(photo: Shutterstock)

Kepler Chevreux, a French investment bank, has produced a fascinating analysis that has dramatic implications for the global oil industry. The investment bank estimates that $100 billion invested in either wind energy or solar energy – and deployed as energy for light and commercial vehicles – will produce significantly more energy than that same $100 billion invested in oil.

The implications, needless to say, are dramatic. It would signal the end of Big Oil, and the demise of an industry that has dominated the global economy and geo-politics, for the last few decades. And the need for it to reshape its business model around renewables, as we discuss here.

‘If we are right, the implications would be momentous,” writes Kepler Chevreux analyst Mark Lewis.

‘It would mean that the oil industry faces the risk of stranded assets not only under a scenario of falling oil prices brought about by the structurally lower demand entailed by a future tightening of climate policy, but also under a scenario of rising oil prices brought about by increasingly constrained supply. […]

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There is an adage commonly spoken in many activist circles: Think global, act local. And several communities across the Northwest, linked together in their opposition to coal transports by concern for the health of their communities and of the planet, are aiming to do just that.

Feeling the squeeze of reduced demand for coal in the United States, a series of companies have proposed coal transportation projects that would see dozens of trains filled with Powder River Basin coal – one of the world’s largest deposits of the fuel – wind through hundreds of communities every day before arriving in Northwest ports for export to Asia. Since the terminals would help to bring hundreds of millions of tons of dirty fuel to the global market, the carbon impact would be profound. Coal from just three of originally six proposed terminals would, according to the Center for American Progress, ‘result in the same annual increase in carbon pollution as adding approximately 35 million new passenger cars to the road.”

As such, blocking these terminals has been called ‘just as important as KXL [the Keystone XL pipeline]” by Bill McKibben, who says it’s ‘one of the most crucial fights for American climate activists to […]

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Photo by Quinn Dombrowski / Flickr.

Since the first community supported agriculture program was established in western Massachusetts in the 1980s, the concept of buying food directly from local farms has taken off. There are now thousands of CSAs across the country. It’s a simple enough model-consumers purchase a share of the season’s harvest upfront, and they get a box or bag of fresh, locally grown produce each week from the farm.

And this model is not restricted to farming. In recent years, people have applied the CSA idea to other types of goods and services such as dining out, microbrews, and even fish. It’s a system that works for both producers and consumers. Here are some of our favorite examples.
Community supported breweries

According to the Brewers Association, there were nearly 1,500 microbreweries in the United States in 2013, a 23 percent increase over the 2012 count. As craft beer becomes ever more popular, some breweries have adopted the farm CSA model to offer customers exclusive access to their favorite local […]

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WASHINGTON – The Middle East’s seemingly endless conflicts are diverting attention and resources from a graver long-term threat that looms over the whole region: the growing scarcity of water. And the situation will get worse before it gets better – if it ever does get better.

Years of war, careless water supply management, unchecked population growth, ill-advised agricultural policies, and subsidies that encourage consumption have turned a basically arid part of the world into a voracious consumer of water. The trajectory is not sustainable.

Those were the gloomy if unsurprising conclusions of a three-day conference on the subject in Istanbul last week. From Libya to Iraq to Yemen, too many people and too many animals have stretched water resources beyond their limits. Some countries where the urgency is greatest, including Syria and Yemen, are the least equipped to stave off serious water crises.

Jordan, always short of water, has been overwhelmed by a flood of refugees from Syria. Iraq, which once had ample water, has lost critical supplies to war and to dams built by Turkey upstream on the Tigris and Euphrates.

Egypt has twice as many people as it did 50 years ago, with no additional water resources. The isolated Gaza strip has […]

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It’s easy to let your head explode looking at new numbers showing how much time Congress spent in session in 2013. The House broke a record this year, working the fewest hours in a nonelection year since 2005, at an average of just about 28 hours a week (or 942 total), according to The New York Times. The Senate spent just 99 days voting this year, near a 1991 low of 95 days.

When you look at how many hours comparable Americans on average spend working or on work related activities, Congress’s record seems pretty bad on its face. According to the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data, employed people ages 25-54 with children spent 8.8 hours per average work day on work or work related activities in 2012. For a five-day week, that averages out to 44 hours a week. Of course, not all Americans just work on weekdays. For all employed Americans, 34 percent worked on weekends in 2012.

That sure makes it seem like working in Congress is a pretty cushy gig. But that would […]

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