Home

resource depletion

Food/Farming

Video: P. Sainath at the Delhi assembly: Water and farm crisis are the defining problems of our time

28th June 2016

Catch News reports: In a new initiative by Speaker Ram Niwas Goel, proceedings for the day at the Delhi Assembly were kickstarted by a lecture series. The first lecture was delivered by veteran journalist P. Sainath, who spoke on ‘Water and Farm Crisis in India’, which he said were the defining crises of our times….

ALTERNATIVES

How Rain Water Harvesting can stem Hyderabad’s water crisis

12th June 2016

Mayank Ale writes: There is an acute shortage of water in Hyderabad. Today Hyderabad receives water from 4 rivers – Musi, Krishna, Godavari and Manjeera. With 2 of the 4 rivers, Manjeera and Musi, drying up due to over usage, the city is facing acute water shortage and are getting water from farther and farther away….

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….

CLIMATE CRISIS

The true cost of the obsession with GDP growth

30th May 2016

Shankar Sharma writes: It’s evident that an economic policy focusing on high GDP growth rate has not only not resulted in the elimination of poverty, but is certainly leading to accelerated depletion of our natural resources and to the unacceptable level of pollution of land, water and air, while contributing to the global warming phenomenon….

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….

Economy

Gail Tverberg: Energy limits – what most researchers have missed

The common assumption has been that the world will eventually “run out” of oil and other non-renewable resources. Instead, we seem to be running into energy surpluses and low prices. The real situation is that as prices rise, supply tends to rise as well, because new sources of production become available at the higher price….

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….

Economy

Connecting the rise of Donald Trump with global resource depletion

23rd April 2016

Ugo Bardi writes: Something like Trump was unavoidable. He is best defined as the visible effect of the ongoing social phase transition. A symptom of the ongoing breakdown of the social pact in the West. A discrete change in our path in the direction of collapse, in turn precipitated by depletion of resources, especially energy….

Economy

Gail Tverberg: Globalization is reaching its limits; here’s why

10th April 2016

We have identified two different limits to globalization. One has to do with limits on the amount of goods and services that developed countries can absorb before those imports unduly disrupt local economies. The other occurs because of the sensitivity of many developing nations to low commodity prices, because they are exporters of these commodities….

Frans Lanting

Conflict/Dispossession

An infrastructure tsunami is being unleashed on the environment in the name of ‘development’

9th April 2016

Bill Laurance writes: Some 25 million km of new paved roads, thousands of dams, and hundreds of thousands of new mining, oil and gas projects, are being planned, roughly 90% of them in developing nations. Their environmental impacts could easily dwarf climate change as thousands of projects penetrate into the world’s last surviving wild areas….

CLIMATE CRISIS

Global capitalism is facing three tipping points

5th April 2016

In this article, Sagar Dhara examines Capitalism’s crucial tipping points: The first, the impending energy and natural resource crisis, related to the sourcing of raw materials. The second, inequality, related to the production of goods and services. The third, global warming, which is related to greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) in excess of the earth’s sink capacity….

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….

INDIA

Why we must have water budgets

30th March 2016

Techno-economic fixes do not address the underlying “zero-sum game” nature of water resource use. Ultimately, the problem is that of allocating the water available each year among users — both people and the ecosystem. Without understanding how much water is available, how much is used and by whom, solving India’s water crisis will be impossible….

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….

Economy

Gail Tverberg: We are at Peak Oil now; we need very low-cost energy to fix it

12th March 2016

We are hitting something similar to “Peak Oil” right now, but the major symptoms are unexpected. There is a glut of supply, and prices are far below the cost of production. Perhaps we should call it “Limits to Growth,” rather than “Peak Oil,” because it is a different type of problem than most people expected….

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….

Cagle.com

Economy

Hopium economics and the madness of infinite growth on a finite planet

8th January 2016

Satyajit Das writes in The Times of India: Policy makers have sold the future for a precarious, short-lived stability. There is a striking similarity between the problems of the financial system, irreversible climate change and shortages of vital resources like oil, food and water… The world is remarkably unprepared for the crisis that is unfolding….

ECOCIDE/EXTINCTION

Only 60 years of farming left if soil degradation continues

16th December 2015

Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years, and if current rates of degradation continue all of the world’s top soil could be gone within 60 years, a senior UN official said Chris Arsenault, Reuters ROME (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years, and if current rates of degradation…

CLIMATE CRISIS

Richard Heinberg: An open letter to climate leaders

Author and Post Carbon Institute founder Richard Heinberg writes: Here are nine critical issues to consider as we come away from COP21–because as media commentaries about whether the COP21 meetings were a success or a failure run their course, the burden falls on our shoulders to return to the hard work of fighting for, and implementing, the energy transition….