Meanwhile, rising U.S. oil consumption helped increase the nation’s trade deficit in January. There’s more than meets the eye to the growth of both.

With about five percent of the Earth’s population, the U.S. has the world’s biggest economy and is the leading user of oil. These two factors are related.

A modern capitalist economy runs on oil. In the U.S. now, some two-thirds of that oil is used to power ground transportation vehicles—cars, busses, trucks and vans.

In early March, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan suggested that the U.S. economy has begun to grow again. Officially, the economy had been in a year-long recession.

Crucially, U.S. economic growth means more oil consumption. This, in turn, is helping to warm the planet through the emission of greenhouse gasses.

These gases trap the Sun’s heat near the Earth. We get global warming that changes the Earth’s climate.

There are many examples of this happening. Here’s one, distant but very important.

Global climate change is probably the main reason that the Larsen B Ice Shelf recently collapsed at the Antarctic Peninsula. The collapse of this ice shelf and others could make world sea levels rise catastrophically, several scientists have warned.

Terrifying? Absolutely.

However, the world’s leading economy, run by industrial corporations and financial institutions, sneers at an ecological limit to economic growth. Thus U.S. elites shape the world around us.

Still, the Earth’s capacity to absorb greenhouse gasses and sustain life is finite. My 12-year-old understands this concept.

Yet the power of industrial and financial elites in the U.S. trumps such knowledge. This is the path of unsustainability.

Speaking of unsustainable growth, we turn to the U.S. trade deficit, which reached $28.5 billion in January, up 15.4 percent from December. Fueled in part by borrowed money mainly from the European Union and Japan, the U.S. trade deficit—which dropped last year to $417.4 billion from the all-time high of $444.7 billion in 2000—is the difference between what the nation imports and exports.

Contributing to the trade deficit in January was the oil bill paid by the U.S. to foreigners, who supply over half of the oil the nation used. In January, foreign oil was priced higher and the U.S. consumption of it increased.

The nation’s oil production peaked in 1971, as geophysicist M. King Hubbert had predicted it would in 1956 http://www.hubbertpeak.com/. Currently, the Persian Gulf region supplies about a quarter of the oil used in the U.S.

And a U.S.-led military campaign against Iraq? It could increase the price of the region’s oil by disrupting its production.

Note that when the U.S. economy went into slow/no growth last year, the trade deficit dropped. Apparently last January, growth began and the use of oil rose, widening the deficit.

For a moment, let’s put aside the contradiction between ecology and the economy. Consider how long the U.S. economy can sustain its trade imbalance with the rest of the world.

A recent forecast by Goldman Sachs warned that as the U.S. economy grows, private-sector debt held by foreigners rises. Thus the interest payments on that debt will also rise.

Today, the high security and value of the dollar versus other world currencies (euro and yen) play a big part in attracting funds from abroad. Yet what if in the future, despite the strong dollar, the growing indebtedness (principal and interest) of the U.S. deficit begins to make foreign lenders nervous?

It’s been said that capitalism’s critics have accurately predicted one of its past nine economic crises. Hardly such a critic, Goldman Sachs is forecasting that "the long-term outlook for the dollar remains very precarious," as reported in The Independent on Mar. 14.

Thus a leading financial firm is painting a gloomy picture about foreigners continuing to lend money to the U.S. for the nation to buy commodities such as oil on credit. Economists have a technical name for this: capital flight, and it would cause financial hardship for the U.S. economy and major aftereffects around the world.

Alarming? Yes. Avoidable? Maybe, if for starters the U.S. public can wake up and reject a world of corporate commodities for something better.

For now, however, the U.S. economy is a driving force behind world ecological and financial fragility. If this doesn’t indicate future shocks, perhaps we need a new definition of the term.

Seth Sandronsky is an editor with Because People Matter, Sacramento’s progressive newspaper ssandron@hotmail.com

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