Public discourse these days focuses a lot of attention on issues of immediate interest to many Americans: high and rising gasoline prices, rising food prices, overly expensive health care, war in Iraq and other troubles in the Middle East, terrorism and illegal immigration, and global warming. I believe many, if not all, of these issues are related and are actually symptoms of a critical problem predicted for decades and now coming to pass.

Tiefensee told the Welt am Sonntag newspaper that the windfarms would be built in the Baltic and North seas and said some 2,000 windmills should soon be producing 11,000 megawatts of electricity.

Liquefied carbon dioxide would be pumped into depleted gas fields where impervious rock would stop it escaping.

[...]Oil has become the biggest wild card for growth and corporate profits. It jumped to a record above $145 a barrel on Thursday, driven by tensions between Israel and Iran, before the long holiday weekend to mark U.S. Independence Day. The price of crude is up 50 percent so far this year.

Droughts could hit the country twice as often as now, cover an area twice as big and be more severe in key agricultural production areas, the Bureau of Meteorology and Australia's top science organization, the CSIRO, said in a joint report.

"For a developing country that's major, and major bad news," Marthinus van Schalkwyk told reporters after arriving in northern Japan, where the Group of Eight rich nations' leaders are gathering for a summit this week.

"Steadily rising oil prices are due to phenomena that have nothing to do with supply and demand," Khelil, also Algerian Energy and Mines Minister, was quoted by the state news agency as saying in a briefing for diplomats.

A report released yesterday by Abu Dhabi’s Department of Planning and Economy (DPE), an arm of the emirate that is not part of the Federal Government, urged other Gulf countries to take a “unified stand” and consider de-pegging from the US dollar and adjusting exchange rates to increase the value of their currencies.

But here, in the heartland of the four-wheel drive, a revolution is under way. What was once unthinkable is becoming a shocking reality: America's all-consuming love affair with the car is fading.

Yet Doomers are the ones that are considered “crazy,” while magical thinking (“We’ll come up with something. I know…let’s trade ‘carbon credits!’ That way, the market will resolve it all!”) passes for a sane and constructive discourse.

Dozens of countries in the Middle East and Asia have subsidies and controls that keep gas prices low to consumers. Many think that the government tinkering artificially fuels demand, imposing higher prices elsewhere in the world.

In a March Atlantic article, Christopher B. Leinberger, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor of urban planning, contended that yesterday's new suburbs will become "the slums" of tomorrow because high gas prices and the housing meltdown will force Americans back to the urban core. Leinberger is not alone. Other pundits, among them author James Howard Kunstler, who despises suburban aesthetics, and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, see the pain in suburbia as a silver lining for urban revival.

As paradoxical as it may seem, high oil prices do not mean a golden age for the likes of ExxonMobil, Chevron, Totalor BP.

Prime Minister Han Seung-soo told a televised news conference the government would restrict driving of cars owned by public organizations as part of the measures, adding a tougher set of steps would be adopted if oil prices rose further.