Climate change is real & now here

From an Article by Jon Queally, Common Dreams, August 20, 2018

“Climate change is now reaching the end-game, where very soon humanity must choose between taking unprecedented action, or accepting that it has been left too late and bear the consequences.”

Offering a stark warning to the world, a new report out Monday argues that the reticence of the world’s scientific community—trapped in otherwise healthy habits of caution and due diligence—to downplay the potentially irreversible and cataclysmic impacts of climate change is itself a threat that should no longer be tolerated if humanity is to be motivated to make the rapid and far-reaching transition away from fossil fuels and other emissions-generating industries.

“It is no longer possible to follow a gradual transition path to restore a safe climate. We have left it too late; emergency action, akin to a war footing, will eventually be accepted as inevitable. The longer that takes, the greater the damage inflicted upon humanity.” —David Splatt & Ian Dunlop, report authors

In the new report—titled What Lies Beneath: The Understatement of Existential Climate Risk (pdf)—authors David Splatt and Ian Dunlop, researchers with the National Centre for Climate Restoration (Breakthrough), an independent think tank based in Australia, argue that the existential threats posed by the climate crisis have still not penetrated the collective psyche of humanity and that world leaders, even those demanding aggressive action, have not shown the kind of urgency or imagination that the scale of the pending catastrophe presents.

While the report states that “a fast, emergency-scale transition to a post-fossil fuel world is absolutely necessary to address climate change,” it bemoans the fact that this solution continues to be excluded from the global policy debate because it is considered by the powerful as “too disruptive.” However, the paper argues, it is precisely this lack of imagination and political will that could doom humanity’s future.

As Splatt and Dunlop summarize at Renew Economy, their paper analyzes why:
>> Human-induced climate change is an existential risk to human civilisation: an adverse outcome that will either annihilate intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential, unless dramatic action is taken.

>>The bulk of climate research has tended to underplay these risks, and exhibited a preference for conservative projections and scholarly reticence.

>> IPCC reports tend toward reticence and caution, erring on the side of “least drama,” and downplaying the more extreme and more damaging outcomes, and are now becoming dangerously misleading with the acceleration of climate impacts globally.

>> Why this is a particular concern with potential climatic “tipping points,” the passing of critical thresholds which result in step changes in the climate system. Under-reporting on these issues is contributing to the “failure of imagination” in our understanding of, and response to, climate change.

“Climate change is now reaching the end-game,” reads the forward to the report by Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, head of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, “where very soon humanity must choose between taking unprecedented action, or accepting that it has been left too late and bear the consequences.”

When #climate risks are understated, it’s time to understand “What lies beneath” the scientific reports and policymaking. Download the inside story of #whatliesbeneath http://www.breakthroughonline.org.au — David Spratt (@djspratt) 6:20 PM – August 19, 2018

“It is no longer possible to follow a gradual transition path to restore a safe climate,” write Spratt and Dunlop in an op-ed published in the Guardian on Monday. “We have left it too late; emergency action, akin to a war footing, will eventually be accepted as inevitable. The longer that takes, the greater the damage inflicted upon humanity.”

At the center of their argument, the pair explain, is that while the global scientific community—including the vital work of the UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—has been at the forefront of warning humanity about the processes and dangers of human-caused global warming, there has been simply too much “reticence and caution” that has led researchers to downplay the most “extreme and damaging outcomes” that lurk beneath their publicly stated findings and pronouncements.

While this has been understandable historically, given the pressure exerted upon the IPCC by political and vested interests, it is now becoming dangerously misleading with the acceleration of climate impacts globally. What were lower probability, higher-impact events are now becoming more likely.

This is a particular concern with potential climatic tipping points – passing critical thresholds which result in step changes in the climate system – such as melting polar ice sheets (and hence increasing sea levels), permafrost and other carbon stores, where the impacts of global warming are nonlinear and difficult to model with current scientific knowledge.

The extreme risks which these tipping points represent justify strong precautionary risk management. Under-reporting on these issues is irresponsible, contributing to the failure of imagination that is occurring today in our understanding of, and response to, climate change.

“Either we act with unprecedented speed,” Spratt and Dunlop conclude, “or we face a bleak future.”

Paradise Gas-fired Plant -- Coal plants in the background

From a Report by Glynis Board, Ohio Valley ReSource, WFPL – NPR, July 17, 2017

‘Where Paradise Lay‘

Coal is showing its age. The average age of coal plants in the U.S. today is about 40 years and for the past couple of decades power companies have faced tough decisions about the investments needed to keep those coal-burners going in a way that meets both environmental requirements and economic competition.

Many are opting to phase out coal and instead invest in cheaper, cleaner natural gas.

Some 8,000 megawatts of coal power generating capacity will likely be retired this year. That’s roughly the equivalent of 11 Longview plants. Last year, 13,000 megawatts of coal were retired, many of those before planned retirement dates.

Economists like Walter Culver with the Great Lakes Energy Institute at Case Western Reserve University say the boom in the shale gas supply and development of high efficiency technology to burn that gas are combining to force more coal out of the market. “So now the natural efficiency of generating electricity with gas for the same amount of gas energy as coal energy is about half of the costs, basically,” he said.

That was the strong selling point for TVA President and CEO Bill Johnson, who recently addressed a crowd gathered in Paradise, Kentucky. “It’s a big part of our priority here to diversify our fleet to make sure we are making electricity at the lowest feasible rate,” he said.

David Sorrick, TVA’s senior vice president of power operations, stood near the new 1100 megawatt facility. “Directly behind me is the new Paradise combined-cycle facility,” he said. “And it’s co-located with the unit down the hill, which is our Paradise coal facility.”

Gas power produces far less soot, no mercury, and none of the combustion ash that coal power produces. It also produces 40 to 50 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions compared to the coal unit.

Operations technician Kyle Jones conducted a tour at the dedication ceremony, and proudly pointed out the efficiency features. “The combined cycle portion where we’re using all the heat possible is what makes it so efficient,” he explained. “Our exhaust leaving the stack is as cool as we can make it to use all the energy we could, the most heat transfer possible.”

That even reduces the amount of water needed from the nearby Green River. Steam is returned to liquid form in cooling towers. Huge fans pass air over droplets to cool water until it can be reused.

Jones started at the Paradise coal facility a decade ago and worked his way from conveyer operator to unit operator and now a job at the new gas facility.
“I love it,” he said of the new plant. “It’s a whole lot more clean and makes a world of difference in terms of the work I do.”

Others in the community, however, see trouble in Paradise. At the nearby Paradise Cafe, a stone monument to Kentucky’s coal miners greets visitors at the door. Inside, patrons talked over burgers and BLTs about looming concerns over job losses, either at the TVA facility or the nearby coal mine that supplies it.

The TVA is eager to calm those fears. Sorrick pointed out that even though two coal units were retired here, a third one remains in operation and likely will for decades. However, the new gas facility employs fewer people than the coal plant did. Some employees found work elsewhere in the TVA system.

Health Effects of Power Plants

When John Prine put Paradise on the popular culture map, he was writing about the visible effects of strip mining.

But what Prine couldn’t see then were some of the profound public health effects of burning coal, effects that would take years to measure.

The TVA has been burning coal in Paradise for fifty years. But it started burning a lot more of it in the 1980s, after the public’s opinion of nuclear power changed dramatically. “It was completely related to the partial nuclear meltdown of Three Mile Island in 1979,” Carnegie Mellon University researcher Edson Severnini noticed.

When the TVA took some of its nuclear power generators off line, the power gap was met with coal, specifically, a big increase in the output from the Paradise Fossil Plant. That swap in power generation in the mid 80s provided Severnini an opportunity to study public health impacts in places where coal power generation increased.

He found a striking relationship between the uptick in coal burning at Paradise and a decrease in the size of babies born downwind. “Where Paradise coal-fired power plant was located there was a huge increase in coal-fired power generation, a high increase in air pollution,” he said. “And in that particular location there was a decrease in birth weight by 5.4 percent.”

Severnini’s study was published in the journal Nature in April. He looked at recorded birth weight in the first 18 months after the region’s switch to coal. It was accessible data and birth weight is a good indicator of human health outcomes later in life. Severnini explained that low birth weight can be linked to shorter life spans, higher susceptibility to disease, and even a person’s ability to thrive socially.

“What I wanted people to think about is: What are the consequences of energy choices?” he said.

The Paradise coal facility is now far cleaner than it was in the 80s thanks to stronger requirements under the Clean Air Act and pollution control technology TVA installed. But no matter how you burn it, coal is an organic material dug from the ground and will produce emissions. Recent environmental studies indicate that despite progress in pollution control, soot from coal power plants still accounted for an estimated 7,000 premature deaths each year in the U.S. as of 2014. That’s a lot fewer deaths than the country saw just a decade earlier.

“The cleaner you get that carbon-containing compound you’re burning, the better it is,” said University of Pittsburgh physician and public health expert Dr. Bernard Goldstein. “There are cleaner forms of coal, but none of them are as clean as, say, natural gas.”

Goldstein said despite a lack of data to understand the full health effects of the natural gas industry, it is a significantly cleaner fossil fuel to burn. And gas drillers probably face fewer health risks than coal miners.

“Anytime we’ve had areas that have switched from coal to natural gas there are far less particulates in the air and so the pollution levels have decreased because of that switch,” he said.

Uncertainty Exists Over Gas

But while natural gas offers improvements compared to coal, its environmental effects are proving difficult to fully measure.

Goldstein said he thinks the gas industry, which is highly fragmented, has missed opportunities to clearly address concerns about its own environmental effects. Those include air and water pollution near drilling sites, disposal concerns related to drilling waste, and the greenhouse gas emissions that result from methane leakage.

As a result, any health effects remain to be clearly understood. “For natural gas, the major uncertainties are weighing on the people who live next door,” he said.

Next door to gas drilling, that is. Put another way, the health and environmental risks for the industry’s host communities may take years to observe and measure. And the people of the Ohio Valley may well bear the brunt of those effects to come, just as they have with the effects of coal in the past.

See also: Why Are G20 Governments Financing Coal Over Renewables?

Protesting at the Exxon Station

From an Article by Daniel Marans, The Huffington Post, 03/24/2016 

• The Rockefeller Family Fund will divest from fossil fuels, prioritizing Exxon Mobil holdings.
• The fund’s statement rips Exxon Mobil for allegedly deceiving the public about climate change.
• The decision by a nonprofit trust born of oil wealth carries symbolic weight.
• A recent ruling by the SEC also requires company shareholders to vote on a climate change resolution.

##– The FBI is considering whether to investigate the company for deliberately misleading the public about climate change.

The Rockefeller Family Fund is divesting from major segments of the fossil fuel industry, the fund said in an announcement that also singled out Exxon Mobil for blistering criticism.

The nonprofit trust, which was started by the heirs of the industrial-era oil monopolist John D. Rockefeller, called Exxon Mobil’s alleged efforts to cover up evidence of climate change “morally reprehensible conduct” in a Wednesday statement.

The fund, which provides grants to further environmentalism, women’s rights and corporate and government accountability, is the latest in a long list of institutions to divest from oil, gas or coal holdings.

With assets of $130 million, the trust is hardly the largest institution to make the leap. (The significantly larger Rockefeller Brothers Fund, another family philanthropic venture, made the divestment pledge in September 2014.)

The day before the announcement, the Securities and Exchange Commission dealt Exxon another setback. On Tuesday, the SEC ruled in favor of a group of shareholders who are pushing the company closer to disclosing its vulnerability to climate change and new government regulations.

But the fund’s stinging indictment of Exxon Mobil, part of a new escalation of investor-driven climate change advocacy, is especially notable because it comes from the heirs of the Standard Oil fortune, the mega-company from which Exxon Mobil first emerged.

“Evidence appears to suggest that the company worked since the 1980s to confuse the public about climate change’s march, while simultaneously spending millions to fortify its own infrastructure against climate change’s destructive consequences and track new exploration opportunities as the Arctic’s ice receded,” the fund’s statement says. “Appropriate authorities will determine if the company violated any laws, but as a matter of good governance, we cannot be associated with a company exhibiting such apparent contempt for the public interest.” 

In the first stage of its divestment process, the fund will immediately eliminate all Exxon Mobil holdings, as well as all investments in coal and “tar sands-based companies” that the fund holds directly. directly managed by the fund, rather than outside asset managers. It will limit its “exposures for these three categories of investment” to less than 1 percent of its holdings. The second stage will involve divesting from other fossil fuels the fund holds directly, and all fossil fuels held in commingled funds.

“That is a longer process because these commingled funds are very difficult to get out of and we have to be very cognizant of our fiduciary duty to the institution,” said Lee Wasserman, director of the Rockefeller Family Fund.

Exxon Mobil’s potential involvement in denying climate science first came to light in the fall, when Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times published explosive reports suggesting the company had privately acknowledged the reality of climate change even as it cast doubt on the science in public. 

After those reports, Reps. Ted Lieu and Mark DeSaulnier, Democratic congressmen from California, asked the Department of Justice to investigate whether the oil giant violated federal laws like the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. (The federal government used RICO to press charges against tobacco companies 1999, claiming they had engaged in a conspiracy to suppress evidence of tobacco products’ health risks.) Earlier this month, the DOJ asked the FBI to look into whether Exxon Mobil acted illegally.

Exxon, for its part, brushed off the Rockefeller Family Fund’s divestment decision. “It’s not surprising that they’re divesting from the company since they’re already funding a conspiracy against us,” the company said in a statement. 

The company pointed to the fund’s financial support for Inside Climate News and the Columbia University Journalism School, the latter of which collaborated with the Los Angeles Times on its series of stories about Exxon. Exxon called the influential reporting backed by the fund “inaccurate and deliberately misleading stories about ExxonMobil’s history of climate research.”

Wasserman said the grant to Inside Climate News was made without any knowledge that it would be used for the reporting project. The grant to Columbia Journalism School was directed at “public interest research into what the fossil fuel industry understood about the science of climate change and how they acted given that understanding both internally and regarding the public,” but it did not target Exxon Mobil specifically, Wasserman said.

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

The Lancet: Fossil Fuels Are Killing Us… Quitting Them Can Save Us

From an Article by Jon Queally, Common Dreams, June 23, 2015

Comparing coal, oil, and gas addiction to the last generation’s effort to kick the tobacco habit, doctors say that quitting would be the best thing humanity can do for its long-term healing.

The bad news is very bad, indeed. But first, the good news: “Responding to climate change could be the biggest global health opportunity of this century.”

That message is the silver lining contained in a comprehensive newly published report by The Lancet, the UK-based medical journal, which explores the complex intersection between global human health and climate change.

“It took on entrenched interests such as the tobacco industry and led the fight against HIV/AIDS. Now is the time for us to lead the way in responding to another great threat to human and environmental health.” — Prof. Peng Gong, Tsinghua University

The wide-ranging and peer-reviewed report—titled Health and climate change: policy responses to protect public health—declares that the negative impacts of human-caused global warming have put at risk some of the world’s most impressive health gains over the last half century. What’s more, it says, continued use of fossil fuels is leading humanity to a future in which infectious disease patterns, air pollution, food insecurity and malnutrition, involuntary migration, displacement, and violent conflict will all be made made worse.

“Climate change,” said commission co-chairman Dr. Anthony Costello, a pediatrician and director of the Global Health Institute at the University College of London, “has the potential to reverse the health gains from economic development that have been made in recent decades – not just through the direct effects on health from a changing and more unstable climate, but through indirect means such as increased migration and reduced social stability. Our analysis clearly shows that by tackling climate change we can also benefit health. Tackling climate change represents one of the greatest opportunities to benefit human health for generations to come.”

The four key findings of the report include:

1. The effects of climate change threaten to undermine the last half-century of gains in development and global health. The impacts are being felt today, and future projections represent an unacceptably high and potentially catastrophic risk to human health.

2. Tackling climate change could be the greatest global health opportunity of the 21st century.

3. Achieving a decarbonized global economy and securing the public health benefits it offers is no longer primarily a technological or economic question – it is now a political one.

4. Climate change is fundamentally an issue of human health, and health professionals have a vital role to play in accelerating progress on mitigation and adaptation policies.

“When health professionals shout ‘emergency’ politicians everywhere should listen.” —Mike Childs, Friends of the Earth“Climate Change is a medical emergency,” said Dr. Hugh Montgomery, commission co-chair and director of the UCL Institute for Human Health and Performance. “It thus demands an emergency response.”

With rising global temperatures fueling increasing extreme weather events, crop failures, water scarcity, and other crises, Montgomery says the report is an attempt to make it clear that drastic and immediate actions should be taken. “Under such circumstances,” he said, “no doctor would consider a series of annual case discussions and aspirations adequate, yet this is exactly how the global response to climate change is proceeding.”

In a companion paper published alongside the larger report, commission members Helena Wang and Richard Horton explained why human health impacts are an important part of the larger argument regarding climate change:

When climate change is framed as a health issue, rather than purely as an environmental, economic, or technological challenge, it becomes clear that we are facing a predicament that strikes at the heart of humanity. Health puts a human face on what can sometimes seem to be a distant threat. By making the case for climate change as a health issue, we hope that the civilizational crisis we face will achieve greater public resonance. Public concerns about the health effects of climate change, such as undernutrition and food insecurity, have the potential to accelerate political action in ways that attention to carbon dioxide emissions alone do not.

Responding to the findings and warnings contained in the report, Mike Childs, the head of policy for the Friends of the Earth-UK, said the message from one of the world’s foremost institutions on public health has given powerful new evidence to the argument that “radical action is urgently required” to avoid further climate catastrophe.

“When health professionals shout ‘emergency’,” Childs said, “politicians everywhere should listen.”

Going from diagnosis to prescribing a remedy, the doctors and scientists involved with the report—who equated the human health emergency of climate change with previous physician-led fights against tobacco use and HIV/AIDS—argue the crisis of anthropogenic climate change demands—as a matter of “medical necessity”—the rapid phase-out of fossil fuels (with special emphasis on coal) from the global energy mix. In addition, the authors say their data on global human health support a recommendation for an international carbon price.

“The health community has responded to many grave threats to health in the past,” said another commission co-chair, Professor Peng Gong of Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. “It took on entrenched interests such as the tobacco industry and led the fight against HIV/AIDS. Now is the time for us to lead the way in responding to another great threat to human and environmental health.”

The Commission argues that human health would vastly improve in a less-polluted world free from fossil fuels. “Virtually everything that you want to do to tackle climate change has health benefits,” said Dr. Costello. “We’re going to cut heart attacks, strokes, diabetes.”

A video, produced by the Commission and released alongside the report, also explains:

As Wang and Horton conclude in their remarks, “Climate change is the defining challenge of our generation. Health professionals must mobilize now to address this challenge and protect the health and well-being of future generations.”

>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Not ‘If’ But ‘How’: New Study Shows Why All Extreme Weather Is Climate Related

From an Article by Nadia Prupis, Common Dreams, June 23, 2015

New research explains why people debating whether or not specific events are caused by climate change have it all wrong

The debate over climate change has long focused on determining attribution—whether rising greenhouse gases and global warming caused a particular storm, drought, flood, or blizzard. Now, a new study in Nature Climate Change published Monday seeks to shift the underlying question from “if” to “how.”

“The climate is changing,” wrote National Center for Atmospheric Research scientists Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo and University of Reading physicist Theodore Shepherd in their study, Attribution of Climate Extreme Events. “The environment in which all weather events occur is not what it used to be. All storms, without exception, are different. Even if most of them look just like the ones we used to have, they are not the same.”

Humanity may exhaust the Earth’s low-cost mineral resources before the end of this century – but better resource management could avoid the worst risks.

From an Article by Nafeez Ahmed, The Guardian UK, June 10, 2014

A new landmark scientific report drawing on the work of the world’s leading mineral experts forecasts that industrial civilisation’s extraction of critical minerals and fossil fuel resources is reaching the limits of economic feasibility, and could lead to a collapse of key infrastructures unless new ways to manage resources are implemented.

The peer-reviewed study – the 33rd Report to the Club of Rome – is authored by Prof Ugo Bardi of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Florence, where he teaches physical chemistry. It includes specialist contributions from fifteen senior scientists and experts across the fields of geology, agriculture, energy, physics, economics, geography, transport, ecology, industrial ecology, and biology, among others.

The Club of Rome is a Swiss-based global think tank founded in 1968 consisting of current and former heads of state, UN bureaucrats, government officials, diplomats, scientists, economists and business leaders.

Its latest report, to be released on 12th June, conducts a comprehensive overview of the history and evolution of mining, and argues that the increasing costs of mineral extraction due to pollution, waste, and depletion of low-cost sources will eventually make the present structure of industrial civilisation unsustainable.

Much of the report’s focus is on the concept of Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI), which measures the amount of energy needed to extract resources. While making clear that “we are not running out of any mineral,” the report finds that “extraction is becoming more and more difficult as the easy ores are depleted. More energy is needed to maintain past production rates, and even more is needed to increase them.” As a consequence, despite large quantities of remaining mineral reserves:

“The production of many mineral commodities appears to be on the verge of decline… we may be going through a century-long cycle that will lead to the disappearance of mining as we know it.”

The last decade has seen the world shift to more expensive and difficult to extract fossil fuel resources, in the form of unconventional forms of oil and gas, which have much lower levels of EROEI than conventional oil. Even with technological breakthroughs in fracking and associated drilling techniques, this trend is unlikely to reverse significantly.

A former senior executive in Australia’s oil, gas and coal industry, Ian Dunlop, describes in the report how fracking can rise production “rapidly to a peak, but it then declines rapidly, too, often by 80 to 95 percent over the first three years.” This means that often “several thousand wells” are needed for a single shale play to provide “a return on investment.”

The average EROEI to run “industrial society as we know it” is about 8 to 10. Shale oil and gas, tar sands, and coal seam gas are all “at, or below, that level if their full costs are accounted for… Thus fracking, in energy terms, will not provide a source on which to develop sustainable global society.”

The Club of Rome report also applies the EROEI analysis to extraction of coal and uranium. World coal production will peak by 2050 latest, and could peak as early as 2020. US coal production has already peaked, and future production will be determined largely by China. But rising domestic demand from the latter, and from India, could generate higher prices and shortages in the near future: “Therefore, there is definitely no scope for substituting for oil and gas with coal.”

As for global uranium supplies, the report says that current uranium production from mines is already insufficient to fuel existing nuclear reactors, a gap being filled by recovery of uranium military stockpiles and old nuclear warheads. While the production gap could be closed at current levels of demand, a worldwide expansion of nuclear power would be unsustainable due to “gigantic investments” needed.

US Geological Survey data analysed by the report shows that chromium, molybdenum, tungsten, nickel, platinum-palladium, copper, zinc, cadmium, titanium, and tin will face peak production followed by declines within this century. This is because declared reserves are often “more hypothetical than measured”, meaning the “assumption of mineral bonanzas… are far removed from reality.”

In particular, the report highlights the fate of copper, lithium, nickel and zinc. Physicist Prof Rui Namorado Rosa projects an “imminent slowdown of copper availability” in the report. Although production has grown exponentially, the grade of the minerals mined is steadily declining, lifting mining costs. ‘Peak copper’ is likely to hit by 2040, but could even occur within the next decade.

Production of lithium production, presently used for batteries electric cars, would also be strained under a large-scale electrification of transport infrastructure and vehicles. Sustainable lithium production requires 80-100% recycling – currently this stands at less than 1%.

Perhaps the most alarming trend in mineral depletion concerns phosphorous, which is critical to fertilise soil and sustain agriculture. While phosphorous reserves are not running out, physical, energy and economic factors mean only a small percentage of it can be mined. Crop yield on 40 percent of the world’s arable land is already limited by economical phosphorus availability.

In the Club of Rome study, physicist Patrick Dery says that several major regions of rock phosphate production – such as the island of Nauru and the US, which is the world’s second largest producer – are post-peak and now declining, with global phosphorous supplies potentially becoming insufficient to meet agricultural demand within 30-40 years. The problem can potentially be solved as phosphorous can be recycled.

A parallel trend documented in the report by Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) agronomist Toufic El Asmar is an accelerating decline in land productivity due to industrial agricultural methods, which are degrading the soil by as much as 50% in some areas.

Prof Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said that the report is “an effective piece of work” to assess the planet’s mineral wealth “within the framework of sustainability.” Its findings offer a “valuable basis for discussions on mineral policy.”

But the window for meaningful policy action is closing rapidly. “The main alarm bell is the trend in the prices of mineral commodities,” Prof Bardi told me.

“Prices have gone up by a factor 3-5 and have remained at these level for the past 5-6 years. They are not going to go down again, because they are caused by irreversible increases in production costs. These prices are already causing the decline of the less efficient economies (say, Italy, Greece, Spain, etc.). We are not at the inversion point yet, but close – less than a decade?”

For part 2 of this story see here.

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is an international security journalist and academic. He is the author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It.

WEST VIRGINIA ENERGY BLUEPRINT

On behalf of the State of West Virginia, we invite you to explore the West Virginia Energy Blueprint. The document details our State’s role as a national energy leader. This online digital version of the publication allows users to quickly access specific content, as well as print, download, search and share by email or on social networks.

Link to the WV Energy Blueprint here.

The Mountain State’s expertise and opportunities cover the energy spectrum of coal, oil, natural gas, renewables and energy efficiency. Our mission is to insure the wise use of these resources to the benefit of our citizens and the entire nation.

Our home among the hills continues to expand its economic strength while taking a position at the forefront of new energy development. Companies from around the globe are investing in our state to meet the world’s growing demand for low-cost and long-term energy. We are truly an energy state, rich in natural resources with a positive business climate and a stable economy.

We hope you take the time to read and appreciate the West Virginia Energy Blueprint.

Sincerely,

Governor Earl Ray Tomblin
State of West Virginia

Jeff Herholdt
Director, Division of Energy

PDF: Direct Link to WV Energy Blueprint

In the news, Dimock, PA may be included in a 2-year EPA fracking study.  18 wells were contaminated with methane there.   Full story.

Good news from Charleston!   Today the joint interim Judiciary Subcommittee A met, and with the benefit of a quorum, conducted business.  The hydraulic fracking legislation passed and is now heading for the Legislature.