To Sri. Piyush Goyal Union Minister for Coal, Power and Renewable Energy Govt. of India, New Delhi Copy with complements: Sri. Prakash Javadekar Union Minister for Environment, Forests and Climate Change Govt. of India, New Delhi Sri. Arun Jaitely Union Minister for Finance Govt. of India, New Delhi Sri Naredra Modi Prime Minister Govt. of…
Read More about Letter to concerned ministers on fossil fuel subsidiesA publication by FLEDGE, Chennai From the Preface: While a large amount of time and energy is spent on deciding the future of sustainability using the Rio+20 outcome document ‘The Future We Want’, limited space is available for local communities to tell their stories on how simple, on-the-ground initiatives are being pursued enabling them to…
Read More about Sustainable Development: Stories from those making it possibleHeatwave to worsen over the years: Study Times of India Hyderabad suffers a maximum of five heatwave days’ in a year. According to experts, this number will go up to as many as 40 days per year in the future. This prediction has been made in a paper titled Climate change scenarios for Hyderabad: Integrating uncertainties…
Read More about News updateHere are some more additions to Mansoor Khan’s ongoing series of video interviews with experts in various fields from ecology to energy to economics. The interviews take off from the themes covered in Mansoor’s book, The Third Curve: The End of Growth. As We Know It!. View more videos at: The Third Curve YouTube channel Claude Alvarez…
Read More about More video interviews by Mansoor Khan(This article was first published in Industrial Economist) Brent crude oil price after reaching a high of $110 per barrel in June of 2014, seems to have reached a floor price of $45/b this January. It has gone above $60/b. Despite earlier failure to predict oil prices, oil experts are again at it to predict where oil…
Read More about Bhamy Shenoy: Do we really know where oil prices will go?Fossil fuels subsidised by $10m a minute, says IMF The Guardian UK Fossil fuel companies are benefitting from global subsidies of $5.3tn (£3.4tn) a year, equivalent to $10m a minute every day, according to a startling new estimate by the International Monetary Fund. The IMF calls the revelation “shocking” and says the figure is an…
Read More about News updateAustralian artist Stuart McMillan has spent over 700 hours creating this amazing cartoon of the life and work of M.King Hubbert. McMillan writes on his blog about what he aimed to do with this cartoon: I knew that I couldn’t produce the definitive account of Peak Oil, through the medium ofcomics. I could simply never…
Read More about Peak Oil: A Graphic StorySajai Jose As Greenpeace India struggles to stay afloat, the real reason why the government wants to shut down the global environmental NGO hasn’t got much attention: Coal, the single biggest source of primary energy in India, is at the heart of the Narendra Modi government’s ambitious plans to ramp up industrial production in the country. Source: World Resources Institute…
Read More about Why Greenpeace is first on the chopping blockIt’s Official: Global Carbon Levels Surpassed 400 ppm for Entire Month Common Dreams Marking yet another grim milestone for an ever-warming planet, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration revealed that, for the first time in recorded history, global levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere averaged over 400 parts per million (ppm) for an entire…
Read More about News updateThe Breakthrough Institute From the Introduction: To say that the Earth is a human planet becomes truer every day. Humans are made from the Earth, and the Earth is remade by human hands. Many earth scientists express this by stating that the Earth has entered a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans….
Read More about Breakthrough Institute: An Ecomodernist ManifestoWill Tesla’s home battery really transform our energy infrastructure? The Guardian UK “The goal is complete transformation of the entire energy infrastructure of the world,” Tesla founder Elon Musk told reporters as he launched the electric car company’s new home power storage battery. “This is actually within the power of humanity to do. It is…
Read More about News updateLocal Exchange Systems: Designing Community Initiatives A discussion paper on Alternate Economics to Strengthen Local Economy and Facilitate Sustainable Adaptation Mihir Mathur & Mithika D’Cruz – Watershed Organization Trust, Pune Abstract Economic Globalization in its current form is a centralising juggernaut which often causes large-scale resource depletion in remote eco-systems, unpredictable price variations in essential commodities…
Read More about Mihir Mathur: Local Exchange SystemsThe Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University The Future of Humanity Institute is a leading research centre looking at big-picture questions for human civilization. The last few centuries have seen tremendous change, and this century might transform the human condition in even more fundamental ways. Using the tools of mathematics, philosophy, and science, we explore…
Read More about Three Leading Think-tanks Studying Global CrisesAlice In Shale Gas Wonderland Julian Darley It is hard to know where to begin regarding Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s article entitled “Energy crisis is postponed as new gas rescues the world.” But since the speculative world he invokes has more to do with Alice In Wonderland than the hard reality of engineering and science, let us…
Read More about News updateVijay Kundaji, Bangalore Notes Badanavalu is 10 kilometers from Nanjangud along the road to Chamarajnagar in Mysuru (Mysore) District of Karnataka. In 1927, a Khadi and Gramodyog Center was established here by Dalit women and Gandhian activists, which later grew to enlist many hundred workers, producing close to 50,000 lbs of handspun cotton yarn by…
Read More about Badanavalu Satyagraha – A ReportHarry Lehmann, Sudhir Chella Rajan Co-authors: Sneha Annavarapu, Claudia Kabel, Christian Löwe, Astrid Matthey (Indo-German Expert Group on Green and Inclusive Economy) Green Economy has been recognized by the Rio+20 Summit as “one of the important tools available for achieving sustainable development”. It is emphasized that Green Economy should “contribute to eradicating poverty as well as sustained…
Read More about Sustainable Lifestyles: Pathways and Choices for India and GermanySaudi Arabia’s Plan to Extend the Age of Oil Peter Waldman, Bloomberg.com Last Novemeber, Ali al-Naimi, Saudi Arabia’s petroleum minister and the world’s de facto energy czar, told his OPEC counterparts they should maintain output to protect market share from rising supplies of U.S. shale oil, which costs more to get out of the ground…
Read More about News updatePart 4 – Capitalist agriculture: class formation and the metabolic rift Libcom.org In this fourth installment on our series on food and climate, we look at the dynamics of capitalist agriculture in terms of production, class formation, and the ‘metabolic rift’ in the nitrogen cycle. Part 1 (Climate, class, and the Neolithic revolution) looked at the…
Read More about LibCom series on Capitalist agricultureThe International Journal of the Commons (IJC) is an initiative of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC). As an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed open-access journal, the IJC is dedicated to furthering the understanding of institutions for use and management of resources that are (or could be) enjoyed collectively. These resources may be part of the natural world…
Read More about The International Journal of the Commons (IJC)California Drought Tests History of Endless Growth The New York Times For more than a century, California has been the state where people flocked for a better life — 164,000 square miles of mountains, farmland and coastline, shimmering with ambition and dreams, money and beauty. It was the cutting-edge symbol of possibility: Hollywood, Silicon Valley,…
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