U.S. President Barack Obama announced Saturday that “restoring robust economic growth is no longer Job One” at the White House. “All the rhetoric around job creation, economic growth, and the American Dream are just political necessities for anyone wanting to be elected or reelected,” the President admitted. ” I no longer need to worry about reelection, so from this day forward I vow to tell the American people the truth.”

What is the truth? In his weekly address on Saturday, President Obama explained it is time for the people to recognize that “economic growth has become uneconomic. We have filled up the planet with over 7 billion people who all want to drive Range Rovers and live in McMansions. We have arrived at the point where the costs of growth exceed the benefits.” The good news, he explained, is people can live very good lives without ever-increasing GDP and the vicious cycle of work and consumption that necessitates. . . .

I’ve been missing-in-action lately from the global GrowthBusting scene. Duty called for growthbusting of an unusual variety in my own community. I believe the best citizens think globally and act locally, so I had to step up and offer my help when my hometown of Colorado Springs came under frack attack.

Yes, I’ve been frackbusting lately, and that’s a little out of character for me, because I usually focus my energy on the root cause of threats like hydraulic fracturing – growth addiction. There are plenty of people working hard on the symptoms (fracking, drilling in the Arctic, climate change, habitat destruction, species extinction, fisheries decline, plastic oceanic garbage patch, hunger, poverty, etc.), and too few addressing the growth obsession and mythology driving us to create all these problems. . . .

Happy Valentine’s Day! Today we celebrate love. With all the loving going on today, we at GrowthBusters want to introduce a new app we think should get heavy use in bedrooms around the world tonight.

One of the best ways you can express your love is to take charge of your reproduction: take measures to ensure you don’t conceive children by accident, and take responsibility for how many children you intentionally conceive with the one you love.

According to top scientists, our world cannot sustain today’s 7 billion people over the long haul. If you love children, you want them to have a shot at living a good life. So limiting your conception to one or two is the most loving, compassionate thing you can do. If you want a larger family, there are many children available for adoption. . . .

Maybe you haven’t heard about it. After all, it’s a taboo. We tiptoe around the subject of population growth as though it could give you a bad case of leprosy. Even when the topic is addressed, the word “overpopulation” is frequently avoided. Presidents, journalists, and humanitarian and environmental organizations head for the hills when the conversation turns to the role of population growth in hunger, poverty, climate change, species extinction, fresh water availability, desertification, deforestation or fisheries depletion.

I’ve written about this before. My GrowthBusters film put a spotlight on it. I’ve posted YouTube videos about it (see list below), and others have written on the subject. But it’s not everyday we get such an overt, classic, textbook example as the one delivered on a silver platter last month by the U.S. State Department. It was chronicled nicely in The Australian. . . .

The new movie, FrackNation, is a propaganda piece that shucks and jives around the truth in effort to assure us we can safely, and should, frack, baby, frack.

This film had its broadcast debut last night on AXS TV. FrackNation is less about the science behind hydraulic fracturing to free up oil and gas from shale rock formations, and more about warped definition of progress and our faith in technological miracles.

Fracking, as it is commonly called, involves directional drilling, fracturing the rock formation, and injecting a mixture of chemicals (some toxic, some carcinogenic), sand and water into the well under high pressure. This method of energy exploration and production came into widespread use in the U.S. only after the industry was exempted from some provisions of the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, and Superfund (CERCLA) Act in a piece of 2005 legislation. This is known as the Halliburton loophole, because Halliburton is a huge oilfield services provider making a gazillion dollars fracking wells for the industry. This change in the law was reportedly shepherded by former Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney while he was Vice President of the United States. . . .