How important is it that the United Nations just issued an apocalyptic report on global warning? 

Serious stories on global warming have been rare in my local paper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.  I was thus happy to see that the Post-Dispatch placed a punchy graphic about global warming on the front page of yesterday’s paper—2,500 scientists say it’s going to happen and it’s going to ruin the planet.  To get the story, though, one had to turn to page 25A.  There, one learns about

more than a billion people in need of water, extreme food shortages in Africa, a planetary landscape ravaged by floods and millions of species sentenced to extinction.

This report was so incredibly important that the Post-Dispatch dedicated 21 column-inches of text to the story. It’s about the same amount of space the PD gave to yesterday’s front page story about “bratzels” (bratwurst wrapped in pretzels) a new food featured at Cardinal baseball games.  Who would have thought that “bratzels” were almost as important as global warming?

That this story on global warming appeared in a local paper at all is important.   Most people get most of their news from local TV and newspapers.  If global warming hadn’t appeared in the P-D, many people in my city might have assumed that it was all a hoax or that someone figured out what to do about it.

Setting aside the graphics of the global warming story, the PD provided three thin columns of 7-inches each to describe …

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently released a detailed yet accessible report addressing future energy supplies in the U.S.   The title of the report is Uncertainty about Future Oil Supply Makes It Important to Develop a Strategy for Addressing a Peak and Decline in Oil Production.
Here are some of the report’s conclusions:

Most studies estimate that oil production will peak sometime between now and 2040.

In the United States, alternative fuels and transportation technologies face challenges that could impede their ability to mitigate the consequences of a peak and decline in oil production, unless sufficient time and effort are brought to bear. For example, although corn ethanol production is technically feasible, it is more expensive to produce than gasoline and will require costly investments in infrastructure, such as pipelines and storage tanks, before it can become widely available as a primary fuel. Key alternative technologies currently supply the equivalent of only about 1 percent of U.S. consumption of petroleum products, and the Department of Energy (DOE) projects that even by 2015, they could displace only the equivalent of 4 percent of projected U.S. annual consumption. In such circumstances, an imminent peak and sharp decline in oil production could cause a worldwide recession.

The report also contains a section on Peak Oil:  Oil Production Has Peaked in the United States and Most Other Countries Outside the Middle East.  Here is an excerpt:

According to IEA, most countries outside the Middle East have reached their peak in conventional oil production, or