Indian Express The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has warned that the asset quality of scheduled commercial banks may worsen from the current level if the macroeconomic conditions deteriorate drastically. The central bank’s latest Financial Stability Report has also raised red flag on connected banks triggering a contagion and sought more disclosures and accountability in …

Coal Rush in India Could Tip Balance on Climate Change The New York Times India’s coal mining plans may represent the biggest obstacle to a global climate pact to be negotiated at a conference in Paris next year. “If India goes deeper and deeper into coal, we’re all doomed,” said Veerabhadran Ramanathan, director of the …

Sagar Dhara, POI Founder Member (Note: An edited version of this article appeared in The Hindu, dated October 9, 2014, under the title ‘Including people in governance‘) The soul of India lives in its villages, Gandhiji said 100 years ago.  London governed India’s soul then, which it perceived as unjust and so revolted.  Delhi and the state …

Paul Krugman, The New York Times In his latest column, well-known NYT columnist Krugman attacks, among others, the Post Carbon Institute, a leading think tank on Peak Oil and Climate Change, as wrong-headed and inducing “climate despair”.  In a piece titled Paul Krugman’s Errors and Omissions the Post Carbon Institute’s Richard Heinberg responds to Krugman. Below is prominent Peak …

The oil industry’s fake abundance story From Kurt Cobb’s Resource Insights blog We now have nearly an entire population in the United States and nearly an entire media establishment that believes that oil is abundant–not because of the objective facts, but because of the oil industry’s highly successful public relations campaign, a campaign that is …

India’s government sees oil prices going as high as $120 per barrel for three to four months because of fighting in Iraq, potentially driving a hole of at least Rs 20,000 crore ($3.4 billion) in the budget, two government sources told Reuters. “If the oil prices remain high even for 3-4 months around $120 a …

In the context of Peak Oil and the general depletion of fossil fuels, we often hear about Nuclear Energy as an option. However, if we look at the empirical data, we will soon discover that it’s not – even if we discount all the dangers associated with Nuclear Energy programme, such as waste disposal problems …

POI Editor’s Note: This piece by environmental writer and The Guardian columnist George Monbiot eloquently sums up our present predicament – the converging catastrophes of climate change, biodiversity collapse, the depletion of water, soil, minerals, oil. Monbiot also looks at why we are unable to deal with, or even discuss its possibility. We thought it worth reproducing …

How Climate Change is Going To Affect India By Nidhi Jamwal, Yahoo India A new set of reports by UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change point to the rising incidence of freak weather occurrences, and the very real impact of these on our lives. Of course we’ve all heard of global warming, but here’s how …

  ‘If Peak Oil Is Dead, Why Haven’t Prices Dropped?’ Steve Andrews of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas, USA interviews Dr. Richard G. Miller who recently co-authored and co-edited The Future of Oil Supply (see item below), a thematic issue of Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society entirely devoted to future world oil supply. Dr. Miller, …