By Maria Sanchez Diez12 June 2015 (Quartz) – As China, long notorious for its appetite for elephant ivory, moves toward halting the domestic processing and sale of the ornamental material, some international wildlife organizations are pointing the finger at another country that shares responsibility for the slaughter of tens of thousands of elephants a year […]
13 June 2015 (Desdemona Despair) – Data show that growth of human carbon emissions in the modern era is pretty close to exponential (cf. “Graph of the Day: Global carbon emissions from fossil fuels, 1751-2013”). But what about carbon emissions per person? The Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) maintains a database of fossil-fuel CO2 […]
17 February 2015 (BP) – Despite the dramatic recent weakening in global energy markets, ongoing economic expansion in Asia – particularly in China and India – will drive continued growth in the world’s demand for energy over the next 20 years. According to the new edition of the BP Energy Outlook 2035, global demand for […]
By Emma Graham-Harrison5 June 2015 (The Guardian) – The country is grappling with the direct costs of that coal, in miners’ lives, crippling air pollution, expanding deserts and “environmental refugees”. Desire for change contends with fears that cutting back on familiar technology could dent employment or slow growth, and efforts to cut consumption do not […]
By Avaneesh Pandey11 May 2015 (IBT) – Chinese crude oil imports surpassed those of the United States for the first time in April, making the Asian nation the world’s top importer of crude oil. According to a report by the Financial Times, the world’s second-largest economy purchased 7.4 million barrels of crude oil a day […]
20 March 2015 (UNESCO) – Any consideration of the quality and quantity of available water supplies in the region must examine groundwater, which is critical to several economic sectors. Experts estimate that groundwater irrigation contributes US$10 to US$12 billion per year to the Asian economy. When also including earnings from groundwater sales for irrigation, that […]
February 2015 (McKinsey Global Institute) – A new McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) report, Debt and (not much) deleveraging [pdf], examines the evolution of debt across 47 countries—22 advanced and 25 developing—and assesses the implications of higher leverage in the global economy and in specific sectors and countries. The analysis, which follows our July 2011 report […]
By Chelsea Harvey4 May 2015 (Washington Post) – When it comes to combating climate change, many scientists and policy makers focus on one major goal: cut carbon emissions enough to keep the planet’s average surface temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above its pre-industrial level. But a new analysis [pdf], published on Monday […]
20 April 2015 (NBC News) – Apple is more energy efficient than it ever has been, according to a new report, with 100 percent of U.S. operations running completely on renewable energy. Still, the company was responsible for 34.2 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions in fiscal 2014 — the vast majority from manufacturing […]
[“The winter of 2014-2015 was the warmest on record in Russia, may have been warmest winter ever recorded in Northern Hemisphere” –Des] 16 April 2015 (The Moscow Times) – President Vladimir Putin said Thursday that the federal government would send at least 5 billion rubles ($100 million) to the southern Siberian republic of Khakasia, ravaged […]
