We’re digging, drilling, fishing, rerouting water, damming rivers, packing the atmosphere with pollutants, and wiping out forests to make way for our lifestyles. We’re leaving no stone unturned, no ocean, river, mountain untapped. But we need more. More. More of everything. And we won’t rest till every last one of us is turned into a consuming machine.

Michael Moyer and Carina Storrs take a sobering look of what we have left, and what we have given up in the Scientific American article – 20 years of silver, 19 years of gold, 40 years of oil and even more sobering stats on what we’ve already done to make fish and mammalian species go extinct.

If the 20th century was an expansive era seemingly without boundaries—a time of jet planes, space travel and the Internet—the early years of the 21st have showed us the limits of our small world. Regional blackouts remind us that the flow of energy we used to take for granted may be in tight supply. The once mighty Colorado River, tapped by thirsty metropolises of the desert West, no longer reaches the ocean. Oil is so hard to find that new wells extend many kilometers underneath the seafloor. The boundless atmosphere is now reeling from two centuries’ worth of greenhouse gas emissions. Even life itself seems to be running out, as biologists warn that we are in the midst of a global extinction event comparable to the last throes of the dinosaurs.

We’re hoping to see the day in our lifetimes when we won’t have cars powered by oil. For now every one of these is a moment of celebration of the possibility of that day in the nearer future.

(Via WessexWater) The Bio-Bug runs on methane gas generated during the sewage treatment process.

Waste flushed down the toilets of just 70 homes in Bristol is enough to power the Bio-Bug for a year, based on an annual mileage of 10,000 miles.

With support from the South West Regional Development Agency, GENeco, a Wessex Water-owned company, imported specialist equipment to treat gas generated at Bristol sewage treatment works in Avonmouth to power the VW Beetle in a way that doesn’t affect its performance.

We can thank the BP Oil Spill for one thing – suddenly everyone’s paying closer attention to oil drilling around the world. If the three stories below seem like absolute insanity, just imagine the consequences of all the unreported stories right now.

Like this spill in Nigeria: (Full post at Yale Environment 360) AidData says estimates of oil spilled in the Niger Delta since 1960 range from 5.75 million to 10 million barrels, roughly triple the amount of oil that has gushed into the Gulf of Mexico from the blown-out Deepwater Horizon rig.

Spills from offshore rigs quadrupled in the past decade in the US waters alone.

And the 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells in the Gulf of Mexico. Yes, 27,000! Just in the Gulf of Mexico alone!

We can’t get enough of this site.  As always, we try to find interesting, innovative, inspiring stories, but we couldn’t find just one; we found too many to write about.  Check out www.ideabing.com and look for stories like:

• Scary Design: Mouse Pointer Contact Lenses (come on, really?)
• Smart Thinking: Recharging Shopping Carts (awesome)
• Grassroots Innovation – A Refrigerator That Runs Without Electricity for $50 (love it)

Ah, the contradictions of Bobby Jindal.

He’s declared June 27 a “Statewide Day of Prayer” for perseverance through the BP oil spill that continues to devastate the country’s Gulf Coast region. (HuffPo). But he doesn’t want the drilling to stop. Meanwhile he also vetoed a bill to make BP oil spill records public. And while he’s front and center criticizing the federal government’s response, his own government’s response has been less than acceptable (1) (2).

Let us humans do everything in our power to start things that we can’t always control. God will take care of our mess. Hasn’t quite worked out that way for centuries of our existence on this planet, and yet we persevere down this path!