A crazy proposal to transfer massive quantities of coal from ship to ship in the middle of the Great Barrier Reef.

Pollution is certain to spread, but hey, if you're going to burn that coal the reef is doomed anyway.

US citizens: call on Obama to drop the Trade in Services Agreement and other treaties that put businesses ahead of people.

Dwindling water supplies are crucial to the military outcome in Iraq and Syria. Control of a dam means use of the water in its lake, use of the electricity it generates, and the chance to use the water to drown people downstream.

A multi-year drought caused the protests against Assad.

Global heating will eventually make it impossible for the current population of Iraq to survive there.

Our actions that cause global heating are a wrong that we must stop. Iraq contributes to these actions by extracting oil for us to burn. Iraqis also contribute to the problem by having more children than the region can support. One way of reducing population growth is to give women more control over their reproduction. ISIS will clearly do the opposite of that, but so do the religious Shi'ite groups.

Perhaps the world will need to adopt the principle that climate refugees must get sterilized as a condition for asylum. Not as a punishment (they are not personally to blame), but as a sustainability measure.

Ecuador drew up a plan in 2010 to build a power plant in Yasuni to support oil drilling there.

It is not certain that the plan to leave Yasuni oil untouched was dishonest. This could have been a contingency plan for what to do if the world failed (as indeed it did) to contribute the money Ecuador requested for leaving that oil untouched.

In any case, Correa deserves credit for trying something that no other world leader has even tried. If other countries had provided the reasonable sum he requested, he would surely have gone ahead with the deal.

A debate about whether Capitalism inevitably produces great inequality or merely tends to do so.

I think that the great inequality is not inevitable, but avoiding it takes firmness that requires true democracy (government policies chosen by the people in general to keep the rich in check). Once the rich replace democracy with plutocracy, it is a sure thing that the policies necessary to prevent tremendous inequality won't be practiced.