Wastewater, increasingly injected into deep disposal wells amid the energy boom, appears to be the culprit in an increase in U.S. quakes.
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In a study out today that provides the strongest link to date between wastewater wells and quakes, seismologists and geologists say U.S. earthquakes have become roughly five times more common in the past three years. They warn about inadequate monitoring of deep wastewater disposal wells that are setting off these small quakes nationwide.
There are more than 30,000 such deep disposal wells nationwide. They're increasingly used as mile-deep dumping grounds for fluids left over from the more shallow hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” wells responsible for surging U.S. natural gas production. The earthquakes have been linked to the wastewater wells but not the fracking drilling wells themselves.
The climate crisis demands our immediate attention. Climate change could devastate thousands of at-risk communities beyond repair and leave the face of the earth scarred. We cannot be alarmist enough about continued climate change and the threat it poses to life on this planet. This is the first time in the history of this planet that a species altered global climate to such a degree. The future of life on this planet is entering a period of extreme risk and few are offering rational solutions.
Leftists and environmentalists are correct to confront this issue with great urgency. Climate change grows exponentially as powerful elites continue to pursue a course dominated by the consumption of fossil fuels. Social movements continue to challenge the power of states throughout the globe to continue this destructive course. These movements are large, powerful, and often diverse. They face a very strong opponent, however, and have yet to really land a blow against the powerful capitalist elites that seek to profit from climate change rather than prevent it.
What’s the number one reason we riot? The plausible, justifiable motivations of trampled-upon humanfolk to fight back are many—poverty, oppression, disenfranchisement, etc—but the big one is more primal than any of the above. It’s hunger, plain and simple. If there’s a single factor that reliably sparks social unrest, it’s food becoming too scarce or too expensive. So argues a group of complex systems theorists in Cambridge, and it makes sense.
In a 2011 paper, researchers at the Complex Systems Institute unveiled a model that accurately explained why the waves of unrest that swept the world in 2008 and 2011 crashed when they did. The number one determinant was soaring food prices. Their model identified a precise threshold for global food prices that, if breached, would lead to worldwide unrest.
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The MIT Technology Review explains how CSI’s model works: “The evidence comes from two sources. The first is data gathered by the United Nations that plots the price of food against time, the so-called food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN. The second is the date of riots around the world, whatever their cause.” Plot the data, and it looks like this:
Pretty simple. Black dots are the food prices, red lines are the riots. In other words, whenever the UN’s food price index, which measures the monthly change in the price of a basket of food commodities, climbs above 210, the conditions ripen for social unrest around the world. CSI doesn’t claim that any breach of 210 immediately leads to riots, obviously; just that the probability that riots will erupt grows much greater. For billions of people around the world, food comprises up to 80% of routine expenses (for rich-world people like you and I, it’s like 15%). When prices jump, people can’t afford anything else; or even food itself. And if you can’t eat—or worse, your family can’t eat—you fight.
“A few words about a French project named Open Source Energy.This project is intended to enable the design of open hardware solutions to capture the different kinds of energies available all around us (from the environment or from human activities). A first module to transform and to store electricity from renewable sources is being designed: the ENERCAN (opensourceenergy.wordpress.com/lenercan-v1). This first brick is the starting point of a large scale design process toward the creation of new solutions inspired by old or forgotten ones and improved by the use of high-tech devices. The project is not about large and costly devices but about simple, open and cheap modules that can be replicated to capture every stream of available and lost energies, even the smallest one.
Besides designing the modules, the team took part in several events related to design or DIY in order to promote the project and to share with others.
Protesters rallied in Nevada as part of a global protest against seed giant Monsanto and the genetically modified food it produces.
“March Against Monsanto” protests Saturday drew some 2,000 protesters in Las Vegas and about 150 in Reno.
Las Vegas protesters marched about one mile down Las Vegas Boulevard to the “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign, while Reno protesters chanted and waved placards as they marched through downtown Reno.
Genetically modified plants are grown from seeds that are engineered to resist insecticides and herbicides, and to improve crop yields.
Most corn, soybean and cotton crops grown in the U.S. today have been genetically modified. But critics say genetically modified organisms can lead to serious health conditions and harm the environment.
Monsanto Co. says it respects people’s rights to express their opinion on the topic, but maintains that its seeds improve agriculture.
Remains of endangered Hawaiian petrels – both ancient and modern – show how drastically today’s open seas fish menu has changed.
A research team, led by Michigan State University and Smithsonian Institution scientists, analyzed the bones of Hawaiian petrels – birds that spend the majority of their lives foraging the open waters of the Pacific. They found that the substantial change in petrels’ eating habits, eating prey that are lower rather than higher in the food chain, coincides with the growth of industrialized fishing.
The birds’ dramatic shift in diet, shown in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, leaves scientists pondering the fate of petrels as well as wondering how many other species face similar challenges.
‘Our bone record is alarming because it suggests that open-ocean food webs are changing on a large scale due to human influence,” said Peggy Ostrom, co-author and MSU zoologist. ‘Our study is among the first to address one of the great mysteries of biological oceanography – whether fishing has gone beyond an influence on targeted species to affect nontarget species and potentially, entire food webs in the open ocean.”
We Are Now One Year Away From Global Riots, Complex Systems Theorists Say
