Europe

-Bees in the City? New York May Let the Hives Come Out of Hiding
-Produce to the People: Collaborating for Food Access
-Is Goat the New Cow? Why American Foodies and Environmentalists Are Reviving the Old-World Staple
-Ankeny forum to examine agricultural concentration
-New York rolls veggie carts into food deserts; can other cities follow?
-How guerrilla gardening took root
-New report reveals the environmental and social impact of the 'livestock revolution'
-'I'm not a slave, I just can't speak English' – life in the meat industry

OPEC ministers meeting in Vienna this week caused no surprises in deciding to keep production quotas unchanged. Saudi oil minister Ali Al-Naimi described current prices as "beautiful". Indeed as the group met the oil price rose to $82/barrel, close to its 2010 high despite only 53% compliance by OPEC to its quotas and low US demand.

-Money spent on tar sands projects could decarbonise western economies
-China's oil demand increase 'astonishing', says IEA
-OPEC sticks to its guns, demand rising

-Smile now, cry later
-Perils of the Stationary State
-Erik Assadourian: our society needs some serious cultural engineering
-Who negotiates for nature?

Just days before French President Nicolas Sarkozy urged attendees at a Paris energy conference to buy more nuclear power plants, a very different nuclear power conference was held in Potsdam, Germany. The Brookings Institution and the Global Public Policy Institute convened 35 people from governments, academia, think tanks, and industry to consider nuclear power's future. Craig Severance offers his own insights, and his conference presentation on why new nuclear power should undergo a rigorous business oriented "Due Diligence" process.

I just finished reading a book called Anatomy of the Bear where the point was made that rising new car sales are a leading indicator for the end of recession. No wonder then that many OECD governments introduced incentive schemes to boost new car sales following the dive off the cliff that accompanied the credit crunch (Figure 1). Cash for clunkers in the USA was called the Scrappage Scheme in the UK. No prizes for spotting when the credit crunch recession began in the UK. But what will happen now that the scheme is due to end shortly?

-The Case Against Biofuels: Probing Ethanol’s Hidden Costs
-Big Oil Behind Yet Another Biofuels Research Paper
-Harrabin's Notes: Battle over biofuel strategy

-Moody’s Says U.S. Debt Could Test Triple-A Rating
-Europe and America Wrestle over Tighter Financial Regulation
-Gazing Through The Long Tall Grass
-Berlin and Paris Take Aim at Speculators
-Finance Superstars Talk About the Massive Fraud in Our Economic System

-After Smart Grids, Smart Sewage?
-A real bottler
-Lexicon of Change: The Rise of Transition Culture

-Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta
-Will Facebook Remake the World?
-Media tycoons wanted: Make your own newspaper
-Google news tax could boost local papers, report says

A while ago now I was in London for the launch of the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment’s ‘Building a New Green Economy’ conference, where I was a speaker alongside Tim Jackson, David Orr and Stewart Brand. You can read about the event here, and films of our talks will be posted soon. I mention it today because I want to draw your attention to the report launched at the conference, Sustainable Supply Chains that Support Local Economic Development, available to download here.

Vertical farming has become a popular idea, but what is mostly forgotten is that the energy required for the operation and construction of vertical farms largely negates the ecological advantages. This also applies to small-scale systems, like those of Philips (a concept) or Inka Biospheric Solutions (a product).

-Grow your own' revolution receives major land boost
-Slow foodies are not cavemen
-What’s driving our favorite fruit into decline?
-A Backlash After San Francisco Labels Sewage Sludge "Organic"
-How Locavores Could Save the World
-Increasing Yields and Decreasing Fertilizer Waste on Subsistence Farms
-How food and water are driving a 21st-century African land grab
-Greenhouse project promotes self-sufficiency

-EU to exceed 2020 green energy target: forecasts
-Quantum Physics Breakthrough: Scientists Find an Equation for Materials Innovation
-Solar PV has failed in Germany and it will fail in the UK