Andrea Germanos – Scale of Threat Seismic Blasting Poses to Whales, Dolphins Laid Bare

Though the Obama administration in March put a halt on drilling for oil and gas in Atlantic, the dolphins and whales inhabiting the waters are still at risk, says one ocean conservation group, as proposed seismic airgun blasting to look for reserves of the fossil fuels would leave the marine mammals “profoundly impacted.” The scale of the threat they face was laid bare on …

Kali Holloway – White Women Are Dying Prematurely

Some of the consequences of white America’s opiate epidemic—a topic that has been widely explored by media outlets and social scientists—are still coming to light. Opioid use and addiction have exploded in predominantly white communities around the country, and 90 percent [3] of new heroin users over the last decade are white. The vast majority of those users—75 percent—first used prescription painkillers, which …

Gail Tverberg – 2016: Oil Limits And The End Of The Debt Supercycle

What is ahead for 2016? Most people don’t realize how tightly the following are linked: 1. Growth in debt 2. Growth in the economy 3. Growth in cheap-to-extract energy supplies 4. Inflation in the cost of producing commodities 5. Growth in asset prices, such as the price of shares of stock and of farmland 6. Growth in wages of non-elite …

Mark Kernan – The Economics of Exploitation: Indigenous Peoples and the Impact of Resource Extraction

In 1937 George Orwell said that coal mining was the ‘metabolism’ of western civilisation. What he meant by this striking metaphor was that coal was the catalyst for an earlier industrial revolution, just as enzymes act as the life-sustaining catalyst within the cells of living organisms to maintain life. If Orwell were alive today however he would have good cause …

America Is #1 in Police Killings Among Western Democracies, Yet We’re Only Just Discovering How Bad the Situation Is By Terrell Jermaine Starr

Even before the Washington Post [3] published its startling report this weekend on the astronomically high number of Americans shot and killed by police in the first five months of 2015, the U.S. was already easily number one. Number one among highly advanced western democracies with fully developed economies for police killings of citizens: at least 400 people a year, according to a …