how much co2 does the u.s. emit into the atmosphere each year?

I went back to an old post on this subject...I had gotten the math wrong and re-calculated it...or so I thought. I was still wrong! Y'all are supposed to be checking my math. #newmathvictim #it'sthesimplefuckingunitconversionsthatkillmeandnowthati'mgettingoldandmybrainisgoingdownhillit'sevenworsetypeshit

Here it is in metric tons, tons, pounds, acres, square miles, and last but not least, Ford Expeditions.




FUCK MAN I WAS STILL OFF … ONE THOUSAND MILLION IS A BILLION NOT A TRILLION … IDIOT!

NEW CORRECTION 01/27/2019

2017: 5140 MILLION METRIC TONS
[source: u.s. energy information administration]

5140 million metric tons
5665.880133 million tons
5,665,880,133 tons
11,331,760,266,800 11 trillion lbs
5500 lbs/expedition
2,060,320,049 expeditions
110.7 sf/expedition
228,077,429,370 square feet
43560 sf/acre
5,235,937 acres
640 acres/sq mi
8181.152052 square miles

TRAVIS COUNTY 1023 SQUARE MILES
VERMONT 9249 SQ MI
NEW HAMPSHIRE 8969 SQ MI
MASSACHUSETTS 7838 SQ MI

SO TRAVIS COUNTY 8 LAYERS DEEP IN BUMPER-TO-BUMPER FORD EXPEDITIONS - EACH YEAR
OR MOST OF NH (91.2%) 1 LAYER DEEP

THAT'S HOW MUCH CO2 is EMITTED INTO THE ATMOSPHERE EACH YEAR IN THE U.S.

Carbon Dioxide aka CO2 Emissions :: Playing with the Math :: Corrected Version

FUCK MAN I WAS STILL OFF … ONE THOUSAND MILLION IS A BILLION NOT A TRILLION … IDIOT!

NEW CORRECTION 01/27/2019

2017: 5140 MILLION METRIC TONS

5140 million metric tons
5665.880133 million tons
5,665,880,133 tons
11,331,760,266,800 11 trillion lbs
5500 lbs/expedition
2,060,320,049 expeditions
110.7 sf/expedition
228,077,429,370 square feet
43560 sf/acre
5,235,937 acres
640 acres/sq mi
8181.152052 square miles

TRAVIS COUNTY 1023 SQUARE MILES
VERMONT 9249 SQ MI
NEW HAMPSHIRE 8969 SQ MI
MASSACHUSETTS 7838 SQ MI

SO TRAVIS COUNTY 8 LAYERS DEEP IN BUMPER-TO-BUMPER FORD EXPEDITIONS - EACH YEAR
MOST OF NH (91.2%) 1 LAYER DEEP

THAT'S HOW MUCH CO2 EMITTED INTO THE ATMOSPHERE EACH YEAR










ORIGINAL (1ST CORRECTION) 06/02/2014

So I wake up this morning and put on the coffee and start to read the news. Right up there at the top is this: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/epa-to-propose-30-percent-reduction-in-power-plant-carbon-emissions/

Down towards the bottom of the piece, they throw out the figure 2.05 billion metric tonnes for 2013 CO2 emissions (from coal-fired power plants alone).

So naturally, I hop on over to an old blog post of mine to check/cognitate/validate/equilibrate/machinate to otherwise make some rusty-old-carbon-based-life-form-gears kick in and make sense of this figure. Keep in mind that those mind gears of mine are lubricated with high-fructose corn syrup - which ain't a good thing. (grin)

So, immediately (EEmEEdEE-EETLEE like they over-EE-none-CEE-ATE it on NPR), I notice my frickin' math is off. By an order of a thousand or something or other.

You dumbfuck!, I exclaim, and EE-MEE-DEE-EET-LEE run out to my officehovelcave to re-run the numbers and make the corrections.

Big difference in the numbers. BIG, difference. I remember thinking (when I ran the original numbers) that it didn't seem like that much CO2 (by weight). I shoulda double-checked myself.

Shouldawouldacoulda. My mantra these days.



Here's the old post with the wrong math - http://alextangofuego.blogspot.com/2009/01/playing-with-math-carbon-dioxide.html


Below is the revised post - with the math corrected correctly, I hope. Someone please check my "simple" math. Thanks in advance.

I was looking for data on total U.S. energy usage - something to validate the 5 terawatt figure I have rolling around in my head - when I ran across another troubling figure.

Annual CO2 emissions (from fossil fuels) in the U.S. are estimated this year at 5,981.5 million metric tons or tonnes. A tonne is 1000 kilograms or 2205 pounds.

I pull up a blank Excel spreadsheet to start doing the math - simple unit conversions.

So that's 5,981,500,000,000 or five trillion, nine hundred eighty one billion, five hundred million tonnes.

In pounds, that equals 13,189,207,500,000,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere each year. Thirteen quadrillion, blah, blah, blah pounds.

I decide to convert this into units I can get my head around.

The curb weight of one Ford Expedition is give or take 5500 pounds.

That equates to 2,398,037,727,273 [two trillion, three hundred ninety eight billion, thirty seven million, seven hundred twenty seven thousand, two-hundred seventy-three] Ford Expeditions [by weight, not volume], a figure that's still difficult to comprehend. Try writing a check out for that amount! Ha!

A Ford Expedition takes up a footprint of roughly 110.70 square feet. Those 2.398 trillion Ford Expeditions parked side to side, bumper to bumper, would cover 9,522,176 (nine million five-hundred twenty-two thousand one hundred seventy-six) square miles.

Still meaningless?

The United States is 3,537,379 square miles in size.

So that's the entire United States, including Alaska and Hawaii, covered solid with 2.67 (two and two-thirds) layers of Ford Expeditions.

That's just for one year. The annual amount will continue to grow each year to 6800 million tonnes in 2030.

That's just emissions for the United States - you would have to figger in the rest of the industrialized world. Note that this is all CO2 emissions from burning all types of fossil fuels. Then you've got wood and dung and whatever the fuck people are burning.

Ready to reduce your carbon footprint now?

Yeah, that's it, you got it - go ahead and screw in your little fluorescent twisty bulb thingies. Bring your cloth sacks to the grocery store and don't use their plastic bags. String a clothesline. Set the thermostat to sweat in the summer and shiver in the winter. Upgrade your old fridgerator to an Energy Star model. Sell your car and ride your bike. Hell, go ahead and sell both cars. Sell your house or condo and move into a teepee, or a yurt. Erect a solar PV panel to power your computer and tee-tiny two cubic foot refrigerator. Tend your energy usage to zero.

Go ahead and do it, do your part. It still won't be enough to make a difference. Why not? Because there are five billion other people on the planet who will never do it.

Houston, we have a problem.

So you've made it this far and probably noted that I didn't say anything about the article, or Obama, or the EPA's new rule or whatever that is coming out today to reduce CO2 emissions by 30% by 2030. So 30% of 2.05 billion (metric tonnes) over 16 years equates to 10 billion metric tonnes of CO2 "not" pumped into the atmosphere. That's if they started the 0.615 billion metric tonne annual reduction this year.

During the same 16 year period, we've pumped roughly 96 trillion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere - rough math of 6.0 trillion tonnes/yr x 16 years.

So, the long and the short of it is that we'll cut 0.1 trillion (one tenth of one trillion) tonnes against a 96 trillion tonne CO2 load. Over sixteen years.

Helluva tiny drop in a helluva big bucket.

Fuckers. Fuckin' disinforming onion-eyed miscreants.

Hey at least we're talking about it.

Baby steps, right?

Some might say we oughta be happy about this news.

It just pisses me off.

Nunca hay lluvia...

This thunderhead swept by in a glancing blow the other day, dropping only 150,000 drops on us, hustling off to the north and east in short order. In the photos below, the anvil head is about 30-40 miles away, roughly 20 miles east of Austin, more or less on top of Bastrop, Texas.

It hasn't really rained since September of 2010, with no end to the drought in sight.

This storm was at the very tail end of the system that swept through the southeast spawning all the tornadic activity of biblical proportions over the past two to three days. Rough times for those poor folks in the path of destruction in Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. The death toll is now passing 300, and they are saying there are another 400 folks "unaccounted for".

Earth Day 2010 :: What is your Eco-wish?

[Foto by Alex.Tango.Fuego]


Today is the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day! Wow, a time-warp all the way back to 1970.

When I opened up my computer just now, the first thing I really noticed was this Eco-Wish piece from Vanity Fair Magazine. So I'll roll with that. I had planned to lead up to today with various environmental posts - and then have something that I could really be proud of to post today. But I've been busy these days.

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/04/earth-day-video2-201004

Here's VF's "Green Archive".


My wish for the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day is the same as actress Marion Cotillard [in the video above], for "Awareness, good sense, and love, because it is the only energy that will change things."

And Deepak Chopra's, that "we renew our relationship with our Mother Earth"...

And Dr. Steven Chu [U.S. Secretary of Energy], that "people around the world, will come together and begin take action with regard to energy and climate change..."

My wish is that people will begin to realize that recycling, ending their use of plastic bottles, increasing their use of compact fluorescent light bulbs, and turning down the thermostat, while these are a good start - that they are only a start, and the true answers to our problems lie in rather dramatic change in the Western way of life. And a huge part of that change is...

My wish is for the pace of this life to slow down, to temper our frantic, frenetic, arrogant and relentless pursuit of the dollar, so that we can appreciate and intimately know our magnificent Mother Earth, return to the deeper extended family relationships of the past, and have more time in our daily lives to come together in order to design and implement and forge a new, sustainable lifestyle based in love and tolerance, and not profit...

My wish is for human kind to acknowledge that we live on a planet with finite resources, and an ever-increasing population will only continue to tax our vital renewable resources such as clean air and water, arable land, nutrient-rich topsoil, forests, marine and fresh water fisheries, and ocean ecosystems to the breaking point - that we will acknowledge this, and begin to address the challenge of over-population...

My wish is that John Adams [The Series]; Food, Inc.; Baraka; The Beautiful Truth; Flow, For Love of Water; Coal Country; (and a few other documentaries) would all be required viewing in high school...

My wish is that we direct our resources - financial and human capital - into the solution of core problems, and less and less on the symptoms of those problems, all while ignoring the core cause of those symptoms...

My wish is that we focus more of our [human] energy and resources into education, and more K-12 education about the Earth and her miraculous systems - the earth and environmental sciences of Ecology, Biology, Botany, Hydrology, Water Resources, Renewable Energy, Climatology, Oceanography, Soils, Agriculture - all with an emphasis on sustainability...

My wish is for more people to turn off their televisions, read more, listen to NPR on a daily basis, and when they do have to turn it on - to watch PBS and the various nature/environment channels more...

My wish is for people to become aware that we are running out of fossil fuels in the next 20-40 years, that even coal and yellow cake (the raw material for uranium for nukes) are finite and will eventually run out...and...

My wish is that "Green" becomes less of a marketing gimmick for the few, and more of a real, substantial, sustainable lifestyle for the many...

My wish is for the people, through the government, will escalate research and development into renewable, sustainable, alternative energy and transportation technologies...

My wish is for the U.S. to embark on a nation-wide mass transit infrastructure development initiative...

My wish is for people to begin to understand that we need to be figuring out ways to use LESS energy, not create MORE energy...

My wish is for corporations not to have the same rights as citizens under the U.S. Constitution, and that they be held accountable for the true, full-life-cycle costs of their activities, especially as it relates to environmental degradation, globally...

A choice is before us today. We can choose to be remembered as the (few) generations who despoiled the planet within 200 years, for profit. Or, we who are alive today, and our children, and their children, can be remembered 100 or 500 or 1,000, or even 5,000 years from now, as the five generations who were able to come to grips with what our current path is doing and will continue to do to the planet, stop and take notice, begin taking the steps towards change, and holding our governments and world leaders accountable in the process, towards a sustainable and beautiful future.

That was one helluva run-on sentence. Five generations. That's what I see it will take - starting from today. Those who are alive today - the great-grandparents (get to sit back and watch), the grandparents, our parents, us (we, The Baby Boomers), our children, their children and their children's children - the next 100 years will tell - but we have to start today.

Go out today and grab a handful of dirt, rub it between your fingers, smell it. Crunch some leaves or grass up and smell that. Or smell a wildflower. Ride a bike. Sit under a tree and watch the branches and leaves sway in the breeze. Go to the nearest ocean and dip your toes into the water. Paddle a canoe on your closest river or lake. Look up at the sky. Experience our Mother Earth. Smell her, listen to her, lay your eyes upon her, and love her - today, and every day. She is our Mother, and she's all we've got.

Five generations. One hundred years. Starting today.

"Awareness, good sense, and love, because that is the only energy that will change things."
[Marion Cotillard, Actress]

Okay, I gotta get my head around this...

Another blog post from my PickensPlan profile...trying to get my head around what Mr. Pickens is proposing - was proposing - when the PickensPlan first appeared on the horizon about a year ago.


Photo by AlexTangoFuego

This appears to be a useful resource :: EIA :: Energy Information Administration :: Official Energy Statistics from the U.S. Government ::
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epa_sum.html

Total U.S. electricity generation capacity is currently at about 4,065 million megawatt hours [MWh].

Here's the breakdown ::



According to PickensPlan (info gleaned from the home page), wind turbine power is currently at about 48 million megawatt hours [MWh] or 1% of total U.S. power production. Doing the math, that would put the figure at 4,800 billion kWh.

So, for argument's sake, let's say total current capacity is at 5,000 billion kWh.

First and foremost, which I don't ever hear anyone talking about, is the concept of maximum energy production. Under the current state of "affluenza", it's all about more, more, more. We need MORE power, more this, more that. But we don't. Can we all agree that we can't continue building power plants and extracting finite resources infinitely for ever and ever until the end of time?

We need to come clean with the concept of using less energy, figuring out how to live the American dream consuming LESS energy.

So, given that, let's say 5,000 billion kWh is our max - the concept that we should never need more power than that.

Also according to the PP home page, the average American household uses roughly 10,000 kWh (per year). I backed into the figure by using the statement that "4,800 billion kWh is enough power to supply 4.5 million households...".

Keep in mind though, that infrastructure, commercial and industrial power needs are in the 5,000 billion kWh figure.

Now moving on to the dollars.

Pickens says $1.0 trillion for enough wind farms to bring the wind power proportion to 20% of total. Plus $200 billion for the electrical distribution/power grid.

So, corporate sponsorships with little decals on the blades of the turbines aside, let's start talking about where we are going to come up with $1.2 trillion dollars. Or let's say half that as a start - $600 billion.

The momentum of this movement will solve the land challenges - that is the easy part to me.

$600 billion...plus the manufacturing capacity to build millions and millions of turbines.

According to this article on Wikipedia - "Wind Power in Texas", "The Wildorado Wind Ranch is located near Amarillo and consists of 161 MW of wind turbines (70 Siemens Mk II turbines each with a rating of 2.3 MW). These turbines have the capacity to meet the electricity demand of more than 50,000 households."

I'm not sure of the conversion from MW to MWh, but if it's linear, that would mean it takes seventy one [71] 2.3 MW turbines to generate 161 MW of power. It seems to me from driving by Wildorado, that there are more than 71 turbines, but let's go with that figure.

We need 10% from wind (remember, I am going with half of the 20% figures to start out) - so 500 billion kWh. 161 MW = mega is 1,000,000 right? Kilo is 1,000. So 161 million kWh?

I'm lost now. Any engineers out there care to help?

I'm trying to figure out how many 2.3 MW turbines it will take to provide 500 billion kWh....? Let's just say that's a lot of turbines that need to manufactured - not to mention the manufacturing facilities that need to be built to do it. I'm sure the production capacity is not there right now.

Also, to get your head around the dollars involved, a $250 million dollar construction project is huge - like Coors Field (baseball stadium) in Denver. $4.8 billion is the final cost of the Denver International Airport - and I think it took 10 or 12 years to build it. So, $600 billion dollars is huge - the equivalent of building 125 huge airports.

So, now I have my head around the problem...did this help you at all?

Brother, can you spare 22 terawatts?

I'm dredging up some old blog posts from my PickensPlan profile...

I just ran across a good article on ReasonOnline by Ronald Bailey "Brother, can you spare 22 terawatts?" - with great "big picture" figures from Daniel Nocera, a professor at MIT. He looks at current figures, and extrapolates them out to the year 2050 with a global population base of 9 billion.

He also compares world energy consumption at three levels: 1] U.S. levels; 2] Western European levels; and 3] Indian subcontinent levels. I find this very useful in getting my head around the "quality of life" and "living standards" issues.

Here's an excerpt from the article:

However, Daniel Nocera, a professor of chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writes a sobering analysis of the challenge of supplying adequate energy to the world in 2050. In his article, "On the Future of Global Energy" in the current issue of Daedalus (unfortunately not online), Nocera begins with the amount of energy currently being used on a per capita basis in various countries and then extrapolates what that usage implies for a world of 9 billion people in 2050. For example, in 2002 the United States used 3.3 terawatts (TW), China 1.5 TW, India 0.46 TW, Africa 0.45 TW and so forth. Totaling it all up, Nocera finds, "the global population burned energy at a rate of 13.5 TW." A terawatt equals one trillion watts.

Nocera calculates that if 9 billion people in 2050 used energy at the rate that Americans do today that the world would have to generate 102.2 TW of power—more than seven times current production. If people adopted the energy lifestyle of Western Europe, power production would need to rise to 45.5 terawatts. On the other hand if the world's 9 billion in 2050 adopted India's current living standards, the world would need to produce only 4 TW of power. Nocera suggests, assuming heroic conservation measures that would enable affluent American lifestyles, that "conservative estimates of energy use place our global energy need at 28-35 TW in 2050." This means that the world will need an additional 15-22 TW of energy over the current base of 13.5 TW.

Here is Ronald Bailey's conclusion:

Maybe Nocera is right that solar power is the way to go, but history teaches us to scrap the Apollo Project model for technology R&D. Federal bureaucrats are simply not smart enough to pick winning energy technologies. Instead, eliminate all energy subsidies, set a price for carbon, and then let tens of thousands of energy researchers and entrepreneurs develop and test various new technologies in the market. No one knows now how humanity will fuel the 21st century, but Apollo and Manhattan Project-style Federal energy research projects will prove to be a huge waste of time, money and talent.

I agree, we need to keep the Federal government out of this. They haven't managed to come up with a comprehensive energy policy, and they have managed to screw up virtually every aspect of "government".

International Day of Climate Action :: Today!

I've been seeing and hearing bits and pieces about 350.org here and there, but now I'm keyed in on their website. They are the organizers behind October 24th being "International Day of Climate Action".

It appears that their mission is to go beyond mere action, and build a movement. Sounds like my kinda organization. Big-picture-thinking-there-is-no-box-kinda-folks.

More info at 350.org.

I've just discovered it this morning, so I'm behind the eight ball on any meaningful action, so I'll have to go with spreading the word via this blog.

I'm off to read more about this...have a great weekend my friends!

Easy Like Water

Easy Like Water is a feature documentary about floating schools, solar power, and the fate of the earth.

In Bangladesh, solar-powered floating schools are turning the front lines of climate change into a community of learning. As the water steals the land, one man's vision (Architect Mohammed Rezwan) is re-casting the rising rivers as channels of communication, and transforming peoples lives.

More info at www.easylikewater.com

For me, stories like this give me hope that humanity can rise above the floodwaters of petty squabbling and full blown military action, eschew the politics of power for the power of the sun and the wind, and eventually find that the profits of lives and lifetimes lived are about community and family and friends, art and music and creativity, literature and education, and not about capital gains and living the luxe life. Human endeavor is not about money.

I, for one, remained convinced that capital gains and profiteering remain the root source of the largest environmental challenge this planet and its occupants will ever face. I hope that three billion of us can figure that out very soon, for then, the tides will change. Spread the word my friends.

Come to think of it, see if you can get the documentary shown in your community. Here is the trailer.

The Long Emergency :: A book by James Howard Kunstler

This morning, I happened across this on the bookshelves in my office - I bought it a while back, but haven't yet read it. "The Long Emergency - Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century"

"If you give a damn, you should read this book." - THE INDEPENDENT

"This is a frightening and important book." - TIME OUT CHICAGO

"It used to be that only environmentalists and paranoids warned about the world running out of oil and the future it could bring: crashing economies, resource wars, social breakdown, agony at the pump. Not anymore...America's dependence on oil is too pervasive to undo quickly, [Kunstler] warns...In the meantime, we'll have our hands full dealing with...the soaring temperatures, rising sea levels and mega-droughts brought by global climate change. Not long ago, a Jeremiah like Kunstler would have been dismissed as a kook...As brilliant as it is baleful...and we disregard it at our peril." - THE WASHINGTON POST

"What sets The Long Emergency apart...is its comprehensive sweep - its powerful integration of science and technology, economics and finance, international politics and social change, along with a fascinating attempt to peer into a chaotic future. Kunstler is such a compelling and sometimes eloquent writer that it is hard to put the book down." - AMERICAN SCIENTIST

"Funny, irreverent, and blunt." - THE GLOBE AND MAIL

Rolling Stone ::: Article condensed from the book

Books.Google.com

Also note that Kunstler has a new book out - titled "World Made by Hand - A novel of America's post-oil future". I'll have to get my hands on that one.

On Design :: What is our intention as a species?

Here's a TED talk from Architect William McDonough on infinite, or cradle-to-cradle design. In it, he says the "design strategy" for humanity should be this:

"Our goal is a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy and just world, with clean air, water, soil and power - economically, equitably, ecologically and elegantly enjoyed."

Sounds good to me.



I had heard something about China burning up ALL their coal and using ALL their topsoil, simply to produce (clay) bricks build shelter to house their growing population.

I guess this is where it came from. It looks like McDonough and his team have developed and implemented a viable workaround - and moved the farm land to the roofs of the city.

It appears some of us are moving in the right direction, we just need to pick up the pace.

TED :: Shai Agassi :: A bold plan for mass adoption of electric cars

Oil free by 2020...sounds good to me.

His company's website:
http://www.betterplace.com/

His TED talk:

Time for drastic action against global warming?...!

Here's a follow up article on MSNBC to my prior post on the 1,000 year effects of the last 100 years of burning fossil fuels...talking about the "what-if's" of the "do nothing" option...

Deep deep doo doo

Photo by alex.tango.fuego...

For the past couple of weeks, I've been thinking about an article (from 2006) I read in the New Yorker - letting it roll around up there and trying to figure out what I was going to say about it in here. Now that the scientific concept of this article is out in the media - the concept that the damage of global warming has, in effect, been done - I figured I would go ahead and write about it.

In less than one hundred years, fewer than twenty-five percent of the world's population has irreversibly changed our climate. Starting today, we could park every car, shutter every factory, and cease and desist the burning of coal and natural gas for our electricity, and it would take hundreds of years for our climatological systems to equilibrate to their natural order. The report in the media is saying one thousand years - but who really knows? It's definitely not years in scale, common sense tells us this. It's certainly not decades of recovery, but most likely centuries.

What's it to you? Some people might be tempted to say "Well, if we can't reverse the trend, then why do anything about it? Let's just keep on keepin' on." Harsher weather extremes will be the most rapidly evident manifestation. Bigger, more deadly, more frequent hurricanes born of a longer hurricane season. Spring thunderstorms that spawn more tornados. Tornadic activity in places that havent' experienced it in the past. Continued drought. These weather extremes will effect agriculture and food supplies.

Look for water rationing on the horizon, then entire cities completely running out of water. Dust bowl conditions leading to desertification of larger and larger areas. Acidification of the oceans. Continued reductions and diversity of fish populations. Melting of the Arctic ice cap. The breakup of the Antarctic ice shelf. Rising sea levels. Species extinction and the unforeseen ripples that will cause. The list goes on and on.

What struck me yesterday listening to this on NPR, is that if the industrialized world stopped everything today, it would still not be enough. The reality (which I've actually known for roughly 32 years now) is that there are too many people on this blue marble, using too many resources, producing too much waste, burning too much fossil fuel, to support a sustainable way of life. Sustainable as in the one thousand year time frame. We are short-timers, short-sighted, a short-minded bunch.

Are we so cocooned in our luxury high thread count sheets, so consumed with consuming, so involuntarily under the spell of avarice, that we don't care what happens ten or twenty or fifty or one hundred years from now?

I don't know what it all means. I don't pretend to have the solutions. I just know that somewhere in the last one thousand years, humankind collectively chose the unbalanced path. We choose the unsustainable path. We choose the path of least resistance, and highest degree of comfort, that causes the most damage. Most people are unaware. Some have their heads in the sand. Most don't or won't care. They'll continue with their pursuit of the almighty dollar and the American dream. I doubt that we can, as a global society, make the hard choice that are upon us. But then, I'm a pessimist.

Or is it evolution? Is this the natural course of things, of human existence on this planet, that we will be ultimately responsible for our own extinction?

I'm not the least bit worried about this economic crisis. We are just seeing the tip of the fiscal destabilization iceberg. What we see today is an ice cube compared to what lies ahead. It's actually a good thing. It's making us think about frugality in life. It's making us think about more important things in life.

There are bigger things that one trillion dollars to think about. There is the future of humanity...hopefully the human heart, soul and spirit will prevail...hopefully...hope...

Here is the article on MSNBC.

Here is the article, "The Darkening Sea", from the New Yorker.

Stay tuned for my "The end of life as we know it..." series.