Ouch.

Times were tough enough in Detroit before gasoline hit $4 per gallon, but in the past two months the outlook has taken a turn for the worse.

Shares of General Motors are trading at prices last seen in the 1950s, their value cut in half in just eight weeks. Ford and Chrysler are in even worse shape, analysts say.

The sobering implication: The Big Three may have to become the Big Two, and even survivors will have a tough road ahead.

Double ouch.

Nearly all the major automakers reported steep sales declines for June, but for General Motors at least there was consolation: Toyota, its leading international competition, had it worse.

Even Toyota, with its flexible, efficient factories, couldn’t make the shift from trucks to cars as quickly as American drivers. Its sales for June shrank 21 percent.

And now for a roundhouse from the energy-industrial-complex itself.

The International Energy Agency’s warning is the starkest sign yet that even record oil prices above $140 a barrel have not yet not done enough to balance demand growth from countries such as China with sluggish supply increases.

The IEA said that annual non-Opec growth would slow to 0.5 per cent between 2008 and 2013, against demand growth of 1.6 per cent per year. The mismatch means the world economy would be more reliant on Opec, the oil cartel, and oil prices are likely to remain at record levels, analysts said.

The upshot? Sustainability is no longer an altruistic choice. Sustainability is a requirement to do business profitably and live healthy lives.

Oh my.

Seasoned polar scientists believe the chances of a totally ice free North Pole this summer are greater than 50:50 because the normally thick ice formed over many years at the Pole has been blown away and replaced by huge swathes of thinner ice formed over a single year.

This one-year ice is highly vulnerable to melting during the summer months and satellite data coming in over recent weeks shows that the rate of melting is faster than last year, when there was an all-time record loss of summer sea ice at the Arctic.

Meanwhile….

North Korea handed over a long-delayed account of its nuclear activities on Thursday, prompting a still-wary U.S. President George W. Bush to ease some sanctions on a country he once branded part of an “axis of evil.”
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Bush also welcomed an announcement by North Korea that it would blow up the cooling tower at Yongbyon, its main nuclear complex. In an unprecedented move, North Korea has invited Western media to record the event.
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China, the closest Pyongyang has to an ally, hosted talks that last year secured a deal offering North Korea energy, aid and diplomatic incentives in return for disabling its main nuclear facility and unveiling past nuclear activities.

And of course, there’s the fact that everyone across the world is paying more for food.

The world’s food crisis is expected to last for another five years, but expensive food is here to stay, Thailand’s National Food Institute predicts. An estimated 805.4 million people in the world are still living below the standard of daily food intake, said the institute’s director, Yuthasak Supasorn.

”The world is still facing a food crisis situation that is expected to last for another three to five years,” Mr Yuthasak said at a seminar on global opportunities for small and medium-sized food producers in Thailand.

”Expensive food prices will remain even after the crisis is over.”

As long as fuel prices increase, Mr Yuthasak said food prices would also be on the rise as fuel was involved in every step of food production.

There is a convergence of environmental, diplomatic and humanitarian issues that have one common contributing factor — our unrestrained use of polluting and increasingly expensive sources of energy. Carbon is melting the planet. Carbon-based energy — or the lack of it — pushes unstable regimes toward dangerous technologies. And carbon is driving millions toward hunger.

A transition to carbon-free energy will require large investments. But every day brings more evidence that a change sooner rather than later will save countless dollars, immeasurable hardship and many lives.

The UK seems to get it.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the government will encourage utilities to build 7,000 wind turbines for generating electricity, part of a program to cut pollution and reduce Britain’s dependence on fossil fuels.

It will be at least six months before we know if America is prepared to follow suit. But if current food and fuel price trends continue, the timeline may shift dramatically toward quick action to ease human hardship and simultaneously address the climate crisis.

Joe Zilber has given Milwaukee a chance to reinvent itself with his $50 million commitment to community development across the city. Eugene Kane has some ideas about how to invest the money.

Zilber’s team wants to hear more from the rest of us.

So here goes.

• Create a Green Milwaukee Fund to pay for environmental performance improvements in commercial or residential properties. Green Milwaukee dollars would provide the up-front capital. Recipients would agree to repay the fund via savings achieved by reductions in energy consumption or material waste. This formula allows homeowners or landlords to upgrade housing or commercial stock without incurring any capital costs. There could — and should — be a requirement that all vendors employ people from low-moderate income communities. Training dollars would necessarily have to be a component of the program.
  
  Imagine a city full of renovated, green buildings built on the backs of a newly-trained local workforce. The result would be a healthier city with more skilled workers in a growing industry (”green” construction).
• Kane extols the virtues of fresh food for city dwellers and I agree. I would go a step further and build local capacity to grow food locally through a Milwaukee Urban Gardens campaign. There are plenty of examples or working farms in the middle of cities that improve the health of residents and contribute to a sense of community cohesion. And Milwaukee already has local models that could be brought to scale to meet the needs of the whole city.
• Milwaukee’s parks rivers and lake(s) are a huge asset and are in danger because of mismanagement and strained budgets. Create a Green Corps of local youth to clean-up and maintain the city’s public spaces. The concept could be expanded to include ALL of Milwaukee’s public assets and refurbish roads, sewers and public facilities. This would build public management skills and instill a service ethic among youth.
• Though transportation does not fall directly within the scope of the Zilber Neighborhoods Initiative, the ability to move around efficiently is key to finding and keeping good jobs and broadening the horizons of young people. I would spend some portion of Joe Zilber’s money to expand clean, public transportation options.
• Similarly, expanded access to broadband doesn’t always fall into the realm of “community development” but it is very clear that the digital divide between the poor and the not poor hinders growth and limits opportunities in low-income communities. Access to and fluency with information technologies is critical to competing in today’s world. It is about time that Milwaukee commits to providing everyone with 21st century tools.

Send your own ideas to jsmetro@journalsentinel.com.

James Hansen gives us one year to change.

Again a wide gap has developed between what is understood about global warming by the relevant scientific community and what is known by policymakers and the public. Now, as then, frank assessment of scientific data yields conclusions that are shocking to the body politic. Now, as then, I can assert that these conclusions have a certainty exceeding 99 percent. The difference is that now we have used up all slack in the schedule for actions needed to defuse the global warming time bomb…

Otherwise it will become impractical to constrain atmospheric carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas produced in burning fossil fuels, to a level that prevents the climate system from passing tipping points that lead to disastrous climate changes that spiral dynamically out of humanity’s control…

I argue that a path yielding energy independence and a healthier environment is, barely, still possible. It requires a transformative change of direction in Washington in the next year…

Climate is nearing dangerous tipping points. Elements of a “perfect storm”, a global cataclysm, are assembled.

I don’t think markets are the best answer to most — much less every — policy questions. But markets can work very fast. New markets, products and services are created every year and some of them mange to change the world. WalMart is the biggest employer in the world and Google was just a small California internet company a few years ago. The only things that can give a state the speed of markets are disasters (man made, preferably) or fascist governments.

Neither option is particularly appealing.

I have one small quibble.

Clinton’s address at the conference continued the sharp focus on green issues that has colored the four-day meeting: from climate change and rising gas prices to an anti-bottled water campaign and sustainable development.
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”I do not believe we can bring the American economy back with $135 oil and $165 coal unless we all have a serious commitment to maximum energy efficiency…I just don’t think we can do it,” Clinton said at the conference.

”I think if we do it right, it will be the major engine of growth and new jobs in America for at least a decade.” He highlighted the Clinton Climate Initiative that launched a $5 billion project last year to retrofit buildings in 40 of the world’s largest cities, saving both energy and money. The Clinton Climate Initiative partnered with the U.S. Conference of Mayors last year and is working to expand.

If we do it right, the positive economic impact will last even longer than a decade.

But more important than the economic benefits of action is the pure necessity to act as a matter of economic cohesion. Our economy relies on the availability of cheap, polluting and maddeningly finite fossil fuels–all of it will be gone in just a few hundred years. We should change now because we will not have a choice for very much longer.