You may have missed it in the mainstream news media, but statistical societal indicators are reading red across the board. The economic elite have launched an attack on the U.S. public and society is unraveling at an increased rate.

The reason the ecosystem is dying is because corporations look at everything, from human beings to the natural environment, as exploitable commodities.

Tens of millions of the world's poor will have their food rations cut or cancelled in the next few weeks because rich countries have slashed aid funding.

Eighteen months ago, no one dared imagine humanity pushing the climate beyond an additional two degrees C of heating, but rising carbon emissions and inability to agree on cuts has meant science must now consider the previously unthinkable.

In a world of shrinking energy reserves, is Iraq finally fated to become what it was going to be anyway, even before the chaos and catastrophe set in: a giant gas pump for an energy-starved planet?

Iraqi Oil Minister accused of mother of all sell-outs. To public fury, the country is handing over control of its fields to foreign companies.

Obama needs to start putting it on the line in fights against the banks, the energy companies and the healthcare industry.

We heard from representatives of the Peruvian Amazonian peoples about the ongoing protests they were waging, and the repression faced as a result, from their opposition to some of the plans the Peruvian government has for 'developing' the Amazon region and opening it for oil, mineral, logging, and agricultural exploitation.

Climate change kills about 315,000 people a year through hunger, sickness and weather disasters, and the annual death toll is expected to rise to half a million.

After hearing the disturbing news that 76% of Americans don't know what cap-and-trade is, Hank Green over at EcoGeek got his video camera and blue screen out to explain "the most important environmental legislation ever!"

"Companies across Europe are hoarding permits to produce greenhouse gas emissions worth hundreds of millions of pounds, the Guardian can reveal. The surplus credits have been amassed from over-allocation of permits to pollute from the European emissions trading scheme, and by buying cheap credits from carbon-cutting projects in developing countries and holding on to their more expensive official EU allowances. The saved permits can be used to meet future targets to cut the greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming and climate change without actually reducing pollution, or sold for a profit in the future." Tags: Pollution Posted by: ampedstatus

Public belief in climate science has seen a precipitous slide in the US, according to new polling that suggests fewer Americans are concerned about the threat posed by global warming. Nearly half of Americans – 48% – now believe the threat of global warming has been exaggerated, the highest level since polling began 13 years ago, the poll published today by Gallup said. It directly linked the decline in concern to the controversies about media coverage of stolen emails from the University of East Anglia climate research unit and a mistake about the Himalayan glaciers melting by 2035 in the UN's authoritative report on global warming." Tags: Climate change Posted by: ampedstatus

Saltwater pumped deep into the earth in a natural gas mining operation offers a "plausible," though not definitive, explanation for small earthquakes in Texas in 2008 and 2009, scientists say. On Oct. 31, 2008, small (magnitude 3.0) tremblors shook homes in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Similar shakes (3.3) occurred again last May. "The earthquakes were right in our backyard, and quakes don't happen too often in Texas," says seismologist Brian Stump of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, senior author on a Leading Edge journal study. "We usually only get small ones." Tags: oil Extreme Weather Posted by: ampedstatus

Three large aftershocks from last month's massive earthquake struck just as Chile's new president took power, delivering a tangible reminder that the forces that dominated his predecessor's final days will also shape Sebastián Piñera's new conservative administration. Mr. Piñera, a 60-year-old billionaire elected on a pledge to run Chile like a business, was traveling by car to his inauguration in the port city of Valparaiso late Thursday morning when one 6.9 magnitude quake hit. Two more struck later, prompting officials to rush through the swearing-in ceremony, cancel the postinauguration luncheon, and evacuate the congress building of assembled dignitaries, " Tags: Extreme Weather Chile Posted by: ampedstatus

In 2005 General Electric launched their "EcoMagination" campaign, a marketing effort built around selling products that help solve environmental problems and create green jobs. According to GE's CEO Jeffery Immelt "Our Ecomagination initiative has created tens of thousands of jobs at GE and in our supply chain." And if the U.S. steps up and takes the lead on climate mitigation, Immelt promises to "create 250,000 green jobs in the economy." So what are GE's new green jobs of the future going to look like? According to one group of GE "green" workers who have filed a racial discrimination lawsuit in Alabama (complaint below), GE's vision for a green future looks more like a nightmare." Tags: Green Jobs Pollution GE Posted by: ampedstatus

Right now communities in Latin America, as around the world, are suffering a new kind of invasion of their territories. These invaders are not the descendants of the European conquistadores, who appropriated land, gathered slaves and plundered their colonial domains. Nor are they the big finqueros (estate owners) of the 19th and 20th centuries, who expanded their properties by carving up the territories of indigenous peoples and creating vast plantations for the production and export of commodities such as sugar cane, coffee, cacao, banana, henequen, gum, rubber and hardwoods, and who relied on what has been called “indebted servitude”, forced labour under slave-like conditions. The new landowners are not those who brought industrial agriculture into Latin America either, who exploited local people’s ancestral knowledge in order to adapt their methods to the new environment and climate. " Tags: Environmental Justice Posted by: ampedstatus

In her 2002 book titled, Water Wars, noted author, social activist, and ecologist Vandana Shiva called privatizing water: * ecological terrorism; * a global water crisis; * along with overuse, waste and pollution, it can cause “the most pervasive, most severe, and most invisible dimension of the ecological devastation of the earth;” * the road to “an ecological crisis with commercial causes but no market solutions; (they) destroy the earth and aggravate inequality; the solution to an ecological crisis is ecological, and the solution for injustice is democracy;” and * water rights are natural and “usufructuary….water can be used but not owned;” it belongs to everyone as part of the commons as an essential “basis of all life….under customary laws, the right to water has been accepted as a natural, social fact.” Tags: water Economic Death Squad Posted by: ampedstatus

IBM researchers on Tuesday said they have discovered a way to make Earth-friendly plastic from plants that could replace petroleum-based products tough on the environment. The breakthrough promises biodegradable plastics made in a way that saves on energy, according to Chandrasekhar "Spike" Narayan, a manager of science and technology at IBM's Almaden Research Center in Northern California. Almaden and Stanford University researchers said the discovery could herald an era of sustainability for a plastics industry rife with seemingly eternal products notorious for cramming landfills and littering the planet." Tags: no_tag Posted by: ampedstatus

"20+ African countries are selling or leasing land for intensive agriculture on a shocking scale in what may be the greatest change of ownership since the colonial era. " Tags: Africa Economic Death Squad Posted by: ampedstatus

As awareness spreads that lithium is a crucial ingredient for hybrid and electric cars, a global hunt is under way for new supplies of the metal. Toyota Tsusho, the material supplier for the big Japanese automaker, announced a joint venture in January with the Australian miner Orocobre to develop a $100 million lithium project in Argentina. That deal came only days after Magna International, the Canadian car parts company that is helping develop a battery-powered version of the Ford Focus, announced that it was investing $10 million in a small Canadian lithium firm that also has projects in Argentina. " Tags: no_tag Posted by: ampedstatus

Loopholes in the United Nations climate treaties could actually amount to an increase in global climate-warming emissions over the next decade, and must be closed, a draft European Union report shows. European Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard will announce her strategy on Tuesday for advancing international climate talks after the conclusion of a weak deal in Copenhagen in December. An EU report to back that announcement estimates rich countries' current pledges for carbon dioxide cuts will add up to a reduction of between 13.2 percent and 17.8 percent over the next decade. Tags: Climate change Environmental Justice Pollution Posted by: ampedstatus

Major environmental groups are coming under criticism from within their own ranks for taking positions that some say are antithetical to their stated missions of saving the planet. In the latest issue of The Nation magazine, the British journalist Johann Hari writes, “As we confront the biggest ecological crisis in human history, many of the green organizations meant to be leading the fight are busy shoveling up hard cash from the world’s worst polluters—and burying science-based environmentalism in return…In the middle of a swirl of bogus climate scandals trumped up by deniers, here is the real Climategate.” Tags: Climate change Pollution Posted by: ampedstatus

There is one question that no one who denies manmade climate change wants to answer: what would it take to persuade you? In most cases the answer seems to be nothing. No level of evidence can shake the growing belief that climate science is a giant conspiracy codded up by boffins and governments to tax and control us. The new study by the Met Office, which paints an even grimmer picture than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, will do nothing to change this view. The attack on climate scientists is now widening to an all-out war on science. Writing recently for the Telegraph, the columnist Gerald Warner dismissed scientists as "white-coated prima donnas and narcissists … pointy-heads in lab coats [who] have reassumed the role of mad cranks … The public is no longer in awe of scientists. Like squabbling evangelical churches in the 19th century, they can form as many schismatic sects as they like, nobody is listening to them any more."" Tags: Climate change Posted by: ampedstatus

"While astronomers scour the skies for signs of life in outer space, biologists are exploring an enormous living world buried below the surface of the Earth. Scientists estimate that nearly half the living material on our planet is hidden in or beneath the ocean or in rocks, soil, tree roots, mines, oil wells, lakes and aquifers on the continents. They call it the "subsurface biosphere," a dark world where the sun and stars don't shine. Some call it Earth's basement. Tags: no_tag Posted by: ampedstatus

Flanked by forced-out former green jobs czar Van Jones, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) said Monday that creating new jobs in green industries presents the "greatest market opportunity of our generation." Comparing the call to create "green jobs" to former President John F. Kennedy's call for landing a man on the Moon, Gillibrand said at a forum that the nation needs to act in order to inspire the next generation of scientists. "Green jobs" are those in industries that promote environmental protection and energy independence, like energy efficiency, renewable energy and smart energy. With millions of Americans unemployed and global warming threatening the globe, the burgeoning field of green technology could be the nation's next great job creation vehicle." Tags: Green Jobs Posted by: ampedstatus

The United States and Britain are threatening to withhold support for a $3.75 billion World Bank loan for a coal-fired plant in South Africa, expanding the battleground in the global debate over who should pay for clean energy. The opposition by the bank's two largest members has raised eyebrows among those who note that the two advanced economies are allowing development of coal-powered plants in their own countries even as they raise concerns about those in poorer countries. While the loan is still likely to be approved on April 6 by the World Bank board, it has revealed the deep fissures between the world's industrial powers and developing countries over tackling climate change." Tags: Pollution Climate change World Bank Posted by: ampedstatus

For the first time since the dinosaurs disappeared, humans are driving animals and plants to extinction faster than new species can evolve, one of the world's experts on biodiversity has warned. Conservation experts have already signalled that the world is in the grip of the "sixth great extinction" of species, driven by the destruction of natural habitats, hunting, the spread of alien predators and disease, and climate change. However until recently it has been hoped that the rate at which new species were evolving could keep pace with the loss of diversity of life. Speaking in advance of two reports next week on the state of wildlife in Britain and Europe, Simon Stuart, chair of the Species Survival Commission for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature – the body which officially declares species threatened and extinct – said that point had now "almost certainly" been crossed. Tags: extinction Pollution Posted by: ampedstatus

We turned off the main road to Awassa, talked our way past security guards and drove a mile across empty land before we found what will soon be Ethiopia's largest greenhouse. Nestling below an escarpment of the Rift Valley, the development is far from finished, but the plastic and steel structure already stretches over 20 hectares – the size of 20 football pitches. The farm manager shows us millions of tomatoes, peppers and other vegetables being grown in 500m rows in computer controlled conditions. Spanish engineers are building the steel structure, Dutch technology minimises water use from two bore-holes and 1,000 women pick and pack 50 tonnes of food a day. Within 24 hours, it has been driven 200 miles to Addis Ababa and flown 1,000 miles to the shops and restaurants of Dubai, Jeddah and elsewhere in the Middle East. Ethiopia is one of the hungriest countries in the world with more than 13 million people needing food aid, but paradoxically the government is offering at least 3m hectares of its most fertile land to rich countries and some of the world's most wealthy individuals to export food for their own populations." Tags: Africa food crisis water Posted by: ampedstatus

Methane is leaking into the atmosphere from unstable permafrost in the Arctic Ocean faster than scientists had thought and could worsen global warming, a study said. From 2003 to 2008, an international research team led by University of Alaska-Fairbanks scientists Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov surveyed the waters of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, which covers more than 772,200 square miles (two million square kilometers) of seafloor in the Arctic Ocean. "This discovery reveals a large but overlooked source of methane gas escaping from permafrost underwater, rather than on land," the study said. Tags: Pollution Climate change Posted by: ampedstatus

Climate scientists hit back at the sceptics today with new research they say has uncovered the “fingerprint” of man-made global warming. Researchers working like detectives investigating a crime compared real observational evidence with data from computer simulations to see how they matched up. They concluded there was an “increasingly remote possibility” of human behaviour not being the chief driver of climate change. The clues were unravelled using a forensic technique called “optimal detection” in which different factors – natural and human – were given equal consideration." Tags: Climate change Pollution Posted by: ampedstatus