Badlands Journal

 People who take seriously the information that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is cvurrently at 390 ppm when science has stated that the tipping point (where catastrophic sea-level rise begins) is at 350 ppm, observe the current debate about oil – from academic institutional and state and national environmental groups’ divestment of holdings in fossil fuel firms to California’s governor, the Great Reflector’s jitterbugging on fracking the Monterey Shale Formation – and could notice that political hypocrisy is also a petroleum by-product.

Badlands Journal editorial board

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College students, starting in small colleges in New England but in a movement quickly growing, are pressuring high education administrators and boards of trustees to divest investment in fossil fuel corporations.

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DESPAIR!!

Once again, as She does every year now, since its population hit 30 million, Mother Nature is betraying California by not providing enough rainfall to allay the anxieties of the finance, insurance and real estate special interests. The Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite is only 1150 percent of normal capacity for this time of year; Shasta Lake is only 111 percent of normal; and lesser reservoirs are above or at 100 percent capacity.

It's just awful. -- ed

1-30-13
Merced Sun-Star
Hopes for a wet year are drying out…San Jose Mercury News
http://www.mercedsunstar.com/2013/01/30/v-print/2787530/hopes-for-a-wet-year-are-drying.html

When it comes to rain and snow in California, this winter began with great promise. But hopes for a bountiful year appear to be evaporating.

The Sierra Nevada snowpack is at 93 percent of the historical average for the end of January, according to the state Department of Water Resources survey completed Tuesday afternoon.

That's not bad -- but a month ago, it was 140 percent.

What happened? Huge storms in early December dumped lots of snow across the Sierra, and rain filled reservoirs all over the state. But there has been almost no rain or snow in January.

--from Ecological Rift, John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clrk, and Richard York, Monthly Review Press, 2010, p. 101.

The ecological blinders of neoclassical economics, which serves to exclude the planet from its preanalytic vision, are well illustrated by a debate that took place within the World Bank, related by ecological economist Herman Daly. As Daly tells the story, in 1992 (when Summers was chief economist of the World Bank and Daly worked for the Bank) the annual World Development Report was to focus on the theme Development and the Environment:

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