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resource consumption

Morvarid Fernandez

ALTERNATIVES

How to achieve sustainable clean water for everyone

24th June 2016

Perhaps it’s time to reconsider the one-size-fits-all approach of centralised infrastructure and instead pursue a suite of solutions tailored to local needs. Could it be possible to have water systems that have no adverse impact on the environment? Such a transformation will require new technology but also new ways for people to interact with water….

ALTERNATIVES

Droughts and floods: India’s water crises demand more than grand projects

14th June 2016

Bhaskar Vira writes: Water is an issue that cuts across all aspects of social and economic life in India. Compartmentalised responses are unlikely to adequately address the current crises. There is a need for an integrated approach, which addresses source sustainability, land use management, agricultural strategies, demand management and the distribution and pricing of water….

Thermal Power Station at Raichur, Karnataka

ENERGY

Thermal power plants: Giant water-guzzlers in drought-ridden India

10th June 2016

Shripad Dharmadhikary reports: As the summer has progressed, stories of the impacts of drought and water scarcity have been coming up, mostly highlighting the conditions of farmers, cattle and problems of domestic water supplies in villages, towns and cities. However, what’s not reported is the situation with industries, particularly the coal based thermal power plants….

Economy

Video: There Is No Tomorrow: A short film on resource depletion

8th June 2016

There’s No Tomorrow is a half-hour animated documentary about resource depletion, energy and the impossibility of infinite growth on a finite planet, a theme that rarely finds its way to the mainstream media. Inspired by the pro-capitalist cartoons of the 1940s, the film is an introduction to the critical energy dilemmas facing the world today….

Economy

Debt: The key factor connecting energy and the economy

7th June 2016

Gail Tverberg writes: Growth in energy consumption is dependent on the growth of debt. Both energy and debt have characteristics that are close to “magic” when it comes to economic growth, which can only take place when debt (or a close substitute, such as company stock) is available to enable the use of energy products….

Conflict/Dispossession

P. Sainath: “You are in the midst of a mega water crisis”

16th May 2016

Speaking at a National Consultation on Drought, journalist P. Sainath explains how India’s ‘thirst economy’ makes profits. “If we think we are facing is only a drought, we’re in serious trouble. You’re in the midst of a mega water crisis,” he says, debunking the idea that a good monsoon will solve India’s crippling water crisis….

Bookshelf

Bookshelf: The Oracle of Oil: A Maverick Geologist’s Quest for a Sustainable Future

2nd May 2016

The focal point of The Oracle of Oil, the first biography of King Hubbert, is his distinction as the first person to recognize the phenomenon of peak oil. Hubbert spent decades studying petroleum and natural gas reserves data, hypothesizing that output from large regions—such as the United States, or the whole world—would tend to follow a bell-shaped curve….

Bookshelf

Bookshelf: Farmageddon – The True Cost of Cheap Meat

22nd April 2016

Martin Simpson writes: It is impossible to read Farmageddon without coming to the conclusion that the world’s food and agriculture system is screwed. This is a system that produces enormous quantities of food, yet wastes up to a third of it… What it also produces is environmental disaster, ill health in humans and stressful and unhealthy animals….

Economy

Our economic growth system is reaching limits in a strange way

13th April 2016

Gail Tverberg writes: We are experiencing a world economy that seems to be reaching limits, but the symptoms are not what peak oil groups warned about. Instead of high prices and lack of supply, we are facing indirect problems brought on by our high consumption of energy products. I have called it a double pump problem….

The Hindu

Conflict/Dispossession

India’s looming water wars can destroy everything, from Make in India to smart cities

8th April 2016

Nikhil Inamdar writes: India has the world’s largest number of people without access to clean water. The financial burden of this has fallen on its poorest agrarian communities, but the crisis is now spilling over to industries too. In Marathwada, the tanker business is the only one booming. The rest of the economy has collapsed….

Economy

Economic growth: How it works; how it fails; why wealth disparity occurs

1st April 2016

Gail Tverberg writes: Economists have put together models of how an economy works, but these models were developed years ago, when the world economy was far from limits. These models may have been reasonably adequate when they were developed, but there is increasing evidence that they don’t work in an economy that is reaching limits….

Bookshelf

Book/Video: Thanatia – The destiny of the Earth’s mineral resources

24th March 2016

Is Gaia becoming Thanatia, a resource exhausted planet? For how long can our high-tech society be sustained in the light of declining mineral ore grades, heavy dependence on un-recycled critical metals and accelerated material dispersion? Thanatia presents a cradle-to-cradle view of Earth’s abiotic resources through a novel approach based on the Second Law of Thermodynamics….

P.Sainath, People's Archive of Rural India

Development/Growth

Special: P. Sainath’s award-winning series on rural India’s ‘Thirst Economy’

11th March 2016

This series on rural India’s water crisis won P. Sainath a World Media Summit award under the category of Exemplary News Professionals in Developing Countries. It zeroes in on the stark contrasts in the consumption and access to water between the rich and poor to illustrate the alarming trend of inequalities in India and abroad….

ENERGY

Towards Energy Democracy: A Vision Statement

6th March 2016

Unlimited growth and consumerist culture is incompatible with a finite world. We call for an urgent paradigm shift, from the currently dominant model of consumption-led development, to creating frameworks of human and ecological well being. This transition should be defined by the principles of sustainability, equity, and justice. (Adopted at the Bijli Vikalp Sangam, Bodh Gaya)…

Consumerism/Lifestyle

The false promise of economic growth

29th November 2015

We can have it all; that is the promise of our age. We can own every gadget we are capable of imagining, without compromising Earth’s capacity to sustain us. The promise that makes all this possible is that as economies develop, they become more efficient in their use of resources. In other words, they decouple….

ALTERNATIVES

Growth, green growth or degrowth? New critical directions for India’s sustainability

14th August 2014

This is the concept note for the first ever symposium on ‘de-growth’ in India, held in September 2014 in Delhi. Rajeswari S. Raina (NISTADS-CSIR) & Julien-Francois Gerber (TERI University) It has become common knowledge that GDP is a simplistic and even misleading measure for an economy’s health*. In fact, two-digit GDP growth is in many…

ALTERNATIVES

May Day – Let us talk ‘Degrowth’

1st May 2014

Aditya Nigam, Kafila.org I saw men on television (trade union stars, Cabinet Ministers, left-wing think tank advisers) visibly hystericized by talking economics: eyes would glaze, shoulders hunch, lips tremble in a sensual paroxysm of ‘letting the market decide’, ‘making the hard decisions’, ‘levelling the playing field’, ‘reforming management practices’, improving productivity’…those who queried the wisdom…