oil production to decline by 7% per year

http://www.guardian.co.uk/oil/story/0,,2196435,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront

"The report presents a bleak view of the future unless a radically different approach is adopted. It quotes the British energy economist David Fleming as saying: "Anticipated supply shortages could lead easily to disturbing scenes of mass unrest as witnessed in Burma this month. For government, industry and the wider public, just muddling through is not an option any more as this situation could spin out of control and turn into a complete meltdown of society."
Mr Schindler comes to a similar conclusion. "The world is at the beginning of a structural change of its economic system. This change will be triggered by declining fossil fuel supplies and will influence almost all aspects of our daily life.""

Just as China, India, and other countries are gearing up to build more cars for their people, the amount of oil available is dropping. As far as I can see, prices for oil products will zoom up while shortages grow around the world. This could create tension between nations; producers having to decide which countries get their product, consumer countries arguing over who gets in line first.
I wonder where we'd be right now if Al Gore was in office?

top 35 environmental blogs

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_35_environmental_blogs.php

ecogeek.org

http://www.ecogeek.org/

This is a great site to see what new innovations are available, or will soon be, to help get rid of our dependency on oil.

turbineless windmill!

http://www.scribemedia.org/2007/10/12/shawn-frayne-windbelt/

This little vibrating generator looks like it has all kinds of applications besides just generating electricity from the wind. Plus it looks to be really cheap and technically simple to make.

A nice graph showing national debt/surplus worldwide

http://itulip.com/dollardown1currentaccount.htm

So China and Russia, the "communist" countries, have a huge surplus, while the UK and the US have the worst national debts. Kinda weird, huh?
I just can't get excited about being the largest debtor nation in the world. When I was young I was excited about the US being the leader in innovation, in space exploration, in democracy, in freedom. But now the things available to get excited about just aren't as much fun...

The declining international influence of the US

http://mondediplo.com/2007/10/04empire

"For the US power elite, being on top of the world has been a habit for 60 years. Hegemony has been a way of life; empire, a state of being and of mind. The institutional realist critics of the Bush administration have no alternative conceptual framework for international relations, based on something other than force, the balance of power or strategic predominance. The present crisis and the deepening impact of global concerns will perhaps generate new impulses for cooperation and interdependence in future. Yet it is just as likely that US policy will be unpredictable: as all post-colonial experiences show, de-imperialisation is likely to be a long and possibly traumatic process."

recapturing CO2 from coal plant; and making products!

http://www.azcentral.com/news/green/articles/1004fourcorners-ON.html

This is cool. A huge coal-fired powerplant in Arizona is testing a way to capture CO2 with algae, and even make viable products on the side! I hope this works.

lotsa oil in the Rockies?

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5424033

This article quotes a Rand study that there are 800 billion barrels of oil available in the oil shale around the 3-corners area of Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah. In that case, it's just a matter of economically getting it out, and trying not to destroy the environment. I don't understand the problem, though, since Canada has been getting oil from shale for years.
Anyway, this potential for us to continue to rely on oil is not good, in my opinion. We should get off oil dependency as soon as possible to a cleaner more environmentally friendly source.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&time=&date=&ttype=&q=FORT+MCMURRAY,+alberta&ie=UTF8&ll=57.028727,-111.655898&spn=0.026205,0.093555&t=k&z=14&om=1
There you can look at the oil sands of Alberta and see if that looks environmentally friendly or not.

Every American is $30,000 in debt (government debt)

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation/story/256336.html

I guess it will take us a while to work this off, eh? Or we could just borrow more and let our grandchildren deal with it.