This sprawling city east of San Francisco is home to Chevron’s oil refinery, which has made it a battleground between the company’s business interests and environmental activists who are calling for checks on air quality and safety. Now, as part of the company’s latest effort to rehabilitate its image in the city, Chevron is launching its own community news site. Chevron spokesperson Melissa Ritchie said that Chevron wanted to start the site because, “We want to make sure there’s a way to have a conversation with Richmond.”

An environmental organization with a $350 million war chest, a giant protest vessel, 28 activists and a rubber raft have succeeded in drawing Russian President Vladimir V. Putin into a very public global dispute. Attention is now focused on the Greenpeace activists who were arrested last month by Coast Guard agents for trying to hang a protest banner on an Arctic Ocean oil platform and whether they will languish in prison for up to 15 years each on dubious piracy charges.

Leading environmental groups declared on Monday that the Obama administration's latest environmental review of the Keystone XL pipeline fundamentally violated the nation's core environmental law, an unmistakable warning that they would sue the State Department if it continued to insist that the pipeline poses no significant environmental risk. As if to bolster their case, the Environmental Protection Agency weighed in as well with its own rebuke. 

It is important to note that absolute scarcity doesn’t have to be on the horizon in any given resource category for this scenario to kick in. A lack of adequate supplies to meet the needs of a growing, ever more urbanized and industrialized global population is enough. Given the wave of extinctions that scientists are recording, some resources -- particular species of fish, animals, and trees, for example -- will become less abundant in the decades to come, and may even disappear altogether.