Steven D. Ramseur
writes: The camouflage-clad, rifle toting loner of the popular media
isn’t practicing survival, he is practicing for suicide.

Don’t imitate
him, and don’t recruit him.

Survival means teamwork, and the bigger the
team the more comfortable the future.

The answer is specialization.
This is the root foundation for human society. The whole is greater
than the sum of the parts.

Forget the idea that you will survive in
your secure fortress with your solar power, your tons of wheat, and
your thousands of rounds of ammunition.

You will succumb to a superior
force, or to disease, to starvation, or to isolation and depression.
…

Team work is the key to survival, not only individual survival, but
survival of an acceptable standard of living… even survival of a
productive society.

It is simply not possible to cover all of your
future needs from within your family unit. (05/20/08)
more…

James Howard Kunstler writes: Those were the words that Fed chairman Ben Bernanke
used to describe the financial markets (and by extension the economy)
these heady spring days when everybody else with a rostrum, it seems,
has pronounced the so-called liquidity crisis contained. There’s a
great wish for American finance to return to business-as-usual –
raking in fantastic fees for innovating new modes of tradable paper,
and engineering mergers and buy-outs that generate huge fees plus $100
million kiss-offs for corporate CEOs in the noble struggle to dismantle
America’s productive capacity — but apparently events are still out of
hand.

The Federal Reserve itself has been instrumental in
promoting abnormality by doing everything possible to prevent the
work-out of bad debts in the system. Since money is loaned into
existence, and loans are debts, the work-out of bad debt suggests the
discovery that a lot of money has disappeared — which is exactly the
case. The Fed has postponed the work-out by sucking up truckloads of
impaired, untradable securities in exchange for loans to giant banks
who don’t have enough cash on hand to pay their janitors.

Personally, my theory has been that the specter of peak oil pretty
clearly implies the inability of industrial economies to continue
producing real wealth in the customary way. In the face of this, either
consciously or at a more mystical level, the worker bees in banking
recognize that, in order to maintain their villas in the Hamptons,
money has to be loaned into existence some other way (than in the
service of industrial productivity). 

We’ve tried just about everything else. There was the so-called
service economy, an attempt to replace manufacturing with hamburger
sales. Then there was the information economy, in which work would be
replaced with knowing about stuff. Then there was the tech thing, which
was about bringing internet companies that existed only on the back of
cocktail napkins to the initial public offering stage of capitalization
– which allowed a few-hundred-or-so thirty-year-old smoothies to
retire to vineyards in the Napa Valley, while hundreds of thousands of
retirees lost half the value of their investment portfolios. Then there
was the housing boom, which was all about the creation of more suburban
sprawl under the theory that houses (or “homes” in the jargon of the
realtors) represent an obvious sort of wealth, and therefore that using
houses as collateral would allow humongous sums of money to be loaned
into existence — along with massive fees for structuring the loans
into bundles of bond-like thingies. (05/20/08)
more…

Richard Heinberg
writes: The airline industry has no future. The same is true for
airfreight. No air carrier has a viable plan to make a profit with oil
at current prices—much less in years to come as the petroleum available
to world markets dwindles rapidly.

That’s not to say that jetliners will disappear overnight, but rather
that the cheap flights we’ve seen in the past will soon be fading
memories. In a few years jet service will be available only to the
wealthy, or to the government and military.

Sir Richard Branson of Virgin Atlantic says he wants to use biofuels to
power his fleet of 747’s and Airbuses. There are still some bugs to be
worked out in terms of basic chemistry, but it might be possible in
principle—if only we could make enough biodiesel or ethanol without
further driving up food prices and wrecking the soil. Even then it
would be very costly fuel. …

There are good reasons to cut down on air travel voluntarily: flying
not only swells our personal carbon emissions but spews CO2 and other
pollutants into the stratosphere, where they do the most damage.
However, the worsening scarcity of the stuff we use for making jet fuel
takes the discussion out of the realm of optional moral action and into
that of economic necessity and personal adaptation. …

Those who live far from family will be more than inconvenienced, as
will the hundreds of thousands who work for the airline industry
directly or indirectly, or the millions who depend on tourism or
airfreight for an income. These folks will have few options:
teleconferencing can accomplish only so much.

Our species’ historically brief fling with flight has been fun,
educational, and enriching on many levels to those fortunate enough to
benefit from it. Saying goodbye will be difficult. But maybe as we do
we can say hello to greater involvement in our local communities. (05/20/08)
more…

BBC Biological Science — Climate change is “significantly amplifying” the threats facing the
world’s bird populations, a global assessment has concluded.

The 2008 IUCN Bird Red List warns that long-term droughts and extreme weather puts additional stress on key habitats.

The assessment lists 1,226 species as threatened with extinction - one-in-eight of all bird species.

The list, reviewed every four years, is compiled by conservation charity BirdLife International.

“It is very hard to precisely attribute particular changes in
specific
species to climate change,” said Stuart Butchart, BirdLife’s global
research and indicators co-ordinator. But there is now a whole suite of
species that are clearly becoming threatened by extreme weather events
and droughts.”

In the revised Red List, eight species have been added to the “critically endangered” category.

One of these was the Floreana mockingbird (Nesomimus trifasciatus),
which is confined to two islets in the Galapagos Islands. From an
estimated maximum of 150 in the mid-1960s, the population has fallen to
fewer than 60.

Conservationists listed the mockingbird as Critically Endangered
because it experienced a high rate of adult mortality during dry years
that have been linked to La Nina events. Dry years have become more
frequent in recent years, and have been blamed as the main driver of
the current decline. (05/20/08)
more…

BBC Biological Science — Nations should avoid planting biofuel crops that have a high risk of becoming invasive species, a report warns.

A study by the Global Invasive Species Programme (GISP) said only a few
countries have systems in place to assess the risk or contain an
outbreak.

It has listed all the crops used to produce biofuels, and urged governments to only select low-risk varieties.

The global cost of tackling invasive species costs $1.4 trillion (£700bn) each year, the report estimates.

“Many countries are currently looking at growing high-yielding crops
for the production of biofuels to address imminent energy shortages and
reduce the impact of climate change,” the report’s authors wrote.

“This usually involves the importation of foreign (alien) species of plants that are known for their fast and productive growth.

“If these initiatives are not carefully assessed, however, the
cultivation of some popular species will increase two of the major
causes of biodiversity loss: clearing and conversion of yet more
natural areas for monocultures, and invasion by non-native species.”

GISP, a partnership of four conservation organisations, including IUCN
and the Nature Conservancy, fear the biofuels boom could expose gaps in
nations’ bio-security measures.

“Prevention is better than cure,” said Geoffrey Howard, IUCN’s global invasive species co-ordinator.

“We need to stop invasions before they occur. The biofuels industry is
a relatively new concept so we have a unique opportunity to act early
and get ahead of the game.” (05/20/08)
more…

Jerusalem Post — Army Radio had quoted a top official in Jerusalem claiming that a
senior member in the entourage of President Bush, who concluded a trip
to Israel last week, had said in a closed meeting here that Bush and
Vice President Dick Cheney were of the opinion that military action
against Iran was called for.

The official reportedly went on to say that “the hesitancy of
Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice”was preventing the administration from deciding to launch such an
attack on the Islamic Republic for the time being.

The Army Radio report, which was quoted by The Jerusalem Post
and resonated widely, stated that according to assessments in Israel,
the recent turmoil in Lebanon, where Hizbullah has de facto established
control of the country, was advancing an American attack.

Bush, the official reportedly said, considered Hizbullah’s show
of strength to constitute evidence of Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad’s growing influence. In Bush’s view, the official said,
“the disease must be treated - not its symptoms.” …

In an address to the Knesset during his visit here last week, Bush
said that “the president of Iran dreams of returning the Middle East to
the Middle Ages.”

“America stands with you in firmly opposing Iran’s nuclear
weapons ambitions,” Bush said. “Permitting the world’s leading sponsor
of terror to possess the world’s deadliest weapon would be an
unforgivable betrayal of future generations. For the sake of peace, the
world must not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” (05/20/08)
more…