North America

-Scientists Reveals Secrets Of Drought Resistance
-Speaker says water limitations not recognized
-A Drought-Stricken Land Offers Help With Water
-A Victory for the 'Water Underground'
-EROWI - energy return of water invested

-A Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet with Renewables
-Farms going green to save and survive
-Solar power from Sahara a step closer
-Nearly 200 Organizations and Companies Urge Senate to Adopt Key Energy-Efficiency Provision in Climate Bill
-Report Argues for a Decentralized System of Renewable Power Generation

-Coping With Climate Change: Which Societies Will Do Best?
-GM's Money Trees
-The Carnivore’s Dilemma
-USDA Research: Does No-Till Really Capture More Carbon?
-Why growing virgin vegetable oil to burn is crazy
-Pachauri Still Sees a Chance for Success in Copenhagen Talks
-The Inferno

-Jonathan Safran Foer's 'Eating Animals' Book Will Fundamentally Change the Way You Think About Food
-Back to the Land: The New Green Revolution
-Farm Aid
-Georgia growers filling organic niche market
-Discussing the future of urban agriculture in KC

I think the question of land access may end up being the central political issue of the coming century. In both the rich world and the poor world, we’ve systematically deprived people of easy access to land. We have driven up the price of land in the rich world by encouraging sprawl, and thus forced out agrarian populations that previous fed cities. We have pushed people into cities in the name of globalization and industrialization, and claimed their land for speculation.

It is now 4 months since I wrote The Decline of the American Empire. The time is ripe for a follow-up. I will tell a sad story first, talk a little about our precarious banking system, and then relate the lessons learned back to my Decline theme. At the end I will talk about what all this means for the loosely structured peak oil "movement".

-The age of the train: myth or reality?
-Buffett gambles £27bn on rail to get back on track
-Buffett’s Bet on Trains
-Is Warren Buffett's Railway Buy a Billion Dollar Bet on Big Coal?
-It's Time to Rebuild Our Passenger Railroad System
-India jumps on gold bandwagon but Warren Buffett rides the growth train

Wealth is not what we are taught. Wealth is a verb, not a noun. Wealth is not stuff; it is a fiercely protected system of concentration. It is the act of the hoarding, and is a pillar of our culture.

What Arthur Berman is saying is that natural gas companies that extract shale are mis-estimating how quickly natural gas production will decline in the future--they are assuming gas production will decline more slowly than evidence indicates it will. As a result of their optimistic assumptions about decline rates, they are assuming that shale gas can profitably be extracted for as long as 50 years, when Berman believes the average well life is only about 8 years.

As a high-school teacher, I wanted to give my thoroughly-industrial, suburban-NJ students a more detailed peek at their upcoming post-industrial future. I felt the need to challenge their prevailing mindsets regarding our resource-depletion predicament: the “shorter showers & change the light-bulbs” crowd, the “engineers will surely come to our rescue” folks, and the “problem? -- what problem?” people. This essay and the before/after comparison chart that follows are part of my ongoing (unsanctioned) attempts at doing so.

On a stretch of desert near the U.S.-Mexico border, the only eatery on the Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation opened last spring to a full house. The Desert Rain Café brightened a space in a small shopping complex, drawing dozens of curious customers who filled patio tables by noon. Its menu, local by design, featured ingredients from the café’s own farm: desert squash enchiladas, mesquite-flour muffins, hummus made from tepary beans. The café recently extended its hours to take advantage of its booming business.

This month Scientific America is back on track with a cover story entitled "A Plan for a Sustainable Future - How to get all energy from wind, water and solar power by 2030." Getting rid of, or at least making a start on getting rid of fossil fuels in the U.S. over the next 20 years is something we should all be thinking about - especially if we want to leave much of anything to the grandchildren.

-U.N. Signals Delay in Climate Change Treaty
-Republicans walk out of Senate hearing on climate-change bill
-African nations make a stand at UN climate talks
-Senators opposed to the Clean Energy Jobs Act are ignoring the bill’s benefits to Americans
-We only have months, not years, to save civilisation from climate change

-The heart of India is under attack
-Shale gas blasts open world energy market
-Shale gas numbers may not add up
-It’s a dirty business — the new gold rush that is blackening Canada’s name

-Changing a City: Inside Portland's 80 Percent by 2050 Target
-Zone5 Podcast #1 with Albert Bates and #2 with Noel Carillo
-Urban Permaculture in Clacton-on-Sea
-Toward an Ethic of Place: Experiments in Regional Governance