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Allan Savory: A Global Strategy for Addressing Global Climate Change

11th April 2015

Editor’s note: Allan Savory is the recipient of the 2003 Australian International Banksia Award for the person or organization doing the most for the environment on a global scale. Below is Executive Summary of his paper on combating Climate Change. Executive Summary Simplistic and counter intuitive as it may be, the fate of civilization today hangs…

News update

7th April 2015

Green energy: Unrealistic targets Pandurang Hegde, Deccan Herald Recently the Minister of Power, Coal and Renewable Energy Piyush Goyal reassured the commitment of the Central government in achieving the target of 1,75,000 MW of green energy by 2022. The performance of green energy projects needs to be assessed in the light of ground level experiences…

George Monbiot: Soil – the crisis to beat them all?

2nd April 2015

War, pestilence, even climate change, are trifles by comparison. Destroy the soil and we all starve. George Monbiot Imagine a wonderful world, a planet on which there was no threat of climate breakdown, no loss of freshwater, no antibiotic resistance, no obesity crisis, no terrorism, no war. Surely, then, we would be out of major…

News update

31st March 2015

Could India’s Coal Plans Derail the Global Climate? Tobias Engelmeier, The Energy Collective If India were to grow its electricity system based on coal (as China has done), would it derail the global climate? According to our calculations, under a “coal-heavy” scenario, India would need to increase is coal-fired power generation capacity from the 156…

Four Reports: Global Risks, Water, Food Policy & ‘Natural Capital’

29th March 2015

Environmental Risks Dominate the WEF Global Risks Report 2015 Edge Environment Surveyed responses ranked the risks of ‘Water Crises’, ‘Failure of Climate Change Adaptation’ and ‘Extreme Weather Events’ among the topmost likely and impactful global risks in the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2015. These potential risks were considered of greater importance than other…

News update

26th March 2015

Goldilocks Is Dead Richard Heinberg Five years ago I wrote an article for Reuters titled “Goldilocks and the Three Fuels.” In it, I discussed what I call the Goldilocks price zone for oil, natural gas, and coal, a zone in which prices are “just right”—high enough to reward producers but low enough to entice consumers….

Challenging Thomas Piketty: Growth is not the answer to inequality

24th March 2015

Tim Jackson, The Guardian, UK Those like me who fear that the continued pursuit of economic growth on a finite planet might be neither possible nor desirable face a different kind of challenge, brought home to us by Thomas Piketty’s 700 page tome Capital in the 21st Century. The astonishing popularity of the “rock-star economist” is…

News update

20th March 2015

Arctic sea ice extent hits record low for winter maximum The Guardian, UK Arctic sea ice has hit a record low for its maximum extent in winter, which scientists said was a result of climate change and abnormal weather patterns. The US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) said on Thursday that at its…

Report: A New Alignment of Movements?

19th March 2015

New Report Explores The Commons as a Paradigm to Align Movements David Bollier, Shareable.net The proliferation of activist initiatives calling for systemic change around the world has never been more impressive. Yet collaborations among like-minded organizations, projects and movements have been disappointingly modest. As neoliberal economics and policies tighten their grip on American society—notwithstanding the dismal…

Book: Ecological Agriculture in India

17th March 2015

Ecological Agriculture in India – Scientific Evidence on Positive Impacts and Successes Alliance for Sustainable & Holistic Agriculture (ASHA) Note on the book by by Kavitha Kuruganti of ASHA: Very often, when ecological agriculture (whether it goes by the name of organic farming or natural farming or bio-dynamic farming) approaches are advocated for large scale replication…

Call for participation: Asian Youth Climate Network Working Groups

15th March 2015

Asian Youth Climate Network Last year in COP 20- Lima, youth from many Asian countries came together to form a mega coalition – Asian Youth Climate Network, which has participant organizations from countries including Nepal, India, China, Singapore, Taiwan and Japan. The idea of having the Asian network is to ensure that youth voices from…

Free Online Course in Environmental Justice (starting 30th March)

About the course The world faces challenging environmental problems. They are challenging because different people typically contribute differently to environmental change, and because its effects will be felt differently by different people in different places. Understand environmental injustices This free online course will help you understand how injustice is a common feature of many environmental…

News update

14th March 2015

Can Solar be the Backbone of India’s Energy System by 2035? Tobias Engelmeier, The Energy Collective Around 70% of India’s power comes from coal, less than 1% from solar. Will that change in the next 20 years? Can solar become the new backbone of the Indian energy system? I think there is a good possibility…

News update

9th March 2015

Global warming ‘set to speed up to rates not seen for 1,000 years’ The Guardian, UK New evidence suggests the rate at which temperatures are rising in the northern hemisphere could be 0.25C per decade by 2020 – a level not seen for at least 1,000 years. The analysis, based on a combination of data from…

Max Weber on energy and industrial civilisation

8th March 2015

The German sociologist, philosopher, and political economist Max Weber (1864-1920) is often cited, with Émile Durkheim and Karl Marx, as among the three founders of sociology. Weber is best known for his contention that ascetic Protestantism was the driving force behind market-driven capitalism and the rational-legal nation-state in the West. Against Marx’s “historical materialism”, Weber emphasised…

News update

6th March 2015

Lester Brown: ‘Vast dust bowls threaten tens of millions with hunger’ The Guardian, UK Vast tracts of Africa and of China are turning into dust bowls on a scale that dwarfs the one that devastated the US in the 1930s, one of the world’s pre-eminent environmental thinkers has warned. Over 50 years, the writer Lester…

Growth and Inequality in a Carbon-Constrained World

3rd March 2015

Incrementum ad Absurdum: Growth and Inequality in a Carbon-Constrained World David Woodward The paper seeks to assess the timeframe for eradication of poverty, defined by poverty lines of $1.25 and $5 per person per day at 2005 purchasing power parity, if pre-crisis (1993-2008) patterns of income growth were maintained indefinitely, taking account of the differential…

News update

28th February 2015

India’s 100 GW Solar Target Could Create 1 Million Jobs by 2022 The Energy Collective Delhi is abuzz as the first renewable energy-financing summit organized by the Indian government, RE-Invest 2015, wrapped up with commitments totaling a whopping 266 GW of renewable energy in the next 5 years. For context of the magnitude of these…

Isaac Asimov: The Nightmare Life Without Fuel

26th February 2015

In 1977, Time magazine asked science writer Isaac Asimov for his vision of an energy-poor society that might exist at the end of the 20th century. The following portrait, Asimov noted, “need not prove to be accurate. It is a picture of the worst, of waste continuing, of oil running out, of nothing in its…

News update

25th February 2015

What is Saudi Arabia not telling us about its oil future? Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights What if the Saudis are acting now to undermine U.S. and Canadian oil production because they realize that Saudi production will soon reach a peak? What if the Saudis fear that energy efficiency, fuel substitution (say, toward natural gas), and…