A court in China’s vast northern region of Inner Mongolia has sentenced to death a coal mine worker for killing a resident who had complained about pollution […] Earlier this month, a court in the same part of Inner Mongolia ordered the execution of a man for murdering an ethnic Mongolian herder who had also…
How Much Gas Is Left? See with new visualization at Information is Beautiful
The basics: The world uses 2.6 trillion cubic metres a year, we have 187.9 trillion cubic metres left. 187.9 divided by 2.6 gives 72.3 but the graphic says there’s only 63 years left assuming constant consumption. Assuming a constant growth in consumption by 2% there’s supposed to be 42 years left. The top three biggest…
Guardian News / Network Rail losing millions from copper thefts
The theft of copper cables from Britain’s railways is reaching epidemic proportions, costing the operator Network Rail millions of pounds as it takes on extra staff to catch the criminals and pays out compensation to train companies for delays on the system. Copper theft from railway lines jumped by 67% to 3,116 incidents in the…
Climate news: Change linked to food security, emissions up, denialism alive and well, scientists threatened
I’m a bit behind on taking note of the climate change news. First the bad plus the ridiculous: CO2 emissions are setting records while old time denier release auto-biographic film Carbon dioxide emissions hit record levels following global financial crisis lows (Reuters / IEA sees record CO2 emissions in 2010). Apparently now Westerners buy even…
Brazilian rainforest defender murdered
The Guardian reports (Amazon rainforest activist shot dead): Six months after predicting his own murder, a leading rainforest defender has reportedly been gunned down in the Brazilian Amazon. José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva and his wife, Maria do Espírito Santo, are said to have been killed in an ambush near their home in Nova Ipixuna,…
North vs South Sudan fights over oil-rich territory
Reuters / North Sudan seizes disputed Abyei, thousands flee Sudan’s northern army seized control of the disputed, oil-producing Abyei region, officials said Sunday, forcing thousands to flee and bringing the country’s north and south to the brink of full conflict. “Most residents in Abyei town left yesterday (Saturday) and have gone south. There are reports…
Leaks and alibis
The batch of US government “cables” published by Wikiliaks last week were partly about natural resource concerns. Some of them were about climate change and the COP-15 summit too so I have already added some quotes to the collection regarding those topics. Read below a selection of quotes demonstrating the imperative role played by natural…
Just read “Climate Conflict” by Jeffrey Mazo
The book Climate conflict – How global warming threatens security and what to do about it by Jeffrey Mazo of The International Institute For Strategic Studies is a concise discussion of historical, current and future geopolitics as influenced by climate change. It is kind of an academic version of the more popularizing Climate Wars by…
Rape – weapon and cultural disease?
If you can take it, read in The Guardian how women in Eastern Congo have “been raped in terrible ways, whose reproductive organs had been wrecked, who were suffering from fistulas between the vagina and rectum inflicted not just by gang rape but also by attacks with sticks, guns, bottles” – crimes which are hardly…
To the Brits, the Iraq war was about oil
Oil activist Greg Muttitt and The Independent has set the topic since Tuesday’s breaking-yet-hardy-surprising Secret memos expose link between oil firms and invasion of Iraq. Quotes in chronological order: Pre-war, in private “Shell and BP could not afford not to have a stake in [Iraq] for the sake of their long-term future… We [are] determined…
More of the same. And then…
How better lose reader than with a headline like that? (I know: a going nowhere leading text like this one.) Well, while writing up this blog in report format a couple of links have piled up. First: more of the two obvious ones From Population growth, climate change raising odds of war over water, forum…
Middle East riots for food, interventions for oil?
It’s a historical truth that when food prices rise, conflict increases. So it’s no wonder that the spike in the cost of agricultural commodities in recent months has been a contributing factor to revolution in the Middle East. As the map below shows, people in relatively poor countries–including Egypt, Tunisia and others in the developing…