Midway. The State of the World

"Antibiotic resistance will mean the end of just about everything as we know it"

From Salon.com

In the United States, 2 million people are infected with drug-resistant “superbugs” every year, and at least 23,000 die as a result. Such numbers, journalist Maryn McKenna suggests, will seem trivial if we reach the point when all antibiotics are no longer effective — something that’s on track to become a reality.

Considering the full implications of a post-antibiotic era, McKenna concludes that it wouldn’t be so different from the apocalypse. And to know what we’re facing, we need only look at where we’ve come from:

Before antibiotics, five women died out of every 1,000 who gave birth. One out of nine people who got a skin infection died, even from something as simple as a scrape or an insect bite. Three out of ten people who contracted pneumonia died from it. Ear infections caused deafness; sore throats were followed by heart failure. In a post-antibiotic era, would you mess around with power tools? Let your kid climb a tree? Have another child?

To start with, McKenna writes, the loss of antibiotics will mean the end of modern medicine as we know it, impeding everything from surgery to chemotherapy to the far more prosaic:

At UCLA, [Dr. Brad] Spellberg treated a woman with what appeared to be an everyday urinary-tract infection — except that it was not quelled by the first round of antibiotics, or the second. By the time he saw her, she was in septic shock, and the infection had destroyed the bones in her spine. A last-ditch course of the only remaining antibiotic saved her life, but she lost the use of her legs. “This is what we’re in danger of,” he says. “People who are living normal lives who develop almost untreatable infections.”  ....

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Note: As terrible as it is to have people dying from simple infections, our current medical advantages are not sustainable. Antibiotics are partly responsible for our over-population problem. Various diseases are part of the normal processes that keep people in check. Of course, very few would choose to do without those advantages, if given a choice. Nature taking it's course, is not such a bad thing, however, for life on the planet as a whole.

"Invest, Divest: Renewable Investment To Hit $630 Billion A Year In 2030, Fossil Fuel Stocks At Risk Today"

From Thinkprogress.org

Bloomberg New Energy Finance has a must-read piece for investors on how the smart money is beginning to notice the quicksand on which fossil fuel stock prices are built.

We reported back in April that BNEF said 70 percent of new power generation capacity added between 2012 and 2030 will be from renewable technologies (including large hydro).

Indeed, BNEF founder Michael Liebreich posed a good news, bad news story back then:

“By 2030, the growth in fossil fuel use will almost have stopped,” Liebreich told renewable-energy investors…. “We’re told that it needs to happen by 2020” in order to prevent irreversible climate damage. “That won’t happen. But by 2030, it pretty much will.”

Yes, homo “sapiens” will miss by just 10 years or so the window to avert catastrophic climate change — resulting in possibly hundreds of years of misery for billions and billions of people. The tragic irony is the fossil fuel industry is essentially doomed no matter what — but humanity wouldn’t be, if we were just a tad more “sapiens.”

We reported in August that a Goldman Sachs research paper concluded the “window for profitable investment in coal mining is closing” — same for for coal exports.

Now BNEF points out that much the same is true for oil investments:

Last month 70 investors representing $3 trillion of assets under management sent letters to oil-and-gas companies asking them to disclose plans for adapting to a world that may be edging closer to peak fossil fuels. That’s the point when humans stop increasing their annual burn – either because the environmental danger makes it too costly or because buildings and cars run more efficiently. BNEF says peak demand could happen in 2030.

The risk: Oil and coal companies worth more than $7 trillion may be sinking billions of dollars today into projects that will never make sense to finish.

A key point of this article is that it isn’t just enviros saying the days of fossil fuel are numbered. We have institutional investors, Goldman Sachs, Bloomberg New Energy Finance and many, many others in the financial industry:

In 2013, so-called carbon-asset risk “went from a conceptual possibility to a sort of near-and-present reality,” Nick Robins, head of the Climate Change Center at HSBC Holdings Plc in London, said in a phone interview. He wrote a research note in January valuing the risk of “unburnable reserves”: the oil and coal on companies’ balance sheets that will be too expensive to extract. “There is this undertow of demand destruction going on through technological improvement. That’s certainly not fully priced at the moment.”

And that’s without even considering the possibility of the world coming to its senses on the threat posed by unrestricted carbon pollution in time to avert the worst.

There’s more:

“The end is nigh” for global oil-demand growth, proclaimed a Citigroup report in March. Standard & Poor’s cautioned that a patchwork of policies that cut demand for fuels could lead to outlook revisions and downgrades in smaller oil-and-gas companies as early as next year, with a similar shock to the majors in 2016. Goldman Sachs’s advice to oil companies: “invest only in medium-/high-return projects, spend the rest of their cash on buybacks and focus on per share growth.” Translation: prepare to shrink the business.

Divesting from fossil fuels isn’t risky. Not divesting is.

"Amazing Bird’s Eye View Of Texas Fracking"

Above: For larger image see http://media.commonsensecanadian.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Texas-fracking-aerial_.jpg photo by Amy Youngs.

An aerial photo taken on August 3rd of fracking operations in Texas has caused a rumble online, drawing 20,000 views on the photo sharing site, Flckr.

The photo, posted by Amy Youngs, carries the inscription:

Saw these strange new human-made landscapes on my flight from Sacramento to Houston. Not farming, not subdivisions, but many miles of rectangular patches etched out of the earth, some with pools next to them, all with roads to them. I doubt that people see these when driving on major roads – I never have – but they were very visible from a plane. Welcome to your new landscape!

Modern-day hydraulic fracturing was first developed in Texas’ Barnett Shale. As of 2011, the state led the nation with over 100,00 gas wells – many of which have involved fracking in recent years. The water-intensive process is being questioned as Texas faces drought conditions.

See an interactive image of the above fracking operations in google maps.

http://www.popularresistance.org/amazing-birds-eye-view-of-texas-fracking/

"Jellyfish taking over oceans, experts warn"

(CNN) -- 

"Jellyfish and tourism are not happy bedfellows," says Dr. Lisa-Ann Gershwin, author of the recently published book, "Stung! On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean."

Gershwin says popular beach resorts around the world are seeing huge increases in jellyfish "bloom" activity, a result of overfishing and changing water temperatures.

"The French and Spanish Rivieras, Chesapeake Bay, the Great Barrier Reef, Hawaii ... some of the numbers are staggering," says the American scientist who's now based in Australia.

"In Hawaii there have been times that 800 or 1,000 people have been stung in a day. In Spain or Florida, it's not uncommon in recent years for a half a million people to be stung during an outbreak. These numbers are simply astonishing."

At the beginning of October, a large amount of jellyfish inhabiting a cooling-water intake at a Swedish nuclear plant caused operators to manually shut down production at its largest reactor.

Jellyfish prompt nuclear shutdown

In Ireland, a jellyfish bloom reportedly killed thousands of farmed salmon, according to the Irish Times.

This past summer, southern Europe experienced one of its worst jellyfish infestations ever. Experts there have been reporting a steady increase in the number of jellyfish in the Mediterranean Sea for years.

According to a report titled "Review of Jellyfish Blooms in the Mediterranean and Black Sea," written by Fernando Borea for the General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean and the United Nations, scientists are catching up to what travelers in the Med have been experiencing for years.

"In the last decade ... the media are reporting on an increasingly high number of gelatinous plankton blooms," reads the report. "The reason for these reports is that thousands of tourists are stung, fisheries are harmed and even impaired by jellyfish."

Although noting that significant jellyfish blooms "have been known since ancient times and are part of the normal functioning of the oceans," the report cites global warming and global overfishing (which removes jellyfish predators) as causes for exploding jellyfish populations in recent years.

The situation in the Mediterranean was dire enough to prompt Britain's foreign office to issue a warning to its citizens vacationing along Europe's southern coast to watch out for jellyfish.

There are more than 2,000 species of jellyfish swimming through the world's waters.

Most stings are completely harmless. Some will leave you in excruciating pain.

Then there are the killers.

Many of the world's deadliest jellyfish are box jellyfish, which refers to the species' cube-shaped meduae.

"There are several species of big box jellyfish that have caused many deaths -- these include chironex fleckeri in Australia, chironex quadrigatus in Japan and related species in Thailand, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia," says associate professor Jamie Seymour, a venom biologist at Australia's James Cook University.

Also known as the sea wasp and the northern Australian box jellyfish, the chironex fleckeri is possibly the worlds most venomous animal.

Its tentacles can reach lengths of up to three meters long, while its bell is about the size of a human head. It can be found throughout the tropical waters of the Indo-Pacific.

A close cousin and fellow contender for the "world's most venomous" cup is the Irukandji, which is the size of a thimble.

Good luck scanning the waters for that one before you leap in.

"How toxic they are is just phenomenally frightening and equally fascinating," says Gershwin.

"Just the lightest brush -- you don't even feel it -- and then, whammo, you're in more pain than you ever could have imagined, and you are struggling to breathe and you can't move your limbs and you can't stop vomiting and your blood pressure just keeps going up and up.

"It is really surprising how many places they occur around the world -- places you would never expect: Hawaii, Caribbean, Florida, Wales, New Caledonia, Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines, India ... as well as Australia."

Asian giant hornets and other terrifying creatures

Is any place safe?

"More and more, places around the world that are suffering from jellyfish problems with tourists are developing prediction systems so that tourists can know when it is safe," says Gershwin.

The irony, she says, is that tourists who avoid an area because of the known risk may alter their plans to hit a "safe" beach whose officials are merely less up front about the jellyfish situation, putting themselves more at risk.

A common misconception is that places such as Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines are free of dangerous jellyfish.

"Jellyfish occur in all marine waters from pole to pole and at all depths," says Gershwin. "The life threatening ones are found from about 40 degrees north to 40 degrees south latitude.

"Australia is upfront about its jellyfish dangers, and also assertive in safety management, whereas other places have them, but may understand less about them or, in some cases, just don't want to say. I think tourists need to be very aware of local hazards and not expect to necessarily be provided with information."