Toxic ‘Forever Chemicals’ in Drinking Water

FOUNTAIN, Colo. — When Army Staff Sgt. Samuel Fortune returned from Iraq, his body battered by war, he assumed he’d be safe. Then the people around him began to get sick. His neighbors, all living near five military bases, complained of tumors, thyroid problems and debilitating fatigue. Soon, the Colorado health department announced an unusually […]

Is Natural Gas a Fossil Fuel?

Fossil fuels are the energy of the past. With new technologies like wind, solar, and advanced batteries in our hands, we can power today and tomorrow with clean, reliable energy that doesn’t harm our health or destroy our planet. The shift to a clean energy economy is on – and accelerating by the day. Year […]

Global Population Decline And Economic Growth

Rising population was thought to be bad for our standard of living, with classic books such as Limits to Growth and Population Bomb projecting fewer resources per person and environmental collapse. A new book, Empty Planet, makes the forecast that world population will hit a peak and then decline. The authors take this as positive […]

Food shocks increase as world warms

More than ever, the world’s ways of keeping hunger at bay are taking a pounding as food shocks become more frequent. Potatoes are being baked in heat waves. Corn is being parched by drought. Fruit is being bitten by frost. And a long-term study suggests that for the world’s farmers and graziers, fishing crews and fish […]

The Road To 10 Billion: Where Is Global Population Actually Headed?

It was a girl. On Sunday, October 30, 2011, just before midnight, Danica May Camacho entered the world in a crowded Manila hospital, bringing the human population of our planet to seven billion. Actually, the scales could have tipped a few hours later, in a village in Uttar Pradesh, India, with the arrival of Nargis […]

Which species are we sure we can survive without?

Two years ago I asked the question in the title of this piece. Now comes a wide-ranging study that suggests we are about to test that question in a major way. The study predicts that at the current rate of loss of insect species, 40 percent could be gone “in the next few decades.” What […]

Nature doesn’t need people

Harrison Ford is a man who has the knack of being in the right place at the right time. And if he didn’t, he’d likely now be a retired carpenter who worked doing odd in and around Los Angeles. Maybe he’d be living on a pension in one of those boardwalked coastal towns up and […]

1st contact made with melted nuclear fuel at Fukushima

A probe touched melted nuclear fuel debris in a destroyed reactor at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, a long-awaited milestone in the battle toward decommissioning, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Feb. 13. The rod-like probe, fitted with 3-centimeter-long claws, lifted pieces of the nuclear fuel debris during the eight-hour operation at the bottom of […]

Insect Apocalypse: 40% of world species threatened with extinction

What’s happening? Over 40% of global insect species are threatened with extinction, scientists said in a new report, marking an unprecedented loss of biodiversity. A third of the total world’s insects are endangered, the report found, warning that at their current pace of extinction, they might disappear completely in 100 years. Common species such as […]

The Alarm Bells Of Climate Change

In 2015, nearly every nation collectively recognized the threat of climate change. This was done by signing the Paris Agreement which seeks to combat greenhouse effects. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) stated that the document’s central aim is to “strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping […]

Why We Dominate the Earth

Why did Homo sapiens diverge from the rest of the animal kingdom and go on to dominate the earth? Communication? Cooperation? According to best-selling author Yuval Noah Harari, that barely scratches the surface. *** Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens is one of those uniquely breathtaking books that comes along but rarely. It’s broad, but scientific. It’s written for […]

The non-stop waste of water

Every year, water shortages affect more than one-third of the world’s population. In 2017, even Rome — ancient pioneer of urban water provision — saw its myriad public drinking fountains switched off. Environmental economist Edward Barbier plunges deep into these and other stories from the fascinating, often fraught world of water management past and present […]

What can you do to prepare when you can’t?

“A split vortex sending waves of cold into North America, Europe and Russia is what a warmer ocean does.” Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images “And the sixth angel poured out his vial upon the great river Euphrates; and the water thereof was dried up, that the way of the kings of the east might be […]

Warning: A ‘Shrinking Window’ of Usable Groundwater

Share 0 Tweet Reddit 0 Share 0 Share By Tara Lohan, the Revelator. Originally posted on The Revelator. New analysis reveals that we have much less water in our aquifers than we previously thought — and the oil and gas industry could put that at even greater risk. We’re living beyond our means when it comes to groundwater. That’s […]

Time to Replace the Word ‘Sustainable’

For 2019, let’s replace a once-useful word that, like a guest who stays too long, has worn out its welcome. Depending on the context, it can sometimes have no meaning or far too many meanings (which is just as useless). The word is “sustainable.” In a stricter sense, sustainable means minimizing the use of resources […]

Population: Control or Perish

Dr BK Mukhopadhyay (A noted management economist and an international commentator on business and economic affairs. He may be reached at m.bibhas@gmail.com) French Institute of Demographic Studies projected that by the end of this century there will be 10 to 11 billion people on the planet. The world population will jump from the current 7.1 […]

China’s population to peak in 2029 at 1.44 bn

A study by China Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) warned that the country must implement policies to handle a smaller workforce and an older population, the BBC reported on Sunday. (Representational image)Reuters China’s population will peak in 2029 at 1.44 billion before beginning a period of “unstoppable” decline, a government report said. The study by […]

Becoming Plastic

“We can just equip these new monkeys with some silicon AI and have done with the slow and random variety of evolution.”   ‘Sometimes weird things hit a tipping point. For a combination of reasons, including a viral video showing a turtle with a straw stuck in its nose, companies waged war on straws this […]

Extinction Illness: Grave Affliction And Possibility

“Everyone says climate is the most important issue of all, and yet they just carry on as before. I don’t understand that. Because if the emissions have to stop, then we must stop the emissions. To me that is black or white. There are no gray areas when it comes to survival. Either we go […]

How’s the Population Doing?

How’s the Population Doing? 00:00 01:24 Happy new year everyone! As our global family kicks off a brand new year let’s take a moment to get a snapshot of our big family by asking the big question: How’s the population doing? Listen to this Question Your World radio report produced by the Science Museum of […]

The Rise of the Environmentalist Antagonist

Villains in comic book movies have a lot of different motivations, ranging from “I just want to watch the world burn to” to revenge, but one of the most interesting is the “environmentalist villain.” In this past year, in Avengers: Infinity War and Aquaman, we have two villains motivated by a sense of doing what’s right […]

Insect population declining around world

Something is going on in the world of bugs. Actually, something is going wrong in the world of bugs, which means that something is going wrong in the world. Studies are beginning to show the bug population is dropping so low that scientists are now calling it a “bugpocalypse” or “insect armageddon.” The problem is […]

Population Expert Welcomes Declining Fertility Rates

Declining fertility rates throughout the world should be welcomed, said Sarah Harper, an expert on population change at the University of Oxford. Her comments came in a report by The Guardian. She maintained the focus on boosting population was outdated and possibly bad for women. Women now have an average 2.4 children in their lifetime, […]

The Flight from Nature

A couple of weeks ago one of my readers pointed me to an op-ed piece on climate change by Canadian journalist David Moscrop, titled “It’s time for climate change defeatists to get out of the way.” If you’ve watched the slow-motion train wreck of climate change activism for more than a year or two, you […]

Will peak oil save Earth’s climate?

This year, international delegates gathered in Katowice, Poland for the thirty-second international climate meeting in 40 years. As they dithered over whether they should “welcome” or “note” the 1.5°C pathways report they had commissioned, our world was on pace to set another all-time record of 10.88 billion tonnes of annual carbon emissions. Carbon-dioxide in our […]

Too Many People Heating Up the Planet

The Trump Administration released the Fourth National Climate Assessment on Friday November 23, which concluded: “time is running out” to correct a coming climate catastrophe. Make no mistake about it, the only reason they released it at all is because publication was mandated by law. The conclusions in Climate Assessment #4 are, to say the least, […]

At UN, Gore Demands “Ubiquitous” Population Control for Climate

KATOWICE, Poland — Amid freezing temperatures and heavy snowfall, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore arrived at the United Nations COP24 “climate change” summit to preach about a looming “dark age” and a “hell on earth” if humanity refuses to accept his solutions to alleged man-made global warming. “It is real!” Gore (shown) pleaded Wednesday. […]

Carbon Civilisation and the Energy Descent Future

Just as the bird’s nest, the badger’s lodge and the bees’ hive require investments of energy for their construction and maintenance, so too with human settlements. Taken to the extremes of scale and intricacy, settlements in the form of cities constitute humanity’s most energy-intensive creations. In fact, cities might be viewed as meta-creations that enable […]

The Sound of a Second Shoe Dropping

“To avoid the worst of the predicted outcomes, global carbon emissions must be cut by half by 2030, to zero by 2050.“ Montage by author of images from Bartek Sadowski, Bloomberg Polish coal mining supplies 80% of the power to the UN climate summit.    A comment on one of my Facebook posts helped me […]

Over Half of the World’s Tropical Forests Have been Destroyed

UN Biodiversity Conference in progress in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt. The conference ends November 29. Credit: International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) SHARM EL SHEIKH, Egypt, Nov 28 2018 (IPS) – Biodiversity conservationists have revealed that at least 10 more percent of land than what is currently being used to grow green crops will be […]

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