B e t r a y T h e A g e

By Chris Reidy, Boston Globe Heating device that creates electricity as a bonus unveils today. American Honda Motor Co., which has been working on hybrid cars, is collaborating on a hybrid of sorts for the home: a roughly $8,000 natural gas system that ''co-generates" heat and electricity.

By Kathryn Mulvey, AlterNet. Posted April 22, 2005. The food industry's fingerprints are all over the USDA's new food pyramid, in ways that hurt rather than help consumers

by Ian McEwan, Published on Friday, April 22, 2005 by the Los Angeles Times On Earth Day, a call for good data, not dogma

by Wangari Maathai,Published on Friday, April 22, 2005 by the Christian Science Monitor "One of the most important lessons we learned is that citizens need to be empowered. They need to feel that the life they want for themselves and their children can be achieved only when they participate in protecting and restoring their environment and expanding what I like to call "democratic space." They can't wait for others to do it for them; they need to take action themselves. Otherwise, the best theories about how to preserve ecosystems for use by humans and other species will remain just that: theories."

By Adam Porter in Perpignan, France. Aljazeera.net Speculation over the actual size of Saudi Arabia's oil reserves is reaching fever pitch as a major bank says the kingdom's - and the world's - biggest field, Gharwar, is in irreversible decline.

Posted at Earth Day Network Environmentalists around the world are preparing to celebrate the 35th anniversary of Earth Day on April 22, 2005. Earth Day Network, founded by the organizers of the first Earth Day and the organization that supports Earth Day events around the world each year, is leading the celebration through a series of events, campaigns and activities focused on the international theme of “Protect Our Children and Our Future.”

by Kurt Cobb - Published on 9 Apr 2005 by Resource Insights. There are economists who "know" that the world will come up with a cheap, effective, and widely available substitute for oil before we run short of it. And so, it follows that "getting ready" for a permanent oil shortage through concerted civic and governmental action is a "waste of resources." But even if they are right about the miraculous and timely appearance of oil substitutes, are they right that the things we would do as a global society to prepare for world peak oil production are a "waste of resources?" To address that issue I've prepared a Peak Oil "To Do" List. (I don't claim it to be exhaustive.)

by Toby Hemenway, Published on 26 Dec 2004 by Permaculture Activist

by Michael T. Klare, TomDispatch.com While our media is filled with stories on the Bush administration and Iran, they almost invariably focus on the Iranian nuclear program (or European negotiations and U.S. non-negotiations about the same). You could read our press for weeks at a time -- if you didn't stray onto the business pages -- and not be aware that Iran sits on a sea of oil and natural gas. In fact, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that, for long stretches, a typical newspaper reader or prime-time TV news viewer, or, for that matter, an NPR listener, would have just about no way of knowing that our world runs on oil. Of course, our local gas stations are informative enough on the subject these days, so this reality is lost on few people. Still, the sort of piece that hit the front page of the British Financial Times the other day -- IMF warns on risk of ‘permanent oil shock' -- is not normally a front-page commonplace for us. This has a certain importa...

By Stan Cox, AlterNet. The peak oil idea – which says that world oil production will go into irreversible decline sometime in the next decade or two – is quickly morphing into conventional wisdom.

by Dennis Hayes, Mother Earth News Denis Hayes was national coordinator of the first Earth Day in 1970 — an event often credited with launching the modern American environmental movement. He is the recipient of numerous public-service awards, including the 1979 Jefferson Medal for Greatest Public Service by an Individual under 35; he was also named one of the 100 most influential Americans of the 20th century by Look magazine. Hayes remains chairman of the board of the international Earth Day Network (which operates in 160 countries). He also is president of the Bullitt Foundation, an environmental philanthropic organization based in Seattle.

By JEFF NESMITH Cox News - Rutland Herald Although gasoline prices continue to soar, energy conservation advocates see little chance Congress will tighten automobile efficiency standards.

Posted on Friday, July 23, 2004. Originally from Harper's Magazine, February 2004. By Richard Manning. "we humans, a single species among millions, consume about 40 percent of Earth’s primary productivity, 40 percent of all there is. This simple number may explain why the current extinction rate is 1,000 times that which existed before human domination of the planet. We 6 billion have simply stolen the food, the rich among us a lot more than others."

From The Revealer "If it feels good, do it": Chicken Soup for the Capitalist Soul. By Scott Korb They are not running away. They are not rebelling. They may not actually know, or be able to articulate, what they believe, but almost every one of them -- ninety-seven per cent -- believes in God. The vast majority of them -- like the vast majority of us -- are Christians. Very few are what might be called spiritual seekers; hardly any of them know what it means to say (or be) "spiritual but not religious." When prompted, nearly all of them speak positively about religion, yet with each other they hardly ever talk -- much less argue -- about it at all. They are conventional and, according to Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, they "may actually serve as a very accurate barometer of the condition of the culture and institutions of our larger society. Far from being alien creatures from another planet, American teenagers actually well reflect back to us th...

Richard Heinberg, The Red Pepper. The imminent demise of the global petroleum industry will necessarily entail a complete redesign of industrial societies.

. By Gordon Dritschilo - Rutland Herald Staff After two years at Green Mountain College in Poultney, the music festival and renewable energy technology showcase that started out on a farm in Middletown Springs is moving to a farm in Tinmouth.

James Howard Kunstler - Rolling Stone Magazine What is going to happen when we run out of cheap oil to guzzle? Some other things about the global energy predicament are poorly understood by the public and even our leaders. This is going to be a permanent energy crisis, and these energy problems will synergize with the disruptions of climate change, epidemic disease and population overshoot to produce higher orders of trouble.

If you go to the website of the Environmental Defense Fund and locate their Scorecard page, you can find out information that has been gathered about who is polluting your air and water. It is amazing to find out that Rutland County is within the worst top 40% of polluting counties nationside in air and water pollution releases. Can you guess who the worst polluters are in Rutland County? If you guessed Rutland Plywood, you would have guessed right with a release of 5,465 lbs. Second on the list is U.S. Simica with 4,736 lbs. And if you guessed G.E. in North Clarendon, you were close as it came in third place with about 1,058 lbs of pollution in 2002. What amazes me is that information of this importance is not disseminated with the public. Maybe I'm paranoid, but does the recent problems we have been having with the media extend to literally our back door? Perhaps local newspaper and TV would find publishing this information a bit too sensitive for general public knowledge. We are...

By Tad Montgomery | Special to the Vermont Guardian There has been a fair bit of scuttlebutt in Vermont the last few months about biodiesel. Michael Feiner, writing in Rural Vermont’s Farm Policy Network Newsletter takes aim at the “big business” side of biodiesel and calls it “agribusiness’ new Trojan Horse.” Biodiesel is not a simple issue, and there are many cons and pros.

Beverley Thorpe, AlterNet. Posted March 22, 2005. The first U.S. study to test chemicals in household dust found a toxic cocktail in our homes, made of hazardous chemicals emitted from commonly used products.