The world economy has run into a brick wall. Despite countless warnings in recent years about the need to address a looming hunger crisis in poor countries and a looming energy crisis worldwide, world leaders failed to think ahead. The result is a global food crisis. Wheat, corn and rice prices have more than doubled in the past two years, and oil prices have more than tripled since the start of 2004. These food-price increases combined with soaring energy costs ...

At 4:30, when most of Wall Street is winding down, Walter Zimmermann begins a high-stakes, high-wire act conducted live before a paying audience. About 200 institutional investors—including airlines and oil companies—shell out up to $3,000 a month to catch his daily webcast on the volatile energy markets, a performance that can move hundreds of millions of dollars. "I'm not paid to be wrong—I can tell you that," Zimmermann says. But as he clicks through dozens of screens and graphics on ...

From his Cessna a mile above the southern Amazon, John Carter looks down on the destruction of the world's greatest ecological jewel. He watches men converting rain forest into cattle pastures and soybean fields with bulldozers and chains. He sees fires wiping out such gigantic swaths of jungle that scientists now debate the "savannization" of the Amazon. Brazil just announced that deforestation is on track to double this year; Carter, a Texas cowboy with all the subtlety of a chainsaw, ...

Big solar producers should be feeling very, er, sunny. New solar power doubled last year globally, with the world adding 16 gigawatts worth of new photovoltaic energy. In the first quarter of 2011, installations of solar power increased 66% over the previous year in the U.S. Just last week the Obama Administration offered a $1.4 billion loan guarantee to help fund what will be the world's largest rooftop solar project, which put at least 733 megawatts ...

President Barack Obama does not like to get angry. His equanimity is his pride, and he rarely uses the bully pulpit of the Presidency for explicit criticism. But on Friday morning, Obama directed a rare showing of public pique toward the energy giant BP and the other companies involved with the catastrophic Deepwater Horizon oil spill — Transocean and Halliburton — each of which has dodged responsibility for the accident by repeatedly blaming the others, a pattern ...

Seven/Eleven Japan, with over 13,200 stores nationwide, is among the many forward-looking companies helping set the pace for change within the nation's energy policy. The convenience store chain plans to spend over $123 million to switch to energy efficient LED lighting at about 6000 outlets in Tokyo, and will install solar panels on roofs of 1,000 stores around the country over the next few months. This would not only save 125KW a day per store but also ...

When a U.S. alternative energy company signed a technology license contract last month to enable China's largest coal company to build a $2 billion plant to liquefy coal in Inner Mongolia it may have been sealing the future of OPEC. If the technology lives up to its promise and can economically transform coal into diesel and gasoline it may tip the geopolitical scales by reducing the dependence on oil of coal-rich countries like China, the U.S. and Germany. At the ...

Under an azure Patagonia sky, a few dozen conservation-minded citizens and their children took part in a puppet show recently in the town square of Cochrane, a tiny hamlet in southern Chile nestled between ancient forests and winding rivers. In the story, a purple otter sought guidance from the mystical forest spirit about the malevolent plans of a gravelly-voiced developer who wants to dam the river, a scheme that would disfigure the landscape and, with it, the ...

Presidents bedeviled by seemingly intractable problems tend to resort to symbolic gestures. As he wondered how to pay for the Great Society and the Viet Nam War all at once, Lyndon Johnson roamed the White House halls turning off lights to save electricity. In the depths of the energy crisis, Jimmy Carter turned down the thermostat in the Oval Office and put on a sweater. So, as the national furor over the drug crisis continues to grow, it was not ...

If anyone harbored any doubts that hybrid cars are hot, last week the 2005 Tokyo Motor Show put them to rest. Carmakers practically ran over one another promoting their versions in attempts to catch up with Honda and Toyota, the technology's pioneers. Companies such as Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Mazda, Mitsubishi, GM, Volkswagen and Porsche showed new models or talked about plans to sell them by the end of the decade at the latest. On display were not only regular hybrids, the kind powered by ...