Stephan: Little by little the parameters of what the future holds are coming into focus. This is a very good assessment of eight cities that are going to be severely impacted by water. Truly water is destiny and, at this stage, it is pretty ugly.
Earlier this year, an obscure United Nations document, the World Water Development Report, unexpectedly made headlines around the world. The report made the startling claim that the world would face a 40 percent shortfall in freshwater in as soon as 15 years. Crops would fail. Businesses dependent on water would fail. Illness would spread. A financial crash was likely, as was deepening poverty for those just getting by.
The U.N. also concluded that the forces destroying the world’s freshwater supply were not strictly meteorological, but largely the result of human activity. That means that with some changes in how water is managed, there is still time—very little, but enough—for children born this year to graduate from high school with the same access to clean water their parents enjoyed.
Though the U.N. looked at the issue across the globe, the solutions it recommended—capturing rainwater, recycling wastewater, improving sewage and plumbing, and more—need to be implemented locally. Some of the greatest challenges will come in cities, where bursting populations strain systems designed to supply far fewer people and much of the clean water available is lost to waste and shoddy, centuries-old infrastructure.
We’ve looked at eight cities facing different though representative challenges. The […]
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Stephan: Is this overblown? We won't know until we get closer to the target date. But within a decade the pattern will become obvious. Could there be mass starvation? Of course there could. It would just be a bigger iteration of what is already happening with appalling regularity today. Could this destabilize the world economy, causing social instability and violence? You bet. Climate Change is like a fog. It spreads across a landscape, be it a few fields, or a planet touching everything.
A scientific model of the future of the world has some bad news for anyone under the age of about 65, suggesting that the world and comfortable modern life as we know it could collapse by the year 2040 amid apocalyptic food wars triggered by climate change.
The prediction is based around nothing changing and our consumption habits continuing as they are, so there is some hope. Dr Aled Jones, the Director of the Global Sustainability Institute, told Insurgency Intelligence that: “We ran the model forward to the year 2040, along a business-as-usual trajectory based on ‘do-nothing’ trends — that is, without any feedback loops that would change the underlying trend.
“The results show that based on plausible climate trends, and a total failure to change course, the global food supply system would face catastrophic losses, and an unprecedented epidemic of food riots.” (emphasis added)
The calculations released as part of the Global Resource Observatory project, warn that when the postman stops coming and there’s no reduced fat margarine left in the shops to placate the masses the planet explodes — although this is a short-term […]
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David Edwards, - The Raw Story
Stephan: You just can't make this stuff up.
Donna Bahorich picked to chair Texas State Board of Education Credit: Facebook
Texas watchdog group expressed concern this week after Gov. Greg Abbott named a new chairperson to the State Board of Education who has never sent her own children to a public school.
Last week, Abbott announced that he was appointing Houston Republican Donna Bahorich, a former communications director for Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, to chair the Board of Education.
According to Texas Public Radio, Bahorich homeschooled her own sons before sending them to a private high school.
The Texas Freedom Network, a watchdog group, warned that Bahorich would “put culture war agendas ahead of educating more than 5 million Texas kids.”
“If Gov. Abbott wanted to demonstrate that he won’t continue his predecessor’s efforts to politicize and undermine our state’s public schools, this appointment falls far short,” Texas Freedom Network President Kathy Miller said in a statement. “The governor has appointed as board chair an ideologue who voted to adopt new textbooks that scholars sharply criticized as distorting American history, who rejected […]
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Stephan: Slowly. Slowly. But faster than anyone predicted the transition out of the carbon era is taking place. In the Third World where they had no centralized national grid system, they are skipping over all that and going directly for solar and wind, in the process providing millions who had no power at all with electricity. This is very good news.
Solar panels on sale at a shop in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.
Credit: Wegmann/Wikimedia Commons
LONDON—A significant threshold has been crossed by renewable energy as analysts report that the sector’s size last year reached double the level it was at just 10 years earlier.
This expansion happened in a year when the global economy and energy use both grew, but without a matching rise in emissions of carbon dioxide—the main greenhouse gas targeted in efforts to restrain global warming.
The report by REN21, a global renewable energy policy network, says the result is an example of sustainable development. Despite the world’s annual 1.5% increase in energy consumption in recent years and 3% GDP growth last year, 2014’s CO2 emissions were unchanged from 2013’s total of 32.3 billion tonnes.
The report’s authors say this decoupling of economic and CO2 growth is due to China’s increased use of renewables and to efforts by OECD countries to promote more sustainable growth, including by increased energy efficiency and use […]
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Patrick L. Smith, - Salon
Stephan: I spent from 1970 to 1976 researching and writing about military and geopolitics, first as the editor of Seapower Magazine, and then as Special Assistant to two Chiefs of Naval Operations and as a consultant to the Oceanographer of the Navy.
From 1981 to 1996 I was deeply involved in citizen diplomacy and then in owning and running joint venture businesses in the Soviet Union, spending several months each year there working with high level people in media, government, and their emerging business class. Through all of it I was mostly appalled by U.S. policies.
History will record that a massive opportunity to change the course of the world narrative was flunked by an American foreign policy establishment that simply could not give up Cold War thinking. And they still haven't. With almost no coverage in media, we have restarted the Cold War and seem to be flirting once again with Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).
This all is, of course, wildly profitable for the military-intelligence-corporate war machine that eats the largest portion of our wealth. Do I need to say it is very bad news?
Ashton Carter, U.S. President Barack Obama’s nominee to be secretary of defense, testifies before a Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, February 4, 2015.
Credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst
Have you picked up on the new trope du jour? We are all encouraged to bask in our innocence as we lament the advent of a new Cold War. The thought has been in the wind for more than a year, of course, at least among some of us. But we witness a significant turn, and I hope this same some of us are paying attention.
As of this week, leaders who know nothing about leading, thinkers who do not think and opinion-shaping poseurs such as Tom Friedman are confident enough in their case to sally forth with it: The Cold War returns, the Russians have restarted it and we […]
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