And You Thought I was a Downer

Here's someone who's really worried about Peak Oil. But then again, living in Tucson, he'd better be. Scary once one begins thinking how much oil gets used to pump water and condition air in our fastest growing "communities." Or, how much goes into growing, processing, transporting and refrigerating our food (a.k.a., corn). Or, how much is used to pave the roads and fuel the airplanes and ships that make us one small, happy, globalized world (for a little while longer, anyway). It's really not clear how most of the areas of new settlement in the U.S. post-World War II are going to make it - places like much of the arid southwest or the tropical south. Or, perhaps I should say, it's all too clear. A tidbit:

Peak oil is the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. If World War II rates a 1 on a scale of 1 to 10, global warming is a 3 and peak oil is a 12. Most experts who write about peak oil predict complete economic collapse within a decade, followed shortly thereafter by anarchy.

And here's a wicked rant from my favorite ranter, James Kunstler. Another tidbit:

I believe the stunning failure of [fiscal] responsibility actually can be accounted for, though my theory may not be to everyone's taste (especially the science hard-asses out there). In a word: entropy. The US has enjoyed unprecedented energy inputs and the result is unprecedented entropy outputs. The protean force of entropy then manifests as degradation in just about everything around us from the immersive ugliness of a landscape overbuilt with WalMarts, Pizza Huts, and vinyl houses, to the sexual perversion available on the Internet, to the surrender of standards and norms by executives in the financial sector. It's as simple as that. Entropy rules.

Oh, yea, have a nice day :)