Water

-U.S. ads call for Alberta boycott
-Population explosion scrutinised as scientists urge politicians to act
-US Company Set to Ship Billions of Gallons of Water from Alaska to India
-The Drowned World

There is growing recognition of the need for increased access to drinkable water across the world and for water treatment approaches that improve the quality of the delivered water and re-establish a balance between human and natural systems...Localized, networked water treatment systems improve access to potable water, encourage the development and diffusion of innovations through reduced financial and technical risks, lower the potential of total system failure, and provide easier trial and replacement of specific innovations and greater organizational capacity.

In 2009, Post Carbon Institute recruited 29 of the world's leading sustainability thinkers to answer one fundamental question: How do we manage the transition to a more resilient, sustainable, and equitable world? Like us, our Fellows see five key truths:

• We have hit the “limits to growth.”
• No issue can be addressed in isolation.
• We must focus on responses, not just solutions.
• We must prepare for uncertainty.
• We can do something.

An agriculture student from a small North Indian village writes home to his sister about the bizarre way of life he encounters during a stay in America. (An updated "Gulliver's Travels")

In the last few years, scientists have begun to look at whether consumption of renewable resources follows Hubbert’s model. So how useful is the concept of “peak water”?

-Water shortages ‘could plunge the world into conflict’
-Government review to examine threat of world resources shortage
-Phosphorus and the Oxygen Connection

For at least three decades, Americans have had some inkling that we face an uncertain energy future, but we’ve ignored a much more worrisome crisis—water.

Like the Indo-Aryan God Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds, marine ecologist Jeremy Jackson is here to turn your comfortable, complacent Mental World upside-down. He's able to do that because we are destroying the Physical World—in this case, the Earth's Oceans.

It gives me the greatest pleasure this morning to launch the Totnes Energy Descent Action Plan website. The site makes the full version of the UK's first EDAP freely available, invites comments and discussion, and will act as a dynamic portal for people to discuss the Plan and reshape subsequent revisions.

The conventional wisdom in energy-and-environment circles is that China's economy, which is growing at a rate of eight percent or more per year, is mostly coal powered today and will continue to be so for decades to come...Most of this conventional wisdom is correct, but some of it is plain wrong—so wrong, in fact, that environment-, economic-, and energy-policy wonks are constructing scenarios for the future of U.S. and world energy, and for the global economy, that bear little or no resemblance to the reality that is unfolding.

Is Acadiana lost? In truth the Cajuns and their kindred have been losing their idyllic wetlands for decades. Deepwater Horizon may just be the atë, if you will.

A weekly review including:
- Production and prices
- The volcano
- Update on the droughts

There will be at least three major consequences of recurring drought conditions in southwestern China. First will be that millions of people and head of livestock will have to find a source of water or move. Next comes the food supply. The third problem of a lasting drought is the collapse of hydro-generated power in China. Should the hydro-power shortages continue for long we can expect that higher oil imports and world prices will not be far behind.

A group of social and natural scientists and scholars in the humanities is starting the Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior (MAHB, pronounced “mob”). The admittedly ambitious aim is to change human behavior to avoid a collapse of global civilization.

-Dash for Poland’s gas could end Russian stranglehold
-Natural-Gas Data Overstated
-BP fights to limit controls on shale gas drilling