planted city

Animating Biodiversity, Ecosystems & Sustainability: ‘Not Another Nature Film’

From Green TV: 

A specially-commissioned animation featuring the voice of Stephen Merchant explaining, in simple terms, the state of our natural world, and our impacts on it.

Three paragraphs from Thomas Homer-Dixon’s recent article in the Globe & Mail, ‘All’s not lost, Ontario. The future is green, not black’. Homer-Dixon is the director of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation and the author of a number of books including, ‘Carbon Shift: How the Twin Crises of Oil Depletion and Climate Change Will Define the Future’, ‘The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization’, and ‘The Ingenuity Gap’. You can watch, listen and read about his work here.  

(Photo credit: Eco-News)

From Business Green:

Businesses have been urged to accelerate their environmental footprinting strategies to include emerging economies, after new research by the Carbon Trust revealed young people in China could hold the key to unlocking mass demand for greener products.

The survey of 2,800 young people across six countries carried out by TNS found 83 per cent of 18-25 year-olds in China would be more loyal to a brand if they could see it was reducing its carbon footprint. In contrast, just 57 per cent of US respondents and 55 per cent of young people in the UK made the same claim.

Globally, 78 per cent of young people said they want their favourite brands to reduce their carbon footprint, but again those in Chinese showed the highest demand for emission reductions with 88 per cent calling on firms to cut their footprint.

South Africa came in second place with 86 per cent of respondents calling on blue chips to reduce their impact, followed by Brazil at 84 per cent. Again the US and UK lagged far behind with only two thirds of respondents demanding more action from big brands.

Check out the rest of the article here. You can also check out an infographic of the study here.

(Image credit: Carbon Trust) 

Word Cloud: Visualizing the IPCC report on Climate Change & Extreme Weather 

You can check out the report and more here.

(Source: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change via RealClimate)

Global Sustainability | ‘Paul Gilding: The Earth is Full’

From TED Talks:

Have we used up all our resources? Have we filled up all the livable space on Earth? Paul Gilding suggests we have, and the possibility of devastating consequences, in a talk that’s equal parts terrifying and, oddly, hopeful.

Paul is an independent writer, activist, and adviser on a sustainable economy. 

You can read more about his work and ideas here and here.

(Graphic credit: Global Footprint Network)

Urbanization: ‘Thinking Cities, Networked Society’

From Ericsson via YouTube: 

The documentary ‘Thinking Cities’ deals with one of the most dramatic societal trends happening today: urbanization. The world population is expected to soar to more than 9 billion people by 2050, with roughly 70 percent living in cities. At the same time, information communications technology (ICT) is extending its reach.

These parallel trends are intersecting at a time in which the world faces serious economic, environmental, and social challenges in achieving a more sustainable development. Thinking Cities explores the challenges and opportunities of urbanization in the Networked Society.

More here.

(‘The World at 7 Billion - Urbanization’ Infographic’: Reuters)

From The Vancouver Sun:

Large-scale green energy systems can affordably replace fossil fuel as the world’s primary source of electricity within 20 years, new research from the United States weather office suggests.

… a director with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said Friday in Vancouver that wind and solar could supply 70 per cent of electricity demand in the lower 48 states, with fossil fuel and hydro/nuclear renewables each accounting for just 15 per cent by 2030.

Check out the rest of the article here. 

(Photo credit: Vancouver Sun)

A quote from the LiveScience article, ‘NASA Satellites Show How Our Icy World Is Melting’. It profiles a new study that points out that, “The Earth is losing an incredible amount of ice to the oceans annually, and these new results will help us answer important questions in terms of both sea rise and how the planet’s cold regions are responding to global change.” You can check out the full article here. 

(Photo source: LiveScience)

From Wired News:

The global production of oil has remained relatively flat since 2005 and peaked in 2008, declining ever since even as demand has continued to increase. The result has been wild fluctuations in the price of oil as small changes in demand set off large shocks in the system.

In Wednesday’s issue of Nature, James Murray of University of Washington and David King of Oxford University argue this sort of volatility is what we can expect going forward, and we’re likely to face it with other fossil fuels as well.

The notion of peak oil is fairly simple: Oil is a finite resource and at some point we simply won’t be able to extract as much as we once did. There is no getting around that limit for any finite resource. The issue that has made peak oil contentious, however, is the debate over when we might actually hit it. Murray and King are not the first to conclude that we’ve already passed the peak. Even as prices have climbed by about 15 percent per year since 2005, production has remained largely flat.

…

“We are not running out of oil,” the authors argue, “but we are running out of oil that can be produced easily and cheaply.”

…

What are the consequences of being stuck at or near peak oil? The authors have produced a graph showing that, while supply is elastic enough to meet demand, prices stay stable. Once demand consistently exceeds supply, prices swing wildly. Murray and King term this a “phase transition” and suggest we’ll be in the volatile phase from here on out.

That has some significant consequences. Of the 11 recessions the United States has experienced since World War II, 10 have been preceded by a sudden change in oil prices. The United States isn’t alone, either. Italy’s entire trade deficit, which has contributed to its financial troubles, can be accounted for by the rise in imported oil. The world, it seems, has allowed its economies to become entirely dependent upon fossil fuels.

“If oil production can’t grow, the implication is that the economy can’t grow either,” the authors write. “This is such a frightening prospect that many have simply avoided considering it.”

…

The commentary concludes that we simply can’t rely on any fossil fuel to provide a stable and economic source of energy for more than a couple of decades. And, given the economic shocks that result from rapid changes in energy prices, that’s a serious problem.

“Economists and politicians continually debate policies that will lead to a return to economic growth,” the authors note. “But because they have failed to recognize that the high price of energy is a central problem, they haven’t identified the necessary solution: weaning society off fossil fuel.”

Check out the rest of the article here.

The New York Times, Scientific American, PhysOrg, and Energy Bulletin all have their own coverage of this important study.

I’ve also attached the chart below from the International Energy Agency’s 2010 World Energy Outlook report. It pegs peak oil as having been reached in 2006. The chart’s white text was added by resilience strategist Chris Martenson in his economic analysis of the report’s implications.  

(Photo source: Wired News)