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What A Week It Was: Apocadocuments from
View By Scenario:
Species Collapse:(3)
Plague/Virus:(4)
Climate Chaos:(5)
Resource Depletion: (6)
Biology Breach:(11)
Recovery:(15)
This Week's Top Ten Very Scary Tags:
contamination  ~ alternative energy  ~ climate impacts  ~ toxic buildup  ~ efficiency increase  ~ ecosystem interrelationships  ~ water issues  ~ smart policy  ~ economic myopia  ~ global warming  ~ carbon emissions  



ApocaDocuments (6) for the "Resource Depletion" scenario from this week
[see full week] ~ [see full Resource Depletion scenario and stories]
Sat, Jun 6, 2009
from Alternet:
California's Water Woes Threaten the Entire Country's Food Supply
...Here are some not-so-fun facts: California's agricultural sector grows approximately one-third of the nation's food supply and is nourished by diverted rivers and streams filled yearly by runoff from its prodigious Sierra Nevada snowpack, as well as groundwater pumping and other less-reliable methods. That snowpack -- which once sparked the first, but not the last, water war that helped transform a semi-arid Los Angeles into an unsustainable oasis less populous than only New York City -- is disappearing fast...To make matters worse, a crushing drought, now well into its third year, has made simply everything problematic. In California's central valley, home to a majority of the state's agricultural output, farmers are leaving hundreds of thousands of acres fallow, and the resultant economic depression is having a domino effect that could cost California $1 billion to start and is causing residents of a one-time food powerhouse to go hungry. ...


"An unsustainable oasis"... sounds like planet Earth to me!

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Thu, Jun 4, 2009
from University of Maryland, via EurekAlert:
Study: Illegal fishing harming present and future New England groundfish fisheries
Weak enforcement combined with fishermen facing serious economic hardships are leading to widespread violations of fisheries regulations along the Northeastern United States coast. This pattern of noncompliance threatens the success of new fisheries management measures put in place to protect and restore fish stocks, according to a new study published online this week in the journal Marine Policy.... nearly a doubling of the percent of total harvest taken illegally over the last two decades in the Northeast multispecies groundfish fishery (NEGF).... "To many fishermen, the current situation has reached an economic and moral tipping point where the potential economic gains from illegal fishing far outweigh the expected cost of getting caught." ...


When your kids are hungry, you eat your seed corn.

ApocaDoc
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Tue, Jun 2, 2009
from Telegraph.co.uk:
600ft jellyfish crop circle found in Oxfordshire field
Karen Alexander, a crop circle expert, said: "We have seen butterfly and bird patterns in the past, but this is the first jellyfish crop circle in the world.... It is absolutely huge -- roughly three times the size of most crop patterns and extremely interesting. People have been aghast at the size of it. It is a complete monster. "We are looking into the meaning of it, but at present it just seems to have appeared out of nowhere." Crop circle theorists known as 'croppies' - believe the patterns are created by UFOs during nocturnal visits, or caused by natural phenomena such as unusual forms of lightning striking the earth. But it has been proven the patterns can be easily created by artists. ...


Could this be Gaia saying "this is where you're heading, guys..."?

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Tue, Jun 2, 2009
from CNET:
Nobel laureate: Wind is not the future
While the Obama administration has expressed increasing hopes that wind power will play a key role in America's future energy system, one of the world's leading scientists is ruling out the technology. Jack Steinberger, the 1968 Nobel Prize winner in physics and director of CERN's particle-physics laboratory, spoke at a conference of Nobel laureates at the 350-year-old Royal Society in London last week.... The reason? Wind power still requires backup power when the wind isn't blowing, and that decreases its contribution to emissions reductions.... On the other hand, solar thermal power--where collectors concentrate sunlight using mirrors and lenses to produce electric power and heat--is already economical and can handle the storage problem, he said. The heat produced can be stored, enabling solar thermal plants to produce electricity during hours without sunlight. Steinberger now wants funding for a big pilot project. The idea is to link solar thermal power from Northern Africa to Europe via high-voltage undersea cables. The proposed 3- to 3.5-gigawatt power plant would cost an estimated $32 billion to build. ...


$32 billion would buy a lot of small home wind generators.

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Tue, Jun 2, 2009
from Bloomberg News:
Wood Is New Coal as Polluters Use Carbon-Eating Trees
Power companies are burning more trees because the renewable fuel can be cheaper than coal and ignited without needing permits to release carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas blamed for global warming.... Industrialized nations drew 4 percent of their energy from biomass in 2006, the most recent data available from the IEA. That was the equivalent of about 1.1 billion barrels of oil. Chips of wood stumps and branches, heated to 400 degrees Celsius (750 degrees Fahrenheit) at the Novus furnace, are as efficient as coal and cheaper: European Union rules don’t require carbon-dioxide permits because the trees absorbed a like amount of the gas before harvest, making them carbon-neutral.... Trees like pine retain an advantage over wind and solar energy as being readily convertible into power, heat and transportation fuel. "We're really only at the beginning of using biomass efficiently," German Green Party member Juergen Trittin, a former environment minister and parliamentarian, said in an interview. ...


Carbon neutral is better than coal's carbon horrendous... but can we get "carbon positive"?

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Mon, Jun 1, 2009
from Mongabay:
Nike, Unilever, Burger King, IKEA may unwittingly contribute to Amazon destruction, says Greenpeace
Major international companies are unwittingly driving the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest through their purchases of leather, beef and other products supplied from the Brazil cattle industry, alleges a new report from Greenpeace. The report, Slaughtering the Amazon, is based on a three-year undercover investigation of the Brazilian cattle industry, which accounts for 80 percent of Amazon deforestation and roughly 14 percent of the world's annual forest loss. Greenpeace found that Brazilian beef companies are important suppliers of raw materials used by leading global brands, including Adidas/Reebok, Nike, Carrefour, Eurostar, Unilever, Johnson and Johnson, Toyota, Honda, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Prada, IKEA, Kraft, Tesco and Wal-Mart, among others. ...


Does that make me unwittingly complicit, just by buying crap?

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