Thanks to Katie Elmore for this article from the New York Times.
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Nine years ago The Economist ran a big story on oil, which was then selling for $10 a barrel. The magazine warned that this might not last. Instead, it suggested, oil might well fall to $5 a barrel.

In any case, The Economist asserted, the world faced “the prospect of cheap, plentiful oil for the foreseeable future.”
Last week, oil hit $117.

It’s not just oil that has defied the complacency of a few years back. Food prices have also soared, as have the prices of basic metals. And the global surge in commodity prices is reviving a question we haven’t heard much since the 1970s: Will limited supplies of natural resources pose an obstacle to future world economic growth?

For full article, visit:
http://www.nytimes.com

I am pleased to report to you that the Board of Directors of the Population Institute (PI) has formed a formal partnership with Population Media Center (PMC).
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Thanks to Steve Kurtz for this article. Contemplating the demise of civilization is not for the faint of heart. At least it is fair to say we live in interesting times.
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DOOMSDAY. The end of civilisation. Literature and film abound with tales of plague, famine and wars which ravage the planet, leaving a few survivors scratching out a primitive existence amid the ruins. Every civilisation in history has collapsed, after all. Why should ours be any different?

Doomsday scenarios typically feature a knockout blow: a massive asteroid, all-out nuclear war or a catastrophic pandemic (see “Will a pandemic bring down civilisation?”). Yet there is another chilling possibility: what if the very nature of civilisation means that ours, like all the others, is destined to collapse sooner or later?

For full article, visit:
http://www.newscientist.com

Thanks to Paul Paquet, Alan Kuper and Jim Motavalli for this article.
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It was a spectacular late-May afternoon in southern Italy, but the streets of Laviano — a gloriously situated hamlet ranged across a few folds in the mountains of the Campania region — were deserted. There were no day-trippers from Naples, no tourists to take in the views up the steep slopes, the olive trees on terraces, the ruins of the 11th-century fortress with wild poppies spotting its grassy flanks like flecks of blood. And there were no locals in sight either.

The town has housing enough to support a population of 3,000, but fewer than 1,600 live here, and every year the number drops. Rocco Falivena, Laviano’s 56-year-old mayor, strolled down the middle of the street, outlining for me the town’s demographics and explaining why, although the place is more than a thousand years old, its buildings all look so new. In 1980 an earthquake struck, taking out nearly every structure and killing 300 people, including Falivena’s own parents.

For full article, visit:
http://www.nytimes.com

Thanks to Albert Kaufman for sending this article.
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The Arctic Council’s recent report on the effects of global warming in the far north paints a grim picture: global floods, extinction of polar bears and other marine mammals, collapsed fisheries. But it ignored a ticking time bomb buried in the Arctic tundra.

There are enormous quantities of naturally occurring greenhouse gasses trapped in ice-like structures in the cold northern muds and at the bottom of the seas. These ices, called clathrates, contain 3,000 times as much methane as is in the atmosphere. Methane is more than 20 times as strong a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.

For full article, visit:
http://www.energybulletin.net/3647.html

You may have seen An Inconvenient Truth. This half-hour talk in March 2008 by Al Gore updates the slides from An Inconvenient Truth. In this talk, he presents evidence that the pace of climate change may be even worse than scientists were recently predicting, and challenges us to act with a sense of “generational mission” — the kind of feeling that brought forth the civil rights movement — to set it right. Gore’s stirring presentation is followed by a brief Q&A in which he is asked for his verdict on the current political candidates’ climate policies and on what role he himself might play in future.

http://www.ted.com

Thanks to Joseph Hartman for these two documents from climate expert James Hansen.

Climate Change (PDF, 136 KB)

Yankee Ticket Prices (PDF, 22 KB)

Global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the burning of fossil fuels stood at a record 8.38 gigatons of carbon (GtC) in 2006, 20 percent above the level in 2000. Emissions grew 3.1 percent a year between 2000 and 2006, more than twice the rate of growth during the 1990s. Carbon dioxide emissions have been growing steadily for 200 years, since fossil fuel burning began on a large scale at the start of the Industrial Revolution. But the growth in emissions is now accelerating despite unambiguous evidence that carbon dioxide is warming the planet and disrupting ecosystems around the globe.

For full article, visit:
http://www.earthpolicy.org

GLOBAL FUND OBSERVER (GFO), an independent newsletter about the Global Fund provided by Aidspan to over 7,000 subscribers in 170 countries.

Issue 91: 30 June 2008. (For formatted web, Word and PDF versions of this and other issues, see www.aidspan.org/gfo)

Note: This issue of GFO contains just one article, a Commentary article by Wycliffe Muga.

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COMMENTARY: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
by Wycliffe Muga
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Five years ago, ordinary Kenyans who tested positive for HIV were doomed. They were no more likely to receive anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs) than they were to receive a liver transplant if their liver failed.

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This article discusses how fertility relates to social status with the use of a new dataset, several times larger than the ones used so far. The status-fertility relation is investigated over several centuries, across world regions and by the type of status-measure. The study reveals that as fertility declines, there is a general shift from a positive to a negative or neutral status-fertility relation. Those with high income/wealth or high occupation/social class switch from having relatively many to fewer or the same number of children as others. Education, however, depresses fertility for as long as this relation is observed (from early in the 20th century).

For full article, visit:
http://www.demographic-research.org/Volumes/Vol18/5/