the big picture

See The New Republic's piece about Dr. Doom

"A financial crisis needs general thinking, and a team of specialists will have difficulty understanding the whole thing," he says. "Nouriel's approach has always been worldwide, which is not rewarded in academia. "

and

Roubini has traveled from the Jeremiah wilderness, ...

The peak oil thesis is simple and stark:

1. oil has unique qualities as a material and as an energy source
   
2. created eons ago, there's a finite supply of oil
   
3. modern civilization, the world economy and 6 billion people greatly depend on abundant oil
4. we're rapidly using up that oil (80 million barrels a day, including 20 million by the U.S.)
   
5. we're past the peak of what oil we are able to extract globally each year
6. we will not find a substitute for oil in time to avert an irreversible global economic decline
7. we may now be witnessing the start of that decline
8. the decline will be steep and chaotic
9. the decline will result in billions of deaths

Did I say anything about global warming in this? Answer - no, 'cause it's irrelevant.

if only a steady state

Under the heading of connecting the dots, what role does equilibrium (and especially homeostasis) play in our economy? Here's what Fed chief Bernancke said in July '08 before the Senate Banking Committee:

"I do believe we're going to start to see a stabilization in the construction of homes somewhere later this year, the beginning of next year. House prices may continue to fall longer than that because of the large inventory of unsold homes that we still face. There is uncertainty about exactly what the equilibrium is that prices will reach. It is that uncertainty that is generating a lot of the stress we are seeing in financial markets."

The book by Herman Daly, Valuing the Earth: Economics, Ecology, Ethics, has a chapter (14) called the Impossibility of Sustainable Growth. The book is one of my list of peak oil books. Daly is also author of the important Scientific American article, Economics in a Full World, refered to in other posts here.

après moi, le déluge (attributed to Louis XV or Madame de Pompadour) - NY Times - Dr. Doom

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?

ignoring the obvious

In his memoir, or at least from this Newsweek excerpt, Alan Greenspan projects into the future, with no mention of peak oil. Similarly with the upcoming CNN series, Planet in Peril. (CNN did at least once reprise its documentary, We Were Warned, now with added label Out of Gas; see transcription and classroom guide.) Can no one see the forest for the trees?