Can the World Sustain 9 Billion People by 2050?
The world’s population is topsy-turvy, and its exponential and uneven growth could have disastrous consequences if we aren’t ready for it. Humanity recently hit a benchmark, a population of 7.9 billion in2013. It is expected to reach 8.5 billion by 2030, and 9.6 billion by 2050. If that weren’t enough, consider 11.2 billion in 2100. Most of the growth is supposed to come from nine specific countries: India, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Nigeria, the United States, and Indonesia.
It isn’t fertility that is driving growth, but rather longer lifespans. World population growth peaked in the 1960s, and has been dropping steadily since the ’70s. 1.24% was the growth rate a decade ago, annually. Today, it is 1.18% per year.
Populations in developed countries have slowed to a trickle. Here, it has gotten too expensive to have a child for a large segment of the populace, particularly in the wake of the Great Recession, when young people have to invest a lot of time in education and building a career, spending their most fertile years in lecture halls and office cubicles. Although overall, fertility has been dropping worldwide, the report says researchers used the “low-variant” scenario of population growth. It could be higher.
How Did We Get so Big, So Fast
https://youtu.be/VcSX4ytEfcE
Anthrax outbreak triggered by climate change kills boy in Arctic Circle
Seventy-two nomadic herders, including 41 children, were hospitalised in far north Russia after the region began experiencing abnormally high temperatures
Indonesian seaweed farmers launch class action over Montara oil spill
"Our investigations show that the operator of the oil rig has a serious case to answer for cutting corners that endangered lives, the environment and the livelihoods of thousands of seaweed farmers,"
AGL invests in world’s largest battery storage virtual power plant
The project will comprise a centrally controlled network of 1,000 residential and business battery storage systems with a combined total of 7MWh capacity that will both store rooftop solar power and help manage grid stability in the state.
http://reneweconomy.com.au/
Unlike US, Ireland Just Sent Three Bankers to Jail for Role in 2008 Crisis
The trio's scheme was a "very serious crime," judge says
A Dublin court has sent three former senior banking executives to jail for committing "sham transactions" in an effort to deceive customers and shareholders during the 2008 financial crisis.
"The trio will be among the first senior bankers globally to be jailed for their role in the collapse of a bank during the crisis," as Reuters reports.
Former Anglo Irish Bank executive John Bowe got a two-year sentence, former Irish Life and Permanent chief executive Denis Casey was given a sentence of two years and nine months, and Bowe's colleague and former Anglo executive Willie McAteer got three and a half years.
As the Irish Times explains,
[Their] scheme, described by the judge as a series of "sham transactions," involved Anglo placing massive sums with Irish Life and Permanent and receiving the money back, via a non-banking subsidiary, as customer deposits.The short-term transactions enabled the bank to disguise a heavy loss in customers' deposits, which would have confirmed the widely held suspicion in the market that Anglo was close to collapse.
The Washington Post further explains that the trio "essentially inflated Anglo Irish Bank's deposit levels by about $8 billion." The Post continues:
That inflation was meant to obfuscate the funding crisis at Anglo Irish Bank, which had invested heavily in a property bubble in Ireland that popped almost as soon as the financial crisis began in the United States. As the crisis spread from the United States to the European Union, of which Ireland is a part, Irish banks were frantically asked to pay back loans and debts to U.S. banks, but they couldn't. That, in turn, led to Ireland asking the European Union for the most expensive bailout in its history.
Judge Martin Nolan called the scheme a "very serious crime," and said the now-defunct bank's auditors "should have known what was occurring if they were doing their job properly" and that their failure to see the wrongdoing was the result of "blindness or wilful blindness."
