Editor's Note: The following post comes from ThinkProgress, a division of the liberal think tank the Center for American Progress Action Fund, based in Washington, DC.  Joe Romm is a Fellow at American Progress and is the editor of Climate Progress. This post is reprinted with permission. 

By Joe Romm, ThinkProgress

The public understands Obama isn’t to blame for high gasoline prices, as recent polls make clear. Even the Wall Street Journal and Cato Institute agree: “It’s not Obama’s fault that crude oil prices have increased.”

But as the New York Times pointed out Sunday [jn an op-ed], facts don’t stop the GOP:

The issue of gas prices has not only been misunderstood but thoroughly distorted by relentless ideological spin from industry and its political allies, mainly Republican. Hardly a day goes by that some industry cheerleader somewhere — be it Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana or Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma — does not flay President Obama for driving up oil prices by denying the industry access to oil and gas deposits and imposing ruinous environmental rules. Senator John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican, said last week that Mr. Obama should be held “fully responsible for what the American public is paying for gasoline.”

The Times put together some great charts using EIA data. They make clear 1) oil prices are set on a global market and 2) the strategy of “Drill, Baby, Drill” adopted by the GOP and President Obama has succeeded at increasing production and decreasing dependency on foreign oil — but it has unsurprisingly failed at affecting global markets. FULL POST

Editor's Note: Peter Singer is professor of bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne. His books include Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics, The Ethics of What We Eat, and The Life You Can Save. For more from Singer, visit Project Syndicate's website, or check it out on Facebook and Twitter.

By Peter Singer

Forty years ago, I stood with a few other students in a busy Oxford street handing out leaflets protesting the use of battery cages to hold hens. Most of those who took the leaflets did not know that their eggs came from hens kept in cages so small that even one bird – the cages normally housed four – would be unable to fully stretch and flap her wings. The hens could never walk around freely, or lay eggs in a nest.

Many people applauded our youthful idealism, but told us that we had no hope of ever changing a major industry. They were wrong. FULL POST

Editor's Note: Heather Moore is a staff writer for the PETA Foundation.  People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) works to promote animal rights and mitigate cruelty against animals.

By Heather Moore – Special to CNN

There are currently about 7 billion people on this planet, and experts predict that there will be at least 9 billion by 2050. Global meat consumption is projected to double by then too. The Earth simply cannot sustain so many meat-eaters.

A recent report by the Worldwatch Institute's Nourishing the Planet project shows that global meat production increased by 2.6 percent in 2010. Worldwide meat production has tripled over the last four decades and increased 20 percent in the past 10 years. Much of the meat is produced in industrialized countries. The average American eats twice as much meat as the average person worldwide. According to Worldwatch President Robert Engelman, the "world's supersized appetite for meat" is one of the main reasons why greenhouse-gas emissions are still increasing rapidly. FULL POST

Editor's Note: Stewart Patrick is a Senior Fellow and the Director of the Program on International Institutions and Global Governance at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of Weak Links: Fragile States, Global Threats, and International Security.

By Stewart Patrick

Appropriately enough, Halloween this year brings some scary news. On that date, the global population will surpass seven billion, according to the UN Population Fund. That’s quite a strain on an already crowded planet where one billion go to bed each night hungry or malnourished. And there’s no sign of a let-up. The planet should hit eight billion inhabitants by 2025 - and could hit ten billion by 2083.

The dilemma for humanity - and earth itself - is stark. In recent years, the world has been rocked by recurrent volatility in the supply and prices of staple foods. And yet economists say that global agricultural production must double in the next forty years to keep up with population growth and changing dietary preferences (including growing consumption of meat in developing countries).

However, doubling agricultural production will subject the planet to tremendous ecological damage, unless agricultural methods are drastically altered. This is the conclusion of a groundbreaking study in the journal Nature, “Solutions for a Cultivated Planet.”

Bottom line? In trying to feed ourselves, we risk killing the planet. FULL POST

Editor’s Note: Tong Wu is an environmental policy analyst and researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. To submit an article for consideration, email the Managing Editor of CNN.com/GPS at Amar[dot]Bakshi[at]turner[dot]com.

By Tong Wu – Special to CNN

In recent months, the nation has been riveted by the spectacle of catastrophic wildfires across the western United States, most recently in Texas.  Last year, we witnessed the same harrowing phenomenon in Russia, where a catastrophic outbreak of forest fires racked up an appalling ecological and social toll.  These conflagrations have not only wrought significant ecological damage and released large amounts of carbon emissions, but also imposed far-ranging economic burdens.  In southern California, for instance, studies indicate that environmental damages caused by wildfires can decrease the property value of a nearby house by tens of thousands of dollars.  Combined with the resulting standstill in business activity, property damage and lost jobs and income, the fallout from these disasters can stretch into the hundreds of millions of dollars and have all the makings of a recession – albeit one caused by poor management of natural, not financial, resources. FULL POST

By Fareed Zakaria, CNN

At the influential TED conference last year, Bill Gates declared that if he were allowed one wish to improve humanity’s lot over the next 50 years, he would choose an “energy miracle”: a new technology that produced energy at half the price of coal with no carbon dioxide emissions. He explained that he’d rather have this wish than a new vaccine or medicine or even choose the next several American presidents. To help understand the reasoning behind Gates’s thinking, one should read Daniel Yergin’s intelligent new opus, “The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World.”

Yergin, the founder of a leading energy consulting firm, is the author of several acclaimed books, most notably "The Prize," a monumental history of oil from its discovery to 1990. “The Quest” starts where “The Prize” left off, and at 804 pages it is similar in heft, but in fact a very different kind of book. “The Prize” was grand narrative history, full of characters like John D. Rockefeller and Winston Churchill and driven along by momentous events like World Wars I and II, both of which played a role in making oil the world’s pivotal energy resource. FULL POST

By Ben Barnier, GlobalPost

Climate change may be one of the greatest perils of our time, contributing to droughts, floods, deadly heat waves and super-charged hurricanes.

But for the moment, France’s Champagne makers are raising their glasses to it.

They say the climatic shift has made their lives easier and their Champagne better, allowing producers to harvest earlier than before.

FULL POST

Editor's Note: The following text is from GlobalPost, which provides excellent coverage of world news – important, moving and just odd.

King crabs — three-feet-wide red monsters that devour everything in their path — have invaded Antarctica. While it sounds a little like a horror movie, it's actually a large scale global warming problem. According to the New Scientist, three years ago, scientists had predicted that this would happen, but they believed the earth would have warmed to this degree in the next 100 years.

The earth has warmed a little earlier than they predicted. According to Craig Smith, a professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaii, whose team discovered the relocation, millions of these crabs have begun to crawl around by Antarctica. The crabs were known to inhabit the Ross Sea, south of New Zealand, but now they can be found south of South America. Worse, they're wiping out local wildlife, and causing large scale destruction where they go, reports the New Scientist.  FULL POST

Editor's Note: S. Julio Friedmann is leader of the Carbon Management Program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

By S. Julio Friedmann, Foreign Affairs

In June 2011, American Electric Power halted their flagship integrated clean coal and power project at the Mountaineer plant in West Virginia. The venture, jointly funded by AEP and the U.S. Department of Energy, was meant to be an international showcase for a promising environmental technology, carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), which steeply reduces the greenhouse gas emissions from large industrial facilities.

In the wake of the project's end, the future role of CCS remains an open question.Since 2004, when Tad Homer-Dixon and I wrote "Out of the Energy Box" (Foreign Affairs, November/December 2004), the energy sector has changed dramatically. Key events along the way included Hurricane Katrina, the global financial crisis, the Arab Spring, and the tragedies of the disasters at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Our assessment of CCS is basically the same now as it was in 2004: Yes, CCS remains a critical technology. But more needs to be done to develop and implement it, especially in the policy world. FULL POST

Editor's Note: Luke Hunt is a South-east Asia correspondent for The Diplomat, a stellar international current-affairs magazine for the Asia-Pacific region.

By Luke Hunt, The Diplomat

The politics of sand is a dirty business, and there’s plenty of it around – particularly in the tiny island-state of Singapore. Its voracious appetite for constructing mega-buildings and expanding its borders by filling in the sea has led to widespread ecological damage around the region.

Indonesia has complained bitterly about its disappearing islands and banned the export of sand. So has Vietnam. Malaysia uses dealings over sand as a political bargaining chip when negotiating with Singapore, and countries further afield are also thinking twice about selling it sand. FULL POST