James Howard Kunstler writes: As I write at 6:30 Eastern Daylight Time September 01, 2008, Hurricane
Gustave grinds out of the Gulf of Mexico to make landfall on the
Louisiana Coast at Port Fourchon, the marshalling yard for the oil and
gas industry — where the oil companies move people and equipment to
the rig zone offshore. The storm spent the wee hours of the morning
chewing through a wad of offshore drilling platforms and, perhaps more
importantly, the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port (or LOOP), where all the
oil supertanker ships from Middle East come to offload their cargos. It
will probably be days before we know what was chewed up out there –
not to mention the spaghetti-like network of pipelines that run all
over the shallow bottom to carry the oil and gas from the platforms to
the refineries just up the Mississippi corridor between New Orleans and
Baton Rouge.

So, at this hour nobody knows yet what the
outcome will be, either for the city of New Orleans and its suburbs, or
for the oil and gas industry. My guess is that enough oil and gas will
come off-line, be shut-in, or get disrupted to severely affect the
normal operations of America for a couple of weeks. At the
least, our just-in-time gasoline and diesel supply system will take a
forced time-out. Those refineries on-shore are in the path to get hit.
If they are damaged then we’ll probably see shortages of motor fuels
all over the eastern US.

If we see a shortage of motor fuels, we may also get a disruption
of trucking for the just-in-time food delivery system that keeps the
supermarkets stocked. So, there is a possibility that Americans will
experience both fuel and food shortages this back-to-school week — and
in some places it may be the not-back-to-school week if there is any
trouble getting fuel for the yellow bus fleets. There has also been
chatter about possible far-reaching damage to the old-and-fragile
electric grid if this storm trips just the right switches, but that’s
in the category of idle talk for now. …

Update, Thurs, Sept 04, 2008, the
state’s power grid sustained massive damage from Hurricane Gustav,
officials say, and it could be weeks before all of it is repaired.
Frustrated motorists poured back into the state hoping to return home,
only to be turned back at checkpoints on all the major highways. Many
grew frustrated as they roamed the state like gypsies or sat in motels
they could scarcely afford, their cash running low and no way to get
more.

Across the state, more than 1 million people were without
electricity, which meant gas stations were unable to pump fuel, ATMs
could not dispense money and restaurants could not open to feed people
still unable to return home. Communication was made difficult by spotty
cellular and Internet service.

Bloomberg reports: About 96 percent of crude-oil production in the Gulf of
Mexico and 92 percent of natural-gas output remains halted because of
Hurricane Gustav, the U.S. government said.

Energy producers
reported that 91 rigs and 599 production platforms still are evacuated
due to the storm, the Minerals Management Service said today in a
statement on its Web site. About 1.2 million barrels of daily oil
production remain shut-in, along with 6.7 billion cubic feet of gas.

… This hit, and the potential disruptions to
the everyday economy, could be the shot that finally pushes the
long-teetering banking system over the edge. Surely the insurance
industry, which is tied to banking and its worthless alphabet
securities, will not be in position to cover all its billions of
dollars in payouts. This may be what finally stops the game of musical
chairs in which insolvent banks pretend to be capitalized by showing up
for loans at the Federal Reserve’s teller cages. For instance, when
last seen before the Labor Day hiatus, Lehman Brothers was desperately
scrambling for life-support from anybody and anything with a few
billion spare bucks. As the hiatus ends and real-life reasserts itself,
Lehman may finally find itself free-falling into the abyss, and the
chain of mutual obligations, cross-collateralizations, and Ponzi plays
connecting it to the other banks could break, bringing on a domino fall
of insolvent banks and institutions. (09/04/08)
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Tom Engelhardt writes: Here it is, as simply as I can put it: In the course of any year, there must be relatively few countries on this planet on which U.S. soldiers do not set foot, whether with guns blazing, humanitarian aid in hand, or just for a friendly visit. In startling numbers of countries, our soldiers not only arrive, but stay interminably, if not indefinitely. Sometimes they live on military bases built to the tune of billions of dollars that amount to sizeable American towns (with accompanying amenities), sometimes on stripped down forward operating bases that may not even have showers. When those troops don’t stay, often American equipment does — carefully stored for further use at tiny “cooperative security locations,” known informally as “lily pads” (from which U.S. troops, like so many frogs, could assumedly leap quickly into a region in crisis). At the height of the Roman Empire, the Romans had an estimated 37 major military bases scattered around their dominions. At the height of the British Empire, the British had 36 of them planetwide. Depending on just who you listen to and how you count, we have hundreds of bases. According to Pentagon records, in fact, there are 761 active military “sites” abroad.

The fact is: We garrison the planet north to south, east to west, and even on the seven seas, thanks to our various fleets and our massive aircraft carriers which, with 5,000-6,000 personnel aboard — that is, the population of an American town — are functionally floating bases.

And here’s the other half of that simple truth: We don’t care to know about it. We, the American people, aided and abetted by our politicians, the Pentagon, and the mainstream media, are knee-deep in base denial. …

In a nutshell, occupying the planet, base by base, normally simply isn’t news. Americans may pay no attention and yet, of course, they do pay. It turns out to be a staggeringly expensive process for U.S. taxpayers. Writing of a major 2004 Pentagon global base overhaul (largely aimed at relocating many of them closer to the oil heartlands of the planet), Mike Mechanic of Mother Jones magazine online points out the following: “An expert panel convened by Congress to assess the overseas basing realignment put the cost at $20 billion, counting indirect expenses overlooked by the Pentagon, which had initially budgeted one-fifth that amount.” And that’s only the most obvious way Americans pay. It’s hard for us even to begin to grasp just how military (and punitive) is the face that the U.S. has presented to the world, especially during George W. Bush’s two terms in office. (Increasingly, that same face is also presented to Americans. For instance, as Paul Krugman indicated recently, the civilian Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA] has been so thoroughly wrecked these last years that significant planning for the response to Hurricane Gustav fell on the shoulders of the military’s Bush-created U.S. Northern Command.)

In purely practical terms, though, Americans are unlikely to be able to shoulder forever the massive global role the Pentagon and successive administrations have laid out for us. Sooner or later, cutbacks will come and the sun will slowly begin to set on our base-world abroad.

In the Cold War era, there were, of course, two “superpowers,” the lesser of which disappeared in 1991 after a lifespan of 74 years. Looking at what seemed to be a power vacuum across the Bering Straits, the leaders of the other power prematurely declared themselves triumphant in what had been an epic struggle for global hegemony. It now seems that, rather than victory, the second superpower was just heading for the exit far more slowly. As of now, “the American Century,” birthed by Time/Life publisher Henry Luce in 1941, has lasted but 67 years. Today, you have to be in full-scale denial not to know that the twenty-first century — whether it proves to be the Century of Multipolarity, the Century of China, the Century of Energy, or the Century of Chaos — will not be an American one. The unipolar moment is already so over and, sooner or later, those mega-bases and lily pads alike will wash up on the shores of history, evidence of a remarkable fantasy of a global Pax Americana.

Not that you’re likely to hear much about this in the run-up to November 4th in the U.S. Here, fantasy reigns in both parties where a relatively upbeat view of our globally dominant future is a given, and will remain so, no matter who enters the White House in January 2009. After all, who’s going to run for president not on the idea that “it’s morning again in America,” but on the recognition that it’s the wee small hours of the morning, the bender is ending, and the hangover… Well, it’s going to be a doozy.

Better take some B vitamins and get a little sleep. The world’s probably not going to look so great by the dawn’s early light.  (09/04/08)
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BBC Science — A new study by climate scientists behind the controversial 1998 “hockey stick” graph suggests their earlier analysis was broadly correct. Michael Mann’s team analysed data for the last 2,000 years, and concluded that Northern Hemisphere temperatures now are “anomalously warm”. Different analytical methods give the same result, they report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The 1998 hockey stick was a totem of debates over man-made global warming. The graph - indicating that Northern Hemisphere temperatures had been roughly constant for 1,000 years (the “shaft” of the stick) before turning abruptly upwards in the industrial age - featured prominently in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2001 assessment.

But some academics questioned its methodology and conclusions, and increasingly strident condemnations reverberated around the blogosphere. One US politician demanded to see financial and research records from the scientists involved.

However, a 2006 report from the National Research Council (NRC), commissioned by the US Congress, broadly endorsed its conclusion that Northern Hemisphere temperatures in the late 20th Century were probably warmer than at any time in the previous 400 years, and perhaps at any time during the previous 1,000 years. Since then, a number of research groups have produced new “proxy records” of temperatures from the centuries before thermometers were widely deployed. Such proxies include the growth patterns of trees and coral, the contents of ice cores and sediments, and temperature fluctuations in boreholes.

In their latest study, Dr Mann’s group collated more than 1,200 proxy records - the majority from the Northern Hemisphere - and used different statistical methods to analyse their cumulative message. “We used two different methods that are quite complementary in the assumptions they make about data, so that provides a test of the sensitivity of data to the methods used,” he told BBC News. “We also made use of a far wider network of proxy data than previously available. Ten years ago, the availability of data became quite sparse by the time you got back to 1,000 AD, and what we had then was weighted towards tree-ring data; but now you can go back 1,300 years without using tree-ring data at all and still get a verifiable conclusion.”

Both analytical methods produced graphs similar to the original hockey stick, though starting further back in time. The “shaft” now extends back to about 700 AD. (09/04/08)
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BBC Environment — Sea levels could rise by up to one-and-a-half metres by the end of this century, according to a new scientific analysis. This is substantially more than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecast in last year’s landmark assessment of climate science. Sea level rise of this magnitude would have major impacts on low-lying countries such as Bangladesh.

The findings were presented at a major science conference in Vienna. The research group is not the first to suggest that the IPCC’s forecast of an average rise in global sea levels of 28-43cm by 2100 is too conservative. The IPCC was unable to include the contribution from “accelerated” melting of polar ice sheets as water temperatures warm because the processes involved were not yet understood.

The new analysis comes from a UK/Finnish team which has built a computer model linking temperatures to sea levels for the last two millennia.

“For the past 2,000 years, the [global average] sea level was very stable, it only varied by about 20cm,” said Svetlana Jevrejeva from the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory (POL), near Liverpool, UK. But by the end of the century, we predict it will rise by between 0.8m and 1.5m. The rapid rise in the coming years is associated with the rapid melting of ice sheets.” …

A rise of even a metre could have major implications for low-lying countries - especially, noted Dr Holgate, those whose economies are not geared up to build sophisticated sea defence systems. “Eighty to 90% of Bangladesh is within a metre or so of sea level,” he said, “so if you live in the Ganges delta you’re in a lot of trouble; and that’s an awful lot of people.” Dr Jevrejeva’s projections have been submitted for publication in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  (09/4/08)
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