The Ethics of Peak Oil

The cover article of the June '08 Scientific American is entitled The Ethics of Climate Change. The article has two basic flaws, as far as I can see. It ignores 'peak oil', which is the much more pressing danger, and (2) it ignores the thesis of an earlier Sciam article about ecological economics, Economics in a Full World. This is not the first time a Sciam author has ignored highly relevant earlier Sciam articles. See these posts of mine.

I also wonder who, if anyone, edits these articles. Here are two sentences from an article inset, Measuring Catastrophe, missing from the online version:

• A population collapse will cause the premature death of billions of people.
• If humanity becomes extinct or the human population collapses, vast numbers of people who would otherwise have existed will not in fact exist.

and elsewhere:

Is their nonexistence a bad thing?

Earth Day 2007

Sundance Channel aired the documentary, A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash. A wider audience may have thus been introduced to this frightening subject, but as one narrator commented, I'm paraphrasing, we are somehow unable to come to terms with it. It's available on Netflix (and as of July 08, on Netflix Instant & Roku).

Update: The film was released theatrically in the UK on November 9, 2007; BBC referred to that release in its coverage of record oil prices. Also from the UK, in Masterpiece Theater's, The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard, one theme is global warming and the Kyoto Protocol.

Leading up to Earth Day, Newsweek covered the environment in this April issue but, as usual for the general media, conflates peak oil with global warming, and skirts the implications for both.