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Gary Boyd's List: Crisis in the Making

  • American Collapse

    • UPDATE 12/25/08: A number of tragic events in the past several years have exposed the multiple costs of continuing to neglect our deteriorating infrastructure: to human lives, to quality of life, to the economy, to the future health and competitive prospects of our country. President-elect Barack Obama is working with Congress to put together a New-Dealish economic stimulus package that could total $850 billion, with a big chunk of those funds dedicated to projects that will repair, rebuild, and upgrade the nation's infrastructure.

  • The Oil Drum | Discussions about Energy and Our Future

    • The Peak Oil Crisis: Confusion In the Markets

      If you don't understand what is going on with the price of gasoline and demand for the world's oil supply, then join the club.


      Analysts, pundits, government officials, oil ministers, oil executives, and oil traders are all over the board in trying to explain what is happening and more importantly what is going to happen. Some are saying that $30 oil will be with us until the economy recovers while others are talking of a spike to $200 in 2009.

  • The Heat Is Online

    • Beyond the Point of No Return            

                            


      It's too late to stop climate change -- so what do we do now? 


       


      As the pace of global warming kicks into overdrive, the hollow optimism of climate activists, along with the desperate responses of some of the world's most prominent climate scientists, are preventing us from focusing on the survival requirements of the human enterprise.


       


      The environmental establishment continues to peddle the notion that we can solve the climate problem.


       


      We can't.


       


      We have failed to meet nature's deadline. In the next few years, this world will experience progressively more ominous and destabilizing changes.  These will happen either incrementally -- or in sudden, abrupt jumps.


               


      Under either scenario, it seems inevitable that we will soon be confronted by water shortages, crop failures, increasing damages from extreme weather events, collapsing infrastructures, and, potentially, breakdowns in the democratic process itself.

    • We are all adrift in the same boat -- and there's no way half the boat is going to sink.

  • Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler : Change You Won't Believe

    • The economy we're moving into will have to be one of real work, producing real things of value, at a scale consistent with energy resource reality. I'm convinced that farming will come much closer to the center of economic life, as the death of petro-agribusiness makes food production a matter of life and death in America -- as opposed to the disaster of metabolic entertainment it is now. Reorganizing the landscape itself for this finer-scaled new type of farming is a task fraught with political peril (land ownership questions being historically one of the main reasons that societies fall into revolution). The public is completely unprepared for this kind of change. We still think that "the path to success" is based on getting a college degree certifying people for a lifetime of sitting in an office cubicle. This is so far from the approaching reality that it will be eventually viewed as a sick joke -- like those old 1912 lithographs of mega-cities with Zeppelins plying the air between Everest-size skyscrapers.

  • Restoring Mayberry: Sprouts

    • Supporting yourself generally requires land, tools, weeding, composting, practice, and finally the months of waiting for things to finish growing.
    • The Chinese have sprouted for at least 5,000 years, and many Westerners have found growing sprouts an easy source of nutrition in lean times. Captain Cook used sprouting as a source of Vitamin C to avoid scurvy on long ocean voyages, as did soldiers in World War I and Indians during the famine of the 1930s. Sprouts are also high in protein – seven cups have an average person’s daily recommended allowance.

  • Hundreds of Coal Ash Dumps Lack Significant Regulation - NYTimes.com

    • The coal ash pond that ruptured and sent a billion gallons of toxic sludge across 300 acres of East Tennessee last month was only one of more than 1,300 similar dumps across the United States — most of them unregulated and unmonitored — that contain billions more gallons of fly ash and other byproducts of burning coal.
    • Like the one in Tennessee, most of these dumps, which reach up to 1,500 acres, contain heavy metals like arsenic, lead, mercury and selenium, which are considered by the Environmental Protection Agency to be a threat to water supplies and human health. Yet they are not subject to any federal regulation, which experts say could have prevented the spill, and there is little monitoring of their effects on the surrounding environment.
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  • Crops absorb livestock antibiotics, science shows — Environmental Health News

    • For half a century, meat producers have fed antibiotics to farm animals to increase their growth and stave off infections. Now scientists have discovered that those drugs are sprouting up in unexpected places.

      Vegetables such as corn, potatoes and lettuce absorb antibiotics when grown in soil fertilized with livestock manure, according to tests conducted at the University of Minnesota.

      Today, close to 70 percent of the total antibiotics and related drugs produced in the United States are fed to cattle, pigs and poultry, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. Although this practice sustains a growing demand for meat, it also generates public health fears associated with the expanding presence of antibiotics in the food chain.

    • People have long been exposed to antibiotics in meat and milk. Now, the new research shows that they also may be ingesting them from vegetables, perhaps even ones grown on organic farms
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  • Ketzel Uprooted: HORTIDEAS For the Hard Core Horthead

    • HORTIDEAS For the Hard Core Horthead




      This is the 25th year anniversary of a horticulturally intense, informative and ultra-geeky newsletter called HortIdeas. The Big News is that its founders Greg & Pat Williams are now offering online subscriptions as well as a free online sample. All you gotta do is ask.

      If this is the first you've heard of HortIdeas, let me introduce you to some classic content:

      Earthworms and Water Pollution from Farm Fields
      It seems hard to believe, but intentional destruction of earthworms might become a routine practice of commercial growers worried about chemical and/or microbial pollutants from their fields reaching streams and rivers.
      That’s because evidence is accumulating that chemicals applied to the soil in fertilizers and pesticides, as well as microorganisms in manure, can move quickly to subsurface drainage pipe networks via “macropores” made by earthworms.
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