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Spitzer successor would be nation's 4th black governor
CNN
If New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer resigns, Lt. Gov. David Paterson stands to become the first African-American governor of the state and the fourth in U.S. history.

Paterson, 53, is legally blind, and although documentation is scarce, it is widely believed that he would be the nation's first blind governor.
(11 March 2008)
Lt. Gov. Paterson is peak-oil aware. -BA

The Bad News at the Pump
The $100-plus Barrel of Oil and What It Means
By Michael T. Klare, TomDisplatch
On Monday March 3, the price of crude oil reached $103.95 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, surpassing the record set nearly 30 years ago during another moment of chaos in the Middle East. Will that new mark prove distinctive in the annals of world history or will it be forgotten as energy prices drop, just as they did following their April 1980 peak?

When oil costs are plotted over time, the 1980 oil crisis -- prompted by Ayatollah Khomeini's Iranian revolution -- stands out as a sharp spike on that price curve. Both before and after that moment, however, oil supplies proved largely sufficient to meet rising global demand, in part because the Saudis and other major producers were capable of compensating for declining Iranian production. They simply increased their output substantially, dumping a surplus of oil onto the global market. Aided by the development of new fields in Alaska and the North Sea, prices dropped precipitously and stayed low through the 1990s (except for a brief spike following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990).

Nothing similar is likely to happen now. For the present surge in prices -- crude oil costs have risen by 74% over the past year -- no such easy solution is in sight. To begin with, we face not a sudden spike, but the results of a steady, relentless climb that began in 2002 and shows no signs of abating; nor can this rise be attributed to a single, chaos-causing factor in the energy business or in global politics. It is instead the product of multiple factors endemic to energy production and characteristic of the current era. There is no prospect of their vanishing any time soon.

Three factors, in particular, are responsible for the current surge: intensifying competition for oil between the older industrial powers and rising economic dynamos like China and India; the inability of the global energy industry to expand supplies to keep pace with growing demand; and intensifying instability in the major oil-producing areas.

... Lurking behind soaring demand is another crisis entirely -- a crisis of production. The energy industry is now in the difficult process of transitioning from a world of easily tapped oil supplies to one in which mainly tough-oil options prevail. Those "easy-oil" supplies are the ones we've long been familiar with: the giant petroleum reservoirs in friendly, stable countries that provided most of the world's oil during the formative years of the Petroleum Age, stretching from the late nineteenth century until the Arab oil embargo of 1973.

These mammoth reservoirs include Ghawar in Saudi Arabia, Burgan in Kuwait, and Cantarell in Mexico -- monster fields that produce hundreds of thousands or even millions of barrels of crude per day. In the last quarter-century, however, discoveries of "elephant" fields like these have been almost nonexistent. The world is, as a result, becoming increasingly dependent on smaller fields, often in remote, unwelcoming locations that require far more expense to develop and bring online.
(11 March 2008)
TomDispatch Editor Tom Engelhardt writes in the introduction to the article:
... the global resource landscape is changing fast and the "sole superpower" on the planet is looking ever more forlorn. Over the years, no one has caught this changing landscape better than Michael Klare. Once again just ahead of the curve, he has produced a new book (to be published in mid-April), Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy, that lays out the resource and power map of the planet, which is morphing in startling ways. Over the coming months, Klare will be producing a series of articles for Tomdispatch.com based on the findings in his book. This is the first of them

Cheap Oil Is Over: Kiss the Gas-Guzzling NASCAR Era Good-Bye
James Howard Kunstler, Chelsea Green Publishing via AlterNet
A suburban nation of snowmobilers, dirt bikers and NASCAR races -- all of it was made possible by the one-time blessing of cheap oil.
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The following is excerpted from an essay by James Howard Kunstler published in the book Thrillcraft: The Environmental Consequences of Motorized Recreation (Chelsea Green, 2007).
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The tendency for symbolic behavior in human beings is impressive. We are naturally and unself-consciously metaphorical beings, especially as our technological culture has evolved, and we have developed more and bigger prosthetic extensions of our powers. By the 1960s, when America's industrial "smokestack" economy was at its zenith, cigarette smoking was at its peak, too. Forty percent of the adult population smoked, each smoker behaving like a little factory, expelling the by-products of combustion at all hours of the day and night. It was practically required as a mark of adulthood. It was at least an entitlement. You could smoke on the job and in the college classroom. You could smoke in the doctor's waiting room. You could smoke in your seat on an airplane -- a little ashtray was provided right there in the armrest -- and nobody was allowed to complain about it. Every middle-class household had ashtrays deployed on the coffee table, even if the members were themselves nonsmokers.

In those days, smoking was more central to socializing than sharing food. ... The adult population had plumes of smoke coming out of its collective mouth and nostrils the way that our society had smoke coming out of its cities and mill valleys. Notice how cigarette smoking has waned in lockstep with the decline of American smokestack industry.

Along similar lines today, it's compelling to see how NASCAR auto racing has risen to the level of a mania in early 21st century America, as the nation has reached its absolute zenith of automobile use. Even as the world approached the all-time global oil production peak -- with its ominous portents for social relations in this country -- Americans rallied obliviously to the weekend proving grounds of the stock-car gods.
(11 March 2008)