STWR - Share The World's Resources

Delivery of drinking water from the tap is mostly controlled by public utilities in the EU, but fears are being voiced that new policies promoting competition are skewed in favour of giving a greater role to the private sector in this area.

For the briefest of moments this week, the price of oil crossed the historic $100 per barrel threshold for the first time, pushed up by a single eager trader in New York. Fleeting though it may have been – the price dropped almost immediately back down into the high 90s – the crossing of that barrier was the clearest sign yet that the era of cheap oil was over and raised a raft of unsettling questions about the implications for the global economy.

More than 1 billion people on our planet are forced to drink foul, infected water, which has killed at least 22 million people in the last decade. They could all have safe, clean water within 10 years, for just a tiny fraction of the cost of global military spending. Why isn't it happening. Most governments, especially rich white ones, would apparently rather buy weapons to kill other human beings than build water facilities to save the lives of black, brown and yellow poor people.

The rising cost of oil has wiped out the benefits many African countries were expecting from western aid and debt relief over the past three years, new research from the International Energy Agency has shown.

The price of oil is approaching $100 a barrel, the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is accumulating faster than the most pessimistic scenarios are predicting, anthropogenic climate change is occurring. The recognition that the world's scientists, diplomats and media gathered at the Bali climate-change summit are arguing over - the necessity of moving beyond dependency on a fossil-fuelled, carbon-emission-based global economy - is becoming increasingly hard to ignore.

The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded this week, in Oslo, Norway. Al Gore shared the prize with the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which represents more than 2,500 scientists from 130 countries. The solemn ceremony took place as the United States is blocking meaningful progress at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Bali, Indonesia, and the Republicans in the U.S. Senate have derailed the energy bill passed by the House of Representatives, which would have accelerated the adoption of renewable energy sources at the expense of big-oil and coal corporations.