State of the Earth: Still Seeking Plan A for Sustainability: Scientific American

NEW YORK CITY—The state of the planet is grim, whether that assessment is undertaken from the perspective of economic development, social justice or the global environment. What's known as sustainable development—a bid to capture all three of those efforts in one effort and phrase—has hardly advanced since it was first used in the 1980s and the world is hardly closer to eradicating extreme poverty, respecting the dignity and rights of all peoples or resolving environmental challenges, whether climate change or the extinction of plants and animals. Or so argued the participants at the Earth Institute's State of the Planet 2012 meeting on October 11.

The primary force behind all three of these challenges is of course, humanity...
Earth Institute director and economist Jeffrey Sachs, a member of the Scientific American advisory board, delivered this indictment of current human activity to start the day and the dire prognosis was then reaffirmed by everyone from college students in Kazakhstan presenting via video conference to the deputy secretary general of the United Nations, Jan Eliasson. As a student from Brazil noted, even the reduction in deforestation in the Amazon has proved temporary, ramping back up this year.
...[Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change]..."A few years from now, low carbon will be the norm, not a novelty."
[James Hansen claim] ...the world can expect at least as much warming of average global temperatures as has already happened—0.8 degree Celsius—even if all greenhouse gas emissions stopped today.

River Runners: The Latest Victims of Climate Change | Science | OutsideOnline.com

"Some would say it's not climate change, but climate strange, with one of the wettest years on record followed by one of the driest," said Soren Jespersen, northwest Colorado wildlands coordinator for the Wilderness Society.

Carbon price of $29 'not implausible', says Climage Change Department chief

The nation's top climate change bureaucrat has offered only a modest defence of the federal Treasury's widely disputed prediction of a $29 carbon price in 2015, describing it as "not implausible".
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Treasury has based its estimate on how much revenue the government will receive from sales of carbon permits on the assumption that a tonne of carbon reduction will be worth $29 in the 2015-16 financial year.

European carbon units are trading at less than $10 and United Nations-managed carbon credits created by green projects in developing countries at less than $3.

The Case Against Ethanol from Corn

Ethanol from corn has been in my cross hairs for years. It is time to stop this madness. By the way, in January 2011, Peter Brabeck, chairman of the $100 billion Swiss food giant Nestle, addressed the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and stated using food for biofuels was “absolute madness”.