This is the inaugural day of offering a highly-selected list of what I think are the day’s most useful and important articles on nuclear weapons policies, U.S.-Russian relations, and selected environmental issues.
The idea is to present minimal comment but offer for a wider audience some of the issue updates we have provided for years to a small group of interested parties.
- “Is the Pentagon’s Budget About To Be Nuked? The Pentagon is ready to begin sweeping nuclear modernization. Can it afford to do it? Can it afford not to?” Aaron Mehta, Defense News
Nice review of nuclear weapons modernization issues, with interesting quotes, insights, data, and pictures.
- An excellent if partial update on the Syria war in the Western press, where they are relatively scarce: “The Syria War Will Not Be a Quagmire — Because Putin and Assad Are Winning” (Alastair Crooke).
- “Ukraine: A USA-Installed Nazi-Infested Failed State” (Lendman). Lendman is the editor of the excellent “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks World War III” (2014). In this short essay he summarizes the results (so far) of the U.S.-driven coup for Ukraine.
- U.S. oil production is falling and imports are rising. These trends will continue for a while, because the U.S. is now sliding irrevocably down the far slope of its second oil production peak.
See a comment today by Jeffrey Brown, with link to Department of Energy (DOE) Energy Information Agency (EIA) data.
For more insight from oilman Brown see also “The Great Condensate Con: Is the Oil Glut Just about Oil?” and this fine comment over the weekend.
Matt Mushalik offers an outstanding analysis of the overall U.S. situation, savaging the myth of oil independence. Don’t miss it.
Why is this important? Because the world is running out of cheap oil, the kind that supports our present extravagant civilization. The present downturn in price has already cancelled so much capital investment in oil production that 2015 is now sure to stand as the year of peak production in my opinion. The world’s economies are too morbidly unequal, internally inequitable in too many cases, and in some cases (like ours) obese to pay enough for oil to support the cost of the marginal barrels. Meanwhile depletion never sleeps.
- “Humans Are Pushing The Southwest Into An Even Drier Climate, Raising Specter Of Megadroughts,” Joe Romm, Climate Progress. Important new findings. Does the “economic development” community in New Mexico ever think about this? No sign of it so far.