IT'S OFFICIAL... OIL IS RUNNING OUT!

And who says so? It's those nice people the investment experts who tell you where to invest your money! Not that I have money to invest you understand, but I like to know what is really going on in the world of finance. 'Invest in food/land' was a recent journal heading, "you can't eat money" was an unforgettable line of that article, which perhaps explains the rising cost of food as investors gamble on food futures.

The latest edition informs its readers that the increasing demands for and the ever dwindling supply of oil is a threat to the global economy, but is also a big opportunity for investors.

Fatih Birol of the International Energy Agency stated at a recent conference that "The age of cheap oil is over" and so oil companies are hunting far and wide to locate new oil sources, like tar sands. The demand for oil is increasing as, for only one example, China will need more oil. In the EU around 50% of people have cars, but in China, it’s around 3%, and China has a huge population, and now we have the recent political turmoil and upset in the Middle East, a region we in the West are oil dependent on. Iraq oil production, the article informs, is a critical element in increasing future oil supply, so that explains the war then...

The problem for the West is that as the political problems in Bahrain, Jordan, Egypt, Yemen and Libya spreads to their much larger next door neighbour, Saudi Arabia, that the oil price will increase and push the fragile Western economies over the edge of another slump.

The article talks about natural gas as one alternative, pointing out that it is located in politically hospitable areas. My thoughts are that Russia is not the most politically hospitable area, but compared to the Middle East they may have a point I suppose. So what are the investment tips? They are nuclear and renewable energy, and I bet that nuclear gets the nod.

The inescapable facts are though that our transport infrastructure is oil dependent and there is no alternative to oil, it is our primary energy source and it is running out. The sooner the world wakes up to those facts and values what there is the more chance that our children and grandchildren will have a viable future.

The death of Greenland's canary in the 'Climate Change Coal Mine'?

Without the ‘Greenhouse Effect’ life would not exist on earth. The Earth’s atmosphere lets in just enough ultraviolet and visible light, but traps some of the infrared radiation and heat and works just like a greenhouse; light enters and heats up the inside and the glass traps some of it in. This is a delicate balancing act the atmosphere performs, because our atmosphere is very thin, the equivalent to the thin layer of varnish on a 3foot diameter globe.

The ozone layer is a diffused layer and if it were at normal air pressure it would be about 1/8th of an inch thick. It absorbs some 97% to 99% of the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation, if it did not do so all life on Earth would be seriously damaged, yet this layer, depending on the place and the season, is located between only eight to 24 miles high above the Earth.

The problem we now have is that the amount of Greenhouse Gasses, mainly CO2, in the atmosphere has been increased by the use of fossil fuels and the burning of the rain Forests. It really is quite simple; more greenhouse gas equals more heat being trapped in the atmosphere and less escaping into space, what we have done is the same as insulating the greenhouse roof with bubble wrap! It is this increase in trapped heat that changes the climate, altering weather patterns and the greater heat trapped in the atmosphere results in the more frequent and severe weather events that now occur. It is not simply the immediate increase but also the lengthened time scale that this increase occurs over. If for example you insulate the roof of your house the heat does not escape so readily but stays for a longer period. For the Earth then the spring season can start earlier, the summer season extend and autumn arrive later due to the fact that that early and late heat does not escape as it once did and simply builds up within the atmosphere.

Proof of the longer seasons was evident when researchers found that Greenland's annual melting season lasted 50 days longer than average last year when compared to the years between 1979 and 2009. Satellite data indicates that shrinkage of ice sheets may contribute more to sea level rise than was thought. Were the Greenland Ice Sheet to completely melt, which is very, very highly unlikely indeed, then there is the potential of a 5-6 meters sea level rise in the ice sheet which is almost 2 miles thick in the centre.

In Greenland, 2010 summer temperatures of up to 3C above the average were combined with reduced snowfall, and Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, had the warmest spring and summer since records began in 1873.

Greenland’s ice sheet and its melting patterns are quite simply a canary in the climate change coal mine. The canary has started to die, but if action is taken quickly, it can be saved.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

... it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way (Charles Dickens; 'A Tale of Two Cities').

2010 felt like that to me, 2 steps forward, 1.9 steps back, fighting environmental battles for the truth regarding Climate Chaos, GM and others with minimal resources against an enemy with limitless assets who cares for nothing other than the bottom line, then I remember Ola. To stand up and be counted is not easy, but to be a young girl in Babylon Iraq, and stand up outside the gate of Ishtar and be counted makes my fight seem easy.

350.org is an international grassroots campaign, 350 being the number that leading scientists say is the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Scientists measure carbon dioxide in "parts per million" (ppm), so 350ppm is the number humanity needs to get below as soon as possible to avoid runaway climate change. To get there, we need a different kind of PPM—a "people powered movement" that is made of people like us in every corner of the planet.

To see 350 campaigner Ola with others in other countries, please watch the film below, Ola appears at the 24 second mark, proving to me that I should never forget the Power of One.

May I wish you a happy and peaceful Christmas

From the moment the minister nods her head to the very last note, for me this is simply the best choral work ever.



Thou must leave thy lowly dwelling,
The humble crib, the stable bare.
Babe, all mortal babes excelling,
Content our earthly lot to share.
Loving father, Loving mother,
Shelter thee with tender care!

Blessed Jesus, we implore thee
With humble love and holy fear.
In the land that lies before thee,
Forget not us who linger here!
May the shepherd’s lowly calling,
Ever to thy heart be dear!

Blest are ye beyond all measure,
Thou happy father, mother mild!
Guard ye well your heav’nly treasure,
The Prince of Peace, The Holy Child!
God go with you, God protect you,
Guide you safely through the wild!

And may the love of God enfold you and bless you

Wikileaks about GM.

The Wikileaks release of U.S. classified information has been headline news as the sites that are the source of the information have been under attack from every known virus available. It has however been a treasure trove of details on the working of the U.S. Government and their foreign policy.

One mention of agriculture in the released information is in a document that outlines priorities for intelligence gathering in the African countries of Burundi, the Republic of Congo, and Rwanda. In this document is a list of what information the U.S. Government wants to know about the those countries, i.e. their government policies on food security and food safety, information on the impact of rising food prices, agricultural yield statistics, infrastructure improvements, data on deforestation and desertification, water issues and invasive species are included. But also on the U.S. priority list is this:

Government acceptance of genetically modified food and propagation of genetically modified crops.

Says it all!

GM = GENETIC MUTILATION

One baby has Hydrocephalus; water on the brain, the link to this photo can be found HERE, scroll down this link for more images and for a fully documented scientific report in English, see HERE.

The image of the other child, with the back deformation, was taken by Dr Graciela Gomez.

Suffer the little children to come unto me indeed...

Argentina has become a giant experiment in farming genetically modified (GM) Roundup Ready (RR) soy, engineered to be tolerant to Roundup, Monsanto’s formulation of the herbicide glyphosate. The Argentine government, eager to pull the country out of a deep economic recession in the 1990s, restructured its economy around GM soy grown for export, most of which goes to feed livestock in Europe. In 2009, GM soy was planted on 19 million hectares - over half of Argentina’s cultivated land - and sprayed with 200 million litres of glyphosate herbicide. Spraying is often carried out from the air, causing problems of drift.

In 2002, two years after the first big harvests of RR soy in the country, residents and doctors in soy producing areas began reporting serious health effects from glyphosate spraying, including high rates of birth defects as well as infertility, stillbirths, miscarriages, and cancers. Environmental effects include killed food crops and livestock and streams strewn with dead fish.

One of the first medical doctors to report problems from glyphosate spraying of GM soy was Dr Darío Gianfelici, from Cerrito, Entre Ríos, Argentina. According to Gianfelici, there are two levels of toxic effects from glyphosate: acute effects, such as vomiting, diarrhoea, respiratory problems, and skin rashes; and chronic effects, which take 10–20 years to show up. These include infertility and cancer.

Gianfelici said: “Our town experienced drastic changes before and after soy. I’ve seen people die from cancer at age 30. I have witnessed pregnancy problems and a significant increase in fertility problems. I have seen an increase in respiratory diseases, as has never been seen before. GM soy has been a death sentence for humans and for the environment. No money can compensate for the damage that has been caused – the contamination, the deaths, the cases of cancer and malformations.”

Reports of birth defects in glyphosate-sprayed areas of Argentina gained scientific credibility in 2009, when senior Argentine government scientist Prof. Andrés Carrasco went public with his research findings, fully published a year later, that glyphosate causes malformations in frog and chicken embryos at doses far lower than those used in agricultural spraying. “The findings in the lab are compatible with malformations observed in humans exposed to glyphosate during pregnancy,” said Carrasco, “I suspect the toxicity classification of glyphosate is too low ... in some cases this can be a powerful poison.”

At a recent conference, Carrasco, professor and director of the Laboratory of Molecular Embryology, University of Buenos Aires Medical School and lead researcher of the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), said a frequent result of malformations in human embryos is miscarriage. He said that it was now not unusual for women in GM soy producing regions of Argentina to have up to five miscarriages in a row.

The research findings of Carrasco and his colleagues were not welcomed by some sectors of government and industry. After he announced them, four people from Argentina’s crop protection trade association CASAFE were sent to try to search his laboratory and he was “seriously told off” by Lino Barrañao, Argentina’s science and technology minister.

Things took a violent turn in 2010, when an organized mob of thugs attacked people who gathered to hear Carrasco talk in La Leonesa, an agricultural town that has become a centre for activism against agrochemical spraying of soy and rice crops. Three people were seriously injured. Carrasco and a colleague shut themselves in a car and were surrounded by people making violent threats and beating the car for two hours. Witnesses said the attack was organized by local officials and a local rice producer to protect the economic interests behind local agro-industry and Amnesty International called for an investigation, into the event. For more information see HERE.

As with all my posts and unlike GM, all the details above have been thoroughly researched.

THE ROUTE TO SOLAR POWER IN THE US (AND THE UK) IS A ROAD NOT TAKEN.

In 1979, President Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the roof of the White House West Wing. The panels were used to heat water for the staff eating area and were a symbol of a new solar strategy that Carter had said was going to “move our Nation toward true energy security and abundant, readily available, energy supplies.” In 1986, President Ronald Reagan removed the solar panels while the White House roof was being repaired. They were never reinstalled.

In 1991, the panels were retrieved from government storage and brought to the environmentally-minded Unity College near of Bangor in Maine. There, with help of actress Glenn Close, the panels were refurbished and used to heat water in the cafeteria up until 2005. They are still there, although they no longer function.

Swiss directors Christina Hemauer and Roman Keller follow the route the panels took, using them as a backdrop to explore the American oil dependency and the total lack of political will to pursue alternative energy sources.

In the movie ‘A Road Not Taken’, the filmmakers took two solar panels from Unity, placed them in the back of two students’ 1990 Dodge Ram pick-up truck, which runs on vegetable oil, and delivered one of them to the Jimmy Carter Library & Museum in Atlanta and the other to the National Museum of American History in Washington.

In 1979, Carter warned in the speech he gave when the panels were first commissioned, “a generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people - harnessing the power of the sun to enrich our lives as we move away from our crippling dependence on foreign oil.”

Two of Carter’s solar panels are now museum pieces, the chance was missed, and instead we have, in President Carter's prophetic words "our crippling dependence on foreign oil”.

SO, WHAT’S WRONG WITH MISSHAPEN FRUIT AND VEG?

Left are rejected potatoes

A few weeks ago a colleague and I walked the fields around West Malling in Kent. We passed rows of lettuce ready for picking but left in the field to be ploughed in, why? Easy answer, they was not quite the right shape and /or size.

A couple of weeks later I drove past Kent orchards where apples had been left on the tree and are now rotting on the ground, why? Yes, you are there already, they were not quite the right shape and /or size.

All over the UK some of the potatoes, cauliflowers, apples, carrots, tomatoes and other produce we grow are rejected by supermarkets because they are not the right size, shape, or colour. Tomatoes, like apples and many other fruit and veg actually have to be a certain grade of colour and as for apples; those that are picked in the UK have a reject rate of around one fifth, they are perfectly OK to eat but don’t quite make ‘the standard’. The UK imports 70% of the apples bought and these have to conform to the supermarkets standards; they need to be blemish-less and weigh on average about 150g. The size and appearance of fruit and veg is all important, I would hope that taste comes in there somewhere but I have the idea that it’s somewhat behind the shelf-life demands!

The class structure in the UK has now filtered down to fruit and veg; there is ‘Class 1’, so this must be the best surely? ‘Class 2’, so obviously not so good, and then we may well have ‘cooking’ or ‘fun size’. I find myself somewhat confused when the term ‘cooking’ is applied to an onion, does this mean it cannot be eaten raw or used for pickling? When ‘fun size’ is applied to apples, does this mean that the other apples are a miserable lot?

In the supermarkets drive for sales, presentation seems to be all. Fruit and veg are displayed in a way that would have seemed over the top in an amateur grower’s competition. Farmers are dictated to by the supermarkets as to what they will purchase and so have to conform or go out of business. There is concern in the UK about the ever increasing spread of polytunnels on our farms but it is neither realistic nor economic to grow, for example, strawberries in the UK climate to the standards demanded by the supermarkets without tunnel protection.

So instead of selling almost all of the fruit and veg we produce much is fed to animals or simply ploughed back into the soil, and instead the UK imports, among many others, apples from all over the world, green beans and salads from Africa, and tomatoes from Spain. I know that the same applies in the U.S., in Australia and New Zealand also, and I expect also applies in much of the EU as well.

So the consumer is educated away from anything that looks less than perfect, the price they pay goes up and produce is then imported from abroad to make up for the rejected shortfall. Food miles increase enormously, pollution increases enormously, and, as I said prices increase enormously. Are there times when you look at a situation and feel that reality and common sense are unrelated?