An alliance of religious groups is vowing a relentless push to restore a key provision to assist the international poor in America’s Climate Security Act, the first greenhouse gas cap-and-trade bill with a realistic chance of passage in the Senate.

In a press conference today, top faith leaders from the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, the National Association of Evangelicals, the National Council of Churches, and the Union of Reform Judaism emphasized the need for U.S. funding of adaptation efforts in the world’s poorest countries, which emit relatively little carbon dioxide but may be hardest hit by global warming because of their locale and lack of infrastructure and money.

“As always, poor and working-class people need advocates, and that is what the faith community traditionally does,” Paul Gorman, executive director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, told U.S. News before the press conference. “We plan to be sending out materials to delegations and making phone calls. The single most striking thing about us and this issue is the degree of unity across the ideological spectrum. We see this as an extension of our traditional concern for the international and domestic poor.”

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As twilight falls over this Tennessee town, Mayor Tony Reames drives up a dusty dirt road to the community’s towering water tank and begins his nightly ritual in front of a rusty metal valve.

With a twist of the wrist, he releases the tank’s meager water supply, and suddenly this sleepy town is alive with activity. Washing machines whir, kitchen sinks fill and showers run.

About three hours later, Reames will return and reverse the process, cutting off water to the town’s 145 residents.

The severe drought tightening like a vise across the Southeast has threatened the water supply of cities large and small, sending politicians scrambling for solutions. But Orme, about 40 miles west of Chattanooga and 150 miles northwest of Atlanta, is a town where the worst-case scenario has already come to pass: The water has run out.

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Qatar’s energy minister said crude oil prices, which have surged recently to record levels above 80 dollars a barrel, should be more than 100 dollars.

“If we take into account inflation from 1972 to the present day, the real and fair price for oil should be more than 100 dollars,” Abdullah bin Hamad Al-Attiyah said in remarks aired by Al-Jazeera television on Tuesday.

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POPE BENEDICT XVI has called on young people to take steps to save the planet “before it is too late”. Speaking last weekend at the end of an Italian youth gathering at the Marian shrine of Loreto near the Adriatic Sea, the Pope told the young people that one of the “most urgent” responsibilities of their generation was to protect the environment and help reverse ecological destruction.

“Before it is too late, courageous choices must be adopted that are capable of recreating a strong alliance between humans and the Earth,” the Pope said on Sunday to a vast outdoor crowd. The remarks were only an aside in a much broader message to the young people, but they constituted some of the Pope’s strongest comments to date on ecological questions. “There needs to be a decisive ”˜yes’ in defence of creation and a strong commitment to reverse those trends that risk creating situations of irreparable degradation,” he said.

The two-day “Agora” was the first major event of a three-year initiative by the Italian episcopal conference (CEI) aimed at reaching out to young Catholics. The Pope’s environmental comments were made in support of another CEI initiative – the second annual “National Day for the Safeguarding of Creation”, which is commemorated each year on 1 September.

Pope Benedict noted that this year’s theme focused on water, which he called a most precious resource. He warned that it would become a “motive for harsh tensions and bitter conflicts” if not shared in a fair and peaceful manner – a reality that is already occurring in many parts of the world.

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Visitors to East Anglia’s annual Greenpeace fair in England on Sunday will be able to confess their sins against the environment to a [Roman] Catholic priest.

But the Rev. Antony Sutch, who will be hearing people’s eco-confessions, said it would be a question of secular rather than sacramental confession.

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Cooling off with bottled water could soon cost you more within the Chicago city limits if one alderman has his way.

As CBS 2’s Kristyn Hartman reports, Ald. George Cardenas (12th) wants to slap a tax of up to 25 cents on the cost of every bottle to help close a $217 million budget gap.

“People enjoy jogging or driving with a bottle of water. There’s a cost associated with this behavior. You have to pay for it,” said Cardenas, one of Mayor Richard M. Daley’s staunchest City Council supporters.

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Blessed are those who leave no carbon footprints – that has been the public view of the Bishop of London, and he has now lived up to his vow of not indulging in air travel for a year by declaring that he will take the train to Romania to attend a clerical conference.

It was unclear how many of the Church of England delegation would accompany the Rt Rev Richard Chartres on the 36-hour rail trip to Sibiu for the Third European Ecumenical Assembly next month.

The bishop took a “gold” pledge not to fly anywhere for 12 months after pronouncing that flying was potentially a “symptom of sin”.

His next family holiday, he said, would be in Devon. His office, however, had to cancel his attendance at a seminar in northern Norway because it would have been impossible to get there any other way than by air.

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The Dalai Lama, Pope Benedict XVI and the spiritual leader of the world’s Eastern Orthodox Christians were among 15 “Green Religious Leaders” cited by a Seattle-based environmental group.

Grist, an environmental news and commentary Web site that also highlighted “green” actors, musicians and chefs, among others, said the 15 names on the list and five runners-up are dedicated to “spreading the eco-gospel.”

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The age of exploration on our planet, which many assumed had come to an end, seems to have found a new lease of life. Last week, a small fleet – which comprised a scientific research vessel, two mini-submarines and a nuclear ice breaker – set sail from the Russian port of Murmansk. After the ice breaker carved a 125-metre by 10-metre opening in the thick pack ice near the North Pole, the two submarines descended into the freezing waters. Yesterday, one of those submarines planted a Russian flag, in a metal capsule, on the seabed two and a half miles below the Pole. The Russians are comparing the achievement to that of man walking on the moon for the first time.

In terms of audacity and technical skill, it may bear comparison with the 1969 moon landing….

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The climate is changing, and there is now a very high confidence by an overwhelming majority of scientists that human activity is a significant part of that change. The global atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased markedly since 1750 and now far exceed pre-industrial values. Much of this is due to fossil fuel use, changes in land use, and agriculture.

The effects of global warming are increasingly well known. Changing weather patterns such as hurricanes and floods; the melting of the glaciers; the softening of the permafrost; the melting of the polar ice-caps and the ice on Greenland; more intense and frequent heatwaves; the growth of the deserts and consequent likelihood of famine in some areas; the rise in sea levels; the death of the coral reefs. Countries like the Maldives and Bangladesh may disappear under water. There will be a huge movement of migrants from these countries to more habitable parts of the world.

Climate change is real, is growing, and has potentially very dangerous consequences for the well being of the planet and for human life – and the people most affected will be in the poorest and most disadvantaged parts of the world. There is therefore a strong moral imperative to do all we can to avert the danger, reduce the likelihood of global warming continuing at the present rate, and prepare for its likely consequences. There is a moral obligation also on the present generation not to do things which will significantly damage the planet’s capacity to provide a home for our children and grandchildren. There is a further moral obligation to live within our means. At present rates of energy use and consumption in Britain, we need about three planet earths to sustain our current way of life.

But global warming is changing more than the climate.

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As modern officials try to assess the risk global warming might present to the American Southwest, they’re paying a lot of attention to what scientists say about how climate changes affected the region’s ancient past.

Archaeologist Kristen Kuckelman has spent many years digging in the ruins of ancient farming villages on the Colorado Plateau and analyzing the artifacts and specimens she takes from them.

The people who lived in these ancient villages, which are known as pueblos, were part of a large culture that thrived for several hundred years in the high desert plain that covers parts of modern Utah, New Mexico, Colorado and Arizona. Archaeologists call them Anasazi, or Ancient Pueblo People. One of the best known of their pueblos is in Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado.

Listen to it all from NPR.

The $100-a-barrel oil that Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said would prevail by 2009 may be only a few months away.

Jeffrey Currie, a London-based commodity analyst at the world’s biggest securities firm, says $95 crude is likely this year unless OPEC unexpectedly increases production, and declining inventories are raising the chances for $100 oil. Jeff Rubin at CIBC World Markets predicts $100 a barrel as soon as next year.

“We’re only a headline of significance away from $100 oil,” said John Kilduff, an analyst in the New York office of futures broker Man Financial Inc. “The unrelenting pressure of increased demand has left the market a coiled spring.” New disruptions of Nigerian or Iraqi supplies, or any military strike against Iran, might trigger the rise, Kilduff said in a July 20 interview.

Higher prices will increase revenue for energy producers from Exxon Mobil Corp. to PetroChina Co., while eroding profit at airlines including EasyJet Plc and railroads such as Union Pacific Corp. The U.S. and other oil-importing nations risk accelerating inflation, while higher energy costs threaten to restrain growth.

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The obituaries for Lady Bird Johnson last week focused mainly on her advocacy for highway beautification, largely failing to note that nearly all of the 200 laws related to the environment during the Johnson administration had her stamp on them, including the Wilderness Act of 1964, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Program, the Land and Water Conservation Fund and many additions to the national parks system. She worked to protect the redwoods and block the damming of the Grand Canyon.

The environmental movement was just being born ”” Rachel Carson had published “Silent Spring” the year before Johnson took office ”” but it found in Lady Bird its most effective advocate. She hoped to leave the country more beautiful than she found it, and there is no doubt that she did so ”” beginning with her efforts at cleaning up the slums of the nation’s capital to the creation of the National Wildflower Research Center here in Austin.

From the start, however, the centerpiece of Mrs. Johnson’s legacy was crippled by compromises with the billboard lobby. You wouldn’t know it from last week’s coverage, but Lyndon Johnson realized when he signed the bill that it was a failure. “We have placed a wall of civilization between us and between the beauty of our land and of our countryside,” he reflected. “This bill … does not represent what the national interest requires. But it is a first step, and there will be other steps.”

There were no other steps.

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[Whew! NY Times to the rescue! The blog was getting really heavy on the Theology category this morning. Here’s something a bit lighter… Loved the Cruella De Vil line! 😉 ]

BEACH HAVEN TERRACE, N.J.,

July 10 ”” Tired of paying as much as $340 per month for gas and electricity at the Cape Cod home here where he has lived for 18 months, Michael Mercurio erected a 35-foot windmill in his backyard last fall that helped reduce his bill to about $114 ”” a year.

“It just makes sense,” said Mr. Mercurio, who is 61 and runs a company selling and installing windmills. “This is a clean, renewable source of energy.”

Some of his neighbors say it is also annoying. They say it is too big. They say it is too noisy. And some residents in this middle-class borough on Long Beach Island have gone to court to try to make him take it down, while the township has stilled it since winter.

It is a collision between the ideals of alternative energy and the suburban reality of New Jersey’s notorious not-in-my-backyard culture, casting Mr. Mercurio in the role of a latter-day environmental knight errant and his neighbor and principal adversary as the ecological equivalent of Cruella De Vil.

What started as one man’s attempts to find a cheap, clean energy source has become a frequent topic of coffee conversation among the small community of year-round residents in this town, where Mr. Mercurio has lived since he was 4, and has galvanized some segments of the state’s environmental community. And, oh, how the Don Quixote jokes have flowed.

“I hear it all the time,” Mr. Mercurio said, standing in the shadow of his still windmill Tuesday afternoon. “I tell them, ”˜You’ve got it all wrong: I’m not fighting against the windmills, I’m fighting for the windmills.’ ”

The full article is here.

On the front page of this morning’s FT:

The world is facing an oil supply “crunch” within five years that will force up prices to record levels and increase the west’s dependence on oil cartel Opec, the industrialised countries’ energy watchdog has warned.

In its starkest warning yet on the world’s fuel outlook, the International Energy Agency said “oil looks extremely tight in five years time” and there are “prospects of even tighter natural gas markets at the turn of the decade”.

The IEA said that supply was falling faster than expected in mature areas, such as the North Sea or Mexico, while projects in new provinces such as the Russian Far East, faced long delays. Meanwhile consumption is accelerating on strong economic growth in emerging countries.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that supply from non-members of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries will increase at an annual pace of 1 per cent, or less than half the rate of the demand rise.

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From The Independent:

Scientists have criticised a major review of the world’s remaining oil reserves, warning that the end of oil is coming sooner than governments and oil companies are prepared to admit.

BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy, published yesterday, appears to show that the world still has enough “proven” reserves to provide 40 years of consumption at current rates. The assessment, based on officially reported figures, has once again pushed back the estimate of when the world will run dry.

However, scientists led by the London-based Oil Depletion Analysis Centre, say that global production of oil is set to peak in the next four years before entering a steepening decline which will have massive consequences for the world economy and the way that we live our lives.

According to “peak oil” theory our consumption of oil will catch, then outstrip our discovery of new reserves and we will begin to deplete known reserves.

Colin Campbell, the head of the depletion centre, said: “It’s quite a simple theory and one that any beer drinker understands. The glass starts full and ends empty and the faster you drink it the quicker it’s gone.”

Dr Campbell, is a former chief geologist and vice-president at a string of oil majors including BP, Shell, Fina, Exxon and ChevronTexaco. He explains that the peak of regular oil – the cheap and easy to extract stuff – has already come and gone in 2005. Even when you factor in the more difficult to extract heavy oil, deep sea reserves, polar regions and liquid taken from gas, the peak will come as soon as 2011, he says.

This scenario is flatly denied by BP, whose chief economist Peter Davies has dismissed the arguments of “peak oil” theorists.

“We don’t believe there is an absolute resource constraint. When peak oil comes, it is just as likely to come from consumption peaking, perhaps because of climate change policies as from production peaking.”

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America is facing its worst summer drought since the Dust Bowl years of the Great Depression. Or perhaps worse still.

From the mountains and desert of the West, now into an eighth consecutive dry year, to the wheat farms of Alabama, where crops are failing because of rainfall levels 12 inches lower than usual, to the vast soupy expanse of Lake Okeechobee in southern Florida, which has become so dry it actually caught fire a couple of weeks ago, a continent is crying out for water.

In the south-east, usually a lush, humid region, it is the driest few months since records began in 1895. California and Nevada, where burgeoning population centres co-exist with an often harsh, barren landscape, have seen less rain over the past year than at any time since 1924. The Sierra Nevada range, which straddles the two states, received only 27 per cent of its usual snowfall in winter, with immediate knock-on effects on water supplies for the populations of Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

The human impact, for the moment, has been limited, certainly nothing compared to the great westward migration of Okies in the 1930 – the desperate march described by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath.

Big farmers are now well protected by government subsidies and emergency funds, and small farmers, some of whom are indeed struggling, have been slowly moving off the land for decades anyway. The most common inconvenience, for the moment, are restrictions on hosepipes and garden sprinklers in eastern cities.

But the long-term implications are escaping nobody. Climatologists see a growing volatility in the south-east’s weather – today’s drought coming close on the heels of devastating hurricanes two to three years ago.

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Los Angeles residents were urged on Wednesday to take shorter showers, reduce lawn sprinklers and stop throwing trash in toilets in a bid to cut water usage by 10 percent in the driest year on record.

With downtown Los Angeles seeing a record low of 4 inches

of rain since July 2006 — less than a quarter of normal — and with a hot, dry summer ahead, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said the city needed “to change course and conserve water to steer clear of this perfect storm.”

It is the driest year since rainfall records began 130 years ago.

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I used to marvel at how foolish an organism is cancer. It can’t seem to pace itself. Left to its own devices, it will greedily consume its host until the host dies, thereby causing the cancer’s own premature death.

Then, one day I had an epiphany. We’re like cancer. Unable to pace ourselves, we are greedily consuming our host organism (i.e. planet Earth) and getting dangerously close to killing ourselves in the process.

The difference is that cancer has an excuse: No brain.

Consider that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued one of its most sobering reports to date. The hundreds of scientists and scores of nations participating in the project paint an apocalyptic future of flooding, drought, disease and food shortages. In the face of such a crisis, one might expect people of faith to flock to the cause of protecting the environment. After all, the theological issue appears a simple one. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. The world and all that dwell in it!” proclaims Psalm 24:1. The earth is on loan. God owns it, and we are God’s caretakers or “stewards,” according to the Bible.

Despite all that, and the fact that 90% of us say we believe in God, most Americans appear reluctant to begin making the sacrifices necessary to address global warming. Evangelical Christian leaders in particular seem to be dragging their heels. So, why the hesitation? Why aren’t more Christians trading their SUVs for hybrids, turning down the thermostat and writing letters to Congress?

First, our political loyalties get in the way. Evangelical Christians tend to vote Republican, and party leaders such as the president and vice president have been outspoken in their skepticism about the urgency of the global climate crisis.

Then, there’s money. In the short run at least, it simply costs more to go green. Hybrid cars, fluorescent bulbs and alternative energy sources don’t come cheap. Until substantial government incentives or market forces change that equation, many Americans will opt to save a buck rather than the environment.

There’s also the fact that for many Christians, the Bible appears contradictory on the subject of global warming. Didn’t Jesus say there would be wars and rumors of wars, famine and earthquakes before he could return? Isn’t that exactly what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is predicting? For millions of Christians, the world’s downward spiral into political and ecological chaos may appear a necessary prerequisite to the second coming of Christ.

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Gas prices are spiking again ”” to an average of $3.22 a gallon, and close to $4 a gallon in many areas.

And some oil executives are now warning that the current shortages of fuel could become a long-term problem, leading to stubbornly higher prices at the pump.

They point to a surprising culprit: uncertainty created by the government’s push to increase the supply of biofuels like ethanol in coming years.

In his State of the Union address in January, President Bush called for a sharp increase in the use of biofuels, along with some improvement in automobile fuel efficiency to reduce America’s use of gasoline by 20 percent within 10 years. Congress is considering legislation calling for a nearly fivefold increase in the use of ethanol.

That has forced many oil companies to reconsider or scale back their plans for constructing new refinery capacity.

In hearings before Congress last year, oil executives outlined plans to increase fuel production by expanding existing refineries. Those plans would add capacity of 1.6 million to 1.8 million barrels a day over the next five years, for an increase of 10 percent, according to the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association.

But those plans have since been scaled back to more than one million barrels a day, according to the Energy Information Administration, an arm of the federal government.

“If the national policy of the country is to push for dramatic increases in the biofuels industry, this is a disincentive for those making investment decisions on expanding capacity in oil products and refining,” said John D. Hofmeister, the president of the Shell Oil Company. “Industrywide, this will have an impact.”

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