I’ve been giving some thought to the way the discussion about our present and future are engaged in online especially, also of course in print. A few things have struck me after tracking the main authors and sites (see right sidebar for some fo the better representatives of this genre) for a few years, most started by a sneaking suspicion that there is something wrong in the mindset that is driving the discussion. Some of these problems are somewhat obvious, for example authors who benefit from attracting attention to themselves, which in turn sells books. Others are less obvious, and quite a bit more insideous, since they actually make it hard for us to even see what the problem is.

Given the degree of the problem, one thing is becoming more obvious: any changes to come are going to happen in totally unexpected ways. Why? Because we are entering into uncharted territories when it comes to how we believe the world works versus how the world actually works. The key word here of course is sustainability. If you can come to understand this word, you are pretty much most of the way home.

Near term it’s hard to see anything positive happening politically in the USA, unless you consider a non-stop barrage of instigation to violence from the neo-con far right, resulting in, surprise, violence, as a positive. That model is tried and true, admittedly, worked well for the brown shirts too. Personally I’d suggest anyone with any integrity distance themselves from such types, unless that’s the future you want of course.

Or the idea that force-feeding even more capital into large corporate systems (aka, health care ‘reform’ [pray tell, how is forcing more money into the HMO system, thus making it stronger, reform?], military outsourcing, etc) is somehow going to help actually solve our problems.

The main structural problem the EU will face is lack of domestically produced resources. The main positive the core European nations possess: a reasonably coherent political system, and reasonably rational voters who actually understand things when pushed, and of course, a sense of place, of history, mental, linguistic horizons broader than the local walmart parking lot or corporate funded tv/radio shows…

Almost the opposite of the US, oddly.
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Sometimes it’s useful to stop thinking abstractly, and to stop guessing on a future we can as of yet only faintly make the outlines of in our daily lives, and to just see what’s going on here, now, today.

I like Bloomberg.com as a news site, because it aims at capitalists, and the USA is a capitalist country, so news pointed at them tends to be more accurate than most standard corporate mass media. This doesn’t mean you can turn off your critical thinking, but the news there is often real, and points to larger trends, since such trends are exactly what businessmen need to have a solid understanding of in order to hope to make good decisions.

So it struck me when I read Airline Era Ends as Carriers Cull 50-Seat Jets ‘Nobody Wants’ .

The 50-seat jets once prized by carriers such as Delta Air Lines Inc. are being culled from U.S. fleets as higher fuel and maintenance bills make them too expensive to fly.

By 2015, U.S. airlines will have about 200 jets with 50 or fewer seats, down from about 1,200, said Michael Boyd, president of consultant Boyd Group International Inc. in Evergreen, Colorado. More than 80 have been scrapped in 2010, he said.

Got that? I don’t know if you followed the airline industry when oil went to $147 a barrel, in 2008, but one prominent airline CEO stated that the global airline industry becomes non-viable at oil prices over $100 per barrel. This is because of economies of scale certain pricing models enable. In other words, airlines have basically three fixed costs: 1. the physical airplane, 2. fuel, and 3. labor/corporate. Debt costs would mainly be centered around the cost of the aircraft.
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If you don’t like the cost of deep water drilling, if you don’t like what you are seeing on your TVs, if you are shocked by the massive environmental costs of this BP Deepwater Horizon blowout, then push your representatives to establish far more powerful regulations on it. And by all means, do your part as well, stop driving so much. Less demand translates directly to less need to do deep water drilling. At least for now.

The real problem, of course, is that most currently producing large fields are in a state of decline, forcing oil companies to go offshore to get new sources of oil. Drill baby Drill simply allows a tiny bit more high risk offshore drilling to take place. Remember, initial estimates of the recoverable reserves in the Macondo reservoir (the one that is spewing out oil into the Gulf of Mexico now, that is) put them at about 50 million barrels. That’s 2.5 days supply for the USA, give or take, or about 0.6 days supply for the planet.

BP spokesman Jon Pack said it’s still possible there will be oil produced in the area. The reservoir may have held about 50 million barrels of crude, he said. www.businessweek.com

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You can check out what BP is putting out in video and other media a their Gulf of Mexico Response section of their site (see left navigation bar for various formats available, video, image, etc). For video feeds and other video, check out their Response in Video section.

Here’s a site with multiple live camera shots from different sources, deepwaterbp.com. Same site, their wall of ROV videos (takes a long time to load, click on any video to see it full size, esc to return).

Some of these are I think windows media, not sure, some are flash.