Thursday, April 19, 2007

slow crash news update April 19th 2007

The Peak Oil Crisis: Have the Troubles Begun?

While US refinery utilization is now back up above 90 percent of capacity, a question remains as to how much longer the US can import sufficient quantities of finished gasoline and the proper grades of crude that enable our refineries to produce the optimum amount of gasoline in their current configuration. Two weeks ago, as a number of observers pointed out, refinery utilization increased while gasoline production dropped. This may be a one-time glitch, or it could mean that sufficient quantities of light, sweet crude, that are optimal for making gasoline, are becoming difficult to find. If this is indeed the case, then the US has a problem of major proportions.

Bee-Ing and Nothingness. Why have the bees left the environment?

what is being called CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder) is spreading very quickly. it should be noted that being that honeybees are THE corner stone of mass agricultural systems, like ours, than if they go so does agriculture and hence civilization. but not in a nice way unfornuately.

Denial in the Desert

Persistent drought, like melting ice, rapidly reorganizes ecosystems and transforms entire landscapes. Without sufficient moisture to produce protective sap, millions of acres of pinyon and ponderosa pine have been ravaged by plagues of bark beetles; these dead forests, in turn, have helped to kindle the firestorms that have burst into the suburbs of Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix and Denver, as well as destroyed part of Los Alamos. In Texas the grasslands have also burned--nearly 2 million acres in 2006 alone--and as topsoil blows away, prairies are reverting to desert.

The Ashes of Phoenix

“This is not the first time unchecked growth has filled the Valley of the Sun. If you lift the rug of Phoenix, buried directly below you will find the remains of an ancient city, a Neolithic version of Phoenix. The first communities appeared in the low basin of the Salt River 3,000 years ago, as shown by remains recently discovered under the new Phoenix Convention Center. From there, prehistoric settlements took an escalating course of empire, filling the basin to overflowing. They sprawled all the way south to Tucson, while satellite communities appeared even north of Flagstaff. They grew until they were no longer able to sustain themselves. Then, their civilization fell.”