Owen is not a crank or true believer about peak oil; he reports that the decline of oil production has been predicted for nearly a century. He looks at what we know for sure: However much oil is left, it's being used up at a rate of about 350 billion gallons a day; it's getting more expensive to produce; and demand is growing as China and India push ahead to repeat America's mistakes.

News of another big land deal between a rich nation and a poor developing country is becoming a common occurrence. In August a group of Saudi investors said that they would be investing $1 billion in land in Africa for rice cultivation. They are calling it their ‘7x7x7 project’, since they are aiming to plant 700,000 hectares of land to produce seven million tonnes of rice in seven years. The land will be distributed over several countries: Mali, Senegal and maybe Sudan and Uganda.

The area around Basra, Iraq’s second largest city and main port, accounts for as much as 80 percent of the country’s oil production. It has emerged as Iraq’s best hope for stability and prosperity as it prepares to sell off its top undeveloped oil fields to foreign companies at an auction next month. Of the five largest fields that will be bid on, four are in or around Basra.

The once-quiet grounds of what is now the Muscatatuck Urban Training Center now include a simulated Middle Eastern marketplace and devices used to replicate natural gas explosions that are used for preparing troops before they leave for deployments to Iraq or Afghanistan. "

In Caracas, which has the world’s highest murder rates and runaway food prices, residents now face two days a week without water until May next year as the Government imposes rationing to cope with a 25 per cent shortfall in supply.

Organoponico! begins with a summary of life after the start of the Special Period. In Cuba, the Special Period refers to the period of economic crisis that began in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was defined primarily by severe shortages of oil derivatives and imports, leading to widespread famine.

Dr. Jason Bradford, the biology brains behind Farmland LP (more on that here), ticked off a few of the key vulnerabilities of the U.S. food system in his presentation on sustainable agriculture:

When it comes to passing a clean energy plan for the United States, we need to take a broader, longer look at all of the tools we have at our disposal to accomplish two very important goals: Enhancing national security and reducing our dependency on foreign oil.

Canadian Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt said she and her staff are lobbying interests in the United States at all levels, trying to send the message that the huge heavy-oil resource in Alberta is being developed responsibly and that U.S. input on environmental fixes is welcome.

HW: Look, I'll put it very simply: what they sell us as realpolitik these days is a complete illusion, because it doesn't address any the problems of the future – climate change, dwindling resources, mounting water and food deficits, the escalating global conflict potential, the exploitation of our children's future. If you look at it this way, it's the realpoliticians who seem who have a fondness for crises. Crises also provide an excellent opportunity to score points for tireless crisis management. This is good for distracting from the fact that there is nothing on the political agenda.

It has offered $US30 billion ($A33 billion) to Nigeria and is negotiating for stakes in oilfields in Ghana and Angola.

The increase in farmers skirting the rules, from fewer than 10 percent a few years ago, raises the risk that insects will develop resistance to the toxins in the corn that are meant to kill them, the report says. And it raises questions about whether the Environmental Protection Agency and the agricultural biotechnology industry are adequately enforcing the rules."

Thakare, like nearly all the farmers in this arid region of Vidarbha in the state of Maharashtra, is dependent on India's annual monsoon to provide the water necessary to grow his cotton and soybeans. A failed monsoon meant disaster. Without the rain, the crops withered, and so did his primary source of income. Every year, all Thakare could do as the midyear planting season approached was wait and hope that the monsoon would deliver enough rain so he could support his family.

Of course, to claim a simple motive for the actions of the many-headed Iranian regime would be wrong. But in the seven-year wrangle over its nuclear work, there has been an extraordinary correlation between the regime's taste for antagonism and the level of oil futures.