World Overpopulation Awareness

Why Are American Teens So Ignorant About Sex and Birth Control and Benefits of Obamacare

A recent Guttmacher study on contraceptive knowledge found that the "lower the level of contraceptive knowledge among young women", (ages 18-29) "the greater the likelihood that they expected to have unprotected sex in the next three months, behavior that puts them at risk for an unplanned pregnancy," which tells us that access to factual information helps prevent risky behavior.

"Proponents of abstinence-only programs believe that providing information about the health benefits of condoms or contraception contradicts their message of abstinence-only and undermines its impact. As such, abstinence-only programs provide no information about contraception beyond failure rates," Advocates for Youth reports. That explains the results of the survey: 60% underestimated the effectiveness of oral contraceptives and 40% believed that using birth control does not matter." And also explains the CDC finding that 31.4% of pregnant teens didn't use contraception because they "thought they could not get pregnant at the time."

The Affordable Care Act may help correct this. There is the mandate that insurance policies cover all FDA-approved contraceptive methods, but there's also free education and counseling about sex and contraception, at least for the insured. The mandate will also make it far easier for women to get longer-acting and more effective forms of contraception like the IUD — which are also more expensive and which studies have shown women would be interested in if they could afford them. Incidentally, women who are using long-acting or regular hormonal contraception tend to score higher on overall knowledge, the Guttmacher study found.

How much these changes will change the nation's unparalleled rate of unintended pregnancy will not be known for some time. Womens health provisions go into effect August 2012 as older plans are grandfathered and then phased out. That is, of course, unless the Supreme Court overturns all or part of the Affordable Care Act. The Center for American Progress recently declared Obamacare "the greatest legislative advancement for women's health in a generation."

In addition to the reproductive health benefits, the report points to preventive care recommendations for which cost-sharing has already been cut: mammograms, pap smears, prenatal care and so on. According to the report, "close to 9 million women will gain coverage for maternity care in the individual market starting in 2014," currently not covered in 78% of plans sold on the individual market. It notes that women are more frequent users of healthcare services than men, that they're likelier to make the household decisions on healthcare and that they're more vulnerable to losing coverage because they're likelier to be listed as dependents on a partner's plan. The Affordable Care Act also makes it illegal to engage in “gender rating" - charging women $1 billion more than men on the individual market - and bans states from discriminating on the basis of gender identity in their insurance exchanges.

Melinda Gates Wants Family Planning Back on the Global Agenda - Video

Melinda Gates has decided to make birth control her signature issue. "My goal is to get this back on the global agenda," she said in an interview with Newsweek. She is the co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation - the richest in the world; chances are she can do it. Perhaps Gates can do for family planning what Al Gore did for climate change.

215 million women around the world want to avoid pregnancy but aren't currently using modern birth control. As Gates explained "This is a life-and-death crisis. Every year, 100,000 women who don't want to be pregnant die in childbirth. About 600,000 women who don't want to be pregnant give birth to a baby who dies in her first month of life. I know everybody wants to save these mothers and babies."

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has funded family-planning projects since its inception in 1999, but it hasn't been a major focus until now. Melinda Gates says that in her travels over the world on behalf of the foundation, she heard over and over again from women in developing countries that they need consistent access to reliable birth control.

Gates says that contraception shouldn't be controversial. "We're not talking about abortion," ... "We're not talking about population control. What I'm talking about is giving women the power to save their lives, to save their children's lives, and to give their families the best possible future." Newsweek said that Gates hopes to "re-create the former broad-based consensus behind global family planning, but in a way that's focused on women's needs rather than on demographics."

The foundation has launched a No Controversy website - http://nocontroversy.tedxchange.org/ - where people can post their answers to the question, "How have contraceptives changed your life?" And it also has a NoControversy hashtag on Twitter.

Gates was raised a Catholic and did a lot of soul-searching before she was ready to champion the issue publicly. Without promoting contraception for women who want to avoid pregnancy, she said, "we're not serving the other piece of the Catholic mission, which is social justice."

98% of Catholic women in the U.S. use modern birth control, just as Gates herself did when she spaced out the births of her three children.

The Gates Foundation is cosponsoring a family-planning summit for world leaders in London in July, working in tandem with British government and the U.N. Population Fund. The foundation is also investing in research on new contraceptives, like one where women could inject themselves, and also one that works without hormones, or an implantable device that would be turned off or on at will - by the woman -, and that you could put it in, and it could last a woman's reproductive lifetime."

Judge Permanently Blocks Oklahoma's Ban on Medication Abortion and Treatment of Ectopic Pregnancies

In an unprecedented ruling recognizing bodily integrity and reproductive choice as fundamental rights under the Oklahoma state constitution, an Oklahoma state judge has found that a law severely and arbitrarily restricting medical care for women seeking an abortion is unconstitutional and cannot be enforced. Women seeking abortions in Oklahoma will continue to have access to non-invasive treatment options that use medications.

Judge Worthington ruled that the bill's restrictions on medication abortion are unconstitutional because they are "so completely at odds with the standard that governs the practice of medicine that [the bill] can serve no purpose other than to prevent women from obtaining abortions and to punish and discriminate against those women who do."

More than 1.4 million women in the U.S. have chosen to safely end an early pregnancy through medication abortion since mifepristone was approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration in 2000, and reams of scientific data clearly show that medication abortion is highly safe and effective.

Protect Our Federal Lands From Fracking

The natural gas industry thinks it's fair to frack up our federal lands and tell us about it later -- 30 days after the drilling has taken place! The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the largest manager of oil and gas resources in the country, just released a set a rules for fracking on our federal lands with plenty of room for improvement. Right now, the natural gas industry is lobbying to weaken safeguards, and we need you to tell BLM they can do better.

The improvements are common sense -- people should know what chemicals are used in fracking before drilling takes place, diesel fuel (a known carcinogen) should be banned from use in fracking, open pits of toxic chemicals are not safe, and fracking should not take place on our most sensitive lands.

https to give BLM for your input now.

Stop the Amazon Chainsaw Massacre

Twenty percent of the world's oxygen comes from the magnificent Amazon rainforest, and it plays a key role in mitigating global climate change. While there Brazil has achieved a 78% decline in deforestation rates between 2004 and 2011, due to a world-acclaimed forestry law, strong enforcement and satellite monitoring this dangerous new bill would open up an area the size of France and Britain together to clear-cutting and gives loggers amnesty for all past deforestation crimes. This would set a bad precedent for other countries.

Brazil rapidly developing, battling to lift tens of millions out of poverty. Despite evidence that growth does not require deforestation, a powerful agriculture lobby pressuring President Dilma . Activists are being murdered, intimidated and silenced. Ex-Environmental Ministers and people across Brazil have sent a clear message to Dilma that they want to save the Amazon. We can bring the global force of people power to get a win for our planet!

Click here to sign the petition which will be delivered by Brazil's former Environment Ministers directly to Dilma.

"Energy-Smart" Agriculture Needed to Escape Fossil Fuel Trap -- FAO Paper Published During UN Climate Change Conference Highlights How Food Sector Can Tackle Energy Challenges to Safeguard a Food-secure Future

The food sector accounts for approximately 30% of global energy consumption — and produces over 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

"There is justifiable concern that the current dependence of the food sector on fossil fuels may limit the sector's ability to meet global food demands. The challenge is to decouple food prices from fluctuating and rising fossil fuel prices."

The food sector both requires energy and can produce energy — an energy-smart approach to agriculture offers a way to take better advantage of this dual relationship between energy and food, it says.

(Originally published 29 November 2011)

In Case You Didn't Know: Increased Life Span Accounts for One-half of US Population Growth

In 2007, the former U.S. Census Director from 1994-1998, Martha Farnsworth Riche, said video that immigration accounts for maybe 1/2 of the U.S. population growth, the birth rate is at replacement level, and the primary source of population growth occurs because people are not dying as young as they used to. The video is from an online course called the Habitable Planet.

Click here for the link to video (see minute 14:35).

Forget Global Warming and Move Up to Real Climate Change

Deputy Director of the IEA , Ambassador Richard Jones, said at the IEA 'Clean Energy Progress' conference that global temperatures may rise by "6 degrees celsius" by 2050. Many people dispute this claim, including Fritz Vahrenholt, a former leading figure of the German environmental movement who wrote the book: 'Die Kalte Sonne' (The Cold or Cooling Sun).

Vehrenhol, while affirming climate change, is highly critical of current global warming theory. He does supports the idea of 'Energiewende' or Energy Transformation, but says the current German approach is too costly, technologically uncertain. running much too fast and could wind up counterproductive. Germany national biodiversity is being threatened with forests being hacked up to produce biomass and build windfarms.

Global warming proponents consider this rush to renewables imperious because of a) global warming, and b) the high cost of oil and gas imports. Coal seems to be left out of the picture, but they consider other European imports as bad for European trade balances and expensive. Vehrenholt is convinced that CO2 and global warming are being exaggerated: he says we have a lot more time, and more options for developing genuinely sustainable solutions.

He says a lot of climate change depends on the influence of the sun's energy cycles and whether or not we are moving into a longer-term period of low activity sunspot cycles, in which case global temperatures could drop significantly.

In addition, he claims we should not be Ignoring the other and real anthropogenic causes of climate change, especially deforestation and monocrop agriculture over 148 million sq kms of the earth's surface.

Vahrenholt was the CEO of RWE Innogy, which had a renewable energy subsidiary, is a major user of nuclear power, an oil producer, and also the biggest German producer of coal- and lignite-based electricity. Critics conclude from this that Vahrenholt is simply furthering RWE's corporate interests. But Vahrenholt was also CEO of REpower Systems, a wind energy company whose competitors are Vestas and QCells -- QCells, once German and world leader in solar PV production is now in receivership and the Vestas share price is down about 75% in 12 months.Vahrenholt says the basic reason for this was the industry was going too fast, in a casino capitalist market system with no safety nets and where only expansion succeeds.

In his book Vahrenholt tells us that wind power is being affected by deforestation and agriculture development, giving the examples of the the Hadley Cell -- the main driver of all equatorial and lower latitude circulation of air and humidity -- and the Walker-Hadley climate system, both which are weakened by wind speed and frequency reduction due to massive ongoing deforestation and agriculture development, causing radical changes of albedo and average humidity, and directly reducing wind speeds. This concerns Earth-sized chunks of the planet - all the tropical forest areas and is known for at least 25 years. These weakening and more variable wind regimes overturn longstanding cycles of the global climate system, which feature in UN IPCC global warming models, such as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). This is a natural cycle with a period of about 60 years, split into two 30-year subcycles of more wind in winter, for 30 years, and then less - with much colder winters when there is less wind. Tropical forest deforestation has already eliminated 8 million square kilometres of forest on the 16 million total that the Earth had for at least 50 000 years until 100 years ago.

Vehrenholt also claims that the UN IPCC wants to ignore natural climatic variation, such as the 'Medieval Warm Period', around the year 1000 when the Vikings settled in Greenland and were able to live there for a couple of centuries, followed after a 300 year interval by the so-called 'Little Ice Age', starting about 1695. The IPPC claims the Little Ice Age was just a local European phenomena, but many experts claim it was not.

IPCC is a political organization; many of its 31 members are developing countries mostly interested in investment in their energy sector. IPPC should be looking at black carbon emissions, from burning wood and animal dung, which growing evidence shows may contribute at least 50% of the imputed or claimed effect of CO2.

Vahrenholt claims Germany's biomass production -- mainly rapeseed and maize -- could grow to take as much as 20% of all agricultural land. This will be monocrop agribusiness farming, producing almost zero (or even negative) net energy yield. In addition he says that Germany and some other EU states - especially the UK - claim they will or may import wheat and maize, as well as palm oil for biofuel from tropical forest land in Indonesia.

Countries are dropping out of the Kyoto accord. China contributes 25% of global CO2 emissions and its share will grow rapidly. Carbon correct and running a trade surplus is becoming difficult.

Also mentioned in the book are the inadequacies of the smart grid/super grid default solution and no alternative.

More important however -- something that the book skates around -- is that, with the IPCC bending the figures to suit its CO2 theory, we must not overlook that "climate is above all real, is anthropogenic, and is dangerous".

Two Bills - HB 2625 and HB 2800 - Before Gov. Jan Brewer Would Directly Restrict Arizonans' Ability to Make Private and Personal Medical Decisions. Brewer Should Veto Both.

HB 2625 would allow organizations to declare themselves "a religiously affiliated employer" and refuse to include contraception in their health-insurance plans. The "religiously affiliated" distinction is a step back from the original version, which allowed any employer to declare a religious objection. However it still allows employers to impose their personal religious beliefs on another.

HB 2800, would strip any public funding from any organization that provides abortion services, even though it is already illegal for agencies to use public money to pay for those services. Health-care organizations such as Planned Parenthood would be prohibited from receiving taxpayer money to provide any type of family planning services.

HB 2625 would allow employers to refuse to cover "any prescribed drug or device" used as a contraceptive, as well as "consultations, examinations, procedures and medical services provided on an outpatient basis and related to prescription contraceptive methods to prevent unintended pregnancies."

There is no exemption for surgical procedures - such as a vasectomy - that are intended specifically to prevent a man from inseminating a woman and causing a pregnancy. So it's not only women's bodies that Arizona Republican lawmakers want to control - they want to interfere with men's private medical decisions, too.

While HB 2800 names abortion services as the determining factor in taking away medical agencies' public funding, the result would directly affect men as well. Planned Parenthood, for example, provides testing for HIV, testing and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases as well as urinary-tract infections.

Taxpayer dollars do not fund abortion services. This bill would deprive Arizonans of needed medical care, because organizations like Planned Parenthood also provide cancer screenings, pregnancy testing and family-planning services.

These bills affect all Arizonans who want to make medical decisions with the guidance of their doctors rather than Republicans in the Legislature.

Just as a woman has myriad reasons to decide to prevent a pregnancy, so does a man. And he has just as much right to make his own personal health-care decisions as a woman does.

Brewer should protect all Arizonans' ability to make their own private and personal health-care decisions and veto both bills.

Call Gov. Jan Brewer's Tucson office at 628-6580, or call Phoenix toll-free at 1-800-253-0883. Or email her using the form on her website: azgovernor.gov/contact.asp

Population by Lat and Population by Long

Interesting population graphs showing how population is grouped at varying latitudes and longitudes

Oklahoma Personhood Measure Struck Down by Supreme Court

The Oklahoma Supreme Court unanimously vetoed a ballot measure that would have given embryos full personhood rights on Monday, ruling it "clearly unconstitutional" because it would block a woman's legal right to have an abortion.

The personhood measure would give embryos the same legal rights as people from the moment of fertilization, which opponents say would ban abortion and complicate the legality of in vitro fertilization and many forms of birth control. The U.S. Supreme Court's 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey allows states to pass some abortion restrictions but prevents them from overturning the constitutional right to end a pregnancy. The personhood measure would have violated that decision.

Why Women Are a Foreign Policy Issue; the Most Pressing Global Problems Simply Won't Be Solved Without the Participation of Women

Melanne Verveer is the U.S. State Department's ambassador at large for global women's issues. In meeting with a group of Afghan women activists in Kabul, one of the women requested: "Please don't see us as victims, but look to us as the leaders we are."

For generations, the United States too often viewed the world's women as victims of poverty and illiteracy, of violence and seemingly unbreakable cultural traditions -- essentially, as beneficiaries of aid. Now that there has been a transformative change -- from the rise of new economic powers to a growing chorus of voices against repressive regimes in the Arab world -- promoting the status of women is not just a moral imperative but a strategic one; it's essential to economic prosperity and to global peace and security. In other words, it is a strategy for a smarter foreign policy.

Peace talks took place which left women out of negotiating rooms and treaty documents, an omission that weakened the chances of forging durable peace agreements. Development programs were designed without consulting women or considering the crucial role they played, whether it was agricultural training initiatives that targeted men even though women often represented the majority of small farmers, or building wells in areas where women could not go, never mind that women were the ones responsible for fetching water.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is working to ensure that advancing the status of women and girls around the world is fully integrated into every aspect of U.S. foreign policy. Advancing the status of women and girls worldwide is now officially a requirement in every U.S. diplomat's job description.

Those countries that deny women basic human rights are some of the poorest and least stable. Countries where men and women are closer to enjoying equal rights are far more economically competitive than those where the gender gap has left women and girls with limited or no access to medical care, education, elected office, and the marketplace, according to the World Economic Forum.

Goldman Sachs researchers found that closing the gender gap between male and female employment would be a powerful engine for global growth, even in the United States and the eurozone, where it could boost GDP by billions of dollars. The Economist has reported that the increase in employment among women in developed countries contributed more to global GDP growth than China as a whole in recent years.

Many women still lack access to capital, credit, and training and are prevented from inheriting or owning land. Cultural traditions inhibit women's participation in the formal economy. FAO estimates that if women farmers were provided the same access to seeds, fertilizer, and technology as men, they could improve their yields by 20 - 30% and reduce the number of undernourished people in the world by 100 million to 150 million.

In the 1990s, nearly half of all peace agreements failed within the first five years, according to the Human Security Report Project. Women, meanwhile, endure much of the residual violence and poverty caused by armed conflicts, and they bear much of the burden of rebuilding families and communities. Less than 8% of the hundreds of peace treaties signed in the last 20 years were negotiated by delegations that included women, and according to the World Economic Forum, women hold less than 20%of all national decision-making positions.

In 1994 the Lusaka Protocol ended two decades of civil war in Angola. The commission established to implement the protocol consisted of 40 men -- and no women. While there were demobilization programs for ex-combatants, there were no programs for the thousands of women who had been kidnapped and forced to work as military cooks, messengers, or sex slaves. Efforts were focused on roads and failed to target the fields, wells, and forests where women grew crops, fetched water, and gathered firewood.

In Egypt last year, women marched on the front lines of the protests, often leading their fathers, brothers, and husbands into Tahrir Square. A year later, the courageous women of the Arab Spring fear not just that progress on women's rights will halt, but that the rights they currently enjoy will be rolled back.

In Afghanistan the number of women attending school and serving in parliament and on local peace councils has increased dramatically over the past decade, but the country still remains the world's most dangerous for women in terms of health, violence, and lack of economic resources.

Give a small-businesswoman access to capital and training, and she can become a powerful contributor to GDP growth. Include women in governments and peace talks, and they can help ensure that ministries are better run and peace agreements are sustained. Educate a girl, and she will be more likely to raise healthier and more educated children -- and end the cycle of poverty.

Secretary Clinton has championed the use of "smart power": deploying all the tools at America's disposal to advance national interests -- not just military might, but also diplomacy, development, and America's enduring values. Advocating for women's full economic, social, and political participation around the world is one of the most potent weapons in America's smart-power arsenal.

World Needs to Stabilise Population and Cut Consumption, Says Royal Society; Economic and Environmental Catastrophes Unavoidable Unless Rich Countries Cut Consumption and Global Population Stabilises

The Royal Society, a London-based fellowship of scientists, engineers and medical researchers concerned about the natural world, and chaired by Nobel prize-winning biologist Sir John Sulston, have issued a major report. The report has taken 21 months to complete.

World population needs to be stabilised quickly and high consumption in rich countries needs to be rapidly reduced to avoid "a downward spiral of economic and environmental ills."

Contraception must be offered to all women who want it and consumption cut to reduce inequality, says the study published on Thursday.

To achieve long and healthy lives for all 9 billion people expected to be living in 2050, the twin issues of population and consumption must be pushed to the top of political and economic agendas.

Both population and consumption have been largely ignored by politicians and played down by environment and development groups for 20 years.

"The number of people living on the planet has never been higher, their levels of consumption are unprecedented and vast changes are taking place in the environment. We can choose to rebalance the use of resources to a more egalitarian pattern of consumption ... or we can choose to do nothing and to drift into a downward spiral of economic and environmental ills leading to a more unequal and inhospitable future", it says.

The rapid rate of population increase in developing countries would necessitate the building the equivalent of a city of a million people every five days from now to 2050, and increase of 2.3 billion, the equivalent of a new China and a new India.

The report warns the most developed countries to abstain from certain sorts of consumption, such as CO2. "You do not need to be consuming so much to have a long and healthy life. We cannot conceive of a world that is going to be as unequal as it is now. We must bring the 1.3 billion people living on less than a $1.25 a day out of absolute poverty. It's critical to slow population growth in those countries which cannot keep up with services."

For example, Niger in West Africa which has increased life expectancy in the past 30 years but is doubling population every 20 years. Even if its Total Fertility Rate fell to 3.9 by 2050 the population will grow from 15.5 to 55.5 million by 2050. It is a real possibility that the population will outstrip the production of food and other necessities of life. The country needs both sharp reductions in fertility and population growth together with increased investment in health and education.

Ekliya Zulu, one of the authors and president of the Union for African Population studies said "Taking Africa alone, the population will increase by 2 billion this century. If we fail and fertility levels do not go down to 2.1, (from 4.7 now) the population may reach 5.3 billion. When we slow down population growth we empower women and provide more money for least developed countries to invest in education. The majority of women want fewer children. The demand to reduce fertility is there", he said.

While it would take time and massive political commitment to shift consumption patterns in rich countries - the authors acknowledge - providing contraception would cost comparatively little. "To supply all the world's unmet family planning needs would be $6-7 billion a year. It's not much. It's an extremely good investment, extremely affordable. To not provide family planning is an infringement of human rights", said Sulston.

The authors declined to put a figure on sustainable population, saying it depended on lifestyle choices and consumption. But they warned that without urgent action humanity would be in deep trouble. "The pressure on a finite planet will make us radically change human activity", said Pretty.

An Oxfam spokeswoman said "The planet has sufficient resources to sustain 9 billion, but we can only ensure a sustainable future for all if we address grossly unequal levels of consumption. Fairly redistributing the lion's share of the earth's resources consumed by the richest 10% would bring development so that infant mortality rates are reduced, many more people are educated and women are empowered to determine their family size - all of which will bring down birth rates."

Living Planet Report 2010: Biodiversity, Biocapacity, and Development

A report published by WWF International, Zoological Society of London, and the Global Footprint Network came out in 2010. It is the 8th edition of a widely quoted report about the global supply and use of renewable resources - crops, livestock, soils, forests, etc. This edition found humanity's annual consumption of these resources in 2007 as being one and a half times greater than Earth's ability to replace these resources and likely twice as great by 2030, with the overages coming from reductions in the resources' basic stocks.

John R. Bermingham reviewed the rather unwieldly formatted report and what follows is a summary of the review.

WWF International's Director General, James P. Leape concludes, "We have to devise ways of getting as much, and more, from much less. Continuing to consume the Earth's resources more quickly than they can be replenished is destroying the very systems on which we depend. We have to move to managing resources on nature's terms and on nature's scale."

The Living Planet Index (LPI) shows a downward trend of almost 30% (1970-2007) in the state of the earth's biodiversity.worldwide.

The tropical LPI declined by 60% while the temperate LPI increased by almost 30%. This increase may be due to a start from a lower baseline, with various species recovering due to improvements in pollution controls and conservation efforts.

The Ecological Footprint of humanity (a) has doubled since 1966, and (b) by 2007 the Footprint exceeded the Earth's biocapacity - the area actually available to produce renewable resources and absorb CO2 - by 50%.

The Footprint is described as the area of biologically productive land and water required to provide the renewable resources people use, including the space needed for infrastructure and vegetation to absorb waste carbon dioxide. It also shows a trend of continuous footprint growth, largely attributable to an 11-fold increase in the carbon footprint, (and by over one-third since 1998,) but with enormous differences between countries.

The Water Footprint of Production shows that 71 countries are experiencing stress on blue water sources. This has profound implications for ecosystem health, food production, and human well-being, and is likely toe be exacerbated by climate change.

The three indicators just mentioned do not provide any information on the state of ecosystem services. These are defined by the UN's Millennium Ecosystem Assessment as the benefits obtained from ecosystems, including:

1. Provisioning Services: food, water, medicine, timber, fibre, etc.

2. Regulating Services: water filtration, waste decomposition, crop pollination

3. Supporting Services: nutrient cycling, photosynthesis, soil formation, etc.

4. Cultural Services: recreation, aesthetic and religious experiences

Human use of Ecosystem Services create major threats to biodiversity because of: Habitat loss, alteration, and fragmentation; Over-exploitation of wild species populations; Pollution: pesticides, urban-industrial wastes, and excessive fertilizer use; Climate change: from mainly fossil fuel use, forest clearing, and misc. industry; Invasive species: deliberate or inadvertent species transfers from one area to another, becoming competitors, predators or parasites of native species.

These threats stem from demands for food, water, energy and materials and for space for towns, cities, and infrastructure. Agriculture, water, forestry, energy, mining, etc., cause biodiversity loss. Their impact depends upon population, consumption per person, and technologies.

Biodiversity loss can cause ecosystems to become stressed, degraded, and possibly collapsed.

The Living Planet Index combines the findings shown by a tropical index and a temperate index, which in turn are based upon a Terrestrial Living Planet Index, a Marine Living Planet Index, and a Freshwater Living Planet Index.

Living Planet Indices are developed for five realms worldwide (a) North America above the Tropic of Cancer plus Greenland, (b) the balance of the Americas, (c) Europe, Asia and Africa above the Tropic of Cancer, (d) the balance of Africa, and (e) Asia below the Tropic and all Pacific areas including Australia and New Zealand.

To determine whether human demand can be maintained, the Ecological Footprint is compared to the regenerative capacity (biocapacity) of the planet - i.e., the total regenerative capacity available to serve the demand. Both the Footprint and regenerative capacity are expressed in units called global hectares (gha), with one gha representing the productive capacity of one hectare of land at world average productivity.

Every human activity uses biologically productive land and/or fishing grounds. The Ecological Footprint is the sum of this area, regardless where located on the planet. Footprint components are calculated fo Forest land required to absorb CO2 emissions; Land required for animal grazing; Land required for forest products - paper, wood, etc; Fishing grounds; Croplands; Land for housing, transportation, industry, and hydropower.

During the 1970s humanity passed the point at which annual Ecological Footprint matched the Earth's annual biocapacity. This is called "ecological overshoot." Ever since this overshoot started it has continued and increased. In 2007 the overshoot was the equivalent of consuming the renewable resources of 1.5 planets.

Looking at Ecological Footprints per Person, a US footprint level for everyone in the world would require the equivalent of 4.5 earths, but if the average were India only one-half an earth would be required.

A country's biocapacity is determined by two factors: the area of cropland, grazingland, fishing grounds and forest located within its borders, and the productivity of these lands and waters.

The Water Footprint of Production: Calculations are made three types of water: Greenwater - rainwater that evaporates in the growing of crops , water used in production of goods, etc.; Blue water - freshwater, surface and ground, use by people; Grey water - water required to dilute pollutants.

Analysis shows that less than 1% of all freshwater is accessible for humans; nevertheless, there is enough water to meet human needs. Attention is given to rivers running dry, water pollution, climate impacts and uncertainty.

Nearly 3 billion people get at least 15% of their average animal protein from fish.

Biodiversity, Development and Human Well-Being - The relationship between the UN's Human Development Index and the Ecological Footprint is shown for many nations, ranging from 1.5 global hectares (gha) in Peru to 98 gha in Luxembourg.

Scientists Warn of Emerging Fungal Peril

Fungal diseases are a major threat not just to wild plants and animals, but to us, according to a paper in Nature. More and more of these killer fungi are appearing, and they're increasingly attacking animals. We're already heading for huge fungal damage to vital crops and ecosystems over the coming decades.

Persistent low-level infection of fungi already destroy at least 125 million tonnes a year of rice, wheat, maize and potatoes and soybeans, worth $60 billion. In 2009-10, this lost food could have fed some 8.5% of the world's people. Simultaneous epidemics in several major crops could mean billions starve.

Emerging fungal epidemics already account for 72% of extinctions from disease - more than bacteria and viruses put together. Amphibians are being wiped out by a deadly chytrid fungus that's been spread by the global animal trade; at least 500 species are thought to be at risk. 40% of amphibian species in some parts of Central America have been wiped out in just a few years.

Likewise, bats are being struck down by so-called White Nose Syndrome, which has spread all over North America since it was first spotted in 2006. Because bats eat insects that would otherwise attack crops, White Nose Syndrome could end up costing farmers some $3.7 billion a year.

In the UK the invading North American signal crayfish is wiping out the native white-clawed crayfish with the help of a fungus-like disease that the invader tolerates but that's deadly to its indigenous rival.

In addition, fungi are adept at swapping genes between themselves, so when we bring different species into contact, dangerously virulent combinations can result.

New fungal diseases keep appearing, affecting organisms from bees and corals to sea otters. If we don't do more to control them, we could see species wiped out all over the planet.

By tightening rules on the transport of plants and animals around the world, we could limit these pathogens' spread into new areas. We need to cut down the amount of living material we transport around the world, quarantining what we do transport far more rigorously, and doing more to stop the illegal trade in plants and animals.

Tar Sands Oil: Pros and Cons

Canada has oil reserves of 170 billion barrels, more than Iran and Nigeria combined. However, much of that oil has been considered "not economically recoverable." While development of these tar sands began in the 1960s, it has been conducted at a relatively small scale because of the costs involved. But recently declining supplies and increasing prices have prompted attempts to ramp up production, and PetroChina has acquired a 60% interest in two major wells in Alberta in 2009; then by Sinopec bought a 9% stake in Syncrude Canada Ltd. in 2010.

Projections show that as much as 36% of American oil could be coming from Canadian oil sands by 2030.

However, extracting this oil requires a good deal more energy than conventional drilling, which means more greenhouse gases before the oil even reaches the pump. The net energy return on energy invested (EROI) ratio of tar sands oil by the time it is converted to gasoline is roughly half that of the equivalent process for conventional crude oil.

The Canadian government has invested heavily in the use of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) for the tar sands recovery process, but this technology is yet unproven. The process requires also vast amounts of water and chemicals to wash the sands. Anywhere from 2 to 4.5 times the amount of water is required for each barrel of oil produced.

The discharge that accumulates in highly toxic waste ponds pose a huge threat to wildlife. In one incident, 1,600 ducks died from landing in one of these ponds. Tailing pools now cover 50 square miles adjoining the Athabasca River, in the middle of the world's largest intact forest, a key absorber of CO2 and wildlife habitat. The numerous First Nations people living in the area thought the industry would bring a significant number of jobs and economic activity, but the developers not only pollute the area, but they don't take First Nations' interests into account, destroying hunting and fishing, habitat and bringing a number of health risks to the region.

Recently, a number of environmental groups and 23 First Nations groups have asked for a moratorium on new tar sands development. They are also asking to halt the Keystone XL pipeline which would strongly encourage further development of the Tar Sands, by allowing the oil to be shipped from Texas to China, where most of it will be used.

In summary, tar sands oil has a cost/benefit profile that is similar in many ways to coal, except that coal is used for electricity while oil is used for transportation. At the present, there are probably more alternatives for electricity than there are for transportation. This could begin to shift if we see tractor-trailers trucks being converted to natural gas. Of course, the current historically low natural gas prices, combined with high oil prices has, at least for the moment, rearranged the whole energy picture.

The author opined that, as bad as the environmental impacts of coal are, these tar sands might even be worse, despite what the developers might say. There is no question that the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline will encourage expansion of this resource, while bringing questionable benefits to the US, since most of the oil will be shipped to China. "Mostly though, I think the whole conversation is really about price and Americans' desire to live in a world where gas is cheap and no one bothers them to worry about global warming. That world may have existed in the 1950s and 60s, but it certainly doesn't exist anymore."

Dropping Solar Panel Costs and Grid Parity

Even tough Germany and Italy, the world's two largest solar markets, have seen a reduction in subsidies, and manufacturers are struggling from heavy competition, installation costs have been reduced 10% in just in the last 4 months, and global spending on solar installations continues to be high.

For the past two years 27 GW has been produced globally.

Grid parity for solar was expected to occur within 5 years in many parts of the U.S., encompassing about 57 million Americans (including California, Hawaii, and New York). But once solar is less expensive or even costs the same as coal, why would anyone even consider coal, with all its inherent challenges, asks David Crane, CEO of NRG energy, one of America's largest electric utilities, who foresees rooftop solar and electric vehicles being cheaper and easier than their counterparts in as few as 3-5 years for most of America.

UN: Meat Consumption Must Be Cut to Reduce Greenhouse Gases

A recent study by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggests that the developed world needs to cut its meat consumption by 50% per person by the year 2050. This is a necessary step in reducing one of the most potent greenhouse gases, nitrous oxide (N2O), currently the third highest contributor to global warming, but the most difficult to control and the most potent of the three big greenhouse gases because it is a better absorber of infrared radiation.

The main sources of N2O are the spreading of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers used in agriculture, the storage of fertilizers, and the use of livestock manure. Microbes break down the fertilizers and manure, and then release N2O into the air.

Reducing meat consumption would decrease both sources of nitrous oxides. Less livestock means less manure as well as less need for synthetic fertilizers due to less agricultural produce required to feed them. N2O emissions can also be controlled by better management of fertilizer and manure.

IPCC author Dr. Eric A Davidson of the Woods Hole Research Center, outlines four scenarios which represent possible pathways of reductions in greenhouse gases. The most aggressive scenario, where N2O concentrations would stabilize by 2050, would require a 50% cut in meat consumption, 50% cut in industrial emissions, and an equal level of improvement in agricultural practices.

Dr. Davidson said, "If you had asked me 30 years ago if smoking would be banned in bars I would have laughed and said that would be impossible in my lifetime, and yet it has come true. Are similar changes possible for diet? That will depend not only on education about diet, but also upon prices of meat. Some agricultural economists think that the price of meat is going to go way up, so that per capita consumption will go down, but those are highly uncertain projections."

Nigeria Tested by Rapid Rise in Population

In Nigeria whole families often squeeze into 7-by-11-foot rooms along a narrow corridor, with up to 50 people sharing a kitchen, toilet and sink. Over 100 students cram into most classrooms, two to a desk.

Nigeria's unemployment rate is nearly 50% for people in urban areas ages 15 to 24 - driving crime and discontent. For middle-class people with jobs, commutes from even nearby suburbs can run two to three hours.

With the global population having breached seven billion, natural resources will be taxed if countries cannot better manage the growth. Nearly all of the increase is in sub-Saharan Africa, where the population rise far outstrips economic expansion. Of the roughly 20 countries where women average more than five children, almost all are in the region.

Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 12% of the world's population, will account for more than a third by 2100.

Everywhere else in the developing world fertility rates have fallen sharply in recent generations and now resemble those in the United States - just above two children per woman. That transformation was driven in each country by a mix of educational and employment opportunities for women, access to contraception, urbanization and an evolving middle class.

It is unclear whether similar forces will defuse the population bomb in sub-Sarahan Africa..

"The pace of growth in Africa is unlike anything else ever in history and a critical problem," said Joel E. Cohen, a professor of population at Rockefeller University in New York City. "What is effective in the context of these countries may not be what worked in Latin America or Kerala or Bangladesh."

Alarmed governments in sub-Saharan Africa have begun to act. Nigeria made contraceptives free last year, and officials are promoting smaller families as a key to economic salvation, holding up the financial gains in nations like Thailand as inspiration.

Nigeria is the world's sixth most populous nation at 167 million people. If this large nation rich with oil cannot control its growth, what hope is there for the many smaller, poorer countries?

The Nigerian government's effort to rapidly build infrastructure but cannot keep up with population growth, but even though Nigeria has recommended that families limit themselves to four children for 20 years, there has been little effect.

Parfait M. Eloundou-Enyegue, a professor of development sociology at Cornell University, said, "Many countries only get religion when faced with food riots or being told they have the highest fertility rate in the world or start worrying about political unrest."

The swelling ranks of unemployed Nigerian youths have fed the growth of the radical Islamist group Boko Haram, which has bombed or burned more than a dozen churches and schools this year. The African population boom has fueled illegal immigration into Europe and the United States.

Even though Nigeria, like many sub-Saharan African countries, has experienced a decline in average fertility rates, from 6.8 in 1975 to about 5.5 last year, this is not enough: this level of fertility, combined with an extremely young population, still puts such countries on a steep and disastrous growth curve. Half of Nigerian women are under 19, just entering their peak childbearing years.

High fertility rates were desirable when Africa was agriculturally based and sparsely populated, and so family planning, introduced in the 1970s by USAID was initially regarded as foreign, and later on, money and attention were diverted from family planning to Africa's AIDS crisis. The drastic transition from high to low birthrates that took place in poor countries in Asia, Latin America and North Africa has yet to happen in Sub-Saharan Africa.

World Bank population specialist Eduard Bos tells us that such a transition often brings substantial economic benefits, As the last large population group reaches working age, the number of adults in the labor force is high relative to more dependent groups - the young and the elderly - for a time. If managed well, that creates capital that can be used to improve health and education and to develop new industries. Such a transition increased per-capita gross domestic product in Latin America, Asia and North Africa between three and six times as population was brought under control.

In Nigeria, policymakers are studying how to foster the transition, and its attendant financial benefits, Many young adults, particularly educated women, now want two to four children. But the preferences of men, particularly older men, have been slower to change - crucial in a patriarchal culture where polygamy is widespread. One man explained that it was "God's will" for him to have 12 children by his three wives, calling each child a "blessing" because so many of his own siblings had died.

Posters promote "birth spacing," which is acceptable, not "birth control, " which is often not.

In many sub-Saharan African nations, contraceptive use is under 20%. "At this pace it will take 100-plus years to arrive at a point where fertility is controlled," Dr. Guengant said.

The average number of children per woman increased to 7.3 in the predominantly Muslim north, where women often cannot go to a family planning clinic unless accompanied by a man.

But Dr. Peter Ogunjuyigbe, a demographer at Obafemi Awolowo University, sees a change. As Nigeria urbanizes, children's help is not needed in fields; the extended families have broken down. "Children were seen as a kind of insurance for the future; now they are a liability for life," he said.

In Niger, Nigeria's desperately poor neighbor, women have on average more than 7 children, and men consider their ideal to be more than 12. But with land divided among so many sons, the size of a typical family plot has fallen by more than a third since 2005, meaning there is little long-term hope for feeding children, said Amadou Sayo, of the aid group CARE.

Babatunde Osotimehin, executive director of the United Nations Population Fund and a former Nigerian health minister, said he is optimistic for a turnaround if governments better support education for girls and contraceptive services. "We can see rapid changes, but that's up in the air, because you have to be aggressive and consistent."

Birthrates have edged down to about four children per woman in Kenya, Ethiopia and Ghana.

The United Nations estimates that the global population will stabilize at 10 billion in 2100, assuming that declining birthrates will eventually yield a global average of 2.1 children per woman. At a rate of even 2.6, Dr. Guengant said, the number becomes 16 billion.

Population Matters Condemns Coercive Sterilisation

The UK-based organization "Population Matters" wholly condemns coercive family planning of any kind, and sees control of one's own fertility choices as a basic human right, especially for women.

The BBC has reported allegations of an unacknowledged Uzbek policy of sterilising some women, either without their knowledge or by deception. The Uzbek government has denied the allegations. The Observer has separately reported allegations that deceptive, coercive and unsafe practices characterised some sterilisations in the Indian states of Bihar and Madhya Pradesh.

"Sterilisation is a popular choice for people who do not wish to have any more children; but coercion and deception are plain wrong", said PM Chair Roger Martin. "This applies equally to coercive contraception and to the far more common problem of pregnancy arising from lack of access to modern family planning. The United Nations has rightly made universal access to reproductive health a Millennium Development Goal; and we congratulate DfID for giving priority to strictly voluntary family planning and women's empowerment in the aid programme".

"Slowing the growth in the world population - which the UN project as between 1.1 and 3.6 billion more people by 2050 depending on our collective actions meanwhile - is critical for hopes of sustainable development. It directly affects climate change, biodiversity loss, and food, water and energy security."

"The high stakes, however, make it all the more important that family planning programmes are firmly based on consent", he concluded. "Where coercion of any kind is alleged, we urge the responsible authorities to provide for independent investigation. These programmes are vital to the prospects of all our children; and their credibility and effectiveness depend on their remaining voluntary".

Young Adulthood is a Period of High Risk for Unintended Pregnancy and Birth

The Guttmacher Institute has produced a report which says that, in 2008, more than two-thirds of pregnancies among unmarried women aged 20-29 were unintended, while only half of pregnancies among all women of reproductive age were unintended. In 2008, nearly 10% of unmarried women aged 20-29 experienced an unintended pregnancy.

Guttmacher policy expert Adam Sonfield said "Expanding insurance coverage and public funding for the most effective methods of contraception -- and for the counseling and education needed to help women and couples choose the method that is best for them -- can go a long way toward reducing unintended pregnancies and births in this high-risk age group."

In 2008, black and Hispanic women had rates of unintended pregnancy twice those of their white counterparts, while rates among poor women were more than four times the rate for women in the highest income group. In the same year, 54% of births among unmarried 20-29-year-olds resulted from an unintended pregnancy, compared with 31% among their married counterparts. And black and Hispanic women had unintended birthrates more than twice that of white women, while poor women had an unintended birthrate more than seven times that of women in the highest income group.

Since young women typically have sex for the first time around age 17, but generally don't marry until their mid-20s, co-author Laura Lindberg said "We can't just focus on reducing teen pregnancies anymore. We need to expand our focus to include helping young adult women and their partners reduce their risk through improved contraceptive use."

Click on the link in the headline for more.

Tracking What it Means to Be Born From Unwanted Pregnancy

First published in the Durago Herald, by Richard Grossman MD

The prevention of unwanted pregnancy is more important than ever for the well-being of the family.

One of my strongest memories from medical school was a delivery I assisted with. This was the mother's fifth child and a quick birth. I proudly held up the newborn boy to show him to his mother. She turned her head away and cried.

I don't remember the names of the mother or baby, who would be about 44 years old now. How his life has gone is only conjecture, but the likelihood is that his path has not been an easy one.

We generally assume that all adults are cut out to be parents, but that is not true. Forced parenthood can have unhappy consequences for the adults, and especially for the children. This column examines the outcomes of children of unwilling parents. Next month's column will include the words written by a person who, herself, was born unwanted.

The biggest and best analysis of children born unwanted was done in Czechoslovakia at a time when women had limited access to legal abortion. An American psychologist, Dr. Henry David, collaborated with Czech counterparts. Czech women had two chances to request an abortion in the 1960s. The first chance was at a local clinic. If the woman were turned down, she could apply again at a regional level, the last resort for a legal abortion. Unfortunately, the many advantages of adoption were not considered in this study.

One of the Czech psychologists had a list of women who had been twice denied for the same pregnancy. Because of the excellent record keeping of that country, the children born to these women with unwanted pregnancies could be followed for many years. They were carefully matched to children who were desired—same age, same socioeconomic class, same school etc. All the families lived in Prague, the country's capital.

These people, both those who were unwanted before birth and the "normal" controls, were examined and tested at age 9, in adolescence and again in their early 20s. The investigators also looked at records, interviewed parents and spoke with teachers.

The two groups of people ended up significantly different despite growing up in very similar circumstances. Compared to the people who resulted from pregnancies that were planned (or at least accepted), those born unwanted did not fare so well in life.

Specifically, the babies who had been unwanted were not breastfed as long, and did not achieve as well in school even though their intelligence tests were as good as the more desired children. They were more likely to be less social and more disruptive and hyperactive, and were more likely to have criminal records. When asked as adolescents, the children who had been unwanted believed their mothers showed less maternal interest than did the control group.

The young adults in their 20s were asked how they felt about their lives. Again there was a significant difference, with the people who were unplanned being less satisfied with their lives, with their love relationships, with their own mental health and with their jobs. It is interesting that their sexual debut was at an earlier age and they had more sexual partners than control people. Thus, these people were more likely to beget another generation of unwanted pregnancies.

There are exceptions to the general rule, fortunately. Dr. David's research found three groups of women who requested abortions but were denied. Some had temporary motivation for wanting to abort, such as financial reasons. These women usually accepted the pregnancy and both mother and child did well. For other women the pregnancy resulted from a poor relationship, and they did not do so well with childrearing. The third group of women apparently realized from the beginning that they would not be good parents, and the study, unfortunately, bore this out. Both the women and their children did not fare well.

The Czech study was of women who were denied legal abortion. Those who were allowed to have abortion must have had even more compelling reasons to not parent. If they had been forced to bear their unwanted kids, presumably these children would have had even more severe problems.

What does this mean? A person resulting from an unplanned, unwanted pregnancy starts off life with a handicap, like the baby I delivered in medical school. This can have consequences for society, too. There is a controversial theory, popularized in Freakonomics, that the downturn in serious crime in the USA noted in the early 1990s was due to the decrease in unwanted pregnancies after the legalization of abortion in 1973.

An unwanted pregnancy can be devastating. Sometimes things work out well, but delivering and raising an unwanted baby may be traumatic for the parent(s), and scar the child.

From the Naysayers: UN Report for Rio+20 Outlines Top-Down "Green" World Order

Bits and pieces of this article are quoted below, just to show you what we are up against. Click on the link in the headline to read the entire article.

A recently released United Nations report outlines the global body's plan to foist a centrally planned "green" world order on all of humanity, making every level of government subservient to its "sustainable development" agenda. The upcoming Rio+20 sustainability conference in Brazil ... will be used to solidify the foundation of the emerging planetary control system.

Under the guise of a "green economy" — expected to cost trillions of dollars per year, according to the report — the UN intends to make use of coercive power at all levels of governance to implement the plan. From local and national governments to regional and global entities, programs affecting every area of human life will be used to advance the controversial "sustainable development" agenda.

To aid in the transition toward a so-called "green economy," the report explains, governments at all levels will have to employ "mandatory technical regulations" and other measures. International bodies, of course, will be used to ensure the whole world is signing up to and complying with the controversial agenda.

"Strategic planning" of so-called "city-regions" — also known as central planning — is also, according to the UN document, “critical" to ensuring that humanity stops consuming more resources than the planners think appropriate. A transition toward what the UN calls “sustainable diets" will be needed, too.

Even with sustainable diets, however, the supposedly wise would-be central planners hold as a central tenant of their faith that supposed "overpopulation" represents a threat to Mother Earth. So, to partially alleviate the alleged problem, the UN proposed ensuring access to legalized abortion and “family planning" all over the world.

"Demographic change together with urbanization not only heightens the need for a swift transition to a green economy, but also calls for policies to address population dynamics within a human-rights based framework," the document claims. “These policies, most notably, include universal access to reproductive health care [also known as abortion, birth control and sterilization] and family planning as well as the empowerment of women and appropriate investments in education."

While the "green" UN vision appears at first glance to be unprecedented, there seems to be an existing model: Red China. The totalitarian communist regime — with its brutal suppression of dissent and its one-child policy enforced through forced abortions — is described by the UN report as “a good example of combining investments and public policy incentives" in the development of clean technology for the march toward the “green economy."

Despite well over 50 million deaths caused by the communist dictatorship under Chairman Mao, key proponents of the UN goals continue to praise the system. "The social experiment in China under Chairman Mao's leadership is one of the most important and successful in history," billionaire UN supporter and "green" agenda driver David Rockefeller was quoted as saying by the New York Times in 1973.

Before the Word 'Sprawl' was Invented: Black-and-white Photographs Taken by Ansel Adams Capture Laid-back Los Angeles in the 1940s

A picture is worth a thousand words. In the 1940s, more and more people had an automobile which enabled them to sprawl out. After WWII there was a population boom in California, due to returning soldiers who came through California on the way to and from the war, and who found California an attractive place to bring their brides and raise a family.

Click here to see how laid-back and less crowded California's Southern California cities and suburbs were back then.

Interactive Graphic - Areas with Population Density Over x People Per Square Kilometer

Interactive graphic showing population denseness of various world regions as people per square mile is increased.

Resource Depletion is a Bigger Threat Than Climate Change

James Stafford of Oilprice.com interviews energy specialist Dr. Tom Murphy, an associate professor of physics at the University of California, who runs the popular energy blog Do the Math which takes an astrophysicist's-eye view of societal issues relating to energy production, climate change, and economic growth.

Tom Murphy had previously indicated that no renewable energy source can replace fossil fuels on its own. However solar power is still cheap at 2-3 times the cost of fossil fuel energy, abundance is unquestionable, and manufacturing is not inordinately caustic. Murphy himself has panels on his roof which feed batteries. Wind and next-generation nuclear also deserve mention as potential large-scale sources. Yet none of these help directly with the liquid fuels shortage.

While Bill Gates has stated that innovation in energy can take 50-60 years to take effect, Murphy applauds any effort that takes our energy challenge seriously, and generates ideas. If nothing else, it raises awareness about our predicament. But there is the problem with the tendency in our technofix culture to think we have "loads of viable solutions in the hopper. Many of the ideas are just batty."

Murphy is particularly interested in the promising development of an artificial photosynthesis technology which would provide a liquid fuel that can support personal and commercial transportation on land, sea, and air with minimal changes to infrastructure. But these may rely on the appropriate catalysts which just might not be found.

Climate change: Murphy thinks that resource depletion trumps climate change, because he thinks that resource depletion has the potential to effect far more people on a far shorter timescale with far greater certainty. Since our economic model is based on growth, we are on a collision course with nature. When that growth cannot continue, the ramifications can be sudden and severe. "So my focus is more on averting the chaos of economic/resource/agriculture/distribution collapse, which stands to wipe out much of what we have accomplished in the fossil fuel age," he said. "To the extent that climate change and resource limits are both served by a deliberate and aggressive transition away from fossil fuels, I see a natural alliance."

Shale gas: Murphy says that the sentiment that "our problems are solved" is based on a very short history of tapping low-hanging shale-gas fruit. While shale gas will contribute to our net energy demands in an unanticipated way, anticipating large amounts is risky; natural gas is not a direct answer to a liquid fuels shortage; the associated exuberance can stifle the imperative that we have an all-hands-on-deck response to the looming challenges.

Biofuels: Murphy says that the scale of our fossil fuel use prohibits replacement by biofuels at a substantial level. The energy return on energy invested (EROEI) is low. Harvests have to depend on increasingly erratic weather. Algae is the most promising because it can be grown and moved about as a liquid medium in sealed tubes, but algae has problems with bio-sludge, the algae contracting disease, and the fact that we have not yet found/created a viable hydrocarbon-excreting algae.

Nuclear: Murphy does not see Fukushima as a reason to abandon nuclear. While it has its problems, it is one of the few things we know how to do that can scale. Conventional nuclear faces limited resources, but thorium is promising. However, nuclear development will take time, which is not much help in a near-term crisis. Also, nuclear is yet another technique to create electricity. We need liquid fuels.

Keystone XL Pipeline: Murphy says that Canada produces about 5% of U.S. demand. Even if this were increased by current ambitious plans, it would only amount to half of our current oil imports. But "how much oil will Canada sell to the U.S.? How much will China pay for it? How much will Canada decide to keep for themselves? It's not a crystal clear win."

Technology will fix it: Murphy says "I worry about the strength and pervasiveness of faith in science and technology to fix our problems." ... We should acknowledge that once our inheritance is spent, we may not live like the kings we want to be." "Most physicists I meet in departments around the country are not aware of peak oil and associated challenges. Hardly anyone I meet is working on the problem. No one (i.e., funding) has told us this is a real problem that deserves our full attention." ... "Most ideas on the table provide electricity, which does not address our most critical need." ... "But let's also prepare a plan B that may be less about techno-fixes and more about behaviors and attitudes."

Batteries: Murphy says "Making large-scale storage more practical resolves the single-biggest technical barrier to widespread solar and wind deployment." He is sceptical about giant grids and more attracted to resilient local solutions. "On a moderately ambitious scale, a continental grid will reduce the need for storage, but it will not eliminate it. We still benefit from super-sized batteries."

Improving efficiency: "Efforts to improve efficiencies of the big stuff like power plants have been continuous. And we have seen improvements at the level of 1% per year." .. " I think incremental efficiency improvement does not have nearly enough bite to 'solve' our problem." ... "I have found behavioural modification to be far more effective, achieving factors of 2, 3, 5, etc. in short order without grossly changing lifestyles."

Space-based solar plants: "Why make solar power even more expensive with exorbitant launch costs (which only increases as energy costs increase), placing the equipment in an unserviceable, hostile space environment (cosmic rays, debris) while only gaining a factor of five in night/weather avoidance?"

Smart grids: "I'd sooner have smart people than a smart grid, deciding that it's in our collective interest to scale back energy use at a personal level." "They may be irked that they lose control over when the laundry decides to start - possibly resulting in clothes smelling of mildew, or that they are not present to fold clothes at 2 AM when the dryer is finished. Loss of control may not play well."

Cold Fusion: "This appears to be outside the domain of known physics."

Rock phospate fertilizer and resulting food shortages: Murphy says: "How about this solution: one billion people on Earth would obviate many of our problems. Any takers? Any acceptable path to this state? The original question does remind us that our problems are numerous. It is no surprise that the phenomenal surge in population and living standards/expectations in the last few hundred years - both a direct consequence of exploiting our fossil fuel inheritance - should be exposing fault lines every which way. Aquifers, soil, forests, fisheries, coral, ice pack, and species counts are in decline. The very simple answer staring us in the face, yet somehow unthinkable, is to consume far fewer resources and aim to reduce population. Hopefully we can do this in a more controlled way than nature may enforce if we ignore the myriad warnings. This 'solution' will no doubt offend many, but just because we want to continue growth does not mean we can. We need to take control of our destiny, and that starts with us as individuals. Decide to reduce; mentally abandon the growth paradigm."

Investment in green technologies: "Plenty of people are waiting to cash in on green energy, and investment begins to flourish when energy prices soar. But as soon as high energy prices trigger recession, demand flags, prices crash, and the volatility wipes out many green efforts. A year or two of high prices is simply not long enough for a transformation, which takes decades to accomplish." "Those high prices hurt large segments of the (conventional) economy and self-generate volatility. In principle, governments could "artificially" keep energy prices high enough to maintain the impetus for developing alternatives, pumping the revenue into a national alternative energy infrastructure." But the public wouldn't like it. We need "education about the challenges we face - including a sober confrontation of the fact that failure is a likely result of our not bucking up to the challenge."

Peak oil: "The simple observation that a peak in global discovery in the 1960's must be followed by a peak in production some decades later is unassailable." "I would not at all be surprised if a decline makes itself clear by the end of this decade." But "volatility, deliberate withholding, recession, unemployment, wars, etc. can stir in enough complexity to hide the physical truth from us for years."

Rapid Population Growth Threatens Dhamar

Dhamar, a governorate of Yemen, is suffering a scarcity of resources, and a December 2011 study funded by the Dutch government said that further population growth will worsen already deteriorating economic conditions and put increased pressure on service sectors such as education, health, food, energy, water, effectively doubling expenditures.

Arable land per capita is expected to fall to 201 square meters, compared to 494 in 2009, while agricultural crops (grains) would fall from 61kg to 22kg per head - all while the growing population will actually need more land and grain to meet demand.

Water availability - which is falling across Yemen - will decline in the governorate from 102 cubic meters to only 42 if the current levels of water produced in the region remain the same.

"More awareness of reproductive health and family planning are needed," it was concluded. The demand for birth control methods is still low due to a lack of awareness - particularly in rural areas - and fears among families of any side effects and risks. Religious views on contraception are also a factor.

The government must offer free delivery services and family planning at medical centers. They must take actions to make families send their children to schools. "Decisions to set the marriage age at 18 and the banning of female genital mutilation have to be supported."

Studies confirm that Yemen's population will increase from 23 million in 2008 to 61 million in 2035 as a result of the high fertility rate - maintaining its position as the fastest growing Arab country. These numbers could be reduced to 46 million in 2035 if proper health and population measures are taken.

Global: Energy Efficiency: Overinvesting in Energy Efficiency, on Purpose

By David Roberts

Climate change means we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, a lot, beginning immediately. We can increase low-carbon energy supply and/or decrease total energy consumption.

But ramping up clean energy supply can't be done fast enough to keep us within our carbon budget, so we've got to use less energy. We can either reduce the energy intensity of the global economy and/or reduce the growth of the global economy.

Substantially reducing global energy intensity turns out to be extremely difficult, thanks in part to the rebound effect. But if energy intensity can't be reduced quickly enough, then the only answer left is slowing GDP growth. Yikes.

Let's go back to reducing global energy intensity. How difficult would it be to increase global energy efficiency faster than global economic growth? Scholars Soham Baksi and Chris Green claim it would be almost impossible to drive the rate of decline in energy intensity (historically around 1%) much higher than, say, 1.25% through policy interventions.

On the other hand, Danny Harvey, University of Toronto professor - and author of a set of comprehensive textbooks on energy demand and clean energy supply - has done some detailed modeling and believes that "between now and 2050, we can average 3 or 4 % [decline in global energy intensity] a year," and thereby reducing total energy use. The efforts required would be heroic, but within the realm of possibility.

Harvey, when asked whether economic growth can continue as it has, was unequivocal: "Of course not. You can't have infinite growth on a finite planet. … If we're serious about climatic change, we have to recognize sufficiency, not just efficiency."

A report from the Institute for Integrated Economic Research (EIR) concludes that "while it is possible for emerging economies to improve the well-being of their populations without growing greenhouse gas emissions, it won't be feasible to industrialize them in the ‘green' way everybody hopes for." IER and many others say that, eventually, we'll end up with some kind of steady-state economy, either because we chose and crafted it or because it was forced on us by necessity.

Now for a look at the rebound effect, which is the boost in economic growth spurred by energy efficiency. If we want to "counter" the rebound effect, we have to suppress that growth. Often people discussing this effect recommend raising taxes on energy services that become more efficient, to prevent energy demand from rebounding back up after efficiency pushes it down. But energy taxes would be spent by the government on other things, thus driving economic activity and energy use. There's rebound even here.

The author suggests that, if we don't want to maximize economic growth, but just to get more energy efficiency without additional growth (that's what "avoiding rebound" means), we need to substantially overinvest in efficiency — spend 150% of what's economically optimal, or 200% — to the point that there are effectively no net savings (over the relevant investment horizon). Doing that would get us twice the efficiency with none of the rebound/growth, roughly speaking.

So if we invest our money in "too expensive" projects, we can skip the economic growth and gain enough energy. We can make leaps: not just more efficient furnaces, but passivhaus construction that makes buildings into net energy producers; not just electric cars, but dense, walkable, transit-serviced communities that recycle their water and waste; not just more efficient boilers, but distributed energy sources linked by smart grids into resilient electricity networks. We can spend what's necessary to help nations with limited access to water and power "leapfrog" over carbon-heavy infrastructure straight to the low-carbon kind.

This kind of hyper-efficiency would spur more growth eventually. But by overspending on efficiency in the near term, we would dampen the delayed boost in productivity, at least for a while, and in the meantime be shifting investment to economic sectors with lower energy intensity. Eventually, maybe, we could push global energy intensity down fast enough that when growth resumes, it no longer involves increasing GHG emissions.

U.S.: Women Hit Hardest by Recession, Budget Cuts

The State of California is once again facing a large budget deficit, and the governor and lawmakers face choices that will determine our state's future and the future of programs that Californians depend on.

Their deliberations should be informed by new research showing that California's women have been especially hard hit by the Great Recession.

CalWORKs, California's welfare-to-work program has been cut by more than $3 billion, about $3,000 for each of the 1.1 million children in the program.

Funding for the California State University system was cut by nearly one-third between 2007-08 and 2011-12, while support for community colleges was reduced by almost one-fifth. These budget cuts limit women's access to higher education. Most troubling is the drop - by nearly 130,000 students in recent years, with women accounting for more than 80% of this decline - attending California's community colleges, which help students build employment skills or prepare to transfer to a four-year institution.

State budget cuts also have hit support for child care and preschool, eliminating services for 35,000 children in the current year alone and an additional 62,000 children in 2012-2013, making it harder for working parents to find affordable child care that enables them to remain in - or return to - the workforce.

Between 2007 and 2010, the share of single mothers with jobs dropped by 10%. Only six in 10 single mothers were employed in 2010, the lowest employment rate among this group since 1996. This means that job losses among single mothers in just three years erased all the employment gains this group had made since the implementation of welfare reform in the late 1990s.

Budget choices reflect our values and priorities. As lawmakers seek to close the budget gap, they should strive to help all Californians to achieve success and contribute to the state's prosperity. The very future of our state is at stake.

Isolation, Poverty Loom for An Aging Population

There is No Sustainable Development Without a Sustainable Population - Suzanne York

Rio+20 (the UN Conference on Sustainable Development conference) seems to be skirting the population issue. Of the seven critical issues for Rio, listed on the UNCSD website, population isn't one of them. The one paragraph which does talk about it accurately states the situation the world is facing:

"We are deeply concerned that around 1.4 billion people still live in extreme poverty and one sixth of the world's population is undernourished, pandemics and epidemics are omnipresent threats. Unsustainable development has increased the stress on the earth's limited natural resources and on the carrying capacity of ecosystems. Our planet supports seven billion people expected to reach nine billion by 2050."

The draft document addresses sustainable development goals, including sustainable consumption and production patterns as well as priority areas such as oceans; food security and sustainable agriculture; sustainable energy for all; water access and efficiency; sustainable cities; green jobs, decent work and social inclusion; and disaster risk reduction and resilience. All of these are important, but since population growth affects all of them, it should be directly addressed by the Rio agenda.

Kim Lovell, with the Sierra Club's Global Population and Environment Program, said that "Rio provides a rare opportunity to have a global conversation about sustainable development solutions that protect human rights, improve community and environmental health, and preserve resources for future generations. Slowing population growth by ensuring access to voluntary family planning and education for women and girls is essential in this pursuit. "... "When women are educated and have the ability to plan their family size, they tend to have smaller, healthier families - and with solutions like these that improve lives and lessen pressure on scarce resources, what better venue than Rio to engage stakeholders at all levels to take local, national, and global action?"

In September 2011, the UNFPA called the failure to address population in Rio+20 a step backwards and said that failure to cover it would undermine efforts to promote sustainable development. Viable solutions would address voluntary family planning, women's rights, and conservation, as well as poverty alleviation, reduction of inequality and unsustainable levels of consumption. The world cannot afford another global conference with modest or weak results.

What you can do to get population on the agenda: Go to Rio de Janeiro and join in civil society activities, such as The People's Summit, a parallel event to Rio+20 being held Jun. 15- 23, 2012.

U.S.: A Political History of Contraception: When the Catholic Church Nearly Approved the Pill

The battle over birth control was fought and won half a century ago. At that time, the vast majority of Americans, nearly all mainstream religious organizations and leaders in both political parties accepted contraception as beneficial to families, society and the world.

The move toward acceptance of contraception began in the early 20th century and accelerated in the 1940s. When the Birth Control Federation of America changed its name to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Abraham Stone, medical director of the Margaret Sanger Research Bureau, explained at the time that "planned parenthood" signaled "the need for individual couples to plan their families and for nations to plan their populations."

In 1959 President Dwight D. Eisenhower declare: "The government will not, so long as I am here, have a positive political doctrine in its program that has to do with the problem of birth control. That's not our business." But in the 1960s, President John F. Kennedy - the first Catholic US president - supported family-planning programs as part of foreign aid. Then Eisenhower came around, saying "Governments must act. . . . Failure would limit the expectations of future generations to abject poverty and suffering and bring down upon us history's condemnation."

Thereafter, for two decades, every American president promoted contraception as an essential part of domestic and foreign policy. Even the Catholic Church considered lifting its prohibition on contraception - and almost did.

Prior to the 1930s, the church had no official position on contraception. But on Dec. 31, 1930, Pope Pius XI issued a papal encyclical which for the first time explicitly prohibited Catholics from using contraception.

Margaret Sanger, a daughter of Irish Catholic immigrants, protested the pope's decree; her passionate commitment to promoting birth control stemmed from watching her mother weaken and die at age 50, having given birth to 11 children. She blamed her mother's premature death on constant childbearing and lack of access to contraceptives.

John Rock, a devout Catholic doctor - who taught at Harvard Medical School and who would become one of the leading clinical researchers responsible for developing the pill - also opposed the ban. Besides being medically necessary at times, he said it was personally desirable for maintaining happy marriages and well-planned families and essential for those who could not afford many children. In the 1940s, Rock promoted diaphragms - even though birth control was illegal in Massachusetts.

Rock believed church would accept the pill was a means of birth control because it simply repressed ovulation and replicated the body's hormonal condition in early pregnancy. He even wrote a book on it: "The Time Has Come: A Catholic Doctor's Proposals to End the Battle Over Birth Control."

In 1962 Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council, which resulted in a number of reforms that modernized church practices. But he died as he was putting together a committee to consider the matter of the pill. In 1964, Pope Paul appointed a commission to advise him on birth control. Many journalists, clergy and lay Catholics expected the church to lift the ban. A significant majority of its members including 60 of 64 theologians and nine of the 15 cardinals favored lifting the ban. But Pope Paul issued a formal encyclical, Humanae Vitae ("Of Human Life") in 1968, siding with the minority and reaffirming the church's prohibition of any form of artificial birth control.

Many Catholic leaders criticized the decision. Two years after the decree, two-thirds of Catholic women were using contraception. Now, according to data from the Department of Health and Human Services, Catholic women use birth control at the same rate as non-Catholic women.

In 1984, during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, the United States sent two opponents of abortion rights to a United Nations conference on population in Mexico City. These delegates established the Mexico City Policy, a global gag rule that refused U.S. government support to any agency, American or foreign, that used its own funds to support abortion services. Such facilities were prohibited from receiving any U.S. funds for family planning, even if the money would not be used for abortion-related services.

It was after this that bipartisan support for contraception began to crumble.

The Mexico City Policy was rescinded by Democratic President Bill Clinton, reinstated by Republican George W. Bush, and rescinded by Democratic President Barack Obama.

Now, even though more than 99% of sexually experienced women report having used contraception, we are once again debating whether women should have access to birth control.

Student Reporting: Population 7 Billion

Excerpts from student essay written by Carleton University undergrad Marika Washchyshyn:

Is the birth of 'Baby Seven Billion' cause for concern or celebration?

Population growth has risen from the three billion people milestone in 1959 to the seven billion people in 2011. The billion-person increments between 1959 and 2011 took 12 years on average versus the 159 years it took to add the first three billion people. The world population has grown by enough to equal all of the AIDS deaths since the epidemic began 30 years ago, according to Foreign Policy magazine.

The world's current population is consuming commodities and natural resources at a rate of one and a half Earths, which the Global Footprint Network explained as the "ecological overshoot" phenomenon, where annual demand for resources exceeds what the Earth can generate in a year. Today, it takes the Earth one and a half years to regenerate what its population uses in one year.

Michael Borucke, a research scientist at the Global Footprint Network, said "If we think about the Earth as a bank and if we understand that we're taking more out than we're putting in, over time, is that sustainable?" .. "Eventually, we're going to get to zero. It's just a question of how long it will take."

There are 215 million women around the world who want to avoid pregnancy and aren't using modern contraception. Between lack of access to contraceptives and cultural norms including male dominance, high prevalence of child marriages and gender inequality, unplanned and unwanted pregnancies are a problem worldwide, particularly in developing nations.*

Women's empowerment is key, and too often in too many places, women have little or no say over their reproductive decisions. *

The UNFPA reports an estimated 80 million unintended pregnancies, 22 million unsafe abortions and 358,000 deaths from maternal causes.

If we spent an additional $3.5 billion dollars, or an increase of about three per cent of what they currently donate, those millions of women would have drastically increased access to contraceptives and reproductive health measures. * "The world spends $200 billion on beer every year," ... "surely we can find $3.5 billion for women who want to avoid pregnancy."

Dr. Christabelle Sethna, associate professor at the University of Ottawa's Institute of Women's Studies, says although contraception and abortion are very important issues, family planning solutions alone won't solve the problem. She thinks ongoing inequality among individuals and countries is what's unsustainable.

Fertility rates have been declining since the 1960s, but not enough to mitigate resource loss. We are reaching the limits of growth. Food commodity prices have risen about 130 per cent over the last 7 years. Metals and other minerals have seen even higher increases at 200 to 300%, and oil has seen a ten-fold increase at over $100 a barrel. *

Urbanization rates are greater than population rates as arid land shortages force rural inhabitants to move to cities. Slums continue to grow, as well as the number of people living on less than one dollar a day in highly unsanitary conditions. Local city planners are unable to keep up with the growing demand of services for their populations.*

Thomas Friedman predicted that our current consumer-driven growth model will be replaced with a more happiness-driven growth model, based on people working and owning less. "We are heading for a crisis-driven choice," he says in the article. "We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model."

The wealthiest 10% of humanity need to start focusing their efforts on investing in clean, renewable energy. In the end; it's a profound moral choice, he says. But Walker of the Population Institute thinks that only by meeting the express desire of gender equality, we can then try to make the world more sustainable in the long term. "I think 7 billion is cause for concern, not celebration."

Protect Corals, Fish and Whales From Ocean Acidification

Without swift, national action to protect the ocean's vast diversity of life from acidifying waters corals, shellfish, salmon and a whole host of beautiful creatures will be lost.

We need your help to ask President Barack Obama and the Environmental Protection Agency to get working on a bold plan to curb ocean acidification.

Carbon dioxide pollution is also being absorbed by the ocean, causing its chemistry to change and become more acidic. This spells trouble for marine animals that are now having difficulty building shells, growing and sometimes even surviving in increasingly corrosive waters.

Click here or on the left arrow to take action. Everything from the smallest of plankton to the largest of whales has a stake in what the White House and the EPA decide to do about ocean acidification.

World Lacks Enough Food, Fuel as Population Soars: U.N.

The world is running out of time to make sure there is enough food, water and energy to meet the needs of a rapidly growing population a recent U.N. report warned.

The world's population, now at 7 billion, is expected to reach 9 billion by 2040, with 3 billion of them middle-class consumers, increasing the demand for resources exponentially, and at a risk of condemning up to 3 billion people into poverty.

Even by 2030, the world will need at least 50% more food, 45% more energy and 30% more water at a time when a changing environment is creating new limits to supply, says the UN .

Efforts towards sustainable development are neither fast enough nor deep enough, as well as suffering from a lack of political will, the UN high-level panel on global sustainability said. "To achieve sustainability, a transformation of the global economy is required" it said. "Tinkering on the margins will not do the job. The current global economic crisis ... offers an opportunity for significant reforms."

Although the number of people living in absolute poverty has been reduced to 27% of world population from 46% in 1990 and the global economy has grown 75% since 1992, improved lifestyles and changing consumer habits have put natural resources under increasing strain.

There are 20 million more undernourished people now than in 2000; 5.2 million hectares of forest are lost per year - an area the size of Costa Rica; 85%t of all fish stocks are over-exploited or depleted; and carbon dioxide emissions have risen 38% between 1990 and 2009, which heightens the risk of sea level rise and more extreme weather.

The panel made 56 recommendations for sustainable development to be included in economic policy as quickly as possible.

EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard suggested: "Let's use the upcoming Rio+20 summit to kick off this global transition towards a sustainable growth model for the 21st century that the world so badly needs."

The report urged governments to agree on a set of sustainable development goals which would complement the eight Millennium Development Goals to 2015 and create a framework for action after 2015.

It suggested an "evergreen revolution," which would at least double productivity while reducing resource use and avoiding further biodiversity losses; more efficient management of water and marine ecosystems; universal access to affordable sustainable energy by 2030; pricing of carbon and natural resources should be established through taxation, regulation or emissions trading schemes by 2020 and phasing out of fossil fuel subsidies; reform of national fiscal and credit systems to provide long-term incentives for sustainable practices as well as disincentives for unsustainable ones; application of sustainable development criteria to their investment decisions for sovereign wealth and public pension fund, development banks and export credit agencies; strengthening the relationship between policy and science by regularly examining the science behind environmental thresholds or "tipping points"; and naming a chief scientific adviser or board to advise the organization.

The report is available at www.un.org/gsp/

Petition Against Jail Time for Birth Control in Honduras

The Honduran Congress is about to vote on a proposal that would send women to jail if they use the morning-after pill -- even for rape victims. But the President of the Honduran Congress can stop this. He's concerned about his international image and his future in politics, so our massive outcry can shame him and stop this attack on women. Click here to sign the petition:/?cl=1718679404&v=13635 . The vote could happen any day.

Some Congress members agree that this law -- which would also jail doctors or anyone who sells the pill -- is excessive, but they are bowing to the powerful religious lobby that wrongly claims the morning-after pill constitutes an abortion.

Avaaz will work with local women's groups to personally deliver our outcry.

The emergency contraceptive pill delays ovulation and prevents pregnancy - like ordinary birth control pills. But if this new bill passes, Honduras will be the only state in the world to punish the use or sale of emergency contraception with a jail term.

Emergency contraception is vital for women everywhere, but especially where sexual violence against women is rampant, unplanned pregnancy rates are high and access to regular birth control is limited.

For more information see: Honduras, most sweeping ban on emergency contraception anywhere (RH Reality Check): http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/02/14/honduran-supreme-court-upholds-complete-ban-on-emergency-contraception-0

The Future of the USA - 2012-2016 (part 3) - the Breakdown of the US Socio-Political Fabric

The breakdown of the United States' socio-economic and socio-political tissue began some forty years ago. In 1970s the US saw the end of the fixed link between the Dollar and gold, defeat in the Vietnam War, "impeachment" of President Nixon, the last period of great inventions / US scientific adventures (the conquest of space, Internet...), etc...

One strategically important aspect: the collapse of the education system. LEAP estimates that the change in the 1970s to an education system based on student assessment via multiple choice questions, from primary school to university, has generated a far-reaching and lasting weakening of the education of US generations under the age of 40 today. At the same time a two-speed education system was established, alienating the country's social elite from the middle class even further, because of the rising costs of access to quality education. Furthermore, all-out marketing, combined with online or home education, has dealt a fatal blow to any consistency or general requirement for quality in the US education system.

Having those less than forty years old in the US who are much less well educated and less socially integrated than their elders has consequences, on their "employability", their ability to act in a world where globalization is everywhere and requires varied knowledge (such as languages, history and geography, for example), their ability to talk of the country's re-industrialization, or the need to address the country's scientific and technological challenges, even the country's military capabilities.

Democratic life and political discourse also suffer because the citizen is less able to distinguish between lies and truth, between information and spin, between competence and demagoguery. The Republican primaries for the 2012 presidential election is a case study on the subject. The breakdown of the country's democratic and political fabric is well under way, particularly because of this generational "dumbing-down of education" started in the 1970s.

The degredation of education combined with the very unequal impact of the current depression which, like any crisis, affects the weakest the most rapidly, increases the fragmentation of the United States' population's identity.

On both sides of the US-Mexico border, killing, corruption, trafficking is growing, strengthening each other's identity reflexes, and pushing for the adoption of increasingly severe laws against illegal immigrants.

The break-up of the socio-political fabric is also due to the collapse in the quality of the country's infrastructure: bridges, roads, railways, airports, dikes, dams, nuclear power plants, pipelines... need more than USD 2 trillion just to be repaire. But funding is impossible to get from a locked-down Congress and from a high deficit budget.

Without repairs, bridges will soon be in poor condition, ready to collapse or leaking pipelines to eventually explode. People tend to get used to the poor state of things thinking, little by little, that it's their normal state... until the day they break completely. 2012-2016 is when LEAP/E2000 predicts such a development.

Inter-community tensions, breakdown of social cohesion, political demagoguery, massive "dumbing-down of education", lack of jobs, rapid rise in poverty,... it all leads to a very predictable development that marked the 2011 "Black Friday, which saw in 2011 the largest increase in firearm sales compared to 2010 (+32%), and 2013/2015 will be a period that is likely to see the constitutional order of the United States upset by events.

LEAP/E2020 believes that this is one more sign that the American public is preparing for the worst,. The fear of a development in the crisis towards violence is also fuelled by budget cuts in the police and the feeling that the increase in the number of poor will constitute a growing threat to the wealthy.

LEAP/E2020 goes on to forecast bank failures in 2012, uncontrolled violence in 2013, the US military withdrawal from continental Europe for 2017 (the country no longer has the political, fiscal, diplomatic, and soon military means, to engage in first-strike conflict). The current attempt by the Obama administration to trigger a mini Cold War with China will fail because it's the fact of a penniless country who "threatens his banker" (a banker who is better armed), which can't go very far.

NOAA: March was An Epically Weird Weather Month

A mega tornado outbreak early in the month spawned 2012's first billion-dollar disaster, as warmer-than-average conditions created a juicy environment for severe weather. There were 223 preliminary tornado reports in March, a month that averages 80 tornadoes.

It was the warmest March on record for the contiguous United States, a record that dates back to 1895 - 8.6 degrees F above the 20th century average for March and 0.5 degrees F warmer than the previous warmest March in 1910.

The freakish weather was due to a persistent weather pattern that put a kink in the jet stream and kept cold away from the eastern two-thirds of the Lower 48.

Every state in the nation experienced a record warm daily temperature during March. There were 21 instances of nighttime temperatures being as warm, or warmer, than the existing record daytime temperature for that date.

Precipitation was either really wet or really dry compared to the 1981-2010 average, with not a whole lot in between.

According to NOAA's US Climate Extremes Index (USCEI)—which tracks the highest and lowest 10% of extremes in temperature, precipitation, drought, and tropical cyclones across the contiguous US—38% of the contiguous US racked up the second highest USCEI rank on record for the nation's normal cold season: October 2011 to March 2012.

The Trojan Paradox

Globally, about one in five pregnancies ends in abortion according to a new study in the medical journal the Lancet. Evidence suggests the best way to reduce the world's abortion rate is to provide more widespread access to contraceptives, and yet there are those who are opposed to both abortion rights and supplying contraceptives.

The percentage of couples in the world - ages 15 to 49 - using a modern method of contraception expanded from 41% in 1980 to 56% in 2009, U.N. data shows. However the rate of progress has slowed considerably in the last 10 years - to a growth of just 0.1% a year.

44% of couples who aren't using modern contraceptives are trying to have a baby. But hundreds of millions of women aren't using modern contraception because they don't have access to it or can't afford it.

The rhythm method or withdrawal method are free but these are much less reliable and require the cooperation of male partners. 01%-50% of women in a relationship in 10-country study by WHO had suffered sexual abuse by their partners. Men in developing countries usually want more children than do their partners. So women can't always rely on their partner to cooperate when it comes to avoiding pregnancy.

The Guttmacher Institute says that 40% of unintended pregnancies in the developing world occur among mothers who lack access to modern contraception. Roughly 300,000 women worldwide die each year as a result of pregnancy and childbirth, with about 13% of those deaths due to unsafe abortions.

In a country where abortion is illegal, primitive, risky methods are often used. About half of pregnancy-related deaths in the region are due to botched abortions, the great majority of which are dangerous traditional approaches.

In the United States, the number of abortion-related deaths per million live births fell by three-quarters between 1970 -- three years before Roe v. Wade -- and 1976. Abortion-related deaths fell similary in South Africa after its abortion laws were liberalized in 1997. Abortion rates are a little higher in regions where the procedure is illegal than where abortion laws are comparatively liberal, according to the Lancet study.

The percentage of women ages 15 to 44 who got pregnant unintentionally each year dropped from 7.9% to 6.9% between 1995 and 2008 across the developing world, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

The former Soviet republic of Georgia had the highest rate of abortions in the world in 2000. But that rate declined 15% over the next six years as contraceptive prevalence increased by nearly a quarter, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Turkey saw a 46% decline in abortions in 1988-1998, due to more widespread use of modern contraceptives and more effective use of traditional methods. Bangladesh reduced the its abortion rate at Matlab from one in 10 pregnancies to one in 50 due to high-quality contraception services.

If you want to reduce the number of abortions, making them illegal won't work. Making modern contraceptives widely available is far more effective. This is also a strategy that puts women more firmly in charge of their own bodies and health, saving tens of thousands from death and millions from illness each year.

Spain's 'Lost Generation' Threatens Social Fabric

Roughly half of all Spaniards between 16 and 24 are jobless, the highest level among the 17 nations that use the euro. It's a devastating picture of blighted youth that threatens to distort Spain's social fabric for years to come, dooming dreams, straining family structures and eroding the well-being of a rapidly aging population.

Gayle Allard, a labor market specialist says: "The young people who are coming on the market now are the lost generation. They are losing the advantage of their youth and energy and that does not come back."

Jobless figures are at 39% for those ages 20-29, holding dire consequences for a country that grew accustomed to prosperity on the back of a property boom that collapsed in 2008.

These jobless young people will put off having children, slashing a birth rate that's already declining just as Spain's large baby boom generation begins to retire. That means fewer people to absorb the costs of caring for the swelling ranks of pensioners.

Last year thousands erected protest camps in Madrid and Barcelona. Spain's relatively new democracy, launched in 1978 after decades of dictatorship, may become threatened if an entire generation ends up convinced they will never attain the same lifestyle as their parents.

With low-paying jobs the norm, college graduates are increasingly moving abroad to do work below their qualifications, for example as bartenders or hotel workers in Germany or Britain. Last year more people left Spain than came to settle for the first time in a decade.