King Gilgamesh wanted to build a great city, Uruk, to immortalize his contribution to Sumerian civilization. Claims have steadily climbed since then, causing many insurance com-panies to re-write their policies to exclude weather–related or “act of God” events from coverage. He was the first mortal to defy the forest god, Humbaba, who had been entrusted by the chief Sumerian deity, Enlil, to protect the cedar forests of Lebanon from mankind. )How did it get this way? The interior of the sun consists of three major zones, each with its own unique properties. Vast areas of timber-land along the Euphrates and Tigris rivers were cut bare, increasing the siltation of their irrigation canals and cropland and further decreasing downwind rainfall. Animals, including humans, cannot create tissues directly from sunlight, water, and air, as plants can. That’s a common mistake, however—that tree is mostly made up of one of the gasses in our air (carbon dioxide) and water (hydrogen and oxygen).Plant leaves capture sunlight and use that energy to extract carbon as carbon dioxide from the air, combine it with oxygen and hydrogen from water, to form sugars and other complex carbohydrates (carbohydrates are also made of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen) such as the cellulose which makes up most of the roots, leaves, and trunk. How much fossil fuel do we have left? About 900 years ago, humans in Europe and Asia discovered coal below the surface of the earth and began to burn it. Trees and their roots are an important part of the water cycle, so rainfall downwind of deforested areas decreased by 80 percent. And so domestication and herding were born, for which we can find archeological evidence going back over 40,000 years. Virtually all of Pangaea was covered with a dense mat of vegetation, rising hundreds of feet into the air, creating a thick ground cover of rotting and dead plant matter that became, in some places, hundreds or even thousands of feet deep. This is called the Random Walk Problem. Yet Europe has a climate more similar to that of the United States than northern Canada or Siberia. As our culture moved from ancient hunting/gathering times to the technological era, we discovered ancient sunlight -- captured millions of years ago by plants and compressed into oil deep under our soil and oceans. Scientist M. King Hubbert first pointed this out in 1956, when he developed the well-known “Hubbert Peak,” defining the moment when oil supplies have peaked and then begun a downhill slide. Every life form on the surface of this planet is here because a plant was able to gather sunlight and store it, and something else was able to eat that plant and take that sunlight-energy in to power its body.[1]. [2] While coal is clearly ancient vegetation, there is a debate about the origin of oil. until around the time of Christ saw the human population of the world increase from 5 million people to 250 million people. And current (2004) industry information (such as from the British Petroleum website www.bp.com and other industry sources) indicates that we have between 25 and 45 years worth of oil left. Then, in the Middle Ages we discovered a new source of sunlight that had been captured by plants nearly 400 million years ago: coal. But nobody expects this rate to continue: there simply isn’t enough food that can be produced. This means that every other species of plant and animal must now compete against each other for what little we have left them. This is nature’s population control system for every animal species: population is limited to what the local plant/food supply can feed.Similarly, people’s clothing and shelter back then were made out of plants and animal skins which themselves came to life because of “current sunlight,” the sunlight which fell on the ground over the few years of their lives. As William Calvin documents in his book on this topic, A Brain for All Seasons: Human Evolution and Abrupt Climate Change, “In the Labrador Sea, flushing failed during the 1970s, was strong again in the 1980s, and then declined. In this way, the abundance or lack of abundance of our human food supply was, until the past few hundred years, largely determined by how much sunlight hit the ground. PCI needs funds. 641,000 exploratory wells have been drilled, and virtually all fields which show any promise are well-known and factored into the one-trillion barrel estimate the oil industry uses for world oil reserves.And, finally, the oil industry’s “optimistic” numbers say we have 45 years left at current rates of consumption. While there is much we can all do in our own lives to reduce our oil consumption, on the larger level it’s likely that true, systemic change will only come when we again have political leadership that sees the problem and addresses it clearly and unambiguously. Most scientists involved in this research agree that the melting of the icebergs on Greenland and the Arctic ice pack, currently underway as a result of global warming, and the flushing of cold, fresh water down into the Greenland Sea from the north, could reduce salinity sufficiently to switch off the Great Conveyor Belt. Neo-conservative front men for the fossil fuel industry have effectively cowed news reporters in all sectors of American reporting. This is Hartmann at his best. What will you do when oil is no longer “cheap” and abundant? Climate change driven by increasing carbon dioxide levels already appears to be producing huge swings in weather all over the planet, because heat is energy, and increased heat in the atmosphere means increased energy in the atmosphere.