With the U.S. taxpayers probably facing a multi-billion dollar clean up effort in the Gulf of Mexico from the massive oil spill, a new International Energy Agency study commissioned by G20 nations which found that in 2008, fossil fuel industries reaped $550 billion in subsidies, up from up from $342 billion in 2007.

“Soaring subsidies for the oil and gas industries in foreign countries have led to a dangerous dependence on foreign oil that threatens our national security and that of nations around the globe,” said Tom Buis, Growth Energy CEO.

Buis said that by investing in new clean technologies to speed the production of domestic, “renewable energy sources like ethanol, we will not only enhance U.S. energy independence and clean our air but grow our economy by creating new green jobs here at home.”

“Further, by employing the technological innovations that the U.S. uses today for agriculture and ethanol production, developing nations can benefit from both food and fuel production, helping them address critical energy supply concerns, spur economic growth and improve the quality of life of their citizens,” he said.

With Rep. Adrian Smith, R-Neb., wanting to continue offshore drilling as the oil spill catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico widens it destructive impact, there may be future concerns in his own backyard. 

“The oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico provides visceral proof that our nation’s reliance on oil breeds dirty and dangerous consequences—not only for ecosystems, but for workers, communities and local economies,” said Alex Moore, Dirty Fuels Campaigner, Friends of the Earth.

With President Obama upset about the oil spill, Moore said his administration faces an impending decision on whether to “approve a permit for a new pipeline to carry oil from Canada’s tar sands to refineries on the Gulf Coast of Texas.”

This pipeline, called the Keystone XL, Moore said, would put “essential Great Plains resources at risk of oil spills and double our country’s dependence on the world’s dirtiest type of crude—tar sands oil.”

The pipeline’s proposed route is through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas.

A public comment period on the State Department’s draft analysis of the pipeline’s potential environmental impacts closes June 16. After taking this input into account, Moore said the Obama administration will make a final choice this fall.

Moore said tar sands oil, the world’s dirtiest, is already on track to surpass conventional crude as our nation’s top source of imported oil. A report released May 17 , he said, by the sustainable investment network Ceres warns that the tar sands industry bears environmental and financial risks that eclipse even those of Gulf drilling.

Moore said the Keystone XL pipeline, proposed by Canadian oil and gas company TransCanada, would stretch from Alberta, Canada to refineries on the Gulf Coast of Texas and pump 900,000 barrels of tar sands oil into the country each day. Its approval, he said, would enable big oil corporations to expand their “destructive tar sands operations in Canada and lock our country into reliance on the dirty crude they produce.”

 Moore said increasing our country’s reliance on tar sands oil would imperil natural resources and public health from Alberta, Canada to Texas.

In Alberta, Canada, Moore said the tar sands oil industry is already “devastating local communities with its massive extraction projects.”

“Companies clear-cut massive swaths of forest, drain wetlands, and haul away tons of living matter and soil to set up their mines,” he said. “The toxic sludge that is a byproduct is contaminating water supplies of communities downstream. Villages like Fort Chipewyan have seen soaring cancer rates. One hundred of the town’s 1,200 residents have died from rare cancers and auto-immune diseases since 2000. Spikes in renal failure, lupus, and hyperthyroidism are becoming commonplace as well.”

Here’s the concern for Nebraska, Moore said, as the Keystone XL pipeline would “traverse some of the Midwest’s most fragile and important natural resources, including the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers and the Ogallala Aquifer, the primary source of water in the Great Plains.”

“An oil spill above the aquifer could contaminate drinking water supplies far from the proposed path of the pipeline,” he said.

Adding to the standard risk of spills, Moore said TransCanada is seeking a special permit from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration that would allow it to use thinner than normal pipe that has a smaller percentage of steel.

“As Gulf communities are experiencing firsthand, when the oil industry cuts corners on safety it opens the door to disasters,” he said. 

Moore said tar sands oil is a high-carbon fuel that is worse for the climate than conventional oil, emitting three times more greenhouse gases in the production process and 20 percent more overall.

“The oil brought into the U.S. by the Keystone XL pipeline would have a carbon footprint equal to adding six million new cars to the roads,” he said. “Issuing a permit for the Keystone XL would be an investment in a dirty energy future that we don’t need and can’t afford.”

Moore said that before TransCanada can begin construction, the company needs a presidential permit from the State Department. The State Department, he said,  is in charge of reviewing the project and determining whether it lies in the national interest.

“The agency issued its draft environmental impact statement on the project on April 16, commencing a 60-day window for public comments and initiating a series of hearings in states that would be impacted,” Moore said.

A final decision on the permit is expected by the end of this year, he said.

The environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico with the massive oil spill has lead to a lot of playing of the blame game. But one should look at this disaster collectively when it comes to pointing fingers as society has created a dependency on fossil fuel to operate its most basic to its most sophisticated technology. That dependency has such as a grip on our quality of life and standard of living. It fuels this planet’s economic engine.

While we are in a recession, the key factor for the growth of the world’s economy in the last 300 years is the harnessing of fossil fuels and turning it into a cheap and readily supply of energy to power industry and commerce.

But that dependency has come at a cost. Not so much the fact that fossil fuel is a diminishing resource, but the environmental degradation it has caused. The oil spill is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s visible. We have cameras at the source of the spill running 24 hours a day showing the oil spilling out of the broken well. We have photographs of birds and wildlife soaked in oil as the oil spill has spread into their nesting habitats.

The environmental degradation that is happening because of our dependency on fossil fuel is one that is not quite as visible as the oil spill. It involves fossil fuels as an agent of global climate change. There are more than 6 billion people who depend on the planet as a vital resource for food production. Disruptions in global food production due to weather problems where environmental degradation from overuse of fossil fuels has been a direct or indirect cause will lead to economic problems that impact the entire planet, such as drought, disease and war.

A recent report from the International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management found that how the world is fed and fueled will in large part define development in the 21st century as one that is increasingly sustainable or a dead end for billions of people.

The focus of the report was the reforming, re-thinking and redesigning of energy and agriculture in a way that would generate “significant environmental, social and economic returns.”

The report found that current patterns of production and consumption of both fossil fuels and food are draining freshwater supplies; triggering losses of economically-important ecosystems such as forests; intensifying disease and death rates and raising levels of pollution to unsustainable levels.

And if there’s any sustainable solution to this problem, the report said it starts “at the level of the household.”

Sustainability goals, according to the report, can begin through “dramatic improvements in household patterns of energy and food use including heating and cooling systems, gadgets and appliances and the way people travel.”

The report also calls for a significant shift in “diets away from animal based proteins towards more vegetable-based foods in order to dramatically reduce pressures on the environment.”

“Decoupling growth from environmental degradation is the number one challenge facing governments in a world of rising numbers of people, rising incomes, rising consumption demands and the persistent challenge of poverty alleviation—thus setting priorities would seem prudent and sensible in order to fast track a low carbon, resource efficient Green Economy,” said Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and executive director of the UN Environment Program (UNEP). UNEP hosted the panel.

What the panel found was that energy and agriculture are currently having a “disproportionately high impact on people and the planet’s life support systems—these are energy in the form of fossil fuels and agriculture, especially the raising of livestock for meat and dairy products.”

“Smart market mechanisms, more intelligent fiscal policies and creative policy-making are among the options for internalizing the costs of unsustainable patterns,” Steiner said. “Some tough choices are signaled in this report, but it may prove even more challenging for everyone if the current paths continue into the coming decades.”

Ernst von Weizsaecker, co-chair of the panel, said the report challenged the widely-held view that rising affluence leads automatically to environmental improvements.

“In the case of CO2, a doubling of wealth leads typically to an increase of environmental pressure by 60 to 80 per cent and in emerging economies this is sometimes even higher,” Weizsaecker said. “In the case of food, rising affluence is triggering a shift in diets towards meat and diary products—livestock now consumes much of the world’s crops and by inference a great deal of freshwater, fertilizers and pesticides linked with that crop production in the first place.”

Ashok Khosla, co-chair of the Panel and President of the World Conservation Union (IUCN), said that incremental efficiency gains in such things as motor cars or home heating systems have provided some improvements but, “faced with the scale of the challenge, far more transformational measures need to be taken—currently we are fiddling—or fiddling around the edges—while Rome burns.”

“Part of that new and decisive action also relates to the way the world is trying to combat climate change—as the report points out, for many of the developed economies 20-30 percent of a nation’s pollution is not taking place on its territory, but happening abroad via imports,” Khosla said. “Given this fact, perhaps the current way of structuring agreements on emission reduction targets are becoming obsolete.”

The panel cited the following pressures on the environment as priorities for action: climate change, habitat change, wasteful use of nitrogen and phosphorus, overexploitation of fisheries, forests and other resources, invasive species, unsafe drinking water and sanitation, solid cooking fuels, lead exposure, urban air pollution and occupational (including kitchen) exposure to particulate matter.

The panel concluded that the priorities for achieving transformational change are:

— Agricultural goods, particularly products from animals, which are fed more than half of all world crops. Agricultural production accounts for 70 percent of the global freshwater consumption and 38 percent of the total land use. Food production accounts for 19 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and 60 percent of the phosphorus and nitrogen pollution and 30 percent of toxic pollution in Europe.

— Users of fossil fuels, especially electrical utilities and other energy-intensive industries, residential heating, and transportation. Fossil-fuel production and consumption dominate as the world’s leading cause of environmental degradation. Extraction from alternative fossil fuel sources, such as tar sands, poses potentially even heavier environmental consequences.

— Materials, especially plastics, iron, steel, and aluminium, use of which is growing, not least in the unsaturated emerging economies; and the energy requirements for which are rising because of declining grades of ore as they get used up.

The panel said that some efficiency gains are possible in terms of reducing the impacts of agriculture. But adds that a 50 percent growth in population by 2050 will overwhelm or offset these gains.

The report also focuses on the link between households and greenhouse gas emissions as one area to be addressed as in developing and emerging economies, food and housing dominate as causes of household greenhouse gas emissions.

“Sustainable development starts by putting emphasis on those efforts that do the most good in reducing humanity’s harm of ecosystems,” said Angela Cropper, UNEP Deputy Executive Director In that regard, this report is of high relevance for policy-makers and businesses. And for individuals, it reinforces familiar advice: action is needed beyond recycling to installing energy efficient heating and cooling in the house, shifting to a more sustainable diet, and use public transport where available.”

A new study from the University of California-Berkeley, has found that vegetation around the world is on the move as the result of climate change.

Researchers have found that over the past century, vegetation has been gradually moving toward the poles and up mountain slopes, where temperatures are cooler, as well as toward the equator, where rainfall is greater.

Moreover, the study found that an estimated one-tenth to one-half of the land mass on Earth will be highly vulnerable to climate-related vegetation shifts by the end of this century, depending upon how effectively humans are able to curb greenhouse gas emissions, according to the study.

“This is the first global view of observed biome shifts due to climate change,” said the study’s lead author Patrick Gonzalez, a visiting scholar at the Center for Forestry at UC Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources. “It’s not just a case of one or two plant species moving to another area. To change the biome of an ecosystem, a whole suite of plants must change.”

According to the University of California-Berkeley, researchers calculated that from 1901 to 2002, mean temperatures significantly increased on 76 percent of global land, with the greatest warming in boreal, or subarctic, regions. The most substantial biome shifts occurred where temperature or precipitation changed by one-half to two standard deviations from 20th century mean values, the report said.

“Approximately one billion people now live in areas that are highly to very highly vulnerable to future vegetation shifts,” said Gonzalez. “Ecosystems provide important services to people, so we must reduce the emissions that cause climate change, then adapt to major changes that might occur.”