Of note from the net

World Carryover Grain Stocks Fall to 72 Days of Consumption -
"Uncomfortably Close" to Level Prior to 2007-08 Food Price Spike

Published on Sunday, July 25, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
Why Stewart Brand is Wrong on Nukes - and is Losing, by Harvey Wasserman
Stewart Brand has become a poster boy for a "nuclear renaissance" that has just suffered a quiet but stunning defeat. Despite $645 million spent in lobbying over the past decade, the reactor industry has thus far failed to gouge out major new taxpayer funding for new commercial reactors.

Lloyd's Sustainable Energy Security White Paper - Some Hits; Some Misses
By Gail Tverberg -- 21 July, 2010 -- The Oil Drum
Lloyd's hired Chatham House to prepare a white paper on the risks of peak oil called Sustainable Energy Security: Strategic risks and opportunities for business. It seems to me that this new report gets quite a few things right, but it misleads in the direction of thinking things are better than they really are, when it comes to timing and alternatives.

Is Another Economics Possible?
By NANCY FOLBRE -- Today's Economist
Nancy Folbre is an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
“Another World Is Possible” is the slogan of the World Social Forum, an event first convened in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001 as a challenge to the World Economic Forum, the annual gathering of the world’s political and corporate leaders in Davos, Switzerland.

June 10, 2010 - by Rob Hopkins
Lloyds on peak oil, climate change, resource depletion . . .
a historic publication . . .

Democracy Now!
As Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Spreads, BP, Halliburton and Transocean Executives Deflect Blame for Spill at Senate Hearings Oil-spill
As thousands of gallons of oil continue to spew daily from a damaged well in the Gulf of Mexico, representatives from BP, Transocean and Halliburton were grilled by lawmakers in back-to-back hearings on Capitol Hill Tuesday. Industry executives from all three corporations began with prepared testimony that involved blaming each other for the explosion and deflecting responsibility for the unfolding environmental and economic disaster. We air excerpts and speak with marine biologist Rick Steiner. For the past week he has been working at the site of the oil spill and on the Louisiana coast, where he collected several samples of the oil washing up ashore.

Published on Monday, May 17, 2010 by Inter Press Service
Oil Sands Riskier than Gulf Spill, Say Investor Groups
by Matthew O. Berger
WASHINGTON - As the oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico destroys habitat and livelihoods, the extraction of oil from Canadian oil sands deposits is having a similar impact on fragile ecosystems and communities deep in the North American interior.

10 MAY 2010: ANALYSIS --
The Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill: An Accident Waiting to Happen
The oil slick spreading across the Gulf of Mexico has shattered the notion that offshore drilling had become safe. A close look at the accident shows that lax federal oversight, complacency by BP and the other companies involved, and the complexities of drilling a mile deep all combined to create the perfect environmental storm.

Report: Biodiversity Loss Puts Essentials of Life Under Threat
World Governments Fail to Halt Biodiversity Loss
by Janet Lawrence
LONDON - World governments have failed to meet a 2010 target to halt biodiversity loss and action must be taken to preserve the species and ecosystems upon which human life depends, a United Nations report said on Monday.

OP-ED COLUMNIST
New Alarm Bells About Chemicals and Cancer
Published: May 5, 2010
The President’s Cancer Panel is the Mount Everest of the medical mainstream, so it is astonishing to learn that it is poised to join ranks with the organic food movement and declare: chemicals threaten our bodies.

Bolivia's fight for survival can help save democracy too
The people's summit to tackle climate change is a radical, transformative response to the failure of the Copenhagen club

Eaarth
Eaarth Book CoverTwenty years ago, with The End of Nature, Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about global warming. Those warnings went mostly unheeded; now, he insists, we need to acknowledge that we've waited too long, and that massive change is not only unavoidable but already under way. Our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways that no human has ever seen. We've created, in very short order, a new planet, still recognizable but fundamentally different. We may as well call it Eaarth.

40 Years of Earth Day: The Planet Then and Now
Footprint logoOn April 22, 1970, the first observation of Earth Day took place, a massive series of gatherings, demonstrations and discussions across the U.S. that many credit as the birth of the modern environmental movement. An oil spill off the California coast was the event that triggered U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson to launch Earth Day – but concerns about environmental health and the detrimental effects of industrialization were growing, over issues such as pesticide use, oil spills, poor air quality, pollution, loss of wilderness to development and declining biodiversity. Heralded as a resounding success, the first Earth Day resulted in the implementation of a number of U.S. environmental policies, and the movement quickly went global. Yet today, the environmental challenges we face dwarf those that touched off that first celebration. And the planet we honor on Earth Day is a far different place from that of just four decades ago.

Bolivian President Blames Capitalism for Global Warming
COCHABAMBA, Bolivia, April 20, 2010 (ENS) - Bolivian President Evo Morales said capitalism is to blame for global warming and the accelerated deterioration of the planetary ecosystem in a speech today opening an international conference on climate change and the "rights of Mother Earth."

Moyers on the Cost of Wars
In his closing essay this week Bill Moyers talks about Binghamton, New York's Mayor Matt Ryan and his effort to make manifest the costs of war to his town and its citizens.

Published on Thursday, April 15, 2010 by Democracy Now!
Environmentalist, 350.org Founder Bill McKibben on
'Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet'
Ahead of Bolivia's indigenous summit on climate change and the expected unveiling of a Senate climate bill next week, we speak to someone who sounded one of the earliest alarms about global warming. Twenty years ago, environmental activist Bill McKibben wrote The End of Nature, but his warnings went largely unheeded. Now, as people are grappling with the unavoidable effects of climate change and confronting an earth that is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding and burning in unprecedented ways, Bill McKibben is out with Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, a new book about what we have to do to survive this brave new world.

Tipping towards the unknown
Researchers propose critical planetary boundaries, transgressing them could be catastrophic. But there is hope. (from the Stockholm Resilience Centre)

The Story of Bottled Water, released on March 22, 2010 (World Water Day) employs the Story of Stuff style to tell the story of manufactured demandhow you get Americans to buy more than half a billion bottles of water every week when it already flows from the tap. Over five minutes, the film explores the bottled water industrys attacks on tap water and its use of seductive, environmental-themed advertising to cover up the mountains of plastic - -waste it produces. The film concludes with a call to take back the tap, not only by making a personal commitment to avoid bottled water, but by supporting investments in clean, available tap water for all. check it out

Adbusters/Chris Hedges
We Stand on the Cusp of one of Humanity's Most Dangerous Moments
We will have to resist the temptation to fold in on ourselves and to ignore the cruelty outside our door.

The Psychology of Climate Change Communication
A Guide for Scientists, Journalists, Educators, Political Aides, and the Interested Public
The guide was produced by CRED, an interdisciplinary center that studies individual and group decision making under climate uncertainty and decision making in the face of environmental risk.

Putting a value on nature could set scene for true green economy
Much environmental damage has been caused by the way we do business. Is there a way of changing our economic models from being part of the problem into part of the solution?

Published on Thursday, January 28, 2010 by BBC News
Economic Growth 'Cannot Continue'
Continuing global economic growth "is not possible" if nations are to tackle climate change, a report by an environmental think-tank has warned. (download the report)

Resilience Thinking: an article for the latest 'Resurgence', by Rob Hopkins
The latest edition of Resurgence is timed to coincide with the Copenhagen talks, and looks at resilience as a key aspect of the climate change debates. Here is the article I wrote for it. Resilience Thinking.
Why 'resilience thinking' is a crucial missing piece of the climate-change jigsaw and why resilience is a more useful concept than sustainability: by Rob Hopkins. Resilience; "the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganise while undergoing change, so as to retain essentially the same function, structure, identity and feedbacks

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