World Overpopulation Awareness

Growth Has An Expiration Date

(watch the video at http://fora.tv/2011/10/26/Growth_Has_an_Expiration_Date to see a more accurate account and several educational graphs)

Presenter: Tom Murphy, Associate Professor of Physics, University of California San Diego

NPR's Ira Flatow guided a group of some of the world's best thinkers and doers at the Compass Summit situated overlooking the California coastline.

We could not have our marvelous technological society, better quality of life, great medical care if it weren't for surplus energy beyond the subsistence level. It's the surplus energy that's made more food available, that's created a population surge and more industry and economic growth.

Today we use energy at a total worldwide rate equivalent to12 terawatts (TW) of electricity. Historically that's grown 2-3% for year. Looking at the charts comparing, in logarithmic form, financial growth and energy growth history for the United States from 1650 to the present and you see how both energy and economics grew in parallel - the economy at 2.9% and energy at 2.3%. Economic growth went up with the rise of energy use. We can also make use of the fact that the rate of increase is quite constant. Today we use 12 TW and projecting that same growth rate - 2.3% - into 336 years from now we see that we will be using as much power as all the solar energy from the sun that hits all the continents, assuming we had a 100% coverage of all the land with 100% efficient solar panels.

Maybe we think we can make things better and find ways to put more solar panels in the sun, we could get up to 1400 years before we would be forced to level out our worldwide usage. Impossible to see how we would physically do it, but in 2500 years we would be using as much energy that is from all the stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.

This would be the devastation of our financial affairs, so if you're stuck in the mindset of exponential growth you have to realize what the consequences are.

Supposing we were, in 1400 years, using as much energy as the sun through some fantastical device on earth, we still have the problem of dissipating the waste heat that will be generated. It's going get hot due to the laws of thermodynamics - starting with the global average temperature of fifty nine degrees Fahrenheit today, in 430 years it will be hot enough to boil the water on the surface of the planet; and we get the sun surface temperature in less than a thousand years.

The idea of using this much energy is absolutely nuts. The lesson is that we have to abandon growth.

Most economists and everybody we've met and everybody that they've met has experienced this assumption that the world is expected to grow. People think we can still bring up standards of living and we can have efficiency gains and technology innovations to keep marching along but those things cannot become the whole economy.

Let's just look at a snapshot of growth over the last century - the gross world product for this entire world and for the first half of the century grew at about a 2.9% rate, which was the same rate as energy growth - which is striking because that's the same rate at which energy growth occurred. But since 1915 we had economic growth faster than energy which may be taken as an evidence that we can grow without energy and in a way we can. This is considered something of a triumph, but that gap is partly due to increased energy efficiency, partly doing more with less, and any other part is growth in things that are less energy intensive, as in the service sector like clerical work, real estate, and the psychotherapy we have to have to cope with this crazy world.

Improvements in energy efficiency have mostly been made, future improvements will contribute only a tiny percent to savings of energy. We can maybe get a savings by a factor of 2%. If we want to keep the economy growing at 5% the gap between energy and economy will continue to widen, and so some increasing fraction of your economy has to be based on low energy activities such as in the service industry, which will have to grow and grow until it approaches a 100%. Food, manufacturing, transport would have to go.

So we need a model for a steady state economy. If we assume we can solve this problem, we're not working on it. Some argue that we cannot comprehend what will happen 200 years from now. If we do nothing, however, we face the strong possibility of losing so much more.

Let's say that we manage the transition to renewable resource and we can level at our energy - leveling out actually means that we have to live at about fifth of the US energy standard of living because the US has 5% world's population 25% of the energy. But the world also has pollution, degredation, rainforests being chopped down, soil quality, ancient aquifers being pumped out - these are part of the story here. We need about a 10 time increase in throughput , or at least 5.

To give an example of our truly understanding the problem and taking responsibility of it: a child might really want a pony, and you say ok well let's start with a gerbil to see you can manage it - you have feed it, to clean its cage, and if you manage that you get kitten it's more work, clean the litter box. If you can manage that we get a puppy - that's more work - you have to walk it, and if you can manage that we upgrade to goat, now you have a paddock to take care which is more like being a farmer, and if you can do that you get the pony. But we're not even taking care of a gerbil. But we think we deserve a pony, deluding ourselves we continue to talk about pony, pony, pony. Do we deserve to be using the word sustainable because we haven't really understood what it means or what level we can expect to operate sustainably? It's an open question.

The fossil fuel joyride has clouded our judgment. We will start to see the decline in oil soon. We need an upfront energy investment to build a new energy infrastructure to build our way out of this problem. With our smarts and our technology that requires an upfront energy investment to build the infrastructure that's exactly what we're reading short time so we have to intentionally exacerbate to make the problem seem worse in order to start down that path and that's politically very difficult to do, to just put some numbers on.

We have to invest one energy unit per year in renewable energy to get 4 units of output. But there's no energy financing in nature. You can build a windmill on promised energy, but you must have the energy upfront while there is still energy to do it.

When you look at a project and wonder if it is sustainable, ask is this idea really sustainable, or is it based on continued growth, does this help secure merger will or is it just more promise up for a pony?

U.S.: Trust Women Week March

Do you trust women to make their own medical decisions? Join the Trust Women Week National Online March today. I hope you'll pick up a virtual sign and march with me today! Click on the link in the arrows or the headline to take action.

The last year has seen unprecedented attacks on women's access to care and on the fundamental right of every woman to make her own medical decisions — not just in Washington, but in states around the country. Just last year, 36 states enacted a record 135 provisions limiting access to reproductive health care, including 92 measures restricting abortion.

Planned Parenthood Action Fund has joined 70 other organizations in the National Online March for Trust Women Week to show just how many of us are willing to stand up for women's health.

Despite the setbacks, 2011 also proved that we can achieve tremendous victories when we stand together and speak with one voice. Not only did we secure no-cost birth control for women, but we're seeing some of the effects of the Affordable Care Act take hold.

Philippines: Too Many Mouths?

Click on the link in the headline for the audio version of this article.

Kai Ryssdal: Over the past 50 years, the amount of food that we as a planet produce has doubled. So too has the number of people who depend on that food. There are 7 billion of us now. The United Nations says we're on the way to 9 billion by the middle of the century. So that's what we're calling our year-long series on how we're going to feed them all. Food for 9 Billion is a partnership with Homelands Productions, the Center for Investigative Reporting and PBS NEWSHOUR.

Last month, we took you to Egypt and the realities of food and revolution. Today, the Philippines, where a growing population means the country can't feed itself anymore. And that leaves them with two options: Increase supply and try to do something about demand. From outside Manila, Sam Eaton reports. Sam Eaton: There's a saying in the Philippines, "pantawid gutom." It means to "cross the hunger." When a family can't afford rice, they'll water down a pack of instant noodles or feed their babies brown sugar dissolved in water to ease the hunger pangs. The fact that this saying even exists should tell you something about what it means to be poor here. Clarissa Canayong is 42 years old. She has 10 surviving children -- the youngest only a year old. And she lives in an urban Manila slum called Vitas, at the edge of a garbage dump.

Just Do It, the Film - a Movie on How to Get Involved and Being Effective

Just Do It lifts the lid on climate activism and the daring troublemakers who have crossed the line to become modern-day outlaws.

Documented over a year, Emily James' film follows these activists as they blockade factories, attack coal power stations and glue themselves to the trading floors of international banks despite the very real threat of arrest.

Tragedy of the Commons

By Richard Grossman - First published in the Durango Herald

"In every deliberation, we must consider the impact on the seventh generation…." Great Law of the Iroquois

"They know that they shouldn't fish closer than 500 meters from the coast, but I've seen these boats with their nets out just 200 or 300 meters offshore. The officials don't enforce the laws."

We were visiting the Greek island of Mykonos while on tour with the Durango Choral Society. We walked along the harbor with our guide, David, admiring the many small fishing boats. He explained facets of the failing Greek economy as well as the ancient and modern sites on this beautiful island. The Aegean Sea around Mykonos was so overfished, David said, that there were few fish left to catch.

We found proof that David was correct when we sat down to eat. Restaurants, even those overlooking the beautiful blue Aegean, had menus that listed few seafood dishes. Any seafood was prohibitively expensive since it had been caught in distant seas.

The situation that we encountered in Greece is a good illustration of the "tragedy of the commons". That tragedy can occur when a limited resource is open to uncontrolled use by many people. Any one user may think he can benefit from taking as much of the resource as possible. This behavior is rational only in the narrow sense of self-interest. Regrettably, unbridled use of a resource is likely to lead to its depletion.

The term "commons" referred to pastureland that was available for everyone to graze his sheep in old England. Now it includes many different vital resources such as the air we breathe, the water we drink and the fish in the Aegean.

Most of us learned to share in kindergarten. Unfortunately, some adults never mastered that lesson or have forgotten it. When there are many people using the same resource, any person who takes more than his share may deprive others of their fair share. Even worse, selfish people can deplete the resource, so eventually no one benefits from it.

In the case of fishing off Mykonos, there had been plenty of seafood for centuries. In the past the boats and fishing techniques only allowed small, sustainable catches, so the small proportion of sea life that ended up in nets was quickly replaced. Now, with more fishermen and more effective fishing techniques and many more mouths to feed, the fish supply has been exhausted. The Greek government has tried to prevent depletion by having a "no fish" zone, with poor results. People don't seem to pay attention to the law, or the reason that it is needed.

Human population growth is one factor leading to the tragedy of the commons: more people using the same resource means less for all.

Ironically, some of the pollutants we have unintentionally added to drinking water may serve as a feedback mechanism to slow human population growth. Endocrine disruptors are chemicals that have unintended hormonal effects. They are found in much of our country's drinking water. Some come from insecticides and other agricultural chemicals. Many plastics contain BPA, which has undesirable effects. Another source is the waste of women taking hormones. These chemicals have been shown to produce fish and other animals with sexual aberrations. It is possible that endocrine disruptors will lead to decreased human fertility.

The amount of fresh water on the planet is limited and, in some cases, is very slow to be replenished. The Ogallala aquifer is an example of a resource that is being used in an unsustainable manner. Much of the food grown in our country's midwestern breadbasket depends on water from this aquifer. Tragically, there are some places in eastern Colorado (and in other states) that rely on the Ogallala where the water table has dropped 40 feet in just 15 years!

As our human population has grown, the apparent size of the commons has shrunk. Although the first few wells in the Ogallala made little difference to the water table, now we seem to be sucking it dry. Dumping waste into a river or the atmosphere made little difference with few people and fewer factories, but these resources have become toxic in our populous, industrialized nation. We are learning the problems that can be caused by abusing the commons. The people who will suffer the most may be those who come after us, the "seventh generation" in the Iroquois law. Unless we think and plan ahead, our progeny will not have the use of many of the resources that we have enjoyed.

Trust Texas Women

A federal court just gave Texas's demeaning and invasive mandatory ultrasound the green light. Enforcement could potentially begin as early as January 31.

Send a letter to Texas media NOW—let them know that this ruling is unjust and hurts women. Click on the link in the headline or left arrow

The Next Immigration Challenge

There is no longer an immigration crisis. Illegal immigration is shrinking, and will likely never return to the peak levels of 2000. Also, immigrants who arrived in the 1990s and settled here are assimilating in remarkable and unexpected ways.

We must now shift from an emphasis on keeping newcomers out, to an an emphasis on encouraging migrants and their children to integrate into our social fabric.

Restrictionists, including those driving much of the debate on the Republican primary trail, still talk as if nothing has changed, even though the total number of immigrants, legal and illegal, arriving in the 2000s grew at half the rate of the 1990s, according to the Census Bureau.

There has been an effective disappearance of illegal border crossers from Mexico, with some experts estimating the net number of new Mexicans settling in the United States at zero. Since 2008, the size of the illegal-immigrant population from Mexico has shrunk by roughly 200,000 a year, accounting for about 58% of illegal immigrants. Illegal immigrants from other parts of the globe have similarly dwindled in numbers.

Mexico's birthrate has plunged from 6.8 babies per woman in 1970 to 2.1 today. With a shrinking pool of young adults to meet Mexico's future labor needs, there will be less competition for jobs at home.

As far as assimilation, recent studies show that immigrant parents and children, especially Latinos, are making extraordinary strides in assimilating. Of the children of Latino immigrants who arrived in the 1990s before age 10, 80% are expected to have completed high school and 18% to have a bachelor's degree by 2030. Of the Latinos who arrived in the 1990s, only 20% owned a home in 2000, but 74% of all immigrants are expected to own a home by 2030, well above the historical average for all Americans.

They will be buying their homes from the 78 million native-born baby boomers looking to downsize as their children grow up and leave home, helping to shore up future housing prices.

Immigrants and their children are crucial to America's future economic growth: economists forecast labor-force growth to drop below 1% later this decade because of retiring baby boomers.

The Department of Homeland Security plans to spend only 1% of its budget on helping immigrants assimilate and states with large immigrant populations are cutting the budgets of community and state colleges, precisely where immigrant students predominantly enroll.

The billions of dollars spent on border enforcement should be gradually redirected to replenishing and boosting the education budget, particularly the Pell grant program for low-income students.

The Departments of Labor, Commerce and Education need to help immigrants and their children graduate from high school and college, learn English proficiency, and help in developing migrants' job skills to better compete in an increasingly information- and knowledge-based economy.

California's Population Takes Aim at 38 Million

California, the most populous state in the U.S., is predicted to reach a population of 38 billion in May, according to On Numbers' latest population estimates.

Texas was next, reaching 26 million on New Years Day, New York is at 19,442,080, Florida 19,221,784 and Illinois 12,906,281.

Countries Banning Abortion See Higher Rates of Unsafe Procedures

A recent report from the Guttmacher Institute, published in Lancet, has shown that countries restricting abortions have higher rates of unsafe abortion than those that allow abortion. Most countries in Africa or Latin America restrict abortions, with the exception of South Africa in Africa and Guyana, French Guiana, Cuba and the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico in Latin America.

Africa's unsafe abortion rate was 28 per 1,000 women of childbearing age and Latin America's was 31 per 1,000, compared to western Europe and North America with less than 0.5 per 1,000 unsafe abortions.

Unsafe abortion is defined by WHO as a procedure for terminating a pregnancy that is performed by an individual lacking the necessary skills or in an environment that doesn't conform to minimal standards. Gilda Sedgh, who led the study, said that restricting abortions means women have more difficulty locating practitioners and the ones they do find are less likely to be adequately trained.

Beverly Winikoff, a professor of clinical population and family health at Columbia University, said in Lancet: "The data continue to confirm what we have known for decades: that women who wish to terminate unwanted pregnancies will seek abortion at any cost, even when it is illegal or involves risks to their own lives."

Globally, unsafe abortions, almost all of which occur in developing countries, accounted for 350 times the rate associated with legal abortions in the U.S. 58 countries, with 39% of the world's population, allow abortion without restriction as to reason; 73 countries allow it to preserve health or for socioeconomic reasons, and 68 countries, with 26% of the global population, prohibit the procedure or only permit it to save a woman's life.

The country of South Africa, in 1997, was the first and only in Africa to legalize abortion, resulting in a decline of abortion-related deaths of 91% between 1994 and the average rate from 1998 -2001.

Nepal made abortion legal in 2002, before which abortion-related complications accounted for 54% of hospital-treated maternal illnesses (1998), compared with 28% in 2008-2009.

Eastern Europe has the highest rate of abortions due to higher preference for small families and because effective methods of birth control such as the pill and intra-uterine devices are not used as often. Unsafe abortion rates in the region are much lower than in other developing countries, with the exception of Poland, where abortion is restricted.

Making abortion legal is not enough to lower the unsafe abortion rate. Women need to know about the law; there needs to be health-service guidelines for abortion and providers are needed to obtain training and provide abortion services,

U.S.: Roe Vs Wade is 39 Years Old Today

39 years ago the courts recognized the right of women to make personal, private medical decisions, to control their bodies, their reproductive health, and their lives.

Planned Parenthood has set up a website - www.SinceRoe.com - to show the world exactly what Roe has meant in the past and still means today. We've got a lot to fight for, and a lot to lose. Please, take a look and share it far and wide. Even better, add your own comment about how Roe v. Wade has made a difference in your life.

Despite the broad, mainstream support for upholding Roe, some politicians are as determined as ever to overturn it and strip women of the rights we've held for nearly 40 years.

SOPA and PIPA Dropped by Congress in Wake of Largest Online Protest in History

Two days ago WOA!! at overpopulation.org went on strike, along with 1,000s of websites including Wikipedia and Redditby, by self-imposing a blackout to protest the SOPA/PIPA that would allow websites to be taken down by the government without recourse. Now it seems that the anti SOPA/PIPA activists have won the day.

Congress has dropped the bills in the wake of the largest online protest in history. 13 million people signed a petition to implore congress to oppose the bills in order to keep the internet free of censorship.

MPAA (one of the largest lobbies for the bills) Chairman and former Senator Chris Dodd told the New York Times in a statement that "this was a whole new different game all of a sudden."

"This is altogether a new effect," Mr. Dodd said, likening the online community's response to the Arab spring movement. He even went so far as to comment that he could not remember seeing “an effort that was moving with this degree of support change this dramatically" in the last 40 years.

U.S.: Health Insurance: Obama Protects Birth Control Access for Women

Despite the fact that the Catholic organization USCCB lobbied to obtain exemptions from providing contraception in religious-affiliated employer health plans, the Obama administration announced today it will keep in place a proposed rule that says birth control is an essential service, and employer health insurance plans must cover birth control without a copay. This will ensure effective birth control is available for millions of women.

The USCCB has also wanted to continue receive taxpayer funds to treat victims of human trafficking, but refused to use the money to provide or refer for contraceptive or abortion services - even though these are the kinds of services that many victims of human trafficking need. But the USCCB lost its case with the Obama adminstration's decision today not to renew its contract with USCCB for the trafficking program.

Pulitzer-Prize Winning Reporter Sues Government Over Indefinite Detention Bill

Pulitzer prize winning reporter Chris Hedges has filed suit against Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta for signing the indefinite detention bill into law. The suit challenges the legality of the Authorization for Use of Military Force as embedded in the latest version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), signed by the president Dec. 31. Under this act the military is authorized carry out domestic policing - for the first time in more than 200 years. As of March 3, 2012, the military can indefinitely detain without trial any U.S. citizen deemed to be a terrorist or an accessory to terrorism. And suspects can be shipped by the military to our offshore penal colony in Guantanamo Bay and kept there until "the end of hostilities."

The NDAA is a catastrophic blow to civil liberties. We must fight this act t if we are to have any hope of pulling this country back from corporate fascism.

Chris Hedges is a veteran war correspondent who met regularly with leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza visited the Palestine Liberation Organization leaders, including Yasser Arafat and Abu Jihad, spent time with the Revolutionary Guard in Iran and was in northern Iraq and southeastern Turkey with fighters from the Kurdistan Workers' Party - all labeled terrorist organizations by the U.S. These activities do not make Chris Hedges a terrorist.

Once a group is deemed to be a terrorist organization, the military can under this bill pick up a U.S. citizen who supported charities associated with the group or unwittingly sent money or medical supplies to front groups. We have already seen the persecution and closure of Islamic charity organizations in the United States that supported the Palestinians. Now the members of these organizations can be treated like card-carrying "terrorists" and sent to Guantanamo.

Chris suspects bill's real purpose is to thwart internal, domestic movements that threaten the corporate state. The Department of Justice considers you worth investigating if you are missing a few fingers, if you have weatherproof ammunition, if you own guns or if you have hoarded more than seven days of food in your house. How many million people meet at least one of these criteria? Adding a few of the obstructionist tactics of the Occupy movement to this list would be a seamless process.

Dissent is increasingly equated in this country with treason. Enemies supposedly lurk in every organization that does not chant the patriotic mantras provided to it by the state. And this bill feeds a mounting state paranoia. It expands our permanent war to every spot on the globe. It erases fundamental constitutional liberties. It means we can no longer use the word "democracy" to describe our political system.

What Obama has done is unforgivable, unconstitutional and exceedingly dangerous. Al-Qaida - which Hedges covered - poses only a marginal threat, despite the attacks of 9/11, posing no existential threat to the nation. It has been so disrupted and broken that it can barely function. So why do these draconian measures need to be implemented?

This bill ignores our Fifth Amendment rights—"No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law"—as well as our First Amendment right of free speech.

The oddest part of this legislation is that the FBI, the CIA, the director of national intelligence, the Pentagon and the attorney general didn't support it. FBI Director Robert Mueller said he feared the bill would actually impede the bureau's ability to investigate terrorism because it would be harder to win cooperation from suspects held by the military. "The possibility looms that we will lose opportunities to obtain cooperation from the persons in the past that we've been fairly successful in gaining," he told Congress.

Hedges suspects the bill passed because the corporations, seeing the unrest in the streets, knowing that things are about to get much worse, worrying that the Occupy movement will expand, do not trust the police to protect them. They want to be able to call in the Army. And now they can.

China's Urban Population Exceeds Countryside for First Time

Today in China, 690.79 million people live in urban areas, compared with 656.56 million in the countryside, the 2011 report of China's National Bureau of Statistics said. Three decades of economic development has encouraged farmers to seek better living standards in towns and cities. The number of people in China's urban areas is twice the the total U.S. population.

Capitalist reforms in the late 1970s have taken more than 200 million people out of poverty, fueled a more than 90-fold increase in the economy since 1979, and transformed the nation into the world's second-largest economy and its biggest consumer of steel, copper and coal.

Chang Jian, an economist at Barclays Capital in Hong Kong said "Urbanization in China still has a long way to go, maybe for another 20 years."

Nobel economics laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz has cited urbanization in China, along with technology developments in the U.S., as the two most important issues that will shape the world's development during the 21st century.

China's urbanization has already benefited companies such as excavators makers Caterpillar Inc. and Komatsu Ltd., and iron ore miners BHP Billiton Ltd. and Rio Tinto Plc. Changing consumer tastes and growing wealth have also fueled demand for products sold by Apple Inc., General Motors Co. and Yum! Brands Inc.

China's city dwellers have 3 times the income of rural residents. Per capita urban disposable income increased 8.4% last year while per capita cash income increased 11.4% for rural people. Disposable income statistics for rural residents because much of their annual earnings aren't in cash, such as food they grow themselves. Rural income also grew faster than urban in come in 2010.

As the nation's urban population surges, China now faces the challenge of providing jobs, welfare and other social services to its city dwellers.

U.S.: The War on Contraception Gets Mainstream Attention

Podcast: Nancy Cohen explains how sex is polarizing Americans politically. The question of contraception comes up during the Republican debate, which sets the mainstream media ablaze on a subject we've been hammering for years.

Satellite Studies Reveal Groundwater Depletion Around the World

Agricultural production will need to increase 70% by 2050, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Since agriculture takes up much of our water use, we will see greater demands and strains on our water resources at a time when climate change is changing temperature and precipitation levels and patterns in unpredictable ways.

Groundwater levels have dropped in key agricultural areas such as southern Argentina, western Australia and the western US in the past nine years, according to a pair of studies of satellite gravity monitoring data. California, India, the Middle East and China show the most pronounced groundwater depletion. Water is being pumped out of underground groundwater aquifers faster than it's being replenished, with farming likely the primary cause.

"Groundwater is being depleted at a rapid clip in virtually of all of the major aquifers in the world's arid and semiarid regions," cautioned UC Center hydrologist Jay Famiglietti, whose team presented the results at a Dec. 6 meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), conducted jointly by NASA and the German Aerospace Center, has been taking monthly snapshots of global groundwater used in the two studies since 2002. GRACE's two satellites - Tom and Jerry - are pulled apart and pushed together by variations in the gravitational pull of the areas of the earth they pass over. Water moves over time and creates small fluctuations that the two satellites sense.

GRACE can detect changes in groundwater levels greater than one centimeter (~0.4 inches) over an area about the size of Illinois.

GRACE data shows that China's been underestimating groundwater use, with levels have been dropping 6 or 7 centimeters per year beneath the country's northeast plains.

Due to droughts, Patagonia and the southeastern US now store less groundwater than they did in 2002. Agriculture in northern India takes enough water to fill 7 million Olympic-size swimming pools, according to Science News.

California's Central Valley, which accounts for nearly 1/6 of irrigated land in the entire country, pumps nearly 4 cubic kilometers of water per year out from underground. The valley has been sinking for decades as more wells have been drilled and water pumped out, land subsidence that's also been occurring and causing increasing concerns, and costly remediation efforts, in Mexico City.

Aquifers in arid areas with fast-growing populations, such as the Middle East, are also being depleted, being pumped out faster than it's being replenished.

GRACE can only show changes in aquifer levels, not their total volume, so it is unknown how much water remains.

Better irrigation systems would help reduce water usage, as could channeling water runoff into aquifers during wet periods.

Involving Men in Family Planning

At the Second International Conference on Family Planning,held in December in Dakar, Senegal, at a workshop on "Men Behind Family Planning," a speaker from Nigeria explained that while men have "high awareness" of the need for and importance of family planning, they have "poor knowledge" of the various modern methods of family planning and how these work. Men are “unwilling to use family planning" mainly because they were apprehensive and insecure, and didn't know how exactly they fit in the scenario, he said.

The project intervention among village families included training in spousal communications, encouraging spouses to discuss health issues and engage in “joint decision-making" in choosing the method that best worked for them.

One male workshop participant said “there are not enough options for men." “We can only choose between using condoms or having a vasectomy, and I tell you, both options are not attractive to me," he said. “But if only they would come up with a pill for men, I would take it at once."

Another presentor told of research that found that 72% of those surveyed would be “very comfortable" with being counseled on family planning with their partners; while 75% stated that it was “very important" for men to be part of family planning. “The more a man believed in gender equality, the more likely it was for him to believe in taking part in family planning," the researcher said. But two out of every five respondents said they “believed that health facilities do not welcome men," with some reporting that health workers were unaccommodating, if not hostile, to the men among their women and children clients.

This is unfortunate, given the generally positive results seen when men are actually encouraged to take active part in promoting the health of family members.

Bangladesh, has a high contraceptive prevalence rate of 56%, but only 5% of method users are men. Studies have shown that “husbands play an important role in family planning decisions," since a disapproving or indifferent husband can actually discourage a woman from using a family planning method.

An Engenderhealth researcher gathered “satisfied clients" and found what made them satisfied: a skilled surgeon, prompt and effective management of side effects, and effective client follow-up. The “champions" turned out to be excellent promoters of vasectomy, using themselves as examples, and engaging men in the neighborhood or in community centers in discussions about their family planning needs and health concerns. The “champions" were able to refer an average of two or three clients a month to undergo a vasectomy.

In the area of female genital, after undergoing training in human rights, including women's rights, men have come around to the idea of banning FMG cutting. At the health center midwives explain the injury done by cutting and the health risks a scarred or wounded cervix posed to a woman during delivery.

"After being educated on the right to health of women, and of the dangers posed by cutting, I could no longer support the practice," one man said.

Africa: Women Farmers Can Overcome World Hunger

A UN FAO report showed women produce 60% to 80% of the food in developing countries, including those in Africa. But for many of them, owning land, accessing credit and even having a bank account is out of reach. The women shoulder much of the responsibility of growing crops and tending chicken, goats and sheep but men remain in control of much of the marketing and finances. The International Livestock Research Institute's (ILRI) Dr Jemimah Njuki said women were significantly disadvantaged in their access to information, training, farm equipment and financial help which was holding back economic productivity of many countries.

An ILO study shows a 22% jump in productivity in countries where there is equal access by men and women to resources. "In 2010 there were one billion hungry people in the world but if we could increase agricultural productivity even by 20%, we could reduce this by 150 million," Dr Njuki said. "We will not be able to grow agriculture if we do not address the gender imbalance." Women should be able to benefit from what they are putting into agriculture. "Gender inequality in Africa is slowly changing with ILRI and its partners increasing their capacity to train women in farm production and also train more female service providers," she said.

When markets become commercialised, women who participated in localised markets selling eggs and milk lack the capital or necessary skills to move up to formal markets. ILRI has been working with many women on innovative market payment schemes enabling them to use village banks or receive payment through their mobile phones.Projects of the Australian AusAID'S Africa Food Security Initiative have prioritised the importance of women in African agriculture and provided them with education and training into food production, marketing and post harvest production.

One project that really helps women is the Sustainable Intensification of Maize and Legumes in Eastern and Southern Africa (SIMLESA). Its goal is to increase maize and legume production by 30% to more than 500,000 small farmers in Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania. Maize has been grown in previous years with continual tillage and no fertiliser applications, significantly reducing the soil's fertility and leading to erosion. SIMLESA promotes conservation agriculture (or no-till cropping), inorganic fertilisers, spraying weeds prior to planting, improved plant varieties - potentially trebling maize yields from less than a tonne per hectare to 3.5t/ha.

Kenyan Agriculture Resource Institute agronomist and SIMLESA Project Team Leader for western Kenya John Achieng said "There will be more maize for farmers to eat and feed their households and surplus to sell so they can pay school fees for their children, buy clothing and even improve their houses." Consultant Cathy McGowan has been running research and development and extension programs for women in two other developing countries, Papua New Guinea (PNG) and India for well over a decade. She says women in subsistence agriculture work long hours because of their strong connection to food growing for their families. Their work is often invisible and not considered important because it does not contribute to the country's gross domestic product but as an example in PNG, 85% of the food is grown by women in their gardens.

Children of the Corn: the Renewable Fuels Disaster; How government policy can push more than 100 million people below the extreme poverty line

The ethanol tax credit has expired, a reason to celebrate, one might think, considering that the tax credit gave $0.45 ethanol producers for every gallon they produced and cost taxpayers $6 billion in 2011. However, now we have the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), which creates government-guaranteed demand that keeps corn prices high and generates massive farm profits. Removing the tax credit but keeping the RFS is like scraping a little frosting from the ethanol-boondoggle cake.

At least 37% of the 2011-12 corn crop must be converted to ethanol and blended with the gasoline that powers our cars, under RFS, causing corn demand to outstrip supply by more and more each year, such that even the slightest production disturbance will have devastating consequences for the world's poor.

It is time for the federal government to stop requiring cars to burn food. The RFS mandate requires a massive quantity of corn to be converted to ethanol each year regardless of available supply or what the market price would be without it.

Starting in 2005, ethanol mandates prompted the construction of ethanol plants across the country. By the end of 2005, 4.3 billion gallons of ethanol-producing capacity existed and one year later, capacity under construction had tripled and represented more production than existed at the time. A record number of corn acres were planted in 2007 but production has been unable to keep up with demand, driving prices up to almost triple the pre-mandate level. Ethanol consumes about 16% of the total U.S. supply of corn.

Returning 16% of the supply to the food system would reduce corn prices by about 32%. (See the entire article for details). A decline in corn prices would also stimulate declines in prices of other food commodities such as wheat, rice, and soybeans, which are substitutes for corn on both the supply and demand side. Michael Roberts of North Carolina State University and Wolfram Schlenker of Columbia University estimate that reducing corn ethanol production to zero would lower the price of calories from corn, soybeans, wheat, or rice by 20%.

Corn price increases have relatively small effects on grocery prices in the United States, which are dominated by processing and marketing costs. However, consumers in the poorest parts of the world spend a high proportion of their budget on food commodities such as corn. World Bank researchers estimated that the ethanol-induced price spike between June and December 2010 forced 44 million people below the extreme poverty line of $1.25 per day and that price increases from 2005-08 forced 105 million people below the extreme poverty line.

The difference in corn price between the tax credit spurred corn production and the mandate spurred production would drop prices by only 3.4%. If the 2012 crop is even slightly smaller than expected, then prices will rise even further and plunge millions more people into extreme poverty. If they were unconstrained by mandates, ethanol producers would reduce their use of corn in response to high prices.

Legislation has been introduced that would allow the mandate to be reduced when corn stockpiles are low. This is not enough. Mandates should be remove completely, letting the ethanol industry stand on its own feet.

The US is Out of Sync on Contraception: Across Africa, Leaders Are Starting to Recognise That Birth Control Saves Lives. but the US Still Treats it as a Political Football

Imams in Senegal have become champions of birth control, calling it "Family spacing." "What's good for a woman is good for her family, and for her society. We want healthy societies," they say. In contrast, two weeks ago Barack Obama met with Roman Catholic leaders to discuss the feasibility of including religious and moral exemptions to birth control coverage in a new healthcare bill. This when 98% of sexually active Catholic women in the US currently use modern contraception.

At the International Conference on Family Planning in Dakur Senegal, thousands came to discuss birth control. Dozens of health and finance ministers from across the African continent gathered to extol the virtues of family planning and strategise better ways of delivering it to those in need. But in the US the Secretary of Health and Human services overruled the Food and Drug Administration's recommendation that emergency contraception be available to individuals under the age of 17 without a prescription.

Other countries get it: When people can choose whether or when to become pregnant, women are healthier, and their babies and children more likely to be fed, educated and healthy; the workforce is more robust; the government spends less on healthcare, studies show. And yet 215 million women around the world want, but lack, access to birth control.

In October, the US House of Representatives tried to cut $40m in funding from the United Nations Population Fund. Other plans to undermine reproductive health included gutting family planning programs in the US and reinstating the "global gag rule" to punish developing countries for addressing unsafe abortion.

The final US 2012 spending bill is $5m shy of last year's sum. This year, we must do better. "You get it right for girls and women - you get it right for development," said under-secretary of state Stephen O'Brien of the UK's department for international development (DFID) recently. Last month, DFID pledged £35m in new funds to UNFPA and a day later tacked on an additional £5m for female condoms.

Women in sub-Saharan Africa and south-east Asia, where the vast majority of maternal deaths and unmet need for birth control lies, are struggling with the burdens of preventing or spacing pregnancies, dodging HIV risks, chronic lack of health services taboos around sexuality. Obama's Global Health Initiative launched in 2009, gave a modest bump to US global family planning program, but more is needed.

By not prioritising birth control access within US borders or worldwide, the US is sending a message that contraceptive access is not important. Nothing could be farther from the truth. More and more developing country leaders are committed to improving women's lives, and access to birth control is the first stop. Progress is imminent, especially in Africa.

U.S.: States Enact Record Number of Abortion Restrictions in 2011

Legislators introduced more than 1,100 reproductive health and rights-related provisions (not bills or laws - there are multiple provisions in a bill) in the 50 states of the U.S., up from the 950 introduced in 2010. 135 of these provisions had been enacted in 36 states, up from the 89 enacted in 2010 and the 77 enacted in 2009.

68% of these provisions restrict access to abortion services. Last year only 26% of new provisions restricted abortion.

In 2011 voters in Mississippi rejected the ballot initiative that would have legally defined a human embryo as a person "from the moment of fertilization," setting the stage to ban all abortions and, potentially, most hormonal contraceptive methods in the state. Five states (AL, ID, IN, KS and OK) enacted provisions to ban abortion at or beyond 20 weeks' gestation, based on the claim that a fetus can feel pain at that point. These same five states plus Nebraska have adopted a ban on abortions after 20 weeks.

A South Dakota law would have required a woman to obtain pre-abortion counseling in person at the abortion facility at least 72 hours prior to the procedure; and it would have required her to visit a state-approved crisis pregnancy center during that time. The federal district court enjoined the law and it is not in effect. Texas now requires that women who live less than 100 miles from an abortion provider obtain counseling in person at the facility at least 24 hours in advance. North Carolina now requires counseling at least 24 hours prior to the procedure. A total of 26 states now mandate that a woman seeking an abortion must wait a prescribed period of time between the counseling and the procedure.

Five states adopted provisions mandating that a woman obtain an ultrasound prior to having an abortion, but two, in North Carolina and Texas, were immediately enjoined by federal district courts. Both of these restrictions would have required the provider to show and describe the image to the woman. However, in AZ, FL and KS, provisions are in effect which would require the abortion provider to offer the woman the opportunity to view the image or listen to a verbal description of it. Six states now mandate the performance of an ultrasound prior to an abortion.

Six states now limit abortion coverage in private insurance plans, including newly added Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Utah.

16 states have provisions restricting abortion coverage available through state insurance exchanges as part of the implementation of health care reform.

Four states enacted provisions directing the state department of health to issue regulations governing facilities and physicians' offices that provide abortion services. Supporters of the measures made it clear that the goal was to set standards that would be difficult, if not impossible, for abortion providers to meet. Enforcement of the proposed Kansas regulations has been enjoined by a state court.

Seven states (AZ, KS, NE, ND, OK, SD and TN) adopted provisions requiring that the physician prescribing the medication for a medication abortion be in the same room as the patient (disallowing telemedicine).

Family planning services escaped major reductions in nine (CO, CT, DE, IL, KS, MA, ME, NY and PA) of the states where the budget has a specific line-item for family planning. However FL, GA, MI, MN, WA and WI, family planning programs sustained deep cuts, although generally in line with decreases adopted for other health programs. Montana eliminated the family planning line item, and New Hampshire and Texas cut funding by 57% and 66%, respectively.

Indiana, Colorado, Ohio, North Carolina Texas and Wisconsin, meanwhile, moved to disqualify or otherwise bar certain types of providers from the receipt of family planning funds. New Hampshire decided not to renew its contract through which the Planned Parenthood affiliate in the state received Title X funds.

On the other hand, Maryland, Washington and Ohio took steps to expand Medicaid eligibility for family planning. With the approval of these two programs, 24 states have expanded eligibility for family planning under Medicaid based solely on income; seven have utilized the new authority under health care reform.

Regarding sex education, Mississippi adopted provisions that make it more difficult for a school district to include subjects other than abstinence, such as contraception, in order to offer a more comprehensive curriculum. North Dakota enacted an new requirement that mandates that the health education provided in the state include information on the benefits of abstinence "until and within marriage." Including North Dakota, 37 states now mandate abstinence education.

U.S.: Remember the Song, "the Pill"?

Suzanne Ehlers of Population Action International reminds us of this song, "The Pill" by Loretta Lynn. It is said that many physicians told Loretta Lynn that this song did more to promote the availability of birth control in rural areas than all the literature they'd distributed.

Rush for Land a Wake-up Call for Poorer Countries, Report Says

More than 200m hectares of land in the global south - over eight times the size of the UK - have been sold or leased between 2000 and 2010, according to a study published by the International Land Coalition.

Population growth, the increasing consumption of a global elite, and an international legal system skewed in favour of large scale investors are fuelling a worldwide rush for land that is unfolding faster than previously thought and is likely to continue.

The food price crisis of 2007-08 may have triggered a boom in international land deals, however "a much broader set of factors - linked to population growth and the rise of emerging economies - is raising the prospect of "a new era in the struggle for, and control over, land in many areas of the global south", the study argues.

The large land acquisitions may marginalise rural communities and jeopardise the future of family farming in favour of big industrial projects. Enthusiasm for industrial-scale agriculture continues to sideline small farmers.

Suprises uncovered by the study: rich national investors play a much larger role than previously thought, food is not the main focus of these deals, and African governments are not the only ones signing away large tracts of land.

Overall, about 40% of land acquired over the last decade is for biofuel production, 25% is for food crops and another 27% for mining, tourism, industry and forestry.

However, in Africa, 66% of land deals are intended for biofuel production, compared with 15% for food crops.

in south-east Asia, 75% of reported land deals have been struck by regional players, while in Africa, South African investors have acquired an estimated 40.7m hectares since 2009.

The IMF, the World Bank and a number of government aid agencies are pressuring developing countries to attract and legally protect foreign investment in agriculture and extractive industries,and to set up sophisticated specialised agencies to promote investment opportunities and offering benefits such as tax breaks and low prices, said the report.

USAID is hosting an international conference to promote foreign investment in South Sudan. Almost 9% of South Sudan's land had already been leased or bought by investors prior to the country's independence in July this year.

There are few effective international mechanisms exist to safeguard the rights of the rural poor. Meanwhile, the common lack of formal, legal titles to land is heightening the vulnerability of rural communities.

Lorenzo Cotula, of the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development said that " poor communities need to have "stronger rights over the land they have lived on for generations."

The G20 summit in Seoul last year encouraged all countries and companies to uphold a set of principles for responsible agricultural investment, developed by the UN and the World Bank But such agreements are little more than window-dressing.

Residents of Mukaya Payam, in South Sudan's Central Equatoria state, launched a campaign in August against what would have been the country's largest land deal - a 49-year lease of 600,000 hectares by an American company. In Selingue, in southern Mali, hundreds of smallholder farmers and civil society activists came together for the first international farmers' conference to tackle the global rush for land.

To the 2012 Candidates for Office: Women Are Watching

"The state has a right to [ban contraception], I have never questioned that the state has a right to do that." .. Rick Santorum

"Mitt Romney is pro-life and... supportive of efforts to ensure recognition that life begins at conception." .. Romney spokespersons

Candidates for office need to know that women (and men) like you and me are paying attention to what's happening concerning women's health and rights at the state and local level. Candidates are hoping they can say whatever it takes to get the Republication nomination for president and get away with it. They're hoping that because they're making outrageous statements in small gatherings designed to reach their own supporters, that we won't know.

I'm watching. So are hundreds of thousands of others. Our Women are Watching campaign is our best bet to stand up against anti-choice, anti-women's health candidates, and it takes all of us, working together.

There is a full slate of presidential candidates vowing to prevent Planned Parenthood health centers from providing health care to the millions of women who rely on them. They are pandering to an extreme base that is determined to roll back the clock on women's right to make their own medical decisions.

They're counting on the media to ignore their most dangerous policies as just campaign rhetoric. They are hoping that you are so exhausted by the constant attacks on Planned Parenthood and women's health that you just give up.

It's so important to keep tuning in, keep speaking out, keep fighting back. Start by signing the Women are Watching letter to all the 2012 candidates (click on the link in the red arrows or headline). Tell lawmakers and candidates for office that we will not sit quietly by while they attack our health and our rights.

The majority of voters are women, and no politician in the country can win without our support.

Debates About Malthus: the Two-card and Three-card Trick

Rightwing pro-business think-tanks wanting us to believe population growth is not a problem would have us believe that Malthus was a gloomy pessimist from whose story we should learn not to listen to "pessimists". But as famine stalks more and more countries, articles are beginning to remark that Malthus may not have been such a false prophet as we all assume.

But in dealing with the propagandists of the growth lobby we find they have two simple but invalid arguments that they use; and anyone debating with them needs equally brief refutations to these.

The first argument is the two-card trick. It is a simple two-stage argument:

1. Malthus is the greatest expert on the dangers of population growth. He prophesied that population growth would lead to famines, which did not come true.

2. Therefore all later warnings of disasters from population growth, no matter by how many eminent experts, will not come true and should be ignored.

The logical fallacy, reduced to a syllogism, is of the form: "My horse is grey. Therefore all horses are grey." But the skill of the those who make the argument is to disguise the logic and sidetrack the listener.

To reply to the two-card argument, point out the main logical error first, then point out the flaw: If in fact Malthus is simply a man who made a spectacular mistake, why are you representing him as pre-eminent in the field, and implying that he is more likely to be right than the modern experts you seek to discredit? Ask the person making the two-card argument: Would you argue "The founders of modern medicine used to deny the heart pumped blood, so why should I believe my cardiologist?"

The main reason Malthus's expectation of continuing famines in the UK did not come true, is that the UK lost a great deal of its population during and after the Napoleonic wars due to death in war, death from colonial diseases, and massive emigration to North America. Further Britain as a colonial power could afford to import food from other countries -- which to this day is the only thing that keeps its bloated population from starving.

The second type of argument is the three-card trick which goes like this:

1. Malthus was the first thinker to argue that population growth tends to outgrow food and resources.

2. Malthus prophesied a famine the British which never happened.

3. Therefore those warning of famine today are less worthy of respect than Malthus.

In fact Malthus did not claim to know the future, and did not predict a future famine, but instead talked of existing famines -- and of reasons they were likely to recur.

Two "fellows" from the rightwing Centre for Independent Studies argue: Thomas Malthus, an early 19th century English philosopher, famously said that unchecked population growth would lead to worldwide famine and disaster. Two hundred years later, entrepreneur Dick Smith is running a similar line . . .

These "fellows" may have been innocently misled into repeating this nonsense, but they should now distance themselves from it, and apologize. World hunger is not an issue to dismiss with such glibness.

Side note: Alison Bashford's study of Malthus claims the 10 chapters usually omitted from reprints of his 1803 Essay on the Principle of Population, show his thinking in a new light. See http://www.abc.net.au/rn/hindsight/stories/2011/3349279.htm

A Punch to the Mouth: Food Price Volatility Hits the World

2011 saw yet another enormous increase in damages from natural disasters. During the past few decades the frequency of weather-related disasters (floods, fires, storms) has been growing at a much faster pace than geological disasters (such as earthquakes). Insurance group Munich Re noted in a late 2010 letter that weather-related disasters due to wind have doubled and flooding events have tripled in frequency since 1980. This has broad-reaching implications particularly for food.

Factors such as population growth, urbanization, the decline of arable land per person, and the upgrading of diets have produced higher food prices. But more damaging than food inflation has been the pushing of global food prices out of their long, quiet envelope of stability.

In the UN Report on the World Food Situation, the FAO Index shows that, while prices are once again down from a peak, a troublesome volatility started to affect food prices this decade. These are the very prices that caused social instability in countries like Mexico in 2007-2008 (pressure on corn prices, owing in part to US corn ethanol mandates) and more recently in northern Africa (Arab Spring).

There has been a rough correspondence of food prices with oil prices - understandable since inputs to food production are heavily composed of fossil fuels. High volatile oil prices play havoc with economies, and so do food prices and marginal speculation in food.

The average oil high of 2008 was at $99.67 a barrel and 2011 also saw the highest average oil prices since then, at $94.81 per barrel. In between was a crash in oil prices -- and most commodities.

The USDA has forecast that the CPI for all food is projected to increase 3.5%, with more to come next year. This falls on top of a deeply under-utilized US economy in which tens of millions derive income from government transfer payments, most of which are not sufficiently ratcheting higher from "inflation-adjustments." Food Stamp recipients, for example, are not seeing food inflation adjustments in their benefit checks that would compensate for the price increases.

Milk is up 40% in the futures market, beef prices are up 9.8%, egg prices are up 10.25%, and potato prices are up 12%. The Food Stamp benefit is basically flat year-over-year. In December of 2007, just after the declared start of the "recession," national participation in SNAP (Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program) stood at 27.385 million. As of the latest data, this has ballooned to 46.268 million.

The chart of Los Angeles County SNAP users (click on the link in the headline to see it) echoes the FAO chart from the United Nations. Upward-moving volatility in energy is concurrent with wild swings in food prices and waves of people in need of public assistance. Wages in the US have remained flat while millions of workers remain either unemployed or underemployed. Meanwhile, urbanization in the developing world has continued apace, forcing food prices and energy prices up at the margin.

When demand begins to hit a resource whose supply cannot be easily increased, then price moves to ration demand and price becomes more volatile. The US is not running out of oil, or corn, and the world is not running out of coal, or copper. Industrialization in the non-OECD, have combined to put an unexpectedly large burden of demand on world resources -- at a rapid rate. Meanwhile, many natural resources, such as copper and oil in particular, had already reached a more difficult place in the arc of their own extraction history when this started to unfold.

In a study of urbanization in China's Pearl River Delta and its aggregate effect on climate and precipitation it was found that paving over the earth decreases rainfall. Photos from NASA show comparing satellite views of the Pearl River Delta over a 14-year period from 1979 to 2003. The loss of arable farmland per capita in China has placed enormous pressure on the global food system and all of its inputs, especially fertilizer. There are limits to the miracle of the food (Green) revolution. We can only convert so much farmland to urbanscape while making up the difference with Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium (fertilizer) before we lose resiliency in the global food system. It did not used to be the case that a bad wheat crop in Australia or the Ukraine would hit global wheat prices so hard.

Stagflation has now entered the US economy - flat wages and rising food prices. Will Americans be able to afford to pay what the world can afford to pay, for food?

Food Security a Looming Crisis

The CEO of GrainCorp Limited, Alison Watkins, warned that the global food chain is approaching a tipping point.

Increasing affluence amongst the growing global population means the world is consuming more protein in the form of meat - for which corn is a major food source. Corn is also now being widely used in the creation of ethanol as nations try to limit their dependence on foreign oil.

The global population growing by 1% per year, the equivalent of adding a Germany - or an Ethiopia - every year.

Watkins said the rate of improvements in crop yields has reduced dramatically over recent years; in addition arable land per person will be cut in half over the next 30 years.

1.5 billion people in the world are overweight, compared to 925 million people that don't have enough food. "Too much nutrition is killing people faster than not having enough food" she said.

Third world farmers must compete with US farmers who receive 60% of their income from the government as a subsidy.

The Food Bubble is Going to Pop

In 2008, OECD published a report on world food supply predicting that the price surge of that year would quickly revert to normal. But between April 2010 and April 2011, the average world price of grain soared by 71%.

This is a catastrophe for poor people who already spend more than half their money just to keep their families fed.

In the early 1970s consumption was outrunning production due to rapid population growth: the world's population almost doubled between 1945 and 1975. Grain prices were even higher in real terms than they are now, and there was near-starvation in some areas. But along came the Green Revolution, which hugely increased yields of rice, wheat and corn.

Part of the success of the Green Revolution was a vastly increased use of fertilizer - increasing nearly 300% between 1960 and 1975. And also because of the over 300% expansion of the world's irrigated area.

Even today only 10% of the world's cropland is irrigated, but that irrigated land provides about 40% of the world's food, so it is absolutely vital. But no new rivers have been found since 1950. Two thirds all of the new irrigated land uses water that is pumped up from deep underground aquifers, which filled with water long ago and will eventually be pumped dry. Almost all wells are being pumped at many times their recharge rate. When the aquifers go dry - in the next 30 years -, the world will have to make do with the one-third of irrigated land that gets its water from the weather. It won't be enough.

In the United States in key agricultural states, irrigated area it is already long past its peak: 1978 in Texas, 1997 in California. In China and India irrigation may be at its peak right now. In 2005 that the grain supply for 175 million Indians was produced by overpumping water, and some 130 million Chinese similarly depend in a dwindling supply of underground water for their grain, according to the World Bank.

Israel banned all irrigation of wheat in 2000 to conserve the remaining underground water for people. It now imports 98% of its grain. Saudi Arabia decided to shut grain-growing down completely before the major aquifer under the country runs dry. Next year, it will import 100% of its grain.

While some of the richer countries can afford to go on importing grain even when the price is twice what it is now there are a great many countries that will lose their ability to feed their own people once the irrigation bubble bursts — and will not be able to afford to import food at the vastly inflated prices that ensue.

This is not even considering what climate change will eventually do to the world food supply. The crisis is coming sooner than that, and it is quite unavoidable.

We are living way beyond our means.

Latest Demographic and Health Surveys Show Varied Progress in Health and Fertility

Population Reference Bureau senior demographer Carl Haub has summarized data on reproductive health and maternal and child health from recently released Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) for a number of developing countries.

Large declines in womens total fertility rate (TFR) have been seen in Ethiopia and Rwanda. Rwanda's progress is the sharpest TFR decline in sub-Saharan Africa that Haub has seen. infant and child mortality are also declining dramatically in both countries, however, Ethiopia is challenged in getting health care delivery to its large rural population.

Slower fertility declines are seen in Burkina Faso, Malawi, and Senegal, but these countries are showing considerable progress in maternal and child health.

Zimbabwe has seen an increase in fertility, a rise in childhood mortality and its progress on health seems to have stagnated in recent years.

Nepal's TFR has been steadily declining and the country is on track to reaching replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. Nepal's progress in childhood mortality is lagging.

India has experienced lack of success in slowing down the birth rate. The Union Health and Family Welfare Ministry in Delhi proposed new incentives for lowering birth rates. Progress in childhood mortality is also lagging.

Vietnam's "one-to-two" children policy has resulted in a below replacement level TFR, even in rural areas.

Taiwan's TFR of 0.9 children per woman in 2010 was the lowest in the world. But births in the first nine months of 2011 have increased compared with the same period last year.

New UN Population Division Fertility Reports

From the Executive Summary: Since the 1970s the world has experienced profound changes in fertility, union formation and contraceptive demand. Fertility has declined throughout the world, early childbearing and marriage are less common and the percentage of women and men using contraception, especially modern methods, has risen.

The World Fertility Report 2009 presents a compilation of key indicators of fertility, nuptiality, contraceptive use and relevant population policies for 196 countries over the past 40 years.

1. Fertility declined worldwide to unprecedented levels between the 1970s and the first decade of the twenty-first century. Total fertility fell in all but three of the 185 countries or areas for which data are available. In the most recent period covered, 75 countries or areas had a total fertility below 2.1 children per woman, the level required to ensure the replacement of generations in low mortality populations.

2. The median level of total fertility among developing countries fell by more than half, from 5.7 children per woman in the 1970s to 2.5 children per woman in the most recent period. More than a third of all developing countries experienced fertility declines of at least 1.0 child per woman per decade during that period. Yet total fertility is below replacement level (2.1 children per woman) in 32 of 102 developing countries or areas with data available and remains above 4.0 children per woman in 10 countries or areas.

3. Fertility levels among the least developed countries remain high and have undergone only moderate decline since 1970s. Among the 39 least developed countries with data, the median total fertility declined from 6.5 children per woman in the 1970s to 5.4 children per woman in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In 2000-2007, more than two- thirds of the least developed countries still had total fertility higher than 5.0 children per woman.

4. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, none of the developed countries had total fertility above 2.1 children per woman. Total fertility was below 1.4 children per woman in about half of developed countries.

(not all points are covered. Go to the link in the headline for the complete report)

7. Increasing numbers of Governments have become dissatisfied with the fertility levels of their populations. In 1976, 53% of Governments at the world level viewed their fertility levels as being satisfactory, and by 2009 only 38% held this view. Among developed countries, an increasing proportion of Governments viewed their fertility levels as being too low: 21% in 1976 compared to 61% in 2009.

8. Age at marriage has been rising around the world.

10. Marriage is becoming less relevant for childbearing. In 62 countries with data on extramarital births the median percentage of all births that occurred out of formal (legal) marriage rose substantially, from 7.1% in the 1970s to 33.8%in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

11.The use of contraception among women aged 15 to 49 who are married or in a union increased in 90% of the 68 countries or areas with data. Among developing countries, contraceptive use increased sharply, where the median of the distribution rose from 44.6% in 1970-1979 to 64.1% in 2000-2009.

12. Despite increases in contraceptive use over time, levels of unmet need for family planning in 2000-2009 were moderate to high in developing and least developed countries. Among the 37 developing countries with data for 2000-2009, half had levels of unmet need for family planning between 7.5% and 20.2%.

Greenspan: ‘True Revolution’ to End Welfare State Impasse

Former Federal Chairman Alan Greenspan says the U.S. welfare state has "run up against a brick wall" of economic reality and fiscal book-keeping and only a "true revolution" involving major entitlement overhaul will improve the economy.

The country's leaders have found it difficult to agree on policy due to the rise of the tea party among Republicans coupled with the shift to the left of many Democrats. Last year's debt-ceiling fiasco was an example.

Compromise must happen eventually, and that will likely include reform to entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security, programs that have expanded without funding to match.

"We face a true revolution, not so much in the streets but in the fundamental choices the American people will have to make to secure our fiscal future," Greenspan writes.

"Arithmetic demands it."

The government's net liabilities swelled by more than $1 trillion for 2011, according to a U.S. Treasury report. The government's liabilities exceeded assets by $14.785 trillion, up considerably from $13.473 trillion a year earlier,.

The Cassandra Dilemma - What to Do About It

The legendary Cassandra had perfect knowledge of the future (she even warned the Trojans about the Trojan horse) and yet nobody would ever believe her. Today modern day Cassandras clearly understand that the current trends in climate disruption, peak oil, water depletion, and soil degradation, combined with a rapidly increasing human population, could soon result in a disaster of unimaginable proportions.

The (less informed) public simply does not believe us. Often they will argue that we must be wrong - even though they are often fundamentally unaware of the facts.

A crisis that unfolds in slow motion is easy to ignore. As each day comes and goes - peak oil, population growth, soil degradation, water shortages, and climate disruption all seem to be no worse than the day before. The vast majority of people never notice the gradual, yet inexorable deterioration of our planet's life support system. For most, their short term problems overwhelm any desire to consider the long term issues.

People engaged in their own day-to-day problems and have little time or energy left over to think about a problem that will not impact them for several decades into the future. "I've already got enough stuff to worry about, " they say.

People seem unable to "conceptualize a future," to "see" what lay ahead for them. They are stuck.

Suppose we have a camera that lets us see (literally) into the future to a time during the height of the predicted collapse. Food is scarce, people are desperate, chaos and extreme violence are rampant, children are killing other children, cannibalism becomes commonplace. Would that jolt people out of their apathy and denial? I think so!

And today, the single most successful NGO effort to reduce population comes from The Population Media Center in the form of television soap operas. They have taken the entertainment-education theories of Miguel Sabido and created soap operas that portray an improved lifestyle through educating women and providing them with birth choices. These television shows clearly conceptualize a better future if certain behaviors are adopted. And they work.

But instead, we Cassandras continue putting out scholarly essays, books, and videos. We attempt to convince through our solid logic and our depth of information. We debate the nits and details of peak oil and population projections.

A creative and unique solution to this problem has two parts: first a book called "The Corn Guild". This is a work of fiction, a fast-paced thriller intended for the general public. It covers a period from 2028 to 2036, a period that chronicles the beginning of collapse (a time when the general public is just beginning to be concerned and scared), to the actual collapse event in the year 2036. And while it is primarily intended to be an accessible, easy, read, it also educates the reader along the way.

The second part - the big part - the unique and creative part - is called "The Faminarchy Project". The Faminarchy project is a website ( www.faminarchy.com) where The Corn Guild book can be read (for free) in its entirety.

On the Faminarchy website, visitors are asked to write short story about what will happen during this collapse event in 2036. There are several examples of possible plot lines provided. These 'famine stories' will be published on the website. Writers are encouraged to use their imaginations to create horrifying and extreme stories of chaos and violence. These famine stories will then force those who read them, and especially those who write them, to experience a clear conceptualization of our shared future.

It is essential that we find a way to increase awareness of the real danger ahead. Only then can steps be taken to turn us away from the abyss.

Is Fracking An Answer? to What?

Hydraulic fracturing (fracking), combined with horizontal drilling, promises to expand gas and oil production and technological optimists see it as the answer to fears of a decline in world fossil energy production. In fact, it is still largely an unknown.

Fracking is the process of opening fissures in tight rock by injecting water at very high pressure. The water is thickened with chemicals so that it can carry sand or ceramic fragments that lodge deep in the fissures and prop them open for the gas or oil to enter when the water is withdrawn. Fracking and horizontal drilling, and the rising price of oil and gas, made it worthwhile to explore formations that had not heretofore been economically interesting.

After the technique was shown to work in the Barnett shale in Texas, the industry took off. U.S. shale gas production was negligible in 2000, then grew 48% per year from 2006 to 2010. It now provides 23% of current U.S. gas production.

There was enough gas to provide a gas boom - and then a glut. The winter price of gas futures dropped from $11.92 per million BTU in 2005-2006 to the present $3.86, the lowest price in a decade. Proponents of growth are claiming that fears of a fossil energy crisis were a myth but a closer look suggests a different current scenario. Shale gas is replacing traditional sources more than it is driving production up. Total U.S. gas production rose less than 5% from 2008-2010.

Shale oil production is taking place in the Bakken formation in North Dakota. The state's oil production has soared from negligible in 2002 to 445,000 barrels per day in August 2011, 8% of total U.S. crude oil output, making North Dakota the fourth largest oil producing state. The Bakken formation has helped to arrest the decline in U.S. production, at least for the time being. This activity has not visibly affected oil prices, because, unlike gas, oil is traded on a world market, the role of fracking is much smaller, and the price of oil depends on multiple factors. The U.S. leads in shale gas and oil production, but foreign producers are buying into U.S. gas drillers to learn the technique. Companies in Poland, Spain, France and the U.K. have all been looking at world shale deposits.

Fracking uses around five million gallons of water per well, in an era of growing water scarcities.The chemicals in the fracking fluids can cause water pollution. The EPA has just confirmed that fracking has been responsible for specific groundwater pollution in Pavillion, WY. The shale wells and the new techniques themselves release methane, which is dangerously combustible and is a potent source of climate warming if it escapes into the atmosphere. There are reports of methane in the water from faucets in nearby houses catching fire.

Minor earthquakes near Fort Worth were widely attributed to fracking in the Barnett shale, and a U.K. firm has acknowledged that "it is highly probable" that tremors near Blackpool, England, were triggered by its fracking activities, which led to a temporary injunction against fracking in the U.K. All the earthquakes so far have been very small tremors, but what calamity might happen in a major earthquake zone such as the Monterey basin in California, close to the San Andreas fault, which is the most promising potential source of shale oil in the U.S.

The EPA on June 23rd announced a major study of the impact of fracking on groundwater pollution. The uneasiness has led to bans in many places, including at least France, Germany, the U.K., Australia, South Africa, Quebec, and several U.S. states.

We really don't know how the future of shale gas and oil will turn out. But by pushing down the price of gas, the shale revolution is making solar and wind energy projects unviable. That in turn is pushing the development of post-carbon energy sources into a more distant future.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates proven U.S. gas reserves at 265 tcf - a new high, 61 tcf of which is shale gas reserves. Total proven gas reserves are expected to rise 19% by 2035. EIA expects shale gas production to treble in that period, supplanting conventional sources, but admits to a "high degree of uncertainty". "Proven reserves" are often not proven until the operators need to validate their presence for operational planning.

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) estimates the total mean undiscovered, recoverable U.S. gas resources at 1025 tcf, nearly twice the estimate made in 1950. Of that, 336 tcf consists of shale gas. EIA, on the other hand, cites 750 tcf for shale gas resources, 86% of which are in the Northeast, with 55% in the Marcellus formation mostly in New York, Pennsylvania and perhaps West Virginia. However, exploration of these fields is just at the beginning, and much remains unknown about their extent or quality.

The World Energy Council (WEC) estimates the recoverable world shale gas resources at 6744 tcf - 2.44 times “conventional gas", two-thirds of them in North America and the former Soviet Union area. The recoverable North American shale gas resources are estimated at 1778 tcf. While that includes Canada, it still it puts recoverable U.S. shale gas resources far higher than the USGS estimate.

The USGS figure for all U.S. oil resources, including shale oil, is 35 billion barrels, which is less than half its 1950 estimate. The EIA estimates recoverable shale oil in the U.S. of 24 billion barrels, which, in terms of energy, is only 20% of its figure for shale gas, and which would replace just 2.6 years of U.S. crude oil imports, if it all was recovered.

Most of it is thought to be in the Monterey formation in California, with the Bakken field second. These estimates will change as drilling progresses. The Texas driller Anadarko has claimed a discovery of “up to one billion barrels" of recoverable oil in Colorado. Maybe.

Because of the multitude of gas sources and the difficulty of predicting how much is recoverable, estimates of the date of peak world gas production have always been uncertain. However, so far the U.S. experience suggests that gas shale will move the peak back some years or decades. It will replace oil and probably coal in many uses.

Peak world crude oil production from conventional sources may have been reached in 2005, and subsequent production has been on a fluctuating plateau. Shale oil will extend that plateau by an unpredictable period and may lead to another peak. Production from existing fields is declining about 6.3% per year, worldwide. New fields must be found to supply 73% of current production by 2030. Shale oil production will have to grow dramatically just to fill that growing gap, and it takes time to find and develop new fields.

Shale oil and gas will put off the transition to a post-fossil energy world. As long as gas and oil are available at competitive prices, the development of alternative energy on which we will eventually have to depend will be held back. Shale oil and gas will increase carbon emissions into the atmosphere. Recent evidence has already raised the estimates of the rate at which climate warming is changing the weather. We are witnessing melting glaciers, more erratic stream flows, more intense storms, more torrents and fewer gentle rains, the loss of lowlands to the sea, desertification, droughts and hotter temperatures. These changes are reducing the Earth's ability to support us and other species.

Water shortages are caused both by rising demand and climate change, and fracking competes for that water. About 70% of the human use of fresh water is for irrigation. It takes about 1000 tons of water to raise a ton of corn. Desalination and water recycling in greenhouses are possible for specialty crops, but not for most agriculture.

Fossil fuels are used to capture nitrogen and make nitrogen fertilizers; thus they are central to modern food yields World and U.S. populations have grown to their present levels only because agriculture produced enough food to feed them. Only half or less of the present U.S. population; 25% to 40% of world population will survive if we have to revert to earlier ways of capturing nitrogen.

Here is where we still have a choice. We can simply use the shale discoveries to support present consumption patterns and the consequent damage. That choice - which is the one we are now taking - will mean more people overloading an already overloaded and deteriorating system, when eventually fossil energy does wind down. Or we can use the prolongation of the fossil fuel window to give us more time to bring human populations into better alignment with resources.

We live in an interdependent world, from microorganisms to the climate. We may later come to realize that the major consequence of the capitalist era and of fossil energy has been to dramatically accelerate the rate at which mankind has taken minerals from the deep lithosphere and injected them into the biosphere and atmosphere. This causes a fundamental reordering of life processes. Human intervention in Earth processes is not simply limited to the climate. It affects the entire biosphere of which we are a part.

Demand is the product of population X consumption. Consumption will probably pretty much take care of itself, as eroding incomes face rising prices.

Population is another matter. Human fertility has been halved in the past five decades. That is a remarkable achievement, but the last mile is the hardest. The great benefit of additional fossil energy could be to provide some more time to turn world population growth around before food production plummets.

The Habitable Planet: Human Population Dynamics Online Textbook

What factors influence human population growth trends most strongly, and how does population growth or decline impact the environment? Does urbanization threaten our quality of life or offer a pathway to better living conditions? What are the social implications of an aging world population? Discover how demographers approach these questions through the study of human population dynamics.

Sex Education Gets Directly to Youths, Via Text

ICYC (In Case You're Curious) by Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, Sex-Ed Loop in Chicago, Sexetc.org, Hookup in California, and Real Talk in New York are all programs that use texting services as cost-effective ways to reach adolescents in the one classroom where absenteeism is never a problem: the Internet.

One high school senior said she liked ICYC for its immediacy and confidentiality. "You can ask a random question about sex and you don't feel it was stupid." ... "Even if it was, they can't judge you because they don't know it's you. And it's too gross to ask my parents."

An Illinois organization enlists Chicago teenagers to create text messages as well as blog posts and testimonial videos for its site.

Only 13 states specify that the medical components of sex education programs must be accurate. Shrinking budgets and competing academic subjects have helped push it down as a curriculum priority. In reaction, some health organizations and school districts are developing Web sites and texting services as cost-effective ways to reach adolescents.

Sex-Ed Loop is a program endorsed by the district that includes weekly automated texts about contraception, relationships and disease prevention. Hookup is a program where teens can text their ZIP codes to a number and receive locations for health clinics.

Sexetc.org, a national site run by and for teenagers, offers both privacy and communities where adolescents can learn about sexuality and relationships, particularly on mobile devices, eluding parental scrutiny. Services offer links to blogs, interactive games, moderated forums, and Facebook and Twitter pages.

The messages, rendered in teenspeak, can be funny and blunt: for Real Talk, a technology-driven H.I.V. prevention program run by the AIDS Council of Northeastern New York, teenagers made a YouTube video, shouting a refrain from a rap song, “Sport Dat Raincoat," during which a girl carrying an umbrella is pelted with condoms.

Proponents of abstinence-based sexual education argue that these digital services presume that sexual activity among teenagers is the norm, and do not spend enough time on alternatives. Valerie Huber, executive director of the National Abstinence Education Association, said her organization hopes to kick off its online service for teenagers next year.

Although the teenage birth rate dropped 9% in 2010 from 2009, the United States still has one of the highest rates among developed countries, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Rates of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia among American teenagers continue to rise.

Most online services receive grants from philanthropies, like the Ford Foundation, and health and education agencies on the state and federal level.

Parents who fear that sex education will encourage a child to experiment are misguided, said Elizabeth Schroeder, executive director of Answer, a national sex education organization that oversees Sexetc. Studies show the opposite is true, she said.

Even though popular culture is saturated with sex, facts and advice can be hard to find. Making sure that Web-surfing teenagers find these programs, rather than pornographic sites, has been challenging.

“How do I write content that says ‘sex' 80,000 times so our page will pop up in a kid's search on Google near the top?" a Planned Parenthood director said.

Real Talk held a classroom contest to see which student could send the most texts containing this prevention message: “ROFL!!!" (Translation: rolling on the floor laughing). “STDs and HIV can spread as fast as this message. Still laughing? Pass on the message not HIV/STDs. 518-HIV-TEST." Within an hour, the message had been sent to nearly 450 phones.

Birth Rate Plummets in Brazil

Across Latin America fertility rates plummeted, even though abortion is illegal, the Catholic Church opposes birth control and government-run family planning is rare.

Migration to the cities, the expansion of the female workforce, better health care and the example of the small, affluent families portrayed on the region's popular soap operas have contributed to such a fast demographic shift that it caught social scientists by surprise. The number of children per woman when from 6 in 1960 to 2.3 by 2010.

Brazil has been particularly fascinating for demographers, it's fertility rate falling lower than in any other Latin American country except Cuba, which has state-sponsored family planning and legalized abortion. With a population of almost 200 million, there is a great gap between rich and poor, although millions have joined the middle class during Brazil's recent economic expansion.

The country's fertility rate has fallen from 6.15 children per woman in 1960 to less than 1.9 today. That is lower than the United States, which at 2 per woman is just enough for the population to replace itself.

Brazil's fertility rate took a big drop uniformly across the country. Suzana Cavenaghi, a Brazilian census bureau demographer. "We wouldn't expect that in a country that's so diverse, with a lot of poverty in so many places and so unequal, economically speaking."

Women were empowered by a pro-democracy movement that rose up against a 1970s-era military dictatorship. That dictatorship, which wanted to populate Brazil's remote areas, inadvertently contributed to fewer births by promoting industrialization. That led rural families to crowd into cities, where a brood of children could be a financial drain.

Women began to look for means of birth control, easily obtained without a prescription. Doctors in the public health service provided sterilizations, which became common, and women sought out pills that induced abortions long before those pills became the subject of controversy in the United States.

A report, "The Battle for Female Talent in Brazil," says that 59% of Brazilian women consider themselves “very ambitious" and that 80% of college-educated women aspire to upper-echelon positions. U.S. women are far less likely to give those responses.

The country's elaborate soaps, or telenovelas, have been an important factor in the drop in Brazilian fertility, researchers say. The protagonists inhabit an appealing, affluent, highflying world, whose distinguishing features include the small family.

EPA Silently Continues Support for Corn Ethanol, Bumping Target for 2012

Under the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has the power to push alternative fuel targets, with a hard target of reaching 36 billion gallons of production by 2022.

The target for corn ethanol was increased 3.39%, cellulosic biofuel (derived from woody plant waste) 31.06%, biomass-based diesel (e.g. refined spent cooking oil) 25%, and advanced biofuel (sugarcane ethanol, algal oil, etc.) 48.15%. Total renewable fuel 8.96% (after adjustment for volume.

Click on the headline above for the article, a descriptive chart and infographic.

The corn ethanol increase was disappointing for those pushing for oil independence and lowered emissions. It's broadly known that corn ethanol both increases greenhouse gas emissions and increases food prices. The EPA appears to be in the minority of remaining federal supporters. Congress recently finalized the cut to corn ethanol's tax subsidy.

Since the EPA now has the right to force importers and refiners to use a certain amount of corn ethanol, regardless of how expensive it is, the corn ethanol industry will likely push the issue by simply raising prices to recoup their lost subsidy.

The cellulosic ethanol figure was orders of magnitude smaller than the original EISA proposal - cellulosic ethanol startup companies like Coskata seemed promising, but difficulty in establishing a solid food-chain to deliver biomass stock and finding the funding to scale laboratory work to production-scale designs has led to the great cellulosic ethanol fizzle. However, there is still hope for this novel technology, which turns non-viable biomaterial (woody waste) into fuel. In 2012 the EPA is increasing the cellulosic ethanol target from the prior year - possibly a signal that the industry is making progress.

The U.S. Navy's deep investment in algal fuel cut costs from $424/gallon last year to $26.67 this year, which would account for the steep rise in advanced biofuel.

From the comments at the bottom of the article 'm15' said that, to provide enough corn ethanol to fulfill our needs for vehicle fuel would require more (1.7 to 6 times) than the total agricultural land area available in the US. Corn ethanol uses almost as much energy to produce the fuel as the fuel itself contains.

Corn ethanol uses an extensive amount of water and intensive tilling, which causes top soil loss. 1 inch of topsoil is lost every 5-10 years and takes 500 years to replace. We are sacrificing our future food growing farmland to make biofuels now.

U.S.: The Myth of Renewable Energy

While the words "clean" and "green" are wide open to interpretation and misappropriation, the phrase "renewable energy" is not. People across the enviro-political spectrum seem to agree what renewable means: It's an energy category that includes solar, wind, water, biomass, and geothermal power. As the US Energy Department explains it to kids: "Renewable energy comes from things that won't run out -- wind, water, sunlight, plants, and more. These are things we can reuse over and over again. … Non-renewable energy comes from things that will run out one day -- oil, coal, natural gas, and uranium."

Renewable energy has its limitations, though:

• Solar power needs photovoltaic panels are not renewable. Nor is desert groundwater. Even after being redesigned to use air-cooled condensers that will reduce its water consumption by 90%, California's Blythe Solar Power Project, which will be the world's largest when it opens in 2013, will require an estimated 600 acre-feet of groundwater annually for washing mirrors, replenishing feedwater, and cooling auxiliary equipment.

• Geothermal power also depend on groundwater; rainwater does not replenish as quickly as it boils off in turbines. At the world's largest geothermal power plant, the Geysers in California, for example, production peaked in the late 1980s and then the project literally began running out of steam.

• Wind power: all the 5,700 turbines installed in the United States in 2009 required approximately 36,000 miles of steel rebar and 1.7 million cubic yards of concrete. The gearbox of a two-megawatt wind turbine contains about 800 pounds of neodymium and 130 pounds of dysprosium - rare earth metals that are found only in scattered deposits, and are difficult to extract.

• Biomass: while biomass produced by thinning wildfire-prone forests or from perennial switchgrass plantings seems renewable, expanding energy crops will mean less land for food production, recreation, and wildlife habitat. In many parts of the world where biomass is already used extensively to heat homes and cook meals, this renewable energy is responsible for severe deforestation and air pollution.

• Hydropower, which supplies about 16% of the world's electricity, require a tremendous amount of concrete and steel, and dams have an unfortunate habit of hoarding sediment and making fish non-renewable.

All of these technologies also require electricity transmission from rural areas to population centers. Wilderness is not renewable once roads and power-line corridors fragment it. The life expectancy of a solar panel or wind turbine is shorter than a conventional power plant. Even dams are typically designed to last only about 50 years.

Meeting the world's total energy demands in 2030 with renewable energy alone would take an estimated 3.8 million wind turbines (each with twice the capacity of today's largest machines), 720,000 wave devices, 5,350 geothermal plants, 900 hydroelectric plants, 490,000 tidal turbines, 1.7 billion rooftop photovoltaic systems, 40,000 solar photovoltaic plants, and 49,000 concentrated solar power systems.

Jane C. S. Long in Nature magazine did the math for California and discovered that even if the state replaced or retrofitted every building to very high efficiency standards, ran almost all of its cars on electricity, and doubled its electricity-generation capacity while simultaneously replacing it with emissions-free energy sources, California could only reduce emissions by perhaps 60% below 1990 levels -- far less than its 80% target.

Long doesn't mention the biggest obstacle to meeting California's emissions-reduction goal: The state's population is expected to grow from today's 40 million to 60 million by 2050.

There are now seven billion humans on this planet. Until we find a way to reduce our energy consumption and to share Earth's finite resources more equitably among nations and generations, "renewable" energy might as well be called "miscellaneous."

Canada: Pregnancy, Haunted by Death

Ghana's former high commissioner to Canada, the late Richard Turkson, spoke at the screening in Ottawa of the documentary Empty-handed, about the lack of access to contraceptives in Uganda. Citing a passage from the Book of Genesis in the Bible: "I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and conception; in sorrow thou shall bring forth children ...", Turkson said "Men have long misinterpreted this passage as a mandate to lord it over women and show very little concern, if any, for women's fertility-related problems,"

"Over time, God's anger seems to have abated in many parts of the world; it appears, however, that in sub-saharan Africa, it continues unabated. Women's lives (there) are largely governed by unnecessarily hazardous pregnancies and child bearing; similarly, their death is often dictated by pregnancy and child birth. Worse still, everywhere in Africa, it is the women, not the men, who suffer from mutilation, disease and death in pursuit of the high premium we traditionally place on fertility, particularly on male children."

The fight to get contraceptives into the hands of African women is far from over.

The Canadian government - although it has led a G8 push for improved maternal health in the developing world - needs to hear this message, since it appears to remain lukewarm to family planning as a key to reducing maternal deaths, and as a development tool. That makes it unusual among western nations, according to some. Canada is not represented at the Senegal conference.

Susan Cohen, director of government affairs at the Guttmacher Institute said Canada was an outlier and "Canadians were dragging their feet on the investment in family planning."

Canada's $1-billionplus commitment to reducing maternal mortality did include family planning, but not abortion. However Canada's maternal health funding is only about $13 million of about $800 million so far - something critics say isn't nearly enough.

Cohen said "It is impossible to achieve the millennium development goal (of reducing maternal mortality by three-quarters) without investing in maternal and newborn health as well as family planning." The number of women in the world who want contraception and can't get them - is estimated at 215 million. Better access to contraceptives would not only reduce maternal deaths, reduce unsafe abortions and improve the health of newborns, because their births would not be spaced so closely together, it would increase education rates among women.

Canadian women have long taken for granted what many women in the developing world don't have- control over when they have children.

Britain, on the other hand, has made family planning a "major priority" according to Stephen O'Brien, parliamentary undersecretary of state for Britain's department of International Development, who attended the Senegal family planning conference.

"Having children should bring joy," he said during a conference call from Senegal. "For far too many women, having children amounts to a death sentence. ... Family planning is a smart, simple and extremely cost effective investment."

One of the messages from the Senegal conference was that family planning is a key to improving not only the health of women and children, but a country's economic health as well.

U.S.: Young Women's Use of Reproductive Health Services Declines

A study found online in the American Journal of Public Health, from the Office of Population Research at Princeton University, reported that 8% fewer U.S. women ages 15 to 24 are receiving reproductive healthcare. 60% of young women receive services such as Pap tests, pregnancy tests, contraception prescriptions, tests for sexually transmitted disease and other gynecological and obstetric care.

Data was taken from the huge National Survey of Family Growth. The declines were seen across all demographic and socioeconomic groups. Overall, however, economically disadvantaged women are the least likely to get care.

This is in contrast to the period between 1995 and 2002, when reproductive health service use by young women had increased. Reasons offered for the decline: there has been a decline in public sector clinics serving economically disadvantaged women; increasing unemployment and the corresponding lack of health insurance; updated gynecological health screening guidelines that require fewer Pap tests; and legislation that has increased mandatory parental participation in adolescent sexual and reproductive health care.

The authors of the report suggest that new provisions for care under healthcare reform may bring some of those women back into care.