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India’s most innovative cities including Bengaluru run out of water

India’s most innovative cities including Bengaluru run out of water

Tech professionals are leaving India’s IT hub of Bengaluru amid an intensifying drought that has gripped the city as it sweats through another torrid pre-monsoon season

water

A thirsty growth engine | Photo: Bloomberg
At the time Egypt’s pyramids were being constructed, one of the cradles of global civilization grew up in the Indus Valley around the borders of Pakistan and India. Its grid-planned cities produced sewerage networks, delicate artworks and an undeciphered writing system. Then a 900-year drought emptied its urban areas and sent its population back to a simpler, poorer village life on the plains of the Ganges.
Something grimly similar is happening right now.
Tech professionals are leaving India’s IT hub of Bengaluru amid an intensifying drought that has gripped the city as it sweats through another torrid pre-monsoon season, the Deccan Herald reported this month. More than half of the wells the city depends on for groundwater have dried up after failed rains last year, leaving businesses and citizens dependent on trucked-in water tankers.
In neighbouring Kerala, which catches much of the monsoon rainfall before it reaches inland stretches of Bengaluru’s Karnataka state, a minister has even written to Bengaluru’s companies, suggesting they relocate because “water is not an issue at all” in his state, the Times of India reported.
That seems in poor taste in southern India, where fights over the distribution of river flows between parched states have gone on for decades. He’s not wrong, though. Indeed, these pressures are only going to grow as populations rise and climate change makes the cycles of drought and monsoon more pronounced.

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Peak Oil Has Finally Arrived. No, Really

Peak Oil Has Finally Arrived. No, Really

Those who have called a top in oil may finally be proven right as sharp global rate hikes hurt consumption.

Is the sun setting on oil?
Is the sun setting on oil?   Photographer: Jason Alden/Bloomberg

I’ve rarely felt more trepidation about writing a column than this one. But here goes: After more than a century of almost continual growth, the world’s appetite for oil is peaking, and will soon enter terminal decline.

That’s hard to write, because those who’ve called a top in oil have a forecasting record on a par with film producer Harry Warner’s skepticism that people in the 1920s wanted to see talking pictures.

Running on Empty

Liquid fuels production isn’t expected to regain its peak levels of 102.2 million barrels a day this year or next

Source: Energy Information Administration

As far back as 1919, the chief geologist of the US Geological Survey wrote that domestic output — then running at about 960,000 barrels a day, about 6% of levels nowadays — would start falling within two to five years. In the 2000s, a dearth of oilfield discoveries led to febrile worries that supplies were running out, before the shale revolution prompted a surprise jump in production. BP Plc in 2020 predicted that consumption of liquid hydrocarbons would at best plateau for 15 years around the 97.9 million barrels a day mark it hit in 2019, before revising its forecast to a peak between the middle of this decade and 2030.

Through all that, oil demand has continued to grow as the indispensable energy carrier fueling rising global incomes and development. Still, the reserves of stamina that crude has called on to maintain its upward trajectory are finally giving out — and US Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell may have just delivered the coup de grace.

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Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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