More bicycles than cars were sold in the United States over the past 12 months the US Chamber of Commerce reports, with rising gas prices prompting commuters to opt for two wheels instead of four. Not since the oil crisis… Read moreBicycle sales overtake cars
The new resident reactionary on the New York Times op-ed page, John Tierney, boasts in his Aug. 23 column, entitled “The $10,000 Question,” that he has made a five-grand wager with Matthew Simmons, author of Twilight in the Desert: The… Read moreOil shock: denial in the New York Times
An Aug. 11 story from NewScientist.com notes recent findings by scientists that the world’s largest frozen peat bog is melting. An area stretching for a million square kilometres across the permafrost of western Siberia is turning into a mass of… Read moreSiberian permafrost melting
The annual Hiroshima Peace Declaration, delivered this year by the city’s Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba, explicitly calls the nuclear powers to task for not living up to their committments under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The historic 60th anniversary of the dawn of… Read moreHiroshima Peace Declaration: nuclear powers “jeopardize human survival”
From Scientific American, Aug. 4: In the spring of 2002, a large chunk of the Larsen B ice shelf (LIS-B) on the Antarctic Peninsula broke off and tumbled into the Weddell Sea. A new analysis published today in the journal… Read moreAntarctic ice shelf collapse “unprecedented”
Daniel Yergin, author of the Pulitzer-winning history of the petroleum industry, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power, was recently invoked by New York Times columnist Bob Herbert to drive home the point that the Persian Gulf… Read moreYergin rains on “peak oil” parade
No, we aren’t being sarcastic. The Space Shuttle “Discovery”—the first sent into flight since the Shuttle fleet was grounded following the mid-flight destruction of the “Columbia” in 2003—succeeded in docking at the International Space Station this week, but only after… Read moreNASA grounds Shuttle; outer space temporarily safe from US imperialist aggression
A very interesting story today cites poll results on American versus Japanese attitudes about the likelihood of a new world war, even if random guy-on-the-street quotes are by definition never presented objectively. It is certainly very telling that Americans are… Read moreWhich world war is this?
Shades of Soylent Green. “The plankton is dying!” From AP July 14, via TruthOut: Scientists Raise Alarm about Ocean Health SEATTLE – With a record number of dead seabirds washing up on West Coast beaches from Central California to British… Read moreMeanwhile, the oceans are dying…
A friend writes on the Car Free Cities list: Terrorism, Transit and Public Safety: Evaluating The Risks In 2002 according to statistics 1,000,000 people were killed by cars: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_accident For 2003, 2004 and 2005 the numbers are (will be) higher… Read moreStatistics: cars worse than terrorism
News reports of the Deep Impact space probe’s explosive Independence Day rendezvous with a comet could not have made clearer that the whole affair was barely-disguised patriotic propaganda, very convenient at a time when the Iraq war is turning into… Read moreDeep Impact: “science” as propaganda
As we noted yesterday, reportage on the oil market jittters sparked by the Iran elections included a quote from one analyst predicting an imminent rise to $100 a barrel. This ominous figure is being heard more and more. The Wall… Read more“Peak oil” hits mainstream
