The world gets back to burning NOT since 1973 has world energy use increased by as much, in percentage terms, as it did in 2010. According to BP's annual Statistical Review of World Energy, published today, 2010's energy consumption was up by 5.6% on the year before. In part this is thanks to recovery from the economic crisis; in part it is down to the longer-term shift in economic activity towards emerging economies, which are less efficient in their energy use. Read more...

Subsidence Problem

A HEALTH check of America’s housing market is bound to be sobering. The 2011 edition of the “State of the Nation’s Housing”, an annual report from Harvard University’s Joint Centre for Housing Studies (JCHS), serves up some suitably chilling statistics.

The number of completions of new single-family homes last year hit lows last seen in the second world war. Prices continue to fall, despite the lack of new supply: the latest Case-Shiller national home-price index, released last week, showed a first-quarter fall

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Plan for China’s Water Crisis Spurs Concern

By EDWARD WONG- Source NYTimes.com

DANJIANGKOU, China — North China is dying.

A chronic drought is ravaging farmland. The Gobi Desert is inching south. The Yellow River, the so-called birthplace of Chinese civilization, is so polluted it can no longer supply drinking water. The rapid growth of megacities — 22 million people in Beijing and 12 million in Tianjin alone — has drained underground aquifers that took millenniums to fill....

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