“There are a lot of reasons not to elect me.”
– Mitt Romney, last September

Beyond tomorrow, the Iowa caucus crap-shoot is Tuesday, starting the political version of 2012 — which might be meaningless if other forces, i.e., economics-finance, climate, war, energy, and so forth, don’t blow the lid off before next November — election day seemingly seen from here as way down a patch of real-bad road.

(Illustration found here).

This particular season has been the easiest for me at the liquor store where I work — my fifth New Year, the third as manager — since I have weekends off, missed Christmas, and now New Year’s, and, this is a big, ‘and,’ no long hours, or 13 days in a row — all employees working full shifts, nobody going home for the holidays.
When I left work yesterday afternoon, business was starting to pick up a bit and people had money (checks early for the first of the month).
But a shitload of people still pay for a pack of Marlboro or a Tilt Watermelon with handfuls of coin.

Near shadowing the national picture, decent business comes in binges/holidays/special events with a crater-like effect in between — the store is down near two grand a month compared to 2007.
We’re doing okay at this financial ‘near normal,’ but the owner worries month-to-month.
After this weekend, no blip on the business-traffic radar until Super Bowel Bowl weekend.

Tonight and wee-tomorrow morning, and maybe on into Sunday, a lot of booze will be sucked down, big Times Square crowds, people all over will gushing and hugging and cheering ‘Happy New Year, and then, wake up Monday with a WTF hangover.
And still be just as clueless.
Well beyond any Mayan bullshit, 2012 on its own merits ain’t going to be pretty.

An excitingly long, short year — 2011.
Both it and the year before would have made way-nifty titles for science-fiction novels written in the mid-1970s.
‘Fer instance:

• “2010 AD” — sprawling, multi-character story of the end of energy told via a war between giant international financial consortiums for oil discovered in the now near-iceless Arctic, even as the world is pitched into chaos due to abrupt and bizarre shifts in weather…

or maybe,

• “2011: Rise of the Machines” — guy invents a small device in his parents’ garage, said device spawns a vast cornucopia of machines highly morphoditing all of humanity, and except for just 1 percent of the population, machines rule civilization, forcing an occupying of ceaseless uprising begins…

Unfortunately, we’re not back in the naive, dumb-ass’70s.

Even after a not-so-calm 2010, this year quickly coming to close has been one for the literal record books — in the US alone, 14 billion-dollar weather-related disasters; and although all not directly tied to global warming, the collateral effect takes place.

But there is a systematic influence on all of these weather events now-a-days because of the fact that there is this extra water vapor lurking around in the atmosphere than there used to be say 30 years ago.
It’s about a 4 percent extra amount, it invigorates the storms, it provides plenty of moisture for these storms and it’s unfortunate that the public is not associating these with the fact that this is one manifestation of climate change.
And the prospects are that these kinds of things will only get bigger and worse in the future.

Most-likely climate change is the biggest problem mankind has ever faced — it’s just another Happy New Year.
And to start things off in the right mind, and the real horror of urban life is the reports of a series of arson fires churning up around Los Angeles.
Hollywood Mayor John J. Duran may have coined a ‘new-normal’ phrase, via CNN:

“When you have millions of people living with millions of cars in these very dense neighborhoods, this is becoming a new form of domestic terrorism that really has got our community in a very bad spot.”

Twenty-one of these fires were started in Duran’s town — ‘a new form of domestic terrorism.’

Even as I hear firecrackers popping in the distance, the new year is coming whether I’m ready or not and from all indications, most US peoples will celebrate, but the heart is afraid.
No resolutions will temper the gloom.

Although prices here in northern California have dipped a bit, it’s still freakin’ high compared nationwide — the national average for regular this week is $3.258 a gallon, still more than 20 cents higher than the same time last year.

Meanwhile, in California the statewide average hit $3.576, up 2 cents since Dec. 19, according to the Energy Department’s weekly survey of service stations. That shattered — by 28.9 cents — the old record of $3.287 a gallon set in December 2007 and was tied in December 2010.

(Illustration found here).

The price of oil — beyond the natural-technical problems — has been influenced by more swinging bullshit centered around Iran, which, in the face of new efforts by the US and the European Union to halt Iran’s nuclear program, has threatened to close the most-vital Strait of Hormuz if the shit gets too deep.
Some experts Iran is bullshitting.
Maybe not — the two-mile-wide strait is much closer to Iran than just the physical: After boasting yesterday: “Shutting the strait for Iran’s armed forces is … easier than drinking a glass of water,” Iran’s navy chief Admiral Habibollah Sayari said: “Today, we don’t need [to shut] the strait because … it is completely under the control of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
A nasty set of circumstances, though, it doesn’t seem to ruffle many feathers.

The US, however, will not be intimidated, and pooh poohed the possible action as an empty gesture:

However, playing down the threat, State Department spokesman Mark Toner called it as nothing more than mere “bluster.”
According to Toner, this was just another attempt by Iran to draw attention away from the key issue, that of their habitual “non-compliance with international nuclear obligations,” he added.

A lot of drama is being played out with this Iranian deal — the US claims it has certain “red lines” (kind of like those famous, ‘line in the sand’ routines) that if crossed would justify a preemptive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and then, the shit would really hit the fan.
Israel is the most concerned.
Jason Ditz at antiwar.com:

Officially, of course, both sides would insist such an attack was about Iran’s nuclear program.
But since both nations have been claiming Iran is within striking distance of acquiring nuclear weapons since the mid-1980s, the excuse isn’t going to really fly internationally, so both nations are hoping to settle on something which could be the “trigger” for the attack.

This ‘trigger’ ain’t no horse on some happy trail.

Bluster or not…
From liveoilprices: In London, Brent crude oil futures for February 2012 delivery was trading at $107.90 a barrel, 08.03 GMT this morning on the ICE Futures Exchange.
And WTI: US Light crude oil futures for February 2012 delivery was trading at $99.53 a barrel, 07.42 GMT this morning in electronic trading on the NYMEX.

The quickly approaching new year signals even higher prices to come.

Humanity is fatally blind.
Seeking oil for energy is akin to eating poison — it tastes good and makes us feel good all over, but will kill us in a horrible, twitching death.
Talk about bat-shit crazy — the intake of this crude is making an environment already stunned near-beyond recovery even worse and apparently the glutton forces are stronger than self-preservation.
Even the so-called ‘saving grace’ of the Canadian tar sands oil creates a horrible future:

Extraction of Alberta’s energy-intensive tar sands has expanded steadily in recent years, with about 232 square miles now exposed by mining operations.
That expansion is expected to double over the next decade, which could mean the destruction of 740,000 acres of boreal forest and a 30 percent increase in carbon emissions from Canada’s oil and gas sector.

And in perspective (via DeSmogBlog): The latest tally (2008) puts Canada’s GHG emissions at “only” 1.8 per cent, which is swell as long as you don’t think about Canada’s population amounting to just 0.004 per cent of the world’s total. That makes Canada the fourth worst polluter per capita. It also makes our 34 million inhabitants the seventh largest source of CO2 among all the countries in the world – that’s seventh from a list of 216 countries and jurisdictions.

And the end result?
From TreeHugger:

A new study in the Journal of Glaciology shows that the glaciers in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca mountain range are melting so quickly that the water they supply to the arid region is being threatened 20-30 years earlier than expected.
Lead researcher Michel Baraer, from McGill University, told IPS News that the time needed for the region to adapt to the coming water shortages, previously thought to be decades off, “those years don’t exist.”
Baraer said that the glaciers feeding the Rio Santo watershed are now too small to maintain past flows of water.
During the dry season water availability is expected to be 30 percent lower than historic levels.
In the 1930s glaciers in the Cordillera Blanca covered 850 square kilometers.
Today they cover less than 600 sq km.
In a global context, the World Glacier Monitoring Service recently has said that 90 percent of the glaciers studied in its latest Glacier Mass Balance Bulletin are losing mass.
In the Himalaya, 75 percent of the glaciers there are melting; the USGS fully puts the blame on this on global warming and not other factors.

My underline for some way-emphasis — and that, my friends, ain’t bluster.

When bad shit hits the fan — even a zombie apocalypse — the president, military types and other important folks will be saved to carry on while the rest of us run for the burning hills: The $223 million aircraft is outfitted with an electromagnetic pulse shield to protect its 165,000 pounds of advanced electronics. Thermo-radiation shields also protect the plane in the event of a nuclear strike.

Nice ride in an era of gloomy doom-speak.

(Illustration found here).

Scary is the events unfolding now in North Korea — even as everybody on the planet have their panties in a bind over Iran’s so-called nuclear ambitions, another way-more serious situation lies via Pyongyang — and the fright is the secrecy.
Kim Jong-il kicked the bucket without anybody outside a few North Koreans knowing about it, and all despite billions of dollars worth of all kinds of high-tech gear.
From the New York Times:

For South Korean and American intelligence services to have failed to pick up any clues to this momentous development — panicked phone calls between government officials, say, or soldiers massing around Mr. Kim’s train — attests to the secretive nature of North Korea, a country not only at odds with most of the world but also sealed off from it in a way that defies spies or satellites.
Asian and American intelligence services have failed before to pick up significant developments in North Korea.
Pyongyang built a sprawling plant to enrich uranium that went undetected for about a year and a half until North Korean officials showed it off in late 2010 to an American nuclear scientist.
The North also helped build a complete nuclear reactor in Syria without tipping off Western intelligence.
…
“ ‘Oh, my God!’ was the first word that came to my mind when I saw the North Korean anchorwoman’s black dress and mournful look,” said a government official who monitored the North Korean announcement.

What bullshit — the Korean peninsula is a tender box waiting for a match while the rest of the world sits in the dark.
The Washington Post: “It is scary how little we really know,” said one administration official who closely follows the region and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence. “I don’t think you can overstate the concern.”

When one takes a truthful view of the world nowadays, there’s much to be alarmed about and gloomy, but it’s only a respite before the doom arrives, and it will.
According to all the data, we (the planet) can’t avoid a coming horror — between climate change, energy depletion, worldwide financial collapse, and just plain old war, amongst a host of lesser calamities — although apparently the world sits willingly in the dark.

Last weekend, the UK’s The Guardian ran a detailed piece on this age of destruction — titled, “The news is terrible. Is the world really doomed?” — and presented all the gloomy evidence to support a coming implosion/explosion of civilization.
A few key points:

“The apocalypse,” wrote the German poet and essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger in 1978, “is aphrodisiac, nightmare, a commodity like any other … warning finger and scientific forecast … rallying cry … superstition … a joke … an incessant production of our fantasy … one of the oldest ideas of the human species.
Its periodic ebb and flow … has accompanied utopian thought like a shadow.”
…
This autumn, as the estimated world population passed seven billion, an earlier prophet of doom, Paul Ehrlich, co-author of the 60s and 70s bestseller The Population Bomb and professor of population studies at Stanford University in California, resurfaced in the British press to warn that demand for the planet’s resources would soon decisively exceed supply.
“Civilisations,” he reminded this newspaper, “have collapsed before.”
…
In July, the word “apocalypse” appeared 60 times in British national newspapers.
In August, 70 times.
In September, 92 times.
In November, 100 times.
Usually calm Guardian columnists have started to ponder armageddon.
After the chancellor George Osborne’s bleak autumn statement on the economy, Zoe Williams discussed the pros and cons of food hoarding.
In November, Simon Jenkins declared: “Today’s [economic and political] predicament is unquestionably worse than the 1970s.”
The same month, Ian Jack wrote: “Build a bunker with a vegetable plot on some high ground and leave it to your grandchildren: dangerous levels of climate change now look all but inevitable.”
…
Meanwhile, for westerners who instinctively look to other countries or big political ideas for inspiration, the possibilities seem to be withering.
The US appears economically declining and politically dysfunctional.
The EU is damaged and possibly disintegrating.
The social democracy of Europe’s postwar golden decades seems unable to modernise itself.
The ability of Thatcherism and its international variants and descendants to rescue countries from national decline — if that ability ever truly existed — seems to have run its course.
Žižek argues that over the past five years the west has suffered a form of bereavement.
To describe the resulting mindset, he uses the famous “five stages of grief” model devised in 1969 by the Swiss-American psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
The current combination of public doominess and desperate-looking political summits certainly seems to feature the middle three.
Gray sums up the prevailing mood more succinctly: “People are afraid – for good, practical, experientially based reasons.”

The entire post covers all the ugly angles.

A nagging truth, however, is there’s not much the average-guy-on-the-street can do about it.
As I sit here in the comfort of my apartment on a clear, pre-dawn morning, the world outside is quiet and still — I can hear the slight roar of the Pacific Ocean — and the coming horror seems so far remote and so Horn of Africa.
Time is a much flexible measure, although time never changes, slows or changes direction.
A downer indeed if one doesn’t have the ears to hear.

If one is interested, the best read on the attack is John Toland’s old masterpiece, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945, although told from the Japanese perspective.

Pearl Harbor also displayed an astonishing blowback (to the Japanese): How the US way-quickly booted itself up to wage war, from sitting on our ass to full-blown, break-neck-running in a matter of seconds to tackle the problem.
A similar situation nowadays required for a foe that will make all of WWII look like a walk in a springtime park — climate change, which if not acted upon, the world’s causalities won’t be just 2.5, but 100 percent.

(Illustration found here).

The approaching climate calamity is so humongous, so overwhelming and so quickly-coming that pussy-footing around won’t work anymore — no more small talk at chaotic conferences.
David Roberts at Grist:

This cannot work.
At least it cannot work if we hope to avoid terrible consequences.
Why not?
It’s simple: If there is to be any hope of avoiding civilization-threatening climate disruption, the U.S. and other nations must act immediately and aggressively on an unprecedented scale.
That means moving to emergency footing.
War footing.
“Hitler is on the march and our survival is at stake” footing.
That simply won’t be possible unless a critical mass of people are on board. It’s not the kind of thing you can sneak in incrementally.
It is unpleasant to talk like this.
People don’t want to hear it.
They don’t want to believe it.
They bring to bear an enormous range of psychological and behavioral defense mechanisms to avoid it.
It sounds “extreme” and our instinctive heuristics conflate “extreme” with “wrong.”
People display the same kind of avoidance when they find out that they or a loved one are seriously ill.
But no doctor would counsel withholding a diagnosis from a patient because it might upset them.
If we’re in this much trouble, surely we must begin by telling the truth about it.

The awful truth is it might be too late already, but maybe not.

Five years — the amount of time reportedly left to take hard-core action before all the bad shit locks in and there will be no escape, leading to irreversible climate change.
Last month, the most thorough analysis yet of world energy infrastructure revealed the clock is indeed ticking down.
Via The Guardian:

“The door is closing,” Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, said.
“I am very worried — if we don’t change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety].
The door will be closed forever.”

And there ain’t getting out of that windowless room except through that door.
And we’re not joking — if we were joking, it’d go something like this: ‘Horse walks into a bar, bartender asks, Why the long face?‘

Most scientists identify as Democrats (55 percent), while 32 percent identify as independents and just 6 percent say they are Republicans.
– Pew Research, July 2009

Reality conception doesn’t require the brains of a rocket scientist, but one does need some kind of brain, and maybe a brain that’s not so flat.
Take Mitt Romney (please!), who carries an impressive foreign policy brain trust, but still lacks walking-around sense.

“Romney’s team is almost too broad, it’s soulless,” worried one GOP foreign policy expert who has informally advised the Romney campaign.
“You don’t know what direction he would go and some conservatives are worried it could be analysis paralysis.”

Before any paralysis, there’s gotta be some emotional feelings.

(Illustration found here).

A couple of weeks ago, Herman Cain blew off an interview with the Manchester (New Hampshire) Union Leader due to the fact the talk would also be on video — a real bad piece of equipment for Cain after the Libya incident — and his campaign had installed a new rule: No video cameras in newspaper interviews.
And why? Because “videos are typically used for television, and it’s a newspaper.”
The  Union Leader responded in a blistering editorial, the final graph the kicker:

Videos these days are used by everyone, even random people on the street who record candidates with their cell phones.
The difference between television and newspaper interviews is not that cameras are present, but that newspaper interviews tend to be longer and more in depth.
The Cain campaign knows this.
It seems that Cain is fine with everyone seeing him give short, prepared answers, but not with everyone seeing him try to answer questions in which he has more than 30 or 60 seconds to respond.
He would do well to rethink that decision, for it gives the impression that he’s got something to hide.

No shit, sherlock.
Herman has a major, and disgusting, problem with women.

However, the much, way-much-bigger problem is that US politics sucks through a small straw.

Nearly 70 percent of US peoples consider the current Congressional operation the worse in 60 years — a “do-nothing Congress,” as scripted by Harry Truman in 1948 (via CNN).
The failure of the so-called “Super Committee” is a case in point — a do nothing due to the (t)he nastiness of the proposed cuts and the huge, huge ass-holeness of the GOP.

A most-excellent post yesterday at The Bonddad Blog reported the US could get going again if a lot of shit is put aside, with an emphasis on putting people back to work, pointedly on this country’s embarassing infrastructure.
The problem? Too much bullshit:

So what’s the problem?
Why is our system so fundamentally stuck?
Partly it’s a colossal, bipartisan lack of the political courage required to tell people what they sort of know but don’t want to hear.
Partly it’s a Republican Party that, for its own cynical reasons, wants no deal with this president. Partly it’s moneyed, focused lobbies that swarm in defense of specific advantages written into the law; there is no comparable lobby for compromise, let alone sacrifice.
…
The point to the above two paragraphs is simple: our political system is beyond broken and dysfunctional. I’m not quite sure where that is, but I do know it’s really bad place to be.
And that is why watching the train-wreck that is the daily news is so frustrating: solving the problem is easy, but our political system has become so dysfunctional as to prevent that from happening.

Brains infested with dry rot won’t work — the US is in a world of hurt.

“They’re on the edge of a mess,” one experienced delegate told BBC News, “and they may not be able to resolve this mess.”

The above-mentioned ‘mess‘ is a deep divide between the greedy and the near-dying, with the good-old US of A counted amongst the greedy.
Despite the obvious oncoming terror of climate change, this COP17 (the 17th Conference of Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) is another example of horrid political bias killing us all — those whining for longer time-frames for any kind of climate agreements are Russia and Japan, Brazil and India (Brazil claims the next few years should be a “reflection phase,” while India, a “technical/scientific period”).

And America:

The US remains the fly in the ointment and will not ratify the Kyoto Protocol or agree to legally binding cuts at this stage.
Not only have several attempts by President Barack Obama to push through the required national climate change legislation failed, but the presidential race for the next term of office has started in earnest — and some Republican candidates don’t even accept the reality of climate change.

WTF!
Time is of the essence for action, for most-sure, not a complete-dumb-ass ‘reflection phrase.’
And could the GOP might ultimately be blamed for destroying mankind — Whoa!

Climate change effects/affects everyone.
And even in the US, the fly in a toxic ointment.
A potentially-devastating environmental mystery is unfolding close to home here in northern California — last summer, just south of where I live, previously unknown blooms of toxic algae killed tens of thousands of abalone, sea urchins and other mollusks in Sonoma and Mendocino counties.

An incident which sparked near-immediate action: A group of scientists led by led by UC Santa Cruz was formed to figure out what the shit’s happening, not only for California waters, but maybe along the US Gulf coast as well.

A toxic water bloom is even affecting Lake Erie fish — disastrous results off climate change are multi-faceted, from ocean acidification, to sea level rise, to “extreme weather events,” or to minor shit like worsening allergies, and leading even to mass extinctions, maybe including wise-ass humans.

(Illustration of Agardhiella tenera ‘red algae’ found here).

So an investigation into that toxic algae could help other concerned areas of climate change — the UC Santa Cruz research will employ not only the most-advanced technological ocean-measuring devices and equipment, but will also use robotic gliders.
The five-study is on a problem that’s both dangerous and disturbingly apparent.

From the San Francisco Chronicle this morning on the proliferation of this entity that’s toxic to both humans and marine mammals:

“It is a huge problem for wildlife,” said Raphael Kudela, a professor of ocean sciences at UC Santa Cruz and the lead scientist for the study, which began last week.
“We’ve seen a lot more of what we consider unusual events.
It’s not always the same organism, but new things keep cropping up.
The million-dollar question is: What exactly is the change in the environment that these things are linked to?”

Not only can this stuff kill marine life, but can put a hurt on a human: People can contract amnesic shellfish poisoning, which causes nausea, vomiting, dizziness and, in severe cases, disorientation, seizures, coma and even death.
And in the natural process nowadays, climate change way-most-likely plays a part:

“We can’t say for sure that it is tied to something like climate change,” Kudela said, “but it does seem to be spreading globally, so something is changing, and we are trying to find out what that is.”

Alarms going off anywhere?
Despite the fact this story deserves A1 attention, the online version notes it originally appeared on C1 of the Chronicle.

The US involvement in tomorrow’s start to COP17 — no one in authority is going, in fact, the conference is way down on the list of shit to do.
Via Climate Progress:

“It’s awful to say, but I haven’t focused on them at all because first of all we’ve hit a wall here for now on climate change,” said Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), adding that Congress’ focus is now on debt and economic issues.
International climate issues are “basically happening through the administration now,” he said, “although I think Congress has to stay involved.”
Waxman, who sponsored a cap-and-trade bill that cleared the House in 2009, said he “hoped for the best” from Durban.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t thought about it.”
“It hasn’t been brought to my attention,” said Environment and Public Works Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.).
Asked whether she planned to go, Boxer said she could not.
“I’m too busy here,” she said.

However, it might be a good thing Republicans aren’t going — keep the assholes from making bigger assholes of themselves.
Or make a much-bigger mess.

Tomorrow, of course, is turkey day — one of US peoples’ more obtuse holidays where actual thanksgiving gives way to stuffing the face with food.
And like most of the other so-called holidays, it’s authentic as a 3-dollar bill.

One — watch out for the shit in cans, and the increase of BPA, an endocrine disruptor that has been shown to interfere with reproductive development in animal studies.
BPA is found in the lining of canned foods, cash register receipts, dental fillings, some plastics and polycarbonate bottles marked with the number 7.
Via Raw Story: People who ate canned soup for five days straight saw their urinary levels of the chemical bisphenol A spike 1,200 percent compared to those who ate fresh soup, US researchers said on Tuesday.
And: “The magnitude of the rise in urinary BPA we observed after just one serving of soup was unexpected and may be of concern among individuals who regularly consume foods from cans or drink several canned beverages daily,” said senior author Karin Michels. “It may be advisable for manufacturers to consider eliminating BPA from can linings.”
Watch that gravy.

And watch the conversation around the dinner table tomorrow — Politics may not be an easy topic for families with diverging viewpoints, but that doesn’t mean it’s off-limits, said etiquette expert Anna Post of the Emily Post Institute.
I wonder if Anna has ever had a discussion with a climate-change denier, OWS hating, right-wing crazy who does not understand, nor allow facts to get in the way of an opinion.

This is one lame post, that I agree.
When I started surfing the news sites online this morning, nothing seemed to jump out at me from all the bullshit replayed from all over this crazed planet and most of the stories are ones that’s been going on for weeks.
One — these GOP presidential debates are making me sick to the bowels and I continually wonder how those clowns even draw a crowd.
Last night was absolutely the same, except most-likely the most-odorous guy found on the public stage for decades, Newt Gingrich, was declared the “winner.”
Some shit from the MSM, in this case, CNN and Gloria Borger:

“You never know who’s going to show up: It could be the good Newt, smart Newt, full-of-ideas Newt, who I think we saw tonight. Or it could be the negative, nasty, anti-media stuff.
“And I think tonight we saw the first Newt Gingrich, the more positive Newt Gingrich who sort of had a vision and took on Ron Paul, and the Patriot Act debate.
“It was very, very interesting — the intellectual Newt — but he was appealing, which is something I don’t think he’s really been before.
I think it’s probably because he’s more relaxed, and he’s doing better in the polls and people like him.
I think he was more likable this evening.”

Gloria is one of those I wouldn’t want at my Thanksgiving table — Newt “likable?”

From live-blogging at The Economist: If Gingrich won, it’s because he’s such an unviable, nonthreatening candidate, the others didn’t feel the need to attack him. Once they do, it will kill him.
Newt is so full of shit, his eyes have got to be some kind of brown color.

Eat hearty tomorrow — food is food until its not.
Tim Lang, creator of the food miles concept and professor of food policy at London’s City University and president of British charity Garden Organic, argues our food system is essentially “broken” and failing to act will be catastrophic.
Indeed, ‘food miles‘ refers to the distance food is transported from the time of its production until it reaches the consumer, a good indicator of how foodstuffs are impacted by such things as climate change.
Via Australia’s The Sydney Morning Herald:

In the 1940s, mainstream thinking was captured by the view that applying science and technology such as chemicals, plant breeding and fertiliser to agriculture could solve the world’s hunger problem.
“This vision was a very optimistic, humanitarian use of science,” Lang says.
“It essentially triumphed in the 1940s and it’s what we are living with still.
We are living with the view that the problems of the world are caused by underproduction and that we have to raise production in order to increase consumption.”
Lang admits technology has brought about great improvements in public health but believes the old way has run its course.
“Seventy years on, we know that model, which the West has successfully spread around the world, may have been humanitarian but it was flawed,” he says.
“By the end of the 20th century it was already clear that it was running out of steam.
Look at the environmental problems, the growth of obesity and the gross inequalities in consumption.”
The sort of inequalities to which Lang refers are revealed starkly by the fact that an estimated 1.3 billion people worldwide are overweight or obese, while 800 million humans are believed to be underweight. Then there is the fact about a third of the grain the world grows is fed to livestock.
“Converting” grain into meat, milk and eggs on this scale is notoriously inefficient.
Or consider the estimated 31 per cent of total greenhouse gas emissions contributed by the European Union’s food-production sector.
“This is, frankly, cuckoo,” Lang says.
“It is a crazy system and we must not do what some agricultural scientists are asking to do — unleash new technology.
I’m not speaking against those technologies, I’m just saying, ‘Hold on, let’s have a proper debate.’
We must think about supply and consumption and distribution in the sense of social distribution.
“Our politicians have got to address the elephant in the room — an increasingly fat elephant called consumer choice — but no politician likes to do that because the consumer is their voter.
We have to take stock of this and have to realise that more production completely misses the point.
We have to address not just the ‘how’ question — how we farm and grow things — but also what we grow.”

The U.S. Dept. of Agriculture expects retail food prices to increase 3.5 percent to 4.5 percent this year, after climbing just 0.8 percent in 2010, and rising corn prices will take a big bite out of profits for turkey farmers.

The cost of traditional foods at a Thanksgiving dinner will jump 13 percent this year, the most in two decades, with a meal for 10 people estimated at $49.20, the American Farm Bureau Federation said on Nov. 10.
Turkey was the most expensive item on the menu and had the biggest gain, with a 16-pound bird up 22 percent at $21.57.

Eat up, the game’s coming on!

The oil scene, however, is a slow news generator right now, buried among some horror stories, like the ugly, disgusting ugly shit at Penn State (hence, the double-ugly), or the coyote-female-ugly from Herman Cain, or the blockhead, dumb-ass utterings of Rick Perry, or the clashing OWS crusade, or the fiscal escapades of the Europeans, or….you get the not-so-pretty picture.

Unlike climate change, the oil/energy situation is a slow-coming catastrophe — disaster seemingly right now measured in pennies.

(Illustration found here).

According to all indications, oil prices are starting another climb upward, even as the Libyans start cranking back up its own oil production, supposedly to be back to pre-revolt levels within months.
From liveoilprices: Brent oil prices closed Friday’s trading session at $114 a barrel as the spread between Brent and US WTI oil moves back to around $15 as US oil supply data pushes the American oil contract higher, back near the $100 mark.
And WTI is following suit: WTI oil futures end the week near $99 a barrel which is a 4 month high as traders cheered positive sentiment data out of America and the US dollar was trading lower which typically fuels commodity prices to rise.
And if the shit gets deeper in the Middle East — Israel attacks Iran’s nuclear facilities, or something similarly dumb — oil could go whacky: “It is the $200 a barrel scenario.” says Philip Verleger, an independent consultant who correctly predicted in August 1990 the price rally after Iraq invaded Kuwait.
Touchy, touchy.

The pump prices in northern California are still more than a dime more than down south, and is still higher than the US as a whole, but some folks are worse than others.
I guess it’s all in how it’s handled locally.
Despite all the obvious indicators, no one is shouting out the coming calamity — no one playing playing the role of a Paul Revere in proclaiming the quick-coming-end of cheap oil.
Only business as usual.

The LA Times on Saturday:

The Energy Department says surging diesel prices have “provided incentives to refiners to shift some production away from gasoline.”
The result is more expensive gasoline.
The average cost of a gallon of regular gasoline in the U.S. on Friday was $3.438, up 57.4 cents from a year earlier, according to the AAA Fuel Gauge Report.
That’s 32.7 cents a gallon higher than the old record for this time of year, set in 2007.
The average cost in California on Friday was $3.839 a gallon.
That’s 70.4 cents a gallon higher than a year earlier and 47.3 cents a gallon higher than the record for fall reached in 2007.

And in October, US peoples spent 8 percent of their household incomes, or an estimated $332.40, at the gasoline pump — and in a time when traditionally pump prices go down, the numbers are spiraling up.
The experts claim next year will be a female dog: “We are at the highest fuel prices ever for this time of year, even though they have dropped a bit in recent weeks,” said Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst for the Oil Price Information Service. “I think we will see prices in 2012 that will break … records.”
Indeed.

What do we do? Drill, baby, drill?
President Obama continues his wishy-washy, environmental bullshit by announcing last week a proposal to open some Arctic areas to oil drilling, and such in the words of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, “…we must proceed cautiously, safely and based on the best science available.”
Incredible amount of bullshit — need some high waders.

The LA Times had a most-excellent opinion/commentary last week on the subject, titled, “New oil leases in the Arctic: How dumb is that?”
Money bit:

It’s a discouraging time to be a friend of the Earth.
The Obama administration, seemingly, is looking for some way, any way, to approve another environmental nightmare, the Keystone XL pipeline.
And last week came this cheery bit of news:

The global output of heat-trapping carbon dioxide jumped last year by the biggest amount on record, the U.S. Department of Energy calculated, a sign of how feeble the world’s efforts are at slowing man-made global warming.

The new figures for 2010 mean that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst-case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago.
Really now, is this the best we can do?
In October, the world’s population hit 7 billion; most of those people are busy doing their part in heating up the planet by burning fossil fuels — and our response is to go looking for more of the stuff?
If the world were named Michael Jackson, and fossil fuels were called propofol, someone would be going to jail about now.
Forget stopping the bullet train.
We need to stop the doomsday train.
A few years back, I attended an engineering day at Stanford. One presentation on oil and the environment featured this quote, from a Saudi oil minister: “The Stone Age didn’t end because of a lack of stones.”
There’s only one way to save those polar bears — and ourselves — and it’s not by drilling for more oil.

Don’t the people in charge know there’s no hanging onto oil?
Not only is the shit finite, but it’s bringing an end to civilization as we know it.

In a timely time, today Dr. Richard Muller, the climate-change “skeptic” who changed his tune, will speak at a US Congressional climate briefing: “Undeniable Data: The Latest Research on Global Temperature and Climate Science” — heffy title that, kind of like the ‘undeniable‘ part.
Should be interesting.

We estimate that climatic warming has increased the number of new global-mean temperature records expected in the last decade from 0.1 to 2.8.
For July temperature in Moscow, we estimate that the local warming trend has increased the number of records expected in the past decade fivefold, which implies an approximate 80 percent probability that the 2010 July heat record would not have occurred without climate warming.

(Illustration found here).

Joe Romm at Climate Progress on the study: Again, this extreme event ended Russian grain exports for year. So the increase in extremes very much threatens food security if we don’t act soon to reverse emissions trends.

In other words, gird thy loins, or learn how to re-eat foodstuffs.

Romm also notes the study from PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America) is a “bombshell” because NOAA did a flawed analysis just a few months ago that found no connection between global warming and the record-smashing (heat).
Wiggle room is shrinking for deniers.

And another anti-denial nail was driven home this past week — the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which was supposed to slash holes into the very heart of climate change, released a report ‘confirming‘ the bad news the earth is indeed burning alive.
From former ‘skeptic‘ Richard Muller, the chair of the Berkeley study, in the Wall Street Journal:

We discovered that about one-third of the world’s temperature stations have recorded cooling temperatures, and about two-thirds have recorded warming.
The two-to-one ratio reflects global warming.
The changes at the locations that showed warming were typically between 1-2ºC, much greater than the IPCC’s average of 0.64ºC.
…
When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn’t know what we’d find.
Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups.
We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that.
They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.
Global warming is real.
Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate.
How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects?
We made no independent assessment of that.

Just watch the weather reports, Richard.
Despite Muller and his study, some people are still hard-headed wrong — read a good view of fallout from the Berkeley study on the hardcore denial crowd at DeSmogBlog, and follow the links.

Paul Krugman, in his New York Times column last week, took to task another study, this one from the American Petroleum Institute (and one can guess its point of view), which is the core of the GOP’s economic proposals — pollution makes for more jobs.
Republicans, however, don’t even understand their own shit.
Money bits:

But does this oil-industry-backed study actually make a serious case for weaker environmental protection as a job-creation strategy?
No.
…
Moreover, even if you take the study’s claims at face value, it offers little reason to believe that dirtier air and water can solve our current employment crisis.
All the big numbers in the report are projections for late this decade.
The report predicts fewer than 200,000 jobs next year, and fewer than 700,000 even by 2015.
You might want to compare these numbers with a couple of other numbers: the 14 million Americans currently unemployed, and the one million to two million jobs that independent estimates suggest the Obama plan would create, not in the distant future, but in 2012.
More pollution, then, isn’t the route to full employment.
But is there a longer-term economic case for less environmental protection?
No.
Serious economic analysis actually says that we need more protection, not less.
…
As the study’s authors say, finding that an industry inflicts large environmental damage compared with its apparent economic return doesn’t necessarily mean that the industry should be shut down.
What it means, instead, is that “the regulated levels of emissions from the industry are too high.”
That is, environmental regulations aren’t strict enough.
Republicans, of course, have strong incentives to claim otherwise: the big value-destroying industries are concentrated in the energy and natural resources sector, which overwhelmingly donates to the G.O.P.
But the reality is that more pollution wouldn’t solve our jobs problem.
All it would do is make us poorer and sicker.

And the planet gets warmer and warmer while ignorant dickheads fiddle.

(Illustration found here).

Yeah, well, not so fast there Juan Ponce de León: One might want to place a sorrowful hold on those alliterated adjectives upchucked as literary bullshit.

As a memory’s narrative goes: One can think back, but one can’t call back.

(Illustration found here).

I spent my formative years on the Gulf, enjoying the endless-vacation-like environment of Florida’s panhandle, never truly realizing back then its worth or how truly fortunate we were in having a home in one of the world’s most beautiful locations.
In fact, the panhandle (the major exception being Pensacola) was virtually unknown to the average Jack-American until the late 1960s when apparently everybody and his asshole-brother discovered it, causing the place to go to shit in a wire basket.
Oh, the beaches remained pure white, the waters continued warm, inviting and fairly-clean for the most part, but the entire area quickly became mega-crowded as condos, apartments, houses, golf courses and all other kinds of so-called civilized advancements filled the once pristine near-empty spaces.
For a few quick years, though, growing up there was amazing as “Flipper” and near-about as much fun.

Stretching from the state’s most-northwest boundary with Alabama eastward to about where the coastline makes its ragged jut to the south — leading to Tampa/St.Petersburg, Sarasota and on downward to the Keys — the Florida panhandle is mostly empty, save for the western coastline, as most of the area is still pretty-dense forest or swamp, occasionally spotted with small towns as a ride along I-10 west from Tallahassee will attest.

Panama City Beach has has always been the hot spring break destination for young revelers from Georgia and Alabama; even back when I was a shy, budding-neurotic in high school, PC was where cool, gorgeous chicks seemed to gather in great numbers.

And Destin — in the early 1960s just a nearly-unknown, quiet fishing-village-like place — was where baseball Hall-of-Famer Ted Williams (not the honey-voiced homeless guy from recent nowadays) and other worthies of that era came to fish the Gulf.
One memory of that period was my family’s near-daily visit to the Destin fishing docks and watch the boats return in the evening with the day’s catch — and in less than an hour, a pure circus of fishing admiration.
However, I’ve never really got fishing (my little brother really, really did) and the actual fish didn’t make as much impression on me as did the guy who’d caught it.
Now more than 50 years later, more of a nostalgic-honey-coated remembrance of seagulls, people enjoying people and quiet, easy sunsets.
And like a lot of other places all over, history has inflated the self-styled “World’s Luckiest Fishing Village,” to another level of location where Britney Spears owns a £631,000 apartment and has been marketed/packaged as destin.com.

Mega attraction for the region, naturally, is the pure-white beaches, created supposedly by mostly quartz, pure silica sand, washed down from the Appalachian Mountains over a shitload of time.
The sand “squeaked” or “chirped” when you walked on it.
Taken together as a whole, between the sun and white sand, you could easily fry your ass bad during a beach outing — people picking at peeling skin, however how gross, was nonetheless a familiar sight — and 40 years ago there were miles and miles and miles of near-empty white beaches.

One lingering sad, side-effect, however, of that Florida sand is the shitness of all other beaches in comparison.
Some parts of California’s beach sand actually looks like shit — and having never traveled to the Caribbean or the Bahamas or the south Pacific — that remembered stretch along the panhandle carries the personal title of most-beautiful beaches on the planet.

Away from all that pearly white was the land of the locals — few tourists ventured much-north off the coast — where my family relocated from Alabama in 1957.

(Illustration of Choctawhatchee Bay found here).

Choctaw Bay is an estuary, where Gulf salt water and fresh inland water intermingle, the bay’s only direct entrance to the Gulf is East Pass, just wee-west of Destin.
Growing up, I learned to spell the place only by doing this: Choc-ta-what-chee (or use the short, local version, ‘Choctaw‘).
Still, it was years for me before the whole spelling became near-natural — if one lives in a region, one learns to spell its local places.

My family moved to the western shore of Choctaw Bay, an area dominated (as is much of the central panhandle) by humongous Eglin Air Force Base (seen at left in the above photo, even from space); my dad was in the civil service with the US Department of Defense (we’d just returned a few months earlier from a two-year-post in Japan) and he’d secured a job at Eglin.

The biggest air force base in the world — 724 square miles of land range and 101,000 square miles of air space, which extends over the eastern third of the Gulf — Eglin is also home to a major military Air Proving Ground Center, where all kinds of aircraft, munitions and other assorted nefarious devices are tested.
One near-recent noted test was for an enlarged bunker-buster bomb, constructed in such a way to create an experience similar to Vietnam’s most-wonderful “daisy cutter,” only way-worse, used a few times in the opening rounds of the original Afghan war way back in 2001.

And like all regions located near any military installation, especially one as big as Eglin, everybody and just about everything in the entire area was somehow connected to the base — most of my friends were military brats, or civil-service brats, or in some capacity related directly or indirectly to the vast inner workings of the base.
Of course, mingled minutely amongst the military were the home-born locals, people my daddy seemed to always call, “fish heads” (a native of the west Florida coast), but to my upwardly-mobile middle class, racially-stained, though mega-naive view they seemed to me during those times more in the ‘poor white trash‘ category as anything else — memories remember me mostly feeling sorry for them.

Bigotry is inbred, or so it seems. And having grown up in the US deep south, bigotry is beyond horror, intolerance so much part of the system of life, it’s near invisible (to the white man, of course, not to the black) and the disease so deep, deep-rooted in the white religious-right it can’t help but breed a rather vicious form of hypocrisy.
(Maybe a later post on the mechanics of that attitude toward racial bigotry).

Anyway, back to Eglin Air Force Base and the early 1960s — my family eventually ended up in Shalimar, then a real-small town about three miles from of Eglin’s south gate, right on Choctaw Bay and a junction of two bayous.
In those early, long ago years — 1959 to 1972 for myself, with my parents moving back to Alabama in 1980 — that little peninsula-like knob of land was in the days of a black-and-white JFK, a playground of natural innocence, my own three-year Camelot (fifth through the eighth grades).

Shalimar is situated along major four-lane Eglin Parkway, and in them be-gone days, except for some homes along the shore line and a few houses sprinkled about amongst pines and palmetto, most of the town’s inhabitants didn’t live far off that main drag — the rest of the place was woods and swamp, a most-incredible place to explore and play.
Of course, the town grew, and grew quickly — by the end of the 1960s, a huge chunk of those woods and swamps were replaced by an 18-hole golf course and subsequent housing-subdivision (shown as Lake Lorraine on the little map just above) — and a Goggle Earth look at the place always makes me sad.
And my dad, I guess, helped the process along.
He was one of the town’s first mayors — mention is made of him at shalimarflorida.org:

When Tom Maulden was elected Mayor in 1974, he wanted a real Town Hall with a real Police Department. Blackburn (the Shalimar’s first ‘Police Chief John Blackburn) was hired on as the “Police Department.”
The beginnings were sparse.
Chief Blackburn didn’t have a police car, nor did he have any crime fighting equipment.
He patrolled the Town in his own car.
The Eglin Military Police donated the first RADAR equipment to the Police Department.
…
At that time, Shalimar also hired its first maintenance man and moved to 13 Cherokee Road, a few houses from the current Town Hall.
In April 1979 when Mr. Tom Maulden offered to sell the house at 2 Cherokee Road for $46,000 to the Town, the Commission agreed to pay cash and immediately moved into its new home — a former single family residence.
This old single family facility was extensively renovated and expanded in CY2001.

Dude, be cool, that ‘old single family facility‘ was where I spent them above-mentioned Camelot years.
In fact, while in the eighth-grade I got to see JFK in the flesh.
The visit to Eglin was briefly noted in a USAF Thunderbirds history: President John F. Kennedy was among the spectators at a May 1962 airshow at Eglin AFB, Florida, and in 1963, the “Tbirds” made their first European and North African tours.
The county school system suspended classes the day of JFK’s visit, so a friend and I got on Eglin via his aunt, who worked on base, and had staked out a spot along the president’s motorcade route, and seemingly had waited for hundreds of hours under a baking sun when he came into view, standing in back of an open limousine, waving to people on both sides of the street.
We waved back, don’t know if he actually saw us, but we could see him pretty plain — big guy, with that way-familiar face on a big head with big shoulders — and he quickly disappeared down a small one-lane road heading out to the runway and Air Force One.

Life in May 1962 was fairly simple.
And although the US performed nine nuclear bomb tests in the South Pacific during the month, and beyond the paranoid Cold War, the globe was some-what way-more peaceful (or it seems).
The so-called Cuban missile crisis wasn’t until that October, which shortly after the fact only enhanced JFK’s perceived Camelot and even brightened more so its fuel, the Great American Dream — two US home-grown fairy tales.

Snug in the cocoon of illusion, however, makes for a different view.
During those long-ago Camelot days, a whole shitload of activity was water-centric, from swimming, boating, fishing, swimming, water-skiing, walking shorelines/beaches, swimming…one gets the picture…especially for a middle-class, dreamy-headed teen-ager in a way-naive era.

In the lower-eastern corner of Choctaw Bay is the mouth of the Choctawhatchee River (shown on the map at left), its origin found in middle-eastern Alabama, not far from the Georgia state line, and flows south into the bay.
One of the main tributaries off the Choctaw River, is the Pea River (yes, that’s ‘pea,’ but as in sweet pea), which begins as beaver swamps in southeast Alabama, meanders a little west, then back east bit through a few counties, one being the place of my birth, Pike County.
The Pea joins the Choctaw River at about the Florida state line.

My parents build a retirement home on property right on the Pea River.
As did other relatives, who either lived on or near the river — it was a part of a landscape called the ‘wiregrass region,’ which included not only southeast Alabama, but parts of south Georgia and northwest Florida as well (named for the kind of grass, called wiregrass, found in the area).

In my neck of the woods — Pike, Dale and Coffee counties — the Pea River was also a socio-economic barrier: People north of the river tended to be viewed as a bit more drunkard, poor and slothful, closer to lawless status, than those south of the Pea, who were looked upon to be ‘good folks,’ i.e., less drinkin’, fightin’ and such (hypocrisy seemed to flourish much-much-easier south of the river, however).
My parents bridged the gap: She was from south of the river, and he from the north, and there was much acrimony for awhile, from what I could tell in my earliest years, but my dad slowly put aside those quasi-outlaw tendencies of the poor and ignorant to obtain a certain level of life, which included later being elected mayor of a Florida town.
And was ultimately viewed with much affection and trust by peoples both north and south of the Pea River (he died in 1984, my mom in 1998).

And having performed a great deal of swimming in the Pea River during my younger days, the chances are way-high that I’ve also peed in the Pea River — you can pretty-much bet your wet ass anybody that’s took a swim in the Pea has put pee in the Pea.
(Theoretically-biologically, and not to mention way-metaphorically, there were visits to my grandparents in Alabama when I would swim in the Pea River, pee in the river (remember, I’m in the sixth-grade), return back to Shalimar, later on walk a block and go swimming in Choctaw Bay, thus, having a chance (though, way-way-minute) of swimming in way-diluted strains of my own urine).

Thus, the Gulf of Mexico is tied to beyond just the white-beached shoreline, but way-up into soil and life hundreds of miles away — all kinds of fish, birds, and all kinds of other animals and plant life dwell among what has through nature’s time created an environment inter-locked and depended upon waters lapping up from the Gulf.
And, thus, prey to mankind’s Camelot.

Of course, Camelot itself is a lie based on a misty myth bedazzled in journalism — actually living in those Kennedy years, no one called, or even thought about that particular period as any kind of anything, much less a Camelot.
Jackie Kennedy in cohorts with journalist/family friend Theodore White cooked-up the “classic metaphor“ for a heroic national myth to rescue Jack Kennedy’s presidency from reality.

In my own case, the early 1960s were just a good time to be young in that environment –  though, coincidently, within a short space due to circumstance and events, starting in early summer 1963, before Kennedy’s death, and lasting at least through the Beatles on Ed Sullivan a few weeks afterwards, that ’good time being young‘ sense evaporated.

(Illustration found here).

An illusion created by the past made unreal by history.
And Jackie O, herself, has popped up in the news — this year is the 50th-anniversary of JFK’s presidency, and in that regard, a new oral-history book, Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy, which also includes CDs of the audio of interviews she had with historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. in March 1964.
Reportedly, those tapes paint a picture of a then-34-year-old widow as variously audacious, narrow-minded and unsparingly tart (via LA Times).
And Jackie, though, in “the extreme stages of grief” displays a cool self-possession and a sharp, somewhat unforgiving eye (via New York Times).
Either deliberate or not, Jackie also really knew how to handle historical public perception.

Despite the tart mouth and the public-tell-all, came this apt comment from a piece in the Christian Science Monitor: But bits of the book remind you why at one point Americans could mention the Kennedy presidency in conjunction with the word “Camelot” and not wince.

Those Americans were most especially us baby boomers.
If you have any inclination to the progressive, you took the bait, hook-line-and-sinker, on the myth of JFK’s Camelot.
And the myth dove-tailed nicely with the late 1960s and Vietnam.

Just as a few simple words from a Broadway musical could unleash a romantic myth, there’s the simpleton fancy that life should continue on as before, only getting better — never-ending human economic growth is a myth — an economic Camelot, if you will.
My family climbed the ladder of the American Dream in the 1950s, a period of robust economic optimism (despite the Russkies), and indeed, for a time appearances indicated life could continue bigger, better.
The last near-200 years, the engine for global civilization moving forward is that economic societies grow and continually expand, thus, moving humanity on down history street.

In 1972 — with the US and the Western world at its peak — was published a book, “The Limits to growth: A report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind,” which pretty-much outlined nowadays (though, at the time the book was met with much criticism) in a curb on this so-called expansion.
Physical chemistry professor and writer Ugo Bardi explains about “The Limits to Growth” at cassandra’s legacy: The authors had developed a model that could keep track of a large number of variables and of their interactions as the system changed with time. They found that the world’s economy tended to collapse at some time in 21st century. The collapse was caused by a combination of resource depletion, overpopulation, and growing pollution (this last element we would see today as related to global warming). Only specific measures aimed a curbing growth and limit population could avoid collapse.

Yet here we are nearly 40 years later.

The global economic meltdown is just part-and-parcel for a situation that just can’t keep on, keeping on — the resources just ain’t there.
Former World Bank economist Herman Daly in a May 2008 article at The Oil Drum:

The growth economy is failing.
In other words, the quantitative expansion of the economic subsystem increases environmental and social costs faster than production benefits, making us poorer not richer, at least in high consumption countries.
Given the laws of diminishing marginal utility and increasing marginal costs this should not have been unexpected.
And even new technology sometimes makes it worse.

In other words, life as we know it…

(Illustration found here).

Fueling that economic machine, of course, is oil.
And it’s not just the obvious, like cars, airplanes, and ships at sea — oil dominates the planet:

Oil is everywhere.
It permeates our daily lives in ways we never think about.
It’s in carpeting, furniture, computers and clothing.
It’s in the most personal of products like toothpaste, shaving cream, lipstick and vitamin capsules. Petrochemicals are the glue of our modern lives and even in glue, too.

And that glue is about to harden, get brittle and break into tiny, little pieces.

I actually started this particular post more than a year ago — in June 2010 at the height of the BP horror show in the Gulf of Mexico when it appeared oil would gush out of those pipes for a millennium.
Although the accident was in my old backyard, I never blogged once about the event — instead I opted for daydreaming at the old laptop as the continuing disaster fueled a nostalgic blast from the past.

Although most of the TV news clips were of the New Orleans/Mississippi gulf coast, there was plenty of video of the beaches at Destin, Fort Walton Beach, Panama City Beach, Pensacola, all along my old Camelot haunts — but for some internal reason, I couldn’t put memories into written words, except for little bursts.
So this piece lay buried in my ‘Draft’ box, where I picked at it like some kind of literary sore, adding a paragraph here, removing words from there, doing tons of Google Images search for the early 1960s, or maybe just being caught up in other news of war, death and pestilence, GOPer and Tea Party hypers that once the BP well was capped (supposedly) the post became itself a thing of the past.

Jackie O rekindled the interest.
Since this particular post was on the concept of a Camelot, a myth for just about everything, especially the economic one, and more-than-especially, the Camelot of oil, hearing that strangely-sounding-voice speak across the decades made me really sad.
So sad, apparently, I had to finish this long-winded trope.

And like any good mythical story turned real, the BP disaster in the Gulf is one of those stories that just keeps on giving — and reinforcing the need to go after energy in the worst of places.
An example: The reportedly huge oil reserves offshore of Brazil, to be producing in about two years, are way, way down yonder.
Ian Wyatt, chief investment strategist at High Yield Wealth (via QFinance):

“… most of the oil in Brazil is in very deep water.
How deep?
Well first they must go down through 6,000 to 9,000 feet of water to access the sea floor…Then through 6,000 feet of rock…Then push further through a layer of salt that’s another 6,000 feet deep…Then finally, at a depth of between 18,000 and 21,000 feet they’ll hit the oil reservoir.
That’s the equivalent of three and a half to four miles down.”

Are you shitting me?
Deepwater Horizon’s drill permit was for 18,000 feet, though, apparently there have been indications the drilling had gone another 7,000 feet further.

Just last week, the BP horror show via the weather: A coastal mayor says tests show tar balls washed onto Alabama’s beaches by a recent tropical storm are from last year’s BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Orange Beach Mayor Tony Kennon said Tuesday the connection was found in preliminary tests performed by Auburn University. Kennon says additional tests will be conducted to determine more details.
The shit will never be totally gone.

Also last week, a new report indicates more arrogant incompetence by BP led to the Deepwater Horizon blowout:

Other investigations have faulted misreadings of key data, the failure of the blowout preventer to stop the flow of oil to the sea, and other shortcomings by executives, engineers and rig crew members.
Meanwhile, interviews and documents obtained by The Associated Press show a BP scientist identified a previously unreported deposit of flammable gas that could have played a role in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, but the oil giant failed to divulge the finding to government investigators for as long as a year.

And this the oil industry which is just about regulating itself — a New York Times piece this week revealed just how horribly operated is those pipelines to get that deep-dug oil to refineries and then on to my Jeep Comanche.
Those recent big spills into the Yellowstone and Kalamazoo rivers have drawn attention to oversight of the 167,000-mile system of hazardous liquid pipelines crisscrossing the nation.
Add least we forget, also include that hazardous PG&E-maintained natural gas pipeline in San Bruno, California, which exploded last September, killing eight people and destroying a neighborhood.
And last month, the National Transportation Safety Board jammed on PG&E, tore the utility a new asshole, reporting the company:

…exploited the lack of monitoring by regulators, who mistakenly placed “blind trust” in the utility.
…
“This represents a failure of the entire system — a system of checks and balances that should have prevented this disaster,” said Robert L. Sumwalt, an NTSB board member. “The seam weld may have been the technical reason, but this was an organizational accident.”

Not only does one have to contend with the high-minded concept of ‘peak oil,’ but having an enormous accident-waiting-to-happen in one’s own backyard.

Mankind is poised most-likely beyond the precipice, gripped in the double pincers of peak oil and climate change — odd ironic circle as both are nefariously interconnected.
Camelot as confounded.

(Illustration found here).

And just chucked-full of black humor.

Progress may have been all right once, but it went on too long…
– Ogden Nash, “Come, Come, Kerouac! My Generation is Beater Than Yours,” New Yorker, 1959 April 4 .

Happy memories of un-reality.