Occupation of Independence

Finally I found a big-picture article on the subject of oil and other resources. I am not terribly familiar with Jeremy Grantham but I do like this article , particularly the second graph, "Exhibit 2", on page 5. The article is flawed. It is contaminated with standard environmental gloom and doom theology: mankind has been Sinful for living it up, therefore Gaia must punish mankind. I am heartily sick of supposedly intelligent "free-thinkers" taking pride in outgrowing outdated religious traditions intellectually , but then clinging to the most puerile, Sunday-school-kindergarten notions, emotionally . They do everything but suck on their thumbs. Today let's consider some of the ideas in Grantham's article that seem profoundly true. One of them is that mankind needs to focus on growing qualitatively, rather than quantitatively. That's a big topic for another day. In opposition to Grantham's environmental gloom-and-doomism, you could choose the

Some in the financial commentariat say that Bernanke must stop printing money and weakening the dollar by 2012, or food and gasoline inflation will put Obama out of work. It does cause me to roll my eyes when I hear (fellow) Obama-bashers use opportunistic arguments like 'Americans need gasoline to get to work.' Well sure, but I wonder what fraction of our passenger-miles in motor vehicles is really about getting to work. I do a lot of bicycling after the morning "rush hour"; how many of those people who pass me are going to work, versus going on an unnecessary shopping trip, or just looking for an excuse to get out of the house? I could be attributing my own slouchy driving habits to other people. For the sake of argument, let's assume that half of driving is just entertainment, thinly disguised as transportation and phony necessity. Isn't there cheaper entertainment available in this modern age? If you walked up to the average gasoline pump, where a d