"Antibiotic resistance will mean the end of just about everything as we know it"

From Salon.com

In the United States, 2 million people are infected with drug-resistant “superbugs” every year, and at least 23,000 die as a result. Such numbers, journalist Maryn McKenna suggests, will seem trivial if we reach the point when all antibiotics are no longer effective — something that’s on track to become a reality.

Considering the full implications of a post-antibiotic era, McKenna concludes that it wouldn’t be so different from the apocalypse. And to know what we’re facing, we need only look at where we’ve come from:

Before antibiotics, five women died out of every 1,000 who gave birth. One out of nine people who got a skin infection died, even from something as simple as a scrape or an insect bite. Three out of ten people who contracted pneumonia died from it. Ear infections caused deafness; sore throats were followed by heart failure. In a post-antibiotic era, would you mess around with power tools? Let your kid climb a tree? Have another child?

To start with, McKenna writes, the loss of antibiotics will mean the end of modern medicine as we know it, impeding everything from surgery to chemotherapy to the far more prosaic:

At UCLA, [Dr. Brad] Spellberg treated a woman with what appeared to be an everyday urinary-tract infection — except that it was not quelled by the first round of antibiotics, or the second. By the time he saw her, she was in septic shock, and the infection had destroyed the bones in her spine. A last-ditch course of the only remaining antibiotic saved her life, but she lost the use of her legs. “This is what we’re in danger of,” he says. “People who are living normal lives who develop almost untreatable infections.”  ....

_______________________________________________

Note: As terrible as it is to have people dying from simple infections, our current medical advantages are not sustainable. Antibiotics are partly responsible for our over-population problem. Various diseases are part of the normal processes that keep people in check. Of course, very few would choose to do without those advantages, if given a choice. Nature taking it's course, is not such a bad thing, however, for life on the planet as a whole.

"How Fox Slants The Energy Debate"

From MediaMatters.org

I was scanning the radio on a recent commute and heard a Christian Fundamentalist 'Economist" slamming renewable energy.

I suppose conservatives have never been on board with this - but these days when Global Warming is so obvious and when these solutions seem so reasonable, it's hard for me to believe people are continuing to be so dense. 

Many conservatives seem to be getting on board as far as being anti-coal, pro-nuclear. Being afraid of emission taxes, cap & trade, or other consequences. Forbes.com pays James Conca to write pro-nuke pieces such as, "How Deadly Is Your Kilowatt? We Rank The Killer Energy Sources". 

The right wing doesn't want to acknowledge problems with nuclear waste or meltdowns. Fukushima either did not exist to them or there were no problems. Denial, denial, denial.

"Rare wildfires threaten Canadian polar bear habitat"

Chicago Tribune/Reuters

Wildfires sparked by lightning near Canada's Hudson Bay are threatening the habitat of polar bears, encroaching on the old tree roots and frozen soil where females make their dens, a conservation expert on the big, white bears said on Thursday.

Polar bears are more typically threatened by the melting of sea ice, which they use as platforms for hunting seals, their main prey. But those who live near Hudson Bay spend their summers resting up on shore when the bay thaws, living in dens dug in the frozen soil among the roots of stunted spruce trees.

Fires in this area are rare, said Steven Amstrup, a former polar bear specialist with the U.S. Geological Survey and now chief scientist at the nonprofit conservation organization, Polar Bears International.

"It's a cool, wet environment that doesn't burn very often," Amstrup said by telephone from Washington state. "It's not an environment where the forest is adapted to fires very much."

Unusually hot, dry weather in Manitoba, Canada, and lightning strikes caused several fires through Wapusk National Park across known polar bear dens in July, said Manitoba Conservation Officer Daryll Hedman.

Female polar bears in the western Hudson Bay population use dens under the root crowns of small, slow-growing spruce trees that grow in permafrost soils along the banks of rivers and lakes. Some dens have been used for over 100 years.

"Not only is the permafrost no longer permanent, tree roots needed to stabilize the den structure are disappearing," Amstrup said. "The kinds of habitats where mother polar bears in this area give birth to their cubs are simply disappearing as the world warms."

Historically, the soil in most areas around Hudson Bay is frozen solid below a surface layer about one foot thick that thaws and re-freezes seasonally, Amstrup said.

In recent years, that top layer of soil has gotten increasingly thicker, so the thawing goes deep enough to defrost the soil around the tree roots, making the openings that the bears dig collapse, Amstrup said.

When the trees burn, as some may this summer, their roots die out and further damage the polar bear dens, he said.

Unlike other polar bear populations, where pregnant females use dens dug in snow, Hudson Bay females come ashore to these tree-root dens to rest and give birth, remaining in the dens until the following spring.

"They're essentially food-deprived in the summertime. They come ashore and basically just rest and try to save energy. They crawl into these dens, it's cool in there, they're not harassed by insects and they basically just rest until the snow comes and until they give birth," Amstrup said.

Without these earthen dens, he said, females would not be able to conserve their energy as well. And if snow does not come early enough, cubs could be born out in the open, where they would be exceedingly vulnerable.

"Cubs are born at about a pound and a half (680 grams), blind, nearly hairless, essentially immobile and totally helpless," he said in a follow-up email. "Their survival depends upon the shelter of the den to protect them from the elements."

Polar bears have government protection in Canada and the United States. The U.S. polar bear population in Alaska is listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act because of increasing damage to their icy habitat by climate change.

"Weather Extremes Leave Parts of U.S. Grid Buckling"

From the New York Times:

By MATTHEW L. WALD and JOHN SCHWARTZ

WASHINGTON — From highways in Texas to nuclear power plants in Illinois, the concrete, steel and sophisticated engineering that undergird the nation’s infrastructure are being taxed to worrisome degrees by heat, drought and vicious storms.

On a single day this month here, a US Airways regional jet became stuck in asphalt that had softened in 100-degree temperatures, and a subway train derailed after the heat stretched the track so far that it kinked — inserting a sharp angle into a stretch that was supposed to be straight. In East Texas, heat and drought have had a startling effect on the clay-rich soils under highways, which “just shrink like crazy,” leading to “horrendous cracking,” said Tom Scullion, senior research engineer with the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University. In Northeastern and Midwestern states, he said, unusually high heat is causing highway sections to expand beyond their design limits, press against each other and “pop up,” creating jarring and even hazardous speed bumps.

Excessive warmth and dryness are threatening other parts of the grid as well. In the Chicago area, a twin-unit nuclear plant had to get special permission to keep operating this month because the pond it uses for cooling water rose to 102 degrees; its license to operate allows it to go only to 100. According to the Midwest Independent System Operator, the grid operator for the region, a different power plant had had to shut because the body of water from which it draws its cooling water had dropped so low that the intake pipe became high and dry; another had to cut back generation because cooling water was too warm.

The frequency of extreme weather is up over the past few years, and people who deal with infrastructure expect that to continue. Leading climate models suggest that weather-sensitive parts of the infrastructure will be seeing many more extreme episodes, along with shifts in weather patterns and rising maximum (and minimum) temperatures.

“We’ve got the ‘storm of the century’ every year now,” said Bill Gausman, a senior vice president and a 38-year veteran at the Potomac Electric Power Company, which took eight days to recover from the June 29 “derecho” storm that raced from the Midwest to the Eastern Seaboard and knocked out power for 4.3 million people in 10 states and the District of Columbia.

In general, nobody in charge of anything made of steel and concrete can plan based on past trends, said Vicki Arroyo, who heads the Georgetown Climate Center at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, a clearinghouse on climate-change adaptation strategies.

Highways, Mr. Scullion noted, are designed for the local climate, taking into account things like temperature and rainfall. “When you get outside of those things, man, all bets are off.” As weather patterns shift, he said, “we could have some very dramatic failures of highway systems.”

Adaptation efforts are taking place nationwide. Some are as huge as the multibillion-dollar effort to increase the height of levees and flood walls in New Orleans because of projections of rising sea levels and stronger storms to come; others as mundane as resizing drainage culverts in Vermont, where Hurricane Irene damaged about 2,000 culverts. “They just got blown out,” said Sue Minter, the Irene recovery officer for the state.

In Washington, the subway system, which opened in 1976, has revised its operating procedures. Authorities will now watch the rail temperature and order trains to slow down if it gets too hot. When railroads install tracks in cold weather, they heat the metal to a “neutral” temperature so it reaches a moderate length, and will withstand the shrinkage and growth typical for that climate. But if the heat historically seen in the South becomes normal farther north, the rails will be too long for that weather, and will have an increased tendency to kink. So railroad officials say they will begin to undertake much more frequent inspection.

Some utilities are re-examining long-held views on the economics of protecting against the weather. Pepco, the utility serving the area around Washington, has repeatedly studied the idea of burying more power lines, and the company and its regulators have always decided that the cost outweighed the benefit. But the company has had five storms in the last two and a half years for which recovery took at least five days, and after the derecho last month, the consensus has changed. Both the District of Columbia and Montgomery County, Md., have held hearings to discuss the option — though in the District alone, the cost would be $1.1 billion to $5.8 billion, depending on how many of the power lines were put underground.

Even without storms, heat waves are changing the pattern of electricity use, raising peak demand higher than ever. That implies the need for new investment in generating stations, transmission lines and local distribution lines that will be used at full capacity for only a few hundred hours a year. “We build the system for the 10 percent of the time we need it,” said Mark Gabriel, a senior vice president of Black & Veatch, an engineering firm. And that 10 percent is “getting more extreme.”...

Ms. Arroyo of Georgetown said the federal government must do more. “They are not acknowledging that the future will look different from the past,” she said, “and so we keep putting people and infrastructure in harm’s way.”

"Driving Straight Into Catastrophe"

From IPSnews:

PARIS, Jan 24, 2011 (IPS) - Despite repeated warnings by environmental and climate experts that reduction of fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions is fundamental to forestalling global warming, disaster appears imminent. According to the latest statistics, unprecedented climate change has Earth hurtling down a path of catastrophic proportions.

The Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that the global consumption of primary energy in 2010 reached some 500 exajoules (EJ), a number just under the worst-case scenario formulated ten years ago by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC’s Special Report on Emissions Scenarios, published in 2000, calculated the worst-case scenario as 525 EJ consumed in one calendar year.

The IEA found that coal was one of the largest sources of energy consumed in 2010, comprising approximately 27 percent of the total energy consumption. Coal, one of the cheapest sources of energy, is considered the filthiest of all, as far as greenhouse gases emissions (GHGE) are concerned.

Correspondingly, the global GHGE, measured as equivalent to carbon dioxide, reached at least 32 billion tonnes last year, only one step below the most pessimistic scenario imagined by the IPCC in 2000: 33 billion tonnes of CO2.

The results for 2010 were conditioned by the present global economic crisis – meaning that under normal economic circumstances, the numbers would have been higher. In other words, total consumption of energy in 2010 would have been worse than the most pessimistic scenario the IPCC formulated ten years ago had the global economy been in better shape.

These findings have prompted leading environmental experts to warn that humankind is racing towards destruction. (more here)

On Culture and Consequences

Concerning reactions in the wake of the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords (6 killed, 13 wounded)...

Gabrielle Giffords understood that words have consequences.That one's words can lead to actions by others.

"For example, we’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list, but the thing is, that the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they have to realize that there are consequences to that action,” Giffords said in an interview with MSNBC. (from the HT-Bloomington)

Some people, including media personality Jon Stewart, like to pretend that words do not have consequences. That lyrics and tones of songs have no consequence. Essentially that the culture around us has no consequence. That art has no consequence - or affect on people. I very strongly disagree.
 
I think that the corporate media seeks to influence the culture, including our values and ideas and feelings and actions, as well as buying and voting decisions. That is not a delusion. They have reasons, such as a profit motive, such as maintaining power and influence. 
 
Other people seek to influence the culture by discovering and expressing the truth. While all of us have 'truths' that are unique (based on who we listen to, what we pay attention to, what actions and ideas have come into our circle of awareness - along with our own abilities to understand and analyze our surroundings), many of us realize that it is quite different to try to have one's truth based on scientific knowledge and controlled studies than it is to base one's truth based on the rants of people who hate science and who spew false facts (often taking things out of context or making them up entirely) and hate.
 
The truth is not always a happy thing. The  fact that the way we collectively live our lives causes Global Warming, Dead Zones, and Extinctions is not happy. Nor is Poverty and Inequality, etc. But even the tone of our speech (whether truth or falsehoods) has an effect. According to Dr. Douglas Fields, "Rudeness Is a Neurotoxin"
 
Jon Stewart, on his show, often makes fun of right-wing people who spout nonsense. Part of the effect of that is that people who watch can feel somewhat in community with others that watch, and are happy that others understand nonsense as nonsense. It is nice to see the hate-spouting people made fun of - to have them put into a context that dis-empowers their hate and nonsense. Stewart's show has become part of the liberal culture. So it's odd to see Stewart say that none of that could be expected to have an effect on others - nor could the hate speech that he makes fun of.
 
Stewart does not generally spout hate, that I am aware of. I think he can tend to be somewhat misogynistic (or at the very least - he will not be mistaken to be a feminist), as can other somewhat liberal pundits such as Bill Maher. I think that part of the "truth" that they have absorbed is the idea we are all separate and not connected (and that those in power should have no expectation of concern for those without power).
 
I remember Stewart's response to someone who challenged him on his apparent sexism (the lack of women and women's point of view on his show) was that "women are not funny". So was he being funny, or is that his truth - or is that the truth concerning the role of women in our society? Our culture has an overabundance of possibilities (though not an overabundance of feminists). 
 
On the one hand, artists want to be free to express themselves (I'm assuming this is Stewart's take), but people like Palin and Limbaugh, and Beck are not artists - even though they create fictions. To some extent, Maher and Limbaugh were/are on the same page - they were both against the idea that people should be "politically correct". The concept that they were against was the idea that people shouldn't go around spouting racist and sexist crap. That idea has gone even farther with the latest round of right-wingness - where not only do they (Palin, Limbaugh, Beck) want the right to be rude, they want to go around "Joking" that liberals or anyone who disagrees with them should be shot and killed.

Some would like to suggest that both sides are equally rude and vitriolic, but it is one of the leading figures of the right-wing, tea-party who is disseminating imagery of rifle targets on people and talking about reloading (Palin, but with a lot of support from others). They get a lot of people riled up, and they have a lot of influence. And they are in nearly complete denial about it.

Krugman had a good column today, A Tale of Two Moralities about the " deep divide in American political morality." There is only one side that is pushing to bring down the government as we know it - and right now that is the vitriolic right-wing. I think those who identify with that need to own up to what and who they are supporting and the message that is being sent out.

I also think that while artists should have freedom to express what they want - the art and artists that make it into the forefront sends a message about what kind of society we are. For instance, when artists who create art that is about being pro-macho and anti-women rise to the top (and when art by women is more likely to be excluded), that says that we are not moving forward as a society. It says that the ideology of rudeness, and of Limbaugh - the entrenched tradition of white-male domination is (still) winning. (And yes, Palin and other women support that ideology),

As artists, what we express about our society can have an influence. As consumers, what we consume, endorse, and spread around also has an influence. That's how society works.

Dead Animals in the Gulf of Mexico

It's rather creepy what has happened with information control and all of the dead animals that resulted from the BP Oil Spill Disaster. When Katrina happened - there were dead people all over and thousands of body bags - but the official number did not seem to reflect the catastrophe shown in the news.

In the Gulf - BP, and the Coast Guard along with it, seem to have been working to keep the magnitude of the disaster a secret. Are they worried that people would get more serious about using less oil if they saw the extent of the damage to wildlife? Journalists have been kept far away in many places - with fines if they ventured too close. And there have been reports that a lot of activity happened at night.

The well is capped. Recent reports are that the oil is mostly gone - "evaporated", or something or other.

From Jerry Cope at the Huffingpost:
Dauphin Island was one of the sites where carcasses of sperm whales were destroyed. The operational end of the island was closed to unauthorized personnel and the airspace closed. The U.S. Coast Guard closed off all access from the Gulf. This picture shows the area as it was prepped to receive the whale carcasses for disposal.


In May, Mother Nature Network blogger Karl Burkart received a tip from an anonymous fisherman-turned-BP contractor in the form of a distressed text message, describing a near-apocalyptic sight near the location of the sunken Deepwater Horizon -- fish, dolphins, rays, squid, whales, and thousands of birds -- "as far as the eye can see," dead and dying. According to his statement, which was later confirmed by another report from an individual working in the Gulf, whale carcasses were being shipped to a highly guarded location where they were processed for disposal.

CitizenGlobal Gulf News Desk received photos that matched the report and are being published on Karl's blog today. Local fisherman in Alabama report sighting tremendous numbers of dolphins, sharks, and fish moving in towards shore as the initial waves of oil and dispersant approached in June. Many third- and fourth-generation fisherman declared emphatically that they had never seen or heard of any similar event in the past. Scores of animals were fleeing the leading edge of toxic dispersant mixed with oil. Those not either caught in the toxic mixture and killed out at sea, or fortunate enough to be out in safe water beyond the Source, died as the water closed in, and they were left no safe harbor. The numbers of birds, fish, turtles, and mammals killed by the use of Corexit will never be known as the evidence strongly suggests that BP worked with the Coast Guard, the Department of Homeland Security, the FAA, private security contractors, and local law enforcement, all of which cooperated to conceal the operations disposing of the animals from the media and the public.

The majority of the disposal operations were carried out under cover of darkness. The areas along the beaches and coastal Islands where the dead animals were collected were closed off by the U.S. Coast Guard. On shore, private contractors and local law enforcement officials kept off limits the areas where the remains of the dead animals were dumped, mainly at the Magnolia Springs landfill by Waste Management where armed guards controlled access. The nearby weigh station where the Waste Management trucks passed through with their cargoes was also restricted by at least one Sheriff's deputies in a patrol car, 24/7.

From the Examiner.com:

During the height of the oil spill in mid June, the Coast Guard under direction of Ret. Adm. Thad Allen issued a directive to all news media outlets, constituting a large “no-fly” zone over the Gulf.

Major media outlets such as the NYT and scientists with top government clearance were prohibited from accessing or fly over large areas of the Gulf of Mexico.

One of the researchers, Edward E. Clark from the Wildlife Center who had previously been invited to study the impact of the oil spill on wildlife was refused access to conduct his study.

The immediate reaction among journalists and scientists was one of bewilderment and disbelief and raised the question of what could possibly be so bad that the Government would issue a ban on June 10th not only for the media but also their own appointed scientists.

The first sign of a possible but horrific explanation cam through a text message from one of the BP cleanup workers on June 10 (see article above for the complete text message).
The second sign was a firsthand report from an individual working in the Gulf who reported military like staging areas in Shell Beach and Hopedale, Louisiana where sperm whales, whale sharks and blue fin tuna were processed under huge white tents for further disposal by waste trucks.

Two other reports followed suit, one from a rig operator in Alabama and another from Grand Isle, who reported semi-military and highly secured posts that had been converted to processing plants.

Official reports indicate that the BP oil spill has resulted in the death of 4,100 birds,670 turtles, 70 sea mammals and 1 snake, according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service report.

The numbers are astonishingly low when compared to the official numbers after the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989 which killed 200,000 birds, 3,000 sea mammals and 20 whales while this oil disaster pales in comparison to the Macondo BP oil spill.

Whatever the reasons may be to hide the removal or processing of dead maritime wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico or whatever justification BP and/or the US Government has, the reality still remains the same. Maritime wildlife will be affected for at least a decade to come and human life has been impacted to such an extent that it cannot be measured in data, money, compensation or restitution.

What is important to conclude is that if BP would have opted to clean up the oil spill in a more acceptable and readily available way by using non-toxic dispersants that the impact on maritime life would have been far less reaching and far less toxic then what it we witness today and for many years to come.

Hiding the devastating impact from the general public, the media and committed marine biologists and scientists is a crime against humanity in and of itself.

Living Like Kings/Queens***

And how much ‘work’ is embodied in a gallon of gasoline, our most favorite substance of them all? Well, if you put a single gallon in a car, drove it until it ran out, and then turned around and pushed the car home, you’d find out. It turns out that a gallon of gas has the equivalent energy of 500 hours of hard human labor, or 12-1/2 forty-hour work weeks.

So how much is a gallon of gas worth? $4? $10? If you wanted to pay this poor man $15 an hour to push your car home, then we might value a gallon of gas at $7,500.

Here’s another example. It has been calculated that the amount of food that average North America citizen consumes in year requires the equivalent of 400 gallons of petroleum to produce and ship.

At $4/gallon, that works out to $1600 of your yearly food bill spent on fuel, which doesn’t sound too extreme. However, when we consider that those 400 gallons represent the energy equivalent of 100 humans working year round at 40 hours a week, then it takes on an entirely different meaning. This puts your diet well out of the reach of most kings of times past. Just to put this in context, as it is currently configured, food production and distribution use fully two-thirds of our domestic oil production. This is one reason why a cessation of imports would be, shall we say, disruptive.

This is from Chris Martensons "Crash Course" about Energy & the Economy. He briefly mentions the Environment - but it's not a big thing about what he talks about. For him the big thing is the society collapsing - which I admit would have catestrophic impacts - but so does global warming, habitat destruction, the over-fishing, soil depletion/poisoning, the poisoning of the planet in general, and overpopulation. All of which are being caused by the same things he discusses - the temporary abundance of oil - with little concern to the effects of our actions. He does make some interesting points and connects many dots.

One good thing I saw on my drive home from the east coast were several wind turbine wings being transported on trucks.

Ticks - March 6th

I was out walking in the fields and woods for a little while today. I was thinking to myself that this was the time of year when it's starting to get warm out - but the flowers are not out yet - but neither are the ticks. That's 'supposed to be' part of the enjoyment. No worries. (At least it used to be...).

So I was sitting on a log and here is this hungry tick crawling on my hand - trying to get attached before I could get it off.

One of my dogs had a tiny tick larvae or something a couple weeks ago and I hoped it was a fluke. But apparently - ticks aren't hibernating or whatever they used to do - nearly as long.

I remember - it seems not that long ago - that we didn't have to worry about ticks until May. Those were the days.

Brooksley Born

by KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL / The Nation

The Woman Greenspan, Rubin & Summers Silenced

"Break the Glass" was the code-name high-level Treasury Department figures gave the $700 billion bailout; it was to be used only as a last- resort measure.

Now millions have been sprayed and damaged by broken glass.

But more than a decade ago, a woman you're likely never to have heard of, Brooksley Born, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission-- a federal agency that regulates options and futures trading--was the oracle whose warnings about the dangerous boom in derivatives trading just might have averted the calamitous bust now engulfing the US and global markets. Instead she was met with scorn, condescension and outright anger by former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and his deputy Lawrence Summers. In fact, Greenspan, the man some affectionately called "The Oracle," spent his political capital cheerleading these disastrous financial instruments.

On Thursday, the New York Times ran a masterful and revealing front page article exposing the culpability of Greenspan, Rubin and Summers for the era of dangerous turbulence we live in.

What these "three marketeers" --as they were called in a 1999 Time magazine cover story--were adept at was peddling the timebombs at the heart of this complex crisis: exotic and opaque financial instruments known as derivatives--contracts intended to hedge against risk and whose values are derived from underlying assets. To cut to the quick, Greenspan, Rubin and Summers opposed regulating them. "Proposals to bring even minimalist regulation were basically rebuffed by Greenspan and various people in the Treasury," recalls Alan Blinder, a former Federal Reserve board member and economist at Princeton University, in the Times article.

In 1997, Brooksley Born warned in congressional testimony that unregulated trading in derivatives could "threaten our regulated markets or, indeed, our economy without any federal agency knowing about it." Born called for greater transparency--disclosure of trades and reserves as a buffer against losses.

Instead of heeding this oracle's warnings, Greenspan, Rubin & Summers rushed to silence her. As the Times story reveals, Born's wise warnings "incited fierce opposition" from Greenspan and Rubin who "concluded that merely discussing new rules threatened the derivatives market." Greenspan deployed condescension and told Born she didn't know what she doing and she'd cause a financial crisis. (A senior Commission director who worked with Born suggests that Greenspan and the guys didn't like her independence. " Brooksley was this woman who was not playing tennis with these guys and not having lunch with these guys. There was a little bit of the feeling that this woman was not of Wall Street.")

In early 1998, according to the Times story, one of the guys, Larry Summers, called Born to "chastise her for taking steps he said would lead to a financial crisis. But Born kept at it, unwilling to let arrogant men undermine her good judgment. But it got tougher out there. In June 1998, Greenspan, Rubin and the then head of the SEC, Arthur Levitt, Jr., called on Congress "to prevent Ms. Born from acting until more senior regulators developed their own recommendations." (Levitt now says he regrets that decision.) Months later, the huge hedge fund Long Term Capital Management nearly collapsed--confirming some of Born's warnings. (Bets on derivatives were a key reason.)

...If there is any accountability left in our system, Greenspan, Rubin and Summers should not be telling anyone how to run anything. Instead, Barack Obama might do well to bring back Brooksley Born and promote to his team economists who haven't contributed to the ugly mess we're in.

"Running Out of Planet to Exploit"

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Nine years ago The Economist ran a big story on oil, which was then selling for $10 a barrel. The magazine warned that this might not last. Instead, it suggested, oil might well fall to $5 a barrel.

In any case, The Economist asserted, the world faced “the prospect of cheap, plentiful oil for the foreseeable future.”

Last week, oil hit $117.

It’s not just oil that has defied the complacency of a few years back. Food prices have also soared, as have the prices of basic metals. And the global surge in commodity prices is reviving a question we haven’t heard much since the 1970s: Will limited supplies of natural resources pose an obstacle to future world economic growth?

How you answer this question depends largely on what you believe is driving the rise in resource prices. Broadly speaking, there are three competing views.

The first is that it’s mainly speculation — that investors, looking for high returns at a time of low interest rates, have piled into commodity futures, driving up prices. On this view, someday soon the bubble will burst and high resource prices will go the way of Pets.com.

The second view is that soaring resource prices do, in fact, have a basis in fundamentals — especially rapidly growing demand from newly meat-eating, car-driving Chinese — but that given time we’ll drill more wells, plant more acres, and increased supply will push prices right back down again.

The third view is that the era of cheap resources is over for good — that we’re running out of oil, running out of land to expand food production and generally running out of planet to exploit.

I find myself somewhere between the second and third views...

In retrospect, the commodity boom of 1972-75 was probably the result of rapid world economic growth that outpaced supplies, combined with the effects of bad weather and Middle Eastern conflict. Eventually, the bad luck came to an end, new land was placed under cultivation, new sources of oil were found in the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea, and resources got cheap again.

But this time may be different: concerns about what happens when an ever-growing world economy pushes up against the limits of a finite planet ring truer now than they did in the 1970s.

For one thing, I don’t expect growth in China to slow sharply anytime soon. That’s a big contrast with what happened in the 1970s, when growth in Japan and Europe, the emerging economies of the time, downshifted — and thereby took a lot of pressure off the world’s resources.

Meanwhile, resources are getting harder to find. Big oil discoveries, in particular, have become few and far between, and in the last few years oil production from new sources has been barely enough to offset declining production from established sources.

And the bad weather hitting agricultural production this time is starting to look more fundamental and permanent than El Niño and La Niña, which disrupted crops 35 years ago. Australia, in particular, is now in the 10th year of a drought that looks more and more like a long-term manifestation of climate change...

But rich countries will face steady pressure on their economies from rising resource prices, making it harder to raise their standard of living. And some poor countries will find themselves living dangerously close to the edge — or over it.

Don’t look now, but the good times may have just stopped rolling.

"We're all doomed!"

Or most people are doomed. Lovelock speaks of the coming changes. Loss of cropland, etc.

This is the beginning and the end of the article....

The weather forecast for this holiday weekend is wildly unsettled. We had better get used to it.
According to the climate change scientist James Lovelock, this is the beginning of the end of a peaceful phase in evolution.

By 2040, the world population of more than six billion will have been culled by floods, drought and famine....

The secret is to adapt as best we can - and to take the long view. The Earth is elderly, 3.5 billion years old and with another 500 million to go. The sun has another five billion years to go, before it turns into a "white dwarf" - a lump of rock.

"It is like the flashlight on a torch," explains Lovelock. "The battery will eventually run out. Everything is mortal. I would not want everlasting life for myself or for the Earth.

"We are about to take an evolutionary step and my hope is that the species will emerge stronger. It would be hubris to think humans as they now are God's chosen race."

I pretty much agree that this will probably be the case. Although I think adapting includes everyone consuming less - or at least those who have the money to consume much.

Adapting can also include renewable sources of energy, better transportation modes, etc. But I agree with Lovelock that the current number of people on the earth is not sustainable. Nor is the current mode of living except for a small number. I expect that there will always be some who live fairly well. Though food and resources will be scarce. Lifetimes will probably be shorter, etc.