Ponce
1st August 2014, 06:32 AM
Horror master Stephen King’s “Under the Dome” is a vision of America’s future. Trapped in a massive bubble world warning us to wake up. Get into action. Forget today’s market gurus predicting 40% stock crashes. King’s “Dome” sees how our 21st century America has become a critical mass of bubbles of our own making, guaranteed to self-destruct, unless we listen to the warnings:
Big Jim, the town mayor with a god-complex, secretly develops a solution with a science teacher: Reduce town population. As food, water and other supplies get scarcer at restaurants, gas stations, a secret alliance between religion and science to conserve resources, but also eliminate people … yes, King’s captured the global dilemma “Under the Dome” in little Chester’s Mill, solving problems today’s world leaders deny, minimize, and just keep putting off, probably till too late.
Meanwhile, the real world’s dome of bubbles just keeps blowing bigger and bigger into an unstable explosive critical mass … Limited resources are rapidly vanishing under our global dome … Food scarcity increases worldwide … Political, religious, business leaders all silent about the taboo topic of controlling the world’s out-of-control population growth … silence … while the clock keeps ticking.
Yes, silence on long-term big-bubble issues is deafening … drowned out in the relentless noise on trending social media, by their all-consuming hypnotic materialism, by the relentless drive for earnings by big banks, big oil, big lobbying, big government and myopic, egocentric, small-minded politicians with god-complexes bigger than Big Jim’s.
Pentagon planning for more wars, austerity, massive population losses
What’s ahead in King’s horror? America’s future? In a world where a hundred billionaires own more than half of the world’s resources and want more? Where billions go to bed hungry every night? Where life promises to get worse because the planet cannot feed the 10 billion people predicted by 2050?
So what’s ahead? Wars, wars and more wars fought by desperate people for vanishing resources, because inaction with the big issues will fulfill the Pentagon’s 2020 prediction: “As the planet’s carrying capacity shrinks, an ancient pattern of desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies would emerge … warfare is defining human life.”
Yes, that’s the clear message of Michael Klare’s “The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources.” And about the same time as the Pentagon’s 2020 prediction, Klare published his earlier classic, “Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict.”
Klare’s bottom line hits hard: “No matter how much corporate or government officials wish to deny it, there is not nearly enough nonrenewable resources on this planet to perpetually satisfy the growing needs of a ballooning world population.”
Nations quietly preparing for resource wars, dead ahead
Even worse, in today’s world run by Big Oil and climate-denying billionaires like the Koch Bros, Klare warns “existing modes of production are causing unacceptable damage to the global environment. Eventually continuing with current industrial practices will simply prove impossible.” But “because implementing a whole new industrial order will be a lengthy task, any delay in beginning that work will prove costly, as resources keep dwindling and their prices continue to rise.”
The truth is, our planet is at a historic turning point. A critical mass is near its flash point, bringing with it a perfect storm of regional wars, mass starvation, pandemics and global-warming catastrophes. And yet most conservative politicians, Wall Street CEOs and billionaires minimize the warnings of men like environmentalist Bill McKibben, money manager Jeremy Grantham, anthropologist Jared Diamond, and global security expert Michael Klare … warning us to wake-up before it’s too late to save our planet.
Listen: “The world is facing an unprecedented crisis of resource depletion — a crisis that goes beyond ‘peak oil’ to encompass shortages of coal and uranium, copper and lithium, water and arable land. With all of the planet’s easily assessable resource deposits rapidly approaching exhaustion, the desperate hunt for supplies has become a frenzy of extreme exploration, as governments and corporations rush to stake their claims in areas previously considered too dangerous or remote” such as the melting polar regions.
Wars for what’s left … greedy grabs till nothing is left
Klare opens on a fascinating replay of Russia’s 2007 risky deployment of a minisubmarine using a robotic arm to plant a titanium flag deep under the polar ice cap, two and a half miles below the surface of the North Pole. Why? Very simple: this vast “frozen wasteland is melting. Fast. So Russia, Canada, the U.S. and other nations are all laying claims to “vast deposits of oil, natural gas, and valuable minerals.”
Faced with an impossible equation — out-of-control global population growth plus rapid depletion of nonrenewable resources equals megacatastrophes — the big players are all selfishly grabbing and hoarding scarce commodities … a scenario described in Ian Bremmer’s “Every Nation for Itself” and ‘The End of the Free Market,” where we act like desperate banana republic dictators as the world sinks into a self-destructive anarchy, scrambling for a share of what little’s left — till soon nothing will be left for any nation.
Klare warns: the challenges the world faces are very different from any time in history: “While the current assault on remote resource frontiers bears some similarities to the historical exploration of undeveloped territories,” such as the Roman Empire’s expansion, today’s global threats are totally “different from anything that has come before.”
This time history really is different: “Never before have we seen the same combination of factors that confronts us today.” Five megatrends threaten the survival of our planet:
Commodities: Non-renewable resources permanently disappearing.
New frontiers: No major untapped reserves exist, have vanished forever.
Population growth: Adding billions of insatiable new consumers.
Limitations: Economics, technology, climate limit new exploration.
Climate change: devastating unintended consequences on energy.
Klare warns that in “many cases, the commodities procured will represent the final supplies of their type.” Final. But, unfortunately, too many capitalists, conservative politicians and billionaires ignore the reality of permanently disappearing nonrenewable resources.
As a result, the resource race we’re running today is “the last of its kind that we are likely to undertake.” It’s a worldwide trend that Klare and others see magnifying the risk of global catastrophes: Cash-rich nations, China, Africa, the Saudis competing for scarce resources … an aggressive new mind-set, like Russia, grabbing resource-rich territories … conservatives fighting for existing production methods rather than new technologies … lack of political will to invest government money in innovation … our rapid drift from a democracy into an anarchy of the superrich … the failure to understand that the lack of resources will increase scarcity, austerity and inequality across all nations.
And finally, the total failure to encourage or even acknowledge the need for population controls, even fighting birth control, without which all other strategies will be futile.
The Race for the Last Resources: Happy ending? Endless wars?
Soon, even the myopic leaders in Big Oil, the guys who have been bragging having two hundred or more years of reserves, will be hit with a catastrophic wake-up call, as Klare’s risk factors magnify to critical mass and ignite — fueled by costly resources wars, pandemics, global starvation, environmental crises, skyrocketing commodity prices and accelerating population growth … too late for today’s fossil-fuel dinosaurs.
And in the end, no Stephen King will be able to conjure a magical last-minute appearance of canned food discovered hidden in grandma’s pantry, temporarily solving the food problem in the latest episode of “Under the Doom.” Instead, in today’s very dysfunctional real world, the relentless “Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources” means wars, wars and more wars … unless we wake up in time.
Read more at http://investmentwatchblog.com/america-under-the-dome-who-dies-in-food-wars-austerity-wars-population-control-in-the-coming-age/#QUXrkeKgVPQfRQSb.99
Big Jim, the town mayor with a god-complex, secretly develops a solution with a science teacher: Reduce town population. As food, water and other supplies get scarcer at restaurants, gas stations, a secret alliance between religion and science to conserve resources, but also eliminate people … yes, King’s captured the global dilemma “Under the Dome” in little Chester’s Mill, solving problems today’s world leaders deny, minimize, and just keep putting off, probably till too late.
Meanwhile, the real world’s dome of bubbles just keeps blowing bigger and bigger into an unstable explosive critical mass … Limited resources are rapidly vanishing under our global dome … Food scarcity increases worldwide … Political, religious, business leaders all silent about the taboo topic of controlling the world’s out-of-control population growth … silence … while the clock keeps ticking.
Yes, silence on long-term big-bubble issues is deafening … drowned out in the relentless noise on trending social media, by their all-consuming hypnotic materialism, by the relentless drive for earnings by big banks, big oil, big lobbying, big government and myopic, egocentric, small-minded politicians with god-complexes bigger than Big Jim’s.
Pentagon planning for more wars, austerity, massive population losses
What’s ahead in King’s horror? America’s future? In a world where a hundred billionaires own more than half of the world’s resources and want more? Where billions go to bed hungry every night? Where life promises to get worse because the planet cannot feed the 10 billion people predicted by 2050?
So what’s ahead? Wars, wars and more wars fought by desperate people for vanishing resources, because inaction with the big issues will fulfill the Pentagon’s 2020 prediction: “As the planet’s carrying capacity shrinks, an ancient pattern of desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies would emerge … warfare is defining human life.”
Yes, that’s the clear message of Michael Klare’s “The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources.” And about the same time as the Pentagon’s 2020 prediction, Klare published his earlier classic, “Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict.”
Klare’s bottom line hits hard: “No matter how much corporate or government officials wish to deny it, there is not nearly enough nonrenewable resources on this planet to perpetually satisfy the growing needs of a ballooning world population.”
Nations quietly preparing for resource wars, dead ahead
Even worse, in today’s world run by Big Oil and climate-denying billionaires like the Koch Bros, Klare warns “existing modes of production are causing unacceptable damage to the global environment. Eventually continuing with current industrial practices will simply prove impossible.” But “because implementing a whole new industrial order will be a lengthy task, any delay in beginning that work will prove costly, as resources keep dwindling and their prices continue to rise.”
The truth is, our planet is at a historic turning point. A critical mass is near its flash point, bringing with it a perfect storm of regional wars, mass starvation, pandemics and global-warming catastrophes. And yet most conservative politicians, Wall Street CEOs and billionaires minimize the warnings of men like environmentalist Bill McKibben, money manager Jeremy Grantham, anthropologist Jared Diamond, and global security expert Michael Klare … warning us to wake-up before it’s too late to save our planet.
Listen: “The world is facing an unprecedented crisis of resource depletion — a crisis that goes beyond ‘peak oil’ to encompass shortages of coal and uranium, copper and lithium, water and arable land. With all of the planet’s easily assessable resource deposits rapidly approaching exhaustion, the desperate hunt for supplies has become a frenzy of extreme exploration, as governments and corporations rush to stake their claims in areas previously considered too dangerous or remote” such as the melting polar regions.
Wars for what’s left … greedy grabs till nothing is left
Klare opens on a fascinating replay of Russia’s 2007 risky deployment of a minisubmarine using a robotic arm to plant a titanium flag deep under the polar ice cap, two and a half miles below the surface of the North Pole. Why? Very simple: this vast “frozen wasteland is melting. Fast. So Russia, Canada, the U.S. and other nations are all laying claims to “vast deposits of oil, natural gas, and valuable minerals.”
Faced with an impossible equation — out-of-control global population growth plus rapid depletion of nonrenewable resources equals megacatastrophes — the big players are all selfishly grabbing and hoarding scarce commodities … a scenario described in Ian Bremmer’s “Every Nation for Itself” and ‘The End of the Free Market,” where we act like desperate banana republic dictators as the world sinks into a self-destructive anarchy, scrambling for a share of what little’s left — till soon nothing will be left for any nation.
Klare warns: the challenges the world faces are very different from any time in history: “While the current assault on remote resource frontiers bears some similarities to the historical exploration of undeveloped territories,” such as the Roman Empire’s expansion, today’s global threats are totally “different from anything that has come before.”
This time history really is different: “Never before have we seen the same combination of factors that confronts us today.” Five megatrends threaten the survival of our planet:
Commodities: Non-renewable resources permanently disappearing.
New frontiers: No major untapped reserves exist, have vanished forever.
Population growth: Adding billions of insatiable new consumers.
Limitations: Economics, technology, climate limit new exploration.
Climate change: devastating unintended consequences on energy.
Klare warns that in “many cases, the commodities procured will represent the final supplies of their type.” Final. But, unfortunately, too many capitalists, conservative politicians and billionaires ignore the reality of permanently disappearing nonrenewable resources.
As a result, the resource race we’re running today is “the last of its kind that we are likely to undertake.” It’s a worldwide trend that Klare and others see magnifying the risk of global catastrophes: Cash-rich nations, China, Africa, the Saudis competing for scarce resources … an aggressive new mind-set, like Russia, grabbing resource-rich territories … conservatives fighting for existing production methods rather than new technologies … lack of political will to invest government money in innovation … our rapid drift from a democracy into an anarchy of the superrich … the failure to understand that the lack of resources will increase scarcity, austerity and inequality across all nations.
And finally, the total failure to encourage or even acknowledge the need for population controls, even fighting birth control, without which all other strategies will be futile.
The Race for the Last Resources: Happy ending? Endless wars?
Soon, even the myopic leaders in Big Oil, the guys who have been bragging having two hundred or more years of reserves, will be hit with a catastrophic wake-up call, as Klare’s risk factors magnify to critical mass and ignite — fueled by costly resources wars, pandemics, global starvation, environmental crises, skyrocketing commodity prices and accelerating population growth … too late for today’s fossil-fuel dinosaurs.
And in the end, no Stephen King will be able to conjure a magical last-minute appearance of canned food discovered hidden in grandma’s pantry, temporarily solving the food problem in the latest episode of “Under the Doom.” Instead, in today’s very dysfunctional real world, the relentless “Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources” means wars, wars and more wars … unless we wake up in time.
Read more at http://investmentwatchblog.com/america-under-the-dome-who-dies-in-food-wars-austerity-wars-population-control-in-the-coming-age/#QUXrkeKgVPQfRQSb.99