Suicide rate of Indian farmers rise as country faces urgent water crisis
Bone-dry India’s water crisis seems to bringing the 2015 blockbuster film “Mad Max” to life. Apart from a deteriorating quality of life, countless diseases and loss of economic opportunities, India’s lack of water is also causing a plethora of social ills.
Two successive years of droughts have resulted in India’s water crisis worsening by the minute, with a whopping 75.8 million Indians -- five percent of the country’s population -- currently lacking access to clean water.
Here’s another horrifying fact -- almost all of India’s water is contaminated by sewage, which means those cut off from clean water have two options: purchase water at the high price of 72 cents for 50 litres; or use supplies contaminated with sewage and chemicals.
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How Barack Obama Turned His Back On Saudi Arabia And Its Sunni Allies
A widely held sentiment inside the White House is that many of the most prominent foreign-policy think tanks in Washington are doing the bidding of their Arab and pro-Israel funders. One administration official refer to Massachusetts Avenue, the home of many of these think tanks, as ‘Arab-occupied territory’. Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the Gulf monarchies were briefly convinced that they would get their wish and the US was going to do their work for them by overthrowing President Bashar al-Assad. They claimed this would be easy to do, though it would have happened only if there had been a full-scale American intervention and it would have produced a power vacuum that would have been filled by fundamentalist Islamic movements as in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. By refusing to bomb Syria, Obama “broke with ‘the Washington Playbook’. This was his liberation day”.
Globally as in Australia, residential solar is a people-led revolution
Surge in renewable energy reduces world greenhouse gas emissions. Falling coal use in China and the US and a shift towards renewable energy globally saw energy emissions level for the second year running,
China Is Getting Serious About Kicking Its Coal Addiction
China is halting construction of hundreds of coal-fired power plants across the country, a major move that highlights the sudden and accelerating death throes of the fuel that powered the creation of the modern world.
One crop breeding cycle from starvation
Transgenic tobacco seedlings were the proof of concept that showed enhancing photosynthetic processes can increase yield in high CO2 conditions.
URBANA, Ill. - In the race against world hunger, we're running out of time. By 2050, the global population will have grown and urbanized so much that we will need to produce 87 percent more of the four primary food crops - rice, wheat, soy, and maize - than we do today.
At the same time, the climate is projected to change over the next 30 years, with warmer temperatures and more carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. Crop plants can adapt to change through evolution, but at a much slower rate than the changes we are causing in the atmosphere. Furthermore, the land available for growing crop plants is unlikely to expand to accommodate the predicted rise in demand. In fact, land suited to food crop production is being lost on a global scale.
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