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CONFLUENCE OF THESE FACTORS DRIVING UNPRECEDENTED CHALLENGE TO INTEGRATED GLOBAL ECONOMY 2 January 2008 2008 will be a year in which the integrity of election processes, the quality and resilience of cultivated soils, the availability of credit to consumers, the affordability of homes and rentals, and access to affordable vital staples like food and water, as well as the cost of transportation, will affect economies the world over. Some economic analysts have said the combination of these factors, resulting instability or environmental degradation, and migration of affected populations, could mean the world is facing an unprecedented level of economic precariousness. [Full Story] THE TIME IS NOW FOR GLOBAL ACTION ON EMISSIONS REDUCTION Due to the science we already have, the laws we have to govern our own activity and to force government to act for the public health, we face the real possibility of being forced, in American courts, in the future, to pay for damage done to the most affected populations in other parts of the world, as a result of inaction by our government. The public voice, and those campaigning for the level of public respect needed for election to office, should bring this issue to the fore, push for real initiatives to tackle the problem boldly, in a collaborative way, now. [Keep Reading] THE COST OF GOING GREEN MAY ACTUALLY BE NEW BOOM ECONOMY Ecological advancement and retro-fitting will be the new boom economy. Let's make sure we do everything possible to fund not only research, but implementation. What will it cost to produce an environmentally-oriented overhaul of the US economy, by way of the private sector, with government incentives, and to the ever-growing benefit of private sector interests? [Full Story] WEAK DOLLAR IS CANARY IN PROVERBIAL ECONOMIC COAL MINE Americans living overseas see the front edge of the dollar collapse. Life in Europe seems to be twice as expensive as just a few years ago, as Euro-driven price-inflation meets the rapid drop in the value of the dollar against major currencies, like the Euro and the British Pound Sterling. Americans at home are facing higher food prices, higher fuel costs, and an overall slowdown in home-buying. [Full Story] PREVENTIVE MEASURES TO CURB DAMAGE FROM CLIMATE CHANGE: HOW CLOSE ARE THEY? Can the world prepare to face the potential economic fallout from increasingly intense weather phenomena, prolonged heat waves, desertification, ice-melt and flooding? While there is no clear proof Hurricane Katrina was a direct result of climate change, hurricanes of such intensity will become increasingly frequent as Gulf waters warm; the aftermath provides real instruction for just how fragile the social fabric can be in the face of natural disaster. [Full Story] CHINESE CITY EXAMPLE OF CRISIS IN FRESH WATER FOR FUTURE DEVELOPMENT Shijiazhuang, a city of 2 million on the North China Plain saw 11% growth last year, is undergoing a population and construction boom, and is inviting new residents with money to spend to inhabit water-intensive luxury housing, even as irreplaceable aquifers are drying up, and water tables are dropping at alarming speed. Fossil aquifers upon which the region is already over-dependent may be dry by 2037. [Full Story] PROJECT 'QUIPU': AN INTEGRATED ECONOMIC VIEW FOR THE 21ST CENTURY To emerge from the fog of flawed and incomplete economic and financial analysis, we need to come to grips with the fact that all resources, all functions or 'services', be they natural or the product of human ingenuity, figure somehow in economic values at all levels. Think proposes to create a system whereby live-update, rss-technology, and financial and editorial expertise, for evaluating broad economic trends and engagements, without limiting analysis to single-parameter references like GDP or individual stock indices. [Project page] WATER RESOURCE STRESS: GLOBAL ECONOMIC-ECOLOGICAL FACTOR FOR THE 21ST CENTURY Water is one of the "fundamental building-blocks of life", as is often said in science, in biology classrooms, in medicine, theology, environmental policy debates, and in cosmology and space exploration. It is also a commodity whose economic reality is increasingly defined by chronic scarcity and often intensely uneven distribution. [Full Story] RUSSIAN MISSION TO CLAIM ARCTIC SEA-BED IN BID TO DRILL FOR OIL, GAS Russia has launched an exploration mission to the North Pole, in an effort to plant a flag at the sea bottom and claim the land (and by extension the resources that lie beneath the sea-bed). Some of the world's most extensive reserves of natural gas and possibly petroleum are believed to lie beneath Arctic Ocean sea-bed. [Full Story] PINK SOLAR CELLS CAN PRODUCE POWER AT 25% OF CURRENT COST As environmental groups, lobbyists and the general public push for more environmentally friendly industrial practices, scientists are finding innovative ways to bring down costs and increase the efficiency of renewable resources. The dye-sensitive solar cells (DSSC), with a pinkish sheen, now being developed at Ohio State University, are an example of the type of engineering innovation that could bring about a genuine green-power revolution. [Full Story] ENERGY POLICY, OR THE UNNECESSARY PROLONGATION OF AN INEFFICIENT STATUS QUO? The US Congress is still working on producing legislation that would bring together federal law and executive regulatory policy in one comprehensive national energy strategy. The special consulting group organized in 2001 by the vice president wanted nuclear plants and "clean coal", but both carry huge costs for preventing or reversing high levels of contamination, and neither is broadly considered the "future" by scientific consensus. [Full Story] NEW STRAIN OF STEM RUST THREATENS WHEAT CROP ACROSS AFRICA, SOUTHERN ASIA A new strain of wheat-eating stem rust has emerged as a threat to the global food supply. Ug99, named for the place and date of its discovery, Uganda, 1999, takes advantage of weaknesses in wheat varieties which were specifically developed to be resistant to stem rust, and which have been so for nearly 4 decades. [Full Story] GRAMEEN BANK, FOUNDER YUNUS WIN NOBEL PEACE PRIZE Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi economist and entrepreneur who founded the Grameen Bank to give micro-credit loans to poor small-business owners, has won the Nobel Peace Prize. Yunus shares the prize with the bank he founded, the award given for the bank's efforts to help eradicate endemic poverty among large populations through individual financing. [Full Story] GLOBAL WIND POWER EXPANDS IN 2006 Global wind electricity-generating capacity increased by 24 percent in 2005 to 59,100 megawatts. This represents a twelvefold increase from a decade ago, when world wind-generating capacity stood at less than 5,000 megawatts. Wind is the world’s fastest-growing energy source with an average annual growth rate of 29 percent over the last ten years. In contrast, over the same time period, coal use has grown by 2.5 percent per year, nuclear power by 1.8 percent, natural gas by 2.5 percent, and oil by 1.7 percent. [Full Story] THE WORLD AFTER OIL PEAKS Peak oil is described as the point where oil production stops rising and begins its inevitable long-term decline. In the face of fast-growing demand, this means rising oil prices. But even if oil production growth simply slows or plateaus, the resulting tightening in supplies will still drive the price of oil upward, albeit less rapidly, and in a world of declining oil production, no country can use more oil except at the expense of others. [Full Story] 'THE WIND RUSH IS ON' IN TEXAS State authorities in Texas have announced plans to build the nation's largest offshore wind farm. The facility would be built about 10 miles off Padre Island in the Gulf of Mexico and would consist of 500 wind-harvesting turbines, 400 feet in height. [Full Story] WORLD WATER DAY HIGHLIGHTS EFFECTS OF POVERTY, CLEAN WATER SCARCITY ON 1 BILLION WORLDWIDE Parts of east Africa have not seen rain for six years and six nations there are facing extreme famine. Through events organized by UNESCO, the UN and NGOs are hosting World Water Day today, to raise awareness of the problem of scarcity of safe drinking water affecting an estimated 1 billion people worldwide. [Full Story] BOTTLED WATER: POURING RESOURCES DOWN THE DRAIN The global consumption of bottled water reached 154 billion liters (41 billion gallons) in 2004, up 57 percent from the 98 billion liters consumed five years earlier. Even in areas where tap water is safe to drink, demand for bottled water is increasing—producing unnecessary garbage and consuming vast quantities of energy. Although in the industrial world bottled water is often no healthier than tap water, it can cost up to 10,000 times more. At as much as $2.50 per liter ($10 per gallon), bottled water costs more than gasoline. [Full Story] A BUBBLE TOO FAR In the summer of 2005, the Economist magazine led with a story entitled "After the Fall". The article discussed in detail the problems inherent in what appears to be the most expansive boom real estate has seen since records began, and of all markets studied, only Germany, Japan and Hong Kong were not contributing to the inflation. [Full Story] NORWAY TO BUILD ARCTIC SEED BANK The Norwegian government has announced plans to create a global seed bank, to be located in the nation's arctic subsoil, to preserve all world crop varieties against extinction, should any number of natural disasters strike. The seed bank will be located inside a frozen mountain on the island of Spitsbergen, in the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. [Full Story] POVERTY DISGUISED BY DISTANCE The Economist magazine has published an article, in the 20 December edition, dealing with the subject of poverty relative to environment. It examines the economic situations of two men, one an impoverished elderly man in remote Appalachia, the other an accomplished surgeon in Kinshasa, DR Congo. The two men earn roughly the same income per month, but live broadly different lives, juxtaposed in possibly surprising ways. [Full Story] GREEN LIGHT FOR RENEWABLE FUELS Renewable fuels have enjoyed a lot of attention in recent months, in a market driven by escalating oil costs, strained fuel stocks, worsening environmental degradation, and promises by the G8 to reduce carbon emissions. Revelations about the vulnerabilities inherent in the fossil fuel infrastructure, together with new technological advances in wind- and solar-based power generation mean renewables are now directly competitive with traditional fuel sources. [Full Story] OIL DEPOT FIRE LEADS TO SPREADING SMOKE & SOOT CLOUD OVER LONDON Today the city of London was obscured by a cloud of black smoke emanating from a massive petroleum fire at the Buncefield fuel depot, in Hertfordshire, near Luton airport, north of London. The fire resulted from at least one severe explosion at the fuel storage facility. The blast occurred just after 6:00 GMT and was reportedly heard up to 100 miles away, including in northern France and the Netherlands. [Full Story] HANDICAPPING FOR NUCLEAR POWER Petroleum is a finite resource, a "fossil" fuel that cannot be replaced when existing volume has been exhausted. The UK is finding it hard to cope with Kyoto-agreed obligations. Current infrastructure cannot extract enough power from wind or tide... So, the nuclear power lobby came up with a great solution: build more nuclear power plants despite the enormous costs of maintenance, cleanup and storage. [Full Story] ECONOMY OF ERRORS: HOW ABUNDANCE MAY BRING SCARCITY The global economy in its present form is not only full of and forced to deal with problematic distortions; it has come to depend a great deal on the "bubble" effect of certain miscalculations and manipulations. Assumptions built into weak threads in the economic web mean that markets are not able to set prices or distribute wealth at sustainable levels. [Full Story] WHY WIND IS SMARTER Wind energy offers something no carbon-based fuel can offer: zero emissions, zero cleanup, local control and reasonable local supply everywhere on Earth, and it is 100% non-climate disruptive and essentially infinitely renewable. In fact, the overall global wind resource far exceeds our capacity even to harness or to use it. As of 2003, Pentagon-commissioned research had found that just 3 wind-rich midwestern states possess sufficient wind resources to power the entire US economy with existing wind-turbine technology. [Full Story] DOWN TO THE LAST DROP: THE COMING RIPPLE EFFECT OF THE PROJECTED OIL PEAK Petroleum is a finite resource, an energy-rich "fossil" substance, and we can only burn what we find, until it is gone. "Peak Oil" is the moment when extant reserves of crude oil are no longer enough to sustain the global economy's annual production levels, and production will no longer be able to match increases in demand... A permanent disruption in the supply of cheap oil means a worrying and widespread threat to the world's food-production and distribution systems. [Full Story] LIVE 8 BRINGS MILLIONS TOGETHER TO HEAR ONE MESSAGE The Live 8 "global concert event", intended to raise awareness of the struggle of tens of millions of people in the world's poorest nations, just to survive, brought millions into the streets to hear concerts in 9 nations, and tens of millions of viewers on TV and online together to hear its message. The message was succinct and hopeful: Make Poverty History. [Full Story] WORLD'S FRESH WATER RAPIDLY BEING DEPLETED, GLOBAL SHORTAGE FEARED The United Nations has been pushing for some time for a global strategy to deal with the looming scarcity of fresh water. A BBC report from June 2000 indicated 1 in 5 of all living human beings already lacks access to safe drinking water. Dramatically making the point that our oceans cannot solve the problem, the report says "Only 2.5% of the world's water is not salty, and two-thirds of that is locked up in the icecaps and glaciers." Immediately available, clean fresh water, not contaminated by industrial chemicals, parasites or natural toxins, simply does not exist in the abundance needed... [Full Story] EUROPEAN COUNTRIES MAY LENGTHEN WORK WEEK The New York Times reports that European countries are reconsidering the 35-hour work week, finding that the shorter hours may be holding back general economic growth. The affinity for shorter hours has been seen traditionally as a shrewd political method for spreading employment by creating new jobs, and has in the past shown overall gains in production, while per-capita productivity remained level or even increased. Now, to compete with workers from 10 new EU member states to the east, in a market strained by low-cost labor in Asia and elsewhere, Germans are said to be working longer. As much as 20% of the UK workforce may be working over the EU mandated maximum of 48 hours per week, in 2002. [Full Story] WORLD DEMANDS RENEWABLE RESOURCES AT BONN The Renewables 2004 global conference in Bonn, Germany, has resulted in recommendations for more aggressive research and development of renewable energy resources. Citing persistent unrest in oil rich countries, the negative environmental impact of fossil fuels, along with soaring prices and the economic problems associated with any finite resource, the conference noted the benefits to economic and political security of using resources that are local, clean and renewable. [Full Story] MAINE DEFENDS RIGHT OF CITIZENS TO OPT OUT OF SWEATSHOP PRODUCTS The state of Maine has passed an Anti-Sweatshop Purchasing law requiring that all companies selling textiles in Maine follow international human rights-based code of conduct, inform public of location of factories, allowing consumers to choose lawful, ethical manufacturers over less scrupulous ones. The law also provides for rewarding Maine businesses that follow basic standards of humane treatment and fairness, with intent of strengthening democratic values of Maine culture. [For more: PICA] EPI REPORTS STRAIN ON GLOBAL FOOD HARVEST, COMING SHORTAGES The Earth Policy Institute is reporting new strains on global food stocks and current and coming harvests. According to the non-profit research organization, global food security is now imperiled by the fourth consecutive year of increasing grain harvest shortfalls. In 2003, the shortfall was "easily the largest on record", reducing reserve stocks to 30 year lows, pushing wheat and corn prices to their highest level in 7 years and rice to a 5-year high. During the current year, the momentum of falling grain stocks may be compounded by other evolving crises, such as "falling water tables and rising temperatures". If this year's harvest shows another vast shortfall, grain prices will continue to rise, affecting economies around the world. [For more: EPI at EcoVaria.com] FTAA OBSTACLES SHOW AT MIAMI MINISTERIAL MEETING The United States wants to fashion a Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement which is comprehensive, hemispheric and lasting. The public in many countries is increasingly skeptical about the benefits of such an agreement. Agricultural subsidies in developed countries can pose significant barriers to agricultural prosperity in developing nations. Argentina and Brazil in particular demand that there be an arrangement through which countries adversely affected by such policies would receive compensation or special consideration in bilateral agreements. [Full Story] LATIN AMERICA STRUGGLING BEHIND THE VEIL The Center for Economic and Policy Research has published a study of economic trends in Latin America during the time of liberalized trade policy. Their research determined that growth has been hampered by liberalized trade policies which favor wealthy nations. The study stems from concerns that slow growth in the first years of this century may mirror trends from the 1980's, known to analysts of Latin American economics as "the lost decade". Overall Latin American economic growth in the 1980's languished at -0.3%, marking a decline in prosperity and in GDP. [Full Story] GLOBAL ECONOMIC RALLY? After three years of consistent job losses, even the languishing US job market expanded in the third quarter, according to government figures (based on those receiving aid for lack of work). Germany appears to be out of recession, and European stocks are on the rise. China's exports are booming, as the nation exploits its peculiar labor conditions (decried worldwide as not meeting international standards for fair labor practice). Some major analysts believe that inefficiencies inherent in the current system of economic assumptions are responsible for ongoing economic distresses. [Read about the Food Bubble Economy]
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