Earth’s population is approaching seven billion at the same time that resource limits and environmental degradation are becoming more apparent every day. Rich nations have long assured poor nations that they, too, would one day be rich and that their rates of population growth would decline, but it is no longer clear that this will occur for most of today’s poor nations. Resource scarcities, especially oil, are likely to limit future economic growth; the demographic transition that has accompanied economic growth in the past may not be possible for many nations today. Nearly 220,000 people are added to the planet every day, further compounding most resource and environmental problems. The United States adds another person every eleven seconds. We can no longer wait for increasing wealth to bring down fertility in remaining high fertility nations; we need policies and incentives to stop growth now.

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The “The What’s Next on the Road to Recovery” report, which explores how consumers’ habits related to food and beverage purchasing and usage have been affected by the recession, finds that nearly one in five consumers expect to be worse off 12 months from now than they are today, and half of all consumers expect their financial situation to be the same as it is today. Looking ahead nine out of 10 consumers say they will plan and watch their spending on food and beverages outside the home.

Among the thriftier behaviors consumers say they will do more often than now over the next six months are decreasing spending on groceries, especially those with household incomes under $35,000; using coupons for food and beverage items from newspapers or magazines; stocking up on foods and beverages when they are on sale; searching store circulars for low prices on food or beverages that are on sale; buying less expensive brands of foods and beverages, and searching for manufacturer coupons online.

“As food and beverage manufacturers and retailers begin to rethink their marketing communication programs as they start their recovery planning, it’s important that they understand their consumer’s mindset,” said Dori Hickey, director of product development at NPD and author of the report. “Consumers lost personal wealth in this Recession and they’re skeptical that ‘things will go back to the way they were.’ In their minds, it appears the road to recovery will be a long one.”

http://www.foodproductdesign.com/news/2010/06/consumers-to-continue-food-beverage-thriftiness.aspx

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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/is_america_yearning_for_fascism_20100329/

Through 10 years of global boom and bust, of breakneck change around the planet, of terrorism, war and division, all people everywhere under that warming sun faced one threat together: the buildup of greenhouse gases, the rise in temperatures, the danger of a shifting climate, of drought, weather extremes and encroaching seas, of untold damage to the world humanity has created for itself over millennia.

As the decade neared its close, the U.N. gathered presidents and premiers of almost 100 nations for a “climate summit” to take united action, to sharply cut back the burning of coal and other fossil fuels.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told them they had “a powerful opportunity to get on the right side of history” at a year-ending climate conference in Copenhagen.

Once again, however, disunity might keep the world’s nations on this side of making historic decisions.

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James Hansen, the current director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said forging a global agreement to cut emissions once the Kyoto treaty expires were based on a “fundamentally wrong” approach.

“I would rather it not happen if people accept that as being the right track because it’s a disaster track,” he told Britain’s Guardian newspaper ahead of the December 7-18 summit.

Hansen is the most sceptical about the preferred measure of cutting greenhouse gas emissions, a cap-and-trade system under which a progressively stricter ‘right to pollute’ would be exchanged in a carbon market.

He concluded that a direct tax on fossil fuels was the only realistic way to achieve the necessary cuts.

“The approach that’s been talked about is so fundamentally wrong that it is better to reassess the situation, Hansen told the paper. “I think it’s just as well that we not have a substantive treaty, because if it is going to be the Kyoto-type thing, and people agree to that, then they’ll spend years trying to determine exactly what that means and what is a commitment, what are the mechanisms. The whole idea that you have goals which you’re supposed to meet and that you have outs, with offsets (sold through the carbon market), means you know it’s an attempt to continue business as usual.”

Hansen, who was a headline name across the worldwide press in 1988 with his US Congress testimony that climate change was already well under way.

“We’ve got the developed countries who want to continue more or less business as usual and then these developing countries who want money and that is what they can get through offsets,” Hansen said.
However, he insisted there was still hope, telling the Guardian: “I find it screwy that people say you passed a tipping point so it’s too late.”In that case what are you thinking: that we are going to abandon the planet? You want to minimise the damage.”