Still not too late to post this, I’ve just been too busy to get these nuggets up. More good finds from Lonewolf:

Tipping points are approaching in several interrelated areas. The most important areas of concern include:

1. Financial/economic problems: Multiple financial system crashes are in progress or on the way. Will there be any ray of sunshine in the aftermath? For that matter, will we reach the aftermath in the coming year, or will these problems drag on, perhaps for decades?

2. Politics and government action: Will 2008 be the last gasp for liberty or the start of a Great Unraveling for tyranny? Or neither?

3. Oil, metals, and other natural resources: Peak Oil (which some believe is a scam or an error) is quite real and a genuine threat. Combine rapidly-depleting older oil fields with less oil being found, with the new finds mostly being deep-ocean or otherwise difficult to harvest, with more of the oil now harvested being lower-grade (including tar sands and shale oil, which require huge amounts of energy to extract and refine), and – here’s the kicker – with dramatic growth in oil usage in China, India, and many other nations, and you have a supply and demand problem of potentially epic proportions. A similar situation is playing out for metals (yes, Peak Metal) – as with oil, the easy-to-harvest resources have already been harvested. We may thus be entering a new, broader Age of Scarcity. If so, how can we best respond?

4. Food shortages: will dire predictions from the 1960s and 1970s (not to mention Malthus) of mass famine finally come true – as now appears possible? Or will technology and the markets (or perhaps something else) save the day yet again?

5. Environmental damage: the jury is still out on global warming (so say hundreds of scientists; see also here) but the oceans are dying and the rest of the planet isn’t doing so well either. Will we respond appropriately in time, and if not, how quickly and how severely will the problems worsen?

Looking at these problems as a group, it doesn’t feel like “opportunity” or “luck” ahead so much as “disaster.” But the largest opportunities sometimes do arrive in the form of disasters or crises. For example, dramatically higher oil prices are fueling a boom in conservation, in alternative energy, and in solutions we might otherwise never have considered or even imagined. The coming year will bring plenty of problems to solve, and I look forward to seeing what I hope, but don’t necessarily expect, will be creative and positive responses.

Rest of the article here: The Year Ahead