Empires have been built from it. Wars have been fought for it. Imagine a world without oil. What alternatives do we have in a future with limited oil and other fossil fuels?

Look around. Plastic is everywhere. But some experts say today's plastic will be in our landfills for thousands of years to come. Imagine a world without plastic. In some communities, it's a new reality. Explore the good and the bad of plastic in our lives.

It seems they're everywhere. But scientists believe bees' survival is at risk. What has put bees at risk, and should we care? Imagine a world without these important pollinators and you'll see a world with fewer and fewer critical food sources.

It may be a parent's dream, but imagine life without the Internet or World Wide Web. Would airlines be able to fly? Would our nation's security be at risk? What can be done to safeguard the Internet?

Learn how oil fuels both politics and history! You’re no idiot, of course. Just thinking about life without oil to heat your home gives you the chills. But when it comes to understanding the politics involved in getting it, you feel like your brain is running empty. The Complete Idiot’s Guide® to the Politics of Oil helps you understand why we go to war over oil. In this Complete Idiot’s Guide®, you get: • Compelling insights into how the discovery of oil in the Arabian Peninsula 50 years ago changed the global political landscape. • The relationship between so-called “Big Oil” and US energy, environmental, and national security policy—as well as prices at the pump. • Easy-to-understand explanations of what can be done to prevent oil spills and blowouts, how such accidents are cleaned up, and who pays for them.

Food and the World looks at the distribution of food in the world. It examines fair trade as well as the different ways food is grown, including organic farming and genetic modification.

In 2020, the global lockdowns caused by the COVID-19, or coronavirus, pandemic had resulted in a sharp drop in demand for crude oil. This impact was so severe that on April 8, 2020, a proposal to update the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Holdings Inc. (CME) trading rule to permit negative prices was applied to CME's WTI Oil futures contracts; this led to a novel phenomenon in which the closing clearing price of WTI Oil May future was $-37.63/barrel based on fewer than 400 contracts' trading volume in the last three minutes, reflecting less than 0.2% of the total trading contracts volume on April 20, 2020. This occurrence of negative closing clearing price for CME's WTI Oil futures trading, cannot be explained simply by just the principle of supply and demand; instead, it highlights vulnerabilities caused by CME's allowance of negative price trading (based on its trading platform), a decision which brings potential and fundamental challenges to the global financial system.This event challenges not just our basic concepts of 'value' and trading 'price' of commodities and goods that underline our understanding of the framework for the invisible hand and general equilibrium theory in economics established by a few generations of scholars since Adam Smith in 1776 for market economies, but also have wider implications on the fundamentals that underpin our ideas of value and labor in the organization, activity, and behavior of civilizations and individual liberties.The scope of this book is limited to covering the impact of the negative oil futures derivatives' trading between April 20 and 21, 2020. This book focuses on exploring the issues, challenges, and possible impacts on global financial markets due to the negative clearing prices of WTI Oil futures contracts and related problems from different perspectives. Topics covered include the responsibilities and liabilities of the CME; critique to the fundamental theory of economics and the modern understanding of value and labor; and challenges to the global financial systems and businesses and introduction to new methods of application.

Has the evolution of digital marketing placed businesses at the mercy of software companies? Or is there a path forward for businesses who want to regain their independence and create great marketing again? Digital marketing has been around for over twenty years, yet businesses today are more baffled, bloodied, and battle-scarred than ever. In Snake Oil, marketing scientist Dan Russell offers an entertaining and enlightening joyride back down the hockey stick of digital marketing’s growth over the past two decades. Russell takes readers through the deserts of the Western frontier, flying over a budding Silicon Valley and visiting Einstein’s study in order to discover the secrets to becoming a marketing scientist. With the knowledge contained in Snake Oil, entrepreneurs and business owners will be able to navigate the murky waters of digital marketing, squeeze more profit from their sales funnels, focus on projects that are verifiably important, and build a highly-scalable marketing operating system inside their business.