Timothy Wilken
writes: When America was founded in 1776, the North American continent
provided relatively unlimited resources.  The early colonists were in
the right place at the right time. The right place was the nearly empty
continent of North America. Millions of acres of arable land and
forests, filled with abundant water in millions of steams, rivers, and
lakes and stocked with uncountable numbers of wildlife.

 This was
further enriched with enormous reserves of iron, coal, copper,
aluminum, zinc, lead, gold, silver, oil, and much more — all available
for the taking. …

However, today things have changed. The world is getting full. In 1776, there were less than a
billion humans on the planet, today there are nearly 7 billion. We humans no longer
have a limitless abundance of natural resources available for the
taking — not even those of us living on the North American continent. Our world of plenty is being reduced to a world of scarcity.

In
fact, petroleum production peaked in America in 1971. The world peak of petroleum production is
estimated to have occurred sometime in 2005 to 2007. …

In the 18th
century, Capitalism was a major advance for humankind. The capitalist
system gave individuals opportunities for great economic success. The
birth of free market economics greatly enriched the human condition.
Capitalism is a form of Neutral organization which is much more powerful than adversary organization.
Neutrality did work well in the free world for many of the humans who
inhabited in the past two hundred years. But capitalism requires unlimited resources. When resources get scarce, growth stops. Capitalism stops working. (07/06/08)
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Frank Rich writes: SO much for a July Fourth week spent in idyllic celebration of our country’s birthday. This year’s festivities were marked instead by a debate — childish, not constitutional — over who is and isn’t patriotic. The fireworks were sparked by a verbally maladroit retired general, fueled by two increasingly fatuous presidential campaigns, and heated to a boil by a 24/7 news culture that inflates any passing tit for tat into a war of the worlds.

Let oil soar above $140 a barrel. Let layoffs and foreclosures proliferate like California’s fires. Let someone else worry about the stock market’s steepest June drop since the Great Depression. In our political culture, only one question mattered: What was Wesley Clark saying about John McCain and how loudly would every politician and bloviator in the land react?

Unable to take another minute of this din, I did what any sensible person might do and fled to the movies. More specifically, to an animated movie in the middle of a weekday afternoon. What escape could be more complete?

Among its other attributes, this particular G-rated film, “Wall-E,” is a rare economic bright spot. Its enormous box-office gross last weekend swelled a total Hollywood take that was up 20 percent from a year ago. (You know America’s economy is cooked when everyone flocks to the movies.) The “Wall-E” crowds were primed by the track record of its creator, Pixar Animation Studios, and the ecstatic reviews. But if anything, this movie may exceed its audience’s expectations. It did mine.

As it happened, “Wall-E” opened the same summer weekend as the hot-button movie of the 2004 campaign year, Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Ah, the good old days. Oil was $38 a barrel, our fatalities in Iraq had not hit 900, and only 57 percent of Americans thought their country was on the wrong track. (Now more than 80 percent do.) “Wall-E,” a fictional film playing to a far larger audience, may touch a more universal chord in this far gloomier time.

Indeed, sitting among rapt children mostly under 12, I felt as if I’d stepped through a looking glass. This movie seemed more realistically in touch with what troubles America this year than either the substance or the players of the political food fight beyond the multiplex’s walls.

While the real-life grown-ups on TV were again rebooting Vietnam, the kids at “Wall-E” were in deep contemplation of a world in peril — and of the future that is theirs to make what they will of it. Compare any 10 minutes of the movie with 10 minutes of any cable-news channel, and you’ll soon be asking: Exactly who are the adults in our country and who are the cartoon characters? (07/06/08)
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Megan Quinn Bachman writes: Five
years ago, when I first started giving Peak Oil presentations, my
message could more easily be ignored. The disconnect between the
picture I presented of dangerous and destructive fossil dependence and
people’s daily lives could be maintained. Perhaps the crisis seemed too
far off in distance and time to matter in the here and now.

Today,
that illusion has disappeared. The Chinese curse, “may you live in
interesting times,” is an understatement. Oil and food prices are
skyrocketing as the age of cheap, abundant fossil fuels comes to an
end. A global financial system based upon infinite growth on a finite
planet is teetering, and news of water and soil depletion,
deforestation, species extinction and catastrophic climate changes gets
worse every day. Our fossil fuel dependence is “coming home to roost.”

As
the global situation deteriorates, it becomes clear that it is no
longer just about being sustainable; it is about being survivable. The
question is: Can we survive the severe and multifaceted threats facing
us, from geological to geopolitical? But just surviving is not enough –
it’s also about having a planet worth living on.

As we speak
today, a myriad of solutions are being proposed, developed, and
implemented to survive Peak Oil and climate change — from tar sands,
coal-to-liquids, hydrogen, and electric vehicles to genetic engineering
and climate modification. But what kind of world would we create with
these so-called solutions?

Are we implementing solutions that
maintain an extractive, industrial society which would continue to
exploit the earth’s natural resources and plunder the developing world?
Instead, we should ask what kinds of solutions not only address Peak
Oil and climate change, but create a society that is more equitable and
ecological regenerative, not destructive? Those are the solutions I’m
interested in. (07/06/08)
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BBC Human Behavior – There is a kind of theft that happens every day in a majority of the world’s poor countries - and in many of the richer ones too.

It usually happens out of sight, and most perpetrators get away with it.

The monetary value of this theft is about $15bn per year; the ecological cost can only be guessed at.

Yet many people would turn their noses up if they chanced upon a trove of this treasure.

Because these jewels are fish.

“Those that are fishing illegally, they are paying nothing, so we are losing something from our country”, says Mamadou Diallo, programme manager for the environmental group WWF’s West Africa office, and a former fisheries officer.

The amount that Africa is losing, if new figures from David Agnew of Imperial College London are right, is about $1bn per year - the cost of licences that illegal fishers should have paid to catch what they are catching.

The ecological cost may, in the long run, be much higher.

“The immediate ecological impact is damage to habitat, because they are using trawls, and trawls are not always good for the ecosystems - they damage habitat for fish,” says Dr Diallo. “The second thing is pollution, because they are discharging at sea, and they can do anything they want.”

Precisely how much fish is removed illegally from West African waters is not known - apart from anything else, there is little good data on the state of stocks before the plunder began.

Elsewhere, where ecosystems and commercial fish numbers have been studied for longer, it is clear that illegal fishing can help wreak major damage. In the Mediterranean Sea, where scientists estimate that illegal catches of bluefin tuna in recent years have almost matched legal catches in weight. (07/06/08)
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