In another city, Australians live on floating island pods with apartments both below and above sea level, the population has shifted from land to the sea because of the sky-rocketing value of disappearing arable land. Climate change has also forced many Australians to move inland and create new cities in the outback, relying on solar power to exist in the inhospitable interior.

Projects being ramped up to tap huge undersea fields off the country's northwest could quadruple Australia's exports of liquefied natural gas in the next few years and turn it into what the country's resources minister has called an ''energy superpower.''

Prior to the industrial revolution, the main source of primary energy in society was biological - agriculture and forestry, with a significant assist from water mills. The biological energy was used to feed horses (used themselves in ploughing, but also in transportation), as well as agricultural workers. The water-mills were primarily used to mill flour (ie also used in agricultural production, for the most part).

According to a survey released Tuesday by Clean Edge, a research firm in Portland, Ore., revenue for wind power, biofuels and solar photovoltaics grew in 2009 by 11.4 percent to $139 billion around the world.

After all, oil is vital to keep our cars running, our airplanes flying, our homes heated and our tanks, ships, helicopters and other military vehicles operating. But what remains inexcusable are plans to bivouac more than 3,000 US Marines in a single compound in hostile territory.

Sixteen states asked a federal appeals court this week to become parties in what has grown to be a major legal fight pitting EPA, states and environmental groups against industries, global warming skeptics and other state challengers.

The radical measure – an extension of the renewable obligation that is funding wind farms – will appear in a document to be published alongside the budget next Wednesday.

If everything goes as planned, this much-delayed, controversial project could wreck U.S. efforts to check Iran's expansionist ambitions.

The Senate Select Committee on Climate Change and AB 32 Implementation hosted the hearing, “Energy Security & Climate Change: Global Problems, Local Solutions,” at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

But there is one nutrient necessary to our well-being -- in fact our food security -- that we don't have in plentiful supply, and a new report from the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) warns we are squandering what little of it we have.

It turns out the timing could not have been worse for Saudi Arabia.

Americans continue operating in a 20th century economic paradigm that cannot continue in the 21st century. We think we can grow, consume, grow and consume more.

A team of 30 scientists across the globe have determined that the nine environmental processes named above must remain within specific limits, otherwise the "safe operating space" within which humankind can exist on Earth will be threatened. Amid some controversy, the group has set numeric limits for seven of the nine so far (chemical pollution and aerosol loading are still being pinned down). And the researchers have determined that the world has already crossed the boundary in three cases: biodiversity loss, the nitrogen cycle and climate change.

In 1930, Keynes wrote that “For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.” Keynes has not been the only person to predict that the modern rise in living standards will come to an end, and that a better kind of society will follow. Marx thought universal abundance would usher in socialism. And those who predict a running out of resources like oil are predicting a move to more sustainable, and thus more humane, ways of living.

Shadow energy spokesman Greg Clark told the Daily Mail there would be 'no limit' on the expansion of nuclear power under a Tory government.