More bicycles than cars were sold in the United States over the past 12 months the US Chamber of Commerce reports, with rising gas prices prompting commuters to opt for two wheels instead of four. Not since the oil crisis of 1973 have bicycles sold in such big numbers, according to Tim Blumenthal, executive director of Bikes Belong, a Colorado-based industry association.

The new resident reactionary on the New York Times op-ed page, John Tierney, boasts in his Aug. 23 column, entitled "The $10,000 Question," that he has made a five-grand wager with Matthew Simmons, author of Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy, against the latter's predictions quoted in the Aug. 21 Sunday Times Magazine ("The Breaking Point" by Peter Maass) that oil prices will hit the triple digits by 2011.

An Aug. 11 story from NewScientist.com notes recent findings by scientists that the world's largest frozen peat bog is melting. An area stretching for a million square kilometres across the permafrost of western Siberia is turning into a mass of shallow lakes as the ground melts, according to Russian researchers just back from the region. The sudden melting of a bog the size of France and Germany combined could unleash billions of tons of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.

The annual Hiroshima Peace Declaration, delivered this year by the city's Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba, explicitly calls the nuclear powers to task for not living up to their committments under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The historic 60th anniversary of the dawn of the nuclear age comes just two months after the UN conference on the treaty ended in dischord and paralysis. As we noted in 2002, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists "Doomsday Clock" moved forward two minutes that year in response to rising world tensions and lagging support for disarmament efforts. The clock now stands at seven minutes to midnight—the same position as when it debuted in 1947.

From Scientific American, Aug. 4:

In the spring of 2002, a large chunk of the Larsen B ice shelf (LIS-B) on the Antarctic Peninsula broke off and tumbled into the Weddell Sea. A new analysis published today in the journal Nature suggests that the more than 3,200 square kilometer area that collapsed signifies an unprecedented loss in the past 10,000 years and can be attributed to accelerated climate warming in the region.

Daniel Yergin, author of the Pulitzer-winning history of the petroleum industry, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power, was recently invoked by New York Times columnist Bob Herbert to drive home the point that the Persian Gulf oil reserves are "the greatest single prize in all history"—and at the root of George Bush's Iraq adventure. On July 31, Yergin had an op-ed in the Washington Post (online at the website of Yergin's own group, Cambridge Energy Research Associates or CERA) raining on the morbid parade of the "peak oil" apocalyptoids. Yergin argues that the current price spike is due to "above ground" factors like political instability, not the "below ground" factor of dwindling reserves. But he fails to consider that the driving forces behind this instability—the US military grab for the Gulf reserves, and the jihadi imperative to resist it—may, at least, be driven by the perception that reserves are running on empty. And even Yergin admits that that world energy consumption will explode over the next several years if current trends continue, providing what he perhaps somewhat understatedly calls "a very big challenge." WW4 REPORT has always argued that the price spike could be an intentional creation of a White House strategy to boost global production—which is exactly what Yergin argues it will do. It should also be kept in mind that from the standpoint of the health and stability of the biosphere, continued high oil production is probably the worst thing imaginable, as signals mount of global ecological collapse.

No, we aren't being sarcastic.

The Space Shuttle "Discovery"—the first sent into flight since the Shuttle fleet was grounded following the mid-flight destruction of the "Columbia" in 2003—succeeded in docking at the International Space Station this week, but only after performing an unprecedented back-flip so astronauts on board could photograph the craft's underbelly for signs of damage. NASA managers discovered the "Discovery" was still shedding big pieces of foam insulation on launch, and have again suspended future flights. One chunk captured on camera was almost as big as the one that banged into the heat shield of Columbia's wing, dooming the craft and its seven astronauts. NASA has already poured $1.4 billion into trying to make the shuttle fleet safer since the Columbia disaster, and frustrations are mounting. "Maybe the money would be better spent on replacing the shuttle, rather than flying it," suggested John Pike, who directs the web site Globalsecurity.org. (AP, July 28)

A very interesting story today cites poll results on American versus Japanese attitudes about the likelihood of a new world war, even if random guy-on-the-street quotes are by definition never presented objectively. It is certainly very telling that Americans are more afraid of North Korean aggression than the Japanese, who are far more likely to be its targets. Also telling that these results come on the heels of a wave of anti-Japan protests in China. Japan is an island nation with a limited armed forces, no nuclear weapons and a constitutional prohibition on war; it faces at least two hostile powers—one by actual policy; the other by tradition—to its immediate east, the latter of which is the most populous nation on earth by far, with a vast territory, a nuclear arsenal and an armed forces of over 2 million active trooops. The US is a continent-spanning super-power (generally held to be the only remaining super-power), isolated by vast oceans from any hostile powers, real or potential; its far-flung military bases and control of the seas and global airspace have no remote parallel in all world history, and it has the planet's biggest and most state-of-the-art nuclear arsenal by far. Yet Americans are more afraid of a new world war. Maybe this is because Americans realize that this new world war is likely to be "asymmetrical," and the United States is likely to be its target precisely because it is the global superpower—and, in fact, this war has already been underway since (at least) Sept. 11, 2001. This, however, raises a question (which this blog/zine has always been obsessed with): if this is a new world war, which number will historians assign it? We, of course, argue Four.