¨Effect¨ is the noun and ¨Affect¨ the verb.

I hope that this is of help to you.

My point: eggheads and policy wonks, as usual, drift behind the curve while our auteurs and artists and writers lead the way envisioning our future. Just visit any bookseller or cineplex or skim through an evening’s worth of DishTV offerings. What do you see? That’s right: zombies!

We can do absolutely nothing to effect (or is it ‘affect’? Darn. I never get that right!) this planet’s climate. Not one iota. But we will generate conditions that inevitably produce zombies the way progressives and freakonomic types are going. Zimbabwe’s got’em right now. So’s Congo. They had to do it the old fashioned way, bottom-up: burn, steal, pillage, starve and deploy run-amuck-with-sticks-and-pitchforks misbehavior.

The rate the present administration pushes various suicide mission debt bomb legislation packages, we’re not far behind. So, our demise, if and when it comes, develops top-down. Barney, Nancy, Harry and the president have the plan and the field advantage. But I sense a counter surge and feel its welcome heat right here! Great article.

Lebensraum is space needed for survival.
Since there is not enough lebensraum to go around only the fittest survive, said the Nazi ideologues. Their doctrine brings to mind the joke about the space mission, sponsored by the United Nations to promote world peace. Three astronauts were assigned to the mission: a Russian, an American and a dark representative of the Third World. There was the proverbial failure and the imperative of ejecting one astronaut to save lebensraum for the other two. This unleashed a clamorous movement to save the obvious victim, and the vote of the majority prevailed. The survivors would be the winners of an intellectual contest. Since the representative of the Third World was known for his wide knowledge, the hard choice would be settled between the other two; a plague on both their houses. So the contest began with questions put to the Russian, the American and the Third World representative.
First Question: Who dropped the first atomic bomb?
The Americans, sneered the Russian astronaut.
Second Question: What cities were destroyed by atomic bombs?
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, replied the American.
Third Question: Names & addresses of the victims?
The question put to the representative of the Third World was not answered. Ejection followed.
The Green activists of Europe damn progress as an illusion that led to plunder of the planet to serve wasteful consumption of too many. They want to shrink world population and economy, which they rate as excessive for the non-renewable resources of a finite planet. They have already had their way in Europe, with countries with declining populations and stagnant economies, and want the rest of the world to join them in a suicide pact.
Suicide is the right word, and not a metaphor. In its support there is an organization, VHMENT Voluntary Human Extinction Movement that preaches this openly. See http://www.vhment.org with its slogan: “May we live long and die out”. It means that they only want human reproduction to cease, and that in good time the planet would be saved by the natural death of all living humans. The dodge avoids charges of incitement to violence. In their view, mankind must extinguish itself in a magnanimous gesture to a tormented planet so as to return it to the natural beauty it had before it was defiled by human hand. Save the planet for whom? Save it for an audience of grateful crabs and cockroaches?
Others are in a hurry. It is the case of Theodor Kaczynski, better known as the UNABOMBER. A graduate of Harvard and Michigan universities, he started an academic career at the University of California – Berkeley. In 1971 he exchanged his career for the life of a hermit in a remote cabin in the Rocky Mountains, Montana. He was prompted to his deeds as a terrorist after seeing human encroachment on his surroundings. He never tried to enlist followers, a trait that for 17 years made it hard to track the perpetrator of mysterious bombings. Between 1978 and 1995 this lonely terrorist sent 16 homemade bombs to technological research institutes and the offices of airlines. The bombs killed 3 and wounded 23. In April 1995 he sent a letter to the New York Times promising to abstain from terrorism in exchange for publication of his manifesto, The Industrial Society and its Future in the New York Times or Washington Post.
This was done. Publication led to Kaczynski’s identification by people who had a recollection of his ideas in old letters; he was tracked, arrested, faced trial and was sentenced to imprisonment for life. The Manifesto, with 35 thousand words, does not have the incoherent language of a raving madman; it is well crafted and has the structure of the usual academic thesis with numbered sections and cross-references. It opens with the statement: the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. Kaczynski justified the bombings as a way to draw attention to the erosion of the world by modern technologies demanding big organizations that grow at the expense of gradual stultification of man. The Green activists disassociate themselves from morbid personalities for political and public relations reasons, but if they want the inspiration of lucid text for writing a Suicide’s Note of the Western World they should read the Manifesto at: http://cyber.eserver.org/unabom.txt
With Europe in their pocket and a wavering America under Obama, the nightmare of Green activists is the economic expansion of China and India. Brazil matters little; its growth is at half the Asian rate and its population is less than one tenth of the combined populations of the Asian giants. Russia is on the way out, with a declining population and mired in the legacy of 70 years of Communism. The Greens fear that billions in Asia will rise to a better standard of living, be it at a level much lower than those of the West. They know it would be politically incorrect to label the Asian hunger for a better diet as the sin of gluttony but their mean spirit is present in worries over the launching of the Nano popular car, the least expensive on earth (US$2500) by Tata Group of India. They envisioned it as a harbinger of Doomsday, with Asian fleets of hundreds of millions of cars, demanding non-renewable resources and emitting CO2. The Lebensraum Doctrine once again shows its ugly head.
The giants India and China have weight and stature to reject the fate of the dark astronaut of the joke. Their economic rise will continue and they may some day dwarf the Western world, even if the sun stands still and the heavens fall.

Can’t you? Really? Substantially?

Amplifying that is the rapidly looming tsunami of peaking of conventional light oil will dominate all other concerns and have financially existential impacts. The very high inelasticity in transport fuels/energy caused a 2.5% increase in demand caused a 250% increase in oil prices in 2009 from $32 to $80.

Average decline rates of 6.7% in existing oil fields will accelerate with age. Combined with 1.5% growing population, this implies that we need to replace existing alternate transport fuels/energy or new discoveries & production within about 12 years.
Yet it takes about a decade from conception to production to bring major fuel projects on line. That high feedback delay with very little storage gives a highly amplified and very underdamped control system.

The coming financial rollercoaster will totally swamp concerns of climate alarmists. The coming financial fluctuations have economically catastrophic consequences on both the developed and developing world if not addressed. Climate change and OPEC’s “hiding the decline” have both blinkered us to the real economic tsunami of transport fuel shortages.

Calling for an 80% reduction in fossil fuels by 2050 is a Sunday picnic compared to how to address the likely 80% reduction in exports of current transport fuel production by 2020. This is the greatest challenge facing us from “hiding the decline”.