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CLIMATE CRISIS

Report: Current fossil fuel projects can derail Paris climate goals

20th October 2016

A new study by Oil Change International and 14 other organizations, scientifically grounds the growing movement to keep carbon in the ground by revealing the need to stop all new fossil fuel infrastructure and industry expansion. It’s accompanied by a letter to global leaders, to be delivered at the next round of UN climate negotiations….

Conflict/Dispossession

Fatehabad nuclear plant: A Fukushima in the making?

19th October 2016

Amita Bhaduri writes: Nuclear plants require enormous amounts of water for cooling and other purposes. The Fatehabad plant will be the first project in the world to be located away from water sources. “The water will not be enough even for normal operations; what if an accident takes place?”, asks Dhanraj Jat, a local farmer….

Conflict/Dispossession

Watch: Pentagon video warns of “unavoidable” dystopian future

16th October 2016

The Intercept reports: This startling five minute video from the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations University depicts an “unavoidable” future of brutal and anarchic supercities and offers an apocalyptic list of ills endemic to this new urban environment. In addition, “Growth will magnify the increasing separation between rich and poor,” the narrator warns at one point….

Coral bleaching and death at Lizard Island on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef

XL Catlin Seaview Survey via Associated Press

CLIMATE CRISIS

Obituary: The Great Barrier Reef (25 Million BC-2016)

15th October 2016

“The Great Barrier Reef of Australia passed away in 2016 after a long illness. It was 25 million years old.” So begins Rowan Jacobsen’s moving obituary for the world’s largest living structure. With 2,900 individual reefs and 1,050 islands, it’s larger than the United Kingdom, and it contained more biodiversity than all of Europe combined….

ALTERNATIVES

Mushrooms can save the world (and put Monsanto out of business)

13th October 2016

EcoSnippets reports: According to Paul Stamets, one of the world’s leading mycologists, his patented ‘smart pesticides’ can provide a safe and nearly permanent solution for controlling over 200,000 species of insects – and all thanks to the ‘magic’ of mushrooms. In fact, pesticide industry executives have called it “the most disruptive technology we have ever witnessed.”…

ALTERNATIVES

Is renewable energy really environmentally friendly?

12th October 2016

Robin Delobel writes: The issue is rarely raised, but renewable energies have a heavy environmental impact when the total production chain and overall product life-cycle is taken into account– particularly, the stage of mining the metals needed in their production. In addition, chemical products used in the mining operations often lead to severe long-term pollution….

Actress Dia Mirza with forest rangers at the Rajaji National Park, Uttarakhand

Conserve/Resist

Dia Mirza on the Uttarakhand fires and how we fail our forests

11th October 2016

Dia Mirza writes: We cannot call this devastation of ecology and livelihoods ‘natural calamities’ anymore; it’s evident that there is a nexus of powerful people who are ignorant to the ramifications of their idea of “development” and “progress” that is gutting our forests, polluting our rivers and leading many states to a state of drought….

Digests/Specials

Was Fukushima the worst environmental disaster in human history?

9th October 2016

Whitney Webb reports: Fukushima continues to leak an astounding 300 tons of radioactive waste into the Pacific every day. It will continue do so indefinitely as the leak’s source is inaccessible to both humans and robots due to extremely high temperatures. In other words, Fukushima has contaminated the entire Pacific Ocean in just five years….

CLIMATE CRISIS

James Hansen: Climate Change is ‘young people’s burden’, Paris treaty a fraud

7th October 2016

Former NASA scientist James Hansen is widely regarded as ‘the father of climate change awareness’. His new paper, titled ‘Young People’s Burden’, outlines how — if governments don’t take aggressive climate action today—future generations will inherit a climate system so altered it will require prohibitively expensive— and possibly infeasible— extraction of CO2 from the atmosphere….

Forests/Wildlife

Spotlight: Who is running our pollution control boards?

Ritwick Dutta writes: The National Green Tribunal recently passed a landmark judgment ruling that only those persons who have ‘special knowledge’ and ‘practical experience’ in ‘matters relating to environmental protection’ are eligible for appointment to pollution control boards. Unfortunately, across various states, persons who do not fulfill the criterion have been appointed in these posts….

CLIMATE CRISIS

India’s sinking $50 billion to build hundreds of coal plants it doesn’t need

6th October 2016

Greenpeace reports: India remains committed to one of the most aggressive programmes to build new coal plants (some 600 of them) that the planet has ever seen. Yet, 94% of the coal power capacity currently under construction will be lying idle. What’s more, solar power’s now cheaper than coal power, by the government’s own admission….

ALTERNATIVES

Why the Left should embrace degrowth

Giorgos Kallis writes: Degrowth is a frontal attack on the ideology of economic growth. No Left party might dare to openly question growth, but I find it hard to see how in the long-term they can avoid it. Growth is not only ecologically unsustainable but, as economists like Piketty admit, increasingly unlikely, especially for advanced economies….

The Ice Stupa team with Indian Army volunteers at Lhonak lake

icestupa.org

ALTERNATIVES

Photo story: Draining a glacial lake in Sikkim to prevent climate disaster

5th October 2016

Sonam Wangchuk, the real life inspiration of the character “Phunsuk Wangdu” in Bollywood hit “3 idiots”, recently led an expedition to Sikkim’s Lhonak lake, which has been declared dangerous. Their objective was to install a siphoning system to drain the lake and prevent climate disaster, probably the first project of its kind in the world….

CLIMATE CRISIS

An open letter to our fellow Indians on the Indus Water Treaty

Soumya Dutta writes: Pakistan is a dry country, with average annual rainfall of less than 250 mm, less than our desert district of Bikaner. The Indus, which India is now threatening to block, irrigates around 70% of the ‘food basket’ farmlands in Punjab & Sindh; it’s literally the life line for the people of Pakistan….

www.constructionweekonline.in

ALTERNATIVES

Creating “urban-rural bioregions” in India: a self-sustaining regional planning alternative

4th October 2016

Didier Prost writes: Development impacts on the climate, the way fertile land is used and on ecosystems are catastrophic for the environment. A “return to (the notion of) land as a common good” requires us to raise “awareness or consciousness of place” in order to rebuild relationships of co-evolution between human settlements and the environment….

Bookshelf

Video & Review: The Hidden Life of Trees

Trees operate on very different time-scales from the ones we are used to, both in terms of life-spans and in terms of how long it takes them to process information and translate it into action. Is this the main reason why we find it so difficult to recognise them as truly sentient beings, Wohlleben wonders….

Health/Safety

Air pollution could have killed 600,000 Indians in 2012, says WHO study

3rd October 2016

The Hindu reports: Air pollution could have killed at least 600,000 Indians in 2012, worldwide because they were exposed to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) that may have aggravated or been directly responsible for cardiovascular diseases and lung cancer according to the WHO. India comes just behind China–which witnessed an estimated 800,000 deaths, says the study….

Adivasi groups protested against Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh's film, ‘MSG-2 the Messenger’

Conflict/Dispossession

Botswana prez is ‘Racist of the Year’; Indian godman among nominees

Survival International has given its “Racist of the Year” award for 2016 to President Ian Khama of Botswana. The award is given annually to the person displaying the greatest prejudice against tribal peoples. Nominees in 2016 included Australian cartoonist Bill Leak and Indian godman Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, whose film MSG-2 depicts tribal people as “evil”….

Food/Farming

Appeal: Why we must act now to stop GM mustard in India

1st October 2016

Gopi Sankarasubramani writes: The issue at hand is the impending approval of GM mustard in India. GMOs introduce irreversible, long term changes in the ecosystem that cannot be contained – any farm will be contaminated, because the farm next door has GMOs. With it, we risk permanently losing our 10,000 year-old inheritance of sustainable agriculture….