World's poor pay price

LOS BAÑOS, Philippines: The brown plant hopper, an insect no bigger than a gnat, is multiplying by the billions and chewing through rice paddies in East Asia, threatening the diets of many poor people.

The damage to rice crops, occurring at a time of scarcity and high prices, could have been prevented. Researchers at the International Rice Research Institute here say that they know how to create rice varieties resistant to the insects but that budget cuts have prevented them from doing so.

NVDL: In exactly the same way are ability to combat H5N1's tricks and manifestations is decreasing by the day. The human race has never been more vulnerable to so many converging catastrophes as it is now, and the majority of people still take great exception to that statement, feeling it to be 'negative' or 'doomsday' or an 'exaggeration'. This willful ignorance drives us even deeper and further into the trouble we're due to face, and are presently facing.

This is a stark example of the many problems that are coming to light in the world's agricultural system. Experts say that during the food surpluses of recent decades, governments and development agencies lost focus on the importance of helping poor countries improve their agriculture.

The budgets of institutions that delivered the world from famine in the 1970s, including the rice institute, have stagnated or fallen, even as the problems they were trying to solve became harder.

"People felt that the world food crisis was solved, that food security was no longer an issue, and it really fell off the agenda," said Robert Zeigler, the director general of the rice institute.

Vital research programs have been slashed. At the rice institute, scientists have identified 14 genetic traits that could help rice plants survive the plant hopper, which sucks the juices out of young plants while infecting them with viruses. But the scientists have had no money to breed these traits into the world's most widely used rice varieties.

The institute is the world's main repository of rice seeds as well as genetic and other information about rice, the crop that feeds nearly half the world's people.

But at the International Rice Research Institute, greenhouses have peeling paint and holes in their screens and walls. Hallways are dotted with empty offices. In the 1980s, the institute employed five entomologists, or insect experts, overseeing a staff of 200. Now it has one entomologist with a staff of eight.

"We've had an exodus here," said Yvette Naredo, an assistant geneticist.

Similar troubles plague other centers in Asia, Africa and Latin America that work on crop productivity in poor countries. Agricultural experts have complained about the flagging efforts for years and warned of the risks.

"Nobody was listening," said Thomas Lumpkin, director general of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico.

Now, a reckoning is at hand. Growth of the global food supply has slowed as the population has continued to increase, and as economic growth is giving millions of poor people the money to buy more food.

With demand beginning to outstrip supply, prices have soared, and food riots have erupted that have undermined the stability of foreign governments. World leaders are scrambling to respond. On May 1, President George W. Bush asked Congress for an extra $770 million to pay for food aid and to help farmers improve their productivity.

But cuts in agricultural research continue. The United States is in the midst of slashing, by as much as 75 percent, its $59.5 million annual support for a global research network that focuses on improving crops vital to agriculture in poor countries. That network includes the rice institute.

Robert Bertram, who oversees the funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development, said he was still trying to stop the cuts and argued that research to improve crop yields was "like putting money in the pockets of poor people, and I mean billions of poor people."

The Agency for International Development is the primary vehicle for the U.S. government to finance development projects abroad. James Kunder, its acting deputy administrator, said the agency hoped to reconsider the cutbacks if Congress allows extra money.

Crop by crop and country by country, agricultural research and development are lagging.

The biggest cutbacks have come in donations to agriculture in poor countries from the governments of wealthy countries and in loans from development institutions that the wealthy governments control, like the World Bank. Such projects include not only research on pests and crops but also programs to help farmers adopt improved methods in their fields.

Adjusting for inflation and exchange rates, the wealthy countries, as a group, cut such donations by more than half from 1980 to 2006, to $2.8 billion a year from $6 billion.

"Agriculture has been so productive and done so well, people have kind of lost sight of how fragile it really is," said Jan Leach, a plant pathologist at Colorado State University who works with rice.

"It's as if we have lost track of the fact that food is linked to agriculture, which is linked to human survival."

More.

Heinberg: Saying Goodbye to Air Travel

The airline industry has no future.

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

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

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

Are there other options for powered flight?

Hydrogen could be burned in jet engines, but doing so would require a complete redesign of our commercial aircraft fleet, and H2 would be expensive to make—unless the growing trend toward more costly electricity (as we phase out depleting, polluting coal and increasingly scarce natural gas) can somehow be reversed.

Last year I was invited to give the keynote address at the world's first Electric Aircraft Symposium. NASA and Boeing sent representatives, but all told there were only about 20 in attendance. The planes being discussed were ultralight two-seaters: that's the limit of current or foreseeable battery technology. These might come in handy in a future where they are the only option for emergency air travel (blimps need depleting helium or explosive hydrogen). But forget about 300-seat planes running on solar or wind power, ferrying middle-class vacationers to Bali or Venice.

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

I fly to educate both general audiences and policy makers about fossil fuel depletion; in fact, I'm writing this article aboard a plane en route from Boston to San Francisco. I wince at my carbon footprint, but console myself with the hope that my message helps thousands of others to change their consumption patterns. This inner conflict is about to be resolved: the decline of affordable air travel is forcing me to rethink my work. I'm already starting to do much more by video teleconference, much less by jet.

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

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

From here.

Kunstler: The Risk Economy

As the West's industrial regime sputters toward a cheap-energy-crackup conclusion, there have been attempts to recast what our economy is actually about, how to account for whatever wealth we manage to produce, and project what our society will actually be organized to do in the years ahead.

For a while in the 1990s, the idea was a "service economy," kind of like the old fable of the town whose inhabitants made a living by taking in each other's laundry -- only in our case it was selling hamburgers to tourists on vacation from their jobs making hamburgers elsewhere, or something like that.

Then came the idea of the "information economy" in which making things of value would no longer matter, only the processing and deployment of information (sometimes misidentified as "knowledge"). This model seemed to suggest a yin-yang of software engineers who made up games like "Grand Theft Auto" serving the opposite cohort of people who bought and played the game. If nothing else, it certainly explained how lifetimes could be frittered away on stupid activities.

That illusion yielded to the housing bubble economy, which actually did produce a lot of things, but not necessarily of value -- for instance, houses made of particle board and vinyl 38 miles outside of Sacramento. It was a tragic and manifold waste of resources, as well as an insult to the landscape. But the darker side of the housing bubble lay in the world of finance, where a vast empire of swindles was constructed to support the Potemkin facade of production homebuilding.
Now we are in a strange period when those swindles are unwinding. The people who run the finance sector -- the Wall Street investment banks, hedge funds and ratings agencies, the Federal Reserve, and the US Dept of the Treasury -- in desperately trying to prevent the unwind, have rapidly ramped up another new economy based entirely on the buying and selling of risk. Risk, as a pure abstraction unconnected to any real capital activity, is all that's left to buy and sell after all other plausibly practical vehicles for finance have failed.

While a lack of transparency in the individual risk vehicles has been an object of complaint over the past year, the system as whole is transparently absurd. The system is also abstruse enough to prevent most mortals (including many employed in the system) from understanding its operations. But the general public and the news media are virtually helpless to intervene in this last gasp racket, so the probability increases that it will do tremendous damage to whatever remains of the US economy.

One feature of the risk economy is the Federal Reserve's new willingness to absorb any sort of crap collateral in exchange for massive cheap loans to insolvent companies and institutions. The Fed has, in effect, made itself the world's largest financial shit-magnet. It has already taken in a few hundred billion in securities based on non-performing real estate loans, and has now opened the window to securities based on non-performing credit card debt, car loans, and other miscellaneous IOUs still drifting un-hedged in the banking ether.

It's a mark of our collective desperation to avoid the consequences of so much reckless behavior that no credible authorities have stepped up to denounce this racket -- no Fed governor, no politician of standing (including the candidates for president), no newspaper-of-record. The Attorney-general of New York, Andrew Cuomo, may be quietly cooking up some cases in the deep background, but the SEC and the federal banking regulators hung up their "out-to-lunch" signs on this long ago.

Meanwhile, the basic situation is this: the world is awash with bad investment paper. The standard of living in the US can't be supported on debt anymore. The people of the US don't produce enough real value to service their debts. Institutions can no longer be supported on debt gone bad. Something's got to give -- meaning something has to bring the US standard of living down to a level consistent with our declining actual wealth.

Everything else going on right now is a dodge. The Fed maneuvers, the "coordinated actions" of the western central banks, the postponements of default, the non-disclosure of contents in bank portfolios, the pretense that risk alone is a kind of fungible resource that can be endlessly traded to generate fees -- all this fucking nonsense will only make the eventual unwinding much worse.
Personally, I doubt that it can go on more than a few more months. The velocity of everything is going up past the "red line" where things really fly apart. The increased velocity of non-performing mortgages and deadbeat credit card accounts is one thing that can't be hidden or escaped. America will feel and see very vividly when the repossession teams rush families from their homes, when the pickup truck is taken away, and when the pink slip appears in the pay envelope. Meanwhile all the higher-end banking shenanigans will only debase the dollar and make it more difficult for people already in distress to buy gasoline and food.

If the bankers and treasury officials collude to prop up one more failing big bank a la Bear Stearns, the political fallout for Wall Street could be lethal. In any case, I think we will have a way different sense of ourselves as a society by the time the election comes.

NVDL: This Business Day article is interesting:

Standard Bank said the recent trends in South African house price growth, when compared to trends in the US, could at first glance seem ominous for the outlook for South African residential property.

"Increasingly, there are comparisons being made between the subprime-induced housing recession in the US housing market and the current challenging conditions facing the South African housing market.

"Given the dismal house price growth currently being experienced in SA, the question of whether or not the South African housing market will experience a deep recession similar to that being experienced in the US housing market is being asked with increasing frequency.

"However, our analysis of the sources of the recession in the US housing market and its subsequent transmission mechanism to the rest of the US economy suggests that South African residential property will experience a relatively mild cyclical downturn rather than a full blown recession," Standard Bank said.

No, this ain't no mild cyclical downturn, but expect to hear a lot of 'experts' kidding themselves and us that this is the case. Peak Oil means that the conditions we experience now will gradually and intractably worsen, meaning we are by and far heading for a full blown recession along with all that entails: unemployment, crime, shortages, and general austerity. What makes this scenario bleak is we will see it from Johannesburg to Georgia, from Peru to Paris, and everywhere in between. We will see petrol prices going up by another 50 cents in two days, and our petrol pumps are not even geared to deal with so many digits. Neither, apparently, are our hearts and minds.

I predict that for the next few seasons communities are increasingly going to play catch-up to the actual state of affairs, turning to experts and pundits, presidents and hopefuls, in the skewed hope that good news has anything to do with what will actually happen. The people to turn to now are those with a new lease on life, those who are doing something different - it might be farming, or acquiring or building alternative energy systems or otherwise investing in new forms of technology, those who have started to radically change their lifestyles (what they eat), even their jobs.

In the end, reality speaks better than any man.

Richard Heinberg: It's Happening

There is a surreal quality to the experience of seeing the unfolding of unpleasant events that one has predicted. Plenty of times over the past few years I’ve said, "I want to be proven wrong!" Who in their right mind would wish to see economic collapse and famine? But it was obvious that, given the direction our society is headed, these must be the consequences.

Now, with oil at $117 a barrel, the US economy teetering, and food riots erupting in Haiti, Egypt, and Asia, one could perhaps gain some satisfaction in saying "I told you so." But what faint compensation that would be. We are all going to have to share the bitter fruits of our society's century-long growth binge, whether we have criticized it or participated wholeheartedly.

The only silver lining is the possibility that now, at last, as the trends (Peak Oil, the failure of growth-based economics, the failure of industrial agriculture, climate chaos, and so on) are becoming so starkly clear, policy makers will begin seriously to contemplate a Plan B (or C, as Pat Murphy insists). For those of us who have been lobbying in that latter direction for some while, this is no time to let up, but rather the ideal moment to redouble our efforts.

NVDL: Now is the ideal moment to redouble our efforts. Exactly.

Told you so: Oil at $117, Biofuels under attack as world food prices soar

I'm not gonna mirror all the news on Biofuels here. Suffice it to say before the Biofuels were even endorsed or implemented, a lot of people were saying that neither Biofuels or any other combination of alternatives was gonna allow us to run the world's highway systems the way we are running them. But oil prices are $117 now, so every ostensible 'investment' into fuel comes with a lot more pressure - especially from consumers that are starting to go nuts as they realise they're not going to get through the month.

The answer mustn't be to find alternatives, as in alternatives fuels, it must be in finding different ways to get around, changing our infrastructure, re-engineering and retrofitting suburbia, getting trains going etc. Unfortunately, since we've been stupid and distracted, we'll now find we can't afford to make those changes, and the changes we can afford to make are going to become fewer as our choices become fewer.

Meanwhile the US has 1 new ethanol plant up and running every 2 weeks - right now they have 139 Ethanol Plants. They want to increase this by 300%.

But the hype is even more misleading than everyone thought. The run off from the fertilizers used (and the coal used to fire up these ethanol plants) is creating a lot more pollution than conventional fuel production. I think it's 29% more energy intensive and thus polluting than conventional refining. So much for 'clean' energy. And when you fill your tank with ethanol, it burns quicker, meaning you use more fuel to go the same distance. Ethanol won't satisfy our fuel-for-cars energy appetite, not even close. But then this blog (and many besides) have been saying that for a long time before Biofuels became Campaign Speak in the US.

Biofuels under attack as world food prices soar
Oil hits record $117 a barrel

Finance Ministers Emphasize Food Crisis Over Credit Crisis

WASHINGTON — The world’s economic ministers declared on Sunday that shortages and skyrocketing prices for food posed a potentially greater threat to economic and political stability than the turmoil in capital markets.

More.

NVDL: It might be possible for the stupid and deluded masses to begin to see the obvious signals now. High oil prices = high food prices + climate change = higher food prices + increased activity to attempt to continue our easy motoring culture (eg biofuel farming) = increased climate change + higher fuel/food prices = wiping out the poor, then the middle class. The poor and middle class won't take kindly to being wiped out, and the backlash will herald a particularly austere period for a world that is already de-stabilised for its own reasons. In a period where human communities need to be particularly effective, organised and able to mobilise, we will most likely resort to chaos and war, making the situation worse (for ourselves), but at least by and large the problem of over-consumption, excessive demand etc will be solved by a self-culling of our species. Equilibrium after aftershoot demands a crash, and it is likely to be spectacularly catastrophic.

Sorry if this sounds doomsdayish. If your house is burning and you wake the person up and say, "Your house is burning," he is perfectly entitled to say, "That's very negative; the end of the world is by no means nigh, and besides, looking around me I can't see or smell anything that would lead me to believe you," and go back to sleep. But the person who sees the curtains curling up in flames and the persian carpets starting to smoke is also perfectly justified to prod the sleeper awake and at least attempt to let him know - unpleasant as the news is - what is happening and what is imminently going to happen.

Calling it 'doomsday' is the sort of dismissive attitude to bad news that has gotten humanity slogging through shit filled marshlands.

World Bickering Starts As Oil Prices (and their implications) Bite

Brent Crude Oil is now $109.34 (up 0.54%), and we can already clearly see how countries (and their populations) are dealing with higher food and fuel prices. They're moaning. In many countries there are mass protests. Blame, argue, jump up and down. Prices are going to get worse, not better, and people's reactions, in step, will become more inflamed.

New wave of food protests

At least two dozen deaths have been reported in riots sparked by a sharp increase in food and fuel prices around the world, most recently in Egypt, Senegal, Cameroon and Côte d'Ivoire.

We can generally anticipate (in South Africa in particular) a worsening scenario with regard to the affordability of basic services. Civilian reactions are likely to exacerbate these conditions, culminating in civil strife, looting, burning and pillaging.

Fuel Costs Just Part of Airlines’ List of Woes

Even before the recent flight cancellations, airlines and passengers were facing a new wave of travel misery.

Record-high fuel prices and the industry’s fragile finances have led to a new round of bankruptcies among smaller carriers in recent weeks, including ATA Airlines, Skybus and Aloha Airgroup.
Bigger airlines are shrinking their fleets to cut fuel costs, even as demand for travel remains strong — meaning flights are growing more crowded and unpleasant.

By JEFF BAILEY
More.

Related
If You Must Fly, Some Suggestions (April 9, 2008)
For Pilots, Dreams Run Into Reality (April 10, 2008)
New Delays Loom as F.A.A. Expands Airliner Review (April 10, 2008)
Another Delivery Delay for Boeing’s Dreamliner (April 10, 2008)
Times Topics: Air Travel

Multimedia
Graphic
Fuel Price Pressure

NVDL: South African Airways' days are numbered.

Iran begins installing more centrifuges

TEHRAN, Iran - Iran has begun installing 6,000 new centrifuges at its uranium enrichment plant in Natanz, state television quoted President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as saying Tuesday.

The U.S. immediately criticized the announcement as an example of Iran's continued defiance of international demands that it suspend uranium enrichment, which can produce fuel for a nuclear reactor or fissile material for a weapon.

"Today's announcement reflects the Iranian leadership's continuing violation of international obligations and refusal to address international concerns," said Gregory Schulte, the U.S. representative to the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency.

Iran already has about 3,000 centrifuges operating at its underground nuclear facility in Natanz, and the U.N. has passed three sets of sanctions against Iran for its refusal to suspend uranium enrichment.

More.

NVDL: Is it possible to use nuclear contaminated petrol in my car? Btw in case you're not sure, a war with Iran is a certainty. It's just a matter of timing for the US. I'm not saying it's right, I'm might be saying it's Economics, but I am saying it's a certainty.

Global food crisis looms as grain prices soar

RICE and maize hit record prices yesterday on speculation that global demand for cereals would not be met as governments in producer countries curb exports to prevent protests.

Rice, the staple food for about 3-billion people — nearly half the world’s population — rose 2,4% in Chicago yesterday after doubling in the past year. Soya beans advanced for the third day and wheat also rose.

Harvests have been reduced by drought in countries including Canada and Australia, and by a US freeze followed by excessive rain last year. China, India and Vietnam have cut rice exports and Indonesia has reduced import tariffs to protect food supplies and cool inflation.

Rest of this Business Day article here.

NVDL: And guys like Mobius are dreaming that emerging growth market is going to carry on singing over the long term. It's not going to happen. There has been a fundamental shift in the system, and we are now heading down the other side of the bell curve (towards contraction).

My Year Without A Car (and why we all need to imagine what it’s like)

The essential energy we need to run suburbia just isn’t there, for everyone, any more

So people occasionally ask me: "You keep moaning about oil prices. What are YOU doing about it?" The answer is I've lived it. I've purposefully spent a year in SA without a car, and I've also been a strict vegetarian. Believe me when I say: IT'S NOT AN EASY CHOICE. Once my exile from the world had served its purpose, I must admit, I was relieved to be back in the world of bakkies and braaivleis. Unfortunately, that choice, the alternatives we now have, will not last forever. In fact we're likely to see in this generation, our lifetimes, how whole sectors of the population begin to find that although they felt entitled to a house, a car, a job, a family and kids - it's just not going to happen.

Background

Even if we’re asked to gradually bid our cars farewell, it’s likely to be with plenty of gnashing of teeth. And what then? Will it be back to Platform 9 and a half, and minding the gap? Nick van der Leek goes on one of our toughest assignments yet, to compile this report.

Believe me, it’s not easy to let go of our entitlements: those things we feel we have a right to, like a house in suburbia, a car, a job, groceries and whatever else you want at a local supermarket, movies, laptops and gadgets galore. All of this stuff has been accessible to us because it’s been built on a foundation we’ve not even thought about (until recently): cheap energy. When energy becomes more expensive, everything else does too: from food to flying. Parting with, or even making do with less of any one of these luxuries is going to be really tough.

And what if we had to give up all our entitlements? I know what you’re thinking. ‘What could possibly happen to create a scenario where we’d have to do that?’ Well, the next generation, expecting the same life their parents had, will find that they have far fewer choices than we now have: the future will be about living locally, moving around a lot less and making do with less. We’re about to discover the limits of our world: it has finite resources (something scientists have been saying for at least a generation), even if our wants and demands aren’t finite. Humanity’s begging birdies’ beaks will find – during our generation – the essential energy we need just isn’t there any more, there’s just not enough for everyone (all 6 billion of us) any more, no matter how early the birds go out. What do I mean? Estimates differ, but the world is predicted to ‘not have enough’ oil from around about now.

Given the pace of alternatives (not even close to the pace of current demand for fossil fuel driven technology) the era of cheap, easy motoring and affordable everything else will soon be at an end. This year world oil production decreased. Demand increased once again, and shows no sign of abating. How can it when India and China – there’s a third of world’s population right there – coming online. The question is, will we be able to transition to an alternative project, or will the world fall apart in attempting to do so? The question is not: will we transition smoothly? It’s certain to be a difficult change. The Western world is used to convenience, and the next era will be everything but convenient. It will be tough, on a massive scale.

Woe betide the world when we suddenly wake up to discover: Ooops. Not enough oil for the world to get to the next station. And the world is some project. There are thousands of cities with black stuff running through their veins (pretty much symbolized by complex grids of black tar road radiating into suburbia.) I mean, just think about the daily demand of just a couple of cities out there with 30 million plus people (like Seoul, Tokyo and Mexico). And everyday those people have to go to work. There’s suburban sprawl everywhere, from Jozi to Jericho, that depends on cars swimming in and out to keep it fed.

Actual Experience

Living without a car is a snip if you don’t live in South Africa, or rural Australia, or most of the USA and Canada. I lived in a satellite of Seoul for four years and you know, I didn’t even want a car. London was harder, since taxi’s are so expensive there and buses aren’t quite as ubiquitous as in the Far East. But living without a car in South Africa is about as fun as chewing on someone else’s toenails. No, not something anyone would cheerfully volunteer for.

So how did it happen? Well, first of all, nearly a decade abroad got me into the habit of getting around using public transport, and doing some walking. In Korea in particular, plenty of those walks were through parks, and if you’ve seen how polluted and crammed full of people the streets can be, parks are just the tonic to restore the beleaguered soul. Busses in Korea literally pull up 5, 10 minutes apart, tops. And when I didn’t feel like walking, I cycled. I suppose I should admit, right off the bat here that I’m a triathlete, so finding a variety of ways and means to get around is something I’m sort’ve trained to do.
But training or not, there was a specific psychology I began to adopt during the second half of my two year stint in South Korea.

You see, I read books like Twilight in the Desert, Hubbert’s Peak; The Impending World Oil Shortage and the scariest of them all, James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency; Surviving the converging catastrophes of the 21st century. Were you taken in by Y2K? I was, but instead of babysitting a food cupboard filled with canned beans, I spent December 31st 1999 drinking and dancing at the Grotto Restaurant in Hermanus. Perhaps I overdid the dancing bit, because someone said: “You took two [ecstasy pills] didn’t you?” I nodded, but actually, I was just hyper. (With that short anecdote I hope I’ve demonstrated I’m not a gullible geek, a drug addict or boringly normal).

Like those who have tried to sell bottled sea water, or bought into dodgy pyramid schemes, or anti-aging creams, I got taken in by the Peak Oil alarmists. I even wrote to author James Kunstler (and still do), for advice on surviving the end of the world (of oil, but what’s the diffs), and on becoming a writer. He told me (to make it as a writer) I’d need a proclivity for punishment. I told him I did the Ironman in 2005. “Well then,” he enthused, “you more than qualify!”

So there you have it. Take a triathlete, add a propensity for suffering, the capacity to endure, and a governing psychology predicting a never-ending oil famine, and you have the perfect volunteer for this assignment. When I returned to South Africa in November last year, I naturally had to think carefully about these three vital issues: location, location, location. Where to live, where to work, where to be entertained. Bloemfontein turned out to be my first and best choice, not least because my girlfriend was based here. I’d met her at a gym in Bloemfontein in March 2005, a few days before my Ironman. The relationship rocketed to new levels when I picked her up in a royal blue, restored, long bodied gas guzzler: a Willy’s Jeep with big, silver, masculine alloy wheels. Thanks dad. And after a very romantic frolic on our farm, I jetted off to the Ironman in Port Elizabeth, then back to Korea where I completed the last chapters of brainwashing. The relationship went on the backburner, but the fire had by no means gone out. When I arrived in Bloem at the beginning of summer, we kick started the relationship against the background of my re-integration into South African society. I spent the first few months staying with my father. Meanwhile, I’d integrated the deeply held views about energy conservation, and developing local infrastructure.

The culture shock was intense. You feel it when you leave South Africa and arrive in Asia, and if you stay long enough, you get reverse culture shock in a big way, when you come back, too. For one thing, South Africa feels like early Sunday morning, every day, for the first few weeks. The roads just seem permanently empty, even if you’re in the biggest urban centre you can find. Even Jozi feels dead compared to the endless gridlock and snarling, belching of Korea’s monstrous traffic.

So how did I do it? Well, even Bloem, where you can cycle across the diameter of the city in less than an hour, sooner or later, you’re going to need a car. It’s abundantly obvious from the word go that public transport is virtually non-existent. Even if you were determined to use it, that might mean waiting an entire afternoon for a single bus. The alternative is the mini-bus taxi. I considered it once, but kept seeing very clear front page articles, titled: Stupid White Guy Left For Dead After Riding In Taxi, or Idiot’s Body Still Missing: Pair of Oakley’s in a field remain the only clue.

It’s not that I’m a sissy. I’ve done a very risky and illegal 5 hour trip at night along the Philippino island of Palawan in a pumpboat. A mini-bus taxi, you must understand, presents a death wish of another order.
So, from the beginning, I relied on the charity of dad. He has, after, five vehicles (3 four by fours). But after only a few days he became less supportive. He is, after all, a widower who is used to having things his way.
And one of the difficulties I encountered from the word go was getting to gym. Today (14 November), a consultant from Virgin Active called me to say I need to renew my membership. The first thing I did when I returned to SA was take out a new gym membership. But, with Virgin Active on the far end of town, around 8km from home, getting there, especially at night, was proving tricky. It proved too difficult to get regular transport so I wasn’t able to train (in the gym at least) consistently. I think I went 20 times this year, max.

Living without a car lesson #1: Forget gym

And to be honest, the effort to get around kind’ve makes the idea of gym obsolete. Thus, the future may be a world with no more gyms, fancy that.

After getting on my dad’s nerves eventually, I did what the middle son eventually must do, and got my lazy, good for nothing butt into a job. I taught economics at a high school, and conveniently stayed in the hostel which was across the road from school, close to gym, and best of all: home cooked meals down the hall. Nevertheless, my own stores ran out pretty quickly, and I tended to visit the shops on a daily basis for airtime, the newspaper, and the odd chocolate. It soon became clear that running out of food made the journey home that much more dangerous (imagine a plastic bag loaded with stuff, swinging dangerously, and heavily from handlebars. So, when I went out for dinner with my girlfriend, I’d stock up on groceries on the way back.

Living without a car lesson #2: Prioritize

Fill up with essential groceries whenever possible, and remember to get the sort of stuff active people eat (think fruits, vegetables and pasta, not bottles of wine, biltong and sushi).

Not having a car means the demands on you increase threefold or more. You not only have less time (since getting from a to b is harder), but less energy, and the result is you’re simply less mobile. To get around as much as possible, use your cellphone, know other people’s schedules, try to synergise your schedule, plans or one-off operation with what others around you are doing.

Living without a car lesson #3: Delegate, network, synergize

Those aren’t just pretty words – if you don’t intend to be miserable you’ll need to be very skilled at being in the right place at the right time in terms of yourself and other people. It’s not an exact science, it’s an art, believe me.

One useful trick that I used was test driving cars for a magazine I did some freelance work for. I got to test drive an Isuzu double cab, a Toyota Yaris, an Alpha Romeo GT – and I have to admit, when ever I got my hands on the latest in automobike technology is was hard not to be seduced by it. What a pity, I’d invariably think, that these wonderful machines run on stuff that we’re eventually going to run out of. Can you honestly enjoy life on the highway, air conditioned comfort, push button power when you know it’s built on a platform that can’t possibly last?

Living without a car lesson #4: Roll with the punches, and expect a few on the nose

Once I found myself in a situation where I was feeling dizzy and weak and unsteady on my feet. I thought it was just a mild case of flu. The rules at work required a doctors certificate if I was absent for more than two days, so I needed to get to a doctor. It was snowing (yes, snowing in Bloem) the day I needed to go to the doctor. Sure, I could walk or cycle to the doctor and risk pneumonia. I called just about everyone I could call. No one could help. That was when I realized how helpless I really was. When you really have to depend on someone, and no one can help you when you need help, you know you’re in trouble. I had to postpone the appointment, and when I finally made it he booked me off for the rest of the week, saying I had a serious bacterial infection in my lungs.

Living without a car lesson #5: Adapt

What are the options? If you don’t have transport, get the mountain to come to you. Get all the numbers for food delivery, you’ll need them. Just today I found a new place called Ouma’s Kitchen that delivers wholesome meals in Styrofoam containers by bike messenger – for less than R30!
Or, instead of getting fat on take aways, get yourself a mountainbike and get yourself around on your own steam.

Living without a car lesson #6 Become less independent

Realize how selfish we are, and those we seek to depend upon. Each person is expected to have their own car, own house. That’s new for this era. Think of cavemen. They shared everything, including the cave. Imagine cave people expecting to have their own cave to themselves. It is very hard to become dependent (once you’ve been independent) and it’s also hard for people who are independent to deal with you.

Living without a car lesson #7 Get used to wishful thinking

I think the future is going to be filled with reminiscing about ‘the good old days’. What’s not so good about now is that things are more important than people, and that our relationships with stuff have taken precedent, in many cases, over our relationships with people. People these days seem to think very little about scrubbing a friendship because of some minor transgression. Why? Because there are so many other diversions to occupy our time.

Living without a car lesson #8 Get grateful

The party isn’t over yet, so enjoy it while you can. Enjoy the fact that you can drive to a cycle race for the weekend in a faraway city. Enjoy that you can get takeaway burgers at a drivethru (without getting out the car). Enjoy the fact that you can drive for 10 or 15 minutes to the nearest supermarket, and have access to products from as far away as China, New Zealand and Finland.

Living without a car lesson #9 Take Deep Breaths

When it’s finally over, whole communities are going to become morbidly depressed and apparently powerless. Reality isn’t going to be pleasant. TV channels will be filled with practical DIY shows, including Plating Your Own Vegetables. Learn to handle plenty of extra stress and disappointment

Living without a car lesson #10 Reconnect

The good news is that our current lifestyles are actually cancer-inducing. Millions a year die of heart attacks. Half of married couples divorce. Reconnecting doesn’t mean turning on your cellphone or sending an email. It means the opposite. Look someone in the eye. Stop the clocks and give someone your time and full attention. More important, give yourself the time of day, and reconnect with who you are. One long walk is the first step in that direction. While some have a governing philosophy of ‘Kill a rhino before it becomes extinct’, I’m inclined to want to buy a Toyota Ay-go, and do a round-the-country-trip before the oil runs out. But I have a conscience, and I know a race is coming that will require preparation. I believe we all know that, but some of us are less willing to own up to it than others. To the extent that we can accept the coming reality before it engulfs us, we’ll be able to move safely and happily on our road – wherever it goes.

Kunstler: ..."kindergarten ethos of entitled happy endings"...

Things are getting very weird very fast -- and will probably get even weirder, faster, as the train wreck of bad debt meets the Saint Paddy's Day Parade of bacchanalian excess at the grade-crossing of destiny. The train is carrying America's financial system, but the engine driving it is peak oil, because declining energy resources necessarily means declining capital wealth -- and declining value of all the institutions, instruments, and markers that denote that wealth or hope to profit by trading in it. The fiasco leads straight to the necessary reinvention of American life on other terms and by other means.

I've maintained for a long time that, even among those who recognize we have a big problem, there are many impediments to imagining a credible outcome. One thing I've noticed is that in any given public meeting (or lecture hall) you can divide participants into two groups: those who believe we will 'high-tech' our way out of this predicament; and those who believe we'll organize our way out.

I don't subscribe to either point of view, strictly speaking. Both POV's assume that there will be an orderly transition between where we're at now and where we're headed. They're tainted by the kindergarten ethos of entitled happy endings and outcomes, which has been the chief operating system for the Baby Boomers, a therapeutic bias for placing 'good feelings' ahead of reality -- which also has obliterated the tragic sense of life that acts as the only brake on humanity's inherent hubris.

Ultimately, in my view, the issue of what happens next will be settled not by the fantasies of the algae-biodiesel geeks or the wishful thinking of the sustainable futures organizers, but by the natural, self-organizing properties of a society responding 'emergently' to new circumstances. One of the implications of destiny-as-emergence is the probability that we will try any damn fool thing besides the right things to keep the old game going for a while -- even in the face of obvious failure.

I'm sure our political leaders will mount a campaign to rescue the futureless infrastructure of suburbia. It will necessarily be an exercise in futility. But it has already started. That's what the swindle of ethanol has been all about. And the touting of hybrid cars, and the flimflam of "energy independence." Even the "environmental" crowd" squanders most of its attention these days on how to keep all the cars running on something other than gasoline. They don't question the assumption that we will remain a car-dependent society.

[We need to start thinking about a world that is not dependent on cars; walkable communities plugged into sustainable organic systems...]

As much as I loathe the suburbs in their grotesque late-stage efflorescence, I can understand why those stuck in them would wish to defend their misinvestments. I just hate to think of the political consequences when their disappointment catches up to the reality that the suburbs will not be rescued. And by that I mean not just the houses but the way-of-life associated with them and all its accessories, furnishings, and activities. Bewilderment will soon turn to rage out in the highway-strip-and-cul-de-sac empire.

Now, apparently, we'll also opt for a bail-out of all those who tried to become rich by getting something for nothing at both ends of the Ponzi scheme called the housing bubble -- the "little guys" who signed mortgage contracts they could never hope to pay off, and the Wall Street playerz who bundled these hopeless contracts into fraudulent securities (and their enablers in the ratings agencies, plus the hedge fund smoothies who tried to cash in by using recondite algorithms to dissolve the risk associated with imprudent lending.) The bail-out is likely to accomplish nothing except the more rapid bankruptcy of government at all levels and a second Great Depression at ground level (worse than the first one).

Over the weekend, the Federal Reserve engineered a $30-billion dollar Saint Paddy's day present for the JP Morgan bank by handing them the corpse of Bear Stearns. The object of the game is to prevent the "assets" of Bear Stearns from going to the auction block, on which they would be discovered to be nearly worthless, which would instantly render all similar assets held by the other big banks to be similarly worthless, and would result in a universal margin call that would pretty much unwind the hallucinated "wealth" acquired the past ten years.

Despite the heroics around the fate of Bear Stearns, it looks like the financial system is tottering anyway. Perhaps the last trick left in the rescue bag will be the 100-basis-point drop in the Fed rate rumored to be announced tomorrow. It won't help any of the big banks, since their problem is holding liabilities in excess of assets. Almost certainly it would crater the US Dollar.

The next thing in store for America, in my opinion, will be a rather new surprise: oil-and-gasoline shortages. While frightened money pours into the oil futures markets, driving the price up, strange behavior will start brewing in the actual physical allocation process. Imports of oil and gas to the US may not be as reliable as it had been when America seemed to be a solvent nation. The exporters may be changing their terms of doing business with us -- and that's nearly two-thirds of all the oil we need. The public would probably suck up oil price increases indefinitely, but shortages are going to be something else. A real freak out.

From www.kunstler.com. Also buy Jim's book, order here.

NVDL: We are stuck in a perception that somehow, somewhere (you know the song) someone out there will make everything all right and we can continue...well...with what exactly? The rat race? We are already off the tracks, we're just too silly to realise it. And when we wise up to the fact that suburbia is going to implode, and eating breakfast and going to work the way we do is going to change...well...what else will we be doing? Roll up your sleeves. Find the nearest tract of farmland and convince the farmer you're a laborer worth having around. For the rest, ball your fists. The neighbours are about to turn nasty. All this will happen when the next round of dry pumps start belching around the world, and commuters race again to get this season's last drops first* - meanwhile the world, northern and southern hemisphere, slips into The Next Winter For Mankind.

*Repeat this game ad homicidum.

Why Crude Will Get Even More Expensive (What the Media Don't Tell You)

For months now I have been debating with a friend who should have access to the best data in the world. He regularly does deals with SASOL and merchant bankers with fingers in all the pies. Yet the 'experts' continue to be wrong about predicting the future of energy prices. Why?

To some extent it is a matter of seeing the trees rather than the wood. And by wood I don't mean timber, I mean the entire forest. Energy is a huge issue, and it is easier to take a micro view that is too micro, or a macro view that is not macro enough.

But let's answer the question. Why is oil $105 and going up? Why is there no 'demand destruction?' There are a few reasons, but let's start with those that are the most unexpected.

The cheap easy oil has been extracted, and now about 50% remains. Even if you dispute that half is gone, no one can dispute that the oil that remains in the world is more difficult not only to refine, but simply to reach. These are implicit cost factors.
Another issue is efficiency. Because vehicles are more efficient and can be built more efficiently, we also become more efficient at adding additional users. That really is the problem. We need to reduce demand, and our efficiencies aren't helping - in fact more and more consumers EXPECT to have cars, including consumers in India and China who have had to go without until now. Recently an ultra-cheap, fuel efficient car has emerged in China. Even if fuel becomes twice as expensive, people will buy these vehicles and hope to travel with them as far as they can afford to.
Now we get to the area we all understand. How did you get to work today? Yes, you consumed petroleum to get here. So did everyone else. We do this each day without thinking about it, more and more users. There are a few extras we can cut off, but there is always an additional user lined up to pick up the slack.

In national terms, if the US enters a recession, China will be happy to step into those shoes, even if only to suck up available oil to grow their own economy. Sadly, China has come too late to the party, and will continue to experience chronic energy shortages. China will not fulfill their potential unless they go to war and win. And of course, this is the trajectory we face. In order to have the lifestyles we feel we're entitled to, someone will have to go without. And that is the oil/food fight that these price rises are gearing up towards.

The recent resignation of a CENTCOM general is evidence for how high the stakes are. He does not see the reason for a war with Iran. His boss, Mr. B, does. What no one seems to realise is that if the US don't go to war with Iran - not to steal their oil, just to secure access - then China will. It's a win/lose/lose scenario. Some call it last man standing.

The bottom line is that supply is shrinking and no matter what we do, no combination of technologies or alternatives, are really going to solve our addictions any time soon. The cost for this intransigence, this sleepy entropy, unfortunately, will be the new appearance of large populations of economic losers/havenots. Wealthier nations will be able to afford higher energy, but eventually wealthier nations will vie for the spoils. The point is, the expense account goes up regardless, and those who can't play will start wars.

Brent Crude right now is $106.07. I've predicted on this Blog for prices to reach $120 by July/August. That's if stock markets remain as delusional as they are now.

In the gloom, gas prices shine a light

Kunstler: Blanket Psychology and why we have more to Fear than Fear itself

The maneuvers that the big banks are making nowadays, along with their enablers at the Federal Reserve and elsewhere in Washington, really amount to little more than the old Polish blanket joke -- in which (excuse my concision) the proverbial Polack wants to make his blanket longer, so he scissors twelve inches off the top and sews it onto the bottom. Only in this case, the banks are shearing x-billions of losses off the top of their blankets and re-attching x-billions of new debt onto the bottom. This new debt, of course, goes to cover the old losses and only represents further losses-to-be-reported-later, since the banks are basically insolvent. Borrowing more money when you're broke doesn't make you less insolvent.

The banks can probably keep this gag running a little longer, but not without consequences. My guess is that it spins out of control in March sometime when some more hedge funds blow up and at least one big bank, perhaps Citi, rolls belly up like a harpooned whale. The game is really over, and all the playerz know it. The consequence of continuing to pretend the meta-fiasco of Ponzi endgame is fixable will be an even more shattering depression than the one we're already in for.

We are a much poorer nation than we thought we were and the reality is just too hard to face. Nobody from the most august banker (Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson) to the lowliest wanker (the WalMart inventory clerk who "bought" a house outside Phoenix with a no-money-down, payment-option, adjustable rate mortgage) can believe that this is happening. The candidates for president are pretty much assuming that vast financial resources will exist to be deployed against a range of problems. Everybody is going to be hugely disappointed.

When you introduce perversities into an economic system, they invariably end up expressing themselves as distortions. The economy that evolved the past two decades, driven by the perverse securitization of wishes and frauds, will now express itself in a stark cratering of American living standards. Incomes and jobs will vanish, massive quantities of stuff will collect dust on the WalMart shelves, the fragile infrastructures of daily life will go to shit, and there will be political hell to pay. Every attempt to avoid a straight-up workout of our massive losses, will represent another layer of perversity and more consequent destructive distortions.

I feel sorry for the next president. Even as he takes the oath of office, the nation will be flying apart like a seized-up engine. Since the fiasco in finance is happening in lock-step with Peak Oil (and very likely because of it at a fundamental level) we can expect one of the distortions to take the form of oil shortages. These shortages will come not just from demand bottlenecks in a stressed-out world oil allocation system, but because exporting nations will start demanding payment in Euros or something besides the depreciating currency that reflects our disintegration, and we'll have a problem coming up with payments that amount to at least fifty percent more than we're used to shelling out.

Once the US gets into serious difficulties with our oil supplies, every other sector of the economy wobbles, including especially the food-growing sector, which cannot function without copious amounts of diesel fuel and hydrocarbon-based soil "inputs." Americans will go hungry, and not just the "underclasses."

Along in this process somewhere, there is huge potential for armed conflict with other nations. If the unraveling gets traction while George W. Bush remains in charge, the US may answer bellicosity from oil-exporting nations, or energy-hungry rivals, with truculence of our own. Things can get out of control very fast in such a situation. Nations that were happily selling us salad shooters six months earlier may be targeting our naval vessels with a different sort of shooter, say a Sunburn missile. In any case, we will be acting with a bankrupt, exhausted, and over-extended military, and the best case outcome would leave us merely isolated and marooned geopolitically on our own continent, with dwindling energy and mineral resources and an angry, demoralized population.

This time around we have more to fear than fear itself. The banking executives, government officials, and candidates for president are not doing the nation a service by concealing and ignoring our losses. Finance, as the driver of an economy, is finished, but the deployment of capital is still an indispensable arm of a real economy. Sooner or later we'll get back to money that stands for something and banks that function as credible repositories of wealth. But we haven't even started down the path to that place, and the longer we pretend that we don't have to go there, the worse the journey will be.

By James Kunstler

NVDL: And so ends the spectacular phase known as the generation that 'Wanted Something For Nothing', but instead took everything for themselves leaving Generation Next with Nothing For Something. They (we?) will break their (our?) backs laboring on farms to pay the piper for a chaotic climate and the eviscerations of long term stagflation. I don't think we will get back to a money system again. Money will be invisible after this, banking will be online, but it will be based on the value of real assets that exist in the real world. We will mortgage everything in future, houses, cars, the lot. And thus commerce will finally come to resemble what it always was: trading goods (not for money, but for goods you don't have). Just a theory.

South Africa Faces Grim Epilogue

With the world in tow we now enter the decade starting with the soccer world cup on our knees

Let’s face it, for a while there South Africa had me fooled. I thought this damned country was going to make it happen. We seemed poised – with our mineral resources and growing economy, and certainly our coal energy supplies – to ride out this next wave of global malaise. While America sukkeld, we saw mineral prices shoot through the roof. But then we started sukkeling too: it turns out we will start what Kunstler calls The Long Emergency period in an even worse position than the war wearied USA.

The word ‘recession’ will soon be a cliché. The Long Emergency is essentially a period of worldwide contraction, where the limits to growth are realized, where food (for human beings), fuel (for transport to and from suburban sprawls) and energy supplies (electrification of that suburban sprawl) become concomitantly unaffordably expensive. In plain language, increasing numbers of people, including the conventional ‘Middle Class’ of Western society, will no longer be able to afford the costs of living. In even plainer language: there will not be enough to go around.

$90 oil is now a baseline average infecting the economic mechanism. Where house prices begin to lose value (as suburbia becomes less affordable), all bets are off in all dispensations that have invested so heavily in suburbia, in property. China, whose growth seems to many to be good, simply has reached adolescence too late. It will not find enough fuel to transition its populace into the lifestyle they are aiming for. They are struggling now to find the resources, scouring the world, especially Africa. When countries cannot themselves survive depletion, they will forget about trade, try to survive and either diminish, or strike out.

The world has experienced a supernatural period of growth lubricated, cushioned, unleashed by the potent energies we’ve harnessed from millennium’s worth of solar stores: fossil fuel oil. It has allowed our species to explode over this planet from around a billion a century ago, to close to 7 billion, a 7 fold increase. As excess demand for food, fuel and generic energy becomes the norm, so the number of economic losers will begin to climb.

We return from this background sketch, to our domestic scenario. How will South Africa fare in the Emergency scenario of a world facing the stranglehold of depletion? For a while we seemed to be poised very well. We are isolated from the larger military powers of the world. And until recently, seemed energy efficient at least in terms of keeping the lights on. We could possibly have bought our way out of trouble, selling coal to the Chinese, and enjoying their protection from other large military powers. Japan for example imports something like 90% of its energy; but Japan is also the world’s most energy efficient country, with advanced rail transit systems. As South Africa begins to develop one small urban rail project, the lights have begun to flicker. We are told they will continue to flicker for the next 7-8 years.
We now have to focus on finding ways to cope with a local emergency, we’re focusing already on survival, rather than having the luxury of brokering deals with nations that need our resources.
Unfortunately, this period coincides with the opening chapter of The Long Emergency. The introduction to this period has been the incredible peaks seen in affluence, peaks in stock exchanges. If it seemed like the world was awash in oil, if it seemed like we had never grown faster, or to such an extent, well this is exactly what Peak Oil presents. Our planet at Peak Capacity. Unfortunately, the curve takes us irrevocably down from there. Permanent Decline. The Infinite War. A war that will not end during our lifetimes. It is inevitable that we will see the lobbing of nuclear weapons, and all countries participating in global terrorism. Who will be the last man standing? Which country will emerge relatively unscathed? Not this one.

With a population already ravaged by rape, and murder, with a one party government more appalling and far more corrupt than the bullshitting Bush administration, we can expect the rule of law to diminish rapidly here, and for the demoralization and Africanisation of South Africa to go into high gear. Those who engineered the phrase ‘one settler, one bullet’ will return to centre stage. The number of jobless and poor South Africans will dwarf the ‘haves’. This trend will be paralleled worldwide, but South Africans will experience this in a chronic context. AIDS, poverty and crime will morph the majority of the populace into roving, rampaging, spectacularly self destructive mobs. Looting and burning will be common place. Our President will either endorse this ‘final overthrow’ with incidental ‘Machine Gun’ performances, or will attempt, unsuccessfully, to oppress and resist it. All Presidents in the era to come will be tragic figures: Brown, Obama, Zuma.

The solution to these dire circumstances will be (what may seem an ineffectual response) setting up organic, self sufficient systems: farms able to grow locally, households connected directly to local streams and crops. Secure, walkable communities. Given the state of flux, this will require massive resources and some time to procure and develop, and naturally, any and all surviving camps will be targeted by an overwhelming majority of economic losers. Also, most people – used to the ‘something for nothing’ mindset – will be more motivated to make war and take what they can from others, than to work on farms.

In this highly destructive, highly chaotic downward plunge, ordinary people without homes or jobs, will wonder how it all happened. The already stressed and disenfranchised human population will then have to deal with the inevitable bird flu pandemic, as attention is focused away from culling H5N1 infected chickens towards culling humans. During all this bloodletting, we will blame governments, we will blame our leaders, but more and more people will die unabated.

In the end, we became too many, and too many became too greedy. What happened to us is simply what happens to any species reaching overshoot: there is a crash. Ours will be spectacular. We will see a great culling not only in South Africa, but everywhere. Nuclear weapons will cut down the human race like wheat. Our number will plummet to below the billion number margin, to some hundred million, mostly in the Southern Hemisphere. Endless war will create massive pollution and radioactive contamination, and the climate of the world by then will have deteriorated obviously, becoming an interminable drain on what little motivations our species have to continue living.

For now it is appropriate in South Africa to remind ourselves how we engineered fate to be even less kind (to us) than the rest of the world. Don’t laugh: the dismantling of a world number one rugby team in favor of political chauvinism demonstrates a lack of will to succeed. A focus not on reality, but on personal politics at the expense of success is always risky. It’s also shooting yourself in the foot. This is symptomatic of a widespread delusion. It is this corrupt attitude of personal enrichment at the expense of the natural interest that causes the country to no longer be able to function: not having the capacity to keep the lights on is only one crisis South Africans currently endure. There are many others besides. We have lost the chance to come together as a unified community, we had a chance once upon a time, but I doubt whether there were enough of us whohad it in us to really accept and care about one another in this country.

Racism, religion, riches – will be used to target and terminate large groups of people. Blacks will prey on whites, in the US, the opposite, tribalism especially religious tribalism will be rife right around the world. There will be a ferocious baying for blood. It will be a terrible and systematic slaughter, probably taking place locally in schools and sports stadiums. The carnage in South Africa will reach epic proportions, but this will be echoed elsewhere as the bloodlust gathers momentum in other countries too.

David Bullard once said: “How can you NOT make a success of South Africa?” Indeed. But we have not, and now, cannot. Where to from here? I’m guessing an island state like the Seychelles, Mauritius, Reunion, New Zealand or Australia. But millions of others from here and abroad will make similar choices, and upon arrival we will fight each other over the scraps. The world was not enough. Or perhaps there was a hole in human beings we did not listen to, and have since spent lifetimes pouring our brokenness into the world. We now cover full circle, circumnavigating the great abyss created by our avarice, our vast ignorance. The circle opens like a dark volcano, and the dreamers fall into it, the nightmare and its engineers finally fulfilling its destiny. Let’s be clear that the austerity we face is one we have collectively authored, and as such, it will be an utterly bleak epilogue for our species on this planet.

Ps. I hope I'm wrong and that I won't be the one saying, 'Told you so.' If I am wrong it's good for everyone (including me). If I'm right, shit is on the cards. Unfortunately, I don't believe this to be a question of right or wrong, optimism or pessimism, negative or positive. I believe it to be a matter of logic.

Oil-Rich Nations Use More Energy, Cutting Exports

Luis J. Jimenez for The New York Times

The economies of many big oil-exporting countries are growing so fast that their need for energy within their borders is crimping how much they can sell abroad, adding new strains to the global oil market.

Experts say the sharp growth, if it continues, means several of the world’s most important suppliers may need to start importing oil within a decade to power all the new cars, houses and businesses they are buying and creating with their oil wealth.

Indonesia has already made this flip. By some projections, the same thing could happen within five years to Mexico, the No. 2 source of foreign oil for the United States, and soon after that to Iran, the world’s fourth-largest exporter. In some cases, the governments of these countries subsidize gasoline heavily for their citizens, selling it for as little as 7 cents a gallon, a practice that industry experts say fosters wasteful habits.

“It is a very serious threat that a lot of major exporters that we count on today for international oil supply are no longer going to be net exporters any more in 5 to 10 years,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, an oil analyst at Rice
University. By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
More.

Opec decision likely to push oil prices above $100 this week

Oil prices could finally breach the $100 barrier this week, deepening fears for the West’s economic prospects, if the Opec oil cartel confirms an expected decision at its extraordinary meeting in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday not to raise crude production, analysts believe.

Opec is under pressure from Western oil-consuming nations to take urgent action to rein back prices from their recent record highs, amid mounting concern that the cost of crude will undercut already faltering growth in developed economies while simultaneously stoking inflation.

Close observers of the cartel believe that it will spurn the West’s pleas and keep its output pegged, because any increase ordered this week would not come through until towards the end of the winter in the northern hemisphere. Opec may fear that by that time any extra crude production could risk oversupplying a market in which demand will be cut not only by warmer weather but by an impending slowdown in leading Western economies.

Veronica Smart, an analyst with the Energy Information Centre, a leading consultancy, said that this delayed effect meant that a move this week by Opec to boost output would probably be viewed as “too little, too late”.

She said that the cartel generally disliked raising production ahead of the second quarter because it tries to avoid any build-up of oil stockpiles around that time as part of its pricing strategy.

Simon Wardell, of Global Insight, an independent analysis group, shared Ms Smart’s view: “With the economic problems hanging over the global economy now, Opec’s probably thinking that demand [for oil] is more likely to go down than up in terms of current forecasts, and they will probably want to keep things steady [on output].” Expectations that Opec will stay its hand were reinforced by comments from senior cartel figures.

Rafael RamÍrez, the Venezuelan Oil Minister, said yesterday: “We expect that the market will maintain the same prices that we have seen this year. Probably, if there is not geo-political tension, prices should be around $100 a barrel.”

Ali al-Naimi, the Saudi Arabian Oil Minister, said that present oil stocks were in a “very comfortable range”.

by Gary Duncan, Economics Editor for The Times Online (UK)

NVDL: Is oil at $100 as much of a brou ha ha as the Y2K bug? You'd think so based on the disdain stock markets have for fuel prices. Unfortunately, reality is much more simple. Essentially every time there is a hike in petrol prices (that's prices you pay to fill up your tank), the money you have left for everything else gets less. Not only that, everyone else has less money, and the costs also get transferred to everything else: food, transport and all the rest. We keep forgetting that cheap oil underpins EVERTHING THAT WE DO. Thus, every change in these prices have critical impacts, particularly for those in debt, and the poor.

When the number of poor (economic losers) increases, so do social ills such as unemployment and crime. That's not good for anyone.