than-average declines in land-based wildlife.

Over the next four years they found that the monthly supply of fish was negatively linked to the price of fish and the volume of bushmeat sold. Estimates put the bushmeat trade at 400,000 tons per year but that the figure is almost certainly an underestimate.

Some of Ghana's problems date back to 1982, when the UN established Exclusion Zones that entitled countries to exclusive use of all marine resources 200 miles off their shorelines and Ghanaian fishing boats would have to pay other countries for access to fishing grounds while it is difficult to assess the level of illegal fishing by foreign fleets. Agreements are unusually generous to the foreign fleets. Ghana's fishing sector employs about 20% of the country's labor force, but is rapidly declining.

Ghanaian fishers are generally poorly educated and with few other options for income. Many unemployed fishers have been unable to improve their economic conditions.

Part of the decline could be attributed to overfishing to feed a growing population from 6 million in 1957 to nearly 18 million in 1996. Reforming EU policy will not resolve the problems of diminishing resources in West African nations, but is a solution that can be enacted quickly.

Without intervention, the collapse of resources would result in widespread human poverty and food insecurity.